Histories of childhood and man: Implications for childhood studies

Medieval European constructions of childhood

Histories of modern Western childhood most often begin with the medieval European idea of children as inherently sinful, born with original sin that (should they die before experiencing salvation), could damn them eternally (Bernstein, 2011; p. 4; Gittins, 2015; James et al., 1998). Unlike later constructions of childhood, this did not necessarily indicate an understanding of children as distinct from adults. Sana Nakata (2015), drawing from the work of Joseph Hawes (1991), argues that the harsh disciplinary practices of adults attempting to eliminate children’s sinful behavior were supported by an understanding of children as not particularly different than everyone else, which “allowed children to be held to the same standards as adults: working, contributing to the household and being accountable to the regulations and punishments of their society” (p. 36).

This reflects a broader lack of philosophical, legal, or representative distinctions between childhood and adulthood in medieval Europe (Ariès, 1962; Bernstein, 2011; Brewer, 2005; James et al., 1998; Sonu and Benson, 2016). Philippe Ariès (1962), perhaps the most frequently cited along the lines of this argument, argues that in medieval France, children were often visually represented no differently than adults (except in height), a representation that reflected a larger understanding of childhood as equivalent to adulthood. While there has been considerable debate regarding Ariès’ conclusions, Kate Retford (2016) highlights that one element of Ariès’ argument is undeniably true: children were much more likely to be individual subjects of portraiture starting in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe—a timeline that maps onto the emergence of Man1. Regardless of critiques about medieval childhood or artistic interpretation, Retford argues that this is a change that indicates a level of financial and emotional investment in childhood (and children as distinct individuals) that had not been previously seen. The timing of this understanding, in which the medieval story of childhood was rapidly transformed in the space of a century or two, is additionally supported by the work of Holly Brewer (2005), who notes that in sixteenth-century English law it was acceptable for six-year-olds to sign contracts, four-year-olds to make wills to give away property, eight-year-olds to be hanged for arson, and for teenagers to be elected as government officials (p. 1). Brewer argues that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was not that children were no longer consenting to these acts—it was that their consent started to seem absurd. This maps a dramatic change from a period in which children were “not clearly distinguished from adults” to one in which they stood not only as a discrete category, but as mapped outside of the political world (Brewer, 2005; pp. 2–4).

Wynter argues that the dominant descriptive statement of the human in this era was shaped by Christian theology and Ptolemaic geography, in which people were narrated either as clergy (saved) or as laity (fallen flesh), which supported the hegemony of the church over lay people in the same ways the divine heavens shifted over an unmoving Earth vulnerable to corruption (Wynter, 1984, 2003). Understandings of childhood through a language of sin exemplifies Wynter’s theorization of the medieval order as “based on degrees of spiritual perfection/imperfection,” (Wynter, 2003; p. 287) in which the regulatory role of determining the limits of being human was filled by the Church. The description of childhood available in this era is not separable from (and reinforces) a general conception of all laity as “sinful by nature” (Wynter, 2003; p. 267) that predominated medieval Europe.

It is interesting to reconsider the lack of a distinction between children and adults in medieval Europe in light of this framework. Wynter theorizes that part of the work that descriptive statements do is that they circumscribe the boundaries of what is possible to imagine: understandings of the nature of humans and the world work to make “the “normal” normal, the real real and the self-evident, self-evident” (Wynter, 2001; p. 58, italics original). This means that the fact that children were viewed as no different from adults in the dominant medieval descriptive statement is not merely an illustration of childhood, but rather an indication that this descriptive statement did not allow for an understanding of childhood as a distinct stage of life.

This was likely a facet of the binary structure of this theological genre of the human (the heavens and the earth, the clergy and the lay, the saved and the fallen flesh) which did not allow space to conceptually distinguish children from adults. Wynter argues that this binary theocratic order was ruptured by a cluster of historical events including Copernicus’s theorization of a heliocentric universe, colonial voyages that encountered people in lands that had been deemed uninhabitable, and the development of liberal humanism, all of which deeply challenged how Europeans thought of themselves and their world. This propelled forward a new understanding of humanity as Man that sharply diverged from medieval understandings, and claimed universal applicability to ‘man’ as a whole, rather than only Christians (Wynter, 1984, 1995, 2003). This divergence held radical implications for childhood.

