History Child

What can the history of childhood agree on? PROFESSOR GEORGE ROUSSEAU finds out

Philippe Ariès, the French civil servant who wrote his histories at night and on Sundays after a day's work in a government office for agricultural research, opened the floodgates of children's history in the 1960s. Before then, children were innocents without a history of their own capable of influencing the social order; afterwards, their history was contentious. Like the histories of other significantly neglected groups, the history of childhood was continuous but controversial, defective in its confusions over the lived experiences of children versus adult attitudes to childhood. It wasn't even clear what a "child" was or what the vague "childhood" meant or when it ended. In 2008, no other group proves more intractable to understand or more difficult to legislate for.

Many of Ariès' pronouncements - for example, the notion that unaffected parents did not grieve for children under the age of five before the nineteenth century because they knew they might not survive, or the idea that "childhood" in the abstract had a short epistemological pedigree - have not withstood the test of time. Ariès' triumph was intuitive and rhetorical: in Centuries of Childhood (1962) he described the "epochs of childhood" just enough to whet readers' appetites - nothing more. The veracity of his insights counted for less than his breakthroughs; not that children had been players in history's processes but that they possessed a history from the Greeks to the great war and beyond.

Lloyd de Mause, an American psychoanalyst turned psychohistorian, complemented Ariès' Centuries of Childhood by infusing "sexual history". Children, he claimed, had always been sexual creatures, as Freud and Klein had systematically shown, but de Mause and his colleagues historicised this profile by demonstrating how routinely they had been abused and battered. His group also showed that the sex life of a Greek or Roman child hugely differed from that of a Puritan or Victorian child. He assembled a team of American historians who chipped away at the necessary proof neatly packaged as "parent-child relationships".

Their book entitled The History of Childhood appeared amidst fanfare in 1974, twelve years after the English translation of Ariès' book was published. Eric Fromm, the polymathic Jewish refugee then still resident in New York City, remarked that it was "just magnificent: an extremely important contribution to the knowledge of man". The New York Review of Books hailed it as "brilliant and pioneering". And William Langer, the Archibald Cary Coolidge professor of history at Harvard and president of the American Historical Association, contributed the foreword to "this pioneering volume" while conceding that "the results of these investigations are most depressing...and monotonously painful". Depressing because the de Mausites documented the appalling degree to which children have been battered and abused throughout history.
Ariès and De Mause acknowledged the role of adults while focusing on children: a double-juggling act. I think both historians would have rebutted suggestions that they were compiling histories of adulthood: they recognized themselves as revisionists tapping into a neglected group – the overlooked children. Yet they would have conceded that their work was about the adults: a type of "history of adulthood", although no such term existed then, nor does it exist now.

De Mause's book had no impact abroad. Its message was too bleak and suspect; ordinary readers found its narrative too depressing. Had children really been so miserably abused? Besides, historians in Britain abjured psychohistory long after 1974: only the post-Freudians in middle Europe, still gasping at the atrocities of the death camps, welcomed its approach to this minority of little people whose voices cried out to be heard. So Ariès' notion of childhood rather than de Mause's survived the 1980s: a history of parental disaffection and adult indifference rather than battering and sexual abuse.

But resistance to the permissive 1960s - Ariès' decade of discovery - was setting in. The theories of Marx, Freud and Melanie Klein came under scrutiny, while notions of children as passive players, future abiding citizens, and rational consumers of goods - anything but the flesh-and-blood sexual creatures who had been battered throughout history - grew. The 1980s nostalgically endorsed a pastoral view of innocent children, the one that nineteenth-century romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth and painters William Hamilton, Helen Allingham and George Morland had embraced.

