I don't understand that difference, please explain.

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"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

On that topic from that era? No. Which, I think, is in and of itself an indication that the differences were not recognized. As has been said, the first writing really exploring the differences between adults and children is less than two hundred years old.

Remember, Juliet was twelve!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Juliet had reached menarche. That transferred her from the category
"infant" to the category "adult". Many years ago my friend said that
she was considered at that age to be "an old maid", but I disagree
and don't know whether his comment accurately expressed what he
meant or if he was just using hyperbole for humorous effect. (But he
was likely quoting his high school English teacher. I forget the context
of the conversation.) Juliet wasn't an old maid, which means someone
who should have been married some time ago. She was simply of
marriagable age at that time, and may not have been so for long.

Okay, so Juliet was twelve, was of marriagable age by virtue of
having a minor problem with precious bodily fluids, and was enamored
of the boy on the other side of the oxcart tracks. So? What's that
got to do with either:

A: Children being / not being perceived as different from adults, or

B: Children being / not being valued differently from adults?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"The other planets?
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No "child" category back then?

Well, until very, very recently (that ridiculous "tween" concept!), Juliet would have been considered a child by modern standards, yet there she was, not merely falling in love and being considered marriageable (though, quite right, nothing near an old maid!), but indeed coming up with some very clever plans to prevent herself from living the life her parents expected her to.

Here's another one--the word "nubile." Personally, I thought for years that it meant young and attractive. "Nubile young girls," and all that. It doesn't. It means, in fact, "marriageable."

I'll admit freely that I basically have lots and lots of little pieces of evidence; my largest, frankly, is that no one wrote about childhood as a special case until a couple of hundred years ago. However, there are an awful lot of examples of people who were very young holding positions of enormous responsibility or just holding adult jobs. The plural of anecdote is indeed not data. However, these hundreds of anecdotes that I can cite are all we have. There is no data, because no one of the time thought it worth discussing.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

What those many examples you're thinking of add up to, though, isn't that there's no difference between childhood and adulthood in those cultures; it's just that the transition is defined as happening sooner in those cultures than in ours.

On a slightly similar theme ... I was told yesterday that girls in single mother families develop - achieve maturity - more quickly than girls in families with a mother and father.

The upshot of this was that because the single mother is likely to have another man in the house (or more than one) over a period who is not related to the girl, pheromones etc lead the girl to "get ready" for procreation sooner.

Anyone heard about this? I'm struggling to find much on the net (for starters ... figuring out a relevant keyword search).

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I've heard of this. It might have nothing to do with pheromones and solely to do with stress levels. You'd also want to look at diet differences as single parent housholds tend to be poorer than two parent housholds which in modern society often means more fat in the diet There'd be a lot to untangle and I don't know if anyone's untangled it enough to reach any firm conclusions.

I'd like to see if the effect is seen in monkeys or other animals.

My mother has been single most of my life, and to my knowledge, she's been on about three dates since my father died in 1983. I suppose, however, that we're not a typical single-mother household.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It even works in plants. Plants that are facing a health crisis like a disease or lack of water often start devoting a much larger fraction of their remaining resources to flowering and/or fruiting, as if worried that if they don't do it now they won't get a chance later. Gardeners' tricks to try to get a plant to make more or bigger flowers & fruits are often matters of torturing their plants to the brink of death or tricking them into thinking they're dying, just to cause this reaction.

I never knew gardeners were such dastards.

So you are suggesting that it is stress that is having the effect?

They should also look for a similar result among adopted girls, who would also be living with an unrelated male.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Good suggestion. But if smell is playing a role, surely it would work via there being period of imprinting in which those who are in contact with the child during would be regarded as related?

We might also want to see if girls kept in all female situations such as nunneries or some boarding schools show delayed menarche. (And yeah, I know it's possible for exposure to male smells to occur in such situations. I'm just saying there might be less male smell exposure.)

I think that changes in the meaning of the term "infant"-- which
has been passed from one Latin-based language to another over
time-- are a large part of what we are debating here.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves