Similarities Between Stone And Plumb

The history of childhood is a subject of controversy. Since serious historical investigation began into this area in the late 1960s, historians have increasingly divided into two contrasting camps of opinion, those advocating "continuity" in child rearing practices, and those emphasising "change". As there is little evidence of what childhood was really like in the past, it is incredibly difficult for historians to reconstruct the life of a child, much more the "experience" of being a child. In so many ways, the history of childhood is a history that slips through our fingers. Few Parents have left written records of how they reared their children, and fewer still children have left us their story. It is largely because of this lack of evidence,
Art and literature may reflect to a certain degree the values and attitudes of a given society, but they are also limited by the technological understandings of the age. It could be argued that the change in the portrayal of children was due entirely to the Renaissance influence on physical realism in portraits, and the development of superior artistic skills as a consequence. Also, as artists became more familiar with painting the human form, they may have been more comfortable in exploring other forms of presentation, moving away from the stiffness of some early portraits, to the more naturalistic settings of the eighteenth century. Similarly, the commercial availability of toys and children's literature may have been the product of a growing materialistic and technological world, not an indication of a greater awareness of childhood. Just because toys were not commercially available in the past does not mean that the need for children to play was not appreciated. Parents may have manually made toys for their children. Indeed, Linda Pollock argues that imaginative play was common through out this period. The literary development could
They argue that now parents were aware of the needs of children, they were more equipped to respond to them, and give their children the care and protection they so desperately needed. Both Ralph Houlbrooke and Lawrence Stone argue that during the course of the seventeenth centuries, families became more openly affectionate. They see the decline in observances such as the "blessing" as evidence of a more loving family relationship. The "blessing" was considered to be important in what it symbolised about the inferiority of children to adults. Children were expected to seek their parent's blessing every morning and night. Even in adulthood, children were expected to ask for this blessing every so often. There were also other customs to remind children of the respect, duty and obedience they owed their parents. Boys for example, were expected to take off their hats in their parent's presence, and allegedly girls were expected to kneel before their mother. The Countess of Falkland for example, knelt before her mother even in adulthood, and even though she had obtained a higher social status than her mother through marriage. Ralph Houlbrooke argues that in the seventeenth century such practises were declining. The "blessing" he says was replaced with a "goodnight kiss", and the other customs relaxed. He believes