The History of Childhood and Children’s Rights: From Miniature Adults to Rights-Bearing Subjects

In 1788, a petition was submitted to the British Parliament. It called for improved conditions for young children used as chimney sweep apprentices. The members of Parliament who read it were not unaware of these children’s existence. Children aged four, five, or at most six crawled up narrow chimneys and scraped away soot. It was common for them to get stuck and suffocate, fall to their deaths, or die of scrotal cancer. And yet the Chimney Sweepers Act 1788, which ultimately passed, did nothing more than set the minimum age at eight.^[1]

The core problem with this law was not the number itself. It was that nobody questioned the very premise that young children should be there at all.

‘Childhood’ Is an Invention — and a Contested One

In 1960, French historian Philippe Ariès published a work that would later be translated into English as Centuries of Childhood. His central argument was provocative: medieval Europe had no concept of childhood as a distinct phase of life, and children were absorbed directly into the adult world as soon as they were weaned. As evidence, Ariès pointed to medieval paintings in which children appear dressed like miniature adults, standing in the same postures as the grown-ups around them.^[2]

The argument caused an immediate sensation. But it also met with strong rebuttals.

In 1983, historian Linda Pollock published Forgotten Children, directly challenging Ariès’s thesis. After an extensive review of diaries, letters, and newspaper records spanning 1500 to 1900, Pollock reached the opposite conclusion: across all eras, parents feared when their children fell ill, delighted when they played, and grieved deeply when they died.^[3] The argument, in other words, was not that parents failed to love their children — but that the way that love was expressed, and the social roles expected of children, were different.

Today, the scholarly consensus sits somewhere between the two positions. As Ariès pointed out, the institutionalized, socially sanctioned movement to recognize childhood as a special period deserving of protection did indeed become pronounced after the modern era. But as Pollock showed, the idea that parents regarded their children as mere instruments was an exaggeration. Childhood was invented — but even before that invention, children were loved.

Ideas Begin to Shift — Thinkers of the 17th and 18th Centuries

So where did the movement to conceptualize childhood as a distinct period in its own right actually begin?

In 1693, English philosopher John Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education. He argued that children should be treated as rational beings, and that education ought to proceed through an understanding of the child’s nature rather than through corporal punishment.^[4] Simple as it may sound today, this was a radical claim at the time.

Seventy years later, in 1762, French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Émile, or On Education, a work in the form of an educational novel. Rousseau approached the child from a different angle than Locke. He defined childhood as a phase in which reason had not yet awakened, and argued that rather than instilling adult knowledge, children should be given the opportunity to learn through their senses in the natural world.^[4]

The two thinkers offered different prescriptions, but shared a common premise: children inhabit a world that is uniquely their own, and understanding and protecting that world must be the starting point of education.

Why did these ideas emerge precisely at this moment? Several currents converged. The spread of printing and growing literacy created a need for separate educational spaces for children. Following the Reformation, the view of the family as a unit of religious instruction grew stronger. And an expanding middle class acquired both the economic means and the inclination to invest in their children’s education and futures. The concept of childhood was not the invention of any single genius — it was a product of structural social change.

The Industrial Revolution and the Systematization of Exploitation

While ideas were discovering childhood, the Industrial Revolution was transforming children into instruments of exploitation more systematically than ever before.

The story of the chimney sweep boys has already been told. The situation in Britain’s textile mills was no different. Before the Factory Act of 1833, children under nine threaded their way between spinning machines for twelve hours or more a day, reconnecting broken threads. Their small height and tiny hands made them useful. It was also common for them to lose fingers between machines, or to be killed when their clothing was caught in the machinery.^[5]

The mines were harsher still. Before the Mines Act of 1842, a six-year-old child might be assigned to operate the ventilation doors at the entrance to a mine shaft — sitting alone in pitch darkness for twelve to sixteen hours, pulling a handle. When the Royal Commission report was published in 1842, Britain’s middle-class society was shocked, and that same year the underground employment of women and children under ten was banned.^[5]

British legislation gradually tightened. The Factory Act of 1833 prohibited children under nine from working in textile mills; the amended Factory Act of 1844 strengthened limits on working hours for children; and the Factories and Workshops Act of 1878 extended the scope of protection further.^[5]

Across the Atlantic, conditions in the United States were similar. From the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, hundreds of thousands of children worked in cotton mills and mines across the South. The photographer Lewis Hine became a visual witness to this reality. From 1908, working as an investigator for the National Child Labor Committee, he deceived factory owners to gain access to work sites, and photographed the children working inside.^[6]

Hine’s photographs shook American public opinion. His work contributed to the passage of the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in 1916, and in 1938 the federal Fair Labor Standards Act established federal standards regulating child labor.^[6]

Child labor was not a problem unique to Britain and the United States. At the same time, children were working in the mines and factories of Belgium, France, and Germany, and in the cotton mills of India. Child labor was a near-universal feature of early industrialization.

