During class discussion of Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children, there was a lot of talk about children’s literature having to entertain both children and adult audiences, which I didn’t find that shocking. When taking the class I imagined the books we were to read would be geared towards adults, as well as children, and hold a deeper meaning for the adults that would go right over the heads of these “little people”. Otherwise we would be studying picturebooks with 17 max. pages all semester. What I did find interesting was the part about how “the family” evolved. In the article, Little People: When Did We Start Treating Children like Children?, by Joan Accocella, she discusses how the concept of children is relatively new. Which i related to the books that I’m reading now, which are from A Song of Ice and Fire. In these books, there are children from 8-years-old doing ridiculous things and I usually had to suspend my disbelief that a 10-year old girl* is out their stabbing the hearts of knighted men while riding horseback while trying to navigate a map. After reading the article, I can see how the author of the books I’m reading did some extensive research on the era. The idea that children were not regarded as children clears up a lot of my questions in my own reading.

“Children gradually came to be seen as creatures of a different order from adults: innocent, fragile, temptable, and therefore in need of molding….The ‘discovery of childhood,’ Ariès says, deprived the child of all that and ‘inflicted on him the birch, the prison cell—in a word, the punishments usually reserved for convicts.’ At the same time, children became the objects of ‘obsessive love,’ together with incessant demands for conformity to a family ideal.“

These lines hold true in present day. Many parents that oppose marriage equality will say it is because having two gay parents in a family would pass the “gayness” on to their children—if they can manage to adopt some. Meanwhile, a baby boy can’t even look in the direction of a woman without his parents calling him a little lady’s man, or passing down some other archaic gender roles to their pretty little princesses and tough little men. The innocence of children that is so sort after to protect is sullied by the parents themselves. But then again parents aren’t the only ones to participate in such irony, teachers also play their part. Teaching children on the cusps of their sexuality not to have sex instead of giving them information about what sex is and how to do it safe.