All about the economics of childhood

For much of history, childhood as we know it didn't exist, and children were often treated more like miniature adults than kids

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In the early Middle Ages, when roughly a third of babies didn’t survive to their first birthday, parents didn’t agonize so much over screentime. But some historians go further, arguing that parents didn’t really agonize about their children, full stop. Instead, kids were seen more like short, incompetent adults, and shoved into the workforce soon as they were yay high. Those that died were mourned, briefly. Those that survived had to earn their place. 

At least, that’s the argument that the French sociologist Philippe Ariès advanced in the 1960s. Reviewing medieval paintings, diaries, games, and school records, he concluded that “childhood” as a distinct, sentimentalized life stage didn’t really exist until about the 19th century, and began as an upper-class set of attitudes that slowly, eventually drifted down to the emerging middle class and beyond.

It’s a compelling theory, and a disputed one. In the long years since, historians have pushed back hard, arguing that Ariès mistook a lack of evidence for a lack of feeling, and that grieving parents in, say, 1150 still felt the loss of their children, and maybe even loved a few of them. As for the children themselves, and what they have to say (the darndest things), scroll on below.

1.6: The percentage of its GDP that Sweden spends on early childhood care, with its policy model........

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