AHR Exchange

History of Children and Childhood—Being and

Becoming, Dependent and Independent

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BENGT SANDIN

How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood. You have stolen
my childhood with your empty words . . . You are still not mature enough to tell
it like it is. You are failing us . . . But young people are starting to understand
your betrayal. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you.
—Greta Thunberg, sixteen years of age, UN Climate Action Summit,
UN Headquarters
The history of children and childhood has never grown up, and it has little chance of
doing so given the current state of affairs in the field, Sarah Maza claims. She proposes
a remedy and suggests we should write a history through children rather than of chil-
dren. At this juncture in the field, this is a highly relevant and interesting proposal. I
welcome such a discussion of how historians of children and childhood can go about
their business. Clearly the author sees a focus on the history of children as a dead end
and seems to believe that a history through children can have a more substantial impact
on historical research and thinking. Maza has not given up on the field. I like that. I
agree that the field has a large potential and faces some serious challenges. I think
Maza has some reasonable points to make, but she blends them together in a curious
way, blurring both her vision and her argument. Her worldview, argument, and exam-
ples are also provincial—or perhaps simply from an American point of view—as they
do not fairly account for the status of the field of the history of children and childhood
from an international perspective that accounts for the different academic traditions
worldwide. (Granted, such a historiography is not easy to write.) Let me first take a
look at Maza’s definition of the field’s problem and her diagnosis of the causes of its
stunted growth and then critically evaluate her arguments.
Maza makes a link between the advent of the New Social History and the develop-
ment of the research field of childhood history. In her estimation, the interest in a
child’s perspective and the voices of children tends to be unproductive and can prove
difficult to connect to broader and more central historical questions. The nature of the
research field, Maza maintains, is such that it is basically unable to produce interesting
research of relevance for a broader academic or general audience. Combined with the
fact the childhood is something we all grow out of, this means there can be no real po-
litical clout behind writing a history of childhood—its patronage is ever shifting. The
instrumental use women and ethnic groups have made of their own histories is thus, for
Maza, fundamentally different. Children cannot mobilize anything similar, as they are
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical
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1306
 History of Children and Childhood 1307

destined to leave behind the social category and identity, and make no claim on the
writing of their history. The conclusion she draws is that the history of children and
childhood has not lived up to its potential after a promising beginning and in spite of
some early accomplishments—the founding of a society and an academic journal, an
encyclopedia, and so on. Her markers of failure include the facts that there are no
searches for positions in the history of children (at least in the U.S.), the number of spe-

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cial panels at conferences are few, and there are more women academics in the field
than men (a strange indicator of the lack of success, one might point out). Maza con-
cludes that the reason the history of children has not been more successful lies in the
very nature of the history of childhood itself and its roots in the New Social History
and, she implies, the resulting misplaced focus on the agency and voice of children.
In my view, this description of the field is biased and partly wrong. I think there is
much more to say about the formal success of the field, which Maza understates. The
Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) started as an organization in the
U.S., but it has by now, through a conscious effort, established a much more interna-
tional profile with biannual conferences located in other parts of the world (that is, out-
side the U.S. and Canada) and with awards in languages other than English.1 There is
also a Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past, a multidisciplinary historical an-
nual conference, with a journal and a monograph series.2 There are regional and na-
tional academic child-studies networks all over the world. This year, we will, for exam-
ple, see the Finnish Society for Childhood Studies have its ninth conference on child
studies to focus on the history of childhood.3 Major publishers such as Palgrave, Rout-
ledge, and others have series on the history of childhood.4 Major conferences such as
the European Social Science History Association and SSHA in the U.S. have midsize
standing networks on childhood and education. The one in Europe, at least, has seen a
predominance of histories of childhood rather than education. In other networks in
these social-history conferences, the history of children and childhood is also well rep-
resented, appearing, for example, in the networks on family and demography, sexuality,
labor, health and environment, politics, citizenship and nations, economic history, ma-
terial and consumer culture, and women.5 Historical perspectives are also important in
networks on children’s rights, and they are persistent in leading journals of childhood
research, such as Childhood, and such perspectives are a significant contributor in The
SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies.6 The history of children and
1
Society for the History of Children and Youth (website), accessed March 12, 2020, https://www.
shcy.org/.
2
The Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past (website), accessed March 12, 2020, http://www.
sscip.org.uk/.
3
Lapsuudentutkimuksen Seura [The Finnish Society for Childhood Studies] (website), accessed March
12, 2020, https://lapsuudentutkimuksenseura.yhdistysavain.fi/in-english/. This conference was postponed
due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
4
See, for instance, G. Rousseau and L. Brockliss, eds., Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood,
22 vols. (London, 2007–2019); Claudia Nelson, ed., Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present, 40 vols.
(New York, 2011–2020).
5
“European Social Science History Conference 2020,” accessed March 12, 2020, https://esshc.social
history.org/. This conference was postponed to a later date in 2021.
6
Children’s Rights European Academic Network (website), accessed March 12, 2020, https://crean-net
work.org/; Daniel Thomas Cook, ed., The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, 4 vols.
(Los Angeles, 2020); Anna Holzscheiter, Jonathan Josefsson, and Bengt Sandin, “Child Rights Governance:
An Introduction,” Childhood 26, no. 3 (2019): 271–288, https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219854518.

