In 1960 a pioneering French historian, Philippe Ariès, unusually interested both in demography and in culture, published his book, Centuries of Childhood, on the history of childhood in medieval and early modern Europe, essentially opening childhood to serious historical analysis for the first time. Ariès was inspired by claims, common in France as elsewhere, that the contemporary family was in crisis. These claims were important in their own right, and they also had political implications in that they were often seized upon by conservative groups eager to advance a wider social agenda. Ariès had initially sympathized with the conservative view, but he also realized that the claims of deterioration were hollow without a serious historical base – after all, to know that something is getting worse, one needs a clear understanding of what the situation in the past actually was. It’s quite conceivable – and childhood could be an example – that present conditions rouse concern but are not in fact measurably inferior to those in the past, which may have been unsatisfactory as well (either in the same or in different ways).
Ariès’ take on the past convinced him that the relationship between modern and premodern childhood had been widely misunderstood. Using evidence rather skewed toward elites, including family portraits, he argued that traditional Europeans did not have a very distinct conception of childhood as a separate stage of life, and tended to relegate children to the margins of family activity. Paintings, for example, revealed children either hovering on the edges of the main family group, or dressed up as adults, or both. Ariès did not mean that parents had no affection for children – he was prepared to grant that this is a natural manifestation – but that they simply did not devote much time or special attention to them. In his view, this situation began to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first among the upper classes. Childhood became more central, with growing recognition of special needs for nurture and guidance; a focus on schooling increased; birth rates began to drop in order to permit more attention to individual children; and a more formal distinction between childhood, and major stages within it, and adulthood marked this transformation as well.
Ariès himself believed that the premodern approach to children had many advantages over the modern. His argument is worth attention still: he claimed that lesser focus on childhood in the past, though seemingly a drawback, actually gave children more latitude than they would have amid the careful monitoring of modern societies. This was a conservative outlook with a special twist. Most historians who took up Ariès’ claim, however, simplified it to read that premodern folks tended to neglect childhood and children, often misusing them in the process, and that the modern rise of child consciousness supported a host of specific gains. It was this argument, in turn, that soon drew revisionist fire.
We will take up the arguments about modern change primarily in the following chapter, for without much question Western thinking and practices concerning children did begin to shift from the late seventeenth century onward, in ways that would ultimately influence other parts of the world as well. This chapter focuses on childhood in the traditional West, as it Christianized and gradually developed a more sophisticated economy, mixing agriculture with considerable manufacturing and urban trade, in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. Western Europe was not particularly important in world history during these centuries; its cities were smaller, its political structures less elaborate than those in Asia and parts of Africa. But the debate about Western traditions concerning childhood is unusually well developed. It may shed light on features of agricultural civilizations and the consequences of religious change more generally. It may also contribute to more focused comparative analysis, to the extent that Western approaches to childhood had some unusual features when juxtaposed with other agricultural civilizations. And of course the West did ultimately gain importance in world affairs, during the more modern centuries when conditions of childhood were changing; here’s a final reason to explore traditional Western norms.
