Childhood was invented in the seventeenth century

From Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century . Postman has a very interesting chapter on the development of the concept of childhood (roughly seven to seventeen) in the the eighteenth century as an intermediary period between the older view that there were simply two stages: infancy ending around age seven and adulthood thereafter.

He lays out what he see as the challenge to this relatively recent development in stark terms but which I suspect are warranted.

Childhood was invented in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth, it began to assume the form with which we are familiar. In the twentieth century, childhood began to unravel, and by the twenty-first, may be lost altogether - unless there is some serious interest in retaining it.

He elaborates.

Freud and Dewey crystallized the basic paradigm of childhood that had been forming since the printing press: the child as schoolboy or schoolgirl whose self and individuality must be preserved by nurturing, whose capacity for self-control, deferred gratification, and logical thought must be extended, whose knowledge of life must be under the control of adults. Yet at the same time, children are understood as having their own rules for development, and a charm, curiosity, and exuberance that must not be strangled - indeed, are strangled only at the risk of losing mature adulthood.

Freud and Dewey were writing at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Dewey died in 1952, Freud in 1939, and neither anticipated - who did? - the later twentieth-century conditions that would render eighteenth-century conceptions of childhood problematic. I refer, of course, to the "information revolution" which has made it impossible to keep secrets from the young - sexual secrets, political secrets, social secrets, historical secrets, medical secrets; that is to say, the full content of adult life, which must be kept at least partially hidden from the young if there is to be a category of life known as childhood.

There was no theory of childhood, at least after the invention of the printing press with movable type, that did not assume that the information environment of adults is different from the information environment of children, and that the former is fuller, richer, broader, and, to pay respects to Rousseau and life itself, more depressing and scary. The word "socialization" implies this. It means a process whereby the young are inducted gradually and in psychologically assimilable ways into the world of adulthood. But if the technology of a culture makes it impossible to conceal anything from the young, in what sense can we say childhood exists? Yes, as always, we have young, small people among us. But if, by seven or eight, or even eleven and twelve, they have access to the same information as do adults, how do adults guide their future? What does a forty-year-old have to teach a twelve-year-old if both of them have been seeing the same TV programs, the same movies, the same advertisements, the same news shows, listening to the same CDs and calling forth the same information on the Internet?