Ages and ages: the multiplication of children’s ‘ages’ in early twentieth-century child psychology

Abstract

This paper explores the trend, between 1905 and the late 1920s in UK and US child psychology, of ‘discovering’, labelling and calculating different ‘ages’ in children. Those new ‘ages’ – from mental to emotional, social, anatomical ages, and more – were understood as either replacing, or meaningfully related to, chronological age. The most famous, mental age, ‘invented’ by Alfred Binet in the first decade of the century, was instrumental in early intelligence testing. Anatomical age triggered great interest until the 1930s, with many psychologists suggesting that physical development provided a more reliable inkling of which grade children should be in than chronological age. Those ages were calculated with great precision, and educational recommendations began to be made on the basis of these. This article maps this psychological and educational trend, and suggests that it cultivated a vision of children as developmentally erratic, worthy of intense scientific attention, and enticingly puzzling for researchers

Manajemen Sarana dan Prasarana Taman Penitipan Anak di Lampung

“…Dimana teknologi semakin pesat berkembang dan semakin mudah diakses setiap orang, mulai dari anak berusia dini hingga orang dewasa (Kustiawan & Enggarwati, 2021;Yula Anggriani, 2020). Sebagai orang tua yang paham terkait perkembangan zaman harus lebih berhati-hati terhadap pendidikan dan tumbuh kembang anak sejak dini (Agustina, 2019;Beauvais, 2016). Salah satu pendidik pertama yang diharapkan mampu mengembangkan aspek perkembangan anak usia dini adalah orang tua dan keluarga (Rohmani, 2020).…”

“Don't worry”: Figurations of the child in a Swedish parenting advice column.

“…This figuration offered an alternative account of children's problems that attributed them to transient developmental periods, not constitutional factors. Generally, however, these periods were not clearly specified in terms of years or duration (in contrast to early-20 th -century experts' attempts to precisely calculate the "ages" of children; see Beauvais, 2016). Instead, the phases and ages were relatively broadly defined and could largely be distinguished on the basis of behavior.…”

Modern Schooling and the Curriculum of the Body

“…Classificatory processes were fed by a combination of educational science, ideology, and administrative pragmatismin each of which assessments of young people's bodies were meaningful. Clementine Beauvais (2016), for example, describes a range of metrics used by early twentieth-century Anglo-American educational psychologists to measure children's mind and body maturation against chronological age, for the purpose of better situating them in classes. Others have shown how the pragmatic willingness to mix genders in coeducational classrooms, particularly at high school level, allowed for efficiencies of scale in the building and financial maintenance of schools (Tyack and Hansot 1990).…”