As a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor for Children and Adolescents (I am currently training towards my adult qualification as well) I have worked with children as young as 5 and at this point, up to the age of 15. The title of this post may seem silly at first glance but once you start to consider definitions across time and place, conceptualisations of both children and childhood reveal themselves to be deeply abstruse. What are children? Well, they're little grown ups - right? That has been the overarching perception for many years. I often think of comedian Dylan Moran's bit about children-
'What are children anyway? Midget drunks. They greet you in the morning by kneeing you in the face and talking gibberish. They can't even walk straight'.
Other perceptions centre on innocence and wonder and the preservation thereof through to an arbitrarily selected cut off age. Was this always the case? Where did these ideas come from?
Philippe Ariès (1962) posits that childhood as a distinct phase of life is a recent event, however, tellingly alludes to the great difficulties of such proclamations as early as his introduction to his book Centuries of Childhood. Whilst not addressing childhood specifically he enquires as to the unchanged concept of family. Ariès (1962) contemplates the idea of family as an ever-present constant reaching back into the ages; any historical changes dwarfed by what has continued through time. If one considers child mental wellbeing through this lens one might miss a legion of possible issues (be they social, biological or related to mental health) because one is subscribing to the idea that a basic structure persists through time without interacting with the changes therein. Therefore this structure remains, in the present, unchanged; ergo it does not warrant further evaluation. In a few opening sentences Ariès (1962) hints at one of the great arguments within research; that of continuity versus change. That is, the thesis of continuity; that childhood has existed in a theoretical sense since ancient times and certain universal principals are inherent to the theory of childhood that will never change (Grant, 2005). The ideas of both sides imply complications that are difficult to reconcile.
The notion that across vast swaths of time concepts of childhood exist on a plane of continuity dismisses the variables within time/history itself and proposes an Essentialist view of childhood.
Likewise, Ariès’ (1962) contrasting position that childhood as a concept emerged in the 17th century is, for one, dismissive of the history that predates it as outlined by Grant (2005, p.472) above, theories of continuity stretching back from ancient times and by Pollack (1983, p.314). In addition, another critic of Ariés, Kroll (1977), writes of concepts of childhood dating from the Middle Ages. Kroll (1977) highlights the difficulty of looking into the past for more modern, Westernised concepts of family and expecting similarly modern concepts of childhood to appear. Children would still be viewed as children, albeit in a different manner given that modern concepts of family obviously did not yet exist (Kroll, 1977, p.384).
What Ariès (1962) is saying when he claims that ideas about childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages in essence is that children were not differentiated from adults like they are now. Beale (1975) explores Puritanical accounts of childhood in the 18th century which also position children as ‘miniature adults’ completely undifferentiated from their elders. Firstly, the perception of children as miniature adults is strikingly problematic because it assumes a blanket mode of being in adulthood. Historians make this proposal but they all forego any definition of what constitutes adulthood except for the inference through what children are not when comparing them to broad ideas of what both adults and children should (or should not be), all within the standards of contemporary eras. Saying that children in a bygone age were all tiny adults seems as ham-fisted a conception as that of all adults being ‘large children’. This however has also been conceptualised. Jung (1969) proposed the archetype of the Puer Aeturnus derived from Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Wiki, 2021). The idea of the ‘eternal child’ harkens back to the eighth century AD and remains extant in popular culture. I find myself calling upon revered developmental expert Dylan Moran again-
You're not an adult at all - you're just a tall child holding a beer, having conversations you don't understand
Douglas Murray (2012) expounds (however piously and misdirected) about the marketisation of games consoles and toys for adult males and this infantilisation is further explored by Franz (2000) who comments on a generation of males today who remain at home with their parents, dependent and socially strangled. Newbon (2019, p.18) claims that the ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism. This is particularly interesting given that Rousseau (1762) is widely considered a forerunner of stage theory and also because Newbon (2018, p.27) claims that the infantilisation of adults emerged at a time when many historians claim children were ‘tiny adults’. That is not to say that the two concepts were mutually exclusive in the time of early European Industrialisation, but it does go some way toward challenging or at least complicating the broad ‘miniature adults’ definition when from the same period adults were said to be given to traits of childlike immaturity. Conversely, there is now research to suggest that children (particularly those from economically disadvantaged families) experience ‘adultification’ (Burton, 2017). All of which serves to illustrate the entangled course that definition takes across time and cultures. In recent times The World Health Organisation (2008, p.5) boldly asserted that ‘Children are not little adults’ and explains the different environmental exposures, developmental physiology and political standing that separates children from adults.
Definitions have evolved and developed across time and place, just like children themselves. If concepts are not clearly defined this could muddy the definition of research and therefore stunt progress (Grant, 2005, p.477). The tortuous, often clumsy road to definition has been made challenging furthermore by the hurdle for historians such as Ariès (1962) of the means of research. One of the main challenges for historians over the years has been that historically, children have not written or recorded their direct experiences for posterity and therefore sources have proven difficult to obtain. What is obtained hinges upon the inferences and interpretations of adult researchers (Olsen, 2017, p.2 and Grant, 2005, p.481). Another obstacle is encountered in the fallacy of applying values of the present to the past as Kroll (1977) argued. Ariès’ (1962) concept of the past is defined against the present.
The past is what the present is not (Ashplant and Wilson, 1988, p.256), which doesn’t actually provide a definition of what the past (and past experiences of childhood) was.
All of these positions, which have informed the historical narrative of childhood, are based on and are inextricably linked to adult perspectives and interpretations (Grant, 2005 p.471). This suggests an almost binary, comparative position, via negativa; the past is what the present is not, childhood is what adulthood is not and children are what adults are not. Again, this does not clearly define what childhood or childhood actually are. Olsen (2017) speaks of the exciting turn in research towards ‘the history of emotions’ which considers the experiences of children and young people. Also, the ’emotional frontiers’ and ‘emotional formations’ that Olsen (2017) champions may prove beneficial tools for research in the history of childhood in their analyses of how emotions are formed during childhood.
