Children

Most people in American society resist associating the words children and death in a single phrase. They do not wish to contemplate the possibility that children may encounter death-related events either in their own lives or in the lives of others. As a result, they try not to think about the actual realities implied by the phrase "children and death" and they attempt to shield children from contact with or knowledge of such realities.

Although this effort at "misguided protectionism" is usually well meant, it is unlikely in most instances to be either successful or helpful. To explain why this is true, this entry explores how death and death-related events impinge on the lives of children and what their significance is for such lives. In addition, this entry considers the elements of a constructive, proactive program that helps children in their interactions with death and death-related events.

Children as Harbingers of the Future and Repositories of Hope

For many people in American society, children represent ongoing life and the promise of the future. In them, many hopes and ambitions are embodied. They foreshadow what is yet to come and act as a pledge of its surety. In a special way for females, they enter into life by emerging from their mothers' bodies. In addition, human children are vulnerable in special ways and for an unusually prolonged period of time. They call upon their adult caregivers to care for them. Their presence in adult lives is, more often than not, a source of pride and delight. As they grow and mature, children become their own persons and their parents' companions. In some cases, eventually they become caregivers of the adults who raised them. All these descriptions are true for one's natural children, as well as for those who are adopted or are foster children, and even when the latter are of a different ethnicity or culture.

Children, Adolescents, and Normative Development

In the 1950s the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proposed that there are four major eras (sometimes called "ages," "periods," or "stages") in the lives of children and an additional one for adolescents (see Table 1). His depiction of childhood has been highly influential to other developmental psychologists and scholars, although it is no longer universally accepted. Moreover, subsequent scholarship has sought to distinguish between three subperiods within adolescence. Still, a broad Eriksonian framework helps to draw attention to prominent aspects of physical, psychological, and social development in humans during childhood and adolescence, although it may not comment on spiritual development. Within limits, it can be useful as a general background for an overview of death in childhood and adolescence.

Erikson's model seeks to describe the normal and healthy development of an individual ego. It proposes that a predominant psychosocial issue or central conflict characterizes each era in human development. This is expressed as a struggle between a pair of alternative orientations, opposed tendencies, or attitudes toward life, the self, and other people. Successful resolution of each developmental struggle results in a leading virtue, a particular strength or quality of ego functioning. For Erikson, the task work in these developmental struggles is associated with normative life events, those that are expected to occur at a certain time, in a certain relationship to other life events, with predictability, and to most if not all of the members of a developmental group or cohort. This developmental framework is only roughly correlated with chronological age. Further, it might not apply at all or might only have limited relevance to individuals within different familial, cultural, and societal groups, and it might only apply uniformly to members of both genders when males and females are given equal options in life.

The importance of Erikson's work is the contrast between normative developmental events, however they may be described, and death-related events, primarily because most death-related events are nonnormative. They are unexpected or unforeseen events that occur atypically or unpredictably, with no apparent relationship to other life events, and to some but not all members of a developmental cohort. Still, nonnormative life events occur in a context of normative developmental events and each can influence the other in significant ways.

Both normative and nonnormative life events and transitions are life crises or turning points. They present "dangerous opportunities" that offer occasions for growth and maturation if an individual copes with them effectively, but also the potential for psychological harm and distorted or unsatisfactory development if the coping response is inappropriate or inadequate. Accordingly, the way in which a child or adolescent resolves the issue that dominates a particular era in his or her development and thereby does or does not establish its corresponding ego quality or virtue is likely to be relatively persistent or enduring throughout his or her life.

With respect to adolescence, various scholars have offered a fine-tuned account that distinguishes between three developmental subperiods, along with their predominant issues and corresponding virtues:

• • Early adolescence : separation (abandonment) versus reunion (safety); leading to a sense of emotional separation from dependency on parents
• • Middle adolescence : independence or autonomy versus dependence; leading to a sense of competency, mastery, and control
• • Late adolescence : closeness versus distance; leading to a sense of intimacy and commitment.

The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget looked at child development in a different way by focusing on processes involved in cognitive development during childhood. His work and later research on the development of death-related concepts in both childhood and adolescence is groundbreaking to the field of developmental psychology.

The various schemas all relay the fact that children and adolescents may encounter the deaths of others and even their own deaths. These and all other death-related events will be experienced within the ongoing processes of their own individual maturation. As the psychologist and gerontologist Robert Kastenbaum wrote in his article "Death and Development through the Life span": "Death is one of the central themes in human development throughout the life span. Death is not just our destination; it is a part of our 'getting there' as well" (Kastenbaum 1977, p. 43). Death-related events can affect human development during childhood and adolescence. Equally so, cognitive, psychological, biological, behavioral, social, and spiritual aspects

of that development, along with life experiences and communications from the environment that surround children and adolescents, will all be influential in how they cope with intrusions into their lives by death. According to Kastenbaum, adults who help children and adolescents in this coping work need to be sensitive to the developmental context and the individual perspective of each child or adolescent in order to be successful.

Encounters with Death during Childhood and Adolescence

"'The kingdom where nobody dies,' as Edna St. Vincent Millay once described childhood, is the fantasy of grown-ups" (Kastenbaum 1973, p. 37). In fact, children and adolescents do die, and all young people can be and are affected by the dying and deaths of others around them.

