ABSTRACT
We suggested in the last chapter that the four-year-old’s capacity for behaving in any particular manner is in practice of lesser importance than his mother’s expectations about such behaviour. The degree to which a child is expected to look after his own immediate needs or to contribute in any way to the work of the household is a case in point. It is one characteristic of this particular culture pattern at this particular time that children of pre-school age are required to do hardly anything which could be called work, or which is either necessary or even useful to family or community. In fact, the idea that four-year-olds normally spend all their time playing is accepted so completely that it comes as a shock to remember the position of working-class children not much more than a hundred years ago, and to realize that the productive employment of children was not confined to the over-sixes who were exploited in mines and factories, but extended into the cottage sweat shops to include the youngest members of the labouring family.
