Introduction to the blog

When I worked in Birmingham Reference Library I enjoyed the librarian's privilege of browsing in the closed access stacks.  I read diaries, memoirs, histories, statutes, and of course the books in the Parker Collection of Children's Books, Birmingham.  This blog is about and  childhood in Britain and the USA, what children's lives were really like, and how adults see childhood and their children. I call it the Looking-Glass World:

'Nor shall I thinke this labour lost, though I doe live: for I will make it my owne looking glasse wherein to see when I am too severe, when too remisse, and in my childe's fault through this glasse to discerne mine owne errors'
Elizabeth Joceline, The Mother's legacie to her unborne child, 1625


Children's upbringing has always reflected adult attempts to mould their children.  Children have been seen as limbs of Satan, to be purged of mankind's original sin, and as primeval innocents, to be protected from the corrupting influence of the everyday world. Boys have been educated to become fighting men or classical scholars, or left completely uneducated, as day-labourers. Girls have been educated to run large households, to be decorative symbols of their husbands' wealth, occasionally as intellectual rivals, or to earn their livings with their hands or other parts of their bodies, depending on what class and family children were born into.

Though the way in which adults see children constantly changes, children themselves have changed little.  Children as revealed in a thirteenth century poem, or in a Puritan autobiography are immediately recognisable to modern eyes; wayward, naive, playful, living under the constraints put on them by adult ambitions.

One of the difficulties facing anyone chronicling changes in attitudes to children is the enormous diversity of practises at any one time.  For every writer who advises cold baths and plain diet there will be an opponent to ridicule that view.  At no time were all well brought up British or American children handed over to wet-nurses, given a strict religious upbringing, or denied fairy tales.  Many parents followed the fashion of the day, but others chose to suckle their children themselves, cherished and indulged them when informed opinion advised the opposite, and paid only lip-service, if that, to religion.

But certain overall trends can be perceived.  Family relationships became generally less formal after the mid 17th century and closer ties between children and parents developed. From the Medieval period onwards there has been a slow but steady trend towards greater permissiveness, what might be called an insidious growth of child-power. Religion was of great importance to many people but perhaps the most significant trend of all has been the steady lengthening of childhood.

The upbringing of a child depends very much on its parents' place in society.  The upbringing of a child from a poor background differed radically from that of a child born into the middle or upper classes.  The backgrounds of children growing up on the American continent from the 17th to the 19th centuries were particularly diverse, for their parents came from many parts of the world and belonged to a number of totally disimilar cultures.  Even among the settlers from Europe there is an enormous variety of childhood experience, from Puritan New England to the Southern plantations, from city life to remote log cabin.

Changing views of childhood are reflected in art.  17th century portraits show children dressed as mini-adults but by the 19th century childhood was being idealised and sentimentalised and this trend is reflected in children's portraits.