childhood history essay

Childhood Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on childhood.

Childhood is the most fun and memorable time in anyone’s life. It’s the first stage of life which we enjoy in whatever way we like. Besides, this is the time that shapes up the future. The parents love and care for their children and the children to the same too. Moreover, it’s the golden period of life in which we can teach children everything.

Memories of Childhood

The memories of childhood ultimately become the life long memory which always brings a smile on our faces. Only the grownups know the real value of childhood because the children do not understand these things.

Moreover, Children’s have no worries, no stress, and they are free from the filth of worldly life. Also, when an individual collects memories of his/her childhood they give a delighted feeling.

Besides, bad memories haunt the person his entire life. Apart from this, as we grow we feel more attachment to our childhood and we want to get back those days but we can’t. That’s why many people say ‘time is neither a friend nor a foe’. Because the time which is gone can’t come back and neither do our childhood. It is a time which many poets and writer praises in their creations.

Importance of Childhood

For children, it has no importance but if you ask an adult it is very important. Moreover, it a time when the moral and social character of the children develop. In this stage of life, we can easily remodel the mindset of someone.

Also, it is very important to understand that the mindset of children can be easily altered in this time. So, we have to keep a close eye on our children.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

What Should You Do in Childhood?

In childhood, one should need to enjoy his/her life without any worry. It is a time in which one should have to take care of his diet, his health, and immunity. Besides, the children should be taught to be neat and clean, to eat, read, sleep, play, and to do exercise regularly and these things should be in the habits of the child.

Moreover, we should try to influence children to start productive habits such as reading, writing that should help them in later life. But the books they read and what they write should be carefully checked by the parents.

Care for Everyone

Children are like buds, they care for everyone equally without any discrimination. Also, they are of helpful nature and help everyone around them.

Moreover, they teach everyone the lesson of humanity that they have forgotten in this hectic lifestyle of this world. Besides, these children are the future of the country and if they do not grow properly then in future how can they help in the growth of the nation .

In conclusion, we can say that childhood is the time that makes our adulthood special. Also, children’s are like pottery vessels whom you can shape in any way you like. Besides, this their innocence and helpful nature gives everyone the message of humanity.

Most importantly, they learn by either making mistakes or seeing their elders.

FAQs about Childhood

Q.1 Why childhood is the best period of life? A.1 It is the best time of life because the memories that we make in our childhood always brings a smile on our face. Also, it is the time when the character of the child is shaped. Besides, it also is the best time to understand life and gain knowledge.

Q.2 What is the most important characteristics of a child? A.2 According to me, the most important characteristics of a child is his innocence and helpful nature.

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Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”

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Ishita Pande, Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”, The American Historical Review , Volume 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1300–1305, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa383

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In a complement to the 2020 AHR Roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (125, no. 2), this AHR Exchange focuses on the history of children and childhood. Sarah Maza presents a critical review essay, highlighting the limiting factors in the expanding field of childhood studies. Children, she observes, produce few sources of their own voices, have limited agency, and as individuals and as a group soon outgrow their subaltern status—they grow up. Robin P. Chapdelaine, Nara Milanich, Steven Mintz, Ishita Pande, and Bengt Sandin—historians representing diverse geographical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives on the history of children and childhood—react to Maza’s observations by bringing up important methodological questions about subjecthood, agency, and modernity. Maza’s rejoinder reflects on these questions and on the possibility of age-based historical agency.

I n introducing readers to a field “always on the rise and yet not quite risen,” Sarah Maza’s “The Kids Aren’t All Right” seeks to diagnose the failure of the history of childhood to take on the world. While other categories of analysis such as gender and race have succeeded in permeating and recasting “normal” history, the author suggests, childhood has not. The field’s minority is evidenced by the fact that departments “never” conduct searches for historians of childhood. A general disregard for the field’s growth is evidenced by repeat references to Philippe Ariès Centuries of Childhood (1960), which continues to “stand for” the field sixty years after its publication. 2 All historians should be interested in the scrutiny of children, the author contends, because “childhood is, along with death, one of the two universal human experiences,” and a relative disregard for them is symptomatic of “our discipline’s overall neglect of a category coterminous with humanity itself.” While we must study children because they help us rethink key questions “on the nature of historical actors and agency”—questions that concern all historians—we must forego the obsessive quest for “child-generated sources [to] recapture the agency of the very young” that is responsible for the field’s stagnation. The path forward—as the best work in the field has shown—lies not in pursuing children as agents but in writing history through children.

While there is much here I agree with, the bold claim that childhood is “coterminous with humanity itself” must surely be a slip of the tongue. That children as we perceive them today did not exist in all times and places, that they are social, cultural, and political constructs, is the first principle of the history of childhood. And yet, a tension between the understanding of children as creatures of biology and as subjects of history persists in the field. For instance, a pioneer of the field, Paula Fass, suggests that even while acknowledging the historicity of children, we must not abandon “the drive to inquire about how children resemble each other as biological beings and as the subjects of cultural self-reflection.” 3 Fass evokes biology to suggest that “a serious engagement with the history of children can begin to heal some of the rifts that have shaken up the profession over the last thirty to forty years, as race, ethnicity, class, and gender and sexuality became part of our inquiries.” While on first glance Maza’s review essay appears to propose the opposite, inasmuch as it suggests that we might better comprehend the history of race, nation, culture, class, and other big questions through a focus on children, the essay remains haunted by Fass’s sense that “everyone has a childhood, and childhood is the protean state where identities are formed and the destinies of nations and peoples defined.” 4 Both essays implicitly naturalize their object of inquiry. What if it is precisely this faith in the epistemic universality—even the biological basis—of childhood that is keeping the field from becoming relevant for the wider world?

And what if this paradoxical understanding of childhood as “naturally and developmentally given” even among the most astute historians of childhood is what muddies the quest for children’s agency? 5 In discussing methods for seeking out children’s agency in archives largely created by adults, historians of children and childhood have echoed questions that have been asked (and variously answered) with regards to other marginalized groups. While citing the wide-ranging scholarship on the question of agency, the author falls back on the biological reality of childhood to claim that agency “is a more problematic concept for the young than for any other category of human actors because . . . children are incommensurable with other marginalized and voiceless groups.” 6 Doubling down on childhood’s nature , the author explains this incommensurability thus: “Unlike any other category of human identity, childhood is a vanishing act.” The understanding of childhood as a “vanishing act”—as a shared past annihilated by the inevitability of adulthood—relies on an understanding of time as homogeneous, linear, and progressive, which postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists have debunked in recent decades. 7 But instead of understanding childhood as a condition shared by humanity, and therefore incommensurable with the forms of difference theorized by scholars of colonialism, race, and gender, we could use their insights to ask critical questions about our archival methods and analytical categories.

After all, “Can the child speak/act?” is not simply a question about the limitations of the “official” archive with regards to subaltern speech, but primarily one about self-reflexivity in scholarly practice. 8 Beyond the fetishistic hunt for children’s own scribbles to get to their authentic voice—a quest that the author is dismissive of—historians could draw on insights on the colonial archive to read mediated records against the grain to recuperate the faintest of whispers. Or we could go further to take up the call to abandon additive and recuperative models of history writing that lead us toward “excavating [the archive] in order to posit a history of presence,” and instead embrace “a theory of reading that moves away from the notion that discovering an object will somehow lead to a formulation of subjectivity.” 9 In other words, we might use postcolonial, feminist, and queer approaches to ask whether the (im)possibility of the injunction to “listen to the child” (or to retrieve their agency) lies in the limits to the critical imagination posed by childhood as a normative category. 10 It is, after all, a normative understanding of childhood that informs the author’s suggestion that the teenagers in Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre” or the New York newsies striking against a newspaper price hike were not truly children. The normative idea of childhood makes the “child agent” a contradiction in terms.

The author goes on to clarify that “truly autonomous young rebels and activists do exist, of course, but usually when their age or situation renders the ‘child’ label questionable” (my emphasis). Does the child vanish with the onset of agency? And does everybody acquire agency at a precise, uniformly measurable moment in time? At a universally accepted chronological age? What are the grounds for the historian in the present to decide which historical actors wore the “child” label more comfortably and at what ages in the past? An understanding of childhood as a biological category slides by degrees into a juridical understanding of childhood rooted in a liberal legal discourse that posits an absolute relationship between chronological age and agency. Historians of childhood have long suggested that the chronological ages that indicate the borders of (juridical) childhood have shifted over time; recent scholarship also contends that chronological age itself was not a stable quantity until as recently as the nineteenth century, even in the United States. 11 Scholars working outside of Euro-American contexts have further contended that the very relationship between chronological age and agency is rooted in a liberal legal discourse in which “children become agents when they attain adulthood, [whereas] in tenets of Islam agency is not defined by age.” 12 These alternative understandings of legal personhood allow for a more capacious understanding of agency, not just “as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.” 13 Has the notion of “agency” circumscribed by modern Western law overdetermined our comprehension of the child as an object of historical inquiry? 14

The obscured distinction between chronological age and childhood rises to the surface in the call to historians to use childhood —not age—as a category of analysis. Dismissing efforts that are merely additive inasmuch as they allow us to see what children did at a certain time in history but tell us little about how they made a difference to this history, the author evokes Joan Wallach Scott in a call to go beyond “descriptive approaches that do not address dominant disciplinary concepts, or at least that do not address these concepts in terms that can shake their power and transform them.” 15 But surely such a radical project would fracture the very subject of our inquiry—“the child.” The category of analysis analogous to Scott’s “gender” would be “age” (not “the child”), and could well shake and transform the understanding of agency, consent, and minority for all historians.

While the author suggests we sidestep the issue of agency by writing histories through children, I would contend that in order to undertake such a project, we need to step into the world and outside of the limited Euro-American context that gave rise to the “history of children and childhood,” and which continues to constrain the field. 16 Stepping into the world entails a greater openness to theory, to critique, and to difference. It requires a radical abandonment of a belief in children’s nature, which, as the wisdom of postcolonial, queer, and feminist theory has shown, is grounded in Western epistemologies, especially in the discourses of biology and evolution, and which has been used to rationalize colonial, racial, and heteronormative ideologies in the modern world. In looking for children outside of the contexts that gave rise to them, we might encounter creatures that act in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways; these creatures might introduce us to the strangeness of our present categories. 17

Even as the review essay appears to reject an understanding of childhood as the common ground to heal the rifts caused by the analysis of race, class, and gender, in reaffirming a faith in childhood’s nature , the essay itself ultimately fails “to completely slough off the Eurocentric modernization template that drove the work of pioneers.” The pop-cultural references evoked in the essay’s title—“The Kids Are Alright / Aren’t All Right”—not only hint at the field’s genesis in a particular location, but also replicate the understanding of time as linear and progressive that is naturalized by the understanding of children as a symbol of a shared (if inevitably vanishing) past, and the repository of a desirable (if ultimately unrealized) future. It nods toward postcolonial and queer history, but stops short of noting their assaults on the nature of childhood and, relatedly, the straightness of time. This essay’s copious references both reflect the dominant status of Europe and the Americas within the field and shore up a provincial understanding of childhood. Even as the essay comments on the difficulties of producing global histories of childhood, it makes little effort to comprehend how or why a global lens might fracture the very notion of childhood as humanity’s “shared past.”

