When one looks at European portraits of children (including the Christ child), painted before the Renaissance, i.e. before about 1500, one is amazed at how children were portrayed. They all look like miniature adults. One sees the same images in all ancient cultures that have left pictures of children behind: the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese: children are generally depicted with adult proportions but smaller stature, or as idealised divine youths.
The children are also all dressed the same way as the adults around them, but look awkward, weird and out of proportion. Why? The tip-off lies in the size of the head. Children’s heads are, in proportion to their bodies, much larger than adult heads. At birth, the baby’s head makes up about one quarter of its length. The large head contains our enormous brains, housing the complex wiring necessary for vital survival reflexes, among which is the need to tap into the instinct of adult humans to take care of a new human, and that survival reflex system in a newborn’s brain is highly developed at birth and one of the reasons why the head is so big.
As a person grows, the body lengthens much faster than the head. A newborn’s length is equal to four head lengths. By 2 to 5 years, the child is 5 to 6 heads tall. The proportion of head length to body length (and of head size to body size) gradually decreases so that an adult is about 7.5 to 8 heads tall. The head, while continuing to grow, has shrunk in proportion to body length.
This may seem a naive observation to point out but for thousands of years it was not made and children were painted with adult proportions.
Reasons for this are not known but sometime around 1500, Italian artists began to paint children in correct proportions. Around the same time, people began to talk about children, not as little adults as had been the case up to then, but as unique individuals with unique needs. There might be a relationship.
So, from about 1500, the artistic perception in Europe about children started changing and children began to be portrayed as they really were, big heads and all. And since it is Europe that now begins to dominate the cultural landscape all over the world and spread their beliefs, that opinion appears to become slowly accepted. And it’s around this time that adults begin believing that children are different to adults and have special needs which are, once physical needs like nutrition and safety are satisfied, related to their developing into adults.
This process took years to develop. It is still not accepted. Some cultures do accept that differences between adult and child exist.
It’s really not until the Enlightenment, around 1750, under the influence of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rosseau, who viewed children as inherently good, that the idea of the child as different to the adult and worthy of special care, begins to take off. It took many more years before this was accepted. In England, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824 but the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was not until 1893. The British Medical Association (BMA) was founded in 1855. It was only in 1928 that the British Paediatric Society split off from the BMA. It did not receive its Royal Charter, so important to the English, until 1996. Other countries follow the same trend eg the American Medical Association was founded in 1847 and the American Academy of Paediatrics in 1930. There has been a Trinidad and Tobago Medical Association around since colonial days until it was given formal recognition in 1974. Ten years later, a paediatric group, the Paediatric Society of T&T, was formed. And child abuse, or the deliberate harming of children, was only formally recognised worldwide in 1962 when the American paediatric radiologist, C Henry Kempe, coined the term “battered-child syndrome” despite examples of child abuse going back to biblical times.
Childhood seems to be a recent invention.
Nowadays, society must be careful of not making the mistake of thinking that because children appear to be more sophisticated than we were at their age, they are more adult-like than they really are. That would be as bad a mistake as mediaeval parents who thought their children were little adults. We cannot return to abusing children. Let the children enjoy their “economically useless but emotionally priceless” childhood.
