Small Households, Long Schooling and the Shape of a Life

Fewer siblings and more years in classrooms changed the daily texture of being young more than any argument did.

Ideas about childhood are often traced to writers and reformers, but the daily texture of being young has usually been set by less articulate forces. Household size is one. A house with many young people in it is a different environment from a house with one or two, not because of any belief about upbringing but because of arithmetic. In the crowded version, the young form a group with its own internal life, its own hierarchy and its own supervision, and adult attention is necessarily spread thin. In the smaller version, adult attention concentrates, and much of what was once handled among the young themselves is handled by adults instead.

Schooling did something similar from a different direction. Gathering the young by age, for many hours, over many years, produced a social experience that had not previously existed at that scale: a peer group of near contemporaries, encountered daily, separate from the adult world of work. This is so familiar now that it is hard to see as an arrangement at all. Yet it is an arrangement, and it has consequences. It creates a strong sense of cohort, it makes age itself a primary social fact, and it gives the young a shared world that adults observe only from outside.

Put the two together and much of the modern shape of childhood follows without anyone having to argue for it. The young spend more time among age peers and less among mixed ages. They spend more time in settings designed for them and less in settings designed for everyone. Adult attention at home is more concentrated. The category becomes more visible, more distinct and more separate, and the separation then feeds back into how the period is understood, until it seems obvious that of course the young inhabit a different world. They do, but the world was built recently and by accident.