ABSTRACT
By the middle of the nineteenth century an ideology of child-hood had become a powerful force in middle-class Europe and North America. Its precepts were by no means fully integrated into middle-class practices in child-rearing, and as a set of beliefs it was not without powerful rivals. But it operated as an ideal across wide stretches of western culture. At the heart of this ideology lay a firm commitment to the view that children should be reared in families, a conviction that the way childhood was spent was crucial in determining the kind of adult that the child would become, and an increasing awareness that childhood had rights and privileges of its own.