Liberal thought and childhood in relation to Man1

While there are many ways in which Man1 diverges from the medieval genre of the human, one of the most important for constructions of childhood is that Man1 operates from a framework of humanity as existing on a progressive scale of rationality:

This newly invented Man’s choice is that of either growing downwards into the lower nature of brutes, or responding to the Creator’s call to grow ‘upward’ to ‘higher’ and ‘divine’ natures (Miller, 1965)… this was to be the new ‘idea of order’ on whose basis the coloniality of being, enacted by the dynamics of the relation between Man—overrepresented as the generic, ostensibly supracultural human—and its subjugated Human Others (i.e., Indians and Negroes), together with, as Quijano notes, the continuum of new categories of humans (i.e., mestizos and mulattos to which their human/subhuman value difference gave rise), was to be brought into existence as the foundational basis of modernity. (Wynter, 2003; pp. 287-288)

Wynter’s analysis is not focused on childhood here—rather, her discussion of the ways in which the order of Man1 is based on differential degrees of rationality (as opposed to the binary theological order of medieval Europe) enables her theorization of the foundational manifestation of modern understandings of race. Wynter argues that the production of the idea of Man as oriented towards the progressive achievement of rationality—and the parallel overrepresentation of Man as the human itself—required the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and enslavement of Black Africans, who were made to stand as “the physical referent of the projected irrational/subrational Human Other to its civic humanist, rational self-conception” (Wynter, 1995, 2003; p. 282). This construction enabled and rationalized centuries of colonialism, genocide, and slavery (McKittrick, 2006; pp. 124–126; Wynter, 2003).

Alongside Wynter’s illustration of the ways that this “continuum of new categories of humans” was used to create racial categories and use them as the basis of subjugation, I argue that this also enabled the ability to conceive of temporally-based categories based on phases of life—in stark contrast to the binary medieval descriptive statement that preceded it. In other words, Man1 made childhood a possible thing to imagine (Knight, 2019). The emergence of modern childhood in this era, then, is co-produced with modern constructions of race.

This co-production was grounded in liberal humanist thought, which heavily influenced understandings of childhood through the articulation of concepts like rights, agency, and freedom. Within childhood studies, scholars tracing the origins of dominant Western constructions of childhood reliably reference philosophers like John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose works narrate an irrational, child-of-nature progressing towards adult rationality (James et al., 1998; Wells, 2018). Outside of childhood studies, critical and anticolonial theory also references liberal humanism (including the same philosophers), but focuses instead on the role that liberal ideas of citizenship and property play in enabling colonial wars, enslavement, and Indigenous dispossession (Ivison, 2003; Lowe, 2015; Mehta, 1999).

The foundations of modern constructions of childhood cannot be divorced from this broader context. The philosophers often cited as influential in defining childhood in Enlightenment-era Europe were not focused on childhood; rather, their aims were often writing political treatises about humans and the state, and children were used as a rhetorical tool for the development of their arguments (Archard, 2015; Brewer, 2005; Nakata, 2015). Their use of the child to elaborate the modern subject (as Man) was aimed at legitimizing a modern state defined through, supported by, and invested in colonization and enslavement, “affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty” (Lowe, 2015, p. 6). The ability for childhood to be understood as a distinct category rests on the temporal construction of children as adults-to-be that is only possible to imagine through the racially differentiated continuum of Man1 that, in turn, childhood reproduces as natural.

One of the central roles that childhood plays in liberal thought is as a representation of rationality-to-come: a blank slate (as Locke termed it), the potential of a rational future in an irrational present. This theorization of childhood was used to build arguments about consent, a critical feature of liberalism, in which the state’s authority is made legitimate only through the existence of a free and consenting participant (Brewer, 2005; Nakata, 2015). Children, as symbols of time-based irrationality, are used to fashion the right of (white, property-owning, male) adults to political freedom, whose properly-developed rationality supports the legitimacy of the government that they consent to (Brewer, 2005; Nakata, 2015). Liberal theories define the child as a “potential person,” then, in order to define how rationality is endowed and how it progresses developmentally to produce a reasonable subject who then authorizes governmental rule and individual rights and freedoms (Gollapudi, 2015; Nakata, 2015).

