Short answers, pulled from the story.
A child is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty, or between the developmental period of infancy and puberty. The term may also refer to an unborn human being, and legally it often refers to a minor below the local age of majority.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as a human being below the age of 18 years, unless under the law applicable to the child majority is attained earlier. This definition is ratified by 192 of 194 member countries.
Childhood includes early childhood, which begins with toddlerhood and continues to about age 5 or 6, and middle childhood, which runs from around age 7 to age 9 or 10. Preadolescence, commonly defined as ages 9 to 12, closes childhood and precedes adolescence.
The French historian Philippe Ariès argued that childhood was not a natural phenomenon but a creation of society in his 1960 book Centuries of Childhood. In 1961 he found that before the 17th century children were represented as mini-adults.
After industrialisation began in England in 1760, British children worked in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps, often laboring long hours in dangerous jobs for low pay. British reformers attacked child labor from the 1830s onward, leading eventually to the Factory Acts.
Play is essential to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children, and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights recognized it as a right of every child. Unstructured play encourages creativity and imagination, while undirected play teaches children to share, negotiate, and resolve conflicts.
During the early 17th century in England, about two-thirds of all children died before the age of four, but child mortality has fallen sharply since. About 12.6 million under-five infants died worldwide in 1990, declining to 6.6 million by 2012, with the highest average infant mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa at 98 deaths per 1,000 live births.