The child eludes our understanding. The ubiquitous presence of children in our everyday worlds and the power of the memories of our own childhoods conspire to make the child deceptively familiar to us. Both the scientific understanding of the “natural child” inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and our twentieth-century commonsensical, folk psychology of the child hold that childhood is a human constant. Knowing the child in history poses no special problem, according to this view, just as understanding the child from another culture offers no particular challenge. Children are children.

This everyday view of the child is losing its scholarly legitimation. The academic disciplines that study the child are increasingly inclined to view the child not as a natural object but as a social object, not as the product of developmental, biological forces alone but as a fiction constructed just as much by social and historical forces located in time and space. Social historians, of course, already are predisposed to view the child as a social object, but of significance is that developmental psychologists are coming to the same conclusion. Both disciplines are converging upon the notion of “the invented child,” and both are undergoing what appears to be some fundamental reassessment of the epistemological foundations and goals of their research agenda.