These theorizations of rationality, as an innate capacity developed through Western modes of education to result in consent to state authority, discursively and institutionally fashioned enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples of the Americas into “the embodiment of an ostensibly ‘savage and irrational humanity,’ and, as such, the Human Other to Man” (Wynter, 2006; p. 125). Their purported lack of the rationality of Man (“over-represented as rationality in general”) supported arguments that people cast as Human Others could be justifiably enslaved or colonized, in a manner that often relied directly on comparing them to children, newly constructed as a category of people for whom domination was not only acceptable but also natural (Wynter, 1995; p. 35, 2006).

These arguments justifying violence against Human Others were further solidified through anxieties about the dangers of irrationality, represented through the child’s potential for future rationality as well as a risk that it may not be achieved. ¹ As illustrated by the idealized progression of childhood to adulthood, civilized subjects were understood as those who successfully tempered the irrational aspects of human nature, meaning that access to full humanity was mapped as “political subjects’ adhering to the prescriptive behavioural pathways laid down by the State” (Wynter, 2006; p. 139). The anxiety about the possibility/fact of a continued irrationality surfaced in liberal arguments of irrationality as a justification for war—specifically, wars of colonialism and settlement (Locke, 2003 [1689])—against Indigenous peoples who were often represented as threats to (European) security and civilization (Lowe, 2015; p. 9). This framework enabled arguments that children of racialized, colonized, and enslaved peoples were fair targets of violence as embodiments of irrational Human Others to come (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015; Sharpe, 2016).

Liberal humanist philosophy, then, used ideas of (white, European) childhood to fashion non-white people of geographically distant lands as not only knowable but also as justifiably attacked and oppressed. Representations of childhood as a transitional state of rationality-to-be best transformed by white, Western knowledge and civilization anchors through comparison a temporality that casts colonized and racialized populations as forever lacking and incomplete, thus normalizing and universalizing larger Western understandings of the world and the human (Balagopalan, 2023, citing Ghandi, 1998; Nandy, 1984). This comparison reflects the production and overrepresentation of Man1 and the ways in which race, foundational to how Europeans now answered the question of “the who, and the what we are” (Wynter, 2003; p. 264), was always intimately entangled with the production of the idea of childhood (Garlen and Ramjewan, 2024).

This entanglement appears vividly in ongoing negotiations about childhood’s role in the naturalization of liberal freedoms. In liberal theory, childhood is critical to defining the potential of human freedoms—symbolized through the rights that properly-developed subjects (rational, consenting proprietors) hold under a liberal government. It is in relation to liberal freedoms, and the tensions that appear when they are taken up without critique, that we can see how the exclusions of childhood under Man1 are carried forward. Rights, for example, only make sense if people understand themselves in a liberal manner (having rational control of the mind), which is why a liberal education for children is deemed critical to access the possibilities of liberal freedom—and also makes those without access to or outside of these structures illegible as possible rights-bearing subjects (Mehta, 1992; p. 13; Reddy, 2011; p. 160). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) notes, “race and rights are the means by which patriarchal white sovereignty exercises its power to let live and make live where the granting of life is conditional on the perceived appropriateness of the individual, the measure of which is the good white citizen” (p. 172).

This pattern predicts the tensions that appear with children’s rights, which have both been foundational to the growth of childhood studies, and have also failed to adequately describe and support diverse children’s lives due to the ways they are centered around normative understandings of white, middle class children of the Global North (Balagopalan, 2018; Burman, 2017). The language of children’s rights seeks to challenge children’s exclusion from the liberal subjecthood of Man through a strategy of inclusion (children, too, can be rational actors). This carries forward a belief in the universal applicability of Man, denying the ways that ideas of rationality are premised on exclusion to begin with, an exclusion that is reiterated when a universalized application of children’s rights naturally “risks setting in place new exclusionary logics” (Abebe, 2019; Balagopalan, 2018; p. 30). ²

Taking inspiration from the ways that Wynter marks the emergence of Man1 allows for an understanding of the ways in which imagining childhood as a discrete life stage was only possible through the development of racially differentiated structures of power. Placing liberal theories of childhood in relation to Wynter’s larger chronology allows us to see how these still-influential stories of childhood arrive in relation to the construction of Man1. The dangers of not understanding the larger context which brought forth the roots of dominant constructions of childhood risks, as we can see happening with children’s rights, carrying forward unquestioned ideas of rationality, instrumental in processes of racialization and colonization that continue to harm many children today.

