Childhood (being a child) is a broad term usually applied to the phase of development in humans between infancy and adulthood.

Age definition of a child

In many countries there is an age of majority when childhood ends and a person legally becomes an adult. The age can range anywhere from 14 to 21, with 18 being the most common.

Research in social sciences

In recent years there has been a rapid growth of interest in the sociological study of childhood. Reaching on a large body of contemporary sociological and anthropological research, people have developed key links between the study of childhood and social theory, exploring its historical, political, and cultural dimensions.

Background and History

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Philippe Ariès, an important French medievalist and historian, published a study in 1961 of paintings, gravestones, furniture, and school records. He found that before the seventeenth century, children were represented as mini-adults. Since then historians have increasingly researched childhood in past times.

Before Ariès, George Boas had published The Cult of Childhood.

Several historical events and periods are discussed as relevant to the history of childhood in the West. One such event is the life of Jesus ChristWilde, Oscar. De profundis. Dover Publications New York, 1996. Christ taught that children were to be loved and revered, a departure from the ancients' attitude to children which was to be propagated in the Roman Empire during the next 400 years with the introduction of Christianity.Fact: date=February 2007

During the Renaissance, artistic depictions of children increased dramatically in Europe. This did not impact the social attitude to children much, however -- see the article on child labour.

The Victorian Era has been described as a source of the modern institution of childhood. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution during this era led to an increase in child labour, but due to the campaigning of the Evangelicals, and efforts of author Charles Dickens and others, child labour was gradually reduced and halted in England via the Factory Acts of 1802-1878. The Victorians concomitantly emphasized the role of the family and the sanctity of the child, and broadly speaking, this attitude has remained dominant in Western societies since then.

In the contemporary era Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg have constructed a critical theory of childhood and childhood education that they have labeled kinderculture. Here Kincheloe and Steinberg make use of multiple research and theoretical discourses (the bricolage) to study childhood from diverse perspectives—historiography, ethnography, cognitive research, media studies, cultural studies, political economic analysis, hermeneutics, semiotics, content analysis, etc. Based on this multiperspectival inquiry, Kincheloe and Steinberg contend that new times have ushered in a new era of childhood. Evidence of this dramatic cultural change is omnipresent, but many individuals in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have not yet noticed it. When Steinberg and Kincheloe wrote the first edition of Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood in 1997 (second edition, 2004) many people who made their living studying, teaching, or caring for children were not yet aware of the nature of the changes in childhood that they encountered daily.