changed. No longer did parents wait until a child was guaranteed to survive, or recycle the names of deceased siblings—the individuality of each child was underscored in this shift. Wetnursing—which had been prevalent with families of even middle social classes—was discouraged, and even physical punishment came under fire.

By the mid-1800s, there was a shift from chore-based learning, apprenticeship, and elite-only scholarship into mass education. 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 inste