The Transformation of Childhood: Family Roles and Social Construction

What is Childhood?

Think about what makes childhood special in our society - it's not just about being physically smaller than adults. Pilcher identified that the most important feature of childhood is separateness. We've created entirely different worlds for children with separate laws, clothing styles, and even their own products and services.

Our society treats childhood as a "golden age of happiness and innocence". This idea of innocence means we see children as vulnerable beings who need protecting from the harsh realities of adult life. It's like keeping them in a protective bubble, quarantined from danger.

But here's the fascinating bit - Wagg argues that childhood is socially constructed. This means it's not natural or biological, but something that different societies create based on their own values and beliefs. Whilst all humans go through the same physical development stages, cultures define and treat these stages very differently.

Key Point: What seems "natural" about childhood in Britain is actually just one way of organising society - other cultures do things completely differently.

Take Benedict's research comparing different societies. In simpler, non-industrial societies, children often take on real responsibilities from age five, showing less obedience to adult authority, and have very different attitudes towards children's sexuality than we do in the West.

Childhood Over Time

You might assume childhood has always been the same, but historians like Aries discovered something shocking - in the Middle Ages, the idea of childhood didn't exist at all. Children weren't seen as fundamentally different from adults in nature or needs.

Looking at medieval art provides fascinating evidence. Children appear in paintings without any characteristics we'd associate with childhood today. They're dressed identically to adults, working alongside them, and playing the same games. There was no separate "child world" like we have now.

Shorter reveals even more dramatic differences in how children were treated historically. High death rates made parents emotionally distant from their children. It wasn't uncommon for parents to give a newborn baby the same name as a recently deceased sibling, refer to babies as "it," or even forget how many children they had.

Key Point: The emotional investment and protection we give children today would have seemed bizarre to medieval parents who couldn't afford to get too attached.

Modern sociologists argue that western notions of childhood are being globalised - our idea that childhood should be a separate life stage based around family and school, where children are innocent and dependent, is spreading worldwide. But this is quite a recent development in human history.

How Has Childhood Changed?

Aries traced how our modern obsession with childhood gradually emerged from the 13th century onwards. Schools started specialising purely in educating children rather than mixing ages together. By the 17th century, upper-class boys had special outfits "reserved for their age" that set them apart from adults.

By the 18th century, parenting handbooks were bestsellers - proof that families were becoming much more child-centred. Aries argues we've moved from a world that saw nothing special about childhood to one that's completely obsessed with it. He calls the 20th century "the century of the child."

Several key changes created modern childhood. Laws restricting child labour removed children from the workforce, whilst compulsory schooling (like the 1880 Education Act) gave them a separate role as students. Child protection legislation and the growth of children's rights further marked them out as a special category needing protection.

Key Point: The Industrial Revolution was the driving force behind modern childhood - it created the economic conditions that made prolonged dependency possible and necessary.

Lower infant mortality rates and smaller family sizes meant parents could invest more emotionally and financially in each child. Medical knowledge about child development expanded rapidly, and new laws applied specifically to children (covering everything from smoking to sexual consent ages).

Critics like Pollock argue that Aries went too far - perhaps medieval society simply had different notions of childhood rather than no concept at all. But Aries' work brilliantly demonstrates how childhood is socially constructed and changes dramatically over time.

Future of Childhood

Is childhood disappearing before our eyes? Postman, a postmodernist theorist, argues that childhood is "disappearing at a dazzling speed." He points to children having similar rights to adults, wearing similar clothing, and in extreme cases, committing "adult crimes" like murder.

Postman's theory is clever - he argues that childhood emerged alongside mass literacy. When most people couldn't read, children could enter adult society early because speech was the only skill needed. But printed books created an information hierarchy between literate adults and illiterate children.

This gave adults power to keep "adult" knowledge about sex, money, violence, and death secret from children - creating our association of childhood with innocence and ignorance. Television changes everything because it doesn't require special skills to access, breaking down the boundary between adult and child knowledge.

Key Point: If Postman is right, digital media is fundamentally reshaping childhood by giving children direct access to previously "adult" information.