Instead of comprehending the history of childhood as a means to heal the rifts revealed by a focus on race or class, or even writing histories (say, of race) through children, we could allow (postcolonial, queer, critical race) theory to radically contaminate the field in order to go further still; we could acknowledge that the use of childhood as a category of analysis must begin with an understanding of the history of colonialism and race. 18 It is our reluctance to understand the child as a creature of Enlightenment (and race) science, of liberal jurisprudence, and of normative sexuality that explains why childhood, unlike race, class, or gender, is yet to catch fire as an analytical category. The author’s prescription is that we can rejuvenate our discipline “not by bounding across oceans” but by understanding how childhood has offered “a plethora of strategies and justifications for the building of national, social, racial, and cultural hierarchies.” Indeed. But it is not the distraction of global history that ails the field, but a lingering blindness to it. What makes children worthy of historical scrutiny is not the fact that we all inhabited something called childhood in the past, but that some were and are considered incapable of outgrowing childhood. 19 What makes children a powerful tool of critique and analysis is that there is also a politics to refusing to leave it behind. 20 It is only in acknowledging and foregrounding difference and power, instead of sameness and healing, and in leaving behind the Euro-American contexts that gave rise to it, that the history of childhood will be ready for the world.

Ishita Pande is Associate Professor of History and Chair of Graduate Studies at Queen’s University, Ontario. She is the author of Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Routledge, 2010) and Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1890–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She has published on the entwined histories of childhood, sexuality, race, and age, in a number of venues including the American Historical Review , Gender and History , Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth , Law and History Review , and South Asian History and Culture , and contributed to several edited volumes on the global histories of sexuality, marriage, and childhood. She is currently at work on a monograph on the history of the sexual sciences in India in the twentieth century, and she continues to write about childhood and “age” across discrete legal regimes.

“The Kids Aren’t All Right,” track 5 on the Offspring, Americana , Columbia Records, 1998. The title of the song is supposed to be a play on “The Kids Are Alright” (1965) by the British band the Who. In urging a “turn” to childhood for historians at large, the title also echoes James W. Cook, “The Kids Are All Right: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 746–771, with the “history of childhood” featuring as the “kid” who’s beat.

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life , trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962). The politics of citation is a separate, and important, point and one that could fruitfully be considered by historians of childhood.

Paula Fass, “The World Is at Our Door: Why Historians of Children and Childhood Should Open Up,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 11–31, here 13. To be fair, the essay simultaneously calls for historians to learn from interdisciplinary childhood studies; inquires into what childhoods around the world can teach historians of Western Europe and America; and concludes that such efforts might help “stanch our own undeserved and unthinking hubris” when it comes to “our” horror at the state of children around the world.

Fass, “The World Is at Our Door,” 13.

The phrase is drawn from Liisa Malkki, “Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace,” in Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds., In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Durham, N.C., 2010), 58–85, here 60.

For a comprehensive account of critiques of agency that is also cited by the author, see Lynn M. Thomas, “Historicising Agency,” Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016): 324–339. For “agency“ and the history of childhood, see also Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, “Against Agency,” Society for the History of Children and Youth, October 28, 2018, http://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/against-agency/.

For a well-known summary and reiteration of the point, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000).

I am referring here to Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 271–313. In general, the scholarship produced under the rubric of subaltern studies, generated by scholars of colonialism in South Asia, provides a long line of such interrogation of archival reading practices and the politics of the retrieval of subaltern speech, which reflects (and preempts) many of the questions now raised about children’s voices.

Anjali Arondekar, “Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1/2 (2005): 10–27, here 21–22.

For normative limitations to “listening” to the child, see Michel Foucault, “Sexual Morality and the Law,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings (New York, 1988), 271–285. For a longer bibliography on “the child” and historical methods in the South Asian context, see Ishita Pande, “Listen to the Child: Law, Sex, and the Child Wife in Indian Historiography,” History Compass 11, no. 9 (2013): 687–701.

Including several works cited in the review essay, such as Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005). For chronological age as a category of analysis, the arbitrary borders of childhood, and the intersection of age with other categories of identity, see Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, eds., Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York, 2015); see also the articles included in the AHR Roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020).

Purnima Mankekar, “‘To Whom Does Ameena Belong?’ Towards a Feminist Analysis of Childhood and Nationhood in Contemporary India,” Feminist Review , no. 56 (1997): 26–60, here 54. For further thoughts on consent (and agency) without chronological age, see Ishita Pande, “Power, Knowledge, and the Epistemic Contract on Age: The Case of Colonial India,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020): 407–417.

Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–236, here 203. For the manifestation of “childhood agency” not in the resistance but in a seeming embrace of hierarchical power relations, see Nicholas L. Syrett, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2016).

For an analogous argument regarding the “family” as a analytical category that is “implicitly borrowed from colonial Western law in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” see Indrani Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J., 2004), 9.

Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075, here 1055.

The author suggests the history of childhood is neglected because of the predominance of female scholars in the field; “of the 169 program members of the conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth held at Rutgers University in June 2017, around 32—names make it sometimes hard to tell—were male, or slightly less than 20 percent.” It is also true that two-thirds of the eighteen-member editorial board of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth are women, as is the editor. But what if we inquire into how many of the eighteen editorial members (or even how many of the members of the Society for the History of Children and Youth [SHCY]) study the “world” outside of Europe and the Americas? The SHCY itself carried out a survey of its membership to inquire into the latter question; 56 percent of the 229 self-identified historians of childhood who completed the survey are based in Canada and the United States. Patrick J. Ryan, “SHCY Survey Report—March 2018,” Society for the History of Children and Youth, October 18, 2018, https://www.shcy.org/features/commentaries/2017-shcy-survey-report/ .

I am borrowing from the proposition that the effect of “discovering” the history of sexuality “is to call into question the very naturalness of what we currently take to be essential to our individual natures.” David M. Halperin, “Is There a History of Sexuality?,” History and Theory 28, no. 3 (1989): 257–274, here, 273.

This means understanding the degrees of difference between acknowledging, for instance, that “childhood innocence” is in itself a (post-Enlightenment) historical construct, that it is not the equal property of all children in modern times, and that it is a foundational part of a history of white supremacy. While Robin Bernstein is a recurring reference to talk about agency, childhood, and race in the review essay, I think a fundamental point about the construction of childhood innocence is missed here. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York, 2011).

I am thinking of the large body of scholarship on the use of the childhood metaphor to describe the colonized, and to rationalize empire in the liberal idiom, as discussed, for instance, in Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999).

I have in mind queer critiques both of childhood as a sign of futurity and of the metaphor of growing “up,” as discussed, among others, in Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C., 2004); Carolyn Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, nos. 2–3 (2007): 177–195; and Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C., 2009).

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Childhood Evolution and History Essay (Critical Writing)

True, conventional historians and official biographers have been writing about children over the years. Yet, the content of most of their work is practically fictional, devoid of any useful information and only contains distorted facts of childhood in the periods that they recount.

In Evolution of Childhood, Lloyd DeMause accuses most social historians, whose core work is to expose reality of social conditions in the past, of being apologists for brutal child abuse. He observes correctly and vindicates the fact that what constitutes infanticide, abandonment, swaddling and all other forms child abuse is a matter of objective fact.

Evolution of Childhood reviews the subject from a psycho-historical perspective by studying the psychological motivations surrounding the history of childhood. It introduces psychological principles and integrates insights of psychotherapy to understand the emotional origin of adult-child social behavior in the past. By so doing, DeMause attempts to provide an answer to the principal questions of comparative childhood history, which have been ignored for so long by conventional historians.

In his historical analysis of childhood, DeMause draws attention on those moments which often affect the psyche of the next generation. He explains the three possible adult reactions to a child’s needs: projective, reversal and empathic reactions, which ultimately go a long way to determine the way parents treat their children. The psycho-historian explains how historical change in human psyche has resulted in today’s more empathic parental care.

He brings out the concept of psycho-class or psychogenic modes, which provides an insightful periodic explanation of the influence of the society’s development on parent-child relation and style of childrearing.

DeMause describes six major psychogenic child-rearing modes in the most advanced countries. The psychogenic modes range from the time of antiquity to the mid twentieth century, and explain how parents began to develop the increasing capacity to empathize with their children.

Infanticide mode occurred between antiquity to the forth century A.D. Lloyd provides objective, factual information which shows that childrearing during this period was characterized by high infanticide rates, incest, rape, body mutilations, torture and rituals in which children were offered as sacrificial lambs.

This period was closely followed by the Abandoning mode (forth to thirteenth century A.D) which was characterized by “swaddling, fosterage, apprenticeship”, and out side wet nursing (Dunlop 45). Ambivalent mode which occurred from the end of the Abandoning mode to seventeenth century saw the introduction of the very first child protection laws. Childrearing during this period, however, was still marked by shorter swaddling, enemas and child beating.

During the succeeding Intrusive mode in the eighteenth century, both parents were actively involved in childrearing. Most parents wanted the best for their children and gave them more attention. Yet, a handful of parents during this period were still keen on controlling the children’s behavior and minds. Though there were no more terror threats against the child, repression of a child’s sexuality and early toilet training was common place.

Parents during Socializing mode, in the twentieth century, enjoyed playing there role in child care. Though harsh physical discipline had stopped by this time, parents “still spanked there children and insisted on instilling parental goals” through psychological manipulation (Miller 38).

Childrearing in Helping Mode of modern day is characterized by more unconditional love and less psychological manipulation. In fact, children raised during this psychogenic mode are unarguably open-minded, physically fit, responsible and more sympathetic to others in the society. Compared to children in any other earlier generation, evidence shows that today’s child is gentler, strong-willed, never or less depressed and generally well bred.

Works Cited

Dunlop, Jocelyn. English Apprenticeship and Child Labor , London: Allan Lane, 1912. Print.

Miller, Daniel . The changing American Parent: A study in Detroit Area , New York: Little Publishers, 1958. Print.

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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

How has childhood changed since the 19th century?

How has childhood in the UK changed since the 19th Century, and have these changes been positive?

Table of Contents

Last Updated on October 4, 2023 by Karl Thompson

There have been several changes to the lives of children since the early 19 th century, and we can break these down as follows:

• Work – Policies which regulated and restricted child labour, leading to the eventual exclusion of children from paid work.
• Education – The introduction of compulsory education and the increase in both funding of education and the raising of the school leaving age.
• The Medicalisation of childbirth and early childcare – Rather than high infant mortality rates, the NHS now provides comprehensive maternity and early childcare to mothers and children.
• Legislation has emerged to exclude children from a whole range of potentially harmful and dangerous acts.
• Parents spend more money on children than ever – a range of specialist products and services have emerged and increased which are specifically aimed at children and child development.
• Parents now spend more time with their children , actively engaged with ‘parenting’.
• Child Welfare – The introduction of child protection and welfare legislation, and its expansion into every aspect of child services through recent Safeguarding policies.
• The recent growth of the idea of ‘rights of the child’ has given children more of a voice in society.

Most people see these changes as representing a ‘March of Progress’. They see such changes as gradually improving the lives of children by giving them more protection from the stresses of adult life. It seems that we have moved towards a ‘child centred society’.

However, there are sociologists who point to the downsides of some changes, especially in the last 50 years.

