Centuries Of Childhood
There was a time, back in the 1960s, when any student wanting to show they were conversant with the latest thinking would be quoting French authors. Social anthropologists would be referring to books by Claude Levi Strauss, fascinating analyses even if he wasn’t much of an ethnographer. For Marxism and political theory, it was Jean-Paul Sartre (everyone I knew read Sartre, and some of them even seemed to understand him). For post-modern philosophy and psychoanalysis, it was Jacques Lacan, and for deconstructionism it was Jackie Derrida (in the case of these two, no-one I knew claimed to have really understood either of them). In the midst of this group of increasingly self-referential and complex theorists, up popped Philippe Ariès. At last, here was someone I could understand, even if what he had to say was controversial. He made me think! Sixty years later, I still am.
When Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life appeared in English in 1962 (the original French edition was published in 1960) it was, for a while, one of the most cited and divisive overviews of changing views of childhood ever written. Ariès wasn’t a professional historian. In fact, he was an archivist for the Institute of Applied Research for Tropical and Subtropical Fruits in Paris. However, in his spare time he was an amateur historian, with a particular interest in the history of the family. He was especially concerned with countering conservative claims that the twentieth-century family was going into decline; rather he wanted to show the family as we know it today, a private, domestic circle founded upon the idea of mutual affection, was a relatively new concept. He argued that ‘childhood’ emerged around the seventeenth century, or rather it was ‘discovered’ then.
This ‘discovery’ was predicated on another, much-debated point: Ariès argued that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist”. This claim, which has seen some support and considerable disagreement ever since, is more complex that it might appear. As various writers and translators have pointed out, the English translation of Ariès’s text uses the term “idea” where Ariès himself had used the term ‘sentiment’. The difference between these two terms is crucial. ‘Sentiment’ has two meanings: ‘the sense of a feeling about childhood as well as a concept of it’. Ariès did not intend to claim that individual medieval families did not show affection for their children, but rather childhood was not recognised and valued as a distinct phase of human existence in the same way it is today. Given this, he claimed there was less separation between adults and children in medieval society.
That was a point that made good sense, as far as I was concerned. I had just read The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault, with its extraordinary and deeply engaging chapter on Las Meninas, the 1656 painting by Velázquez, currently in the Prado Museum in Madrid. It is a painting which must have become one of the most widely analysed works in Western art, given its complex and somewhat enigmatic composition. The painting raises questions about reality and illusion, and the uncertain relationship it creates between the viewer and the figures depicted. It deserves a blog of its own, except there is no way in which I could improve on Foucault’s comments. However, as I began to read Centuries of Childhood, I had the image of the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa in my mind: if you know the painting, the Infanta is looking at you, surrounded an entourage comprising two maids, a chaperone, a bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. She is a miniature adult, in dress, in pose, even in her hair style. No ‘child’ there. It is an image apparently supporting Ariès’s thesis.
I doubt many people read Centuries of Childhood now. However, while his views have been largely discounted or ignored, they are worth a second look. Briefly, Ariès begins by arguing that changing notions of chronological age affected the development of Western European notions of childhood. For example, we think it is very normal for a child, indeed for individuals in general, to know his or her age and date of birth. Yet, according to Ariès, most people living before the eighteenth century did not know and were not concerned about their exact age. He suggested that the “curious passion” for recording dates and calculating ages is a recent development, an outcome corresponding to the rise of exact account-keeping by the Church and State during the eighteenth century.
As a result, he proposed that the concept of age was quite different before 1700 from what it is today: an individual was categorised as an “infant” or a “youth” or an “old person”, but not by his specific chronological age but by physical appearance and habits. Furthermore, what was considered “infancy” or “youth” in the premodern era was very different from what we might associate with such terms today: in the sixteenth century, for example, a child of seven years might still be considered an ‘infant’ and a man of forty years might still be considered a ‘youth’. “Such fluid or relatively indeterminate definitions of ‘infancy’ and ‘youth,’” Ariès wrote, “were due not only to a different understanding of chronological age, but also to the tendency, in the middle ages, to view children as miniature adults.” Just as we see in Las Meninas, medieval artists depicted children as adults “reduced to a smaller scale […], without any other difference in expression or features”. Ariès also made another observation about children in art, that it was not until the seventeenth century that portraits of children in their daily, domestic context became “numerous and commonplace”—a trend he claimed indicated developing interest in children as central members of the nuclear household.