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1308 Bengt Sandin

childhood is represented in handbooks published on well-being, education, and media

and culture.7
Certainly the field struggles in terms of identifying its core, relevance, visibility,
and importance with regard to what is going on in the world today. To be sure, the
field’s relationship to the major academic trends in historical and social sciences
remains ill defined. One problem is its success, or rather its attractiveness to other well-

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established fields. As the field developed, perspectives on the history of children could
be found integrated into the history of education, family history, labor history, African
American history, historical demography, discussions of generational interactions, and
many other areas of historical study. Historians in those fields do not always distinguish
explicitly the different nature of, for example, the history of education and that of chil-
dren and childhood; similar arguments can be made about scholars of family and demo-
graphic history or women’s history.8 Moreover, a scholar’s identity as a child or child-
hood historian seems at times to be a phase many historians pass through in their
publishing history, which may be looked on as a weakness, just as the conferences
have had a significant turnover in their participants—but is this not also a strength?9 Is
that not something we strive for—a broad and diffuse intellectual impact?
A central dilemma here, of course, is the distinction between writing a history of
children and a history of childhood. Historians of the latter depend on a history of chil-
dren to be able to write about childhood, but the history of children in a sense belongs
to all fields and does not necessarily involve an interest in childhood or an identity as a
child or childhood scholar. But naturally, this may also lead to the core of the field not
appearing as very coherent, with a focus on a special methodology or a specific set of
theories. Instead, it creates a pluralistic area of studies. With such powerful and often
invisible diffusion across multiple areas of study, how, then, do we identify the very
core of the field? That is the challenge, one that calls for provocative discussions about
what this field is all about. We need more of that. The persistent references (tedious, I
agree!) to Ariès’s work reflect, I believe, maybe its status as a marker, an identifier of
the tradition, much like theoretically oriented disciplines such as sociology begin with a
customary nod to Durkheim, Weber, or Marx and then go on with business of writing
about the issue at hand. Other classic works, markers in the field, are referred to in the
same vein as Ariès—for example, Viviana Zelizer’s pathbreaking book (less tedious!)
on the emotional and economic value of children. She herself makes the nod to the so-
7
John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education (New
York, 2019); Asher Ben-Arieh, Ferran Casas, Ivar Frønes, Jill E. Korbin, eds., Handbook of Child Well-
Being: Theories, Methods and Policies in Global Perspective (Dordrecht, 2014); Kirsten Drotner and
Sonia Livingstone, eds., The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (Los Angeles,
2008); Jens Qvortrup, William A. Corsaro, and Michael-Sebastian Honig, eds., The Palgrave Handbook
of Childhood Studies (New York, 2009).
8
Mary O’Dowd and June Purvis, eds., A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity (New
York, 2018); Berry Mayall, Visionary Women and Visible Children, England 1900–1920: Childhood and
the Women’s Movement (New York, 2018); Rury and Tamura, The Oxford Handbook of the History of
Education (New York, 2019); Jean Trépanier and Xavier Rousseaux, eds., Youth and Justice in Western
States, 1815–1950: From Punishment to Welfare (New York, 2018), which is a part of the World Histo-
ries of Crime, Culture and Violence (WHCCV) series; Nell Musgrove and Deidre Michell, The Slow Evo-
lution of Foster Care in Australia: Just Like a Family? (New York, 2018); Stephen Lassonde, Learning
to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven, Conn.,
2005).
9
This point is based on impressions from some thirty years in the field.