The most dangerous time for children themselves is prior to birth (where they face the implications of miscarriage, stillbirth, and spontaneous or elective abortion), at birth (with all its risks of perinatal death), immediately after birth (with the potential perils of neonatal death), and during the first year of life. The best data available are for infant mortality. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics indicated that a total of 27,953 infants died in the United States during 1999. This figure represents 7.1 infant deaths for every 1,000 live births, the lowest rate ever recorded for the United States.

More than twenty other countries with a population of at least 2.5 million have lower infant mortality rates than those in the United States. Moreover, it is also true that infant mortality rates in the United States are nearly 2.4 times higher for African Americans (8,832 deaths or 14.2 per 1,000 live births) than those for non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans (13,555 deaths or 5.8 per 1,000) and Hispanic Americans (4,416 deaths or 5.8 per 1,000).

Congenital malformations, disorders related to short gestation and low birth weight, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and maternal complications of pregnancy caused just under one-half (49.6%) of all infant deaths in the United States in 1999. There was a decline from 1988 to 1999 of 53.4 percent in the rate of SIDS deaths (from 140.1 to 65.3 per 100,000 live births). However, SIDS still remains the leading cause of death for infants between one month and one year of age, accounting for 28 percent of all deaths during that period.

Overall data on deaths and death rates during childhood and adolescence in the United States in 1999 are provided in Table 2, along with more specific data by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin. (Note that racial and cultural categories overlap in the data presented in this table; thus, totals for all races are not identical with the sum of each subordinate category.) From Table 2 one can see that the largest numbers of deaths take place in infancy or the first year of life in childhood and in middle to late adolescence. In every age, racial, and cultural category, more males die than females, especially during middle and late adolescence. And in every age and gender category, death rates for African-American children are notably higher than those for non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans and Hispanic Americans. Death rates among Native-American children are typically lower than those for African-American children, but higher than for children in other racial and cultural groups—with the exception of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old Native-American females who have the highest death rate in their age group. Death rates for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are uniformly lower than those for all other racial and cultural groups.

The leading cause of death in all children from one year of age through adolescence is accidents.

In children from one to four years of age, the second, third, and fourth leading causes of death are congenital malformations, cancer, and homicide. In children from five to fourteen years of age, the second, third, and fourth leading causes of death are cancer, homicide, and congenital malformations. In adolescents from fifteen to twenty-four years of age, the second and third leading causes of death are homicide and suicide, followed at some distance by cancer and heart disease.

Children encounter the deaths of others that are significant in their lives. Such deaths include those of grandparents or parents, siblings or peers, friends or neighbors, teachers and other school personnel, and pets or wild animals. Many adults undervalue the prevalence and importance of such deaths for children. However these experiences of childhood and adolescence can have immediate impact and long-term significance. Some prominent examples include the school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999, the countless instances of fantasized deaths and violence that children witness on television at an early age, and the many children who are members of families in which someone has died or is dying of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

Children's Efforts to Understand Death

Children and adolescents are curious about the world around them. When death-related events intrude into their lives, they strive to understand them. Many factors affect such strivings, such as the intellectual capacities of the child, his or her life experiences, what society at large and adults around the child might say about the events, and the child's personality. Children's efforts to understand death may not always lead to thinking about death in the ways that adults do. It is incorrect to conclude from the way children respond to death that children have no concept of death or are never interested in the subject. To claim that "the child is so recently of the quick that there is little need in his spring-green world for an understanding of the dead" (Ross 1967, p. 250) is to be unfamiliar with the lives of children or to betray a personal difficulty in coping with death and a projection of those anxieties onto children. In reality children do try to make sense of death as they encounter it in their lives. According to Charles Corr, an educator who has written widely about issues related to children and death, such strivings should be aided by open communication and effective support from adults who love the child.

Expressions of Death-Related Attitudes in Games, Stories, and Literature for Children

Play is the main work of a child's life, and many childhood games are related to death. For example, little boys often stage car crashes or other scenes of violent destruction that they can manipulate and observe from a safe psychic distance, while little girls sometimes act out the ritual of a funeral or compare the deep sleep of a doll to death. Adah Maurer described peek-a-boo as a game in which the entire world (except, of course, the participating child) suddenly vanishes (is whisked away from the child's life) only to reappear subsequently in an act of instantaneous resurrection or rebirth. There is also the song in which "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out," the lullaby "Rock-a-Bye Baby" that sings about the bough breaking and the cradle falling, and the child's prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep," which petitions for safekeeping against death and other hazards of the night.

Similarly, children's oral and written fairy tales offer many examples of death-related events. For example, Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are eaten by the wicked wolf in the original version of the story, not saved by a passing woodsman or hunter. The Big Bad Wolf in the "Three Little Pigs" died in a scalding pot of hot water when the wolf fell down the last chimney. And while Hansel and Gretel escaped being shut up in a hot oven, the wicked witch did not.

There is a very large body of literature for children and adolescents that offers stories with death-related themes or seeks to explain death to young readers. Books range from simple picture books about children who find and bury a dead bird in the woods to more detailed stories that relay experiences involving the death of a beloved grandparent or pet, parent, sibling, or peer.

