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Journal of Policy History 16.2 (2004) 175-187



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The History of Childhood Policy:

A Philippic's Wish List

Bowling Green State University

As late as the 1970s, only a handful of scholars called themselves children's historians. Thirty years later, much had changed. Though nobody possessed an accurate headcount, a new historical field had emerged, with a burgeoning literature, Web sites, and specialized societies.1

Children's historians are not necessarily policy historians. A significant percentage seek to understand actual children's experiences. To do so, they use material and written evidence, all of it tricky. Ancient gravesites have yielded dolls, hoops, puppets, rattles, even tiny clay horses attached to minuscule stone carts. How were they used? Was a five-inch pair of horses from Persia a toy or a potent religious totem? Were the brilliantly painted wooden puppets in Middle Egyptian tombs owned by children or privileged adults? What does it mean that Romans called both their children and their slaves "puer"? Was a Renaissance "conduct book" that very explicitly told a "child" not to defecate in public really a warning directed to an adult servant by a master bent on imposing relatively new standards of behavior within a sixteenth-century noble household? 2

Did, in fact, children inhabit a parallel universe? In the 1950s, British and American folklorists first suggested that the worlds children created were unique. Was children's culture heavily reliant on nonverbal signals, highly oriented to the present, and deeply superstitious? If social scientists thought a wide gulf separated the worlds of twentieth-century children and adults, had that been true in the past?3 [End Page 175]

Resurrecting historical children clearly poses challenges, ones readily acknowledged by most who attempt the task. A new field, rich with controversy and insights, assumes, as yet, only two givens. One: every known society has viewed its biologically immature young as different from those who were older, even if the distinction lasted only briefly and was not clearly differentiated from attitudes about powerless adults. Two: children have always grown up constrained by "childhood"—a system of adult understandings about the young. Policy historians study the creation and consequences of those systems, though quite a few might be startled to be labeled specialists in childhood policy, thinking themselves, instead, to be historians of education policy, or the law, or of the workings of social welfare bureaucracies. That is just as well.

If breathing life into the children of the past is a hard but valuable task, so too is assessment of the ways societies have sought to define and control their youngest members. A celebration of the emergence of "childhood" policy history is premature. Those who examine the ways private and public organizations have attempted to regulate the young should embrace catholicity, not narrowly focused and self-defined membership within a sub-sub-historical genre.

An adequate literature review of the vast scholarship about the history of childhood regulation cannot be condensed within a relatively few pages, even if confined to the United States, or to the twentieth century, or to state actors, even if limited to just one specialty, such as the history of education, medicine, law, social science disciplines, work and workers, or families. Much of this writing is interesting and important. It is also largely unintegrated, concentrated on a particular topic during a specific moment in time.4 It lacks sufficient longitudinal focus, cross-disciplinary emphasis, awareness of the importance of ideas, and objectivity. Any student of policymaking knows that criticizing programmatic failure is far easier than crafting successful alternatives. However, analysis of missteps encourages improvement. What follows is a wish list for childhood policy studies.

Historians of Policies Governing Childhood Need a More Expansive Chronological Perspective

In 1996 a Democratic U.S. president signed into law a bill sponsored by Republicans. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity [End Page 176] Reconciliation Act (PRA) abolished Title IV of the Social Security Act, replacing it with a block grant program controlled by individual states. Title IV's programs of aid to...

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