What was going on? According to Ariès, the high mortality rate in the premodern era caused parents to steel themselves from becoming too emotionally involved with infants who might be soon to die. Rather than conceiving of their vulnerable offspring as unique individuals, Ariès claims, Europeans followed Montaigne in assuming that young children had “neither mental activity nor recognizable body shape”; they were regarded as merely “neutral” beings poised precariously between life and death. However, he suggested that as the mortality rate for infants decreased, there was an inversely proportional increase in the attention paid to children and, in his view, consequently in records, as with the paintings made of them.
The rise in the affection and attention paid to children, Ariès argues, produced a distinct culture of childhood. For example, the seventeenth century brought about a newfound interest in children’s words, mispronunciations, and expressions, and certain styles of clothing, as well as some games and holidays becoming increasingly associated with childhood. One example he gave was that pre-seventeenth century children wore clothes that were smaller-scale copies of those of their parents, but seventeenth century children began to be dressed in clothes that were only slightly different from those of adults. A new fashion was to dress children in robes with ribbons that were the remnants of sleeves once found fashionable by adult wearers of these robes, but later deemed outmoded: Ariès said it would seem, in effect, that new trends children’s clothing rested on the ‘hand-me-downs’ of adult fashion.
According to Ariès, the association of children with certain manners of speech, styles of clothing, and activities came about relatively concurrently with a developing notion of childhood as a time of sexual innocence. Toward the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the image of the child shifted from a sexually indifferent individual to a sexually innocent one whose purity was constantly in danger of being corrupted by immoral influences. Such a shift took place, Ariès argued, predominately in response to the rise of the modern educational system. Educators, most of whom were priests, were just as concerned with their pupils’ salvation as they were with any acquisition of knowledge. They closely monitored their students’ sexual habits and behaviours and took measures to correct those that they deemed unhealthy. The result of such scrutiny, which was subsequently encouraged and disseminated by handbooks on decorum, was a trend that involved the contradictory desires to “coddle” the child, in other words to protect children’s innate innocence from evil influences, and to discipline them harshly, lest they turn to sin.
What about education? Today, we expect young people to begin school at a relatively early age, alongside other children their own age. And we assume that, as each year passes, students will perform increasingly advanced work. Yet, as Ariès demonstrates, this approach to education is a relatively recent one. In the Middle Ages, very few people were formally educated. The only medieval institution reminiscent of the contemporary university or school was the “cathedral school,” where boys and men would study to become clerics. However, as the number of students and masters associated with cathedral schools increased, the institutions we now associate with the modern educational system began to evolve. Rather than allowing students of various ages to mingle together in the classroom, educators began to divide them up into individual, age-based classes, a practice he suggested which contributed to the identification of childhood as a specific stage of life.
Inevitably, this process of separation also enabled surveillance and control. Schoolmasters, assured of their moral superiority over their child-charges, supervised students closely. In addition, they held their students responsible for informing on each other in order to secure confessions of weakness. Corporal punishment became an increasingly popular as a means of discipline. Eventually, the day school evolved into the boarding school, where students were subject to observation and discipline around the clock. Thus, while the medieval school made little distinction between the adult and the child, the (proto)modern school introduced a sharp divide between adult and child worlds and promoted the idea that children were subordinate beings in need of supervision and discipline.
Finally, Ariès concluded that the seventeenth century, the era in which he argues the concept of childhood first flowered, was the point at which the family, as we know it, first found ‘full expression’. The rise of the family, Ariès writes, was the consequence of a general move in Western society from inclusiveness to privacy. Before the eighteenth century, noble families lived in ‘great houses’ in which space was shared between children and adults and servants and masters. Moreover, these wealthy families were surrounded by “concentric circles of relations … [including] relatives, friends, clients, protégés, debtors, etc.”. This crowded, public life placed more emphasis on the collective than it did on the individual.
