Introduction — Studying Childhood Through a Socio-Historical Lens

Introduction: The Socio-Historical Lens

SDS 220R examines childhood as a concept and the lives of children through a socio-historical lens. Childhood is sometimes perceived as natural and unchanging, but a historical understanding reveals that it is constructed daily and differently. Class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and (dis)ability all shape how children and young people experience life. The course examines past childhoods in North America — primarily Canada — from the late nineteenth century to the present, as a way of gaining insight into the issues confronted by today’s children and young people.

Children occupy a central place in society. They embody the hopes and dreams, as well as the fears and panics of adults regarding what society may become. Whether the issue is health, violence, or sexuality, children are invariably at the centre of debate. Our contemporary conception casts children simultaneously as relatively empty vessels to be moulded by parents, teachers, and media into responsible citizens, and as potential agents of disorder if not raised “properly.” This tension generates enormous political controversy.

Social authorities’ efforts to protect young people have both benefited and harmed them. For example, the banning of seemingly homoerotic comic books in the 1950s seems absurd today, yet books addressing same-sex parenting have still been banned in Canada. Similarly, the forcible removal of Indigenous children through what is known as the Sixties Scoop — the mass adoption-out of Indigenous children beginning in the 1960s — was and continues to be profoundly destructive to Indigenous nations. To study changing concepts of childhood is to challenge our assumptions about youth, to critically examine the actions of experts who work with children, and to interrogate our own politically-rooted conceptions of childhood.

The course rejects a narrative of simple linear progress. Few children today labour in dangerous coal mines as they did in the late nineteenth century, yet children continue to work to support their families, and recent decades have in fact seen a deregulation of child labour laws in Canada. The course thus asks: who benefits and who is harmed by our conceptions of childhood over time?

What It Means to Study Concepts of Childhood

To study changing concepts of childhood means three things:

First, it is to acknowledge that childhood is not a natural and static state of being. The concept of childhood is constructed daily, according to social norms, cultural trends, and policies. Present-day concerns — obesity, bullying, sexting — make this very clear.

Second, it is to know that childhood is not innocent or apolitical. Children and youth represent the hopes, fears, and ideals of a society. For this reason, the lives of children draw the attention of a variety of “experts,” including parents, teachers, doctors, social workers, and politicians, who, consciously and unconsciously, treat childhood differently according to socio-economic status, race, gender, sexuality, religion, (dis)ability, region, and many other social indicators.

Third, it is to understand that childhood is not without agency. Although we most often hear about childhood through adult voices, the experience of children and youth can be recovered directly through various sources or by reading sources with a child’s perspective — what this course calls the “knee-high view.” Hearing different children and youth voices over time challenges conceptions of what is “normal” and “abnormal” regarding work, family, school, and law.

“Kids Today” and Class Discussion

The phrase “kids today” encodes a complaint that assumes contemporary concerns about youth are unprecedented. This course challenges that assumption. The anxieties adults express about children and youth — about their work ethic, their use of technology, their sexual behaviour, their political engagement — have deep historical roots. Knowing that past helps us understand our perceptions of children today and interrogate why certain ideas about youth circulate in particular historical moments. Every generation of adults has worried about the generation below it, and understanding that continuity changes how we read contemporary panics.

The Welfare of Children and Youth in Canada’s Past and Today

Theories of Childhood

Philippe Ariès, French historian and author of Centuries of Childhood (1962), is credited with founding the modern study of children and youth. Ariès joined the social history movement of the 1960s to examine the lives of common people. Examining European painting, he found that young people in pre-seventeenth-century art were depicted as small adults — dressed in adult clothing, with adult mannerisms. He argued that this was because the Catholic Church believed that by age seven children were old enough to reason and sin, attributes marking a passage into adulthood. Ariès went so far as to assert that parents in the Middle Ages did not love their children as modern parents do. His primary thesis is that childhood as a discrete stage of life only became an accepted part of family life over time with economic and social advancements.

Ariès’ critical contribution is his recognition that childhood is a social construction rather than simply a biological reality. Scholars have debated his argument that childhood did not “exist” before the seventeenth century; the debate revolves around how we define a child in a particular time and place — is it a matter of moral reason, legal definition, or dependence on others for survival?

Generally, scholars agree that childhood, as a prolonged stage in need of protection, became more explicit by the seventeenth century. John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) declared that infants depended on adult socialization and offered advice to parents on educating children. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) proposed a story of childhood without rational capacity before puberty, and the Romantic notion of the innocent child emerged from the Age of Enlightenment.

By the nineteenth century, upper-class Victorians accepted the idea that a carefree childhood needed protection from the harsh realities of life. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) influenced psychologists to believe that individual child development mirrored evolutionary science — a rise from primitive origins to Western civilization. G. Stanley Hall, credited with founding the study of adolescence, wrote in 1904 about the turmoil of the teenage years and the danger posed if parents did not help children mature into “civilized” adults. The transition from childhood to adulthood was therefore nothing that could be taken for granted as natural or unfacilitated.

Care and Protection — A Brief History

The Western conception of childhood as innocent and delicate led to changes to protect children in North America, including compulsory schooling and limited work. Although few families could attain the romanticized notion of childhood, this ideal set the stage for the growth of the child welfare movement during the early twentieth century — what has become known as the “Century of the Child.”

In the early 1900s, Canada’s infant mortality rate was more than 150 per 1,000 live births; by the end of the twentieth century it had fallen to only 5 per 1,000. Today’s child is also far more highly educated than past children: in the early 1900s less than half of children attended school and one in ten could not read or write, whereas today’s graduation rates hover around 85% in Canada.

Before the industrial age (pre-late 1800s), the welfare of children was certainly a concern, but the state wanted limited involvement. Children’s care was reserved for female kin or, if necessary, female extended family or local community members, usually women religious. Community care was more readily provided for children considered “deserving” — from families struck by tragedy, torn apart by war and disease. The “undeserving” — those who made supposed immoral life choices or who were part of identified minority groups seen as living impoverished lifestyles — found assistance harder to attain (Strong-Boag, 2010).

Childhood changed drastically with industrialization at the end of the 1800s. Crowding, unsanitary conditions, insecure food supply, unstable employment, and increased homelessness characterized urban life. Children who had worked on rural lands with their families were now found wandering city streets looking for work in factories with long hours and little protection from danger and abuse.

In this context, a protectionist philosophy emerged. In 1888, the Children’s Protection Act was created in Ontario. Philanthropic organizations developed to call for social reforms. Children were considered the innocent victims of capitalism and needed greater state protection. Large-scale child protection required trained professionals: the social work profession and organizations like the Children’s Aid Societies of Ontario were founded during this period. Between 1891 and 1912, over 60 Children’s Aid Societies were established. John Kelso, founder of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, was a central figure in this movement. The result was that the state and professional bodies began taking authoritative power from families and placing certain groups — mostly working-class, immigrant, and racialized mothers — under intense surveillance.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the world had endured two major wars. The medical community had brought health advancements from pasteurized milk to vaccines. Psychologists by mid-century had the public’s faith to produce healthy children. As a result, children were tested for “normal” behaviour as never before, and “advice” literature told mothers they were to blame for rising juvenile delinquency (Comacchio, 2002). The fate of certain children — Indigenous, disabled, and “delinquent” — would not live up to the test, and many would be relocated, often forcibly, from their families to state care.

By the late 1980s, the international community recognized children’s rights through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, pressing the state and adult experts to give children a voice in their own future. However, as the neo-liberal era progressed and corporations gained more power than governments, market rule took over state policy. Funding for social services was drastically cut. Child welfare agencies returned to interventionist practices for those deemed “at risk” because of cost-effectiveness.

Class Discussion — Whose Childhood?

Protection as central to childhood has been, and continues to be, grossly unequal. Historian Kristine Alexander argues in “Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History” (2016) that the history of childhood has been shaped by a “‘social forgetting’ of settler colonialism.” The history of childhood has been written mostly about white young people through the lens of white child savers.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission’s report Interrupted Childhoods documents the over-representation of Indigenous and Black children in Ontario child welfare. Journalist Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez’s piece “Why Won’t Society Let Black Girls Be Children?” illustrates the process of adultification — whereby Black girls are perceived as older and more responsible than white girls, leading teachers, parents, and law enforcement to offer them less protection and more punishment. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report on child welfare describes a system still in crisis for Indigenous children today.

The central question animating this discussion is: who has benefited and who has been left behind by the sentimental construction of childhood?

Reflection — The Knee-High View

The “knee-high view” is the methodological and ethical commitment of this course: to pursue a critical inquiry of past and present evidence about childhoods; to collect and examine primary sources using historical thinking concepts; and to analyze secondary sources that speak to the state of childhood. The goal is to hear the experiences of diverse children and, through that hearing, move toward a better foundation for the welfare of children today and in the future.