A host of scholars picked up on Ariès’ cues concerning traditional Western deficiencies, though they twisted his larger interpretation. Some, rather generally, pointed to the high rates of infant mortality and to frequently harsh working conditions for children – valid enough, but also reflecting modern values about children that might not be fully relevant for understanding the past. A number of historians and others working on psychological issues zeroed in more precisely. Some claimed to find little evidence of affection between parents and children, which might help among other things explain the ability to accept the frequency of death. Harsh discipline in many families came in for comment; psychoanalyst Erik Erikson dealt with the frequent beatings Martin Luther, ultimately the leader of the Protestant Reformation, received from his coal miner father, and speculated on what impact this had on his views toward God and Christianity. (It was Erikson who pointed out the shock on the part of American Indians at European settlers’ frequent physical punishments of children.) David Hunt, looking at the upbringing of a future king of France in the seventeenth century, noted how the young man was frequently neglected by his parents, beaten quite deliberately for misbehavior, and then periodically hauled out for the entertainment of guests, as when his father laughingly fondled his (at that point understandably small) genitalia at parties. Wider practices were important as well: many ordinary Western families swaddled infants, wrapping them tightly so that they could not hurt themselves by crawling or squirming, frequently hanging them on a hook in the wall so that both parents could safely go out in the fields to work. The practice showed some concern, of course, but also a desire to invest minimal attention. It was also accompanied by widespread beliefs in the animal-like nature of little children (in contrast to the cute images that dominate more modern approaches, perhaps just as inaccurately though in an opposite direction). Many people did not like to see children crawl, because this reminded them of this animal phase, preferring not to release them fully until they were able to walk. Children’s voraciousness at mother’s breast drew comment as well, another sign of animal-like traits that made early childhood distasteful – perhaps until children were mature enough to begin working and helping out. These emphases bore some relationship to Christian doctrine about the original sin of children at birth, which similarly encouraged a belief in the need for rigorous, civilizing discipline.
Some of these arguments, of course, went further than Ariès himself had done, though in the same basic direction of conceptualizing a very distinctive traditional Western childhood when compared with more modern practices and values. Interestingly, there was virtually no effort to compare with other agricultural societies at the time, and given the state of historical evidence the effort remains challenging. From a world history standpoint, however, this approach may be more fruitful than the kind of modern–premodern debate that Ariès unleashed.
For attacks on what we might call the bleak-traditionalist school were not slow in coming. Historians began to look at different kinds of evidence, while dismissing some of Ariès’ data as too limited. A number of scholars working on early medieval England, for example, discovered law codes that clearly stipulated the need to protect children, recognizing childhood as a distinct and important phase of life. A number of medievalists, deeply convinced of the human qualities of their subjects in a time period they loved, also reacted viscerally to the notion that these subjects were nasty and cruel to children. Some changes in psychology could contribute to revisions of the Ariès approach as well. Many modern authorities believe that physical discipline, if reasonably consistent and not torturous, is quite compatible with adult affection for children and with warm relations between child and parent; they are not necessarily advocating this discipline, simply suggesting that there is more than one way to define effective parenting.
Revisionists, objecting to the bleak-traditionalist interpretation, emphasize two points most strongly. First, as the legal studies suggest, they dispute the idea that traditional Europeans lacked a conception of childhood as a stage of life, with some special needs. Second, they vigorously reject the notion that most parents were not affectionate with their children. In contrast, they argue that when personal kinds of evidence are examined, like letters and diaries, it becomes obvious that parental love was normal, expected and natural. Fathers in premodern England were often so pleased at the birth of their children that they sent out congratulatory letters. Many premodern stories assumed parental and familial affection for children. While some parents may have steeled themselves against infant death by not showing much grief, others – like Martin Luther himself, as a father – were emotionally shattered when a child died. Even art, as against Ariès’ arguments, showed a child-centered interest: after all, one of the most frequent artistic subjects was Mary and the baby Jesus, suggesting that the Western church itself favored a child-centered family (though perhaps with a bit of awkwardness about how fathers fit in).
A number of specific debates follow in the wake of the more general dispute, dealing with aspects of traditional childhood in Europe that are undeniable but not easy to evaluate. Wetnursing is an example. Many European families sent infants out to another woman who had recently had a child, often in the countryside, so that she, rather than the birth mother, could breastfeed. From the standpoint of a child’s health this was often counterindicated, because many wetnurses really did not have enough milk to provide for two infants adequately; and sanitary conditions might be bad as well. There is little question that more children died in wetnursing than was average. So why did it occur? The bleak traditionalists point to wetnursing as a sign of parental lack of interest, perhaps even a sneaking desire for some children to die as a means of ex post facto birth control. The revisionists, in contrast, note that parents often visited children who were out to a wetnurse, suggesting concern and affection. They argue that, while some aristocratic women may simply have wished to avoid the messiness of breastfeeding, most urban women who resorted to the practice did so because of work demands, for example in running the business side of the family’s artisanal shop. (And a few, of course, had to use wetnurses, or animal milk – donkey milk was preferred – because they simply could not produce an adequate supply themselves.) Revisionists note that wetnursing continued in the West into the late nineteenth century, again because of work demands and other issues – though admittedly it came under new attack. They argue, then, that wetnursing was not a sign of traditional hostility and that a sharp modern break from it did not occur either.
