#212 | A Short History of Childhood

Hi there, Alistair here. A quick word before we get into today's episode, I've just opened registrations for the 30 for 30 challenge. This is one of our most popular challenges and it works like this. Every day for 30 days I will post a new question in our community. Your task is to respond to the question. You can write your response or even record yourself speaking if you like. The tasks start simple but get more thought-provoking as the challenge goes on. And if you complete every single one there is a special prize. It starts on Monday the 18th of May and will go on for 30 days. I'd love for you to take part and I've put a link in the show notes where you can find out more. Okay, that is it. Now it's time to enjoy the episode. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Mines by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English. I'm Alistair Budge and today we are going to be talking about childhood and how ideas about children and childhood have changed over the years. We'll start by looking at early ideas about the role of children and concepts of childhood. Then we'll look at when and why this started to change. How the modern ideas of childhood came about. How this was in conflict with industrialisation and the resolutions that were made. Then we'll look at the creation of the idea of the teenager and why the idea of the adolescent didn't really exist in the same way before. And finally we'll reflect on modern and future childhood and ask ourselves whether it really is true that the childhood of children today is not as innocent and carefree as yours or mine might have been. Before we get right into today's episode, though, I want to remind you that you can become a member of Leonardo English and follow along with the subtitles, the transcript and its keyword "cabbery" over on the website, which is Leonardo English.com. Membership of Leonardo English gives you access to all of our learning materials, all of our bonus episodes, so that's more than 200 different episodes now, as well as two new ones every week, plus access to our awesome private community where we do live events, challenges and much much more. Our community now has members from over 60 countries and it's my mission to make it the most interesting place for curious people like you to improve their English. So if you are ready to take the next step on your English learning journey, then the place to go is LeonardoEnglish.com. Oh, okay then, a short history of childhood. Now with this show, we often cover big monumentous topics or historical events, the French Revolution, fake news, pirates. In today's episode, we're covering something that is on one level a lot less monumentous, a lot less covered in the history books, children and childhood. Yet for each and every one of us, we have experienced childhood. We have all been children. Perhaps if you are one of our younger listeners, you might still consider yourself a child now. Even if you aren't a younger listener, perhaps you would still consider yourself a child. And for those of us who are no longer children, perhaps we have our own children who are still in their childhood. Perhaps they are now young adults, or perhaps they have grown up and had children of their own. The point is that childhood, or at least being a child, is something that unites us all. And this is what we'll explore today. We'll focus on the ideas of childhood in Britain, but we'll also touch on ideas of childhood further afield too. There are some important questions to think about before we start on this journey. What exactly is a child? What is childhood? When do you stop being a child? And for what reasons? And when you stop being a child, what do you become? We will explore all of these questions in due course, but I raise them now to get us thinking before we dive into the history. Now, historians are in fact somewhat divided over the idea of childhood before the Enlightenment around 300 years ago. The French historian Philippe Ariès, who wrote the seminal 1960 book, L'Enfant et la vie familière sous l'Orsaye-Aigime, which was translated into English as centuries of childhood, simply believed that childhood didn't exist until the 17th century. Famously, he wrote that in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist. Firstly, infant mortality was so high with anywhere from 30 to 50% of babies dying before their first birthday. Given that such a high proportion of children would die, it simply wasn't practical to devote your emotional energy towards them, nor to invest time and effort in their growth. This certainly isn't to say that medieval parents were cruel, emotionless, and felt no love for their children, but rather that death was so commonplace that the death of a child was not unexpected, and therefore was less of a tragedy than the death of an infant would be today. In medieval times, so the theory goes, if a child was lucky enough to survive its first few years, it would help its parents with household work and farming. There simply was little time to play or develop creatively, as we encourage children to do today. Nor was there the belief that this was an important thing for children to do. Children didn't tend to celebrate their birthday, they celebrated their saint's day, the day on which the saint they would be named after was celebrated. For this reason, many people didn't really know how old they were. What's more, there was this puritanical Christian idea of original sin, the idea that man comes into the world in sin, and so newborn babies needed to be freed from this. A baby needed to be baptized and then redeemed through Christian instruction. If they were lucky enough to be born into a relatively wealthy family, and to survive past their first birthday, they might receive a religious education, but the purpose of this wasn't to allow them to expand their mind and think for themselves. It was to help them on their journey towards Christian salvation. Thus, for most of the medieval era, at least, if you were poor, which would mean the majority of the population, your young life, your childhood, would consist of helping your parents around the house and working, and if you were born into a wealthy family, it might involve some religious instruction, but there was no developed idea that children needed to be treated greatly differently. In both cases, so Arias' theory goes, there was no concept of childhood, or it being a unique, important stage of a person's development. Now, things started to change at the start of the enlightenment, when philosophers and thinkers all over Europe started to question assumed beliefs. When it comes to childhood, the first revolutionary idea came from the Englishman John Locke, who proposed that an infant say newborn child was a tabularaza, a blank sheet of paper, in need of education and instruction from his elders. Thus, it was the parent's responsibility to educate and nurture their children, to make sure that they were able to make their way in the world. Fast forward a few decades, and across the English channel, the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proposed another