Children and Youth in Families

The Construct of Family

Family has been the first line of defense in creating a stable future for the nation, functioning as the locus of economics (from family subsistence living on farms to the working-class family budget), socialization (including ethnic identity, gender roles, cultural capital, early literacy, and values), and child welfare (from shelter and food to affection and affirmation). These functions are not based on genetics but on the social relationships and bonds established within a family unit.

Families, like childhood, are not natural formations. The definition of family is constructed historically and socially. The state — meaning government-supported policies and institutions — has had a central role in defining appropriate and inappropriate family formations and behaviours. At times, government has reinforced sexist, heterosexist, racist, and classist conceptions of family in the name of the “best interests of the child.” At other times, the state’s power has been used to support more inclusive conceptualizations of family.

The Nuclear Family Ideal

There is an element of mass nostalgia about the family. Our historical consciousness tends to connect a happy and healthy family with the cisgender, hetero-normative, white settler, patriarchal, nuclear family — the husband as breadwinner, the wife as homemaker, and typically their two biological children. This image, typified by the television program Leave It to Beaver in the 1950s, is rooted in Christian doctrine that a man and woman marry for the purpose of raising children. Social authorities have affirmed this meaning of family throughout the twentieth century, from schooling to social science literature (Coontz, 1992).

Schools in the early 1800s focused on sewing skills for girls and academics for boys. Well past the mid-twentieth century, young women were still enrolled in home economics while boys took woodworking. Today, women dominate the lower-paid helping professions of social work and teaching, while men continue to dominate the well-paid sciences (Llewellyn, 2012).

Mothers’ Allowance in the early 1900s was also designed to reinforce men as breadwinners and women as unpaid childcare providers. It was only provided to women who had exhausted all efforts to find a husband, and only after they proved they were “proper and fit” to care for children. Even then, the amount was minimal, forcing women to find husbands since they were discouraged from paid labour.

So-called “experts” in health and psychology — from Spock in the 1950s to conservative radio personalities today — have pathologized individuals who fell outside traditional kin arrangements, deeming them “dysfunctional” or “abnormal,” despite the intangible status of the white, middle-class, male breadwinner model for most people. The nuclear family ideal is, however, mythology. It obscures domestic insecurities and diversity in the past and present.

As a video resource in the course (Where Does the Nuclear Family Come From?, Origin of Everything, Season 1 Episode 12) indicates, the nuclear family ideal is a colonial structure. Many diverse family structures exist, including among First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in what we know as Canada today.

Diverse Family Formations

Greater awareness of diverse family formations is increasingly evident today: children of same-sex parent families frequently experience more egalitarian domesticity than children from cisgender, heterosexual parent families, including shared parenting and household work. Children of divorced parents may experience less stigma thanks to no-fault divorce laws and have greater support networks than previous generations.

Yet diverse families are not new. Families have always included working-class compositions, racially and ethnically mixed households, step-parents and step-siblings, adopted and fostered children, and households with two or three mothers or fathers. The traditional nuclear family has long been challenged by the realities of:

• Death, whether from epidemics, childbirth, war, or today cancer and heart disease
• Separation and Divorce: divorce reached an apex in the 1970s with the introduction of no-fault divorce, but for over a century before that, women were deserted by husbands or boyfriends, and reformers established maternity homes to rehabilitate these “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children
• Economics: fathers during the Depression and often their sons would leave the family home to ride the railway looking for work; today, family members are again dislocated seeking employment and housing, often resulting in extended family or boarders coming into the home (Comacchio, 1999)
• Abuse: violence against women and children by family members is widespread; approximately 3,500 youngsters under age fifteen in the industrialized world die from physical abuse and neglect each year

Leslie Paris’s article “The Strange Way We Lived” demonstrates how social, political, and legal transformations of the 1960s and 1970s — including no-fault divorce legislation — fundamentally reshaped the American family and childhood, rendering the family more porous and complex.

The State and Family

Former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau famously said in the 1960s that “The state has no business in the nation’s bedrooms,” borrowing a phrase from a newspaper editorial that commented on his introduction of legislation reforming laws pertaining to divorce, abortion, and homosexuality (CBC Archives). But the state, or what is often referred to as the public sphere, has never been nor can it be separate from the private sphere of the family.

There are many instances historically in which the state has intervened to control, discipline, and even destroy families it considered maladjusted or harmful to society. Several examples illustrate this:

The Dionne Quintuplets (born 1934, near North Bay, Ontario) — the first known quintuplets to survive infancy — provide a clear case of destructive state intervention. The province of Ontario stripped their parents of custody, turned their home into a theme park called Quintland, and allowed tourists from across the world to observe the girls through glass barriers as if in a zoo. Their physician, Allan Dafoe, was their primary caretaker and profited substantially from their fame. The Dionne quints demonstrate how childhood could be commercially exploited and how the state could weaponize “the best interests of the child” against an actual family.

Eugenics: In the 1920s, British Columbia and Alberta passed Sterilization Acts allowing the forced sterilization of women identified as mentally deficient by social reformers, doctors, and judges. Eugenics is the belief that science should control the gene pool from being “contaminated” by the “unfit.” Eugenicists associated mental deficiency with race, particularly immigrant women, and morality with unwed mothers. Although sterilizations decreased dramatically after the Nazi regime demonstrated the horrors of eugenic science, the Sterilization Acts would not be repealed until the 1970s.

Japanese Canadian Internment: During the Second World War, the government uprooted Japanese Canadian families after they were labelled Enemy Aliens. The War Measures Act gave the state authority to remove all persons of Japanese origin — despite many being born in Canada — to internment camps. Male internees were sent to work camps; their wives and children were often at separate sites. The government seized and later sold their family homes and property, using the proceeds to pay for the expenses of internment. Toward the end of the war, internees were given the option to disperse to places east of the Rocky Mountains or repatriate to Japan. Japanese Canadians would not receive government compensation until 1988.

Perhaps the most sustained and catastrophic example of state intervention is the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families to Indian Residential Schools and during the Sixties Scoop, addressed in detail in Week 4.

The legal concept of “the best interest of the child” has been used both to justify and to challenge state intervention in family life. As Baldassi, Boyd, and Kelly’s article “Losing the Child in Child-Centered Legal Processes” demonstrates, courts have often used the best interest standard to impose narrow, heteronormative understandings of family in custody cases involving lesbian mothers, sperm donors, and reproductive technology, frequently erasing the child’s own conception of family in favour of adult ideological commitments.

Conclusions

The primary conclusion to draw from this week is that family, and what that institution means for children, changes for better and for worse. Children will be lost within social transformations of family if we hold on to narrow ideologies. We need instead to be open to the redefinition of family over time and place to include the child’s conception of family, a history of caregiving, cultural identity, and social relationships.

Optional Primary Source — The Dionne Quints Museum

The digital archives of the Dionne Quints Digitization Project (North Bay Public Library, Dionne Quints Museum, 1996) preserve photographs, advertisements, newspaper clippings, and postcards documenting the lives of the quintuplets. These sources reveal the commodification of childhood: the quints were used to sell products from Bee Hive Golden Corn Syrup to Puretest Cod Liver Oil; their image appeared on music, postcards, and souvenirs of “Quintland.” The primary sources collectively illustrate how the state and market together could dissolve the boundary between a family’s private life and public spectacle, using childhood as an instrument of commercial and political power.

Children and Youth in Schools and Institutions

Concepts of Child Welfare

The family has been the first line of defense for children’s care. The pervasive ideology of residual welfare — the belief that state support should be a last resort, available only through rigorous means testing — held that one had to prove both destitution and moral worthiness to receive assistance. The result historically was a reliance on female unpaid labour: if mothers were unavailable, grandmothers and aunts stepped in. While male kin have a greater role in parenting today, we continue to see internationally the reliance on extended female kin for the care of children — from African grandmothers now caring for grandchildren orphaned by AIDS, to women withdrawing from the labour force during COVID-19 when in-person schooling stopped.

Early child welfare legislation made little distinction among delinquent, dependent, and neglected children. The family, and usually women, were stigmatized for any reliance on state welfare. This persists today as some government officials perpetuate the idea of “welfare cheats” and make support dependent upon workfare. The individual family, and not structural inequalities, was to blame when the state needed to provide security for children.

For centuries this has pushed parents into inadequate or even dangerous childcare arrangements — women staying in violent partnerships for fear that social workers will remove their children; children left with inadequate supervision because mothers cannot afford proper care. When family could not care for needy children, institutions became the next stop.

Key Institutions

Institutions developed because Canadians and their government became deeply suspicious of outdoor relief — the term for money given directly to families. Many believed such relief simply rewarded the poor. Institutions became a major feature in Canadian children’s lives by the end of the nineteenth century when families were unable or considered unsuitable to raise certain children.

The state took a more active role in child welfare based on the assumption that institutions could socialize responsible future citizens or re-socialize young people losing their way — typically racialized, working-class youth. Public schools endeavoured to direct children to obedient and industrious maturity. More marginalized, needy youngsters were often directed to hospitals, prisons, and poorhouses alongside adults.

