children

children. In Ireland the 19th and 20th centuries saw a growing perception of children as both a state resource and a group in need of legal protection. The Children Act of 1908 was the culmination of over three‐quarters of a century's attempts to regulate the lives of children by gradually outlawing most full‐time child labour, by sending young offenders (including vagrants, or homeless children) to reformatories or industrial schools, by setting out conditions under which children could be removed from parents or guardians, by acts for the prevention of cruelty to children in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the enforcement of compulsory primary education on all children from 1892. These acts were strengthened by further legislation in the 20th century.

Children had a precarious grip on life, and infant mortality rates remained high until the middle of the 20th century, particularly in cities. The major childhood killer was diarrhoea, particularly in the first year of life. After that, the childhood diseases of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough could be fatal, and poor nutrition could cause permanent disability. Children with rickets were a common sight in the poorer parts of towns and cities up to the post‐war period, when the introduction of comprehensive new health care systems in both jurisdictions reduced infant and child mortality considerably. Universal family allowances, also called children's allowances (introduced in 1944 in independent Ireland, 1945 in Northern Ireland), eased the burden of subsistence for working‐class parents.

‘Illegitimate’ children had, up to the 1950s, a much higher death rate than the ‘legitimate’. Although their survival rates improved greatly with the early 19th‐century development of orphanages and workhouses to replace the lethal foundling hospitals, their lives in institutional care were often grim, and developments in government‐subsidized childcare were slow.

In the early 20th century there are signs that childhood was being thought of in a new way. Catholic bishops' pastorals in the 1920s and 1930s might have advised parents to chastise disobedient teenagers, but they also urged parents not to be ‘austere’ or ‘aloof’, and to tolerate the noise and disorder of their children's playing. Numerous accounts tell us that Santa Claus started coming to many (though not all) Irish children, urban and rural, middle class and working class, in places as far apart as the Blasket Islands and Dublin city, as early as the 1920s. His appearance, spontaneously adopted by parents themselves, was in sharp contrast to the massive commercialization of children's leisure that has occurred since the 1960s.

Caitriona Clear