Children Who Are Coping with Life-Threatening Illnesses and Dying

Children with a life-threatening illness experience changes in their daily routines, acquire new information about their illnesses and themselves, and find themselves confronted with unexpected challenges. Many are anxious about those experiences, most need information that they can understand, and all need support as they make efforts to cope. In 1997 Michael Stevens, an Australian pediatric oncologist, suggested that the emotional needs of dying children include those of all children regardless of health, those that arise from the child's reaction to illness and admission to a hospital, and those that have to do with the child's concept of death. One twelve-year-old girl infected with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) wrote: "Living with HIV and knowing that you can die from it is scary. . . . I think it is hardest in this order: Not knowing when this will happen. . . . Not knowing where it will happen. . . . Worrying about my family. . . . What will happen to my stuff and my room? . . . Thinking about what my friends will think" (Wiener, Best, and Pizzo 1994, p. 24).

Children Who Are Coping with Loss and Grief

Three central issues likely to be prominent in the experiences of bereaved children are: Did I cause the death?; Is it going to happen to me?; and Who is going to take care of me? These issues of causality, vulnerability, and safety cry out for clear explanations and support. In response, in 1988 Sandra Fox identified four tasks that are central to productive mourning for children: (1) to understand and try to make sense out of what is happening or has happened; (2) to express emotional and other strong responses to the present or anticipated loss; (3) to commemorate the life that has been lost through some formal or informal remembrance; and (4) to learn how to go on with living and loving.

When confronted with a death-related event, adults often try to block children's efforts to acquire information, express their feelings, obtain support, and learn to cope with sadness and loss. According to Charles Corr, this strategy cannot be helpful to a child in the long run because its effect is to abandon a child and its major lesson is that the child should not bring difficult issues to such an adult. By contrast, emotionally sensitive adults anticipate that sooner or later children need to turn to someone for help with death and loss. On that basis, they can try to prepare themselves for such moments, strive to ensure that they are responding to a child's real needs, try to communicate clearly and effectively, and work cooperatively with children, other adults, and relevant resources in society. This leads to a proactive program of helping that involves three elements: education, communication, and validation.

Experts note a good way to begin is with education; for example, by teaching children about death and loss in relatively safe encounters and by exploiting "teachable moments" for the insights they can offer and the dialogue they can stimulate. Next, one can turn to effective communication by asking three questions:

1. What does a child need to know?
2. What does a child want to know?
3. What can a child understand?

Euphemisms and inconsistent or incomplete answers are not desirable because they easily lead to misunderstandings that may be more disturbing than the real facts. Honesty is dependable and encourages trust, the basis of all comforting relationships. So it is better to admit what you do not know than to make up explanations you really do not believe.

A third element of a proactive program is validation. Validation applies to children's questions, concepts, language, and feelings. It involves acknowledging these things in a nonjudgmental way and helping the child to name or articulate them so as to have power over them.

The advantages of a proactive program of education, communication, and validation can be seen in the examples of children who take part in funeral rituals and in support groups for the bereaved. Many adults in American society exclude children from funeral rituals, feeling that children might not be able to cope with such experiences and might be harmed by them. In fact, research has shown that taking part in funeral planning and funeral ritual in appropriate ways—not being forced to participate, being prepared ahead of time, given support during the event, and offered follow-up afterward—can help children with their grief work. Similarly, being given opportunities to interact and share experiences with others who are bereaved in the protected environment of a support group can help children and adolescents come to understand and learn to cope with death and grief.

Adult Children

One other sense in which the term "children" can be and is used in connection with death-related experiences has to do with adults who remain the children of their older, living parents. As average life expectancy increases in American society, growing numbers of middle-aged and elderly adults are alive when their children become adults. Indeed, some of the oldest members of American society, including the so-called old-old who are more than eighty-five or even one hundred years of age, may find themselves with living children who are also elderly adults.

Death-related events are relevant to these population groups in many ways. Among these, two stand out. First, when an adult child dies that may constitute a particular tragedy for a surviving parent. For example, the adult child may have been the primary care provider for the parent in his or her home, the only person to visit that parent in a long-term care facility, the individual who took care of practical matters such as handling finances or filling out tax forms for the parent, or the sole survivor from among the parent's family members, peers, and offspring. In these and other situations, the death of an adult child may impact the surviving parent in myriad ways, invoking losses and challenges in forms that had not hitherto been faced.

Second, the death of a parent at an advanced age who is survived by an adult child has its own spectrum of ramifications. Deaths of family members (especially parents) from an earlier generation often exert a "generational push" on younger survivors. These younger survivors, especially adult children, are now no longer "protected" in their own minds by their perceptions of the "natural order" of things. Previously, death may have seemed to them to be less of a personal threat as long as their parents and other members of an older generation remained alive. Now the adult children themselves are the members of the "oldest" generation. These adult children may be relieved of care giving responsibilities and other burdens that they had borne when their parents were alive, but new and often highly personalized challenges frequently arise for these adult children in their new roles as bereaved survivors.

See also: Children and Adolescents' Understanding of Death; Children and Media Violence; Literature for Children; Suicide over the Life Span: Children

Bibliography

Balk, David E., and Charles A. Corr. "Adolescents, Developmental Tasks, and Encounters with Death and Bereavement." In Handbook of Adolescent Death and Bereavement. New York: Springer, 1996.