new and revolutionary idea relating to the development of children. He proposed that children had their own innate natural way of developing, guided by their emotions. The idea was that by nurturing children in the right way and allowing them to explore on their own. They could start to reason and being able to reason was the aim for man. They should be free, but there should also be a closer bond between mother and child. At this time, especially mothers from wealthy families wouldn't breastfeed their children, instead sending them to wet nurses, female servants who would breastfeed them instead of the mother. Rousseau placed a great importance, firstly on the child having its own freedom to explore, but also on the bond between mother and child. This was crucial to a healthy, happy and successful childhood. Rousseau even defined three stages of childhood development. Stage one was up to the age of 12 when children should be guided by their feelings. Stage two was from 12 to around 16, and this is when they start to develop their own sense of reason. And stage three is from 16 onwards when the child becomes an adult, marries and has children of their own. Most of this comes from his 1762 book, Emile or on education, and is still influential today. You can see similar ideas at work in places like Montessori schools, and his theories are an important part of many progressive educational theories. So, the enlightenment gave us these two opposing views of childhood, but they at least recognised that children have unique needs, and that childhood is of vital importance. Strange enough as it might seem to us now, this is something that appears not to have been a real consideration beforehand. At least Ariès, the first historian to write about childhood, believes the concept simply didn't exist in the medieval era. The Romantics, who appeared toward the end of the 18th century, went a step further than the enlightenment thinkers, imagining children as free, pure and innocent, only to be corrupted by the rules of society. Nothing with people like the English poets, William Wordsworth and William Blake, at the turn of the 19th century, in the late 18th and early 19th century. Children were seen as free, unencumbered by the norms of society. Children should be spontaneous, free to do what they want, to learn from what is around them, rather than being forced to learn from textbooks. Children also started to appear in works of art, often naked and smiling, showing their innocence. The English Romantic poets linked childhood to the power of imagination, and believed that children were closer to God than adults. Children were capable of things that adults were not, and the adult world corrupted the innocence of children. We can see how this is so very different to the original ideas of childhood, and even of John Loxvishen, where he suggested that children were blank slates that needed instruction. Now through the Romantic movement in Britain, childhood became almost holy, a time of innocence, the only time in a human's life where he or she was completely free. And thus it was a time to be cherished, a time of vital importance. But at the same time as the Romantic poets, the industrial revolution was just getting started. Great Britain was a deeply unequal society, and the creation of factories and lack of any kind of real social security system pushed more and more children into work. While in the medieval times, children might have worked alongside their parents in the fields or around the house. In the late 18th and early 19th century, children might spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week, literally half their lives and almost all their waking hours, working away in dangerous factories, doing repetitive, communal work. Just while the Romantics were pushing this idea that children should be free, and that childhood was a crucially important time for the development of children, the luxury of having this type of childhood was restricted only to the richest in society. As these awful conditions became better known, in part through novelists such as Charles Dickens, who documented the plight of working children, there was an increasing movement to restrict child labour. In 1833, a law was passed to say that children working in the cotton or woolen industries needed to be more than nine years old, and that nobody under the age of 18 could work more than ten hours a day or eight hours on a Sunday. Now that gives you an idea of how bad it was before, that there was a law that was put in place to stop children who were under nine from working more than 68 hours a week. The Victorians did try various methods to get children into education, including making education free, but children who worked in factories would often be too tired to go to school and would fall asleep in class. Children in much of Victorian Britain were breadwinners, they were responsible for bringing money into the house, and so simply not working wasn't an option for them. Since the 1833 law, numerous more forward-thinking laws were created to increase the working age and reduce the hours, but even in 1901, a 12-year-old could still legally work. Although for the average child in Victorian Britain, a childhood wasn't much of a childhood at all. The Victorians were very influential in creating the modern idea of what a childhood should look like. For starters, there was this new genre of children's literature of books and stories for children that served not primarily to educate but to entertain. Prior to this, the prevailing view had been that children should learn from books. Yes, there were books for children, but they taught them morals, how to behave, and how to live in society. Authors such as Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barry, who wrote Alice's adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan respectively, created magical worlds for children. There might be some morals in there, but they were hugely entertaining and magical, and existed to make children hope and dream. Childhood was a time to be prized because when it was gone, it was gone. Indeed, in Peter Pan, the boy Peter Pan is a boy who never wants to grow up, and never, never land is a place where children don't need to grow up. Childhood became a place for children to explore, to create their own magical worlds, to have their own adventures. This might sound familiar to you now because it is the prevailing view of much of Western society, that childhood is a time for children to explore and to have fun, not a time to be forced to behave in a particularly adult way. Moving into the 20th century, we see compulsory schooling, we see children being required to have an education, and the banning of child labour in Britain at least. It is widely agreed that an education is an important part of a child's development and of childhood, but numerous different ideas about what this education should consist of emerge. Indeed, what education should look like is certainly not something that any country seems to have figured out, and certainly how to effectively help children learn foreign languages still is a hot topic of debate. Moving on