Globalization of Childhood

The globalization of childhood refers to those processes through which a specific set of practices and ideas about children’s capacities, vulnerabilities, and needs that stabilized in Western Europe and North America in the long 19th century were transmitted, received, and implemented in the rest of the world. This specific set of practices and ideas can be glossed as modern childhood. The term is problematic because it presumes that childhoods that do not conform to this set of ideas and practices are backward, premodern, or traditional. Nonetheless, modernity remains a convenient term for the global forces at play in the period from the end of the 15th century through to either the end of the long 19th century (1918) or the end of the short 20th ...