Child development and innocence alongside Man2

In histories of childhood, scholars often flag the nineteenth century for the arrival of two of the most prominent contemporary discourses of childhood: child development and childhood innocence. These arrive in an era that Wynter marks for the emergence of Man2, a universalized subject masked as natural through the rise of the language of biology and evolution (Wynter, 2003). It is in this era that children achieved a new status as objects of scientific inquiry (Castañeda, 2002; Rabello De Castro, 2023; p. 125; Walkerdine, 2009).

Theorizations of childhood in the nineteenth century carried forward liberal ideas of childhood as an origin for Man, now sedimented as a biological process through racial science. The relationship between emerging theories of child development and Man is perhaps most evident in recapitulation theory, in which children’s biologically developing bodies were theorized as representative of global hierarchies: a recapitulation of a societal progression from barbarity to modernity (Burman, 2017; Castañeda, 2002; Fallace, 2012). In this theory’s application in the work of Charles Darwin and many others, children acted as sites for biologizing racial difference: a process of equating children, ancient peoples, and contemporary “savage” peoples worked to naturalize an assumption of a shared, known hierarchy of human growth that manifested both individually and collectively. Neutralized and masked by an association with linear temporality, theories of child development in this way configured a temporal dynamic out of a spatial one, shaping differential access to humanity through territory (Castañeda, 2002).

This construction of development through childhood reflects Wynter’s broader analysis of the emergence of Man2 in the nineteenth century, which purported to map a universal, purely secular truth of all humans as biological organisms, a “‘world’ humanness” (McKittrick, 2006; pp. 124–126; Wynter, 2003). As we can see in the mobilization of recapitulation theory to construct child development as parallel to species development, Man2 casts the racial categories of Black and Indigenous people as evolutionarily dysselected, systemizing the hierarchical degrees of rationality determined by Man1 into bodily, biocentric logics that naturalize and further racial and colonial oppression (McKittrick, 2006; p. 126; Wynter, 2003). The overrepresentation of Man2 (narrated as a biological truth) set up global patterns of colonial oppression as the manifestation of the “dysselected-by-Evolution conception,” legitimizing the explosion of European imperialism (Wynter, 2003; p. 325).

Taking cues from Wynter’s framework allows us to see that the orientation of theories of child development was not constructing the child but rather theorizing a universalized human. Kromidas (2019), writing on how Darwin’s discussion of childhood fits into Wynter’s thought, argues that “Man was built from the child” through the role that the child played for the theorization of Man and Man’s Human Others (p. 70). The child observed by scientists in this era (often the middle-class, white children of the scientists themselves) codified developmentalist discourse that determined those dysselected-by-evolution: both by standing in for racialized and colonized peoples, and also by acting as a “measuring stick” for the determination of developmental norms (Burman, 2017; Castañeda, 2002; Kromidas, 2019; Walkerdine, 2009). These scientific analyses of childhood laid the foundation for developmental science, which reproduces the hierarchies and symbolic codes of Man through the raced, classed, and gendered contours of its supposedly universal subject (Burman, 2017; Kromidas, 2019; Walkerdine, 2009).

The connections between stories of development and racial and colonial violence are made explicit in regulatory anxiety around white children raised in colonial territories, in which the success of colonial states was linked directly to those children’s successful approach towards the cultural norms of white adulthood (Stoler, 2006). These connections were embodied as well in developmental predictions that supported oppression: Black children were constructed as never leaving infanthood in a manner that justified permanent enslavement, and Indigenous people were mapped as untameable forever-children in justifications for genocide and containment (Castañeda, 2002; p. 28; Johnston-Goodstar, 2020). Constructions of development, grounded in territorially-based limitations to Man, continue to support hierarchies of global development and the evacuation of racialized children from childhood for their failure to develop towards Man (Burman, 2017; Johnston-Goodstar, 2020; Sharpe, 2016).