Blos, Peter. The Adolescent Passage: Developmental Issues. New York: International Universities Press, 1979.

Corr, Charles A. "Using Books to Help Children and Adolescents Cope with Death: Guidelines and Bibliography." In Kenneth J. Doka ed., Living with Grief: Children, Adolescents, and Loss. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America, 2000.

Corr, Charles A. "What Do We Know About Grieving Children and Adolescents?" In Kenneth J. Doka ed., Living with Grief: Children, Adolescents, and Loss. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America, 2000.

Corr, Charles A. "Children and Questions About Death." In Stephen Strack ed., Death and the Quest for Meaning: Essays in Honor of Herman Feifel. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996.

Corr, Charles A. "Children's Understandings of Death: Striving to Understand Death." In Kenneth J. Doka ed., Children Mourning, Mourning Children. Washington, DC: Hospice Foundation of America, 1995.

Corr, Charles A. "Children's Literature on Death." In Ann Armstrong-Dailey and Sarah Z. Goltzer eds., Hospice Care for Children. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society, 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963.

Erikson, Erik H. Identity: Youth and Crisis. London: Faber & Faber, 1968.

Fleming, Stephen J., and Reba Adolph. "Helping Bereaved Adolescents: Needs and Responses." In Charles A. Corr and Joan N. McNeil eds., Adolescence and Death. New York: Springer, 1986.

Fox, Sandra S. Good Grief: Helping Groups of Children When a Friend Dies. Boston: New England Association for the Education of Young Children, 1988.

Kastenbaum, Robert. "Death and Development Through the Life Span." In Herman Feifel ed., New Meanings of Death. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.

Kastenbaum, Robert. "The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies." Saturday Review 56 (January 1973):33–38.

Kochanek, Kenneth D., Betty L. Smith, and Robert N. Anderson. "Deaths: Preliminary Data for 1999." National Vital Statistics Reports 49 (3). Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 2001.

Metzgar, Margaret M., and Barbara C. Zick. "Building the Foundation: Preparation Before a Trauma." In Charles A. Corr and Donna M. Corr eds., Handbook of Childhood Death and Bereavement. New York: Springer, 1996.

Papalia, Diane E., S. W. Olds, and R. D. Feldman. Human Development, 8th edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Papalia, Diane E., S. W. Olds, and R. D. Feldman. A Child's World: Infancy through Adolescence, 8th edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Ross, Eulalie S. "Children's Books Relating to Death: A Discussion." In Earl A. Grollman ed., Explaining Death to Children. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.

Silverman, Phyllis R., and J. William Worden. "Children's Understanding of Funeral Ritual." Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying 25 (1992):319–331.

Stevens, Michael M. "Psychological Adaptation of the Dying Child." In Derek Doyle, Geoffrey W. C. Hanks, and Neil MacDonald eds., Oxford Textbook of Palliative Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Wiener, Lori S., Aprille Best, and Philip A. Pizzo comps., Be a Friend: Children Who Live with HIV Speak. Morton Grove, IL: Albert Whitman, 1994.

CHARLES A. CORR DONNA M. CORR

Children

Politics

Among the most important and divisive issues in the cultural politics of the United States during the 1990s was the debate about the rights of children. From the outset, the Clinton administration, largely at the initiative of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, gave the issue top priority. The emphasis on children, however, enabled activists and politicians alike to use the issue as political leverage. "I can win any argument by saying we need welfare reform, but not at the cost of the children," remarked Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) in 1995. For Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), poverty remained the single most devastating problem facing children in the United States. Her proposed solution was straightforward: the federal government must give poor families more money. Many of Edelman's opponents, however, charged that her focus on children masked her real objective—to end poverty for people of all ages through the expenditure of federal revenue. In a general sense, Edelman's basic position remained extremely popular with Americans throughout the decade. A Time/CNN poll conducted in 1996, for example, found that 73 percent of Americans surveyed favored allocating additional tax dollars to programs designed to benefit children. Yet, despite this apparent national consensus, as the 1990s drew to a close, statistics compiled by the federal government suggested that the number of children mired in poverty was growing at an alarming rate. According to a Department of Health and Human Services report the percentage of children living in "extreme poverty" doubled since 1975—at the end of the decade the number stood at 10 percent, or 6.3 million children. To experts in child development, such as Douglas Nelson, executive director of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, such statistics predicted a grim future for the United States. As Nelson explained in 1996: "It may well be that the nation cannot survive—as a decent place to live, as a world-class power or even as a democracy—with such high rates of children growing into adulthood unprepared to parent, unprepared to be productively employed and unprepared to share in mainstream aspirations."

