Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category. Our genes contain no clear instructions about who is and who is not a child, and the laws of survival do not require that a distinction be made between the world of an adult and the world of a child. In fact, if we take the word children to mean a special class of people somewhere between the ages of seven and, say, seventeen, requiring special forms of nurturing and protection, and believed to be qualitatively different from adults, then there is ample evidence that children have existed for less than four hundred years. Indeed, if we use the word children in the fullest sense in which the average American understands it, childhood is not much more than one hundred and fifty years old. To take one small example: The custom of celebrating a child’s birthday did not exist in America throughout most of the eighteenth century,1 and, in fact, the precise marking of a child’s age in any way is a relatively recent cultural habit, no more than two hundred years old.2
To take a more important example: As late as 1890, American high schools enrolled only seven percent of the fourteen-through seventeen-year-old population.3 Along with many much younger children, the other ninety-three percent worked at adult labor, some of them from sunup to sunset in all of our great cities.
But we must not confuse, at the outset, social facts with social ideas. The idea of childhood is one of the great inventions of the Renaissance. Perhaps its most humane one. Along with science, the nation-state, and religious freedom, childhood as both a social structure and a psychological condition emerged around the sixteenth century and has been refined and nourished into our own times. But like all social artifacts, its continued existence is not inevitable. Indeed, the origin of this book is in my observation that the idea of childhood is disappearing, and at dazzling speed. Part of my task in the pages to come is to display the evidence that this is so, although I suspect most readers will not require much convincing. Wherever I have gone to speak, or whenever I have written, on the subject of the disappearance of childhood, audiences and readers have not only refrained from disputing the point but have eagerly provided me with evidence of it from their own experience. The observation that the dividing line between childhood and adulthood is rapidly eroding is common enough among those who are paying attention, and is even suspected by those who are not. What isn’t so well understood is where childhood comes from in the first place and, still less, why it should be disappearing.
I believe I have some intelligible answers to these questions, most of them generated by a series of conjectures about how media of communication affect the socialization process; in particular, how the printing press created childhood and how the electronic media are “disappearing” it. In other words, as I understand what I have written, the main contribution of this book, such as it is, does not reside in the claim that childhood is disappearing but in a theory as to why such a thing should be happening. The book, therefore, is divided into two parts. Part 1 is concerned with showing where the idea of childhood came from; specifically, what were the communication conditions that, at first, made childhood unnecessary, and then made it inevitable. Part 2 puts us in modern times, and tries to show how the shift from Gutenberg’s world to Samuel Morse’s has made childhood as a social structure difficult to sustain and, in fact, irrelevant.
There is one question of great importance that this book will not address—namely, What can we do about the disappearance of childhood? The reason is that I do not know the answer. I say this with a mixture of relief and dejection. The relief comes from my not having the burden of instructing others on how to live their lives. In all my previous books I have presumed to point to a more effective way of solving one problem or another. Professional educators are, I believe, supposed to do that sort of thing. I had not imagined how pleasant it can be to acknowledge that one’s imaginative reach for solutions goes no farther than one’s grasp of the problem.
The dejection, of course, comes from the same source. To have to stand and wait as the charm, malleability, innocence, and curiosity of children are degraded and then transmogrified into the lesser features of pseudo-adulthood is painful and embarrassing and, above all, sad. But I have consoled myself with this thought: If one cannot say anything about how we may prevent a social disaster, perhaps one may also serve by trying to understand why it is occurring.