Institutions won increased support in the early twentieth century with the growth of social science. The professional training offered by social work, medical, and educational professionals provided scientific justification for more specialized services, including twenty-four-hour institutional care for children.

Institutions for Vulnerable Children in Historical Perspective

Before the late nineteenth century, most children in need of care were housed alongside adults in jails, hospitals, and poorhouses. These institutions “crowded the young and old, sick and healthy, the criminal and the merely unfortunate” (Strong-Boag, 2011: 41). In Nova Scotia, as early as 1785 needy boys and girls joined adults in a workhouse. Upper Canada (Ontario today) had workhouses called “houses of industry” until approximately 1900.

One of the most infamous examples of children’s integration with adults in institutions is the “Duplessis orphans” — children born out of wedlock who were named after Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis in the 1940s and 50s. These children were confined to psychiatric hospitals rather than orphanages because the government provided larger grants for psychiatric facilities. In 2001, after demanding compensation since the 1980s, each person received approximately $25,000 from the Quebec government.

By the late 1800s, some provinces — Ontario in particular — legislated state wardship through the Children’s Protection Act, keeping youngsters out of adult institutions. This marked a cautious emergence of the “best interest of the child” doctrine. The creation of orphanages and infant homes, as well as reform and industrial schools, starting in the mid-1800s also signaled the slow embrace of childhood as a stage meriting unique provisions.

Early orphanages were selective about admissions: officials believed the offspring of the “respectable dead” and the “worthy destitute” could be redeemed. Those presumed illegitimate and delinquent, as well as those who were racialized, were regularly refused entry in case they “contaminated” the deserving (Strong-Boag, 2011: 44). By the 1960s, most orphanages had closed or transitioned to other facilities; adoption and fostering programs filled this need.

Industrial schools targeted children believed to be in danger of unsuitable conduct; reform schools were for children who had crossed the line to criminality. In 1875, Ottawa amended the Criminal Code to allow sentencing to provincial reformatories rather than federal penitentiaries for those aged sixteen and under. These schools (re)educated children as young as age five, usually of the poor, assumed to lack discipline and morality. While the transition to specialized sites for children’s care may have been intended to protect children from adult harshness, they did not always succeed: adult-inflicted abuse, long-term stigmatization, and destructive peer cultures characterized many of these facilities.

Public Education Systems

The British North America Act of 1867 established Canada as a nation and laid the framework for public schools as a provincial responsibility. Before this period, education was an informal process where one generation passed skills and values to the next; the most elite children received instruction from tutors or in private schools.

By the mid-1800s, the government looked to public schools as a way of promoting identification with Protestantism, the English language, and British customs among the growing populace. School promoters like Egerton Ryerson believed that mass schooling was an effective instrument for instilling appropriate thoughts and behaviours. Schools could be a solution to problems associated with increased immigration, a transition to capitalist production, and the changing state formation — all of which needed skilled workers who knew their proper social roles as citizens.

Schools would socialize the large group of young, male, semi-skilled workers, many of whom lacked knowledge of British norms — parliamentary government, fair play, and respect for authority. Girls were included to a limited extent through “habits of mind” such as choral speaking, penmanship, punctuality, and orderly queuing. Today’s schools still teach skills and values associated with responsible citizenship.

Canada’s educational history has been defined by conflicts over which values and norms should be instilled in young people, particularly regarding minority-language and religious rights. The history of public schooling includes the segregation of Asian students in early twentieth-century British Columbia; colonial language used in school textbooks that persists today; corporal punishment inflicted by teachers; and the damaging effects of compulsory attendance for children who feel bullied. Throughout the twentieth century there have been calls for a radical change to public schooling practices.

Indian Residential School System

Formal schooling had profoundly different implications for students of non-European ancestry. The Indian Residential School System provides the defining case study.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, missionaries came to Canada to spread Christianity as part of the colonization of what they called the “New World.” Various kinds of formal schooling arrangements existed following first contact. Before Confederation, Indigenous parents exercised some choice, and an Indigenous child’s presence was sometimes needed for schools to survive; in some arrangements, missionaries and Indigenous groups were even allies in teaching.

After Confederation, the government needed to create the British nation out of an existing population that was majority Indigenous. In 1876, the Indian Act gave federal authority to manage Indian Estates, band membership, and all social services, including education. In 1884, school attendance became compulsory for status Indian girls and boys. In 1920, the Indian Act was amended to make schooling mandatory for Indigenous children within residential or institutionalized schools operated by churches.

Residential schools were part of an overall politics of dispossession from lands and resources. Indigenous mothers and fathers were assumed to embody primitive promiscuity and irresponsibility. From the nineteenth century to the 1990s, some 130 residential schools operated in Canada; at its peak in the 1930s, there were over 80 schools. Students ranging in age from five to their late teens were vulnerable to being forcibly removed from their families and cultural ties.

According to a report by Peter Bryce in 1909, school mortality rates varied between 35% and 60% (Bryce, 1922). Over 100,000 children — or 20–30% of the Indigenous population — attended a residential school. Approximately 9 in 10 Indigenous people today have been touched by a residential school experience in their family.

Well-being and education were compromised by abysmal food and accommodation, little attention to academics, untrained educators, and physical and emotional abuse. Residents were prepared for low-waged employment and social subordination. The damage to families and Indigenous nations has proved long lasting.

The last residential institution closed in 1996. The 2008 apology by Prime Minister Harper was long overdue. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada issued its final report on the history and legacy of residential schools with 94 Calls to Action. The TRC report stands as both a historical reckoning and a guide for reconciliation.

Children with Disabilities

As Veronica Strong-Boag writes, the most forgotten of all the forgotten children have been those with disabilities. The concept of disability is defined by environmental accommodations, or lack thereof, so the identification of children as disabled depends on historical context.

In the early twentieth century, many children with disabilities were kept at home. As Canada increased its standards for education and work, the integration of children with disabilities within families became too difficult for some. The 1928 British Columbia Royal Commission on Mental Hygiene explained that the care of severely disabled members was “too great a burden” for “the average home.”

When families could not manage, young people with disabilities might find themselves alongside adults in jails, hospitals, and poorhouses well into the twentieth century. Girls and boys with special needs were often unwanted in orphanages and industrial schools, which were already overcrowded. The language of abnormality in 1929 included “children with bow legs, cross eyes, ugly brick red hair, jug-handle ears, near-sighted children, half-caste children” and many more — “such broad interpretations of abnormality stigmatized countless children” (Strong-Boag, 2011: 56).

While public schools made some provisions for pupils with minor learning difficulties early in the twentieth century, they did not regard children with serious mental or physical challenges as their responsibility — an inadequacy echoed today in the insufficient response to children with autism.

The logic of institutionalizing Canadians defined as abnormal remained largely in place until the latter half of the twentieth century. Some schools for the deaf and blind provided communities of belonging and successfully lobbied for environmental and cultural changes. By the second half of the twentieth century, hopes turned from institutions to therapy: Children’s Aid supported “children’s villages” and centres for community living. L’Arche Canada, founded by Jean Vanier, became the best example of therapeutic, community-oriented environments — though Vanier was subsequently exposed for a history of abuse of women in care.

“Young Canadians with disabilities remain, as in the past, the most likely to be institutionalized” (Strong-Boag, 2011: 60).

Recent Changes to Children’s Institutional Care

Changes to children’s institutional care occurred after WWII in part because reformers asserted that human rights needed to take centre stage in Canada, particularly for the most disadvantaged. As mothers’ allowances, widows’ pensions, and other social security programs appeared in the twentieth century, more youngsters remained with family. Scandals surrounding orphanages, schools for the deaf, and residential schools further undermined the credibility of institutions.

By the late 1970s, child experts advocated deinstitutionalization: the community living movement for children with disabilities and the self-determination movement for Indigenous education. Sadly, deinstitutionalization was marred by its own problems. Drastic cuts to social programming starting in the 1980s under neo-liberal policies meant that community living and therapy-based initiatives did not have the necessary resources to succeed. The assumption of blame for children’s needs remained with families and ignored the underlying causation of structural inequalities. Without effective institutions, without support for community care, and without resourced families, children and youth became increasingly lost.

Veronica Strong-Boag concludes in Fostering Nation that without an effective social welfare net, certain kinds of institutions might, under proper conditions, support vulnerable young people when families simply cannot provide for them: “When institutions represent external impositions by those who presume to be class, ethnic, and racial superiors of those admitted, they have regularly brought pain and truncated development. When they embodied a sense of shared community and worked with kin to find solutions, they have sometimes proved helpful” (Strong-Boag, 2011: 63).

Child Migration and Immigration

Child Migration

Migration is the movement of people from one place to another. Children seem invisible in our common narratives of migration, even though they migrate with families and alone between and within countries. Children have always moved or been moved for various reasons: tragedy to their caregivers, escape from adults, or seeking opportunities to better their lives.