The Movement to Protect Childhood — The Beginning of International Solidarity

As the twentieth century opened, an international movement for child protection began to coalesce.

At the center of this movement was a woman named Eglantyne Jebb. In 1919, she was arrested in London’s Trafalgar Square for distributing leaflets bearing photographs of starving children in postwar Europe — on the grounds that she was inciting sympathy for children in enemy nations, Germany and Austria. Taken to court, she pleaded guilty and was fined five pounds; but the prosecuting barrister, Archibald Bodkin, was so moved that he paid the fine on her behalf. That same year, Jebb and her sister founded the relief organization Save the Children.^[7]

Five years later, in 1924, the declaration of children’s rights that Jebb had drafted was adopted by the League of Nations. Known as the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, the document was brief but historic: the principle that children deserve the best that society can offer was recognized on the international stage for the first time.^[7]

During the same period, in Europe, one man was trying to systematize children’s rights in an entirely different way. He was Janusz Korczak — born Henryk Goldszmit — a Polish pediatrician and educator. Running an orphanage in Warsaw, he gave the children their own parliament and court. The idea was not for adults to impose rules on children unilaterally, but for the children themselves to create and uphold the norms of their community.^[8]

His life came to a tragic end. When Nazi Germany established a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1940, the orphanage was forcibly relocated. Korczak was offered shelter and false papers by acquaintances outside, but he refused. In August 1942, when the Nazis arrived to transport the orphanage’s children to the Treblinka extermination camp, Korczak took the children by their hands and marched with them. He and the children were killed at Treblinka.^[8]

Bang Jeong-hwan and Korea’s ‘Eorinyi’

Before the Geneva Declaration was adopted in 1924, something noteworthy was already happening on the Korean peninsula. Bang Jeong-hwan(방정환) first proclaimed Children’s Day on May 1, 1922, and the following year, on May 1, 1923, more organized Children’s Day events were held, centered on the Saekdonghoe(색동회) — a Cheondogyo-affiliated children’s movement organization that Bang had led in founding.^[9] Accounts differ as to which of the two dates should be regarded as the “first” Children’s Day, but the 1923 events are more widely documented both domestically and internationally.

Among Bang Jeong-hwan’s contributions, perhaps the most remarkable was a single word. At the time, children were referred to by terms like ae, aedeul, and gyejibbae — diminutive, informal, and sometimes dismissive. Bang formalized the use of the word eorinyi instead. Though the word had existed before, Bang elevated it into an honorific term for a person equal in dignity to an adult — the suffix -i attached to the root meaning “young,” signaling full personhood.^[9] It was a choice rooted in the belief that changing language means changing perception.

This movement was not disconnected from international currents. Bang Jeong-hwan had encountered the global children’s rights movement during his studies in Japan, and 1923 was a year in which children’s rights movements were simultaneously taking shape around the world. Korea’s Children’s Day was also, in a sense, a declaration of human rights made under the conditions of colonial rule.

1959 — Ten Rights

On November 20, 1959, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Expanding on the 1924 Geneva Declaration into ten principles, this document was the first occasion on which the international community explicitly set out what rights children should have.^[10]

The ten rights contained in the Declaration are as follows:

1. The right to be free from discrimination on grounds of race, religion, national origin, or sex
2. The right to special opportunities and facilities for physical, mental, moral, spiritual, and social development
3. The right to a name and a nationality
4. The right to adequate nutrition, housing, and medical services
5. The right of the child who is physically, mentally, or socially handicapped to special treatment, education, and care
6. The right to grow up in an atmosphere of affection and moral and material security, in the care of parents whenever possible
7. The right to free and compulsory education and to adequate opportunities for play and recreation
8. The right to be among the first to receive protection and relief in times of disaster
9. The right to be protected against all forms of neglect, cruelty, and exploitation
10. The right to be raised in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, friendship among peoples, peace, and universal brotherhood

Reading through this list, some items may seem self-evident, while others catch one by surprise. The ninth principle no longer feels obvious when one recalls the chimney sweep boys of the nineteenth century. The eighth and tenth make clear sense in light of the world that had just emerged from two world wars. In a very real sense, this Declaration was also a list of things humanity had agreed, by that point, to stop doing to children.

