From another thread:Please do; I find that an extraordinary statement.

I don't find it extraordinary at all, but I know what she is getting at. I'm pretty sure that in the past people realized that children tended to be smaller than adults, less experienced and so on.

Personally I'd be inclined to turn the statement around a little and say, "The concept of adults being different from children is relatively new."

Ronald, I think you might be interested in this...
Airstrip One plans to spot thought criminals as early as possible.

Seems the British believe you're the same person from birth to adulthood...A potential criminal!

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

I think that if you could ask people from 1600 to state some ways
in which children and adults are alike, and ways in which they are
different, you would get a list fairly similar to one that you would
get from people nowadays-- possibly better.

What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and
on three legs in the evening?

Anyone in 1600 would know that a baby cannot stand up on its
own, and that it takes some time before it learns to crawl on all
fours. Anyone in 1600 would know that a baby is born without
teeth, that the teeth grow in, later fall out, and are replaced by
new ones. Anyone in 1600 would know that a baby has to learn
to talk. Anyone in 1600 would know that an adult can lift a child
off the ground but a child cannot lift an adult off the ground.
Anyone in 1600 would know that a 15-year-old can run faster
than a 5-year-old or a 50-year-old. Anyone in 1600 would know
that children almost always have better vision than adults. Etc.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

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

That article is kind of creepy. But it's not what I'm getting at.

I'm more getting at that a couple of hundred years ago most people were subjects and at the bottom of political and religious heirachies. As subjects they were subject to other people's wills much as children are subject to the wills of their parents and teachers, except that today children have legal rights and protections that most people in the past lacked. A child like state of dependance was both encouraged and expected. People were expected to consider their Lords and gods as father (or mother) figures.

The concept of childhood we have is very new. For example the idea that children shouldn't be aware of the existance of sex would seem very strange to most people in the past and indeed strange in many cultures in the world today. Our concept of teenager is even more modern.

One recent change in our attitudes about children is it is now illegal to for children to attack other children. When I was a kid, provided you didn't put anyone in hospital, child on child violence was accepted and even encouraged.

Funny, I feel some real attention is actually needed with the exploitation involved in those hideous kiddy beauty pageants.

Two rascals duking it out in some back alley over "kid protocol" was already old when people thought the world only went as far as the Tigris.
[ I've got a scar on my knee(of all freakin places!)from some long-forgotten playground skirmish....actually, it was more like Bull Run, but that's another story. ]
Those sordid pageants though...there are some serious issues there with both the welfare(psychological and physical) of the child and the responsibility and, in a way I guess, the maturity of the parent with dreams of Don King in their heads. Actually, I liken those pageant moms to Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin in MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE...but then I'm known for my melodramatic imagination.

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

Only if you fail to understand my point.

Yes, they knew the physical differences; these people weren't stupid. However, children didn't acquire a "special" place until the last two hundred years or so; why do you think it took so long to impose child labour laws? And at that, the issue there was, at least in part, one of education--if you start working at the age of, oh, six, when do you have time to go to school?

The issue to which I refer is psychological. Another one of those unbelievable statements that is nevertheless true is that the concept of the "teenager" didn't really exist until the 1920s, when the average person's educational span lengthened. I mean, ye Gods, have you read the Little House books? The only reason Laura wasn't teaching other kids when she was fifteen was that the law said a teacher had to be sixteen.

Heck, check Wikipedia under "childhood." There's not much of an article there, but it's certainly a start, and it's the only online reference I'm going to be able to give you, because I read about this in books. Like, for example, my high school psychology text--and my college psychology text.

Okay, let us start by quoting from three of the books I actually own. The first is Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, by Charles Panati. Panati isn't 100% reliable, but he's probably 95% reliable. This quote is from pp. 168-169.

1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Women's History, by Constance Jones lists quite a few women whose accomplishments started in what we think of as childhood, as does Uppity Women of the New World, by Vicki Leon. The latter describes Mary Haydock, given the death sentence at age thirteen for trying to sell a stolen horse; she was given transportation to Australia instead and was, at the printing of my copy of the book, on the $20 bill there. 1001 Things reminds us that Joan of Arc was twelve when she started hearing her voices.

This is a very small sampling based on three books that happened to be on two shelves of the nonfiction section of my personal library. I could give more examples, but it would be more work.

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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!"

Interesting topic.

On TV a few years ago, they had a schoolgirl quoting Shakespeare in between drinking a milkshake. After a short time, the penny drops: she is playing the part of Cleopatra, and she is the same age as Cleopatra at the time.

I think that, no matter how much you are told about history, you sometimes have to be shown history as well. And sometimes it takes little tricks like this to shake you out of your mindset.

There's a difference between believing that it's alright to expose children to things that many now consider too "adult" for them, and seriously believing that they're the same thing as adults. If all you've got is the former, then saying that it means they're "thought of as miniature adults" is just not accurate; it's a metaphor at best and sensationalist or deceptive at worst. (I, for example, treat men and women the same, but don't think they're the same themselves.)

If one seriously equates children to adults, then one also thinks their minds work the same way and expects the same behavior of them... which I think is the context in which this claim was first made anyway.

Proving the former is easy, especially if you're allowed to use a couple of brief recent oddites of certain Occidental countries (based on rather abnormal circumstances) as stand-ins for the whole of history in all places. But it doesn't equal proving the latter.