This post mainly adopts a March of Progress perspective, with the critical perspectives dealt with in my other posts on ‘Toxic Childhood’ and ‘Paranoid Parenting’. I wrote this post primarily for students studying the Families and Households option for A-level Sociology.

Childhood in Victorian Times

During the early 19 th Century, many working-class children worked in factories, mines, and mills. They often worked long-hours and in unsafe conditions, which had negative consequences for their health, and could sometimes even result in children suffering injuries or dying at work.

At home, children were also often required to take on adult-work, doing domestic chores and caring for sick relatives.

Social attitudes towards children started to change in the middle of the 19 th century, and childhood gradually came to be seen more as a distinct phase of life, separate from adulthood, with children needing protecting  from the hardships of adult life, especially work and provided with more guidance and nurturing through education.

Along with changing attitudes, social policies and specialist institutions emerged which gradually changed the status of children.

The changes below happened over a long period of time. The changes discussed start from the 1830s, with the first factory acts restricting child labour, right up to the present day, with the emergence of the ‘rights of the child’, spearheaded by the United Nations.

A March of Progress?

One perspective on changes to childhood is that children’s lives have generally got better over time, known as the ‘march of progress’ view of childhood.

This is something of a ‘common sense’ interpretation and students should be critical of it!

There were several ‘factories acts’ throughout the 19 th century, which gradually improved the rights of (typically male) workers by limiting working hours, and many of these acts had clauses which banned factories from employing people under certain ages.

The 1833 Factories Act was the first act to restrict child labour – it made it illegal for textile factories to employ children under the age of nine and required factories to provide any children aged 9-13 with at least 12 hours of education a week.

The 1867 Factories Act extended this idea to all factories – this act made it illegal for any factors to employ children under the age of 8 and provide children aged 8-13 with at least 10 hours of education a week.

The 1878 Factories Act placed a total ban on the employment of children under the age of 10, fitting in nicely with the introduction of education policies.

Today, children can only work full-time from the age of 16, and then they must do training with that employment. Full adult working rights only apply from the age of 18.

Government policy in 2023 discourages younger people from taking on full time work because younger people receive lower wages.  

The minimum wage by age in the UK IN 2023:

• £5.28 for under 18s.
• £7.49 for 18-21 year olds.
• £10.18 for 21-22 year olds. 
• £10.42 for those aged 23 and over. 

This means that those under 18 can’t realistically expect to earn enough to survive, and so are effectively not able to be independent. Those aged up to 21 are in a similar position. 

These lower wages encourage young people to stay in education for longer, until at least 21.

Children aged 13-15 can work, but there are restrictions on the number of hours and the types of ‘industry’ they can work in. Babysitting is one of the most common jobs for this age group.

The 1870 Education Act introduced Education for all children aged 5-12, although this was voluntary at the time.

In 1880 it became compulsory for all children to attend school aged 5-12, with the responsibility for attendance falling on the Local Education Authorities.

The next century saw the gradual increasing of the school leaving age and increase in funding for education:

• 1918 – The school leaving age raised to 14
• 1944 – school leaving age raised to 15 (also the year of the Tripartite system and massive increase in funding to build new secondary modern schools)
• 1973 – The school leaving age increased to 16.
• 2013 – Children required to remain in education or work with training until 18.

Today the UK government spends almost £100 billion a year on education and employs around 500 000 people in education.

Children are expected to attend school for 13 years, with their attendance and progress monitored intensely during that time.

The scope of education has also increased. The curriculum has broadened to include a wide range of academic and vocational subjects. There is also more of a focus on personal well-being and development.

The Medicalisation of childbirth and early childcare

Rather than high infant and child mortality rates as was the case in the Victorian era, the NHS now provides comprehensive maternity and early childcare to mothers and children.

In the United Kingdom today it is standard for pregnant women to have a dozen ante-natal appointments for health checks and ultrasounds with National Health Services. 

After birth, the government expects parents to subject their newborn children to extensive health checks to measure their development. 

There are several of these in the first weeks after birth and then:

• A monthly health review up to 6 months.
• Every two months up to 12 months.
• Every three months from there on. 

During early reviews experts discuss things such as vaccinations and breastfeeding with parents and administer full health checks.

Later reviews are more light touch and may just involve general health checks, height and weight monitoring. 

Legislation protecting children

The government introduced several policies over the last century which protect children from engaging in potentially harmful activities:

• Children under the age of 14 cannot work, but at age 14 they can do ‘light work’.
• Children can apply for the armed forces at 15 years and 9 months, but they can’t serve until they are 16.
• 16 years of age is really where children start to get more rights – you can serve. with the armed forces, drive a moped, get a job (with training) and change your name at 16.
• At age of 18, you have reached ‘the age of entitlement’ – you are an adult.

For more details you might like to visit the ‘ at what age can I’ ? timeline.

More money spent on children

This could well be the most significant change in social attitudes to childhood, specifically in relation to the family.

A range of specialist products and services have emerged which are specifically aimed at children and child development.

Children use to be perceived as people who needed to bring money into the family home. Today adults are happy to spend more money on children.

According to one recent survey, the average family spends half their salary on their children .

Expenditure by parents on their first newborn child (on things such as push chairs) increased by almost 20% between 2013 and 2019.

According to CPAG   it cost £70 000 for a two parent family to raise a child to 18 in 2022; and it cost £110 000 for a one parent family. This is not including housing or child care costs.

Parents spend more time with their children

Research from 2014 found that fathers spent seven times longer with their children compared to 40 years earlier in 1974.

Statistics from Our World in Data shows an increasing trend too. 

Child Welfare

The introduction of child protection and welfare legislation, and its expansion into every aspect of child-services through Safeguarding policies.

The Stats below Public Spending on Children 2000-2020 show how a lot of the recent increase comes from more ‘community spending’ – in light blue.

The ‘rights of the child’

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child outlines several rights children have including the right

• to be heard.
• to an identity
• not to be exploited
• to an education.

There are several more, as outlined in this child friendly version of the document…

A Child Centred Society

Changes such as those outlined above suggest our society has become more child centred over the last century or so. Children today occupy a more central role than ever. The government and parents spend more money on children than ever and children are the ‘primary concern’ of many public services and often the sole thing that gives meaning to the lives of many parents.

According to Cunningham (2006) the child centred society has three main features (which is another way of summarising what’s above)

• Childhood is regarded as the opposite of adulthood – children in particular are viewed as being in need of protection from the adult world.
• Child and adult worlds are separated – they have different social spaces – playground and school for children, work and pubs for adults.
• Childhood is increasingly associated with rights.

If we look at total public expenditure on children, there certainly seems to be evidence that we live in a child centred society! (Source below) .

Criticisms of the March of Progress View of childhood

The common sense view is to see the above changes as ‘progressive’. Most people argue that now children are more protected that their lives are better, but is this actually the case?

The ‘March of Progress’ view argues that yes, children’s lives have improved and they are now much better off than in the Victorian Era and the Middle Ages. They point to all the evidence on the previous page as just self-evidently indicating an improvement to children’s’ lives.

Conflict theorists, however, argue against the view that children’s lives have gradually been getting better – they say that in some ways children’s lives are worse than they used to be. There are three main criticisms made of the march of progress view

1. Recent technological changes have resulted in significant harms to children – what Sociologist Sue Palmer refers to as Toxic Childhood .

2. Some sociologists argue that parents are too controlling of their children. Sociologists such as Frank Furedi argue that parents overprotect their children: we live in the age of ‘Paranoid Parenting’.

3. There are significant inequalities between children, so if there has been progress for some, there certainly has not been equal progress.

A further criticisms lies in the idea that childhood may now be disappearing – for more details check out this post: The Disappearance of Childhood .

Signposting

Childhood makes up part of the families and households option in the first year of A-level Sociology.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

The National Archives

Child Labour: The British Library

UK Child and Labour Laws: a History

Child Employment

Public Spending on Children 2000-2020

National Minimum Wage Rates UK

Office for Budget Responsibility : Welfare Spending

NHS: Your baby’s health and developmental reviews

Children’s Commissioner: Spending on Children in England and Wales .

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The History of Childhood in Modern Britain

All societies establish norms that regulate the environment, interactions and care of those who are most vulnerable, especially children. The boundaries used to categorise acts and impacts as harmful or unacceptable, however, are historically and culturally specific.  As an historian of modern Britain, my research explores these boundaries. I am interested in children’s experiences and subjectivity, in family relationships, and in the impact of changing welfare policies on social inequalities.

It is possible to conceptualise the history of child welfare since the 1880s through a linear narrative that explains how Britain came to be increasingly attentive to the unique vulnerability and malleability of the young. Unsurprisingly in the context of the modern British state, each of the pioneering interventions was the result of makeshift collaborations between the national government, local authorities, voluntary associations, mutual organisations, and professional expertise. We know quite a lot about the politics that made this public investment in future citizens’ lives possible over the last 140 years. Changes included the creation of legislation and organisations to protect children from abuse and neglect from the 1880s; state support for infant welfare services, free school meals and medical inspections from the 1900s; and the payment of family allowances (from 1975 child benefit) and free healthcare in the aftermath of the Second World War. Many of these changes were the result of fleetingly publicised ‘scandals’. Moments of public attentiveness made grumbling concerns briefly into national priorities, for instance through W.T. Stead’s sensational journalism in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. At other times, child welfare became an unintended priority during larger national crises. For instance, childhood psychological distress and urban poverty were made prominent by evacuation during the Second World War, but the underlying problems were novel neither as social problems nor as areas of expertise. As modern childhood was increasingly sharply and universally defined by age-specific education, welfare and laws, it is possible to write a simple history of child welfare that focuses attention on adult-led, public and short-term responses to newly perceived risks.

‘“Hurrah” for “Northern Weekly Gazette”’, Northern Weekly Gazette, 10 November 1900, p.15

Historians know far less, however, about the people that lived with and grew through these initiatives. My research seeks to understand children’s experiences and their interpretations of their own lives, when they were still young. I currently use two complementary bodies of sources material. Between the 1870s and the 1930s, many provincial newspapers included children’s columns, which attracted up to 300,000 child members. Some of these columns were participatory and adult editors included up to six pages of content authored principally by named working-class children. As the first generation to benefit from compulsory elementary schooling, these young people were more literate than their parents. They were keen to use the tool of writing, which was for them excitingly modern, to become powerful producers, not merely consumers, of print. Their letters, drawings, poems and stories offer unique insights into the experiences, opinions and identities that children chose to make public. The second body of source material offers a window into the lives of the youngest and least articulate children, who were more seldom published authors, especially by the mid-twentieth-century. As national and civic interest in child welfare expanded, archived case files allow us to examine how welfare provision was used and how these uses – sometimes unintentionally – contributed to changing family dynamics and cumulative disadvantage. We need to examine both public and private investments in the early years of people’s lives to understand patterns of inequality in modern Britain.

The Faculty’s cluster of researchers interested in the history of modern childhood has allowed us to create a new Special Subject on late-Victorian childhood and citizenship. Designed and taught with Christina de Bellaigue and Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Becoming a Citizen 1860-1902’ explores this period of franchise reform and increasing public investment in social welfare. Third-year historians interrogate what children did with the growing concern that adults expressed for the education, socialisation and protection of the next generation of citizens. A high proportion of the set texts are personal sources, such as children’s diaries, letters and manuscript newspapers, or their later autobiographies. These are complemented by public texts that reveal how (and how successfully) adults sought to shape children’s lives, including through parliamentary debates, medical literature, educational treatise, periodicals, and children’s games, including sources that allow us to use the Bodleian Library’s rich special collections. Students examine how fundamental differences – of class, gender, religion, locality and ethnicity – were moulded into ideas of modern citizenship. In their extended essay, students have the opportunity to assess whether historians should conceptualise the young as active agents in social, cultural and political change, rather than merely the passive subjects of these processes.

One of the privileges of working in Oxford over the last three years has been the chance to also think about these themes with colleagues from other disciplines. Since 2015, I have been developing an interdisciplinary collaborative research project with Lucy Bowes, associate professor in experimental psychology, that applies historians’ understanding of the contextually- and temporally-specific meanings of adversity to attempts to measure and explain the life-long impact of these experiences. Qualitative understandings of mid-twentieth-century experiences (such as poverty, domestic violence, neglect, abuse or family instability) can be applied to the quantitative longitudinal datasets to refine current interpretations by epidemiologists and psychologists.

It is not surprising that a lack of resources or care in childhood had a significant impact on later life, but, importantly, our research also seeks to understand what has worked to support people following early life adversities.  One of the most thought-provoking parts of my work this year has been the chance to work on our on-going Knowledge Exchange project, Changing Lives. Funded by the University of Oxford’s ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, as well as Magdalen College and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), we organised a workshop in July to bring together experts from national charities such as the NSPCC and The Children’s Society, from children’s social care and community health services, and from across the humanities, social sciences and medical sciences. The event began a series of conversations from which we hope future collaborations will develop to think about how we can better work across sectors to bring together strong evidence for what enables children growing up in adversity to thrive in modern Britain. These dialogues are always difficult, but I hope they are worth having if it can help to ensure that historians asks questions and communicate findings in ways that are most likely to contribute to improved care for children.

Since its foundation in 2003 by Laurence Brockliss and George Rousseau, the Oxford Centre for the History of Childhood has supported and promoted research into the history of childhood and children. The Centre’s impact has stretched far beyond Oxford, but it does make Oxford a particularly rewarding place to teach about and research children’s lives. 

-Siân Pooley 

Best Childhood Memories Essay Ideas: 94 Narrative Topics [2024]

Many people believe that childhood is the happiest period in a person’s life. It’s not hard to see why. Kids have nothing to care or worry about, have almost no duties or problems, and can hang out with their friends all day long.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

An essay about childhood gives an opportunity to plunge into your memories. All you need to do is recollect those happy days and write a brilliant essay! In this article by Custom-Writing.org , you’ll find great tips and topic ideas to kickstart the process.

• 🔝 Top 10 Topics
• 💡 Coming Up with Ideas
• 🧸 Childhood Memories Essay Topics
• ✍️ Writing Examples & Guide
• 🔍 References

🔝 Top 10 Childhood Topics to Write About

• Your favorite holiday memory.
• Your brightest memories of winter.
• Your earliest school memory.
• Your first visit to a farm.
• What was your favorite toy?
• Do you remember your granny’s kitchen?
• Your childhood memories of your parents.
• Your best childhood friend.
• Things that you initially disliked at school.
• Experiments with physics in childhood.

💡 Coming Up with Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Perhaps you got lost in your memories and cannot choose the best one to describe in your essay. Or maybe you have a bad memory and cannot recollect something specific to write about. If that’s the case, here are some recommendations for you.

Childhood Memories List: How to Write

Don’t know where to start? Try creating a list of your memories to decide which ones you need for your paper.

There are our top tips on making a childhood memories list:

• Write down everything that comes to your mind. What are some significant memories from your childhood? Every little experience starting with your earliest memory matters. Of course, you don’t need all of this information for your essay. Still, it will help your brain to start working in the right direction.
• Try to focus on specific things such as holidays, trips, or food. Everybody’s favorite childhood memories are often connected with them. Remarkable events also might include school, neighborhood, hometown, presents you received, and your achievements. Nostalgia is your best friend in this case.
• Divide your memories into categories. Good childhood experiences such as receiving a dream present or adopting a pet belong to one category. Life-changing events, key achievements, and unfortunate accidents can go into other categories.
• Try not to avoid bad childhood memories. It’s not the most pleasant thing in this task. But sometimes, writing about bad situations or challenges is a good strategic decision for your paper. It can also help your personal growth.

How to Remember Childhood Memories

What is your earliest memory? A frightening fall down the stairs? Or perhaps blowing candles on your second birthday? Whatever the content, it is probably short and vague.

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When we grow older, our recollections of early childhood become fragmentary . In fact, a profound memory loss occurs, which psychologists call infantile amnesia (you can learn more about it from the article “ New perspectives on childhood memory ”). Memories formed during early childhood are more fragile than those formed later in life.

That’s why it’s a great idea to write down our childhood recollections. This way, they’ll stay with us even after they lose their rich vividness and start to fade altogether.

Naturally, you can’t keep everything in your head. Some childhood memories will stay with you forever, while others vanish during your teenage years. Remembering something you have forgotten is not an easy task.

Here’s a way out: use this checklist to recall your childhood experiences:

Feeling completely out of ideas? Or maybe you can’t think of a specific topic? Keep reading to learn how to generate new ideas and write a great childhood memories essay.

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🧸 Childhood Memory Essays Topics List

Favorite childhood memory ideas.

• Meeting Santa at a mall
• A gift you’ve created yourself
• First time you stayed up all night
• Your first visit to an amusement park
• Your favorite children’s book or comic
• Your best childhood camping memory
• The craziest fact you’ve learned as a child
• Memory about winning a school competition
• What was the most fun school assignment?
• Your favorite food at the elementary school cafeteria

Early Childhood Memories Essay Topics

Kindergarten is often the place where kids start socializing for the first time. Think about your experiences with friends and teachers, as well as with your family. These topic ideas will help you get on the right track:

• The first day in kindergarten . Kindergarten is a new world for a child. It has an unfamiliar environment, new people, and rules. This essay can aim at discussing feelings and expectations that accompany a child on their first day.
• Describe the first pet you had in early childhood. Almost all families have a pet that they love. Often pets are given to children as presents. This essay can relate the best moments spent with a pet when you were little.
• A relative who was closest to you in early childhood. Every child has a family member with whom they enjoy spending time. It could easily be a parent, a grandparent, a sibling , or perhaps an uncle. Write about exciting moments related to your beloved relatives.
• Your first childhood hobby . Most people had hobbies when they were kids. This initial interest sometimes determines one’s future occupation. Here, you can describe the activities you used to do as a little child. Focus on the events associated with your first hobby .
• Festive events in kindergarten . During the whole year, people celebrate many holidays. Naturally, kindergartens hold festive events to amuse children. This essay can portray the unforgettable celebrations in kindergarten .
• Describe family gatherings from your childhood.
• A typical day in your kindergarten.
• What’s the first birthday celebration you remember?
• Activities or games in kindergarten .
• Your first Halloween costume.
• Things that you didn’t like in kindergarten.
• Write about your relationship with nature in early childhood.
• Describe a performance you took part in when you were little.
• What was the best teacher in your kindergarten like?
• Discuss the book or story you loved the most in early childhood.

Elementary School Memories Essay Topics

Would you like to look back at your elementary school days? This section is just what you need. Check out these ideas and get inspired:

• How you met your first teacher. Teachers lead children through a complicated yet exciting path. That’s why we all remember our teachers, especially the first day of meeting them. This essay can recount the brightest moments associated with this event. Additionally, you might describe the teacher’s appearance and personality .
• The most challenging lesson in elementary school . You can probably recall numerous lessons from your school years. This essay can aim at describing positive and negatives aspects of studies, as well as your favorite classes.
• Memories about extracurricular activities in school. It could be sports, artistic pursuits, or activities related to specific subjects. Describe your personal preferences and say who inspired you to start doing them.
• Celebration events at school. Celebrations create the brightest and most joyful memories. In this essay, you can share personal experiences about such events, be it school performances, shows, or games.
• Who was your best school teacher ? Describe the personalities of your favorite teachers and explain why you liked them.
• Write about a person who helped with school lessons .
• What did your first school building look like?
• Describe what you daydreamed about in school.
• Wonderful hikes or trips organized by the school.
• What were your plans for the future growing up?
• Write about going to a museum with your class.
• Memories of participation in school sports activities.
• Recall your participation in writing for a school newspaper .
• Did you take part in any important school activities or events?

Happy Childhood Memories Essay Topics

When writing about your childhood, you’d probably prefer recalling happy events rather than sad ones. But what if you don’t know which pleasant memory to choose? This list will help you make up your mind!

• The best birthday party ever. Recall the most exciting details associated with it. For example, describe some beautiful presents and a celebratory atmosphere.
• The day you’ve met your first love . Write about the impressions, feelings, and the most treasured memories associated with that day.
• Recall the best day spent with your childhood friend. Recount the activities and events that made you happy.
• The most significant achievement in childhood. Recall your achievements connected with the studies, sports, or arts. You can start by describing the task you’ve had, explain its importance, and thank the people who helped you.
• The day you made somebody happy . This essay can describe the instances where you helped others. What were your motivations, and why did it make you happy?
• Describe the best school gathering you can remember. Schools often organize parties where students can have fun. This essay can recount the circumstances and special moments related to such a party.
• Recall a fictional character you liked the most in childhood.
• Write about the best present you gave to someone when you were little.
• Describe the best surprise made by friends or relatives in childhood.
• The most wonderful journey or trip in childhood.
• A sad event that changed things for the better.
• What were the happiest summer holidays in your childhood like?
• Chronicle the day when your childhood dream came true.
• Write about your childhood fear and how you overcame it.
• Tell about getting a good grade for an important assignment.
• Describe the first home where your family lived.

Funny Childhood Memories Essay Ideas

Writing about a funny event is perhaps the best option you can choose. You’ll enjoy describing it, and your readers will appreciate you for making them laugh! Here are some prompts to kickstart the creative process.

• Recollect your childhood actions that make your relatives laugh. Children often behave in interesting, comical, and amusing ways. This essay can detail some fun moments that your parents remember.
• Amusing and funny moments in your favorite cartoons . You probably remember many great cartoons from your childhood. What made them funny? Do you still find them entertaining?
• The funniest pranks you did at school. If you were a mischievous child, this topic is for you. Recall various funny, elaborate, or even failed pranks you did at school.
• Describe the first time you rode a bicycle . Learning to ride a bike is a staple of many childhoods. It’s challenging, but once you master it, you will never forget how to ride it!
• What tricks used to help you pass difficult exams ? Usually, students make cribs or copy someone else’s answers. You can describe more creative ways of passing exams.
• Poking fun at younger siblings . If you have brothers and sisters, you probably tease each other. How do you feel about such activities? Do you both have a good laugh, or did somebody get upset?
• Playing superheroes in childhood. Many children have favorite superheroes such as Batman , Spiderman, Ironman, and others. What were your personal favorites? Did you try to imagine you have superpowers?
• Describe the most ridiculous haircut you’ve had when you were little.
• Funny moments with your school teachers.
• Did you have an imaginary friend? What were they like?
• Trying to cook in childhood.
• What tricks did you use to hide bad marks from your parents?
• Attempts to renovate your childhood room.

