throughout history, and many experts have since sought to build context around his arguments.

It has become a very crowded conversation. Even an attempt to define “childhood” makes it clear that nuance shapes every angle of the subject. Ariès’ perspective foreshadowed an investigation into the developmental conception of life, with stages increasingly elaborated. What had historically been as simple as a transition from baby to adult became a journey from infant to child to youth to adolescent to middle-aged to elderly. The current popular consensus seems to agree that childhood ends at, or right after, adolescence. Even now, a debate rages over when human life begins—next, could embryonic life precede infancy?

And that is to say nothing of childhood’s fluid definition throughout time and within various cultures—with current life expectancy in industrialized Western societies being much longer than it was centuries ago, childhood has experienced a creeping scope. Where a 16th century European 13-year-old was considered adult (because he or she would only live to be about 35 years old), a modern European 13-year-old has just crossed the threshold from child to adolescent, and can remain in a childlike state for decades, having the luxury (an average life expectancy of 78 years) to bask in it.

Consider further the modern differences across the globe when it comes to the legal drinking age, the age of consent, the age to serve in the military, and the age to drive—these laws are popularly held to be official markers of the end of childhood, and there is no one standard answer. It wasn’t until the 1890s that experts began formally studying adolescence—American psychologist G. Stanley Hall first fully defined it in 1904, then Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson blew the case wide open. Even the laws that govern children are a relatively new concept.
But to attempt an understanding about changing attitudes towards childhood, one must traverse the transforming landscape of society from the earliest points of human history via various expert findings. One of the more succinct views comes from anthropologist David F. Lancy, who divides societies between two definitions: neontocracy and gerontocracy. Most current Western countries are neontocracies: societies where children are the most valued members (the United States, for example). But historically, the majority have been gerontocracies, which emphasize attention to the oldest members.