Children and Education

The chief innovation in elementary education during the 1990s did not concern curricular reform. Rather, it involved the assumption on the part of schools, particularly those located in impoverished and crime-ridden neighborhoods, of responsibility for the emotional and social welfare of children from birth to age twelve. Theoretically, anything that affected a child became the business of the school, from nutrition to the prevention of drug abuse to health care to psychological counseling. Joy G. Dryfoos maintained in Full-Service Schools: A Revolution in Health and Social Services For Children, Youth and Families (1994) that "schools are being called on to be those 'surrogate parents' that can increase the 'teachability' of children who arrive on their doorsteps in poor shape." During the decade, therefore, schools expanded beyond traditional academics, but to many educators it was a logical evolution. One of the more far-reaching educational programs of the 1990s began in Missouri and had spread to forty-seven other states by 1996. This program employed so-called parent educators to offer advice on parenting skills to young families. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this program was that it began by focusing on future parents in the third trimester of pregnancy. Bowling Park Elementary School in Norfolk, Virginia, which advertised itself as "A Caring Community," provided another notable example of the new directions in elementary education. Principal Herman Clark not only looked after the needs of his students, but provided object lessons for their parents in the form of field trips. One year Clark took them to the Greensville Correctional Center. On another occasion parents visited the woman's prison in Goochland County, Virginia. Perhaps the most memorable trip, However, was to death row at the Mecklenberg Correctional Center. "The parents are subjected to a shakedown body search," Clark said. "They hear the door slam. They look at the inmates and see the way the inmates look back at them. We ask the prisoners 'Was there something that led you to this life?' They say, 'Yes, my parents were not there when I was a kid. There was nothing to do, so I did this or that [crime].' It is frightening. It makes our parents realize: this is where their kid is heading." The shock-treatment field trips were just one of the methods that educators began to use to rescue not only children, but entire families. "School has to be about more than reading and writing," Clark declared. In 1992 Bowling Park was selected as the site of the first CoZi school, developed by James P. Comer and Edward Zigler of Yale University. The CoZi school model has since been adopted in more-affluent school districts throughout the United States. Operating year-round, CoZi schools became an exercise in cooperative management in which parents, teachers, administrators, and mental-health professionals jointly decided policy in an effort, as Zigler put it, to "make the success of the child in every aspect of development our constant focus."

The Market Place

Preteenage children, "tweeners" as they were known to advertisers and marketers, were active consumers. According to statistics compiled for the last quarter of 1999, preteens (ages eight to thirteen) spent approximately $14 billion a year throughout the 1990s, much of it on expensive, brand-name clothing and accessories. They also accounted for 9 percent of compact disc (CD) sales. James McNeal, professor of marketing at Texas A & M University, estimated that tweeners directly influenced more than $128 billion in family spending in 1997, the last year for which complete figures are available. "Kids invented the minivan," McNeil asserted, "and just recently, they've been encouraging their parents to sell them and get an SUV (sports utility vehicle) instead." Experts suggested that children came to exert so much influence on family spending habits because of a dramatic change in family relations. "People treat each other more like members of a group," McNeil points out, "rather than as sons and daughters and moms and dads." This more democratic ideal of parenting not only gave children of the 1990s more individual freedom but more power within the family as well. Child psychologist Paula Rauch of Harvard Medical School expressed concern that during the decade it became harder for parents to set limits on their children's behavior, a failure that, in turn, gave children a false sense of power. "They may end up self-centered, self-absorbed, incapable of managing a successful social life, spoiled and unhappy because they're never going to get their own way all the time," concluded William Damon, director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence.

HARRY POTTER

Throughout the latter part of 1999, thousands of young children walked around with paste-on tattoos in the shape of a purple lightening bolt. Many adults were puzzled; for those in the know, however, the tattoos indicated that these kids were fans of the young, would-be wizard Harry Potter. The fictional character and his adventures, the creation of English author J. K. Rowling, captivated readers young and old. Three books, Harry Potter and the Sorcerors Stone (1998), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), racked up record-breaking sales in the United Kingdom and the United States. The books also earned the distinction as one of the few children's books ever to crack the adult best-sellers list, remaining on The New York Times Best Sellers' List for more than thirty-eight weeks. By the fall of 1999, more than 7.5 million volumes were in print, translated into twenty-eight languages, with more than 650,000 lightning-bolt tattoos also being sold at local bookstores across the country. Why Harry Potter? For many readers, the visit to Harry's world of enchantment promises a brief respite from the uncertainties of the 1990s. Rowling, a single mother of a young daughter, plans to write four more books for the series.

Sources:

"The Year of Harry Potter," USA Today, 18 (20 December 1999): 50.

"Hurry Harry/' Neivsioeck, 134 (1 November 1999): 6.

Paul Gray, Elizabeth Gleick, and Andrea Sachs, "Hooked on Harry," Time. 154 (20 September 1999): 66-72.

Sports

Paying for children to play sports was another major family expenditure of the 1990s. Some estimates placed the number of American children participating in organized sports during the decade at more than forty million. Parents on average paid close to $4,000 a year to enable their children to participate. These costs included not only equipment and uniforms, but club dues to help pay coaches' salaries, fees for private clinics and camps, and travel and hotel expenses. By the end of the 1990s, however, sports for children had succumbed to a cycle of rising expectations. "Nobody seems to want to play on the little neighborhood team for more than one season," said Judith C. Young, executive director of the National Association of Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) located in Reston, Virginia. The athletic lives of many children were consumed by practices, clinics, and competitive tournaments. There was no longer room for dilettantes or for what parenting manuals used to call "unstructured play." The objective of participating became more than experiencing the thrill of victory, winning a trophy, or molding a good character. Instead the prize was often a college scholarship, a place on an Olympic team, or a lucrative professional career. Experts and parents alike, however, pointed to the benefits of participation. A child busy with sports was less susceptible to the lure of drugs, gangs, and violence. Sports provided exercise, discipline, and camaraderie. Mark Goldstein, a child psychologist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, maintained that "we know from a lot of research that kids who participate in sports tend to do better academically. It forces them to be more organized with their time and to prioritize better." By contrast, critics increasingly cited the pressure that parents and coaches placed on children as the principal reason why 73 percent of them quit playing sports by age thirteen. Fred Engh, a coach and author of Why Johnny Hates Sports (1999) wrote that "they drop out because it ceases to be fun, and the pressures put on them by coaches and parents don't make it worthwhile.… There's nothing wrong with competition.… But children under the age of 10 don't necessarily want competition. What they want is to have fun."