Childhood Christmas Memories Topics

Christmas is the favorite holiday of many children. Were you one of them? Choose your essay title from this list on Christmas memories:

Get an originally-written paper according to your instructions!

• What is the best Christmas present from your childhood? Describe the present, the wrapping, and your emotions related to it. Why did you want it so much? You can also try to remember where this present is now.
• Describe a family Christmas trip that you enjoyed the most as a child. Answer the following questions. What were the new places you have seen? What were the new people you met? How much time did you spend there? Did you feel homesick? What did you feel when you returned home?
• What was your favorite pastime during the Christmas holidays in childhood? For example, you can write about watching cartoons or playing with your siblings. Or maybe you enjoyed winter sports and walking with your friends.
• Was Christmas your favorite holiday in childhood? Explain why or why not. Create a list of the things that you did and didn’t enjoy. You can also compare Christmas with other holidays. Find several arguments to defend your opinion.
• Describe the best Christmas present you gave somebody in childhood . It can be something you made yourself or bought. Explain why you chose this gift and what was the recipient’s reaction. What did you want to show with this present? Was it your idea to give it? How did you choose it? Answer these questions in your essay.
• What are your favorite Christmas memories ? You have a wide choice here. You can describe family get-togethers, receiving or giving presents, eating sweets, or having fun while resting from school.
• Describe your favorite childhood Christmas photo . Explain why it is so valuable to you. Define the people or objects in the picture. Try to remember who took it and what camera was they used. Also, provide some information about the time and place.
• Write about your family’s Christmas traditions .
• Describe your favorite Christmas decorations in childhood.
• When was the time you stopped believing in Santa Claus?
• What was your favorite Christmas movie in childhood?
• Write about the Christmas dishes did you enjoy the most as a child.
• What was your favorite Christmas TV special ?
• What were your favorite Christmas songs when you were little?
• Describe the perfect Christmas Eve of your childhood.
• Tell about the friends you liked to invite to your Christmas parties.

These recollections can form a great foundation for your essay. Because childhood is often the best time in a person’s life, writing essays on your childhood experiences can be a real pleasure. If you try to be creative and choose a unique topic, you are sure to succeed in writing an impressive essay.

✍️ “My Childhood Memories” Essay Writing Guide

Writing about your childhood is an exciting assignment that has some peculiarities. Let’s explore some of them.

Childhood Memories Essay: Dos and Don’ts

Your main task is to make the reader feel like they’ve experienced the memory you described. There are certain elements that you can include in your essay to make it stand out. Similarly, some things are better to avoid.

Keep these things in mind, and you will surely write a perfect composition.

Childhood Memories Essay: Step by Step

Follow these steps of the essay writing process, and you will see that writing a good essay on your childhood memories is not as challenging as it may seem.

Narrative Essay on Childhood Memories: Outline

Every essay must have a proper structure. That’s why it’s useful to make a short outline before you start writing. It will keep you from losing your way as you write your essay. It also saves you time! If you have a plan, you won’t miss any important points in your essay.

Your paper should include:

After you’ve finished writing, revise and edit your essay . Make sure your paragraphs are written in a logical order. Read your essay aloud so that you can see how it flows and determine where you need to improve it.

Try our memory-activating prompts and follow these writing tips to compose your perfect childhood memories essay! If you’re not sure that you can write a good paper on your own, you can always ask our experts to help you out.

Further reading:

• School Days Essay: How to Describe a Memorable Event
• Growing Up Essay: Great Ideas for Your College Assignment
• Writing Essay about Someone Who has Made an Impact on Your Life
• Excellent Remembering a Person Essay: Free Writing Guidelines
• Life Experience Essay: How to Write a Brilliant Paper

🔗 References

• The Fate of Childhood Memories: Children Postdated Their Earliest Memories as They Grew Older
• Can You Trust Your Earliest Childhood Memories?: BBC
• How to Start Writing Your Own Childhood Memories for Posterity: HobbyLark
• 650 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing: The New York Times
• Bright Side Readers Shared 14 Childhood Stories and We Plunged Into Their Memories Together: Brightside
• Great Questions: StoryCorps
• Introductions and Conclusions: University of Toronto
• Make a List: Childhood Memories: Practical Parenting
• Tips to Retrieve Old Memories: Harvard University
• Make the Most of Your Memory: 10 Tips for Writing About Your Life: Writer’s Digest
• Childhood Christmas Memories: DNA Explained
• What Do Your Earliest Childhood Memories Say about You?: The Conversation
• Can’t Remember Your Childhood? What Might Be Going On: Healthline
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HIST 3320: The History of Childhood

Online class, course technology, brooklyn college history discord server, helpful information on accessing resources remotely, course textbook and readings, course description, course objectives, outcomes anticipated from the course.

• Course Components
• CUNY Policies
• Helpful Resources for Students
• Unit 1: Thinking Historically
• Unit 2: Locating Childhood in History and Exploring Sources
• Unit 3: A Brief History of the History of Childhood Secondary Sources and the Problem with Historiography
• Unit 4: Childhood in Agricultural Societies
• Unit 5: Childhood in the Classical Societies
• Unit 6: Medieval and Early Modern Childhood
• Unit 7: The Rise of Modern Childhood (18th- 20th century)
• Unit 8: The Victorian Child
• Unit 9: The Many Worlds of the Indian Child
• Unit 10: Gender, Race, Class, and Ethnicity in Childhood
• Unit 11: The world of Native American Children
• Unit 12: The State and the Child
• Unit 13: Recuperating Children: Age and Voice
• Unit 14: Modern Childhood Across the World
• Unit 15: Childhood, War, and Eugenics
• Unit 16: Globalization and Childhood
• On campus : Interesting History Events
• Bibliography

Important Dates

• Sept. 1 Personal/Introductory Essay
• Sept. 8 or 9 DB#1
• Sept. 13 DB#2
• Sept. 22 DB#3
• Sept. 23 Student Presentation starts
• Sept. 29 DB#4
• Oct. 8 Historical Survey Essay
• Oct. 13 DB#5
• Oct. 20 DB#6
• Oct. 29 Primary Source-based assignment
• Nov. 3 DB#7
• Nov. 12 Research topic ideas and analysis
• Nov. 15 DB#8
• Nov. 20 DB#9
• Nov. 23 Final Paper Outline
• Dec. 1 DB#10
• Dec. 6 DB#11
• Dec. 14 Final Paper
• Brooklyn College Academic Calendar

Note on e-mail correspondence:

• Check your email and BlackBoard announcements daily.
• For messages without attachments, send e-mail to: [email protected]
• For messages with attachments, send e-mail to: [email protected]
• The Zoom link for your classes is on the syllabus. I will also post it on BB. To check BB announcement, you need to check your registered e-mail account. The Zoom links are only for those registered for this class. 
• Do NOT share the Zoom links with anybody else . Violation of this rule will lead to serious disciplinary action.  
• E-mail me only for course-related matters and keep it short. Always think before you write to me.
• I will not answer unnecessary e-mails regarding questions that are addressed in the syllabus.
• I will NOT answer e-mails during weekends . Allow 24-48 hours for my response to your mails, even on weekdays.
• Do NOT e-mail me for your petty illnesses or other reasons for missing classes. 
• I will not discuss your big concerns with assignments, lectures, or readings over e-mail. For such concerns you must see me during my office hours and by appointment. 
• ALWAYS put your <yourname> and the course number IN THE SUBJECT. 
• Email is a FORMAL means of communication (at least when you correspond with your professors or employers, etc.). Let's treat each other with respect. Use capital letters, punctuation, greetings and salutations as in a professional message. Avoid abbreviations, slang, and cuteness.
• The use of magic words (please, thank you) and politeness in general is strongly encouraged.
• Sign every message at the bottom. 
• Exchange phone numbers or email addresses with your classmates. If you happen to miss a class please do NOT ask me to summarize what we did or will do in class, or what the assignment is/was, UNLESS YOU HAVE SERIOUS REASONS. Email or text a classmate instead.
• Lectures will be conducted synchronously via zoom.
• Course Time: Tuesday and Thursday, 11 am-12:15 pm via zoom

IMPORTANT: If you do not have reliable and regular access to a desktop or laptop computer, headphones or internet access please go to the Brooklyn College Device Loan Requests/Returns to request equipment. Brooklyn College has Chromebooks, Laptops, iPads, Headphones and T-Mobile Hotspots that can be loaned to you. 

• We will hold synchronous class sessions on Zoom for all classes . 
• I will post Zoom links , announcements, assignments, course materials, and relevant news items on BlackBoard.
• Zoom links will also go to your BB e-mail. 
• If you do not frequently access the mail account for CUNYfirst/BB, please make the necessary changes quickly. 
• If you cannot attend synchronous class time, you are required to write a 3-4 page paper on the assigned readings for that class. Send me the paper as an attachment to [email protected].
• I prefer that you attend class with your Zoom camera on. However, I understand that this may not always be possible. If that is the case, I would like you to actively participate in class by raising your electronic hand and/or contributing to the online chat. If your camera is off, I need to be assured that you are still actively engaged with our discussion.  
• Although our classes will be virtual, use of cell phones during class hours is strictly prohibited.

The COVID-19 pandemic entails unpredictable challenges (Synchronous classes, meetings, etc.). If you are faced with an emergency or something in your life changes because of COVID-19 that interrupts your attendance or other commitments related to the class, please be in touch with me as soon as possible. I will adjust the assignments and accommodate your needs so that you can successfully complete the semester. 

• I reserve the Right to Alter Reading and Writing assignments as required. The syllabus can be modified (within limits) according to the interests and intellectual curiosity of the students.
• In turn, I expect a thorough familiarity with the Syllabus that outlines the requirements and the constituting elements of the course.  
• For doubts and questions please contact me at your earliest —we will meet over zoom during my office hours or by appointment. Send me a short and appropriate e-mail to set up a meeting.

For the most part, you will need technology that will allow you to access this OER website, Blackboard, other websites and a device that has audio and video capabilities. If your internet connection is spotty, try to have a stable connection or not use WIFI when you are taking any quizzes or attending live meetings.

• Check your following college accounts are updated and accessible. ( CUNYFirst , Brooklyn library account , Blackboard , Zoom Pro ,  CUNY Dropbox , and CUNY Microsoft 365 cloud services account .
• Again: If you do not have reliable and regular access to a desktop or laptop computer, headphones or internet access please go to the Brooklyn College Device Loan Requests/Returns to request equipment. Brooklyn College has Chromebooks, Laptops, iPads, Headphones and T-Mobile Hotspots that can be loaned to you. 

Did you know that Brooklyn College History has its own Discord server?

It includes dedicated channels for experiencing your History courses with classmates, a Virtual Lounge for discussing history and other topics with your peers, as well as a bulletin board for all the latest information about upcoming History department events.

• Sign up for the BC History Discord Server Brooklyn College History Discord (url: https://forms.gle/xBjis3JGVjBswpYn6 )
• Off-campus Access
• Newspaper access

To access some items you need to use your CUNYFirst login and others you will need to enter a password given to you by your professor.

The following icons will let you know what you will need to do to access the items. 

If an item has no icon, then you don't need to do anything to access it.

Need assistance with off-campus access? Go to the library's  Library Remote Access page for assistance and instructions.

