Re-Imagining the Child's World

When social history captured the profession’s imagination over thirty years ago, the history of the family and, within it, of children played a prominent part. It seemed obvious that the family was a basic and determinate social institution, and that how children were treated and raised mattered historically. Erik Erikson had modified Freud and given historians a credible view of how children matured and a means to connect the child with the man (gender intended). Many of the most important studies to emerge from that time were centered on colonial villages and the colonial period because these gave the most comprehensive pictures of the links between adults and children, and the effects of socialization could be most clearly delineated. John Demos’s A Little Commonwealth is probably the single best known product of that psychologically primed time. ¹

And then starting in the eighties, the interest in children and in childhood petered out. Some excellent and innovative books, like Philip Greven’s Protestant Temperment and Karin Calvert’s Children in the House continued to ask about changing childhood experience and its consequences (and kept the focus on the early period in America), but the significance of studying families and children receded amidst the growing attention that social historians directed to gender, race and ethnicity, and the social dynamics within and among groups in modern societies. It became harder in this context to speak with assurance about all children in the way Demos had about children in tiny Plymouth, or even as Greven had about variations in Protestant childhoods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As significantly, we became less confident about the centrality of childhood to the modern self, as an emphasis on the possibility of multiple self-recreations implied that the child is not, after all, necessarily father to the man. Instead, all men (and women too) seemed to be constantly seeking to reconstitute their identities in a manner practically free of restraints from a personal past. (Ironically, this view of personal malleability and liberation often came through psychological insight.) Having lost the steadying hand of psychology and the belief that any particular historical study could be representative, childhood and even family studies lost their pivotal place in social history. ²

Recently, however, historians are once again turning to childhood and children as significant subjects of investigation and new books now appear regularly which discuss children’s books and writers, and other children’s issues. Part of this revival results from our renewed interest in culture and the products of culture. How can we avoid children in exploring Western culture during the last two hundred years? First popularized by Rousseau and endowed with revolutionary significance, childhood and children became a fixture of sentimental literature in the nineteenth century and the subject of major institutional drives in schooling, public welfare, and advertising in the twentieth century. Increasingly, as a result, cultural historians have been discovering representations of children in history and asking about their meanings and significance both to children and to adults. Some social historians have even ventured back into psychological territory, though it is often a psychology that is vague around the edges and unwilling to make totalizing assumptions. Peter Stearns, for example, has been linking culture and psychology through the study of emotions, while William Tuttle recently explored diverse recollections of profound psychological experiences of war and loss in childhood. ³

This return to the historical study of children is an altogether good thing as long as we recognize the obvious limitations that confront us as we examine this most inarticulate group of historical actors. With children, the usual problematics of social history (an absence of voices) and the frequent temptations of cultural history (an attribution of meanings) are compounded because so many others often speak for children and on their behalf, so that the historical remains out of which we try to piece together past lives and experiences are often obscured by the interference run...