to childhood in the 20th century, there is one very important addition to childhood that we haven't touched on yet. The invention of the teenager. The term teenager started to be used in 1944 to identify children in adolescence, technically children children who are from 13 to 19 years of age. Previously, children in this age group weren't given any special treatment. They weren't considered any differently, really. The term adolescent had started to be used in the late 19th century, but it mainly referred to the period of transition between childhood and adulthood, rather than giving children of this age a distinct identity. The teenager was a new invention entirely. The post-war period in America gave teenagers their own identity, their own freedoms. Films were made for teenagers, and companies realized that they could sell products to this discrete audience that was different to children. There was a New York Times article from 1945 called a Teenage Bill of Rights, which outlined 10 rights that children in this particular age group should have, from the right to make mistakes, to the right to question ideas. Given that teenagers no longer needed to work in factories, they were free to explore the world on their own, to rebel against their parents, to have sexual relationships, to do things that teenagers previously had simply never been able to do, because they had either been working, or if they came from a wealthy family, they were rarely allowed out of their own little familiar bubble. When you combine this with the mass production of cars in America at least, teenagers suddenly had a way to gain independence from their parents. They literally had a vehicle that could take them anywhere. And this cult of the teenager has only got stronger. Billion dollar companies exist solely with teenagers as customers. Authors write for teenagers, films are made for teenagers. The teenager is a discrete part of childhood that simply didn't exist 100 years ago. Now, coming to the question of modern childhood, and how childhood now is different from the childhood that you might have experienced, and why that is, I'll just invite you to think about your own childhood for a minute. You can even press pause if you like. Okay, if you paused and thought about your childhood for a bit, well done. For many of us, we think of our childhoods as being the happiest, most carefree period of our lives. You might think of being able to get the school bus home without a care in the world, ever world without mobile phones or social media. Perhaps a world where your mother kicked you out of the house at eight o'clock in the morning and told you to come back for tea. A world that was safer, more innocent, a happier place to grow up. When compared to the childhood that many adults believe children are living today, it seems simpler, easier, safer, and you might even say better. And in the UK, a lot of the media outlets, especially right-wing media outlets, relish stories about the decline of childhood, about how the innocent youth that Brits used to enjoy is gone forever. Indeed, there's a story by a famous historian called Professor Hugh Cunningham, who is the author of an excellent book called Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, where he recounts being offered to write an article for the Daily Mail newspaper about the history of childhood. He was offered about a pound of word and told that the article should be around 2000 words. That would be around £3000 in today's money, so around €4,000 for an article that he could probably write in his sleep. He said, "Sure, I'll write it." But was told that the editor in chief of the newspaper, a man called Paul Daker, would only publish it if it showed that childhood had got worse since the 1950s. Cunningham's view was that childhood hadn't got worse, so the article was never published. The point is that Daker knew exactly what his audience wanted, and that was to be told that the past was better than the present. If Cunningham wasn't willing to say this, well, the article wouldn't be published. And this brings us to the very real question of whether childhood is better or worse today than it was in the past. Well, of course it really depends on how far back in the past you go. If we are talking about the medieval or Victorian era, or even childhood in the first half of the 20th century when you might have finished school at 13 and started working. Well, I think I'd prefer to try my luck with the pressures of social media over working 12 hours a day in a coal mine. But if we are talking about a childhood in the 1970s, let's say, then it's probably safer to say that the problems are simply different. Children today have opportunities that simply didn't exist even 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. Some opportunities to connect with other children from all over the world to the opportunities to access any information they want. These opportunities come with their fair share of risks, but it seems too binary and short cited to say childhood now is simply better or worse. At least we can be happy in the knowledge that most societies have recognised that childhood is a fundamental part of a human's life, a time for adventure, a time to be curious, a time to learn, a time to play, a time to laugh, a time to experiment. Childhood has certainly come a long way since its creation. If you are to believe Philippe Ariès, remember he was the French historian who said it didn't exist until the 17th century. And as our idea of what is a correct and proper childhood has continued to evolve, this would suggest that it will continue to evolve in the years to come. Childhood is a process of figuring out how the world works, what sort of person you are, and what sort of person you want to be. It's perhaps appropriate that even as adults and as a wider society, we are still figuring out what sort of childhood is right for our children. Oh, okay then, that is it for today's episode on childhood. I hope it's been an interesting one and that it's made you think about your own childhood in a slightly different way. As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode. How do you think childhood is different from what it was when you were growing up? Is it better? Worse the same or just different? And as we mainly dealt with childhood in Britain today, how is the evolution of childhood in your country different? I would love to know for the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.linadoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds. And as a final reminder, if you enjoyed this episode and you are wondering where to get all of our bonus episodes, plus the transcripts, subtitles and giver cabri, then the place to go for that islinadoenglish.com. I am on a mission to make Leonardo English the most interesting way of improving your English. And I would love for you to join me and curious minds from 60 different countries on that journey. The place you can go for all of that islinadoenglish.com. You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Mines by Leonardo English. I'm Alistair Budge, you stay safe and I'll catch you in the next episode.