March of progress for childhood

• • Philippe Ariès (1962) suggested that children in the Middle Ages were little adults
• In the 18th century, children went to work in dangerous conditions from a very young age and were prone to many (now preventable) diseases.
• Some sociologists talk about a march of progress from the dangerous childhood of the Industrial Revolution to today‘s protected and privileged time of life.
• Edward Shorter (1975) suggests that today’s childhood has a functional fit with today’s society: we need people to be more educated and so children do not start working until they are older
• We now live in a child-centred society
• Chris Jenks (2005) suggests that adults now focus on their children more because these are dependable, compared with marriages that increasingly end in divorce
• Changes in attitudes have come alongside changes in the law, such as restrictions on child labour, access to alcohol, tobacco, etc. This suggestion is that things have just kept getting better for children