tion. In America and France, laws were passed in an effort to make it mandatory. New advances in factory machinery made the employment of children less necessary, and early regulations of child labor began appearing. In the East—specifically Japan—primary education became universal, and children were increasingly defined by their capacity to learn. The Russian education system, too, was expanding at the time. This is also where some of the first childrearing guides emerged—expertise beyond a parent’s instinct was now required. And people became fascinated with recording birth dates and ages—prior to the 18th century, as Ariès argues, most people did not care to know, let alone celebrate, these facts. One can see how, with such an indeterminate definition, those in the medieval world might have a different conception of childhood, and age in general.

During the Enlightenment, art was also beginning to mirror the changing attitudes about children, and reflect them back onto society. Whereas, as Ariès noted, many medieval works rarely featured children (and if they did, they looked like small adults), pieces were created in the 1700s that singularly featured children as individual, thinking, feeling beings, and focused on the love and nurturing of family life. Ariès notes an uptick in family portraits with children prominently displayed, underscoring their integral part in the unit—he also specifies a trend towards portraits of dead children rising inverse to the infant mortality rate, asserting that child death was becoming an exception instead of a rule and families valued them enough to mourn them. The French artist Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin was one of the first to focus on painting individual portraits of children as they truly were: immersed in play. In contrast, the infant Jesus was the most commonly-pictured child prior to this time—his decision to paint children at all was quite novel, and his work contributed hugely to the public perception of the young having an interior life.

By the 19th century, painters concerned themselves more with representing emotion and changing people’s perceptions of reality—depictions of the poor young victims of the Industrial Revolution were controversial at the time, but their humanism coaxed growing interest in children’s rights. On their heels were the Impressionists—instrumental in depicting the intimacies of daily life. [ANNE HIGONNET QUOTE(S) HERE]

Literature, too, began changing the landscape of perceptions on childhood. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the religious view of saving children’s souls gave way to a mindset based less on the perils of youth and more on the in