Opie strongly disagrees, arguing that childhood culture remains vibrant and separate. Her research into children's games, rhymes, and songs shows strong evidence of continued separate children's culture that has persisted for generations.

Jenks offers a middle path - childhood isn't disappearing but is definitely changing as we move from modern to postmodern society. In postmodern society, adult relationships become more unstable (higher divorce rates), making adults even more fearful for their children's security and more obsessed with protecting them from perceived dangers like abuse.

Critical Perspectives

Jenks fundamentally disagrees with Postman's disappearance theory. Childhood continues to be a separate legal and social status - the restrictions on what children can do still clearly mark them off from adults in meaningful ways.

The evidence suggests childhood is transforming rather than vanishing. Legal frameworks, educational systems, and family structures still treat children as a distinct category requiring different treatment from adults.

Key Point: Even if childhood is changing rapidly, it remains a powerful organising principle in how we structure society and family life.

March of Progress Views

The "march of progress" view argues that children's lives have steadily improved over recent centuries and are better now than ever before. Supporters like Aries and Shorter point to children being more valued, better cared for, with professionals catering to their educational, psychological, and medical needs.

Today's children are protected by comprehensive laws against abuse and exploitation. Better healthcare and higher living standards mean children have much better survival chances than a century ago. Smaller families mean parents can afford to provide better for each child's needs.

March of progress sociologists argue that families have become genuinely child-centred. Children are no longer expected to be "seen and not heard" like in Victorian times, but are now the "focal point" of family life, consulted on decisions and given unprecedented attention.

Key Point: Parents today invest enormous amounts emotionally and financially in their children, often hoping to give them better opportunities than they themselves had.

However, Palmer's concept of "toxic childhood" challenges this rosy picture. She argues that rapid technological and cultural changes in recent decades have damaged children's physical, emotional, and intellectual development through junk food, excessive screen time, intensive marketing, parents working long hours, and educational pressure.

Marxist and feminist critics argue that the march of progress view presents a false, idealised image that ignores important inequalities. They point out that many children still experience poverty and poor care, whilst others face greater control and dependency rather than genuine protection.

Power and Inequalities in Childhood

Not all children experience childhood equally. Hillman's research shows gender inequalities - boys get more freedom to cross roads, cycle, use buses, and go out after dark unaccompanied. Bonke found that girls do five times more housework than boys, showing how domestic responsibilities are unequally distributed.

Critics like Firestone and Holt argue that what the march of progress sees as "care and protection" are actually new forms of oppression and control. Firestone suggests that protecting children from paid work isn't beneficial but creates powerlessness and adult dependency.

Consider how much control adults exercise over children's daily lives - when to wake up, eat, move around, watch TV, and sleep. Adults decide if children are "too old" or "too young" for particular activities, a concept that doesn't exist in many other cultures.

Key Point: Adults control not just children's time and activities, but even their bodies - how to sit, walk, what to wear, hairstyles, and even how they can touch themselves.

Economic dependency keeps children powerless. Labour laws and compulsory schooling exclude them from well-paid work. Child benefits go to parents, not children. Pocket money depends on "good behaviour" and comes with spending restrictions.

Gittins uses the term "age patriarchy" to describe these inequalities between adults and children - a system of adult domination and child dependency similar to how patriarchy describes male dominance over women.

Resistance and Control

Children aren't completely powerless - they develop strategies to resist adult control. Hockey and James identified two main approaches that children use to challenge the restrictions placed on them.

"Acting up" involves behaving like adults by doing forbidden things - swearing, smoking, drinking alcohol, joyriding, or engaging in underage sexual activity. This directly challenges the boundaries adults set around childhood innocence and dependency.

"Acting down" means deliberately behaving like younger children when it suits them. This might involve using baby talk, insisting on being carried, or claiming they're "too little" to do something they don't want to do.

Key Point: These resistance strategies show that children actively negotiate their position rather than passively accepting adult control.

Gittins reminds us that the term "family" originally referred to male power over all household members - children, servants, and women. This power sometimes manifests as violence against both children and women, showing how age and gender inequalities can intersect and reinforce each other.

These strategies reveal that childhood isn't just something that happens to children - they actively participate in constructing and challenging the boundaries of their social position.