The Brooklyn College Library's electronic resources (e.g. journals, ebooks, databases, etc.) are available to registered students, faculty, and staff when off-campus , including while abroad.

IMPORTANT :

• To authenticate for remote access to Library databases you will be prompted to use your CUNYfirst Username and Password to log in (same credentials for logging into Blackboard). You may see a redirection screen to the new login screen.
• Using Firefox as your browser is recommended.
• For further assistance go to the library's  Ask a Librarian or read more on Library Remote Access .

All CUNY members have free access to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

• Use CUNY.edu email to sign up.
• Faculty & staff renew every year.
• renewal requires working CUNY.edu address.  

NY Times: Anyone who initiates an account will have an active subscription for one year from the date she/he creates the account. If you already have an annual subscription to the NYTimes, you can cancel it and will receive a refund. However, if you only have a monthly subscription, the New York Times will not issue a refund for that month.

• Create Account: New York Times
• Create Account: Wall Street Journal
• Create Account: Chronicle of Higher Education

Newspaper Icons

Other useful links and academic journals to explore:

• Children and Youth in History Primary Sources A collection of more than 300 primary sources on children and youth in world history. Citation: Center for History and New Media. Children and Youth in History Primary Sources. The University of Missouri-Kansas City. (n.d)
• Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians and the Problem of Childhood Sarah Maza, The Kids Aren’t All Right: Historians and the Problem of Childhood, The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4, October 2020, Pages 1261–1285.
• To make students aware that childhood is a social and cultural construction that changed over time; that it both converges with and differs from the contemporary notions of childhood.
• To make students understand that childhood is not universal: it is diverse and complex depending on the contexts and determined by class, caste, race, gender, religion, geography, time period, and politics, among other factors.
• To familiarize students with the historiographical debates surrounding the history of childhood.
• To read and analyze different kinds of primary sources (written documents; art forms; maps; music; film, space) and secondary literature to make connections between what is presented as “facts” and their interpretations. 
• To enhance critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through reading and writing assignments.
• Reveal an understanding that childhood is not a monolithic and unchanging category; that it is a historically constructed notion and an important subject of scholarly investigation. 
• Demonstrate familiarity with the major trends in the history of childhood.
• Acquire adequate knowledge about why the history of childhood is crucial for an understanding of childhood and the development of world history.
• Demonstrate the ability to critically evaluate and discuss primary and secondary sources for articulating an argument and draw a meaningful conclusion. 
• Exhibit leadership role in the classroom by choosing to present on a topic identified from the syllabus, formulate discussion questions, and respond to questions from the audience. 
• Next: Course Components >>
• Last Updated: Sep 13, 2022 2:26 PM
• URL: https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/hist3320

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Childhood — How Childhood Has Changed Over The Years

How Childhood Has Changed Over The Years

• Categories: Childhood

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Published: May 19, 2020

Words: 1531 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

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• History of child rights

International standards have advanced dramatically over the past century – explore the milestones.

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In the industrialized countries of the early twentieth century, there were no standards of protection for children. It was common for them to work alongside adults in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Growing recognition of the injustices of their situation, propelled by greater understanding of the developmental needs of children, led to a movement to better protect them.

International standards on child rights have advanced dramatically over the past century, but gaps remain in meeting those ideals.

Timeline of child rights

The League of Nations adopts the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, drafted by Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the Save the Children Fund. The Declaration articulates that all people owe children the right to: means for their development; special help in times of need; priority for relief; economic freedom and protection from exploitation; and an upbringing that instils social consciousness and duty.

The United Nations General Assembly establishes the International Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF, with an emphasis on children throughout the world.

The United Nations General Assembly passes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , in which Article 25 entitles mothers and children to ‘special care and assistance’ and ‘social protection’.

The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which recognizes, among other rights, children’s rights to education, play, a supportive environment and health care.

With the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, United Nations Member States promise to uphold equal rights – including education and protection – for all children.

The International Conference on Human Rights is convened to evaluate the progress made by countries in the 20 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. An agenda for future work is drafted and national commitments to upholding human rights are bolstered.

The International Labour Organization adopts Convention 138, which sets 18 as the minimum age for undertaking work that might be hazardous to a person’s health, safety or morals.

Concerned about the vulnerability of women and children in emergency and conflict situations, the General Assembly calls on Member States to observe the Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict . The Declaration prohibits attacks against or imprisonment of civilian women and children, and upholds the sanctity of the rights of women and children during armed conflict.

The Commission on Human Rights puts forth a draft of a Convention on the Rights of the Child for consideration by a working group of Member States, agencies and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, the United Nations General Assembly declares 1979 as the International Year of the Child, in which UNICEF plays a leading role.

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice detail the principles of a justice system that promotes the best interests of the child, including education and social services and proportional treatment for child detainees.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and widely acclaimed as a landmark achievement for human rights, recognizing the roles of children as social, economic, political, civil and cultural actors. The Convention guarantees and sets minimum standards for protecting the rights of children in all capacities. UNICEF, which helped draft the Convention, is named in the document as a source of expertise.

The World Summit for Children is held in New York. The Guidelines for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency outline strategies for preventing criminality and protecting young people at high social risk. 

Experts from UNICEF, Save the Children, Defence for Children International and other organizations meet to discuss data gathered from the reporting process of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The meeting leads to the formal establishment of the Child Rights International Network (CRIN) in 1995.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) adopts the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention , calling for the immediate prohibition and elimination of any form of work that is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children. UNICEF has been working with the ILO since 1996 to promote the ratification of international labour standards and policies concerning child labour.

The United Nations General Assembly adopts two Optional Protocols to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, obligating State Parties to take key actions to prevent children from partaking in hostilities during armed conflict and to end the sale, sexual exploitation and abuse of children.

At the United Nations Special Session on Children, child delegates address the General Assembly for the first time. The World Fit for Children agenda was adopted outlining specific goals for improving the prospects of children over the next decade. 

UNICEF co-publishes the Manual for the Measurement of Juvenile Justice Indicators with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The Manual enables governments to assess the condition of their juvenile justice systems and make reforms as necessary.

The United Nations Secretary-General issues the Status of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

A new Optional Protocol to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is adopted. Under this Optional Protocol on a communications procedure, the Committee on the Rights of the Child can field complaints of child rights violations and undertake investigations.

Somalia and South Sudan ratify the Convention. The Convention is the most widely ratified international instrument with 196 States. Only the United States has not ratified to date.

More about the Convention on the Rights of the Child

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section History of Early Childhood Education in the United States

Introduction, general overview.

• The History of Kindergarten in the United States
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States from 1920 to 1929
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States from 1930 to 1949
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States from 1950 to 1959
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States from 1960 to 1969
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States from 1970 to 1979
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States from the 1980s to the 2020s
• The History of African American/Black Early Childhood Education in the United States
• The History of Asian American Early Childhood Education in the United States
• The History of Hispanic Early Childhood Education in the United States
• The History of American Indian (Indigenous) Early Childhood Education in the United States
• The History of Early Childhood Education in the United States in Early Childhood Teacher Education Textbooks
• Early Childhood Professional Education in the United States
• The History of Technology in Early Childhood Education in the United States

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• Advocacy and Activism in Early Childhood
• Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood Education
• Early Childhood Education Pedagogy

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• English as an International Language for Academic Publishing
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History of Early Childhood Education in the United States by Blythe F. Hinitz , Betty Liebovich LAST REVIEWED: 17 January 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 17 January 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0295

The history of early childhood education in the United States (US) is multifaceted. This bibliographical account of early childhood education and programs offers a glimpse into the range of approaches taken in the US to provide young children access to learning environments and services. The resources provided demonstrate the emergence of a diverse system unique to the US, in which education is a function of individual states rather than the federal government. Therefore, early childhood education is overseen by a variety of different entities, stemming from several distinctive philosophies, leading to a multiplicity of theoretical foundations, standards, regulations, curricula, and practices. Early childhood educators and scholars may use this bibliography to gain a deeper understanding of early childhood practice in a contemporary learning environment by exploring the roots of the ideas that inform teaching and learning in early childhood. By engaging with this historical account of early childhood education and programming, readers may become more familiar with the network of ideas that informs their own philosophy of teaching young children. The topics are designed to highlight the histories of the cultures served by early childhood education and the impetus for focused attention on young children in specific eras.

The history of early childhood education in the United States, like the country’s population, has global roots. These are described in detail in History of Early Childhood Education , which expands on what early childhood education (ECE) historians already know, at least in part. Many subcultures of US society are brought to life as the deep tradition and the creative knowledge base of the early care and education community are portrayed in Lascarides and Hinitz 2011 . Historians of early childhood education in the US have tended to focus on specific programs or people. For this reason, there are few comprehensive histories, and even fewer that discuss historical research in early childhood education. Notable exceptions include Lascarides and Hinitz 1993 , Beatty 1995 , Lascarides and Hinitz 2011 , Hinitz 2013 , and Ranck 2015 . This bibliography of the history of early childhood education in the United States is divided into chronological and cultural sections. The chronological section begins with the founding of kindergartens and addresses program development from the 1920s through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to the present. The cultural segment of this bibliography includes sections on The History of African American/Black Early Childhood Education in the United States , The History of Asian American Early Childhood Education in the United States , The History of Hispanic Early Childhood Education in the United States , and The History of American Indian (Indigenous) Early Childhood Education in the United States . See also the Oxford Bibliographies in Education article “ American Indian Education ,” particularly the subsection on “The Role of Early Childhood Education.” Additional sections addressing the history of technology in early education, the integration of the history of early childhood education in teacher education textbooks, and the history of early childhood professional education in the United States are included in this bibliography.

Beatty, Barbara. 1995. Preschool education in America: The culture of young children from the colonial era to the present . New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

This political and program history includes three detailed chapters about all aspects of early private and public kindergarten programs in the US, the free movement, and the establishment of public kindergartens. Descriptions of the European roots of early childhood education, and the development of family, infant, and nursery schools constitute the remaining chapters. Sixteen pages of photographs enhance the written material. The text is written in a way that makes readers feel a part of the history of early childhood education.

Hinitz, Blythe Farb, ed. 2013. The hidden history of early childhood education . New York: Routledge.

This book focuses on the story of programs and people who have been marginalized or ignored by standard histories. Primary sources provide an in-depth view of early childhood education. In “Glimpses of Past Practice,” the authors explore the education of Quaker, Japanese American internee, and home-schooled children. On-campus schooling and education during the Eisenhower administration are discussed. “Portraits of ECE leaders” includes Oneida Cockrell, Lula Sadler Craig, Patty Smith Hill, James L Hymes Jr., Constance Kamii, Betty Kirby, Margaret Naumburg, and Evangeline Ward.

Lascarides, V. Celia, and Blythe Hinitz. 1993. Teaching the history of early childhood education: Materials devoted to history. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 14.3: 24–26.

DOI: 10.1080/1090102930140307

This study reviews print sources available to teach early education history. Criteria included: comprehensiveness of the material, in-depth versus superficial account, facts and interpretation versus opinion, historical period covered, graphics, extensiveness of the bibliography, and how the historical material was related to current thought and practice. There is little mention of US pioneers’ contributions, and no mention of programs for ethnic populations. More autobiographical accounts and use of archival resources are suggested.

Lascarides, V. Celia, and Blythe F. Hinitz. 2011. History of early childhood education . New York: Routledge.