Child migration in Canada gained sustained attention for the first time in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the government solicited newcomers to populate and settle vast parts of the country. Child savers worried that children lacked proper familial roots, especially newcomer children; without roots in white settler Canada, these children were considered possible causes of disorder.

The plight of children who relocate, often forcefully, continues to be a major issue for child welfare organizations globally. At the end of 2019, approximately 40% of the world’s estimated 80 million displaced people were children, and half of the world’s 26.3 million refugees were under age 18 (UNHCR, 2020). Canada is currently recognized by the UN Refugee Agency as a leader among Western nations in refugee resettlement, but Canada’s response to stateless children has historically varied from positive integration services to detention and deportation.

Karen Dubinsky’s scholarship examines how the age, race, gender, and disability identity of child migrants shape the stories adults tell about their movement — particularly around interracial and transracial adoption of Indigenous and Black children.

Urbanization and Child Migration

In the late nineteenth century, industrialization caused massive social transformation that affected families, schooling, and child welfare. Families moved from rural areas to cities where factories and jobs were located. According to Statistics Canada, the proportion of people living in rural areas in Canada has steadily declined since 1851, when nearly 9 in 10 Canadians lived in a rural area.

Cities did not have the infrastructure to support the rapidly growing dense population. Limited housing, too few skilled jobs, and minimal public services resulted in unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and rampant poverty. These conditions increased fears among the middle and upper classes of unrest by the urban poor and a moral panic that urban families were failing to properly raise children. Social or moral reformers — a religiously-rooted group who sought to reform the ills of society — believed that children of the urban poor needed to be removed from the evils of city life.

One method was to transfer children to rural environments: boys were thought vulnerable to alcohol and gambling in the city, girls to prostitution. Reformers and the government depicted Canada’s unspoiled frontier as healthy, complete with fresh air and family-oriented living (Valverde, 2008). It is not an accident that transplanting children with and without their families to less populated, rural areas assisted with national goals. The colonial government wanted settlement to mark territory with “desirable” white settlers, which occurred in concert with driving Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands, including by starvation and force (Daschuk, 2013).

Settlement in the West

The Canadian government recruited families and their children to rural parts of Canada through immigration schemes. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Laurier government, through Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton, attempted to recruit immigrants to the West with millions of pamphlets and posters. References to specific temperatures and harsh terrain were banned from publications to attract newcomers. Sifton famously described the ideal immigrant as “a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children.” Under Sifton, immigration to Canada increased from 16,835 per year in 1896 to 141,465 in 1905.

But the government did not want any immigrants. Popular pseudo-scientific race theories asserted that only certain groups could conform to a white, British-Canadian identity. “Foreignness” was calculated based on skin colour (the darker, the more foreign and less assimilating) and the extent to which the immigrant’s religious and political institutions differed from the British. A racial hierarchy emerged: British were most desired, followed by Americans and Western Europeans. The least desired settlers included Asians and Blacks.

To keep Chinese settlers out, the federal government created a head tax: initially $50 in 1885, raised to $100 in 1900, and then to $500 in 1903 (Chan, 2014). South Asian immigration was curtailed by a “continuous journey” clause in the Immigration Act of 1908, requiring immigrants to travel to Canada in an uninterrupted journey — impossible given that ocean steamers did not travel directly from India to Canada. The Komagata Maru incident of 1914, in which 376 passengers of South Asian origin were refused entry to Canada in Vancouver, is the most dramatic illustration of this exclusionary policy.

Between 1901 and 1911, less than 1,500 Blacks entered Canada, mostly Oklahoma farmers coming to the West.

Immigration and Eugenics

In 1910, the government implemented a new Immigration Act that barred immigrants from races deemed undesirable (Knowles, 1997). Immigration policies restricted access to Canada for certain children based on eugenics social philosophy. Child savers, usually white and middle-class, targeted the urban poor and believed that to “clean up the cities” of wandering, disorderly children, the “unfit” had to be prevented from breeding.

At its extreme, eugenics resulted in the sterilization of thousands of women. Alberta (1928) and British Columbia (1933) passed Sexual Sterilization Acts that would not be repealed until the 1970s. By 1972, First Nations and Métis people represented over 25% of those sterilized under Alberta’s legislation. Between 1971 and 1974, 125 women were sterilized at the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital alone.

Historian Marjory Harper argues that the home children movement was based on “an overt eugenics confidence that the future of Britain and its empire [Canada] could best be secured by the judicious transplantation of young people from debilitating urban environments before their constitutions had been irreparably damaged” (Harper, 1998: 48).

Home Children

Between 1869 and the 1930s, over 100,000 children were sent to Canada from Great Britain as part of the child migration movement. Such immigration was halted with WWI but resumed with large state support in the 1920s under the Empire Settlement Act. Immigration decreased with the Depression and finally ended with some British child evacuees arriving during WWII.

As Harper’s research demonstrates, these young people were brought to Canada from institutions in Great Britain under a fostering program that had them work as cheap labour. The boys — who comprised most home children — were farm workers; girls were brought to work as domestic servants. In Britain, these children were considered too poor to survive without public support. Most were not orphans but were considered troublemakers or potential troublemakers hanging out on city streets. The choice for these children was a workhouse, industrial school, or assisted emigration through philanthropic homes.

The Canadian government subsidized the transportation of these children because they provided workers-in-training or adoptees for suitable rural families. Critics on both sides pointed out that children and their families in Britain were often made false promises about wages and the type of homes they would be provided (Parr, 2000). Life for home children in Canada was often characterized by overwork, isolation, emotional deprivation, and exploitation.

Immigration from WWII to Today

Despite increased awareness of human rights and an official multiculturalism policy since the mid-twentieth century, Canada has been selective and even unwilling to assist certain child immigrants and their families.

The St. Louis Affair: In 1939, 907 Jewish refugees fled Nazi Germany aboard the MS St. Louis. On June 7, 1939, they were denied entry to Canada. Immigration director Frederick Blair publicly declared that no country could “open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere.” The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe; 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust. Only 5,000 Jewish refugees were permitted to enter Canada from 1933 to 1947 — the poorest admission record among Western countries. One immigration agent is infamously recounted as stating that ’none is too many’ (Abella & Troper, 2012).

Separated and unaccompanied Jewish children who survived the Holocaust were not permitted in Canada until the Canadian Jewish Congress agreed to pay for their travel. These children, mostly older boys, were distributed to families across the country with little supervision of their care arrangements.

Today Canada accepts few separated children, though unaccompanied minors do arrive and are typically placed in foster or group homes. There is no clear federal strategy to deal with these minors. Furthermore, despite legal requirements to consider the “best interests of the child” when deciding whether to detain, Canada has not formally abolished its policies to detain migrant children.

Working Children and Youth

Defining Child Labour

Prior to the 1800s, children were considered contributors to the family economy. This assumption lasted far longer for children of working-class homes, whose work often determined family survival. Only with the sentimentality of “modern” childhood that began to emerge in the nineteenth century was children’s labour put into serious question.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated in 2016 that 168 million children worldwide were in child labour — almost 11% of the child population as a whole, and 85 million of those in hazardous work. The ILO distinguishes between child work and child labour: child labour is work that is mentally, physically, socially, or morally dangerous and harmful, and that interferes with schooling. It is a myth that child labour is only a problem for developing nations: there are hundreds of thousands of unlawfully employed children in North America, including exploited minors in unregulated sectors (garment sweatshops, agriculture, construction). World Vision Canada estimates that more than $3.7 billion in goods involving child labour entered Canada in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has worsened children’s health, safety, and education on a global scale, has also worsened child labour.

Industrialization

Before industrialization, children’s work was within and for the family economy: raising animals, tending crops, doing washing, caring for siblings. Girls mostly engaged in domestic-based work; boys worked in the fields. Children were also engaged in economic activities outside the homestead — young boys and girls catching and processing fish in Newfoundland, hundreds of boys working in coal mines in Cape Breton or Vancouver Island, boys selling newspapers on the streets of Montreal, girls providing domestic service.

The Industrial Revolution of the 1860s had significant implications for working conditions. Manufacturers sought unskilled workers who would work under conditions to profit employers. Industrial working conditions included discrete repetitive tasks, scrutiny by managers, and few protections from exploitation — low wages, long hours, and physical harassment. The principles of Taylorism (Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management) and later Fordism became synonymous with industrial production: maximum efficiency through stopwatch precision, inculcation of virtues like punctuality, and careful oversight.

Employers wanted children in their factories — even those under age ten — for their nimble fingers, low wages, and compliance. No longer under parental supervision, children were disciplined and abused within industries. Children’s wages were also pooled with family income to survive rampant poverty and the increased costs of urban living.