On another point: poor families in the West often abandoned children – putting them at a church door was a favorite ploy. To the bleak traditionalists, this shows lack of love, and indeed many abandoned children did die. To revisionists, this shows sheer poverty and a real hope that someone else, better able than the parents themselves, would care for the child. (And they might add: at least, still-more-traditional outright infanticide became rare in the West, as in Islam.)
Another debate involves physical discipline. There were horrific examples of abuse in the traditional West, as when a German schoolmaster beat a student bloody for not studying. Certainly, physical discipline was widely accepted, even recommended, in family settings as well as schools. Benjamin Franklin, apprenticed to an older brother as a printer, was beaten so often that he finally fled Boston for Philadelphia. But extremes of physical punishment were not accepted, and community control over parental behavior may have been better than it is today, in more anonymous urban settings. The German schoolmaster was fined for his excess.
Many premodern Western families sent teenagers out to work in another household for several years, often realizing that an outsider family was unlikely to treat a child very warmly. Was this a sign of callousness, or a desire to let other families do the job of disciplining children at a difficult stage of life? (One historian even suggested a twist on this argument: parents actually loved their kids but realized they needed some sense beaten into them after puberty, so they preferred to leave this painful task to others.) Or was the practice simply a reflection of a desire to make sure children received job training, the most important form of education, plus the need for families with more kids than could be put to work at home to spread them out to childless families, as a means of best-possible resource allocation? Or, possibly, a bit of all of this? (One problem with the debate between bleak traditionalists and revisionists is a frequent neglect of individual variety: surely some parents were harsh, and were perhaps able to use premodern practices to express this harshness, while others were more genuinely affectionate and used the practices for other reasons and/or modified them through the emotional ties they had with their offspring.)
Finally, revisionists have pointed to aspects of premodern childhood that may have offered very positive features, sometimes in contrast to characteristic modern constraints. They note how whole villages helped look out for children, providing multiple contacts and safeguards and showing a clear, if not exactly modern, child-centeredness. They stress opportunities for comradeship among children themselves, as they participated in village festivals for example, including the opportunities these festivals might provide to let off steam in a relatively tolerant atmosphere. They note many opportunities for play without intense adult monitoring. Children often played together without much age-grading and without any sense that play should be specifically instructional. They had many traditional games, and they could be creative in finding playthings. Not a few scholars have argued that outlets for children’s play-like qualities would actually deteriorate with modernity, among other things because of more schooling and adult supervision – an implicit plus, then, for the traditional centuries.
Historians’ debates, not surprisingly, mirror ordinary debates. They sometimes generate more heat than light. They often push participants into extreme statements of positions, rather than encouraging compromise and complexity. At the same time, they can contribute to the advancement of knowledge, pompous as this may sound, and the debate over traditional Western childhood is a case in point. The debate has died down now, though by no means is everything settled. At risk of some oversimplification, it is possible to sketch how things now stand.
Premodern Western childhood was different from modern in lots of ways. Many of these differences reflected the birth and death rates and the work roles of children in agricultural societies generally. But there are some specific features, like frequent wetnursing, that need separate interpretation. Nevertheless, all but the most extreme revisionists admit that a number of changes in ideas, practices and contexts occurred between premodern and modern times – though they also note, quite correctly, that some of the changes occurred later than sometimes imagined, and some of them were less uniformly adopted than general characterizations of the “modern” might imply.
