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Conventional Western notions of a childhood full of play and exploration are relatively recent (if we're talking evolutionary time-scales here). True, babyhood
by HSO 17y ago
Conventional Western notions of a childhood full of play and exploration are relatively recent (if we're talking evolutionary time-scales here). True, babyhood is obviously not "useful" in the sense of work. But in poorer or, dare I say more "primitive" cultures, children are expected to earn their keep by helping out where they can. They are made to work. In Dickens's books, for example, one doesn't get the sense of innocent childhood. Children there are treated like incomplete and weaker adults. Perhaps the distinction between babyhood and childhood should be made clearer...
- rue 17y agoI am not sure how much of humanity's history can be gleaned from Dickens books, good as they are...at most they tell us that in a certain part of the world, in a certain period, some children in certain classes of society were made to "earn their keep." And we all know how well the 1800's went for social justice. Undoubtedly children have participated more in livelihood in the past; helping with the fields, milking the cows and whatnot. Simultaneously nothing suggests that children never played, or even that they played any less than they do now, or that play was frowned upon somehow (generally, individual idiocies aside.) There are certainly drastic differences between cultures, but there are very few -- that I am aware of -- that completely or nearly so did away with "childhood."