Concurrent with these developments was the rise in the 1980s of family history as an academic sub-field: retrieval of the basic unit of biosocial control then clearly under stress. The idea that families could be studied comparatively, as well as the actual interior lives and intrinsic arrangements of family structures in need of decoding, had been endorsed from Victorian times. Family historians revisited this microcosmic world in the 1980s. Religion and nationality - German families, Italian families, Scottish families - played a part in their formulations, as did the variability of family dynamics. But the main point was elucidation of kinship responsibilities, marriage rituals, affective patterns and emotional ties, especially as they impinged on child-rearing and adolescent development. The new family historians barely heeded Ariès - his Centuries of Childhood merely sensitized them to the past's differences.

After the twentieth-century's global wars (and, more recently, 9/11), these contradictory images required readjustment. Even before the attack on the Twin Towers it was evident that children needed more local protection, as well as forums where their voices could be heard – both concurrently. Threats of global terrorism heightened adult anxiety across the spectrum of class. Adults fretted more than they had in a long time; their solution to these menaces invariably taking the form of hyper-parenting.

Proper guarding and mentoring of underprivileged children had of course been long overdue. But extending this to the most privileged of children bordered on hysteria: a moral failure of collective nerve, panic based on expectations of invasion and evil gone amok. All children needed broadly based forms of protection - they still do. But protection from roaming criminals, kidnappers and pedophiles suggested the formation of a new era in the surveillance of children.

Since 9/11 new policing has infiltrated children's lives under the guise of management: aiming to perfect them, sharpen their competitive edge, turn them into aggressive consumers whose purchase power rivals their parents'. But these regimens of self-care should be understood as assuaging adult anxiety rather than enhancing the quality of children's lives.

Most parents do not see it this way. They continue to insist that hyper-parenting is necessary without recognizing to what degree it is accelerating: an unacknowledged movement in urgent need of redress.

If children constitute the historians' last frontier, they also present technological society with its greatest gift: a growing army of consumers avid to purchase every gadget and grain. That children need to play is incontestable, but play now requires expensive apparatus. Big business has learned that children consume more than sugary foods; they buy toys, games, clothing and electronics worth billions of pounds. Some economic historians focus on child consumers, alert to adult strategies to buy off children. Much of our generation's affluence has been fueled by technology's conspiracy with parental bribery.

The fallout is stark. Children of the affluent are being coerced by their parents and hyper-managed into league-tables while poorer children sulk, unable to share the wild spending sprees, and bored as well, wreak criminal revenge. In Britain the level of precocity among privileged children has never been higher, while illiteracy among the bypassed young continues to rise and cripple their futures. The rhetorical cant that 'no child should be left behind' has produced a dismal double standard that is widening despite political spin to the contrary.

The solutions to these predicaments are no clearer now than they were when Ariès and De Mause wrote. Many children have never been so perfect, polished and competitive, while others without role models and resource have no incentive: when their parents cannot read why should they bother to learn?

The polarisations are distressing, leaving "balanced" children of the middle rank hard to find. Among the hyper-managed privileged, the idea of failing children is so grotesque that parents go to extraordinary lengths to prevent it.

Some affluent mothers force their children to eat perfectly healthy diets, free of excess, while others encourage their prepubescent daughters to become prematurely sexual by dressing up. Prescriptive mothers are intensely imaginative in the new forms of parenting.
As I send this article off to the editors of The Oxford Forum, the posh parents of a nine-year old girl tell me at a Christmas drinks party in London that they prefer for their daughter to study mathematical engineering at MIT rather than at Harvard. Amused at such advance planning, I inquired further. A lengthy explanation followed. Naughtily I asked whether they had booked their flights for 2017, then drowned my weepy eyes in the bubbly stuff. "Save the children" indeed.

Historians of childhood agree on little, but it is high time we recognized that in late capitalism, just as the worldwide sphere of influence is shifting eastwards away from America, a new era in parent-child relations has dawned, in which the contrary forces of indulgence, management and technology are playing havoc with childhood. Twenty-first century historians are going to have a field day decoding it.

George Rousseau is co-director of the Centre for the History of Childhood at Oxford University. Professor Rousseau's book, Children and Sexuality: The Greeks to the Great War, was published in 2007 by Palgrave Macmillan.