Re-Imagining the Child's World

Abstract

When social history captured the profession's imagination over thirty years ago, the history of the family and, within it, of children played a prominent part. It seemed obvious that the family was a basic and determinate social institution, and that how children were treated and raised mattered historically. Erik Erikson had modified Freud and given historians a credible view of how children matured and a means to connect the child with the man (gender intended). Many of the most important studies to emerge from that time were centered on colonial villages and the colonial period because these gave the most comprehensive pictures of the links between adults and children, and the effects of socialization could be most clearly delineated. John Demos's A Little Commonwealth is probably the single best known product of that psychologically primed time.1 And then starting in the eighties, the interest in children and in childhood petered out. Some excellent and innovative books, like Philip Greven's Protestant Temperment and Karin Calvert's Children in the House continued to ask about changing childhood experience and its consequences (and kept the focus on the early period in America), but the significance of studying families and children receded amidst the growing attention that social historians directed to gender, race and ethnicity, and the social dynamics within and among groups in modem societies. It became harder in this context to speak with assurance about all children in the way Demos had about children in tiny Plymouth, or even as Greven had about variations in Protestant childhoods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As significantly, we became less confident about the centrality of childhood to the modem self, as an emphasis on the possibility of multiple self-recreations implied that the child is not, after all, necessarily father to the man. Instead, all men (and women too) seemed to be constantly seeking to reconstitute their identities in a manner practically free of restraints from a personal past. (Ironically, this view of personal malleability and liberation often came