The 1990s Lifestyle

"They are a generation stuck on fast forward, children in a fearsome hurry to grow up," concluded writers Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert. "The girls wear sexy lingerie and provocative makeup … in order to complete what some parents call the Lolita look. The boys affect a tough-guy swagger—while fretting about when their voices will change." These were the children of the 1990s: educated, affluent, computer savvy, apparently obsessed with athletic competition, and often motivated by the dictates of consumption, fashion, and celebrity. Experts worried, though, that they might never grow up, mistaking the appearance for the substance of maturity. "What we're seeing is a superficial sophistication," lamented Damon. "There's been no increase in the values that help a kid get through the confusion of life in a steady, productive way." The lives of these well-to-do children moved at an increasingly frenetic pace. Ten-year-old Allie Terese Baron-Phillips of Tarzana, California, described her hectic daily routine to Kantrowitz and Wingert. "My life is really hectic right now. I'm doing what some people in the 1800s weren't doing until they were full-grown adults. I get up at 6:30 every morning, go to school and have to rush through all my classes, come home and work on my homework, go to ice skating lessons, watch a little TV, talk on the phone, do more homework and practice my violin. If I'm lucky, I get to sleep by 11. And then the entire ordeal starts again." The consequences of this constant pressure are difficult to quantify, but perhaps one indication of its effect was that physicians wrote an estimated five hundred thousand to one million prescriptions a year for antidepressants to treat children and teenagers. The pressure on children to behave like adults became almost irresistible during the decade. Children were "being exposed to adult things from birth," said Markus Kruesi, a child and adolescent psychologist at the University of Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research. Half were children of divorce. As young children they worried about being abducted by strangers and having their photograph appear on milk cartons. Before they had been on a date, they had heard about the perils of AIDS. Many were exposed to drugs, gangs, and violence before they entered junior high. Recent research has suggested that sexual activity and drug use among preteens have both increased dramatically. According to a study conducted in 1997 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Gerogia, 6.5 percent of ninth-grade girls and 14.7 percent of ninth-grade boys admitted to having had sex before the age of thirteen. A University of Maryland study completed in 1998 found that 29 percent of eighth graders had sampled illegal drugs. More than half (52.5 percent) said they had used alcohol, with 24.7 percent saying they have been drunk at least once. Researchers placed the responsibility for the attitudes and behavior of children primarily on parents. "This is a time when they're real curious about the world and they're soaking up other points of view," argued Mary Pipher, the author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994). "They're not getting enough of that from the people who love them. They're getting it from machines and people who want to sell them stuff." Still, despite the problems and pressures they faced, the children of the 1990s remained optimistic. According the "1998 Roper Youth Report: The Mood of Young America," 80 percent expected to have better lives than their parents.

Sources:

Joy G. Dryfoos, Full-Service Schools: A Revolution in Health and Social Services For Children, Youth and Families (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994).

Fred Engh, Why Johnny Hates Sports (Garden City, N.Y.: Avery, 1999).

Andrew Ferguson, "Inside the Crazy Culture of Kids Sports," Time, 154 (12 July 1999): 52-60.

Elizabeth Gleick, "The Children's Crusade," Time, 147 (3 June 1996): 30-35.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, When the Bough Breaks: The Costs of Neglecting Our Children (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

Margot Hornblower, "It Takes a School," Time, 147 (3 June 1996): 36-38.

Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert, "The Truth About Tweens News-week, 134 (18 October 1999): 62-72. J. F. O. McAllister, "The Children's Crusade," Time, 150 (25 August 1997): 36.

"1998 Roper Youth Report: The Mood of Young America" (New York: Roper Starch Worldwide, 1998).

Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Putnam, 1994).

"Special Report: Troubled Kids," Time, 154 (31 May 1999): 33-59.

children were the victims of the Second World War to an extent quite unknown in previous conflicts. In Germany and occupied Europe many were victims of the Nazi Lebensborn and euthanasia programmes, and it has been estimated that 1.2 million Jewish children died in the Final Solution. (Only 11% of Jewish children living in Europe in 1939 survived the war.) But before it started the Refugee Children's Movement set up what became known as the Kindertransporte. It arranged for German and Austrian children—whose lives were at risk, whose parents were willing to part with them, and whose expenses could be guaranteed—to travel to the UK; and from November 1938 to September 1939 nearly 10,000 children, 9,000 of them Jews, were transported by train to safety.