Child Labour Reform

Children’s increasing presence in industries resulted in philanthropic groups and unionists advocating for regulations on child labour. At first, some reformers accused working-class parents of being irresponsible and forcing their children to work. Over time, most reformers turned their attention to the ills of capitalism as the source of the problem. Unions supported a male breadwinner ideology — the concept that the public, paid world of work should be the preserve of husbands and fathers. Social reformers, led by middle-class women (often part of the first-wave feminist movement), believed the best interests of the child was to be in school or at home with their mothers.

The argument by unionists was that cheap labour by children, women, and male immigrants reduced the chance of white men ever receiving a fair wage. This logic reveals the class, gender, and racial politics underlying child labour reform: child servants, often from poor and non-white populations, freed other children from work and for education, thereby reproducing cycles of poverty and widening socio-economic and racial gaps.

Legislation

Child savers — including first-wave feminists like Nellie McClung and the Famous Five, middle-class philanthropists like J.J. Kelso, male trade unionists, and entrepreneurs — tried to “save” children through fostering programs, philanthropic organizations, educational reforms, and government legislation.

Legislation regarding child labour was fast and furious during this era. All provinces enacted legislation requiring school attendance. Ontario required compulsory school attendance for 8- to 14-year-olds in 1891; the Adolescent School Attendance Act of 1921 raised the age to sixteen in urban areas. By 1929, children under 14 had been legally excluded from factory and mine employment in most provinces. Quebec enacted a series of restrictive laws from 1885 to 1934, with minimum ages varying by industry and gender, and evolving upward over time.

Unfortunately, legislation regarding work and schools was often left unenforced, with little attempt to regulate farm and domestic labour. The structural causes of children’s labour were unaddressed. Mothers’ Allowances during WWI and Family Allowances introduced during WWII were intended to shore up family income so children would not need to work, but government income supports proved insufficient. Interventions throughout the twentieth century overlooked the work of women and children and failed to provide systemic supports for equitable workforce participation.

Child Labour Today

The reading by McBride and Irwin, “Deregulating Child Labour in British Columbia” (Lost Kids, pp. 230–243), documents how neo-liberal economic policies from the 1980s onward have reversed decades of protective legislation. Rather than representing a relic of industrial capitalism, child labour in Canada has been actively re-enabled through legislative deregulation, particularly affecting youth in sectors like agriculture and retail. The balance and transition between school and work for young people continues to raise urgent questions about economic exploitation, educational access, and the definition of childhood itself.

The Health of the Child and Nation

Lecture 7.1–7.3: “Healthy” Little Bodies — From Early 1900s to the 1930s

The healthy child has functioned throughout the twentieth century as a site for both social inscription and political aspiration. The state of the child’s body has never been purely a medical matter but always also a reflection of social norms about class, race, gender, and nationhood.

Before the early twentieth century, children’s health — such as it was — was managed primarily by mothers and female kin. Infant mortality was catastrophically high: over 150 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1900. Children died from contaminated milk, tuberculosis, and the diseases of poverty-driven overcrowding. Beginning in the early 1900s, the state began taking active responsibility for children’s health through a series of reforms.

The pasteurization of milk was a foundational reform. By the early twentieth century, many municipalities required the pasteurization of milk to eliminate deadly bacteria, especially the tuberculosis bacillus. Public health nurses visited homes to provide advice on infant feeding and hygiene. The child hygiene movement sought to educate mothers — primarily working-class and immigrant mothers — in the “scientific” management of child health: proper diet, cleanliness, fresh air, and vaccination.

The school as a health institution became central to this program. Medical inspections of schools were introduced across Canada in the early twentieth century. Children were weighed, measured, examined for head lice, dental hygiene, and signs of disease. This medicalization of the school body simultaneously provided genuine public health benefits and served as a surveillance apparatus that marked certain children — racialized, disabled, and working-class children — as deficient. As historian Mona Gleason demonstrates in her reading “Lost Voices, Lost Bodies?” medical practitioners’ accounts of children’s bodies in English Canada from 1900 to the 1940s reveal how thoroughly ideals of the healthy body were saturated with assumptions about race, class, and gender.

Health Reforms — 1940s to 1960s

Health care emerged as a human right following the Second World War. Eugenics philosophy had quickly fallen out of favour in the face of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. All citizens living within a strong democratic nation like Canada deserved to be healthy.

Taking care of one’s health became a civic responsibility rather than a Christian duty. In the 1940s, young men were encouraged to play competitive sports and to resist alcohol, tobacco, and self-abuse so their bodies would be fit to defend their country. Postwar drop-in centres were erected for youth in low-income urban areas to teach leadership skills and self-confidence — a remedy, authorities hoped, to growing concerns about juvenile delinquency. Healthy children were good citizens; but health was often pre-determined by white, middle-class, abled-body, cisgender, and heterosexual status.

Health curriculum in schools focused on citizenship lessons through personal development: appearance, dating, and community service. In 1951–52, British Columbia created a new course, “Effective Living”, for grades ten to twelve. All course units — Personality, Family, and Community Health — underscored “developing a stable heterosexual pattern, developing habits of constancy and loyalty, and adjusting to accepted customs and conventions.” Such questions as “Why is wearing the right dress a mark of maturity?” and “What is the importance of religion to happiness in life and in marriage?” were presented to students as health questions (Llewellyn, 2012).

The growing consumer industry of the postwar period provided grooming and hygiene products targeted to young people that promised good health. Housewives were directed to the latest domestic technology — the washing machine, the vacuum — to create a healthy and happy home. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946) became the bible for proper mothering. Male psychologists had an unprecedented place in schools, testing and inspecting children for normal behaviour and appearance, and identifying potential deviants.

Child Health — 1970s to Today

Children’s health has received increasing medical attention over the course of the twentieth century, evident in how we explain child behaviour — public officials now seek psychological and physiological explanations for bullying and abuse, with systemic injustices receiving less attention. When Spock wrote post-WWII, issues from autism spectrum disorder to child obesity were not yet prominent concerns.

The expansion of medical provisions for child health waned during the 1970s and 1980s as health care costs skyrocketed and the economy entered recession. Public health moved toward community approaches to well-being, combining medical and social sciences to address underlying social causes of ill health. The government, in its retreat from social spending, partnered with corporations to provide recreation programs for “at-risk” youth — the 1980s and 90s saw programs like ParticipACTION and Nike’s PLAY; today soccer fields are filled with children playing as Timbits, which are running advertisements for Tim Hortons.

Frisby et al.’s article “Play Is Not a Frill” argues that private-public recreation initiatives perpetuate stereotypes of at-risk youth without addressing the scarcity of resources that create poor health. Barriers to accessibility — from fees to equipment — and discriminatory top-down program delivery have gone unaddressed. Furthermore, structural inequalities continue to determine health outcomes: Indigenous infant mortality rates are twice as high as those for non-Indigenous people in Canada today (Sheppard et al., 2017). In the United States, well over 4 million children lack health insurance, directly related to poverty and negative health outcomes.

Children’s Rights and Social Policy

Defining Children’s Rights

Children’s rights span civil, cultural, economic, social, and political rights. They can be crudely broken down into two types. Protective rights advocate for society to protect children from harm because of their dependency on adults (health, shelter). Rights to autonomy advocate for children as autonomous persons who will participate in community (education, voting).

Given our conception of children as dependent and innocent, we most often discuss rights for young people in terms of protection from something. Far less often are children’s rights discussed in terms of rights to something. This positions young people as citizens-in-waiting who need to learn responsibility to the state, rather than first benefiting from rights to which they are entitled. Children and youth rights need to be conceptualized in terms of both protection and autonomy (Kennelly & Llewellyn, 2011).

The Development of a Children’s Rights Movement

A movement for children’s rights can be traced to late eighteenth-century ideas of natural and divine rights. Thomas Spence was one of the first modern philosophers to explicitly address the natural rights of children in The Rights of Infants (1796). In Canada, the children’s rights movement emerged during the late nineteenth century, born out of the child saving movement. The earliest children’s rights focused on labour and shelter: late nineteenth and early twentieth century laws limited the age and type of labour for children, created separate judicial systems for young people, and made school attendance compulsory.

By the early twentieth century, the international community turned its attention to children’s rights, in large part because of the horrors of the First World War. Despite recent labour laws, during the war children returned to factories in the absence of their fathers and to replace fathers’ wages. Some older boys lied about their age and joined the military. War propaganda infantilized the soldier — little boys dressed up in army gear sent the message that sons were off on an adventure. The patriotic song There’s Nobody Home But Me (Ehrlich and Conrad, 1918) illustrates this infantilization of the war effort.

Boys and girls growing up too fast during the Great War concerned adults around the world. One response was the League of Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924, which stipulated that children must be given the means for normal development, materially and spiritually; that hungry children must be fed, sick children nursed, backward children helped, delinquent children reclaimed; and that children must be protected against every form of exploitation.

The Great Depression (stock market crash of 1929 to approximately WWII) severely limited the focus on and money available for the children’s rights movement. In Canada, a social safety net developed by the early 1940s: unemployment insurance and the Family Allowances Act of 1945 — Canada’s first universal welfare program, based on age and citizenship rather than income. But these measures failed to eliminate the exploitation of children or address the underlying causes of poverty.

