Child

• 1. Introduction

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  In Roman times, a child accused of a crime was regarded as not culpable, a position the Church later adopted. By the 19th century, that mercy had narrowed to a single age. Children younger than seven were believed incapable of crime. Children from seven forward could face criminal charges, be sent to adult prison, and be punished by whipping, branding, or hanging. A child, in the plainest definition, is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty. Yet that simple span has been measured, divided, and argued over for centuries. Who counts as a child, and at what age does that protection end? Why did one French historian claim childhood was not a natural fact at all, but an invention of society? And how did the same era that imagined childhood as a time of innocence also send children into factories, mines, and chimneys for long hours and low pay?

• 2. Where The Line Is Drawn

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  The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child fixes the boundary at a number: a human being below the age of 18 years, unless under the law applicable to the child majority is attained earlier. That definition is ratified by 192 of 194 member countries. Beneath that headline figure, the lines scatter. In Singapore, a child is legally someone under the age of 14 under the Children and Young Persons Act, while the age of majority there is 21. In United States immigration law, a child means anyone under the age of 21. The legal child and the biological child rarely line up. A person can be a biological adult, fully developed physically, mentally, and sexually, and still be a minor in the eyes of the law. Children generally hold fewer rights and responsibilities than adults, classed as unable to make serious decisions. They must always remain under the care of a responsible adult or child custody, whether their parents divorce or not. The word stretches further than law. It can name a relationship, the son or daughter of any age, or membership in a clan, tribe, or religion. It can mark someone shaped by a moment, as in a child of nature or a child of the Sixties.

• 3. The Stages Of Growing

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  Toddlerhood opens early childhood, beginning when a child first speaks or takes steps independently. That stage ends around age 3, when the child grows less dependent on parental help for basic needs, while early childhood itself continues until roughly age 5 or 6. The National Association for the Education of Young Children counts infancy within early childhood too. Here a child learns by observing, experimenting, and communicating, and a strong emotional bond forms between the child and care providers. Middle childhood begins around age 7 and ends around age 9 or 10, and together with early childhood forms what are called the formative years. School arrives as a new setting with new challenges, and it often brings hidden conditions to light, including autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD. Tools such as special education, the least restrictive environment, response to intervention, and individualized education plans exist to help children with disabilities. Preadolescence, commonly defined as ages 9 to 12, closes childhood and precedes adolescence. Its markers include menarche, spermarche, and the peak of height velocity, changes that usually occur between ages 11 and 14. The preadolescent thinks more realistically than the fantasy-driven younger child, described in the source as the most sensible stage of development. Such a child may notice the flawed, human side of authority figures, and may feel an individual, no longer just one of the family. Adolescence usually runs between the onset of puberty and legal adulthood, mostly the teenage years of 13 to 19, even though puberty often begins earlier, at 10 to 11 for girls and 11 to 12 for boys.

• 4. The Invention Of Childhood

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  During the European Renaissance, artistic depictions of children increased dramatically, though this had little effect on social attitudes toward them. The French historian Philippe Ariès argued that during the 1600s the concept of childhood began to emerge in Europe, a claim other historians like Nicholas Orme have challenged, pointing to childhood as a separate stage since at least the medieval period. The English philosopher John Locke shaped the new attitude with his theory of the tabula rasa, which held the mind at birth to be a blank slate that parents were dutybound to fill with correct notions. Jean Jacques Rousseau gave the romantic view its form in his 1762 novel Emile: or, On Education, describing childhood as a brief period of sanctuary before the perils of adulthood. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted children extensively, and his 1788 painting The Age of Innocence, emphasizing the posing child's natural grace, became a public favourite. William Wordsworth carried the theme into verse with his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Historian Margaret Reeves traces this Romantic conception further back, to the neo-platonic poetry of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan, whose works include The Retreate from 1650 and Childe-hood from 1655. These views stood against the stridently didactic Calvinist belief in infant depravity.