However, he argued that by the eighteenth century, “the family began to hold society at a distance, to push it back beyond a steadily extending zone of private life”. An ever-growing separation between the ‘inside’ of the household and the ‘outside’ of the greater social world emerged, and this, Ariès argued, coincided with the increasing attention being paid to the child. Children were more often home with their birth-families, and therefore increasingly subject to family attention and affection. Moreover, the upper- and middle-class’s growing preoccupation with etiquette led to an increased focus on the proper upbringing of children: parents joined with schoolmasters and religious officials in appropriately ‘moulding’ the child. The child became the centre of the family’s attention.
Many critics of Ariès’s work have reacted especially strongly to his claim that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist.” Indeed, commentators suggest medievalists “never seem to tire of proving Ariès to be wrong” and yet “set themselves the task of showing that the middle ages did have a concept of childhood, not perhaps the same as in later centuries, but a concept nonetheless”. Adrian Wilson suggested Ariès’s mistake was to argue that medieval society had no awareness of young people simply because they lacked our awareness of what children were like and how they should be treated. Another major criticism of Ariès’s study was that the great majority of his sources were poems, paintings, sculptures, and other works of art. Ariès assumed that art directly reflected life.
Given the degree of criticism levelled at Ariès’s work, one might wonder whether there is any value in studying his history of childhood. Strangely enough, even those who voiced strong reservations regarding Ariès’s study nevertheless recommended it, if only because of its status as a foundational work in the field of children’s history. It is widely recognized as a classic text. The degree to which Ariès has been cited by scholars in various academic fields suggests Centuries of Childhood has catalysed continuing theoretical debate. Many who reject Ariès’s arguments on the relatively recent discovery of childhood agree childhood was experienced and imagined differently in the Middle Ages, acknowledging that material conditions, power relations, religious beliefs, and cultural mores have a profound impact on notions of childhood. In recent times social anthropologists have added support to the view that childhood and family life aren’t universal constants, but rather contingent concepts.
Rereading Ariès today is to encourage us to ask what difference does his analysis make? Was it just an interesting by-way in research, now discarded or ignored, or is there still some relevance to be considered? It could be the Medieval world assumed that there was no childhood and treated young people accordingly. Young people behaved as they were expected, and society operated on that basis. Today, our culture assumes that young people are children. We also believe there is a longish period of preparation of children for adulthood. We treat young people accordingly, and they respond accordingly. Rather than concluding that children are children by nature, surely we’d agree children are ‘children’ by our choice. If so, we might want to rethink parenting and childhood today. It’s not an academic point, as children seem to be maturing physically at a younger and younger age.
Another perspective on his work relates compulsory schooling. The evidence is the industrial revolution created a factory-centred urban society, initially supported by child labour. Industrialists responded to growing criticisms and anti-child labour laws emerged. For the first time in Western history millions of young people were forcibly out of work. Youth became a social problem (does that sound familiar!?). Society demanded protection from delinquency, and the solution to all these problems was mandatory schooling, forcing children off the streets into school, to keep them under control. An extreme view? Well, country by country there is about a 20-year gap between industrialization and child labour laws, and another 20-year gap between child labour laws and laws for compulsory schooling. Even contemporary commentary emphasises the importance of getting the kids off the streets. School was, and is, a form of detention, as most school children have always known!
I’ve taken part in a few discussions about Centuries of Childhood. We usually conclude that Ariès got many things wrong. However, most readers do agree with the proposition that the definition of what constitutes being a ‘child’ varies from one society or one time to another. Are there alternative perspectives on childhood today? If so, what are they? Many questions remain about the ‘sentiment’ explored in Philipe Ariès analysis. As society continues to change, there is every good reason to suggest our views on the status and nature of childhood should remain on the agenda for regular review and possible rethinking.