Children were also victims of Soviet policies. According to Irene Wasilewska (Suffer Little Children, London, 1946) the Polish authorities calculated that about 140,000 children were deported to the USSR after Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in October 1939, of whom about 40,000 subsequently died and 85,000 never saw their homeland again. Many of those children in occupied Europe who did survive faced a bleak future: in 1945 there were 13 million abandoned children; Poland had one million orphans, Czechoslovakia 50,000, France 250,000, and Hungary 200,000; in Greece one child in eight was an orphan.

The number of children who were involved in the actual fighting was not insignificant, especially when their country was in extremis. In Moscow in July 1941 the war photographer Margaret Bourke-White recorded that ‘children patrolled the streets at twilight to warn householders who allowed threads of light to leak through their blackout curtains. It was the special function of children to help keep sandbags and water pails constantly filled in case of incendiary raids’ (Shooting the Russian War, New York, 1942, p.62). In the occupied parts of the USSR children reconnoitred German positions and worked with the partisans. They were such efficient scouts that Field Marshal Kluge ordered that ‘special vigilance should be exercised with regard to little boys, members of the Soviet Children's organization, the “Pioneers”, who snoop around everywhere. Anyone of them caught on the railway line is to be shot on the spot.’ A British war correspondent, Alaric Jacob, related in his book (A Window in Moscow, London, 1946) that he met boys aged 13 and 14, who had worked with partisan units and killed with them, and several had been awarded decorations. Resistance movements in other parts of occupied Europe also used children: boys, some as young as ten, fought with Tito and the partisans in Yugoslavia; others were used as couriers; in Belgium young children helped resistance workers by noting down the movement of German vehicles. In April– May 1945 Japanese schoolchildren, sometimes armed only with swords, fought on Okinawa at the same time as 5,000 Hitler Youth, some only 12, were opposing the Red Army during the fall of Berlin, an experience only about 10% of them survived.

For every child who was killed or wounded in combat many more died, or were maimed, by bombing. The Allied raids on Hamburg in July 1943 killed 5,586 children, and several thousand—it is not possible to be more exact—were the victims of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Of those who survived the blasts, many subsequently suffered long-term effects from radiation. Horrific damage was also done to unborn children; of 169 exposed in utero in Hiroshima, there were 33 cases of microcephaly.

To avoid the bombing both sides evacuated children from cities. In Germany a programme called Kinderlandverschickung (sending children into rural areas) set up about 9,000 camps for children in the country. In July 1941 80,000 women and children were ordered out of Moscow, but in Shooting the Russian War Margaret Bourke-White wrote that this was never officially announced as evacuation. Instead 20,000 schoolchildren were said to have gone to the Arctic regions for scientific research and another 50,000 had gone on an expedition to central Asia to undertake geographical surveys. Such was the confusion that some children never saw their families again. In Japan, 15,000 children were evacuated from Hiroshima before the atomic bomb destroyed it, and at the start of the Finnish–Soviet war in 1939, 9,000 Finnish children, followed by 55,000 more during the next years, were sent to safety in Sweden.

But it was the British who evacuated the largest numbers. Under a government scheme, about 4 million adults and children were moved from the bigger cities, and another 2 million were evacuated privately. The first evacuees left on 1 September 1939 and during the next days 827,000 unaccompanied children and 524,000 mothers with pre-school children left the cities. But the phoney war followed this exodus and by early 1940, 80% had returned to their homes. A further evacuation did not take place until the Blitz began that September, and this was followed by another from London in mid-1944 when the V-weapons became operational. British children were also sent to Canada and the USA by their parents. In London, the American committee for the Evacuation of Children, formed by American businessmen, had the names of 35,000 children whose parents had requested their evacuation. But transatlantic travel was hazardous—77 children died when the liner Arandora Star, en route for Canada, was torpedoed in 1940—and adequate convoy facilities were rarely available; only 2,000 eventually found American foster homes.

Though the bombing of civilian targets killed many children, and evacuation often inflicted considerable distress on those who survived, the young of unoccupied countries suffered less than those who were forced to live under Nazi rule. In western Europe Jewish children were usually deported with their parents to the concentration camps. Many were hidden or adopted into other families to avoid this fate, though some families went into hiding together (see Frank, Anne). Non-Jewish children were also regularly deported for committing minor offences and many suffered internment with their parents.

It was in eastern Europe that children, especially Jews, felt the full force of Nazi rule. They suffered a massive disruption of family life, for even if parents survived the fighting, bombing, starvation, or reprisal executions, they were divided, often for ever, from their children by forced labour and the concentration camps. Nazi ideology corrupted childhood, and often brought it to an abrupt end because, to survive, a Jewish child had to act and work like an adult. ‘Children of tender years were invariably exterminated,’ the commandant of Auschwitz testified after the war, ‘since by reason of their youth they were unable to work…’

Though the teaching they received was often distorted, non-Jewish children in occupied western Europe were allowed to continue their secondary education. But in those eastern territories absorbed into the Greater Germany the school system was replaced with institutions which only taught, in German, the most basic curriculum, and in the Polish General government (see Poland, 2(b)), and in the occupied parts of the USSR, all schools above the primary level were closed and their equipment destroyed. ‘For the non-German population of the East,’ Himmler stated in May 1940, school should consist ‘in teaching simple arithmetic up to 500, the writing of one's name, and that God has ordered obedience to the Germans, honesty, diligence, and politeness. I do not consider an ability to read as necessary.’ This policy led (as it did with Jewish pupils who were often banned from school altogether) to clandestine classes being held. In Warsaw alone, 8,000 matriculation certificates were secretly issued during the war years. Play, too, was restricted. Jewish children were forbidden bicycles, the use of local parks, or visits to the theatre or cinema. The laws became draconian and a child of 14 could be given the same punishment as an adult. In some parts of Poland children as young as 12 were eligible for forced labour: in Greece the age was 16, in Yugoslavia 17, and in France it was 18 for boys and 21 for girls.

