Canada

Canada

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Canada occupies the northern half of the continent of North America. The forty-ninth degree of latitude between the Pacific Ocean and Lake of the Woods forms its southern boundary with the United States. This border follows a series of lakes and rivers through the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River. The eastern portion follows an irregular path across the state of Maine to the Bay of Fundy. On the coast of the Pacific Northwest, the state of Alaska separates the northern portion of its most western province, British Columbia, from the Pacific Ocean. In terms of area, Canada is the second-largest country in the world. In terms of population, however, it ranks only thirty-third. The vast majority of Canadians live along the southern edge of the country, in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region where Toronto and Montreal, the two largest cities, are located.

The French first colonized Canada, a name derived from the Huron-Iroquois kanata, meaning a village or settlement, in the early seventeenth century. Known as New France, it occupied a small territory around the Gulf of St. Lawrence. From the founding of the city of Quebec in 1608 until the ceding of Canada to Britain in 1763, France placed its stamp upon the history of the continent. Canada came into its own in 1791 when the Constitutional Act (or Canada Act) divided Quebec, then considerably enlarged, into the provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada. In 1841 they were joined to form the province of Canada and in 1867 the British North America Act united the province of Canada (divided into Ontario and Quebec) with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form "one Dominion under the name of Canada." The remaining provinces and territories followed suit between 1870 and 1999.

The history of Canada's children follows the varied paths of the country itself. Although we do not have any physical evidence, the first child born in what would become Canada was likely a son or daughter of Canada's first inhabitants, who are believed to have come from Asia some 18,000 years ago over a temporary land bridge that joined Siberia and Alaska. The children of the First Nations peoples, the eventual successors of these anonymous early settlers, had to learn the ways of complex societies. The nature of childhood, like adulthood, varied greatly among aboriginal peoples, depending on their location and means of survival. The rhythm of life for fishing people like the Kwakiutl on the western coast, hunters like the Blackfoot on the prairies, or farmers like the Huron in central Ontario differed from each other and, in turn, shaped the unique nature of childhood among First Nations peoples.

First Nations: Kwakiutl and Huron

On the central West Coast, for example, Kwakiutl lived in numaym, extended households of up to one hundred people. Midwives assisted at births. Four days after birth the infant was given its first name, and it spent its first year in a cradle carried by its mother. At about a year the child acquired a new name, and boys had their hair singed and holes pierced in their ears and nose. High-status children were later given other names owned by the family. Families marked each new name with a potlatch, or gift-giving ceremony.

Each numaym in Kwakiutl society moved several times a year to one of the five to seven resource sites owned by the chief. In a society highly conscious of property rights, children learned the precise locations of fishing and food-gathering sites and winter village locations. By observation and practice, children gradually mastered some of the skills employed at each site: making wood, stone, bone, and metal tools; constructing longhouses, canoes, and watertight wooden boxes; preserving and storing food; carving poles and masks; and weaving aprons, capes and blankets.

By contrast, the Huron in southern Ontario lived in long-houses consisting of an average of six nuclear families. Families had on average three children. Since the Huron were a matrilineal society, girls were particularly prized. Newborn children usually had their ears pierced, and later, beads and other trinkets were hung about the child's neck. The Huron had a large supply of names available to give their children. It is possible that particular names were the property of different clans.

The training of Huron children followed a gendered script. Boys were encouraged to refuse domestic chores and instead were trained to use the bow and spend much of their time outside shooting arrows, hunting and trapping small game, and playing ball games. Girls received a much different training that focused almost exclusively on domestic tasks, such as pounding corn.

As the process of colonization took increasing hold, First Nations families would struggle to adapt to, and often resist, the encroachments of settler society. After an initial period of cooperation with Europeans, First Nations peoples found their way of life increasingly questioned and threatened by notions of European Christianity and racial superiority. This long period of contact and conflict forever altered the ways in which aboriginal peoples raised children and their expectations for the future.

The Colonial Period: New France

When Samuel de Champlain founded a tiny trading post at Quebec in 1608, the colony of New France began to take shape. In New France, sage femme (midwives) assisted women in childbirth. During the first few months of life, babies were bound tightly in swaddling clothes believed to help straighten their legs and backs. In the absence of either mother's milk or a wet nurse, some infants were given raw cow's milk diluted with river or well water.

As Jacques Henripin's studies show, as many as one in four children in New France died before they celebrated their first birthday. This high rate of infant mortality was countered somewhat by an equally astounding birth rate. Peter Moogk has demonstrated that after the birth of her first child and until the age of about thirty-five, a married Canadienne bore one child every two years. Families in the colony averaged six children. As infants, children slept in wooden cradles and were often given rattles. At night, a mother would tie a rope to the cradle so she could rock her baby from the warmth of her bed. By around the age of seven, children entered the period known as tendre jeunesse, a time in which they were believed to begin to reason for themselves. Along with tendre jeunesse came added responsibilities, such as helping with family chores.

