The Emergence of Childhood – From the Enlightenment to Modern World of Childhood

Abstract

The Early Modern period was one of rapid economic expansion with considerable periods of turmoil. A period of economic hardship and recovery followed bringing with it new philosophies that were inclusive of children rather than as previously focussing entirely on men or the family. It was also a period of new economic ideas that set in chain the growth of the industrial world that is still part of contemporary life. Children appeared in literature as fully rounded characters in their own right, not only for children but in adult works such as those by Dickens and Hugo. Education, welfare and child health provision developed extensively toward the end of the nineteenth century, heralding in ‘the century of the child’ as Aries called the twentieth century. Child protection in many forms became a standard and marker of advances in society, followed by a notion of children’s rights that was born in the wake of the First World War and toward the end of the same century when it became a reality.