1989 — From Declaration to Treaty

The 1959 Declaration, however, remained a statement of principles without legal force. If a country violated it, there was no mechanism to compel compliance. Change came thirty years later. In 1989, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).^[10]

The Convention differed from previous declarations in two ways. First, it was a legally binding international treaty: states that ratified it became obligated to protect children’s rights. Second, it defined children not merely as objects of protection but as subjects of rights in their own right. This included children’s right to express their opinions, right of access to information, and freedom of thought and conscience.

The Convention became the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history. As of 2022, 196 countries had ratified it; the only UN member state that has not is the United States.^[10]

So, How Old Is a Child, Exactly?

Article 1 of the Convention defines a “child” as follows: “For the purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”^[12] Brief as it is, this definition carries great weight. The number eighteen was, for the first time, formally established at the international level.

Today, most countries follow this standard. South Korea’s Child Welfare Act, Japan’s Child Welfare Act (児童福祉法), the United Kingdom’s Children Act 1989, the German Civil Code, the French Civil Code, China’s Law on the Protection of Minors (未成年人保护法), and India’s Majority Act all define those under eighteen as minors or children.^[12] Even the United States, which has not ratified the Convention, uses eighteen as the federal standard for the age of majority.

Within the same “under eighteen” threshold, however, the rights and responsibilities that apply vary considerably by domain:

• Age of criminal responsibility: In England and Wales, criminal responsibility begins at age ten; in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, at fourteen. Below these thresholds, children cannot be held criminally liable.^[12]
• Minimum working age: ILO Convention No. 138 sets the minimum age for employment at fifteen in principle, linked to the end of compulsory schooling.^[12]
• Minimum age for marriage: Eighteen in most countries, though many still permit younger ages with parental consent or court authorization.
• Voting age: Eighteen in the majority of countries; some, including Austria and Brazil, allow voting from age sixteen.

What about social convention? Interestingly, the age that comes to mind when people say “child” in everyday speech is typically much younger than the legal threshold. In Korea, the word eorinyi generally refers to children up to around twelve or thirteen — those in elementary school — while those older are called cheongsonyeon (teenagers). In English, too, there are distinct categories: child, teenager, young adult. Japanese distinguishes 子供 from 青少年; Chinese separates 兒童 from 青少年.

The law treats everyone under eighteen as a single protected category; language carves that range into finer gradations. Somewhere in between, a person moves from being the object of protection to the subject of self-determination. It is difficult to say which vocabulary is more accurate. What this gap reveals, however, is one consistent truth: we know that people grow gradually, but exactly where along that continuum to assign which rights and responsibilities remains an answer that differs from one society to the next.

A Changed World, and a Persistent Reality

More than thirty-five years have passed since the Convention was ratified. The world has changed considerably. Child mortality has fallen, school enrollment has risen, and international standards on child labor have been strengthened.

But reality still lags behind the norms. According to a 2024 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, approximately 138 million children worldwide are currently engaged in child labor, of whom 54 million are involved in hazardous work that threatens their health and safety.^[11] Child marriage remains a common practice in some regions, and in conflict zones children are conscripted as child soldiers.

New challenges have also emerged. In digital environments, children are subjected to data collection and advertising algorithms. Online bullying, exposure to harmful content, and the exploitation of children’s data by platform companies are all areas that the 1989 Convention could not have anticipated. The United Nations and national governments continue to debate how to define and protect children’s rights in this digital age.

The Road to Consensus

Childhood was not something naturally given. It is a historical construction — discovered by thinkers, bounded by legislators, and codified in international norms by activists.

What this history reveals is an uncomfortable truth. The eras in which children were exploited were not eras in which society failed to love children. They were eras in which there was no social consensus about what children are, or what rights they deserve. The man who drove chimney sweep boys mercilessly up their chimneys may well have been a tender parent to his own children.

That consensus did not emerge on its own. It required people who wrote petitions, who broke into factories to take photographs, who were arrested for handing out leaflets, and who walked side by side with orphaned children to the very end. Eglantyne Jebb had the League of Nations adopt the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924. It took another sixty-five years for that declaration to develop into a legally binding international treaty.

The Convention’s preamble contains these words: “the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding.” To reach a sentence like that — and to gather the signatures of 196 nations behind it — the children in the chimneys had to wait for centuries in the dark.