However, the focus will always be pulled towards adults when adults remain the arbiters of emotional education for children (Help Me Grow, 2022).
With the dawn of the Enlightenment came a shift away from dominant Medieval philosophies of Foundationalism as espoused by thinkers like Descartes, back toward ‘Aristotelian teleology’. (Newbon, 2018, p.27). This teleology proposes that knowledge of a ‘thing’ (in the epistemological sense) is dependent upon not just the ‘cause’ of the thing in and of itself but also its wider ‘causes’ upon the development of a greater whole. In biology at the time this led to mechanistic considerations of nature; that each organism acted upon something else and contributed some purpose, as the ear to hearing or the eye to seeing (Britannica, 2019). ‘This understanding of human history as linear and progressive inculcated a model of the evolution of human societies: the stadial paradigm’ (Newbon, 2018, p.27). Thinkers of the time, such as Smith (1763) saw history as existing by stages of development and sought to discover what caused these developments. It is easy to find correlates in the developmentalist tradition in Psychology. During this period Rousseau (1762) set forth his belief that children were different to adults, and just like sociocultural stadial theory regarded society progressing through stages, that children did the same. If societies were developed out of primitivism or natural forms they would gradually mature into industrialisation.
The Enlightenment was Man’s progression away from the ‘immaturity’ of Romanticism. Development in Sociocultural Theory finds its parallel in Psychological Theory in that an equation is made between progress and maturation; from the ignorance of a state of nature (the child) to the civility of industrialisation (the adult).
Progress for parents is measured by the child’s embracing of specific norms (Grant, 2005, p.427) and is certainly echoed in Murray’s (2012) scathing Spectator article mentioned previously. Get your own place, get a job, retire the Xbox and bloody well grow up. What Rousseau (1762) contributed towards within a particular form of the counter-Enlightenment was the questioning of the Foundational philosophies of knowledge only existing because of a foundation of other knowledge, like a tower. Now, thinking turned away from such linearity and became more intersectional and mechanistic (Newbon, 2018, p.27).
Prout (2005) in some ways touches upon this intersectionality and Aristotelian teleology when writing about Modernity. ’There was no single underlying modernisation process that underpinned developments in all places and led inevitably to a single predetermined end point, albeit at different speeds’ (p.9). This speaks to the similarly hypostatised idea of childhood espoused by certain historians in these terms; that no single underlying process underpins its definition. To understand it therefore requires multitudinous resources at an interdisciplinary level. Yet, despite the best efforts of those such as the aforementioned Olsen (2017), how children are assessed or organised (their experiences, that is) in a person-centred manner seems an incredibly painstaking task. It makes sense that history has leaned towards broad generalisations about children and childhood experiences when the legion of resources required to track individual experiences of every child are contemplated.
The children I have worked with so far are incredibly complex. Though they have yet to 'complete' their emotional, cognitive, social, moral, psychological and physiological developmental 'tasks' that does not mean they are not formed human beings consisting of multiple dimensions. I believe it forms part of the task of the child therapist to listen directly to their experiences as they see them and to remain mindful of my adult interpretation of such. Children have their own agency. We should be concerned with the care and safety of all children. Children should be seen and heard.
References
Aries, P., 1962. Centuries of Childhood, New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, 2016, April 19. Teleology. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/teleology
Burton, L., 2017. Childhood Adultification in Economically Disadvantaged Families: A Conceptual Model. Family Relations , Oct., 2007, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Oct., 2007), pp. 329-345
Erikson, E., 1950. Childhood and Society, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Franz, M., 2000. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, Toronto: Inner City Books accessed via Academy of Ideas, https://academyofideas.com/2019/06/carl-jung-psychology-of-man-child/
Garlen, J. C. (2019). Interrogating innocence: “Childhood” as exclusionary social practice. Childhood, 26(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218811484
Grant, J., 2005. Children versus Childhood: Writing Children into the Historical Record, or Reflections on Paula Fass's "Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, History of Education Quarterly , Fall, 2005, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 468- 490, Cambridge University Press.
Help Me Grow, 2020, What Is Social and Emotional Development, accessed via https://helpmegrowmn.org/HMG/HelpfulRes/Articles/WhatSocialDev/index.html
Jung, C., G., 1969. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, part 1 of volume 9 in The Collected Works.
Kroll, J., 1977. The Concept of Children in the Middle Ages, Journal of the History of Behavioural Science, 13: 384-393.
Larcher V. (2015) Children Are Not Small Adults: Significance of Biological and Cognitive Development in Medical Practice. In: Schramme T., Edwards S. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8706-2_16-1
Murray, D., 2012. Children’s Hour: Is There Any Way to Stop the Infantilisation of Britain? The Spectator, (London. 1828), 2012-07-21, Vol.319 (9595), p.14 accessed via Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A301871054/AONE?u=anglia_itw&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=dc5a878f.
Newbon, P., 2019. The Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Olsen, S., 2017. The History of Childhood and the Emotional Turn. History Compass, 15: e12410. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12410
Prout, A., 2005. The Future of Childhood, RoutledgeFalmer.
Rousseau, J-J., 1762. Emile or On Education. Translated by A. Bloom., 1979. London: Penguin.
Smith, A., 1763. Lectures on Jurisprudence, also called Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms accessed via https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speakings/adam-smith-and-stadial-theory
Wikipedia, 2021. Puer Aeturnus, accessed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puer_aeternus on 28 December 2021 and Sociocultural Evolution, accessed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_evolution#Stadial_theory
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