Children

What and Who is a Child

Children exist in every society, but what is meant by child or children, and when childhood is believed to begin and end, varies from culture to culture, across time, and between organizations and institutions within societies. Even by legal definitions, a child can be anyone under the age of 6, 12, 14, 16, 18, or 19, or can be anyone, of any age, as long as they have a living parent. There is little consensus in how child, children, and childhood are defined, even among contemporary official or legal documents. Within any given time period or region, there are differing philosophical approaches to understanding children and childhood; and children of different genders, races, and social class backgrounds often experience childhood differently.

Redefining Roles of Mother, Father, and Child

The post-World War II period, and especially the 1950s, was an anomalous period for families in North America. After the war and the return of soldiers, marriage rates soared, especially among younger women. In Canada, for example, for those aged 15 to 19, the marriage rate more than doubled, climbing from 30 marriages per 1,000 in 1937 to 62 marriages per 1,000 in 1954. The average age of brides at first marriage fell from 25.4 in 1941 to 22 years by 1961. Women married younger and had children at younger ages. The sharpest increase in birth rates occurred among women under 25. Not only were they having children at a younger age, they were also having more total children. What resulted was a baby boom—a bulge of births in the postwar period.

Changes in fertility rates contributed to the redefinition of motherhood and child rearing. Before this, particularly during early industrialization, a significant number of women (and children) were in the labor force or working the land alongside adult men; older children were expected to care for younger ones. To be a woman did not exclusively mean being a mother. Families could not afford to have women as childminders first and foremost. While women could not own property or vote, rural societies nonetheless needed women to work the land, and later, with industrialization, work in factories alongside their husbands. Like their husbands, women contributed to the household as producers. First in the Victorian period and then again with the end of World War II and the baby boom, womanhood was redefined and more closely equated to motherhood. It was expected that mothers should devote more time and attention to child rearing at the expense of other pursuits, including paid work. This put pressure on working-class mothers who were seen as neglectful if and when they needed to work for pay.

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