History of Childhood: Ariès's Thesis on a Recent Discovery

In 1960, French historian Philippe Ariès published a book in France that changed how people looked at childhood: L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. The English translation followed in 1962, titled Centuries of Childhood, carrying the thesis beyond France. According to the source tracing his biography, Ariès argued that children, once pushed to the margins of family life, steadily moved to its center, as parents began openly tending to how they grew up.

Ariès’s thesis, also covered by Slate, holds that medieval society had no distinct concept of childhood. The claim concerns how families viewed a child’s upbringing, treated as a period of life in its own right. This shift, according to Ariès, emerged mainly among more prominent families of early modern Europe, tied also to changes in marriage and family sensibility — the same period examined from another angle in the Recaps on the Renaissance and on social contract theory from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

Practical example: historian Didier Lett studied medieval miracle tales written in Latin and in French, and found distinct terms for different stages of childhood. For him, that linguistic clue weighs against the idea that the Middle Ages, covered in full in the Recap on the Middle Ages summary, lacked any concept of childhood at all.

Ariès’s thesis has not gone unchallenged. English historian Nicholas Orme flatly rejects it, drawing on medieval English sources different from the French ones Ariès used. Historian Albrecht Classen’s objection is that Ariès drew on too small a slice of the evidence, leaving a lopsided picture of the Middle Ages; according to the critics cited by the Retrospect Journal, Ariès generalized the history of childhood from sources concerned mostly with the upper classes.

Two other historians, Patricia Crawford and Linda Pollock, challenge Ariès for treating childhood as a fixed category and for projecting Western moral values onto other societies. Pollock, in particular, argues that Ariès overlooks how closely poorer families remained attached to their children, hardship or not.

The result is a field of study still open today, born from a book published in the 1960s. Those who build on Ariès’s thesis use it as a starting point for studying how family attention toward children changes over time; those who challenge it take different routes: Orme draws on medieval English sources Ariès never used, Classen and Crawford revisit the choice of sources and the projection of Western values, and Lett relies on the medieval linguistic clues already mentioned above. The underlying question — when and why a society starts treating childhood as a stage apart — is the same one examined, from different angles, in the Recaps on the Age of Enlightenment and on Roman education, two other moments when Europe rethought what it means to grow up and be educated.