Editor’s Introduction

This issue explores family dynamics, family narratives, consumerism, and child welfare policy through a range of historical methodologies, including infant health records, family letters, oral histories, court records, a children’s column, birthday celebrations, and television programming. Beginning with an “object lesson” by James D. Alsop, the “infant health” records compiled in the mid-1800s by Dr. Gustavus R. B. Horner of Philadelphia take us back to the beginning of the infant-health movement in America’s eastern urban centers and facilitate understanding of the relationship between middle-class parents, babies, and doctors. Horner’s health histories of his four nephews and niece generate questions on how child health and infant mortality were perceived and contextualized within middle-class families and by elite nonspecialist physicians.

Discovering the lived experiences of children, whom decades of Western culture had deemed best seen and not heard, requires innovative microhistorical methodologies. Amy Harris’s exploration of the Sharp cousins, Jemima (born 1762), Catherine (born 1770), and Mary (born 1778), illuminates an under-explored aspect of English families: the intergenerational cousin networks of single women. The Sharp cousins grew up in a family largely composed of single adults, an experience that shaped their later attitudes toward marriage. Harris’s construction of the “exceptional normal” highlights that while the Sharps were not representative of an average experience, their “family dynamics” are demonstrative of eighteenth-century possibilities.

Two articles on childhood histories in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Zealand are by Hugh Morrison and by Sherry Olson and Peter Holland. Morrison draws from the two culturally similar and connected British world contexts of Scottish and New Zealand Presbyterian missionary families. He tries to clarify the ways in which parents and children articulated a “family narrative” around children’s well-being, domestic mundaneness, and family separation. Olson and Holland also contribute to the scholarship on what Morrison calls “empire children.” The co-authors argue that the sample of four thousand letters written by New Zealand-born children to the Otago Witness’s children’s column “Dot’s Little Folk” offer insight into children’s efforts to project themselves into the world. Olsen and Holland conclude that children’s conversations in print documents enabled the Little Folk of southern New Zealand to make places for themselves at home and abroad.

February 25, 1881, fourteen-year-old Félix Lemaître murdered a six-year-old boy he did not know. Stephen Toth argues that Lemaître’s life story became the object of medico-legal and journalistic scrutiny. In the mid-nineteenth century, due to the powerful ambiguities underlying conceptions of heredity, fear of degeneracy, and criminal insanity, many areas of the law deferred to the burgeoning profession of adolescent psychiatry. Toth argues that the legal, psychiatric, and public gazes shifted attention away from the crime Lemaître committed to an assessment of his character. Subsequently, the new category of adolescent offender created the need for a separate juvenile justice system to protect society from the imagination, intellect, and dangerousness inherent in the adolescent mind.

The rite of passage, age grading, and ritual of children’s birthday celebrations is studied by Vyta Baselice, Dante Burrichter, and Peter N. Stearns. The authors argue that the rise of the modern birthday represents a fascinating tension between the history of emotions (joy, happiness, self-indulgence), religious and parental authority, children’s expectations, criticism of showy consumerism, normative pedagogy, and the globalization of birthdays. The historical construction of the birthday and its party signals important changes in ideas about the child as a special individual within family, school, and community, because birthdays involve more than creating the annual family ritual.

From Davy Crockett hats and Sesame Street toys to new streaming platforms such as Netflix, the final article, by Colin Ackerman, argues that the lived experience of children today includes charting the historical trajectory of children’s television network policy in America. In the early years of television, children were not considered a unique audience and advertisers had not yet identified them as valuable consumers, so the desire to invest in children’s programming was minimal. Ackerman asks why the US federal...