Defining Happy Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change

It's bad form to begin what's intended as a scholarly presentation in history with a personal experience, but I hope that I might be forgiven, particularly since I've reached a stage where I've lived through part of the history I write about. When I was equivalent to a freshman in high school, my parents spent a year in Britain, and I of course with them. I was sent to a tutorial school so that I could follow in part the curriculum I would have had at home, while also participating in the school's courses. One was Latin, which my father insisted I would take in the United States. I brought the first-year textbook my high school was going to use but (since I was behind the British students, who were frittering away Empire while pursuing the classics) also had British materials. My American text was a marvel: lavishly illustrated, with lots of stories about "Mario goes to the forum" and, intermingled, a bit of Latin. My British teacher looked at the book with amused wonder, while he gave me a small, unadorned volume of vocabulary, noun cases, and verb declensions which he expected me to memorize—in fairly short order. The American book was, of course, designed to provide a student with diversion and fun, with its sparkling graphics and the lightweight human interest stories, presumably on the deep-seated national assumption that actually learning a language might be dangerously taxing. The British material had no concept of joy but was (if taken seriously) quite effective: I learned enough Latin that first year to carry me through three more years back in the United States with almost no work at all. That, indeed, did make me happy.

And from this, a second personal comment, though more obviously relevant (I will be tying my first vignette into my historical analysis in due course). At a Berkeley conference several years back, I was intrigued to hear a number of historians, along with related social-science types, speculate about when the idea that children should be happy first surfaced. Everyone involved seemed to assume—correctly, as I will argue shortly—that the idea that children should be happy is a novel historical artifact, and many seemed to assume, further, that it was a somewhat burdensome one. But no one in the informal group seemed to know exactly when happiness was added to the goals of childhood, so, kindly invited to another Berkeley conference, I thought I would try to find out. Of course, it's quite possible that everyone in the group actually did know and simply didn't tell me, or, not knowing, thought it was probably not worth anyone's while to pursue the matter. It is certainly true that new goals for happiness correspond to many things we already do know about modern American childhood history, including adult investment in an ideal experience. But I do think there's a distinctive topic here, with a different periodization from the more general tendency to idealize. Seeking the turn to happiness focuses on identifying and analyzing a measurable departure not just from traditional but from certain modern but pre-contemporary approaches to childhood, and one that has equally measurable consequences. To some extent, despite the probing questions scholars have been ready to ask, the pervasiveness of the contemporary assumption that children and happiness go together may have inhibited a realization that there's a serious historical topic here, a real opportunity to probe significant change.

For the topic, despite its importance, seems under-examined. Darrin McMahon, in his splendid history of happiness, notes that Romantic intellectuals, particularly in Britain, started talking about children's "freshness and wonder," with poems on topics such as infant joy (interestingly, some of these were reprinted in the United States in the 1930s). But there was no focus on children's happiness per se. And, as we will see, the new attention to happiness in the late eighteenth century, though an important backdrop (remember, obviously, rights to life, liberty and pursuit of), did not immediately spill over...