The inhabitants of New France, including its children, were constantly ravaged by epidemics of smallpox, by war, and by infections brought ashore from visiting ships. Nearly half of the adolescents in the colony lost a parent. Illegitimate children were seen as a particular problem in New France, reflecting, in the watchful eyes of church officials, the breakdown of communal social restraints. Between 1701 and 1760, some 1,112 illegitimate children were baptized in what would become the province of Quebec. Guardianship and foster parentage were often the only recourse for single mothers who could not bear the burden of looking after many fatherless children. Often, children as young as five or six were indentured as domestic servants to merchants or to wealthier families. The colonial administration, far from regretting such private arrangements, enforced children's indentures.

In general, few children in the colony were strangers to work. Well before adolescence, children were expected to engage in productive labor. The youngest children helped their mothers amuse infants or took younger siblings for walks. Older children could be expected to help plant crops, cut firewood, or rake hay. In village settings, stables had to be cleaned, chamber pots emptied, firewood gathered and piled, dirty boots scraped, and water fetched. Children generally reached a certain level of competency in their domestic skills, reflected in the fact that, theoretically, those who reached puberty were eligible for marriage (legally twelve for girls and fourteen for boys). Few, however, actually entered into marriage at such a young age.

Childhood among the English-speaking settlers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was similar to that described for New France. In particular, children were highly valued for the work they performed in settler families. European commentators remarked on the independent and self-reliant character of North American settler children– characteristics more highly developed, they argued, than in children back home.

The Importance of Schooling in the Nineteenth Century

By the nineteenth century, schooling began to slowly over-shadow work as the dominant experience in the lives of many children. Most children attended publicly supported schools for a certain number of years, and by around 1900 many children between the ages of five and sixteen years attended consistently. The increasing importance of schooling in the lives of children reflected shifting attitudes emerging in Western Europe and North America regarding childhood as a separate and special stage of life. Children were increasingly seen as needing protection, special attention, and training. This attitude was reflected also in the care of dependent children, for this was the period in which Canadians began to build special institutions to care for orphans and for children whose parents could not, or would not, care for them. Other economic and demographic changes, such as increasing urban populations, improved roads, and innovations in standardized and mechanized work, also had a considerable impact on the changing character of Canadian children's lives.

By the 1920s, professional interest in the quality of child care and child rearing brought these private concerns more firmly into the public domain. In anglophone Canada (and somewhat later in francophone Canada), social workers, social activists, public health reformers, and education reformers, predominately white and middle class, worked to shape the nature of childhood. Sometimes for better, but occasionally for worse, they intervened in the home and nursery in order to advocate for more hygienic feeding methods, better public health, safer milk supplies, better outdoor play space, and a more inclusive school curriculum. More often than fathers, mothers were the target of this advice and admonishment.

In order to promote ideal middle-class families, social reform advocates in the early years of the twentieth century outlawed child labor, made school attendance compulsory, and worked for the appointment of truancy officers. They tried to provide support for families that had suffered the loss or incapacitation of a male breadwinner by agitating for workers' compensation and mothers' pensions. The work of mothers in factories or sweatshops was more closely monitored, and hot lunch programs at schools were set up. In the larger cities, such as Toronto, "fresh air" funds were initiated to provide poorer children with a chance to escape the city environment during summer vacations.

The turn of the twentieth century also saw a significant change in the way reformers viewed the efficacy of institutional care–a feature of the nineteenth century–for dependent or troubled children. In an effort to ameliorate the worst evils of the baby farming system, they began adoption services to place illegitimate children into family homes rather than in foundling institutions and to legitimize children whose parents subsequently married. The Federal Juvenile Delinquents Act set up a system of juvenile courts, detention homes, and probation officers to focus detection and treatment efforts on the needs of troubled children.

Despite these successes, many other children continued to live under institutional care well into the 1940s and 1950s. Across the country, First Nations children in state-cosponsored residential schools, so-called delinquent children, and children with disabilities often languished in poorly run and supported institutions. As historians continue to discover, many of these children, whether due to racism, powerlessness, official incompetence, or a combination of these and other factors, suffered horrible abuses.

The hardships endured by many children, particularly those outside the dominant white middle class, temper the notion that the history of childhood in Canada has represented an uncomplicated march toward success and improvement. Clearly, however, over the course of the nineteenth century, Canadians by and large strove to improve the lives of the children in their midst.

See also: Australia; Native American Children; New Zealand; Placing Out .

bibliography

Henripin, Jacques. 1954. La population canadienne au début du XVIIIe siècle: nuptialité, fécondité, mortalité infantile. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Moogk, Peter C. 1982. "Les Petits Sauvages : The Children of Eighteenth-Century New France." In Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Sutherland, Neil. 1976. Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sutherland, Neil. 1997. Growing Up–Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Trigger, Bruce G. 1969. The Huron–Farmers of the North. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mona Gleason