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 History of Children and Childhood 1309

ciological classics—and makes good use of them.10 And other classics may yet come,
as it is unpredictable how classical work emerges and is then universally accepted as
such. Some of the important work in the field by, for example, Cunningham and Hey-
wood may indeed deserve such a role.11
We may also need to ask how the problems posed by the history of children and
childhood prompt and initiate academic discussions in the social sciences as they ad-

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dress questions relating to the history of psychology, parent-child relationships, and the
history of generational conflict.12 Perhaps there is a story to tell about the history of
children and childhood as an innovating force? Can we not seek better explanations for
the evolution of the field in its relationship to other disciplines, rather than the impossi-
ble quest, as Maza sees it, for child agency and the association with the New Social
History? And is the distinction between history of children and history through children
really productive? We need to root the history of the field in a sociological and historio-
graphical account of how the character of academic disciplines more generally evolve,
differentiate themselves, and then reassemble as new theories are brought on board and
new insights are made. Seeking an explanation like that, we need a broader outlook
than the reference to the role of the history of children and childhood in a U.S. context.
An important question in such a broader context is how the voice of children, the
history of children and childhood, can speak to the distinctive—and often competing—
grand narratives of individual nations in the West and the Global South. If such histories
of children and childhood cannot infuse themselves into these narratives, or represent a
critical perspective on them, as gender history, the histories on the Global South, and la-
bor history have done, they will probably not have a major influence on academic hiring,
curricula, or publishing. What role did children and childhood play and have an influence
in the advent of imperialism, the Cold War, industrialization and modernization, and,
more recently, climate change?13
All that said, I do agree there is a problem with agency and voice in the history of
childhood, just as there is in other areas of social history, or, as we used to call it, his-
tory from below. How the agency of children and their voices can be related to overall
historical shifts in society and politics remains a pressing question and a challenge.
That has indeed also been an issue in family and demographic history.14 It is worth not-
ing that seeing children as having agency or as subjective agents of their own history,
acting on the world as well as being acted on, does not necessarily mean that one only
has to hear children’s voices, as Maza seems to imply. That would indeed be fruitless
or antiquarian. But a study of agency can involve charting children’s autonomous
movements and actions as they left an imprint on city planning, court procedures,
household arrangements, gender relations, schooling, industrial policy, leisure and con-
10
Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton,
N.J., 1994).
11
Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (London, 1995); Colin
Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times
(Cambridge, 2001).
12
See, for example, the workshop on Historical Perspectives on Child Development: Implications for
Future Research (University of Michigan Department of Psychology, Ann Arbor, May 12–14, 2016), later
published in European Journal of Developmental Psychology 14, no. 6 (2017).
13
Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History, 3rd ed. (New York, 2017).
14
Tamara K. Hareven and Andrejs Plakans, eds., Family History at the Crossroads: A Journal of Fami-
ly History Reader (Princeton, N.J., 1987).

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1310 Bengt Sandin

sumption, and patterns of spatial presence as mirrored in urban planning and polic-
ing and social control, to name but a few phenomena shaped by the agency of young
people.15 This is the kind of analysis that has made it feasible to study hidden histories of
women’s and gender history by charting changing social patterns, and not only by relying
on oral sources. Moreover, children must not always do something to be agents; remain-
ing silent, passive, or invisible is also a social action that has very real effects in the

