EDMUND LEITES
119
Pollock's
Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900
(Cambridge University Press, 1983) . Pollock argues that there has
been no important change in the devotion, care, and emotional style
with which English parents treated their children in these four cen–
turies. Her main opponent is Aries. She objects to his view that the
late Middle Ages did not recognize childhood, or, as he sometimes
put it, that childhood did not exist in the Middle Ages. He meant by
this that there was not a well-developed recognition of a world made
especially for children; they were not insulated from the adult world
nor kept from the special knowledge possessed by grownups. There
was no idea of childhood insofar as childhood, as we moderns think
of it, involves the creation by adults of a special and protected realm
for children. Pollock misunderstands this thesis. She takes Aries to
say that adults in the Middle Ages simply had no idea that children
were different from them in any way; that they did not see that peo–
ple of six or seven or eight years old were in any way different from
adults of twenty or thirty.
It
would be very surprising indeed, as
Aries himself recognized and as Pollock well knows, if people
everywhere did not recognize significant differences between small
children and grown parents. One might then wonder why Pollock
offers such a simple-minded reading of Aries, who made himself
very clear on this point.
In Pollock's view, historians of childhood like Aries have in–
vented change in treatment of children for the sake of having a his–
tory of childhood. The scientific method, as she sees it, sustains a
"no-history" theory of the family. The concepts of childhood and
adolescence may not be quite the same, but parental care appears–
from her statistics - to have altered little from the sixteenth century
to the present. After reading 496 British and American diaries and
autobiographies and an additional twenty-seven unpublished British
manuscripts, she counted up each and every passage in which some–
thing about children occurs, and then checked to see whether there
have been any changes - say, more instances of cruelty to children
recorded in one era than in the next. On this basis Pollock concludes
that parents are no more humane to their children nowadays than
they were in the sixteenth century (no more beatings or abuse having
been recorded then than were recorded later on). And in some cases,
she says, the severity of nineteenth-century parents exceeded that of
earlier centuries.
Pollock is willing to admit that public institutions do develop,
but she feels that the relations between parents and children are
