‘Worthy’ vs ‘Unworthy’ Children: Images of Childhood through Time

Abstract

If anything can be said for certain about the images of children that emerge from history it is that, contrary to the conclusions of some earlier theses (Aries, 1962), there is no linear narrative charting the evolution of ideas about the young — and no clear transition from an age when conceptualizations of childhood did not exist to one in which they did. Childhood was not ‘invented’ (Cunningham, 2006) or ‘discovered’ (Aries, 1962; Sommerville, 1990) at some imagined point between the early Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. Sources ranging from an early Mesopotamian tablet lamenting that ‘children no longer obey their parents’ (ibid., p. 15) to Anglo-Saxon king Aethelstan’s ordinance exempting thieves aged 15 and younger from harsh punishments reserved for their elders (Heywood, 2001, p. 14) suggest that juveniles have been distinguished from adults, across continents, for millennia.