Children and the Holocaust

World War II demonstrated how inadequate the protection of citizens — especially children — was under the League of Nations Covenant. Millions of Jewish children were murdered in concentration camps; others lived in constant fear. Children were uprooted from their communities and families to escape persecution and poverty.

Anne Frank, a Jewish girl born in Germany, moved with her family to Amsterdam in 1933 when the Nazis gained power. The family went into hiding in 1942; Anne kept a diary between ages 13 and 15. The family was captured in 1944 and sent to concentration camps; Anne died of typhus. Her father, the only survivor, recovered the diary. One diary entry reads: “I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway. I’ll just let matters take their course and concentrate on studying and hope that everything will be all right in the end.”

Japanese Children and WWII

War atrocities were inflicted upon children in Canada. In March 1941, Ottawa required all Japanese Canadians to register with the government, deeming them “enemy aliens.” Japanese children were subject to curfews, employment bans, and other restrictions on civic life. By 1942, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, through Order-in-Council P.C. 1486, ordered the expulsion of all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. More than 20,000 Japanese Canadians were removed from their homes, stripped of material possessions, and placed in shantytowns or government-built centres where they were malnourished and given limited schooling. Men were regularly separated from their wives and children to work in road labour camps. After the war, families had to choose between deportation to war-ravaged Japan or relocation east of the Rockies. Japanese Canadians would not receive compensation until 1988.

Children’s Rights and Reconstruction Politics

Historian Dominique Marshall argues that children’s rights were a political tool used to distract the public from adult welfare issues during the reconstruction of the country following the war. Minimum levels of welfare and education were provided for children to channel popular hopes for increased economic and political democracy — adults were being dissuaded from making too many demands on the government.

The postwar period saw a broadening of democratic guarantees and the social welfare system. In the United States, the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education, put a legal end to segregated schooling for Black children. In Canada, in the late 1940s, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian Canadians got the right to vote federally for the first time. In 1960, First Nations had the right to vote without giving up treaty rights (Joseph, 2018). Canada implemented the Unemployment Insurance Act (1941), the Family Allowances Act (1945), and the Disabled Persons Allowance Act (1954).

Canadian policies followed international human rights movements. In 1948, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was produced — paradoxically, despite a Canadian (John Humphrey) drafting the declaration, Canada initially abstained from the vote, arguing the declaration was too vague or imposing upon provincial jurisdiction. Canada was again a reluctant participant in the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959.

Children’s Rights since the 1980s

According to Molly Ladd-Taylor’s chapter “What Child Left Behind?”, the children’s rights movement’s reliance on appealing to fear or sympathy for “hopeless” or “damaged” children has resulted in regression of children’s rights in North America since the 1980s. Conservative politicians used images of hopeless childhood to demonize welfare mothers and roll back the social safety net. Constructed moral panics about drug-addicted Black mothers having “crack babies,” Native American children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, and inner-city teenage gang members were used to prove a hopeless cycle of poverty — and to cut children’s basic human rights provided by social services.

In Canada, analogous neo-liberal cutbacks were enacted: decreased community-based supports for children, deregulation of child labour, and increased rates of child poverty. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) was a major milestone: twenty states ratified the Convention, which became international law. Article 3 states: “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”

Yet, thirty years later, the gap between the rhetoric of children’s rights and the reality of children’s lives in Canada and the United States remains vast. As Canadian education professor Charles Pascal reflected on the 2019 anniversary of the 1989 Convention, we must close the gap between words and behaviour on children’s rights.

“Bad Kids” in Conflict with the State

The Birth of Adolescence

By the 1920s, specialized attention for the young grew beyond early childhood years. Adolescence was a newly regarded stage of life warranting attention by burgeoning experts. As Cynthia Comacchio explains, the birth of the teenager came about following the First World War, when a generation of young people came of age during a period of unprecedented unrest: international violence, labour disputes (such as the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike), and the decline of traditional social agents such as the family and church. Talk began of youth as a “lost generation” from the 1920s.

Comacchio argues that “adolescence came to be regarded as a social problem primarily because its constituents were coming of age in the modern age” (Comacchio, 2009: 53). Adolescents were potential modernizing forces for the future, but also considered potential sources of disorder if not properly managed — inaugurating a generational divide within society that continues to this day.

The Rise of the “Modern” Youth Problem

G. Stanley Hall is credited with developing the term adolescence in his 1904 work Adolescence. Hall asserted that child development mirrored human evolution, characterizing childhood as the prehistoric stage and adolescence as the critical gap between primitive childhood and civilized adulthood. Normal adolescence was, for Hall, an episode of “physical and mental anarchy” brought about by the onset of biological puberty.

Sigmund Freud proposed a psychosexual development theory in which the genital stage and fixation on the opposite sex was the ultimate sign of maturity during adolescent years. Alan Brown, Canada’s well-known pediatrician, argued that due to rapid growth during adolescence, teenagers experienced emotional confusion, including anxiety and alienation.

By the 1920s, sociologists were examining the social causes of youth problems. These experts diagnosed teenage angst as “maladjustment” — a catch-all phrase that had public resonance and justified the extensive work of adults to regulate young people’s lives.

Rebel Youth

Class, race, and gender made some young people a greater “problem” than others. Hall argued that girls were in a perpetual state of adolescence compared to men naturally prepared for modern life. The 1920s flapper typified girls who resisted their “natural calling” by partaking in urban commercial amusement — dance halls, movies — and employment outside the home.

If girls were depicted as promiscuous, boys were characterized by experts as more “naturally” violent. After the Second World War, the state mostly punished Mexican American youth (associated with the zoot suit riots) and African American youth (supposedly hardened criminals in black juke joints), while the media worried about rebel youth like James Dean (Bush, 2009: 78). The Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 in Los Angeles illustrated how anti-Mexican racism became encoded in the construction of youth criminality.

Delinquent Boys and Girls

By the 1950s, adolescents were not merely a problem but potential juvenile delinquents and a source of moral panic. Bush argues that the face of delinquency after the Second World War was different than the interwar years. Particularly fearsome by the 1950s was the wholesome, suburban, white, middle-class youth turning bad through improper mothering or indulgent parents giving over to seedy popular culture. Like earlier generations, child experts deemed white, middle-class boys and girls redeemable with increased mental hygiene services, advice literature, and restoration of traditional family values. For other adolescents — racialized, poor — redemption would be hard pressed; they would fall under the purview of the juvenile justice system.

Early Years of the “Juvenile Delinquent”

Youth crime existed before the development of the concept of adolescence. Before then, public authorities relied upon the family to correct and contain misbehaving children. When the family could not contain “bad kids,” they were treated as small adults by the state — convicted children faced the same penalties as adult offenders, including incarceration, whipping, and even hanging. British common law did protect children under age seven with the doli incapax defence (“the incapacity to do wrong”), but this presumption was unevenly applied: working-class children were often presumed more dangerous and capable of knowing wrongdoing.

When the Kingston Penitentiary opened in 1835 as the first prison in Canada, children as young as eight were among the first prisoners. The conditions were so troubling that the government established the Brown Commission (1848), led by George Brown, to investigate. The Commission’s 1849 report condemned the treatment of child prisoners, documenting floggings of eleven-year-old Alexis Lafleur (38 times), Peter Charboneau aged ten (62 times), and eight-year-old Antoine Beauché (47 punishments in eight months) — punished for trifling childish behaviour such as talking, staring, making faces, or winking. All four were French Canadians.

With increasing faith in modern childhood (dependence, protection, delayed responsibility), child savers demanded penal reforms. Elizabeth Fry and John Howard were leaders in the early movement in England for humane prisons, and societies in their names continue today. Industrial and reform schools for children were used by the state as a solution to poverty, associated with immorality, and for discipline. By the late 1800s, most criminal activity by youth was minor — curfew infractions and truancy from school.

A Separate Juvenile System

By the late 1800s, governments enacted legislation to develop a separate juvenile justice system:

• 1874: Ontario’s Industrial Schools Act permitted school boards to establish industrial schools for neglected, incorrigible, and truant children under 14
• 1875: Ottawa amended the Criminal Code to enable courts to substitute reformatory sentences for penitentiary terms for offenders to age 16
• 1880: Ontario legislation provided for the incarceration of pre-delinquents (ages 10–13)
• 1892: Ottawa amended the Criminal Code to allow separate, non-public trials of those under age 16
• 1908: The Juvenile Delinquency Act took a social welfare approach to care for delinquents under age 16, requiring care approximating parental treatment, forbidding incarceration with adults, providing probation officers, and stressing treatment not punishment

The 1908 Juvenile Delinquency Act was the most notable: it defined delinquency as acts by those under age 16 violating federal, provincial, or municipal ordinances. Section 38 stated that “the care and custody and discipline of a juvenile delinquent shall approximate as nearly as may be that which should be given by its parents, and that as far as practicable, every juvenile delinquent shall be treated, not as a criminal, but as a misdirected and misguided child.”