This book draws from primary sources and historical literature to tell the story of early education in the US. It traces the roots from ancient Greece and Rome to Europe, then describes the integration of the theories and programs into methodology in the US. The development of the kindergarten, nursery school, and child-care branches of the field from inception through the 1960s is explained. Biographies of contributors to the field are included. Timelines explain how some entities developed.

Ranck, Edna Runnels. 2015. Past as prologue: Doing historical research in early childhood education. In Handbook of research methods in early childhood education . Vol. 1. Edited by Olivia Saracho, 667–713. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

This chapter reviews models of historiography, including books by eleven early childhood historians, and five organizational histories. A precise description of how to conduct research includes finding sufficient primary, secondary, and tertiary sources; engaging with colleagues; finding a mentor; and identifying gaps in the literature. Details about the entities that house sources are provided. Four appendices contain an overview of writing history, characteristics of an ECE historian, how to navigate disagreements, and caveats for guarding against complications.

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History Of Early Childhood Education Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: History , Education , Children , Europe , Childhood , Family , Students , America

Published: 03/25/2020

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Why it is important to learn from the past? How has the view of children change through history?

It is very important to learn from the past because that is how we get to know how people lived. Besides that, people get to learn from past mistakes in an effort to lead a better life. Learning from the past also helps in the understanding of the present and the possible future.2. How did European educators such as Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori influenced early childhood education in the United States? Europe is considered to be one of the sources of influential educational ideas that have transformed the United States of America. European educators played a very crucial role in changing elementary and early childhood education from the traditional ways to what it is today. These educators brought in a different perspective that sought to build a vision which sees to it that the human society is improved by first helping children realize their full potential in up to date meaningful ways (Johnson 195).3. What events and people propelled the kindergarten, nursery school, and child care movements? The kindergarten, nursery school and childcare movements were mainly propelled by the industrial revolution whereby mothers found themselves going out to work in the factory labor force. There was no one to take care of their children and therefore found themselves taking them to these institutions. Aside from this, several philosophers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and methodology creators such as Maria Montessori, John Amos Comenius and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi provided the philosophical foundations that necessitated children go to these institutions. This was because the needs of the children must be adapted to an early childhood curriculum (Johnson 198).4. What were the experiences and contributions of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans in the history of early childhood education? African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans had a history of lack of education. There was also a very high dropout rate of these groups. They were therefore encouraged to take their children to school. This led to the introduction free Head Start Program which benefitted them and encouraged many parents to take their children to school.5. How did trends in early childhood history come together and influence the launch of the national Head Start program? Trends in early childhood influenced the launch of the National Head Start program in so many ways. First there was need for children to get a comprehensive education early on in life before getting into elementary school. Before the 1960s kindergarten and early childhood education was only accessible to about 40% of the American population and there was need to extend it to the rest of the population. The goodness of early childhood had been experienced and therefore there was need to incorporate children from low income families.

James E. Johnson (Eds.), Approaches to early childhood education (pp. 181-219). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Oral History Offers a Model for How Schools Can Introduce Students to Complex Topics

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As historian David McCullough said, history is the study of who we are and why we are the way we are.

That’s why teachers in the Memphis-Shelby County public schools, as racially isolated now as they were when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, have launched a curriculum to introduce their students to the 13 children who helped integrate these Tennessee city schools in 1961.

Memphis-Shelby County teachers, researchers from the University of Memphis, and the local Memphis 13 Foundation worked with seven of the 10 surviving members of the Memphis 13—a group of Black 1st graders who peacefully enrolled in four all-white schools at the height of the civil rights era—to develop teacher training, lesson plans, and oral history activities for elementary students.

“Just going home and talking to grandparents or talking to the elders in their community was never going to be enough,” said Anna Falkner, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis and a co-developer of the curriculum, “because it wouldn’t provide [students] with the context that they needed in order to understand what happened and understand the ongoing effects of, for example, the way segregation looks today.”

The Memphis 13 project offers a model for how schools can introduce complex subjects to students, even in early grades, while also giving them opportunities to investigate social studies in their communities

“Really consider the context,” Falkner said. “What are the specifics that can help students understand their Southern context or the context wherever they are and what that means in relation to the larger experience. It’s not just focusing on that national narrative, not just sharing Brown v. Board , but really thinking about, what did this look like in my backyard? What did it look like for my family members or my community members?”

For example, teachers met with surviving members of the Memphis 13 to identify projects for students in 2nd and 5th grades, when Tennessee social studies standards cover civil rights issues. Sheila Malone, one of the students who first integrated into the district’s Bruce Elementary as a 1st grader, suggested that 5th graders record the experiences of others who had attended the district schools during desegregation.

“[Malone] wanted the students to go back home and share the story and have intergenerational conversations about the history of our schools,” said Gina Tillis, the director of curriculum and instruction for the Memphis 13 Foundation, who co-developed the Memphis curriculum. “One of the things that I’ve noticed with the members of Memphis 13 is, as they’re sharing their stories, they’re unpacking memories that have been silenced. … This is a really powerful space for students to reflect on their education, their parents’ and their elders’ education, and what we’re doing collectively to create a more inclusive and equitable school system.”

Second graders, for example, watch documentaries and review news accounts about the school desegregation decisions in Memphis and other cities, identifying ways children their age participated. In 5th grade , students review collected oral history interviews and collect their own, as well as analyze modern policies related to school integration. Tillis said the project plans to expand the curriculum to 8th and 11th grades in the future.

Building school integration history projects

Emerging technology has made it easier for educators to engage their students in active historical research, according to the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University in Ohio. The center, for example, has developed apps to help students record interviews and archive historical documents.

Efforts like those of the Memphis 13 helped integrate public schools in the decades following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education . However, these trends began to reverse in the 1990s and have worsened to this day, even as the overall public school population has grown more diverse. Studies find schools serving high populations of students of color continue to have on average fewer educational opportunities —including challenging courses, experienced teachers, and other resources—compared with schools serving mostly white students.

While the Memphis 13 are well known, Tillis stressed that schools can use community history to engage students regardless of where they are. “Everyone has a school desegregation story. Every district, every person ... and every district story is unique,” she said. “It’s, I think, one of the most powerful stories to share because it offers you this platform to really deconstruct what’s going on in our schools.”

Researchers recommended that schools interested in developing similar projects:

• Work with local historians and groups to identify social studies topics and events that had strong effects on the local community. This can include school district librarians or archivists, for example.
• Provide teachers with training in both the historical context and strategies and tools for documenting community history.
• Focus on topics that encourage students to make connections between history and current issues in their community.

“One of the lessons that we’re hoping to share with other school districts is just the power of listening to your community members who are historians, even if they don’t work for the local archive: the neighbor down the street who kept all the newspapers, the person who knew everybody in the neighborhood,” Falkner said. “Finding those community members and making a meaningful way for them to participate in the curriculum development is the most important piece.”

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Faith Ringgold Dies at 93; Wove Black Life Into Quilts and Children’s Books

A champion of Black artists, she explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media and later the written word.

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By Margalit Fox

Faith Ringgold, a multimedia artist whose pictorial quilts depicting the African American experience gave rise to a second distinguished career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died on Saturday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Barbara Wallace.

For more than a half-century, Ms. Ringgold explored themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media, among them painting, sculpture, mask- and doll-making, textiles and performance art. She was also a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into the collections of major American museums.

Ms. Ringgold’s art, which was often rooted in her own experience, has been exhibited at the White House and in museums and galleries around the world. It is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the American Craft Museum in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and other institutions.

For Ms. Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole. Classically trained as a painter and sculptor, she began producing political paintings in the 1960s and ’70s that explored the highly charged subjects of relations between Black and white people, and between men and women, in America.

“Few artists have kept as many balls in the air as long as Faith Ringgold,” the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote in 2013, reviewing an exhibition of her work at ACA Galleries in Manhattan. “She has spent more than five decades juggling message and form, high and low, art and craft, inspirational narrative and quiet or not so quiet fury about racial and sexual inequality.”

The hallmarks of Ms. Ringgold’s style included the integration of craft materials like fabric, beads and thread with fine-art materials like paint and canvas; vibrant, saturated colors; a flattened perspective that deliberately evoked the work of naïve painters; and a keen, often tender focus on ordinary Black people and the visual minutiae of their daily lives.

Critics praised Ms. Ringgold’s work from the beginning. But wide renown, in the form of exposure in the country’s most prestigious museums, largely eluded her until midlife — a consequence, she often said, of her race, her sex and her uncompromising focus on art as a vehicle for social justice.

“In a world where having the power to express oneself or to do something is limited to a very few, art appeared to me to be an area where anyone could do that,” she told The Orlando Sentinel in 1992. “Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that you could do it and not have anyone know you were doing it.”

Ms. Ringgold ultimately became best known for what she called “story quilts”: large panels of unstretched canvas, painted with narrative scenes in vivid acrylics, framed by quasi-traditional borders of pieced fabric and often incorporating written text. Meant for the wall rather than the bed, the quilts tell of the joys and rigors of Black lives — and of Black women’s lives in particular — while simultaneously celebrating the human capacity to transcend circumstance through the art of dreaming.

One of her most celebrated story quilts, “Tar Beach,” completed in 1988, gave rise to her first children’s book, published three years later under the same title. With text and original paintings by Ms. Ringgold, the book, like the quilt, depicts a Black family convivially picnicking and slumbering on the roof of their Harlem apartment building on a sultry summer’s night.

“Tar Beach” was named a Caldecott Honor Book by the American Library Association and one of the year’s best illustrated children’s titles by The New York Times Book Review. It has endured as a childhood staple and garnered a string of other honors, including the Coretta Scott King Award, presented by the library association for distinguished children’s books about African American life.

Ms. Ringgold went on to illustrate more than a dozen picture books, most with her own text, including “Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky” (1992), about Harriet Tubman, and “If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks” (1999).

Her eminence in the field is all the more striking in that she never set out to be a children’s author in the first place.

A Child of Harlem

The youngest child of Andrew Louis Jones and Willi (Posey) Jones, Faith Willi Jones was born in Harlem on Oct. 8, 1930. Her father, a New York City sanitation truck driver, left the family when Faith was about 2, though he remained in close contact.

Faith’s mother, a seamstress, later became a fashion designer with her own label, Mme. Willi Posey, and an atelier in Harlem. She was so successful that she was able to move with her children to Sugar Hill, the exclusive Harlem enclave whose residents also included Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington and Thurgood Marshall.

“We all lived together, so it wasn’t a surprise to see these people rolling up in their limos,” Ms. Ringgold told The Times in 2010. “And that said to us, you can do this, too.”

An asthmatic child, Faith was often kept home in bed, where she passed the time drawing and painting. Her father brought her her first easel, salvaged from his trash-collection rounds.

Theirs was a storytelling family, and as an adult, Ms. Ringgold recalled with particular pleasure the narrative gifts of her elder brother, Andrew.

“We went to the movies at a time when there were already great stories, but they didn’t have any Black people in them — or if they did, you didn’t like the way the characters were,” she said in an interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered” in 1999. “So my brother would come home and he would rewrite everything.”

One day in the 1940s, when Andrew was a teenager, he was dispatched on an errand for their mother to a white neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. There, a gang of white youths surrounded him and beat him nearly to death. He was refused treatment at a local hospital.

