Finding the Turning Point

In the text they are trying to find the turning point of when childhood actually started to exist. There are five main points that we looked at

1) The quest for a Turning Point

         - Aries believed that we had no conception of childhood

         - Postman wrote a book called the end of childhood

                - In this book he writes that childhood is disappearing again, he believes that the written word is what creates childhood and literacy is the birth of childhood. He goes on to say that television is the end of childhood because he believes that if you can watch television you can be an adult.

2) The Industrial Revolution and Machine Age

        - Before the Industrial Revolution most people lived in rural setting, but then land became more profitable if people could produce cotton and wool on it. People then had to move to cities to work in the factories

        - Then Marxian Alienation happened which is that people that are working in factories did not know what was being produced with their work, and people were searching for lost lives

3) The Romantic Conception of the Child

        - This happened in the late 18th early 19th century

        - It was a reaction against industrialization, they thought it was not right for children to be working in the factories, and they believed that children represented: innocence, grace, glory, heaven, and flowers in a garden.

4) Resistance

        - This was the concept that everyone was born with the burden of an original sin

5) So...

        - According to Heywood there is no single defined turning point for when childhood was developed.

I think that childhood as always existed, just back then it was a different kind of childhood. I think this because children have the natural instinct to play and even the way that things were back in the day does not change that. I children have that natural instinct it is going to happen regardless of the condition the child is living in.