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world.16 I would agree that perhaps too much effort has been devoted to looking for a
genuine “voice” as if that has some essential quality and truthful nature representative of
the child as a historical figure. Also, the voices of children must be critically evaluated as
all historical sources are. Oral history, in itself, is not the solution to this particular prob-
lem but can be used to other ends and other problems, such as writing the history of those
who remember their childhoods and how such recollections have been used by individu-
als seeking compensation for experiencing abuse in the past, or how state authorities
have evaluated the nature of past abuse and childhood memories.17 The usage of the his-
tory of children and childhood is both public history and individual history, but children’s
agency in the past requires an ability not only to link them to larger narratives but also to
connect children’s experience—past, present, and remembered—to political and social
transformations of central importance. The ever-changing constructive nature of the his-
tory of childhood and children can speak to such transformations. That, however,
requires that we defocus children, and include the larger picture, which helps produce
and define the issues we study. The historical events defining the role and lives of chil-
dren cannot always be sought in the vicinity of childhood. The specific welfare-state
childhood that developed in Sweden from the 1940s to the 1990s was as much an effect
of a shortage of industrial labor; this shortage led to a massive mobilization of women’s
participation in the labor force and the import of a foreign labor force, resulting in
changes to taxes on incomes and an expansion of public day care for small children. The
welfare-state childhood that developed as a consequence led to a discussion of family
and children’s rights and the constitution of children as rights-bearing individuals pro-
tected by the state, within both the family and all public institutions.18
Certainly, edited volumes including only the voices of children can be totally incon-
clusive if they lack coherence and cohesive questions. However, there is a great value in
15
See, for example, Carl Suddler, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar
New York (New York, 2019); James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile De-
linquent in the 1950s (New York, 1986); James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of
Child Labor (Cambridge, 2010); N. De Coninck-Smith, Barndom og arkitektur: Rum til danske børn
igennem 300 år (Aarhus, 2011).
16
Spyros Spyrou, Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Child-
hood Studies (London, 2018).
17
Johanna Sköld, “Apology Politics: Transnational Features,” in Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain,
eds., Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in ‘Care’ (London, 2015), 13–26; Johanna Sköld,
Bengt Sandin, and Johanna Schiratzki, “Historical Justice through Redress Schemes? The Practice of
Interpreting the Law and Physical Child Abuse in Sweden,” Scandinavian Journal of History 45, no. 2
(2020): 178–201; Johanna Sköld and Shurlee Swain, eds., Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children
in ‘Care’ (London, 2015); Malin Arvidsson, “Retroactive Responsibility: A Comparison of Argumenta-
tion on State Redress for Historical Institutional Child Abuse in Sweden and Denmark,” Scandinavian
Journal of History 45, no. 2 (2020): 159–177, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2019.1621195.
18
Bengt Sandin, “Children and the Swedish Welfare State: From Different to Similar,” in Paula S.
Fass and Michael Grossberg, eds., Reinventing Childhood after World War II (Philadelphia, 2012),
110–138; Roger Klinth, “Göra pappa med barn: Den svenska pappapolitiken, 1960–1995” (Ph.D. diss.,
Linköping University, 2002).

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 History of Children and Childhood 1311

making readers of historical studies aware that children have a place in our joint past; that
may lead to new questions. The inconclusiveness of such studies is not particular to the
history of children. A collection of voices of suppressed servants from all over the world,
or the voices of laborers, would have the same problems. Such examples are hardly useful
to identify the problems within a specific academic field like the history of childhood, but
one that shares this pitfall with all historical endeavors. And children’s agency in the past

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can be linked to larger narratives but also to political processes of importance. Recent his-
torical work from Australia demonstrates that memories of childhoods, and voices in the
past, can identify and contribute to the understanding of historical abuse of children
in government care and the welfare system. When critically evaluated, as all historical
sources must be, such voices can speak not only to the understanding of the present
politics of restorative justice but also to our understanding of the social processes and
agency in the past.19
I have other difficulties appreciating Maza’s argument. When she refers to examples
of children or young people actually having done something political, Maza insists that
their actions were on behalf of adults or else shifts the goalposts by claiming that as ac-
tive citizens, below the age of maturity at the time, they were in effect adults, revealing
the constructive and changing notion of childhood. Maza thus creates an interpretative
framework in which children by definition must be passive, inactive, and dependent,
and if they are not—voilà—then they are defined as adults and fall outside the story of
childhood history! The remaining younger children are only seen as pawns used in the
interest of the adult world.
The problem with this approach, which seems intellectually founded in the tradi-
tional division between children in a state of becoming (that is, dependent and imma-
ture) and children in a state of autonomous being (that is, independent and mature) as
adults, is that all of us are both dependent and independent beings across the life course,
as many childhood-studies scholars have pointed out.20 This demarcation is not useful
or productive as an instrument of inquiry. There is no clear boundary here; states of be-
coming and being operate on a sliding scale and are not always discernable from each
other, or may operate in parallel in different aspects of a lived life and at the same time.
Adults are also dependent and incompetent over their lifetimes, rely on other adults and
sometimes even their competent children, and alternate between autonomy and inter-
dependence, without completely sacrificing agency. Agency cannot (must not) be used
to establish the distinction between adulthood and childhood.21 Besides, being an adult
was not so one-sided in the past either; older unmarried servants, hands in the
nineteenth-century household, were, for all intents and purposes, politically dependent
19
Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove, and Carla Pascoe Leahy, eds., Children’s Voices from the Past:
New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cham, 2019); Nell Musgrove, The Scars Remain: A
Long History of Forgotten Australians and Children’s Institutions (Melbourne, 2013); Kaisa Vehkalahti,
“Dusting the Archives of Childhood: Child Welfare Records as Historical Sources,” History of Education
45, no. 4 (2016): 430–445.
20
Alan Prout, The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Children (London,
2005); Nick Lee, Childhood and Society: Growing Up in the Age of Uncertainty (Buckingham, 2001).
21
Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge, 1998); Lee, Child-
hood and Society; Nick Lee, Childhood and Human Value: Development, Separation and Separability
(Maidenhead, UK, 2005); Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That
Made the American People (New York, 1951); Lassonde, Learning to Forget.

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1312 Bengt Sandin

beings, defined as “children” or at least “childlike,” as were slaves, women, and mature
populations in the colonies, to name but a few categories, irrespective of their age.22
That suggests that the historical definition of childhood not only rests on the so-
cially constructed category of age but also relies intersectionally on, for example, social
status, gender, class, ethnicity, and one’s role in society or the household. For economic
and social reasons, young adults in many parts of the West today, for instance, are a lot

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more dependent on adults, and for a longer time than they were in the past, but they are
still looked on as being adults. The protean nature of age cohorts and the very definition
of childhood are much more complex than Maza indicates and acknowledges, a com-
plexity she disregards at the cost of a central aspect of writing a history of childhood
and children. Such definitions must take into account that childhood operates within a
framework of variable generational relationships in different times and places, generat-
ing variable notions of childhood. The concept of childhood is also defined in relation-
ship to changing notions of parenting and can hardly be conceived of in isolation from
parenthood and political regulation of the lives of children and families. The examples
mobilized by Maza to illustrate the immaturity of the history of children, as demon-
strated by its alleged failure to show children as “visible actors in the past,” have little
explanatory value when it comes to the nature and status of the field, and they in fact
put constraints on the academic quest of writing the history of young folks.
Maza’s argument is particularly ironic as she proposes as a solution to the poor state
of childhood history that we write instead histories through children, how children are
used and childhood is constructed for political and cultural purposes—a history of chil-
dren as “a point of entry into another issue.” But is that not how the history of child-
hood has been written and is being written today? The studies of varying meanings of
childhood and notions associated with age and agency are exactly that! These themes
are a central aspect of the history of children and childhood, as researchers look at age
and sexual maturity, sexual agency, political suffrage and agency, social and participa-
tory rights, to mention but a few, including studies of both voice and agency in the
terms indicated previously. The fact that children ultimately will grow up and, hence,
not form a lobby and claim a fair role in the past or present based on their collective
identity is another matter altogether.
Still another problem remains with Maza’s argument about the transient nature of
childhood. “Childhood is a vanishing act. . . . Future-directed activity makes no sense
since it would mean struggling for a time in which their defining identity will cease to
exist,” she writes. She insists that the project of other groups gaining a voice “revolves
around the fulfillment of identity; the story of childhood is that of its own disappear-
ance.” Such a premise is essentialist in its nature, and it is based on the indefensible
premise that childhood is a specified given period, by nature or by culture, and one that
children identify with and acknowledge, if only temporarily. Given the premise that
childhood is a social construct, which Maza seems to share, one cannot take for granted
historically that such notions are accepted by children and define the extent of their his-
torical agency or being, and that such notions about childhood direct the life of children
in the past. Such constructs are based on the power structure as the adult world defines
22
For example, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding
Paternalism in the Old South (Cambridge, 2011); Karen Vallgårda, Imperial Childhoods and Christian
Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark (Basingstoke, 2015).

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 History of Children and Childhood 1313

it. Children in the past may have had other more important and complementary identi-
ties—as Africans or Italian Americans, members of first nations, Danes or dyslexics,
explorers or colonizers of foreign territories or future space engineers, physicians, weld-
ers, or cowboys—that may be more important. Children may also act with a notion of
improving not only their specific period of childhood but also their future lives as adults
(or as parents), irrespective of how childhood is culturally defined at the time. And

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childhood, as it is socially defined, is always very future oriented in its nature, defined
by, for example, the educational structure, as well as by systems for parent-child trans-
fers of property. It is about nurturing (acting out) an identity, being, but also about trans-
formative becoming—physically, emotionally, and intellectually—and sometimes with a
claim on the future, a claim, as sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg suggests, that is being
denied by the current generation of adults. Not because children would like to become
the adult “role models” they see around them but perhaps because they would like to
claim a different world and a different future. It is interesting how Thunberg, in claiming
a future endangered by the environmental crisis, acts in a realm defined by adults yet at
the same time demands the right to a childhood, now denied her, as she is forced to act in
lieu of the responsible politicians. Her critique of the adult world is expressed in terms
sometimes used to describe children—adults are immature and irresponsible. I cannot see
that the agency of children historically can only be reduced to “performance,” children
following a script offered to them by an adult world, as Maza claims.23
In the ambitions to identify a voice and agency (carried out by researchers who
have to take on the laborious task of actually listening to real voices and individuals),
however, histories of childhood have sometimes remained local and provincial and
have failed to associate themselves with the larger societal processes and grand narra-
tives that tend to be important in the historical discipline—as have descriptive social
histories of local labor protests, strikes, industrial captains and innovating individuals,
and women protesting their status. Another roadblock to access and to be integrated in
a national grand narrative is the varying and sometimes conflicting nature of grand nar-
ratives. What defines a “grand narrative” will differ across national histories. Swedish
scholars adhere to a very different national—and international—narrative from that of
U.S. or Vietnamese scholars, and that also shapes how one can address the problem of
writing an adequate history of children. At the same time, social histories as yet unteth-
ered to grand narratives face another roadblock. The problem with microhistory in the
field of childhood history (one that partly branches off in so many directions—family,
schooling, labor, rights) is that some of the paths to the grand narrative are not always
23
It could perhaps be useful to try to conceptualize Greta Thunberg’s critique as childism, in the terms
developed by John Wall: “Childism can be understood as like feminism but for children. It has emerged
in the academic literature as a term to describe efforts to respond to the lived experiences of the third of
humanity who are children through the radical systemic critique of scholarly, social, and political norms.
Beyond including children and young people as active social participants, childism also challenges and
transforms the historically ingrained adult-centered assumptions that underlie children’s systemic exclu-
sion in the first place. It functions analogously to terms like feminism, womanism, postgenderism, postco-
lonialism, decolonialism, environmentalism, and transhumanism. As such, it provides a needed critical
lens for deconstructing adultism and patriarchalism and reconstructing age-inclusive research and advo-
cacy.” Childism Institute (website), accessed August 8, 2020, https://johnwall.camden.rutgers.edu/child
ism-institute/. See also John Wall, “Childhood Studies, Hermeneutics, and Theological Ethics,” The Jour-
nal of Religion 86, no. 4 (2006): 523–548; Wall, “Human Rights in Light of Childhood,” International
Journal of Children’s Rights 16, no. 4 (2008): 523–543; and Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood (Wash-
ington, D.C., 2010).