This said, there is also considerable agreement now that earlier efforts, à la Ariès, to portray the traditional West as a totally different society were off the mark. There was a recognition of childhood; there were many signs of affection for children. While doubtless varied, premodern people were not as different from modern as the initial picture suggested.
And finally, though this is mainly a topic for later: the assumption that modern is not only somewhat different, but clearly better, has to be held up for examination. Rhetoric about children has changed – the idea of kids as little animals began to ease in the eighteenth century – but actual adult attitudes may have altered less. Finally, some of the changes that have occurred may have worsened the experience of childhood, or at least not clearly improved it. Premodern childhood, in other words, was not so bad that change would necessarily mean progress.
The debate about Western childhood also applied to colonial America. There is evidence of surprising harshness, as when Protestant ministers thundered against children’s original sin and used images of death to try to regulate children. Physical discipline was applied to children not only when in school but when they dozed off during long church services. But signs of affection and grief were abundant as well, and communities seem to have guarded against abuse. The American experience was itself different, however, from the premodern European in a few respects, which can affect the debate about its quality as well. More abundant land increased the need for child labor and facilitated a higher birth rate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Death rates were lower, again partly because of better food resources, though they probably rose in the more crowded areas by the later eighteenth century. Because of the need for labor, a lower infant mortality rate, and the open frontier, American families may have been more careful with children than their European counterparts, more eager to keep them positively happy lest they move away. (Stories of children who fled or were abducted became an anxious part of American popular culture.) Correspondingly, American families began to seem unusually open to children’s input by at least the later eighteenth century – willing to listen to children and take their opinions into account. Such, at least, was the reaction of many European observers, some of whom liked American family “democracy,” some of whom found the children insufferable. Almost surely, by modern standards, even early modern American children were rather firmly kept in line, enjoined to be docile and obedient; but some variance from European traditionalism may have developed earlier, along with considerable overlap.
A key question that the debate about traditional Western approaches to childhood has not explicitly engaged involves comparisons. Was there anything particularly unusual about premodern Western childhood compared to the patterns in other agricultural civilizations? The debate, after all, has partly reflected some standard differences between children in agriculture and children in more modern settings, and this has no inherent comparative significance across societies at the same point in time. But there may be some real Western-ness involved as well, which will help us get at premodern childhood from one additional, final angle.
Two Western strands deserve particular attention. One, of course, is Christianity. As Christian nativity art suggested, the religion in many ways encouraged sympathetic attention to children. The Bible provided many stories emphasizing the religious importance of childhood, as in Christ’s injunction, “suffer the little children to come unto me.” There’s no question, also, that children could be deeply drawn to Christianity. At one unfortunate extreme, in the year 1212 two people, a teenager called Stephen of Vendôme, in France, and Nicholas of Cologne in Germany preached a children’s crusade, in which bands of children were enjoined to recapture the Holy Land that had been lost again to Islamic rulers. Stephen’s group reached the port of Marseilles where it was sold into slavery, while Nicholas’s company was turned back. The whole episode may lie at the origins of the Pied Piper story.
For all the attractiveness and attractions of Christianity and childhood, there was of course the unusual belief in original sin, theologically understandable in light of the emphasis on the need for faith and redemption, not necessarily taken too seriously in the ways many children were treated, but nevertheless available, sometimes inescapable, as the basis for a critical approach to the qualities of childhood. Tainted by original sin at birth, children would continue to sin as part of human nature. This belief could occasion some worried discussions about the fate of the souls of children who died in infancy, and some flexibility developed on this point; it certainly underlay the importance of baptism as a first step in redeeming children’s evil nature; but it could also generate beliefs, fierce or well-intentioned or both, in the need to impose strict discipline on children lest their impulses lead them further astray. (And this was on top of other superstitions about children who might be born as witches, because their mothers had been frightened during pregnancy or because the children themselves had a fateful birthmark.)