He recovered, but he was never the same, Ms. Ringgold said. He became addicted to drugs and died of an overdose in 1961.

The young Ms. Ringgold graduated from George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan. At about 20, she eloped with a childhood sweetheart, Robert Earl Wallace, and had two daughters in quick succession. But she soon discovered that her husband, a classical and jazz pianist, was a drug addict; they separated in 1954 and divorced two years later. (Mr. Wallace also died of an overdose, of heroin, in 1961.)

Ms. Ringgold earned a bachelor’s degree in art and education from the City College of New York in 1955 and a master’s in art there in 1959. In 1962, she married Burdette Ringgold.

From 1955 to 1973, Ms. Ringgold taught art in the New York City public school system, in Harlem and the Bronx, while trying to establish a career as a painter. At first she produced landscape paintings in the vein of the European masters she had studied in college.

“We copied Greek busts, we copied Degas, we copied everything,” she said in an interview for the catalog of “Faith Ringgold: A 25-Year Survey,” a 1990 retrospective at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island that toured nationally. “It was generally thought that we weren’t experienced enough to be original, and if we were original we were sometimes up for ridicule.”

Little by little, Ms. Ringgold cast about for an aesthetic that reflected her own life and times. By the 1960s, influenced by the writings of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), along with the rich visual polyphony of African art and the rhythms of the jazz she had heard and loved as a child, she had found it.

Her work from this period includes the “Black Light” series, a set of portraits in which she depicted her African American subjects using a specially conceived palette of rich dark colors.

It also includes a 1967 painting, “American People Series #20: Die,” which proved a professional watershed. Twelve feet long, the canvas depicts a violent profusion of men, women and children — Black and white, some wielding weapons, most spattered with blood — whose roiling tangle recalls Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, “Guernica.”

“Die” became the centerpiece of her first solo exhibition, held that year at Spectrum Gallery in New York. The show helped her stake her claim as a significant American artist.

A Voice of Protest

In 1968, Ms. Ringgold helped organize a protest by Black artists, long marginalized by the art establishment, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Two years later, she took part in a protest at the Museum of Modern Art centering on women artists.

“Today, some 25 years later,” she wrote in 1995, “nothing much has changed at the Modern except which white man gets the next show.”

The word “man” was telling, for Ms. Ringgold had long since come to believe that her efforts on behalf of Black artists were of little avail to those who also happened to be female. By the 1970s, she was producing more overtly feminist work.

Ms. Ringgold, who had learned to sew from her mother, began augmenting her arsenal with the traditional materials of “women’s work”: needles, thread and cloth. She made masks, cloth dolls and soft fabric sculptures, some of them life-size, that were exhibited on their own and used in her performance pieces about racial and sexual disenfranchisement.

She also embarked on her “Slave Rape” series, a set of paintings depicting the fate of Black women in the antebellum South, which she framed with borders of patterned cloth.

Collaborating with her mother, Ms. Ringgold made her first full quilt, “Echoes of Harlem,” a montage of painted Black faces and pieced fabric, in 1980. It was a modern manifestation of a centuries-old Black tradition.

“I think of quilts as the classic art form of Black people in America,” Ms. Ringgold told The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2005. “When African slaves came to America, they couldn’t do their sculpture anymore. They were divorced from their religion. So they would take scraps of fabric and make them into coverlets for the master and for themselves.”

In 1983, frustrated at her inability to find a publisher for a memoir she had written, Ms. Ringgold began incorporating narrative text into her quilts. Few artists of the period were doing anything of the kind.

The first of her story quilts, “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?,” reimagined the original stereotyped figure — the fat, frumpy Black woman, drawn straight from a minstrel show, whom many Black people considered offensive. On Ms. Ringgold’s quilt, Jemima has been transformed into a Black feminist role model: trim, elegant and a successful entrepreneur.

In the late 1980s, after an editor at Crown Publishers saw “Tar Beach,” Ms. Ringgold was asked to transform that quilt into a picture book. The resulting work tells the story of 8-year-old Cassie Lightfoot — the daughter of the picnicking family — who one magical night in 1939 flies over the rooftops of the city to soar above the George Washington Bridge.

“I can fly — yes, fly,” Ms. Ringgold’s text reads. “Me, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, only eight years old and in the third grade, and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want for the rest of my life.”

Ms. Ringgold’s art was acquired by many private collectors, among them Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey. It was also commissioned for public spaces, including the 125th Street subway station on the Lenox Avenue line in Manhattan, where two immense mosaic murals, collectively titled “Flying Home,” depict storied Black figures like Josephine Baker, Malcolm X and Zora Neale Hurston.

For what is very likely the most widely utilized public space of all, the internet, she created a Google Doodle to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2012.

Ms. Ringgold was the subject of significant retrospectives at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Rutgers University and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington. In 2016, not long after her 85th birthday, MoMA acquired “Die” for its permanent collection.

More recently, in 2022, she received a major retrospective at the New Museum in Manhattan. The show, which filled three floors, “makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now,” Holland Cotter wrote in his review in The Times. The exhibition later traveled to the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Ms. Ringgold, who for many years divided her time between her home in Englewood, N.J., and California, where she was a faculty member of the University of California, San Diego, also taught in New York at the Bank Street College of Education, Pratt Institute and elsewhere.

In 1999, she established the Anyone Can Fly Foundation, which promotes the work of artists of the African diaspora from the 18th century onward.

Among her many laurels are a Guggenheim fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts awards for painting and sculpture, and a spate of honorary doctorates.

Her other books include her memoir, “We Flew Over the Bridge,” published by Little, Brown & Company in 1995.

In addition to her daughter Barbara, a linguist, Ms. Ringgold is survived by another daughter, Michele Wallace, a prominent feminist writer and cultural critic; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her husband, Burdette Ringgold, died in 2020.

Though Ms. Ringgold had felt the need to draw and paint from the time she was a girl, she said late in life that her career sprang from an even more urgent imperative.

As she told an interviewer in 2008, “If I woke up white in America, I wouldn’t be an artist.”

Emmett Lindner contributed reporting.

Margalit Fox is a former senior writer on the obituaries desk at The Times. She was previously an editor at the Book Review. She has written the send-offs of some of the best-known cultural figures of our era, including Betty Friedan, Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney. More about Margalit Fox

What is ADHD?

Signs and symptoms.

• Managing Symptoms

ADHD in Adults

More information.

ADHD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood. It is usually first diagnosed in childhood and often lasts into adulthood. Children with ADHD may have trouble paying attention, controlling impulsive behaviors (may act without thinking about what the result will be), or be overly active.

It is normal for children to have trouble focusing and behaving at one time or another. However, children with ADHD do not just grow out of these behaviors. The symptoms continue, can be severe, and can cause difficulty at school, at home, or with friends.

A child with ADHD might:

• daydream a lot
• forget or lose things a lot
• squirm or fidget
• talk too much
• make careless mistakes or take unnecessary risks
• have a hard time resisting temptation
• have trouble taking turns
• have difficulty getting along with others

Learn more about signs and symptoms

Get information and support from the National Resource Center on ADHD

There are three different ways ADHD presents itself, depending on which types of symptoms are strongest in the individual:

• Predominantly Inattentive Presentation: It is hard for the individual to organize or finish a task, to pay attention to details, or to follow instructions or conversations. The person is easily distracted or forgets details of daily routines.
• Predominantly Hyperactive-Impulsive Presentation: The person fidgets and talks a lot. It is hard to sit still for long (e.g., for a meal or while doing homework). Smaller children may run, jump or climb constantly. The individual feels restless and has trouble with impulsivity. Someone who is impulsive may interrupt others a lot, grab things from people, or speak at inappropriate times. It is hard for the person to wait their turn or listen to directions. A person with impulsiveness may have more accidents and injuries than others.
• Combined Presentation: Symptoms of the above two types are equally present in the person.

Because symptoms can change over time, the presentation may change over time as well.

 Learn about symptoms of ADHD, how ADHD is diagnosed, and treatment recommendations including behavior therapy, medication, and school support.

Causes of ADHD

Scientists are studying cause(s) and risk factors in an effort to find better ways to manage and reduce the chances of a person having ADHD. The cause(s) and risk factors for ADHD are unknown, but current research shows that genetics plays an important role. Recent studies link genetic factors with ADHD. 1

In addition to genetics, scientists are studying other possible causes and risk factors including:

• Brain injury
• Exposure to environmental risks (e.g., lead) during pregnancy or at a young age
• Alcohol and tobacco use during pregnancy
• Premature delivery
• Low birth weight

Research does not support the popularly held views that ADHD is caused by eating too much sugar, watching too much television, parenting, or social and environmental factors such as poverty or family chaos. Of course, many things, including these, might make symptoms worse, especially in certain people. But the evidence is not strong enough to conclude that they are the main causes of ADHD.

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Deciding if a child has ADHD is a process with several steps. There is no single test to diagnose ADHD, and many other problems, like anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and certain types of learning disabilities, can have similar symptoms. One step of the process involves having a medical exam, including hearing and vision tests , to rule out other problems with symptoms like ADHD. Diagnosing ADHD usually includes a checklist for rating ADHD symptoms and taking a history of the child from parents, teachers, and sometimes, the child.

Learn more about the criteria for diagnosing ADHD

In most cases, ADHD is best treated with a combination of behavior therapy and medication. For preschool-aged children (4-5 years of age) with ADHD, behavior therapy, particularly training for parents, is recommended as the first line of treatment before medication is tried. What works best can depend on the child and family. Good treatment plans will include close monitoring, follow-ups, and making changes, if needed, along the way.

Learn more about treatments

Managing Symptoms: Staying Healthy

Being healthy is important for all children and can be especially important for children with ADHD. In addition to behavioral therapy and medication, having a healthy lifestyle can make it easier for your child to deal with ADHD symptoms. Here are some healthy behaviors that may help:

• Developing healthy eating habits  such as eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and choosing lean protein sources
• Participating in daily  physical activity based on age
• Limiting the amount of daily screen time from TVs, computers, phones, and other electronics
• Getting the recommended amount of sleep each night based on age

If you or your doctor has concerns about ADHD, you can take your child to a specialist such as a child psychologist, child psychiatrist, or developmental pediatrician, or you can contact your local early intervention agency (for children under 3) or public school (for children 3 and older).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funds the National Resource Center on ADHD , a program of CHADD – Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Their website has links to information for people with ADHD and their families. The National Resource Center operates a call center (1-866-200-8098) with trained staff to answer questions about ADHD.

For more information on services for children with special needs, visit the Center for Parent Information and Resources.  To find the Parent Center near you, you can visit this website.

ADHD can last into adulthood. Some adults have ADHD but have never been diagnosed. The symptoms can cause difficulty at work, at home, or with relationships. Symptoms may look different at older ages, for example, hyperactivity may appear as extreme restlessness. Symptoms can become more severe when the demands of adulthood increase. For more information about diagnosis and treatment throughout the lifespan, please visit the websites of the National Resource Center on ADHD  and the National Institutes of Mental Health .

• National Resource Center on ADHD
• National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
• Faraone, S. V., Banaschewski, T., Coghill, D., Zheng, Y., Biederman, J., Bellgrove, M. A., . . . Wang, Y. (2021). The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 evidence-based conclusions about the disorder. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.01.022

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