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1314 Bengt Sandin

as obvious as they are in more established fields. A narrow study of the diplomatic
exchanges during the Cold War may have a clearer and more distinct narrative in the
West to relate to and thus is not necessary to develop. Clearly the childhood historians
have to take on such challenges and have indeed done so since the very start of the his-
tory of childhood and children. That is, for example, what Le Roy Ladurie does in his
history of the Cathar revolt when he writes about children or when Natalie Davis cri-

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tiques Ariès and points to the importance of youth groups and the role of charivaries as
an instrument of upholding norms and value structures. Or when Michael Grossberg
writes about child custody as an example of legal processes embedded in the family, or
Paula Fass on abduction, or Anthony Platt about delinquency and the child-saving
movement, or Viviana Zelizer, Harry Hendrick, Peter Stearns, and many more.24
The distinction that Maza tries to draw between a history of children and a history
through children, then, is basically exaggerated—they are intertwined in the nature of the
history of the field. We need the history of children to write a history of childhood. His-
torians of childhood since the very beginning of the field, struggling to identify voice and
agency, have taken an interest in a history through children, using both the perspectives of
children (voices, agency, presence) and childhood (as a construct about children) as instru-
ments to understand other societal and political processes.25 Having mischaracterized and
then rejected that specific kind of amalgamated historiography, Maza then proposes just
such a history as an alternative—a history through children that is already being done by
her targets, the straw person she criticizes and whose contributions she ignores. I see the
relevance and importance of the kind of history that the author promotes, but it is not new,
and worse for her theses in this article, the supposed absence of this approach cannot con-
sequently explain the failures of the history of children and childhood. History through
children has never been absent from the field. I truly believe and agree that it is a produc-
tive approach and that it can be a critical and relevant instrument when historians of child-
hood partake in the scholarly conversation as much as those of any other branch of his-
tory. However, I am not convinced that using a template developed by childhood studies
represents a solution, and I think Maza overvalues its potential.
Maza goes wrong when she attributes what she regards as the new approach—his-
tory through children—to the development of childhood studies. What Maza calls his-
tory through children was present before the development of the cultural theorizing of
childhood studies. When childhood studies emerged as a field, sociologists could use
24
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324,
repr. (London, 1978); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays
(Cambridge, 1987); Michael Grossberg, “Who Gets the Child? Custody, Guardianship, and the Rise of a
Judicial Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 2 (1983): 235–260; Michael
Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1985); Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 2nd ed. (Chicago,
1978); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977);
Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Per Bolin-Hort, Work,
Family, and the State: Child Labour and the Organization of Production in the British Cotton Industry,
1780–1920 (Lund, SE, 1989); Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Prob-
lem, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1990); Stearns, Childhood in World History; also Bengt Sandin, “Education,
Popular Culture and the Surveillance of the Population in Stockholm between 1600 and the 1840s,” Con-
tinuity and Change 3, no. 3 (1983): 357–390. See also Holzscheiter, Josefsson, and Sandin, “Child Rights
Governance.”
25
Gunilla Halldén, “Barnperspektiv som ideologiskt och/eller metodologiskt begrepp,” Pedagogisk
forskning i Sverige 8, no. 1/2 (2003): 12–23.

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 History of Children and Childhood 1315

constructivist historical and anthropological analyses of children and childhood in dis-

tant and past cultures to question positivist and essentialist understandings of children
in the social sciences.26 Historical studies of children and childhood underwrote the po-
litical project of establishing a sociology of childhood and ultimately childhood studies,
rooted in a critique of the behavioral sciences. The state of the behavioral sciences
were, partly, also a straw person created to motivate the academic political project.27