Almost certainly, for many children, Christianity encouraged the use of fear of death and damnation as a regulatory tool, setting up what some historians view as deep-seated characteristic anxieties. Into the nineteenth century, for example, many common readers for children in the United States would stress the fragility of life and the need to prepare for death at any moment. Christianity may have exaggerated, in other words, the impact of one of the inescapable features of premodern childhood everywhere. It is possible, further, that Protestantism, with its greater emphasis on predestination and human sinfulness, created still further pressures on many children, with fathers supposed to take on the role of moral judge and guardian. Without falling back into ahistorical condemnations of premodern discipline, it is possible that, compared to childhoods in other societies, there were some distinctive disciplinary and even psychological features of Western childhood, some of which may have intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The second feature of the Western experience that affected childhood, developing from the later Middle Ages onward, was the special nature of the European-style family. This unusual family type emphasized a relatively late marriage age for people beneath elite status – that is, for the vast majority, marriage at 26 for women and 27 for men was common. Further, a substantial minority, mostly the poorest in terms of economic prospects, did not marry at all. The goal was probably to limit the birth rate in order to protect property holdings from the demands of too many children. The system had several consequences for children besides sheer numbers. It focused attention on nuclear rather than extended families; interaction with grandparents was often limited because by the time young adults could marry their own parents were often dead. Family work concentrated on the wife and husband, plus able children and perhaps an outside laborer; this probably increased work responsibilities for women, which helps account for practices like swaddling and the use of wetnurses. Is this labor pressure, in turn, why Western tradition has tended to limit physical contact between mother and children, compared to societies such as those in Africa where mothers carried children as they worked, delighting in the closeness of two bodies? Even the timing of children in Western Europe and colonial America – with a disproportionate number of children born in February and March, apparently deliberately in order to inconvenience women’s work the least – reflected labor needs and the results in terms of available attention for offspring.
The system obviously risked more than the usual amount of generational tension at the upper end of youth. When children could not marry until they had property, and when property usually stayed with the father until his death, the chances for harsh relationships were high. In the American colonies, some fathers modified this by turning over some land before death (of course, land was unusually plentiful, compared to Europe), but even here there were many bitter quarrels and some outright violence. In eighteenth century France, older fathers were the most common victims of murder, at the hands of impatient sons. One peasant expressed nonchalance, if not hostility, even when his father passed away naturally, “My father died today. I went to plough the field.”
The European family pattern depended, finally, on considerable sexual control. Most people could not marry until over a decade after puberty. At the same time, both religious codes and the need to protect the family economy against unwanted births discouraged full sexual activity before marriage. Villages monitored youth sexual behavior closely, not permitting individual pairings until there was a clear prospect of marriage; at this point, sexual activity might occur, leading to a number of prebridal pregnancies where births, however, occurred well after the wedding. Outright illegitimacy did arise, but rates were relatively low at 2–3 percent of all births. Western youth, in other words, had to accommodate unusual restrictions on sexuality because of late marriage, and it is interesting to speculate about the consequences in terms of individual tensions and the development of alternative outlets. These last included frequent resort to bundling – letting a couple lie together, but clothed – and (to an extent we can only guess at) the use of animals for sexual purposes. There was also some increase in prostitution particularly in urban areas.
Comparative perspectives suggest some distinctive patterns in the West concerning very young children and also youth, thanks to the combination of religious doctrine and family arrangements. Differences operated, of course, within a common range. Swaddling, for example, was not unique to the West, though the work distractions of mothers may have contributed to greater isolation. The Middle East also featured characteristically strict discipline, though with a bit more debate than in the West, and Islam also encouraged some fearful concern about sin. Interest in obedience was widespread.
Prolonged youth in the West certainly contrasted, however, with the interest in the Middle East in moving more directly from childhood to adulthood, where work could nevertheless still be controlled by extended families. The Western pattern may have had some advantages, though it also encouraged more unrest; much urban protest in Western Europe could be attributed to young men kept back from full economic maturity.
