Children's Games

Children’s Games According to Pieter Brueghe’s painting, children’s games, children in the painting are depicted to be having a great childhood, one that every child would love and remember. This photo takes place in the Spanish Netherlands around the 1560s. The children are playing with hops, kick balls and what looks like to be a game of baseball. Childhood was never and emphasized time in a human’s life during this era. Their parent’s needed help early so a child’s childhood was limited to parental needs. Their parents needed them to work around the house, in the fields and through this process children were forced to mature really early, so the children missed the whole adolescents phase. Many thoughts about a child’s childhood started to changed. Pieter Brueghe is trying to show the transition from young children to young adult to adulthood in this painting. He wants to show the era where people started to understand the idea of that children will act the way they were raised. In the painting, Pieter shows that the children are running around and playing with each other. The kids are centralized to more of the middle of the painting and are shown playing with a number of different children’s toys and other children. They are using kick balls, they have a baseball game going on and others are running around doing hand stands and cartwheels. This was a relative new thought process between the 1450’s and the 1750, adults began to let their children develop more and have more time to play games. Before this new thought of a separate childhood phase came about, children were forced by the age of eight to be working full time with their parents. The boys would be haling water buckets and taking care of the livestock while the girls would be making food and clothing in the house. In the painting the adults are seen more around the borders of the picture and are shown working in the city with no help from children. This would make one think that adults were