4.2.2 - Changes in the Status of Children in Family and Society

Changing status over time

Children's status is not fixed by biology alone. Sociologists argue that it is shaped by law, culture, and the organisation of society. In early industrial Britain, many children were treated more as workers and economic contributors than as emotionally priceless dependants. Aries argued that childhood is socially constructed: the way a society defines and treats children changes over time rather than staying constant. Shorter added that high infant mortality and harsher living conditions limited emotional investment in children in earlier periods.

A march-of-progress argument says that children's status rose as industrial society developed and as the state intervened more strongly in family life. The key pattern was the gradual separation of children from the adult world of paid work and the increasing idea that children should be protected, educated, and nurtured.

The legal changes below are important because they show how children's status became more protected and more closely regulated:

This change in status also affected family life. Modern families are often described as more child-centred because children's needs, safety, and education are prioritised more than in the past. Jenks helps explain this cultural shift through the modern Apollonian image of the child: the child is seen as innocent, special, and in need of careful protection. That image fits well with a society that treats childhood as precious and closely supervised.

The march-of-progress view identifies real changes, but it does not settle the debate. More law and protection may improve children's lives, yet it can also increase adult monitoring and control.

Rights and adult power

The conflict view challenges the optimistic picture above. It argues that childhood is still structured by adult power and that the language of care can hide relationships of inequality. On this view, adults define the rules, control most resources, and decide when children may speak, move, work, or make important choices.

Firestone argued that childhood can operate as a form of oppression because children are kept dependent and powerless by adults. Holt went further, describing modern childhood as a kind of imprisonment in which children are denied many of the freedoms adults take for granted. Both writers force sociologists to ask whether long dependency always benefits children, or whether it often benefits adults by preserving adult authority.

This is where the debate over rights becomes important. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child supports the idea that children have rights to protection, provision, and participation. In other words, children should be safe, their needs should be met, and their views should matter. Yet children do not have the same autonomy as adults. Parents, teachers, courts, and the state still claim authority to decide what is in a child's best interests.

That tension between protection and autonomy is central to the topic. If adults leave children entirely alone, children may be exposed to harm. If adults regulate every part of childhood, children may be protected but also silenced. Sociologists therefore ask not only whether children have more rights than before, but also who defines those rights and who gets the final say when adults and children disagree.

Media and commercialisation

Postman argued that childhood was being weakened by modern media. His key idea was that earlier societies had an information hierarchy: adults could control access to knowledge because literacy and print culture created a barrier between adults and children. Postman focused on television; his information-boundary argument can also be applied to digital media, which can reduce that barrier by giving children easier access to information about sex, violence, money, relationships, and the wider world.

This argument helps explain why some sociologists think the distinctiveness of childhood has been eroded. Children may dress like adults, follow adult celebrities, and encounter adult concerns far earlier than in the past. However, Postman may overstate the case. Parents, schools, age restrictions, and safeguarding rules still draw sharp boundaries around childhood. Opie and Opie also showed that children maintain their own peer cultures rather than simply absorbing adult culture.

Another change in children's status is their growing importance as consumers. The commercialisation of childhood means that children are not just dependants within families; they are also a target market. Advertising, branded toys, streaming platforms, games, and influencers all construct children as consumers with tastes and purchasing influence. This helps explain the idea of pester power, where children pressure parents to buy specific goods.

Palmer argues that these pressures can contribute to a toxic childhood in which commercial expectations, screen-based leisure, and reduced adult time undermine well-being. Yet this view should also be qualified. New media can create opportunities for play, identity work, learning, and peer connection. A sociological answer should therefore avoid simple panic and instead ask how media and markets reshape childhood differently for different groups of children.