The Act required provinces to set up courts, forbade incarceration of children with adults, provided probation officers, and stressed treatment not punishment. Courts had a wide range of options besides incarceration: Children’s Aid Societies, foster homes, industrial schools, reformatories, and more. Although a separate justice system was created, justice continued to be uneven — the system failed to distinguish between neglected, dependent, and delinquent youth, and all were viewed as potentially dangerous.

Uneven Justice for Young People

Redress of youth crime in the early twentieth century moved away from punishment models. Individual diagnoses of “maladjustment” by the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s and the psychology profession in the 1940s ignored the structural causes of crime and the demographics of the population deemed juvenile delinquents — overwhelmingly racialized, urban poor youth.

William Bush’s examination of the Gatesville School for Boys in Texas reveals the gap between progressive rehabilitation rhetoric and brutal reality. During the early decades of the twentieth century, youth were treated as convict labourers. African American boys, disproportionately institutionalized, were segregated in a whole separate facility that was overcrowded, unsanitary, and abusive — including whippings, solitary confinement, and the water cure. “Intelligence tests” were used to classify racialized minority boys as feeble-minded, barring them from rehabilitation, while low scores for white boys were excused. The rhetoric of rehabilitation stood in sharp contrast to the reality.

Bush argues that the image of the wholesome, misguided, white, freckled-faced boy in need of professional mentoring erased the socio-economic context for juvenile delinquency and diverted attention from the actual population of juvenile delinquents. In locking up other people’s children, he writes, we must recognize “the continuing gap between the promise of childhood’s universality and that all too frequent reality of childhood denied” (Bush, 2009: 90).

“Modern” Youth Justice?

By the 1980s, the rehabilitation rhetoric was subsumed by calls for youth accountability. In 1984, Parliament passed the Young Offenders Act, replacing the Juvenile Delinquents Act. The legislation shifted youth justice away from a social welfare approach toward making youth responsible for their actions, while acknowledging that youth have rights distinct from adults. The Act stressed that society should be protected from youth criminality and that incarceration should be avoided when possible.

The Act in practice, however, was a “get tough on crime” form of legislation that increased youth coming before the courts. The federal Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs reported in 1997 that Canada’s rate of youth incarceration was almost twice that of the United States and more than ten times higher than most European countries. Under the Young Offenders Act, “Canada had one of the highest youth incarceration rates of the Western countries” (Statistics Canada, n.d.).

Calls for reform led to the Youth Criminal Justice Act enacted in 2003 — Canada’s main legislation today dealing with juvenile crime. The Act reserves the most serious interventions for the most serious crimes, increases extrajudicial measures (restorative justice, restitution), provides reintegration provisions, and explicitly addresses the needs of Aboriginal young persons. Statistics indicate the Act has significantly reduced incarceration rates of youth, including a decrease in youth coming before courts since 2006.

Unfortunately, the incarceration of marginalized youth, especially Black and Indigenous youth, remains disproportionately high. In 2018, Indigenous youth, who represent less than 9% of the population, made up 43% of all admissions to correctional services (Malakieh, 2020). A survey of Toronto high school students found that Black students were more than twice as likely to report having been stopped by police than white students. This systemic racism has been taken up by the Land Back, Black Lives Matter, and Abolitionist movements.

Gender, Sexuality, and Childhood

“Normal” Youth

As Mary Louise Adams states in the readings for this week, teenagers were “particularly singled out as targets for intervention by adults, because if they were normal, the future would be normal too” (Adams, 2002: 290). Normal teenagers are classified as those young people who adopt dominant behavioural standards and participate in a national social consensus of “good” citizenship. Abnormal teenagers or “deviants” are classified as those who resist and/or seek to redefine social norms.

As Mona Gleason explains in Normalizing the Ideal (1999), drawing on Michel Foucault: “Regulation or normalization represents socially and historically contingent processes whereby some behaviours and attitudes come to be labelled as normal and good while others come to be labelled as deviant and bad.” Normalization is a disciplinary power that emerged in the nineteenth century to regulate citizens as society became more complex, occurring through military, factories, and asylums, and continuing today through social institutions (schools, church, media), social groups (peers, family), and social policies (recreation, labour regulations, correction services, welfare). Young people also have agency in defining normality — student protests of the 1960s or the establishment of popular culture trends demonstrate youth influences.

“Normal” Youth Sexuality

Sexuality has been the ground where fears about social change and the boundaries of normality for young people were most intensely contested. In twentieth-century North America, experts increasingly defined adolescence as a critical journey to sexual responsibility, which they correlated with the production of a cisgender, heteronormative family structure. Adams writes: “Sexual normality was not simply about sex: normal was about being middle class; it was about whiteness and not being ’ethnic’; it was about proper expressions of gender. As a concept, normality erased difference and limited the forms of sexual identity and expression available to young people” (Adams, 2002: 273).

Although essentialist theories held that biology is destiny, fears persisted that young people were vulnerable and could be led astray. Adolescence was, according to most child psychologists, a normal process leading to differentiated masculinity and femininity and eventually heterosexuality. But outside threats to “natural” development had to be contained.

Early Cold War Canada

During the post-WWII period, Canadians searched for a sense of “normality.” The recent Depression and Second World War had exposed society to mass war casualties, rampant poverty, and dramatic changes to gender relations. Following the war, Canadians feared continued upheaval with the threat of the atomic bomb and a possible third world war. The Cold War (1945–1989) pitted the Communist East (Soviet Union) against the Democratic West (US-centred).

Historian Elaine Tyler May in Homeward Bound (1988) argues that the United States and its citizens accepted the best internal defense to these threats was a strategy of containment: national togetherness or conformity to a dominant social order. Those on the political left were charged with being communist sympathizers. Senator Joseph McCarthy led hearings to expose communist sympathizers in unions, education, government, and Hollywood. In Canada, the government purged the civil service of anyone who might be a communist sympathizer. Teachers and academics were specific targets of the red scare (Llewellyn, 2012; Hewitt, 2002).

The nuclear family took on an extremely important social and cultural meaning: it was considered the foundation for the strong consumer economy, the basis for cohesive and peaceful relations, and a protection against communist threats. Conformity to ideal citizenship — white, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual — became a patriotic imperative. The 1950s saw rampant heterosexuality in advice literature, psychological discourse, school textbooks, and advertisements. Television shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver were enormously popular, depicting apron-wearing women subservient to pipe-smoking husbands, and innocent, obedient children in suburban homes.

LGBTQ2S+ people were targeted as sexual subversives. Starting in the 1950s, the Canadian government characterized lesbian and gay individuals as engaging in immoral and illegal activities that could make them vulnerable to blackmail by communists — a threat to national security. One egregious attempt to identify lesbian and gay civil servants and soldiers was the “Fruit Machine” — a device intended to measure involuntary physiological responses to homoerotic imagery. The RCMP investigated and kept secret surveillance files on thousands of suspected lesbian and gay individuals, resulting in dismissals, forced resignations, stigmatization, and social exclusion. By the late 1960s, there were files on 9,000 individuals. After decades of activism, the government issued an official apology in 2017 (Kinsman & Gentile, 2010; Levy, 2020).

Morality and the Modern Teenager

Social authorities considered teenagers to be potential delinquents, drawing upon the idea that puberty was a vulnerable life stage for sexual confusion at best and deviancy at worst. Teenagers in the postwar period were considered of sound mental health if they sexually matured gradually through same-sex friendships, then opposite-sex romantic friendships (including “going steady” — a new form of dating), and finally marriage with traditional gender roles. The worry was that children were rushing the process, engaging in sexual relations prior to marriage.

Anxieties around youth sexuality inspired city councils to enact a variety of laws. For example, in 1944 the Toronto City Council requested police impose a curfew banning anyone under 16 from “places of entertainment after 9pm, unless accompanied by his (sic) parent or guardian.” The Toronto school board refused to permit mixed-sex swimming in city pools and launched a campaign to put up “morality lights” — spotlights on schools and in parks to prevent teenagers from lurking after dark.

At the end of the war, the Canadian government established the Canadian Youth Commission — composed of academics and social workers — to interview young people about postwar reconstruction and their social lives. The Commission concluded that Canadian youth were not as sexually “restless” as their American counterparts, but that Canadian youth were indeed frivolous and needed proper civic guidance to take their places in the postwar world.

Gleason and Adams in the readings also describe anxiety about boys remaining “mama’s boys” and girls prioritizing careers over family, as well as boys and girls prioritizing same-sex relationships. Experts attributed such “maladjustment” to a lack of mothering during the war, over-mothering by women who returned home after the war, and the influence of immoral popular culture. The response was increased regulation by experts, particularly male psychologists, to provide proper socialization for teenagers.