Well I think in the past they often did expect the same sort of behaviour from children as adults in many regards. They used to hang people we would now consider children. There were armies that were commanded by sixteen year olds and so on. Rather than say children and adults were regarded as the same I would say childhood was regarded as very different from today. And adulthood too. And the distinction was very different and not as clear as today. As anyone who has been Bar Mitzvaed can tell you certain cultures regarded you as an adult when you were 13.

The fact that our culture treats people as children who would be treated as adults in another culture doesn't make the two phases of life equivalent; it just means the dividing line between them has moved. (In our case right here and now, it's moved so far I find it a bit absurd; we're now treating biological adults as children for their first several YEARS as biological adults. No wonder they act so weird! How would YOU, adult readers, respond to being treated like a kid right now?)

The people would respond the same way regardless of whether I
understood your point, and I would still think what I said above
whether I knew that I failed to understand your point or not.

Perhaps the problem is that you were quoted out of context at
the start of this thread. You were quoted as saying:
But what you meant was that the way children are valued has
changed, and along with it the concept of how children should
be treated.

From the quote I get:

Olden days: "Children and adults are the same."
Modern age: "Children are different from adults."

But you meant:

Olden days: "Children and adults are of similar value to us,
so we treat them similarly."
Modern age: "Children have a value to us that adults don't have,
so we treat them differently from adults.

(Gillian says this because she knows that I have read the
'Little House' books.)

I was thinking about American farm children and Hellenic silver
miners when I wrote the previous post, but those thoughts didn't
make it into print.

Heh. I have a book tiltled 'The Psychology of Everyday Things'
by Donald A. Norman. Totally different subject: How to design
stuff so that it can be used by humans. Nice book.

The statement (and notion) that "children were regarded as
miniature adults" is the one that I question, and which motivated
me to write my first post in this thread. The rest of what Panati
describes could apply equally to children almost everywhere and
everywhen. It wasn't just insomnia that made me sit for hours on
the stairs in the dark, listening to the adults talk downstairs
when company stayed late-- or even when it was just my parents.
Unfortunately they never had anything really interesting to say.

However, the extent to which children in the past kept the same
hours as adults was largely dependant on how much sleep they
need, which is not something that is likely to change. If the
child needs nine hours and the adult needs only seven, and both
arise at the same time, then the child is going to fade out
before the adult. If you give yourself a couple of hours of
peace and quiet in the morning before getting the kids up, then
it is more likely that they will be up as late as you.

Nowadays there are more reasons than ever before for children
to have pharmacologically-induced psychosis.

I'd say my strategy paid off. I hate to type stuff out of books.
I do it far less than I used to, back in the olden days of Fidonet
and GEnie, before the Internet made 'copy/paste' so easy.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

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

Re:
There's a tendency, based on physics, for children to be younger than adults.

But on many occasions, the child is more mature than the equivalent adult.

Or even a continuum.

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Not sure I understand the topic. Children were treated very differently in the past. So were adults. We have learned much about the human psyche, though our learning is of course not complete.

If it is just that we are now more in tune with the development process from infant to adult, I'd agree.

But is the premise that people did not recognize the differences between children and adults? I disagree with that. Did they choose not to address the needs, or care for their children as most civilized folks do today? I'd agree to that, but it is a different issue.

Treat them in a far more callous way then we do, yes. Not realize they were different, no. They could not have been that inobservant.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

Someone in one of the threads in General Science was going on about how we should understand that they're children, and children have special needs (which, don't get me wrong, I agree with!), and how could people not know that? And the fact is, children were treated as tiny adults quite a lot of the time through history. Portraiture is one aspect that will show us this; I think it's Francis Drake's son that is shown in a painting as being dressed and postured exactly like his father, unto having an actual by-God sword; the kid was maybe seven.

As would I. As we understand brain development, for example, those rules about not giving people under the age of about 18 or 20 a lot of mind-altering drugs start making an awful lot of sense.

But the very fact that they didn't means something, didn't it? As does your caveat about "civilized." If it were such a universal fact that children get treated as children, you wouldn't need it.

History disagrees with you. Oh, very small children--say five or younger--were given more latitude, but older children weren't. Children as young as seven could be entered into apprenticeships, though they were more likely to be closer to ten. Children as young as four were put to work in the textile mills in the 19th Century.

And, if you think about it, why would they have treated children callously if they realized they were different? Was everyone four hundred years ago just a jerk?

When Jane Grey died, she could speak some four or five languages fluently. She could write lengthy essays about major points in theology. She had been declared, if not crowned, Queen of England. She was married. She had a better education than some PhDs do today, albeit lacking in anything like modern science.

Oh. And she was seventeen.

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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!"

History is full of very young monarchs and divine leaders. But the fact that they were not truly given the reigns of power (there was always an overseer - usually evil and nefarious?) proves that they did see children as different.

The fact that they were abused doesn't mean much.

__________________
Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

It is true that when you look at pictures of children (paintings, sculptures, etc.) they tend to look like miniature adults for a very long time. Until the 19th century, more or less, if I'm not mistaken. What this says about the society which produced those pictures, I do not know.
There is no question that the teenager is a 20th century creation. But maybe this is not just a matter of sociology, because nowadays people are more slow to mature physically.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire