Enlightenment and its notion of progress (Rousseau) are explicitly based on the assumption that the child itself, through natural education and development, would work its way to the highest level: that of adult Western cultural man. Rousseau’s adoration of the “noble savage” (Rousseau, 1755, 1762) formed the basis for a hierarchical organization of peoples and of child‐development stages. Piaget endorsed this line of thinking. This is illustrated by the influence exerted on him by the cultural anthropologist he frequently quoted, Lucien Lévy‐Bruhl (1857–1939), who wrote classic works on “les sociétés inférieures” (Lévy‐Bruhl, 1910) and on “La Mentalité primitive” (Lévy‐Bruhl, 1922). In this last book, Lévy‐Bruhl described the thinking of “primitive” man as being “pre‐logic.” This was a characterization that Piaget applied to young children; in its development a child passes through different phases, from primitive to developed.
At the end of the 19th century this concept was biologized (Morss, 1990). The biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) from Jena, which was as influential as it was controversial, stated: “ontogenesis is a recapitulation of phylogenesis.” This fundamental law gave child development the status of a firm phylogenetically embedded structure and became the basis of Western developmental psychology (see Koops, 1990; Koops & Kessel, 2015). William Preyer (1841–1897), a friend of Haeckel, is generally considered the author of the first thorough developmental psychological study (Preyer, 1882). In the works of many key figures in the history of developmental psychology a strong echo of Haeckel’s biogenetic law can be discerned (Koops, 1990; Koops & Kessel, 2015), very much so in the work of Piaget. This implies that the child in its individual development rises from the primitive level to the highest level, that of Western European cultural man, by a law of nature.
After World War II, the idea of hierarchical organized stages has been challenged little by little. Lévi‐Strauss has done away with the reprehensible idea of the primitive state of natural peoples, which formed a justification of colonization. He has done so in such a radical way that modern cultural anthropologists nowadays feel shame because of the incomparability of pre‐logical thinking by so‐called savages and by children. In a fine article on the question of “Why don’t anthropologists like children?,” Hirschfeld (2002) recalls an extract from the essay by the French philosopher Jean‐Paul Sartre (1905–1980) on “The Anti‐Semite” (Sartre, 1954). Following an unpleasant experience with a Jewish furrier, Sartre’s Anti‐Semite started hating Jews, not furriers (Sartre, 1954, p. 14). Similarly, cultural anthropologists felt very awkward about their past of comparing children with natural peoples and as a result gave up studying children, not peoples.
Hirschfeld does exaggerate a little. I would like to comment here, that although there is no such thing as a well‐established subdiscipline of the “cultural anthropology of the child,” some interesting studies have been carried out. The most important are included in an excellent anthology (see LeVine & New, 2008); and see also Chapter 8, this volume.
Applying Lévi‐Strauss’ view to the stages of child development dismisses the idea that these stages are hierarchically interrelated (see Van der Veer, 1985, p. 108; Van IJzendoorn et al. (1981, p. 66), and results in age groups being considered groups with an independent “culture.” Ultimately, the concept of childhood loses its meaning. According to authors who will be discussed later, this has indeed happened since the 1970s. A fine example of this new de‐infantilizing thinking is a book by the Dutch children’s book author Kuijer, who describes a stage theory equivalent to Piaget’s as “a series of locks ensuring that not a spark of ‘childlikeness’ accidentally passes into adulthood” (Kuijer, 1980, p. 15). In such a view, the classical idea of childlikeness primarily consists of contempt of childhood. Relinquishing this contempt would imply humane respect for children, resulting in the disappearance of the child. Has this indeed happened? The answer to this question will comprise two steps: first the history of infantilization will be described and will then serve as a background against which the relatively recent “disappearance of childhood” will be sketched.
Infantilization according to Ariès
No image is as pliable as that of the child. Since the beginning of the 1960s there has been a separate subdiscipline within the domain of historical studies, which is directed particularly at the history of these pliable images, called the “history of childhood.” This new subdiscipline is primarily inspired by the work of Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) (Aries, 1960, 1962). Here I must resist the temptation to expand on Ariès’ work and suffice with a brief summary with respect to what I consider as his two main hypotheses: the discontinuity hypothesis and the change hypothesis (Koops, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2016).
The discontinuity hypothesis assumes that the child did not exist until after the Middle Ages. In Medieval civilization there was a negligible difference between the worlds of children and of adults; as soon as the child was weaned, it was seen as the natural companion of the adult. Other historians have found little or no evidence to support this hypothesis. Important research has been done by Hanawalt (1993) which shows that children in London in the 14th and 15th centuries, in many respects, did indeed inhabit a world which was specifically for children and not for adults: they played more than adults, and in separate, safe places; they were part of age groups and had their own, age‐related social environment. Even Ariès himself admitted that his discontinuity hypothesis requires far‐reaching modifications, so far reaching that I would simply conclude that the discontinuity hypothesis is not tenable (for more detailed documentation see Koops, 1996, 1998).
The change hypothesis states that, from about the 13th century, there was a continuous increase in childishness in the cultural representations of children. For this continuous increase in childishness I will use the term infantilization, that is an increasing duration of the childhood stage, which is necessarily accompanied by an increasing distance between the worlds of children and adults (Elias, 1939; Koops, 1998; Plessner, 1946). Much empirical historical support has been gathered for the change hypothesis. Instead of going into the abundant and complex literature, I will illustrate Ariès’ notion of historical changes by referring to a series of paintings. Although Ariès used many types of historical material to support his change hypothesis, it is his interpretation of the child in the world of art that is most controversial. I will briefly illustrate Ariès’ interpretation of children in paintings and refute some of the most persistent academic arguments, which so persistently criticize him precisely on this point.
Ariès argued that up to the 14th century, there are no depictions of children characterized by a special artistic representation, but only images of men on a reduced scale. From around the 14th century onward the Christ child is gradually portrayed as increasingly childish. In the 16th century genre paintings arose in which the child was apparently depicted because of his or her graceful or picturesque qualities. In the 17th century, the modern child was, at last, fully represented in paintings, particularly in Dutch paintings: for the first time there are portraits of children on their own, an intense interest in typical childish scenes is shown, and even family portraits were completely planned around the child. Probably the most dramatic change in the attitude towards the portrayal of children occurred in the 18th century, and generally Rousseau is seen as the advocate of the new stance – not by painting but through his book on the boy Émile. In the 19th century the romantic interest in children even extended to adolescence, which at that time began to take on dramatic forms for the first time in Western History (Koops & Zuckerman, 2003).
Several years ago I made the effort to study the empirical tenability of Ariès’ assertions on children in paintings (Koops, 1996). This was primarily to investigate the most important argument against Ariès’ interpretations, namely that his discussion of some tens of paintings (out of a population of tens of millions of paintings: Koops, 1996; Van der Woude, 1997) certainly cannot be called representative for Western paintings in general. Thanks to a careful and time‐consuming inventory of Dutch and Flemish paintings in which children