Children are real living people, but childhood is a set of ideas about what children are like, what they ought to be like, and how adults should treat them. Over the centuries, these ideas about childhood and childcare have changed enormously.
We often believe that today we know much more than was known in the past about what children are really like, and about the best ways to care for them. Is history a slow progress towards better and better understanding of children and their needs?
Suppose a woman who lived in 1805 could watch children living today. Here are some of the countless things that would amaze her.
On a winter morning, many children today wake up in warm homes with sealed windows, and no draughts blowing up between the bare floorboards and under the doors. The climate is much milder. We can see through the windows, which are not covered with thick frost patterns and hung with icicles.
The woman - I'll call her Susan - would immediately smell something that we rarely notice, dust burning on light bulbs. And she would miss a smell she took for granted, from the chamber pots under the beds, and the baby's wet clothes and bedding.
Susan would marvel at light and heat coming on at the flick of a switch, instead of women having to clear the ashes out of the grate and light each fire, besides trimming the oil lamps, and burning candles that sent shadows leaping across the walls, which frightened many children.
Bathrooms, toilets, plumbing, washing machines, driers, dishwashers and hot water gushing from taps would seem like a dream to women used to heating and carrying water to fill up washing bowls and tin baths, and mangling washing, besides having to empty the said chamber pots.
Televisions, radios, DVDs, videos, telephones, mobiles, computers and faxes would look like miracles or magic.
Susan would probably be even more surprised by the constant noise they make, and by the general rush and speed, from the whirling kaleidoscope of children's cartoons, to the average family all hurrying to get ready to go to work and school or nursery. In 1805, people only ever heard or performed 'live' music.
Meat and beer
Our piles and cupboards full of papers, clothes, toys and gadgets, and our big wheelie rubbish bins contrast with the quite bare houses and lack of waste in 1805. Going by car and leaving the house empty all day would be two further mysteries to Susan.
Breakfast cereals, chewy bars, and our concern with fruit, vegetables and vitamins contrast with the 1805 slowly prepared breakfasts that would include meat and beer, even for young children.
Our oil-based plastics in kitchens, furniture, children's toys, cups and plates, highchairs, disposable nappies, and many other things, now save hours of cleaning and scrubbing each day. Our light comfortable clothes and the slouchy way we sit and stand without corsets would be further surprises. In Susan's time children wore tight corsets. Richer girls would spend some part of every day strapped to a backboard to ensure they had an upright 'deportment'.
Susan might be astonished by people's behaviour today. Our technology enables one-year-olds to turn on lights and televisions and to work complicated battery-powered toys, so they can seem to have a fair degree of choice and control. Children probably speak far more casually, critically and loudly to adults than children in the past would dare to do. Susan would wonder why such a seemingly wealthy family had no servants, and why there were so few children.
Watching the clock
The greatest surprise for Susan might be our multi-tasking. We half-attend to the present tasks while planning the next ones and watching the clock.
For many families, breakfast is a task to complete as quickly as possible so as not to be late for all the next tasks.
In 1805, people tended to do one thing at a time more slowly and quietly.
Evenings might often be spent sitting silently by the fire, making and mending clothes. Children's clothes had tucks and big hems, which were gradually let out as the child grew, and then sewn back in again ready for a younger child to begin to wear them.
Weeks were spent watching by the bedside of a sick child, while scarlet fever or measles grew steadily worse, waiting in anxious suspense for the turning point when the child would either die or slowly begin to recover.
Around 1840, more than one-third of children died before their fifth birthday, most of them in their first year. Today there are free schools, health and welfare services, free libraries and playgrounds, which 1805 families could not imagine.
So have there been 200 years of progress in childcare? Overleaf I describe childhoods from the past in more detail, which may make you more certain that children's lives are better today than ever before.
