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Sunday Schools and Changing Evangelical Views of Children in the 1820s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Anne M. Boylan
Anne M. Boylan
Affiliation:
visiting lecturer of history, the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Extract

During the early nineteenth century Americans developed a new consciousness of children and of childhood as a stage of life. While it may be hyperbolic to term this event the “discovery of the child,” it seems clear that nineteenth-century Americans saw children and adolescents in very different ways than did their ancestors. Adults began to recognize the characteristics of childhood which separated children from themselves and to perceive that psychological and emotional changes accompanied the physical experience of puberty. Thus the nineteenth century saw the beginning of attempts to understand children on their own terms and to elaborate a theory of that stage later termed “adolescence.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 1979 , pp. 320 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1979

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