Childhood inventions

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Hugh Cunningham

About our expert

Hugh Cunningham is Emeritus Professor of social history at the University of Kent. He's been interested in the history of childhood since the 1980s, and is the author of The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (1991), Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (1995; 2nd edn, 2005), and The Invention of Childhood (2006), the latter accompanying the Radio 4 series which he co-wrote with Michael Morpurgo.

Hugh's other interests are in nineteenth-century British history, on which he has written The Challenge of Democracy: Britain 1832-1918 (2001), and the history of leisure and of national identity.

Cultural childhoods

Children who inhabit a spirit world or children beaten for lack of social competence, explore how children the world over are regarded very differently in cultural childhoods.

Related programme

The Invention of Childhood

Each generation remakes the meaning of being young. Hugh Cunningham explores some of these childhood inventions.

Ideas about the nature of childhood and about how best to bring up a child have changed in significant ways over time. It’s true that at any one point in time we can find people disagreeing about these issues, but in most periods of the past there have emerged dominant modes of thinking about childhood. We can think of these as inventions of childhood, new ways of imagining the key features of childhood.

The most significant of these inventions as they affected Britain I’ve described in six main sections. We should not, however, assume that parents necessarily followed the advice they were given. Quite often those who were setting out ideals were all too aware that day-to-day parenting differed sharply from what they regarded as best practice.

The Middle Ages

During the five hundred years between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the dawn of the Reformation, there were many different emphases in thinking about childhood. But there was one dominant and enduring institution, the Catholic Church, which set the tone for all such thinking. In the ceremony of baptism a child was received into the Church and freed from the burden of original sin. Babies, said one preacher, "are symple, withowt gyle, innocent, wythout harme, and all pure wythowt corruption."

The Church had inherited from Greek and Roman authorities ideas of the stages of life. Infancy lasted up to the age of seven, pueritia or childhood up to fourteen, to be succeeded by adolescence. These ages were in some senses building blocks to enable you to reach the peak of life which came with young adulthood: childhood was not thought to be as important as we now consider it in the formation of personality and character. That said, there was nevertheless room for debate as to how best to bring up a child.

It’s best brought home to us in a story about St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. An abbot told Anselm of the difficulties he was having in bringing up boys in his care. The abbot was a disciplinarian, beating the boys for each and every misdemeanour. Anselm could not contain his disagreement: "In God’s name", he burst out, "I would have you tell me why you are so incensed against them. Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?" The boys, he said, need "the encouragement and help of fatherly sympathy and gentleness", not just blows.

Anselm’s views were widely known and widely quoted in the later Middle Ages. But equally the abbot had his successors: every picture of a schoolroom features a master brandishing a whip. Spare the rod and spoil the child echoes through most centuries of British history. But whatever else this debate about child-rearing shows, it puts paid to the idea, frequently cited, that in the Middle Ages, and beyond them, children were seen simply as ‘little adults’. They were not. Childhood was clearly recognised as a distinct time of life.

The Protestant Reformation

The Reformation of the sixteenth century replaced the Catholic Church and its rituals with a sterner faith. Children and their parents no longer had the comfort of knowing that, once baptized, they would be spared the pains of hell should they die – an all too frequent occurrence. Godly parents, urged on by their preachers, tried to bring their children to an awareness of their sins and of the need for salvation. As the printed word became increasingly available, catechisms became the means of bringing children to a knowledge of God. Adults put the questions, and children learnt the proper reply. Parents couldn’t begin too soon: there was a catechism for children "that are not past the breast yet" – and a four-hundred page one for a five-year-old. Parents, if not children, lived in a state of anxiety unparalleled until our own time.

There was plenty of evidence that some children were responsive. The most famous book for children in the seventeenth century was James Janeway’s A Token for Children, being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of several young Children. Janeway was a Protestant minister in London. He’d experienced the terrible plague of 1665, children most vulnerable to its ravages. "Did you never hear of a little Child that died?" he asked. "And if other Children die, why may not you be sick and die? And what will you do then, Child, if you should have no grace in your heart, and be found like other naughty Children?" It is perhaps some relief to the modern reader to find that there were some ‘naughty Children’, apparently unaffected by the preachers. And on the positive side, parents were told not to resort too easily to corporal punishment, and to aim at a happy medium, in the words of one advice book, ‘so as I neither make my child to despise me through too-much lenity, nor to hate me through too-much severity’.

The Enlightenment

In 1693 the great philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) published Some Thoughts Concerning Education, probably the most influential British book on childhood. Its origins hardly suggested this. Locke had been tutor to a number of aristocratic children, and on the basis of this experience wrote some letters to a relative on child rearing. These circulated, and eventually Locke was persuaded to publish them. Locke, unlike the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, does not seem at all concerned about the child’s salvation. His interest, rather, is to suggest ways of instilling good habits into a child that will last a lifetime. The way to do this was not through corporal punishment, not through frightening them, as servants were inclined to with stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, but to take reason as your guide.

For Locke "the Principle of all Vertue and Excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own Desires, where Reason does not authorize them", and this should be instilled from babyhood. The first thing babies should learn is that they shouldn’t have something because they like it, but because it is thought good for them. Locke is full of sensible advice on clothing and food for children, and on not buying them too many toys. He also thinks that learning should be made fun, and that children should "be tenderly used … and have Play-things". And he recognises that each child will have its own ‘natural Genius and Constitution’. Parents fell on Locke’s book in much the same way as they would fall on Dr Spock in the mid-twentieth century: he relieved them of many anxieties, and set them a clear agenda, for, he claimed, nine-tenths of how a child turns out as an adult, "Good or Evil, useful or not", will be the result of its education.