• 5. Innocence And The Factory

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  With the onset of industrialisation in England in 1760, the gap between romantic ideals and reality grew impossible to ignore. By the late 18th century, British children worked in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps, often laboring long hours in dangerous jobs for low pay. The contradiction between conditions on the ground and the middle-class notion of childhood as simplicity and innocence sparked the first campaigns for legal protection. British reformers attacked child labor from the 1830s onward, strengthened by the horrific descriptions of London street life by Charles Dickens, and the campaign eventually led to the Factory Acts that mitigated the exploitation of children at work. The modern attitude emerged by the late 19th century, as the Victorian middle and upper classes emphasized the family and the sanctity of the child. Children's literature took off, and Lewis Carroll's fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865 in England, became a landmark regarded as the first English masterpiece written for children, opening the First Golden Age of the genre. Compulsory state schooling spread across Europe in the latter half of the century, decisively moving children from the workplace into schools. The market economy turned childhood into a time of fun and imagination, with factory-made dolls and doll houses for girls and organized sports for boys. In 1908, Sir Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts, offering young boys outdoor activities aimed at character, citizenship, and fitness.

• 6. Childhood As An Idea

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  In his 1960 book Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès, a French historian specializing in medieval history, suggested that childhood was not a natural phenomenon but a creation of society. In 1961 he published a study of paintings, gravestones, furniture, and school records, finding that before the 17th century children were represented as mini-adults. The American philosopher George Boas published The Cult of Childhood in 1966, after which historians increasingly researched childhood in past times. Hugh Cunningham continued the inquiry in 2006 with Invention of Childhood, examining British childhood from the year 1000 and the Middle Ages through what he calls the Post War Period of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The modern era leans toward a belief that children should carry no worries or work, that life should be happy and trouble-free, a mixture of simplicity, innocence, fun, imagination, and wonder. Against that ideal runs the common concept of a loss of innocence, often treated as part of coming of age, a period that widens a child's awareness of evil, pain, or the world. That theme appears in the novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies. The fictional character Peter Pan stands as the embodiment of a childhood that never ends.

• 7. The Right To Play

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  The United Nations Commission on Human Rights recognized play as a right of every child, a measure of how central it is to cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being. Through play children run, jump, and climb, build social skills and general knowledge, and develop empathy, compassion, and friendships. Unstructured play encourages creativity and imagination, while undirected play teaches children to work in groups, share, negotiate, resolve conflicts, and advocate for themselves. When adults control the play, children acquiesce to adult rules and lose some of its benefits, especially in creativity, leadership, and group skills. The environment shapes play and therefore development. Poor children face widespread environmental inequities, with less social support and parents who are less responsive and more authoritarian, and children from low income families are less likely to have access to books and computers. Beyond adult oversight lies children's street culture, a cumulative culture sometimes called their secret world, most common between the ages of seven and twelve. It is strongest in urban working class industrial districts where children play in the streets for long periods without supervision, on quiet backstreets, pavements, and routes out to parks, playgrounds, scrub, and local shops. Since the advent of indoor distractions such as video games and television, concerns have grown about its vitality, even its survival. Richard Louv named a related trend Nature Deficit Disorder in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, describing less outdoor play in the United States and Canada and a range of behavioral problems. The source notes the average American child spends 44 hours a week with electronic media, and 2007 research drew a correlation between declining National Park visits in the U.S. and rising electronic media use among children.

• 8. Survival And Inequality

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  During the early 17th century in England, about two-thirds of all children died before the age of four. The Industrial Revolution reversed the trend, and child life expectancy increased dramatically. About 12.6 million under-five infants died worldwide in 1990, a figure that fell to 6.6 million by 2012, as the infant mortality rate dropped from 90 deaths per 1,000 live births to 48. The highest average infant mortality rates fall in sub-Saharan Africa, at 98 deaths per 1,000 live births, over double the world's average. Education divides children's prospects as sharply as survival does. UNICEF data show that in 2011-57 million children were out of school, and more than 20% of African children have never attended primary school or left without completing it. A UN report found warfare preventing 28 million children worldwide from receiving an education, owing to the risk of sexual violence and attacks in schools. Marriage marks another fault line. In 2013, child marriage rates of female children under 18 reached 75% in Niger, 68% in Central African Republic and Chad, 66% in Bangladesh, and 47% in India. A 2018 study in the journal Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies found that worldwide 4.5% of males are married before age 18, with the Central African Republic highest at 27.9%. Fertility itself bends to schooling. The completed cohort fertility at age 50, the measure scientists prefer, ranges from 5 to 8 children in women without education to fewer than 2 in women with 12 or more years of education, the sharpest reminder that the shape of childhood depends on the world a child is born into.