ABSTRACT
Childhood and youth are understood in very different ways in different societies and at different times. This was brought sharply to our attention by the historian Aries (1962), who argued that, in the West, the notion of childhood did not exist prior to the fifteenth century: once the physical dependency of infancy was ended, children were treated as miniature adults, fully integrated into social and economic life. In the sixteenth century differentiation between childhood and adulthood became more distinct, but only in the late nineteenth century, as schooling became universal and children were progressively removed from adult society into their own spaces, did many of today’s popular ideas about childhood emerge. Although this thesis has been critiqued, it is widely accepted that medieval concepts of childhood differed greatly from those prevailing today (Heywood 2001), and conceptualisations of childhood continue to change. Even within the UK, expectations concerning the treatment and behaviour of children today differ from those common in the 1950s.
