We operationalized Ariès’ change hypothesis so that the infantilization intended by him would mean that images of children in paintings became increasingly childish from the 15th to the 20th century. We predicted that the paintings of children across the centuries would demonstrate a kind of cultural historical neotony. We simply calculated the correlation between the historic dates and the childishness‐scores, based on ratings by adults according to the Kindchenschema‐criteria. The findings supported the change hypothesis: the correlation was .60, which indicates that paintings in the past emphasized less childishness than modern paintings. This is a surprising and important result, precisely because, contrary to what most historians and in particular art historians claim, it does support Ariès’ interpretation of the paintings.
This research concerning the most controversial part of Ariès’ influential original study shows that we certainly cannot discard Ariès’ view on the infantilization of children as a fable. I therefore consider it important to study the history of pedagogy and developmental psychology, themselves cultural historical phenomena, from an Ariès’ type perspective, rather than from a naive progressive view, as has been the case for too long. The names of Montaigne, Locke, and Rousseau are often proposed as milestones in the progressive modernization of our approach to children. However, instead of a gradual progression in our attitude towards children, supported by science, from my perspective there are culturally and historically changing images of children, of which scientific study is rather the result than the cause (Koops, 1990, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2016).
A most important cultural historical change that in fact ended the process of infantilization is the influence of modern electronic media, actually leading to what could be called the disappearance of childhood.
The Disappearance of Childhood
According to the American culture critic and media specialist Neil Postman (1931–2003), the Western child started to disappear in the early 1960s (Postman, 1992). Following the beliefs of Ariès, Postman observed that without education, or rather without schools, there are no children in the modern sense of the word. After all: “In an illiterate society (like that of the Middle Ages) there was no need to sharply distinguish between children and adults, such a society harbours few secrets, and civilisation does not need to supply education in order to understand itself” (Postman, 1992, p. 22). The notion of the “child” is redundant if everyone shares the same information environment and lives in the same social and intellectual world. In the wake of many media experts and historians, Postman believed that the art of printing created a new world of symbols, which in its turn required a new interpretation of the notion of “adulthood” (Postman, 1992, p. 28).
The invention of the printing press most likely by Johannes Gutenberg (1394–1468) in 1440, resulted in “adulthood becoming a symbolic achievement, not a biological phenomenon. With the invention of the art of printing, children were required to develop, which would be effected by learning to read, by entering the world of typography” (Postman, 1992, p. 43). As a result, children needed education and were compelled to go to school. This made the notion of the “child” inevitable. We can join Postman in observing that this notion had its “finest hour” between 1850 and 1950 (more appropriately a “finest century”). Children had to work in factories as little as possible and were required to attend school. They were given their own clothes, furniture, literature, games, and social world. A process usually called infantilization took place, a historical lengthening of childhood (see Koops, 1998). In contrast, the person who according to Postman is responsible for the “childless era” starting after 1950 is Samuel Morse (1791–1872). Morse’s invention of the telegraph (demonstrated in public for the first time in 1837) further denaturalized information from “personal possession to merchandise of global value.” “Telegraphy marked the beginning of the process of information becoming uncontrollable” (Postman, 1992, p. 74). All this affected the notion of the child immensely.
The child originated from an environment in which the information in books was controlled by adults and was gradually supplied to children. However, anonymization as a result of telegraphy caused a development that would ultimately take away information from the authority of parents and the family. After the invention of telegraphy, this development was boosted by a continuous stream of inventions: the rotation press, camera, telephone, gramophone, film, radio, television (Postman, 1992, p. 76), culminating in what was not described by Postman, the launch of the internet. Mainly because these modern means of communication primarily use image language, the typical characteristic of childlikeness, illiteracy, loses its meaning. Knowing the alphabet is not a requirement for understanding images (Postman, 1992, p. 81). Television, for example, removes the dividing lines between children and adults to a large extent: “Supported by other electronic media which do not rely on the written word, television re‐creates communication conditions like those existing in the 14th and 15th centuries” (Postman, 1992, p. 82); “in the new media climate everything is available to everyone at the same time: electronic media cannot keep secrets …” and “without secrets the notion of the ‘child’ is void …” (Postman, 1992, p. 83).
Postman (1992) thoroughly demonstrated the disappearance of the child by presenting a large amount of (anecdotal) information on: the portrayal of young people as miniature adults in the media (p. 122); the disappearance of children’s songs (p. 123); the fading of the Disney view of the child (p. 125); the disappearance of children’s clothes, while adults have begun to wear clothes that were previously intended for children (p. 127 ff.); the disappearance of children’s games (p. 129), while top‐class sport has become normal to children (p. 129); and the decline of good manners (p. 132). All this together points to the decline of the notion of the “child,” said Postman, “and accordingly to a weakening of the nature of adulthood.” Postman’s book is concisely and powerfully summarized in the final sentence of the cover text: “The basic notion of this book – that our electronic information environment makes the ‘child’ disappear – can also be read as follows: an electronic information environment makes the adult disappear.”
It is important to realize that many books have been published in the 1970s that intend to free the child from the chains of its immaturity. An example of such books is that by Kuijer (1980). Other examples are Illich’s book, calling for a “deschooling” of society as it hinders children from participating in an adult society (Illich, 1973); Holt’s book, consistently pleading for freeing the child from the chains of a 300‐year‐old tradition of servitude (Holt, 1976); and Farson’s book, interpreting the rights of the child very literally and broadly, e.g., by demanding that children are given the right to vote, “because adults do not stand up for their interests and cannot vote on their behalf” (Farson, 1974, p. 179).
Interestingly, the period discussed by Postman in relation to the disappearance of childhood, the 1970s, also witnessed an unprecedented large global research effort, centering on undermining Piaget’s structural cognitive theory. In other words, the non‐inter‐convertible developmental stages, referred to as cognitive structures, were gradually replaced by continuous domain‐specific developmental processes. Neo‐Piagetian research from that time undermined the presumptions of the Rousseau‐Piaget tradition, which emphasized the inaccessibility of childlike thinking, like never before. The fanaticism with which the origins of all kinds of childlike rationality were explored, caused many a researcher to end up as an “infancy expert” (Koops, 1990, 2004). This post neo‐Piagetian research, among other things, resulted in research on the Child’s Theory of Mind experimentally demonstrating how 2–3‐year‐old children already have a command of current lay psychology, based on a simple theory of desires and beliefs. Meanwhile, the search for the increasingly younger origins of generally human means of communication has not come to an end. Onishi and Baillargeon (2005), for example, demonstrated in an article in Science