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The chronology in itself is also an indication that all children’s history was not pro-
duced within the framework of family history and the New Social History, as Maza
claims. The chronology indicates a successful and important dissemination of historical
perspectives into the sociology of childhood and child studies as a field. History of chil-
dren (and through children, in Maza’s terms) was not a perspective borrowed from
childhood or child studies but one that predated and paralleled it. Historical perspec-
tives generated by a history “through” children were a central aspect already at the start
of child and childhood studies, as exemplified by the first child and childhood studies
institutions in Sweden (1989), in Norway (1986), and later in the U.S. (at Rutgers Uni-
versity–Camden). However, I am afraid that childhood studies does, in fact, need more
and continued historical grounding. The field of childhood studies has a few of the
problems Maza associates, erroneously, with the history of childhood. The focus, in
very sweeping terms, is strongly on children and voice, the agency of children, and
children’s interactions with family and media and cultural expressions. Interesting and
relevant, but it is also a separate and internal academic discourse, where scholars of
childhood studies talk to each other and have a challenge to reach a broader academic
visibility and critical potential that Maza and I, too, want to secure for the field. It is in
this context where we can see the use and advent of theoretical initiatives, such as the
discussion on “childism,” that aim to redirect the study of children and childhood in a
more critical vein that can “respond to the lived experiences of the third of humanity
who are children through the radical systemic critique of scholarly, social, and political
norms” (as Wall’s Childism Institute discusses above) or through the concept of child
rights governance as a way of incorporating agency, politics and policy, and different
disciplinary approaches.28 The problems you can address with a history through chil-
dren (if speaking in the terms defined by Maza) can be of central importance to discus-
sions about human rights, governance, welfare regimes, the role of schooling in child-
ren’s lives, migrations, and international relations. Maza and I agree about that. That
consequently leads me to think it would be better for historians of children and child-
hood to engage in a critical interaction with scholars working in political science, inter-
national relations, human rights, welfare theory, economics, governance, and gender
26
Prout, The Future of Childhood.
27
Patrick J. Ryan, “How New Is the ‘New’ Social Study of Childhood? The Myth of a Paradigm
Shift,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 4 (2008): 553–576.
28
To mention just a recent interesting study I think lives up to such criteria, see Anette Wickström,
“From Individual to Relational Strategies: Transforming a Manual-Based Psycho-Educational Course at
School,” Childhood 20, no. 2 (2013): 215–228; Wickström, “Schoolgirls’ Health Agency: Silence, Upset
and Cooperation in a Psycho-Educational Assemblage,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on
Health and Well-Being 13, no. S1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/17482631.2018.1564518; Sofia Kvist
Lindholm and Anette Wickström, “‘Looping Effects’ Related to Young People’s Mental Health: How
Young People Transform the Meaning of Psychiatric Concepts,” Global Studies of Childhood 10, no. 1
(2020): 26–38. See also Holzscheiter, Josefsson, and Sandin, “Child Rights Governance.”

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1316 Bengt Sandin

studies, rather than with just scholars in childhood studies.29 These are all areas in
which history through children and the history of childhood can make important contri-
butions. Here we need both history of children and through children—or rather, a his-
tory based on a child’s perspective, a history based on the politically, socially, and cul-
turally defined child and childhood, and a perspective of the child and their voice,
agency, and presence. The latter needs the former to reach its potential.30 Historians

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could seek to publish in such journals outside the narrow realm of childhood studies
and take another step in the diffusion of critical historical perspectives on children.
Like children themselves, the history of children and childhood as a field of study is
both an intellectual entity in its own right (being) and ever transforming through inter-
action with other disciplinary fields (becoming), as well as both independent of and de-
pendent on other fields. Always and at the same time.

29
The following text is an attempt in that direction, although in a child studies journal: Holzscheiter,
Josefsson, and Sandin, “Child Rights Governance.”
30
See Gunilla Halldén, “Barnperspektiv som ideologiskt och/eller metodologiskt begrepp”; and Wall’s
Childism Institute, https://johnwall.camden.rutgers.edu/childism-institute/.

Bengt Sandin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Thematic Studies, Unit

of Child Studies, at the University of Linköping, Sweden. Sandin’s research has
focused on children and childhood in a historical perspective, spanning the time
from the early modern period to the late Swedish welfare state. His current re-
search deals with children’s rights regimes in Sweden, voting restrictions and the
political representation of children and youth in Sweden from 1900 to 2000, and
the limit of state responsibility; these are all different projects, but the limits of
state responsibility are exemplified by redressing child abuse in out-of-home care.
Recent publications include “Child Rights Governance: An Introduction,” with
Anna Holzscheiter and Jonathan Josefsson, in a 2019 special issue of Childhood;
“Historical Justice through Redress Schemes? The Practice of Interpreting the
Law and Physical Child Abuse in Sweden,” with Johanna Sköld and Johanna
Schiratzki, in Scandinavian Journal of History (2018). He is currently publishing
a book titled Governing Childhood, Education, Children, and State-Formation in
Early Modern Sweden (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming 2020).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2020