When I look back on my own childhood in the 1970s and 80s and compare it with children today, it reminds me of that famous sentence ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between). Even in a relatively short period of time, I can see the enormous transformations that have taken place in children’s lives and in the ways they are thought about and treated.

Looking further back I can see vast differences between contemporary and historical childhoods. Today, children have few responsibilities, their lives are characterised by play not work, school not paid labour, family rather than public life and consumption instead of production. Yet this is all relatively recent. A hundred years ago, a twelve-year-old working in a factory would have been perfectly acceptable. Now, it would cause social services' intervention and the prosecution of both parents and factory owner.

The differences between the expectations placed on children today and those placed on them in the past are neatly summed up by two American writers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. Comparing childhoods in America today with those of the American Colonial period (1600-1775), they have written: ‘Today, a four year-old who can tie his or her shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens and could produce intricate embroidery: at age six they spun wool. A good, industrious little girl was called 'Mrs.' instead of 'Miss' in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: she was not, strictly speaking, a child’.

These changing ideas about children have led many social scientists to claim that childhood is a ‘social construction’. They use this term to mean that understandings of childhood are not the same everywhere and that while all societies acknowledge that children are different from adults, how they are different and what expectations are placed on them, change according to the society in which they live.

Social anthropologists have shown this in their studies of peoples with very different understandings of the world to Western ones. Jean Briggs has worked with the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and has described how, within these communities, growing up is largely seen as a process of acquiring thought, reason and understanding (known in Inuit as ihuma). Young children don’t possess these qualities and are easily angered, cry frequently and are incapable of understanding the external difficulties facing the community, such as shortages of food. Because they can’t be reasoned with, and don’t understand, parents treat them with a great deal of tolerance and leniency. It’s only when they are older and begin to acquire thought that parents attempt to teach them or discipline them.

In contrast, children on the Pacific island of Tonga, studied by Helen Morton, are regularly beaten by their parents and older siblings. They are seen as being closer to mad people than adults because they lack the highly prized quality of social competence (or poto as the Tongans call it). They are regularly told off for being clumsy and a child who falls over may be laughed at, shouted at, or beaten. Children are thought of as mischievous; they cry or want to feed simply because they are naughty, and beatings are at their most severe between the ages of three and five when children are seen as particularly wilful. Parents believe that social competence can only be achieved through discipline and physical punishment, and treat their children in ways that have seemed very harsh to outsiders.

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