Starting with the influential and admittedly highly contested research of historians such as Philippe Aries, scholars have come to the conclusion that if childhood itself is not an invention of the relatively recent past, the particular stages of demarcation—infant, toddler, preschooler, preteen, adolescent—are themselves arbitrary and subject to ongoing change.3 Several quite contemporary examples illustrate this point well. Currently the U. S. Census Bureau reports on the child care arrangements for children under the age of fifteen, thereby implicitly viewing that as an appropriate age for children to begin to be left on their own.4 But as recently as in the 1950s (during which at least some of those interviewed were children themselves), the Census Bureau reported only on the child care arrangements of those under twelve.5 Presumably anyone older than that could safely be left untended. Or consider this: teen parenting, which is identified as being a significant problem today, was the norm just a few generations ago.6 Indeed, the notion of adolescence itself is but a hundred years old.7 And recently psychologists have begun to extend the teen years out to a new stage—emerging adulthood—in recognition that even in their early twenties, “children” are not yet either autonomous in action or independent of parental guidance and support.8
Even outside these broad delineations we can find substantial regional and class differences. I vividly recall interviewing a farmer in Vermont, who told me that she had no trouble allowing her seven-year-old son to drive a tractor even though he had not yet learned the difference between left and right; she easily resolved this difficulty by giving him directions in terms of objects in the landscape (turn toward the barn; turn away from the apple tree). Read any contemporary account or memoir of growing up poor—as in Mary Childers Welfare Brat—and we find very young children, who would be pampered in many environments, holding down jobs and caring for still younger siblings.9
In short, the periods of demarcation for different stages of childhood, and the degree of autonomy (or, when looked at from the flip side, the degree of coddling) deemed suitable for those stages, continue to shift and change. And, as is part of the broader argument of this book, distinctive and class — based parenting practices, along with the long projected period of immaturity for one’s children discussed in chapter 1, are part of what is producing these changes today.