Psychological Persuasion and Sex Education

Marion Hilliard, a prominent Canadian doctor who wrote advice columns on teenage sexuality for Chatelaine in the 1950s, argued that a strong sex drive for boys and girls was natural but that teenagers needed to learn to control and direct those urges. Girls, more so than boys, were responsible for safeguarding the moral compass of society.

The postwar years saw an increasing number of boys and girls, as well as their mothers, attending mental hygiene clinics and being prescribed medicine or therapy for sexual and gender “abnormalities.” Sex education films like Molly Grows Up and Habit Patterns circulated in schools to train teenagers in “normal” sexual and gender development. For girls, “normal” meant deferring sexual activity, prioritizing domesticity and marriage, and serving as the moral guardian of heterosexual relations. Boys’ normality was measured by their embrace of competition, leadership, and future breadwinning.

Popular Culture Regulation

Concerns about youth sexuality and delinquency extended to popular culture. Suggestive hip movements of Elvis Presley, the leather-jacketed James Dean, and the sheer blouse-wearing Marilyn Monroe caused alarm. Of greatest concern to politicians were comic books.

Historian Mary Louise Adams in The Trouble with Normal (1997) describes how comic books became a controversial political issue in the postwar years. Post-WWII crime, horror, and love comics — with titles like Tales from the Crypt, Crimes by Women, and Flaming Love — caught political attention. Tory MP Davie Fulton from British Columbia convinced the Liberal government in 1949 to amend the criminal code to include “crime comics” on the list of obscene literature in Canada. Fulton and other commentators held the view that “young readers (blank slates that they were assumed to be) passively absorbed whatever the comics put before them” (Adams, 1997: 147).

Fulton’s justification came from American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who later published Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Wertham characterized comic book reading as a “bad sexual habit” that perversely stimulates children. He explicitly worried about “masturbation, sado-masochistic fantasies, homosexuality and homoeroticism, prostitution, and sex crime.” Most notoriously, Wertham expressed particular concern about the “homoerotically tinged type of comic book” — arguing that Batman was “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together” — and depicted Wonder Woman as a lesbian in disguise, describing her as “the cruel, ‘phallic’ woman” who was “an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be.”

Troubling Normality

Moral panics, media representations, and government legislation give us a window into adult desires for normative behaviour from young people, but they do not tell us exactly how teenagers acted daily in response. As sociologist Stephanie Coontz reminds us, Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary.

Alfred Kinsey reported from his studies that 90% of his female sample engaged in pre-marital sexual activity. While rates of youthful marriages increased in postwar years, so too did divorce — roughly 25–30% of all marriages in the 1950s ended in divorce (Prentice, 1996). Women representing about 30% of the total wage-earning labour force in 1960, approximately 50% of them married. And racial diversity was a much more pressing issue than popular images suggested: Viola Desmond, who had been a community activist for years, refused to sit in a segregated part of a Nova Scotia movie theatre in 1947 — a decade before Rosa Parks.

There is nothing natural or static about “normal.” Rather, history demonstrates that constructing “normal” for young people was a concentrated effort on the part of adults. Normalization obscures differential realities, creating hegemonic social norms that can have devastating consequences. Norms have disciplinary power over young people’s lives because of the promise of social belonging and the fear of not belonging during a particularly important stage of identity formation. Adams writes: “normality was perhaps less responsible for shaping teenagers’ daily activities than it was for curtailing the possible range of meanings that could be ascribed to them. Regardless of whether one felt normal or aspired to normality, it was always present as a standard by which one could judge oneself or be judged by others. At times, the consequences of not measuring up were considerable” (Adams, 2002: 290).

Contemporary examples of normative pressures on youth include the continued normalization of cisgender identities and the oppressive realities for transgender youth. The historical record, as documented by Jules Gill-Peterson’s work, shows that trans youth are not a new phenomenon — they have always existed, and the denial of their experience is itself a historical and political act.

Race, Ethnicity, and Childhood

Week 11 was designated a research week in the Spring 2021 course — no new lecture content was released, and students devoted their time to completing the “Changing Concepts of Childhood” final essay. The analytical threads regarding race, ethnicity, and childhood were woven throughout the preceding weeks.

Race and Ethnicity as Running Themes

The course as a whole demonstrates that race and ethnicity have been decisive determinants of which children were deemed deserving of the protections of childhood. The racialized construction of childhood is evident across every topic examined:

Child welfare: Historian Kristine Alexander argues that the history of childhood has been shaped by a “social forgetting” of settler colonialism. The over-representation of Indigenous and Black children in Ontario’s child welfare system reflects a long historical pattern of racialized surveillance and removal (Ontario Human Rights Commission, Interrupted Childhoods). The concept of adultification — the perception of Black girls and boys as older and more responsible than they are, resulting in less protection and more punishment — represents a direct denial of childhood to racialized youth.

Institutions and schools: Indigenous children were subjected to the coercive, often lethal disciplinary apparatus of the residential school system. Black children were excluded from, or educated in inferior conditions within, public school systems throughout the twentieth century. The history of segregated schooling in Canada, from British Columbia schools that excluded Asian students to Nova Scotia’s segregated schools for Black children, demonstrates that public education reproduced racial hierarchies.

Immigration and migration: Canada’s immigration history is marked by explicit racial hierarchies — the Chinese head tax, the continuous journey clause to exclude South Asians, the quotas and barriers that let in almost no Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese Canadians — all of which affected children and youth directly. Karen Dubinsky’s work on transracial and transnational adoption shows how Canada has simultaneously imagined itself as a haven from racism for adopting Indigenous and Black children while exposing those children’s families to deeply racist policies and practices.

Juvenile justice: The disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous and Black youth in Canada’s juvenile and youth justice systems reflects structural racism embedded in policing, courts, and corrections. Indigenous youth made up 43% of all admissions to correctional services in 2018 despite being less than 9% of the youth population.

Health: Indigenous infant mortality rates are twice as high as those for non-Indigenous people in Canada. The medicalization of childhood has consistently marked racialized children’s bodies as deficient, diseased, and in need of intervention, while failing to provide equitable access to health care.

Contemporary Issues and Conclusion

“Lost” Young People

We are all quite familiar with the numerous warning signs posted in communities to protect and regulate the privacy, health, and lives of young people. These signs indicate the primary change in the concept of childhood over the last century. Before the mid-1800s, children were considered small adults: young people worked in the familial economy, were susceptible to polio, and hanged for theft. As North America became more modern and complex, adults turned to the young to provide a stable future. Children were imbued with the hopes and fears of adults who encouraged — and at times forced — young people to be the “right” kind of citizen for the nation.

From the mid-1800s, adults increasingly characterized children as innocent, malleable, dependent, fragile, and in need of protection. Child savers, psychologists, and social workers moved to establish programs and policies to protect the welfare of the child. Children benefited from health campaigns, immunizations, rights movements that increased school access, and the creation of a separate juvenile justice system. But not all children benefited, or benefited equally, from such progress. As the primary course text Lost Kids demonstrates:

• African American and Mexican American children did not benefit from juvenile justice
• Indigenous children were not better off for the introduction of state-enforced compulsory schooling; they suffered under the residential school system
• Young people with disabilities did not always reap the rewards of science
• Working-class children were not equally included in expanded welfare programs

There are no signs prominently posted in our neighbourhoods asking us to watch out for hungry, impoverished, or homeless children; no signs warning that we are without universal childcare or insisting we stop youth incarceration and disenfranchisement. Some kids remain lost because of government cutbacks to social programs, moral panics about their behaviour, and adult well-intentioned initiatives to save the young without attention to systemic discrimination based on gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and more.

While we must recognize the lack of comprehensive justice for all children and youth, it is equally critical to acknowledge, as this course has done throughout, the ways that young people have resisted adult regulations and carved out powerful paths in their worlds. Rather than being “lost,” young people often know a better way forward than the adults around them.

Learning into Actions

Our underlying assumptions about childhood — created over time and in specific social contexts — shape policies and practices that have consequences for children’s lives. Who gets to be innocent and delay responsibility? Who, in contrast, is perceived as dangerous and forced to be independent?

An understanding of childhood over time can transform into actions toward justice and equity. This matters not only for those who work or will work with young people. Lost kids are in our lives in many ways; lost kids grow up.

The course asks: Why is it important to know about changing concepts of childhood? How can this understanding lead to actions that improve children’s lives? The critical historical lens developed throughout SDS 220R offers tools for interrogating the present — for seeing how contemporary panics about children and youth, contemporary child welfare policies, contemporary juvenile justice practices, and contemporary health disparities are all shaped by historical processes that can be understood, challenged, and changed.

Thank You

Llewellyn closes the course with an invitation to remember that childhood can be a time of pleasure, play, and happy memories — and to hold onto that as motivation for the difficult, necessary work of understanding and improving the conditions of children’s lives.

Prepared from SDS 220R Spring 2021 lecture materials, University of Waterloo (Renison University College). Course author: Kristina Llewellyn, Associate Professor, Social Development Studies.