The Western approach toward young children, insofar as it reflected some influence from the idea of original sin, may have been less indulgent, more guilt-inducing, than its counterparts elsewhere. This might have combined with somewhat less maternal attention, given the labor demands within the nuclear family. Did these differences, also, affect the wider society? It is certainly interesting, as we will see in the next chapter, that one of the first targets of reformers in the West focused on the treatment of young children, from swaddling to the very idea of sinfulness. The target did not result from careful comparative analysis, but suggested awareness of some of the drawbacks of the premodern Western approach.
Premodern Western characteristics of childhood did begin to change from the late seventeenth century onward, though many older practices and ideas continued for a long time. Change would gradually modify some of the emphases of traditional Christianity, including the invocation of original sin, and some of the features of the European-style family including such strict insistence on sexual control. It was a changing Western approach to childhood that would come to have significance not only in the West itself, but through influence on other parts of the world; during most of the period this chapter covers, the West was more imitative than imitated, save in the export of a version of Western childhood across the Atlantic by the seventeenth century.
We will pick up on the larger changes in the Western experience in the following chapter, but one note warrants a place in this discussion. One of the first signs of alteration in the Western approach to children came at the intellectual level. In the late seventeenth century, John Locke argued that children, far from being corrupted by original sin, were actually blank slates, capable of improvement through careful education. In the following century many Enlightenment thinkers took up this charge, blasting traditional Christianity for its harm to children (among other wrongs) and urging greater attention to schooling. Other intellectuals, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, added a more passionate commitment to children’s individuality, and to systems of upbringing that would cherish the child, systems of schooling that would nurture the creative spark. What caused this significant revision in outlook – a revision that undeniably prompted some of the more specific changes that would affect children, from more individualistic naming practices to new forms of mass education? Obviously, the rise of science, with its challenge to traditional religion and its apparent demonstration that knowledge could progress beyond Christian dogma, encouraged rethinking. So did growing prosperity for many Europeans, which allowed them to afford new kinds of care for children – ultimately, by the later eighteenth century, including a first set of consumer items deliberately designed for the young. But was there also an implicit realization that aspects of the Western tradition were not only harsh but counterproductive, in producing tensions between children and parents and in failing to optimize children’s talents? Western tradition itself did not directly suggest any basis for leadership in what became a worldwide tendency to reconsider aspects of childhood; but perhaps its very weaknesses encouraged further change.
Even with change in the offing, traditional Western childhood remains important historically, in part because of its involvement in vigorous and ultimately illuminating debate. Earlier practices did not die with the process of change. Wetnursing persisted longer than might otherwise be imagined, given the criticisms that began to be directed at it. Older ideas about discipline persisted as well. Historian Philip Greven has identified continuities amid the evangelical Christian minority in the United States, in the ongoing belief in the need for strict physical discipline and a barely contained anger in parent–child relations. Another interesting expression: as Western society developed new ways to move children around, they tended to repeat the idea of considerable physical separation, putting the kids in buggies or strollers; in contrast, efforts to sell strollers in urban Africa have largely failed, because of the continued desire to carry young children close. There is still room to debate what Western childhood is all about, what is distinctive about it, and what complex links to the past remain.
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: a social history of family life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962); Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: a study in psychoanalysis and history (New York: Norton, 1958); Mary Hartman, Households and the Making of History: a subversive view of the Western past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Stephen Ozment, Ancestors: the loving family in old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: parent–child relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Hunt, Parents and Children in History: the psychology of family life in early modern France (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: the emergence of a Western guilt culture, thirteenth–eighteenth centuries (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); Philip Greven, Spare the Child: the religious roots of punishment and the psychological impact of abuse (New York: Knopf, 1991); John Demos, Past, Present and Personal: the family and the life course in American history (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).