All about the economics of childhood
For much of history, childhood as we know it didn't exist, and children were often treated more like miniature adults than kids
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In the early Middle Ages, when roughly a third of babies didn’t survive to their first birthday, parents didn’t agonize so much over screentime. But some historians go further, arguing that parents didn’t really agonize about their children, full stop. Instead, kids were seen more like short, incompetent adults, and shoved into the workforce soon as they were yay high. Those that died were mourned, briefly. Those that survived had to earn their place.
At least, that’s the argument that the French sociologist Philippe Ariès advanced in the 1960s. Reviewing medieval paintings, diaries, games, and school records, he concluded that “childhood” as a distinct, sentimentalized life stage didn’t really exist until about the 19th century, and began as an upper-class set of attitudes that slowly, eventually drifted down to the emerging middle class and beyond.
It’s a compelling theory, and a disputed one. In the long years since, historians have pushed back hard, arguing that Ariès mistook a lack of evidence for a lack of feeling, and that grieving parents in, say, 1150 still felt the loss of their children, and maybe even loved a few of them. As for the children themselves, and what they have to say (the darndest things), scroll on below.
1.6: The percentage of its GDP that Sweden spends on early childhood care, with its policy model treating childcare as a matter of public infrastructure, rather than some private family burden. The world average runs about 0.7% of GDP, while the U.S. lags behind at just 0.3%. The gap shows how unevenly countries socialize the cost of raising children.
3.1: Percentage of the world’s children who are American — even as they consume some 40% of the world’s toys, according to a UCLA study. Of course, you already know this from your own living room floor.
29: Percentage of the world’s population currently under 18, reflecting roughly 2.4 billion people, or nearly three in 10 humans on the planet.
$13,128: The average annual child care cost for a family in the U.S. as of 2024, where such costs consume about 32% of a typical household’s income. But seriously why aren’t people having kids?!
2 billion: The number of children ages 0-14 alive today, a handy reminder that, even as birthrates fall, childhood remains a major demographic reality.
It’s true that kids used to be economic assets, not metaphorically but literally — as in hauling water, scaring birds off fields, minding younger siblings, working looms, and mining coal. A child who couldn’t or didn’t contribute was, for much of history, a liability your average family couldn’t afford.
“I have worked in the pit for two weeks; I stand and open and shut the door; I’m generally in the dark, and sit me down against the door... I stop 12 hours in the pit; I never see daylight now, except on Sundays,” as one seven-year-old told a British government commission in 1842. Those were the days! It’s evidence that, even if Ariès was correct about childhood being a more modern concept, the concept was still firming up in your great-great-grandparents’ day.
Then, somewhere in the last century, our notions about children truly flipped. Whereas feeding a kid used to be a much more limited investment, and one that came with a payback period, now it's pretty much just a cost, stretched out over roughly 20 years with no return except hugs and drawings for the fridge. The change has been complicated and political — as much a matter of compulsory schooling laws, and minimum age requirements as it was any new cultural consensus that hard hats should be a matter of dress-up only.
Sociologists studying childhood today talk less about kids as passive dependents and more as “social actors” — that is, subjects with their own vivid inner lives and worth studying on their own terms. This represents one more shift in how seriously childhood gets taken. Yet the lived experience of being a kid has arguably never been more managed, more scheduled, above all scrutinized. The paradox is, by almost every metric, children are safer than they've ever been, and at the same time, they’re more anxious and less free. The happy medium remains a matter of imagination.
“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: ‘youth’ is the privileged age of the 17th century, childhood of the 19th, adolescence of the 20th.”
—French historian Philippe Ariès in his landmark book, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life.
Approx 80,000 years ago: Neanderthal footprints suggest packs of children running amok, perhaps playing in ways we’d recognize today.
1750: Data from Sweden suggests that, as late as the 18th century, about 40% of children died before age 15.
1960: Philippe Ariès published Centuries of Childhood in French, while the English translation came out in 1962. His argument that historical understanding of childhood has changed dramatically over time upended the common assumption that childhood is a fixed, universal experience.
1990s: Newer sociological views of childhood emerge, with children being viewed as people with their own subjectivity, valid feelings, agency, etc.
2024: More than 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S., which sounds like a lot. But it reflects a long-term decline in the birthrate, one mirrored in many other developed countries, such as Japan, where adult diapers outsell those for kids. Waaah, indeed. We may be taking children more seriously now, and having fewer. Whether these things are related is an open question.
If you don't remember much about your early childhood, you’re not the only one. Scientists speak of “childhood amnesia” and have found that most people's earliest memory is a moving target which depends on how subjects are asked and how many times they’re asked. But most people don’t recall anything before about age four.
If you want to spark a good conversation with your parents or even your own children about their childhoods, check out this list of prompts from Story Corps, a nonprofit oral-history project staffed by folks who ask such questions for a living.