The developmental child thus sediments the liberal construction of childhood as of-nature (a pure representation of the origins of humanity) as a biological truth (Castañeda, 2002; Garlen, 2019; Taylor, 2013). This understanding helped support the growing cultural hold of childhood innocence under Man2, despite a foundation in the works of Rousseau a century before. Garlen and Ramjewan (2024), tracing the ways that childhood innocence finds its grounding in the racist developmentalism of Man2, argue that innocence “is a rhetorical strategy that enacts its own epistemological violence through the perpetuation of colonial logics and white supremacy” (p. 7).

As many have noted, childhood innocence, as a facet of the larger project of Man, depends on and reinforces the evacuation of many children (through race, sexuality, ability, and more) from innocence and from childhood itself, which makes them vulnerable to violence, imprisonment, and even death (Dyer, 2020; Epstein et al., 2017; Farley, 2018; Garlen, 2019; Garlen and Ramjewan, 2024; Meiners, 2016). Garlen (2019), writing about the rise of childhood innocence in the nineteenth-century US, notes that this was a politically turbulent time in which rising immigration, rapid industrialization, women’s suffrage, and a growing abolition movement each “raised questions about racial, ethnic, and gender violence—sexual, psychological, and physical—which had heretofore been justified by White supremacy” (p. 60). In response to this political moment, innocence gained cultural momentum through mobilizing an understanding of childhood that was “classist, patriarchal, and the exclusive property of whiteness,” working to perpetuate white supremacy by naturalizing a political structure in which white elites stood as models of piety and protection (pp. 62-63).

In this way, childhood innocence was mobilized to cast structures of power dominated by white supremacy as good, true, and right at a critical moment of imperial expansion and racial violence. The parallel way this moment simultaneously cast Black children in particular outside of innocence reflects Aimé Césaire's, (2000 [1955]) articulation of the manner that the violence and barbarism of colonization is rhetorically transported from colonizers to those colonized. Central to the perpetuation of childhood innocence is the concealment of this dynamic, and the ways in which its prominence (historically and today) is owed to its role in maintaining white supremacy. Childhood innocence, requiring a performance of “forgetting” social violence and difference, works to dismiss political threats to existing hegemonic structures of power while simultaneously reifying them through enforcing race-, class-, and gender-based stratification informed by who is or is not innocent (Bernstein, 2011; Garlen, 2019).

Historically, these distinctions were mobilized in the removal of Indigenous children to residential schools and to further stereotypes about Black parents (especially mothers) as insufficient that led to an overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous children in child welfare that continues today (Bullard, 2014; Garlen, 2019; Roberts, 2022). These projects are directly connected to the way an order of the world predicated on racial hierarchies under Man is made to seem as if it is based on “natural” aspects of humanity, supported here by the essentializing of childhood innocence. Childhood innocence is part of a collection of representations of Man-overrepresented-as-the-human that “[ensure] the stable reproduction of the US order that [call] for the white population group as a whole to be held at the apex” (Wynter, 2003; p. 326). Globally, the exportation of childhood innocence as a supposedly universal concept is used to naturalize the exclusion of racialized children and children from the Global South from childhood itself, who are more likely to be characterized (through narratives of working children, rebelling/protesting children, children in need of saving) as barbaric, inappropriate children—a continued transportation of the violence of colonization and racism onto the bodies and selves of people who are harmed by it (Césaire, 2000 [1955]; Hopkins and Sriprakash, 2016).

In both the stories used to understand children (developing rationalists, innocents, sinful children, biological becomings) as well as the differential abilities of racialized, disabled, or lower-class children to access these stories, it is possible to see how childhood’s entanglement with coloniality structures children’s lives today. The continued overrepresentation of Man is what makes childhood innocence and child development incredibly difficult to challenge, despite their acknowledged violence—which illustrates the critical manner in which challenges to normative ideas of childhood must contend with its coloniality.