Conclusion : Change , Globalization and Childhood

Amid all the complications of dealing with globalization and childhood, including its great unevenness, a crucial issue involves its relationship to larger, or at least earlier, processes of change. No conclusion can hope to embrace the various findings of the essays in this collection, but a final comment on this relationship will help. The fundamental transformation of modern childhood began before globalization, at least as the latter is usually defined. It took shape initially in Western Europe and the United States, in association with rapid industrialization; although the West added in some particular elements, including ideas about children derived from the Enlightenment and Romanticism, it was really the industrial process that predominated. Change involved three intertwined elements, all of which developed over several decades, and qualified by social class, but all of which constituted decisive contrasts with childhood past. First, schooling replaced work as the child's primary social obligation, a radical departure from the norms that had predominated, for most families, in agricultural economies. Initially affecting young children, this shift would spread upwards in age. Second, the birth rate dropped, which altered children's relationships with their parents and, even more obviously, with siblings. And third, the child death rate plummeted, again with impacts on parent-child relations, including, potentially at least, parental emotional investment in individual young children. Relationships among these changes were obvious: with schooling, children moved from contributing to the family economy to drawing wealth from the family. Once realized, this in turn promoted a lower birth rate. Schooling for women also correlated strongly with lower birth