German children were also the victims of Nazi ideology. Compulsory enrolment in the Hitler Youth and its offshoots encompassed about 80% of those eligible, and its regimentation inculcated a fanaticism among its members to which even the most ardent adult Nazi found it difficult to aspire. However, a significant percentage of those who were not members of the Hitler Youth rebelled against the regime and were persecuted for doing so. There were two main groups. Neither could be classed as mere hooligans; nor did they represent an organized resistance against the regime. The Edelweisspiraten (Edelweiss Pirates) were mostly working-class city youths aged between 14 and 18 in non-skilled jobs, though their leaders were sometimes older. They beat up Hitler Youth patrols, wrote anti-Hitler graffiti, and sang anti-Nazi songs. In Cologne-Ehrenfeld they helped deserters, raided military depots, and assaulted Nazi Party members, and in November 1944 twelve of them were publicly hanged. The second group, the Swing-Jugend (swing youth), were mostly middle-class youngsters who listened and danced to jazz, condemned as decadent by the Nazis. They wore English clothes, spoke English, aped English mannerisms, and liked singing English songs such as ‘We're gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’. Some of their leaders were sent to concentration camps but, as with the Edelweiss Pirates, the Gestapo never managed to eradicate them entirely.

Juvenile delinquency rose nearly everywhere during the war years. In Belgium, France, and the Netherlands the number of cases brought to trial almost tripled, while in Norway they increased six times, from 5,016 in 1939 to 30,152 in 1944. In unoccupied countries such as the UK and the USA the figures were not so dramatic. Nevertheless, figures for the UK show an increase from 55,511 cases in 1936 to 73,620 in 1945. In the USA, where wartime conditions bred v-girls and the zoot-suit riots, and where new words such as ‘teenager’ and ‘bobby-soxer’ described the young, the statistics varied. Delinquency rose in the large cities, but fell in rural areas. It affected secondary education which in any case suffered a sharp decline, as American youngsters preferred work to study. Between 1941 and 1945 there was a decline of about 17% in enrolments, while the numbers of those aged from 14 to 17 who had a job rose from just over a million in 1940 to two million, or 29.6% of that age group, in 1944.

Bibliography

Dwork, D. , Children with a Star (New Haven, Conn., 1991).
Halls, W. , Youth of Vichy France (Oxford, 1981).
Johnson, B. (ed.), The Evacuees (London, 1968).
Macardle, D. , Children of Europe (London, 1949).
Sosnowski, K. , The Tragedy of Children under Nazi Rule (Poznań, 1962).
Turner, B. , And the Policeman Smiled (London, 1990).

Children

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Although seemingly intuitive, the meaning of the term children depends on the context. From a strict biological perspective, the term children refers to the offspring of a female and male who have mated. However, the term need not refer only to biological offspring, as it also applies to socially defined categories of children including stepchildren, adopted children, and foster children. By law, one is considered a minor until the age of eighteen. However, the law distinguishes children from minors in general. According to the law, a child under the age of fourteen is a “child of tender age ”. The term juvenile is used to categorize individuals between fourteen and seventeen years of age, thus distinguishing juveniles from children.

The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) sets forth the universal human rights of children: “the right to survival; the right to develop to the fullest; the right to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation; and the right to participate fully in family, cultural and social life.” The four core principles of the convention are: “non-discrimination; devotion to the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival and development; and the right to participation.”

Although these meanings are valid, the meaning of the term children extends beyond the concrete terms imposed by legal and biological reality. From a developmental standpoint, the term can be used to describe individuals from infancy through preadolescence (before puberty), thus including the following periods of human development: infancy, early childhood, and middle childhood. Children undergo significant biological, cognitive, and social changes during each of these stages.

Growth during infancy is characterized by rapid changes in height and weight. Children are born with reflexes such as those that enable them to suck and turn their heads. They are also sensitive and responsive to the facial features and vocalizations of others, particularly their primary caregivers. By twelve to eighteen months of age, children are able to share attention between a person and an object, known as “joint attention,” and they use words and gestures such as pointing to communicate. Children also transition through the stages of locomotion, from crawling to independent upright walking and their early fine motor skills develop. Social interactions initially emerge in dyadic turn-taking bouts between caregiver and child and features of temperament (personality) also emerge. By age two, children are able to recognize their reflections (self) in a mirror, combine words to communicate, search for hidden objects, and manipulate objects during play. Early experiences in infancy set the stage for children’s later growth and development. Developmental outcomes during this period are strongly influenced by both nature (genetic influences) and nurture (environmental influences) and risk susceptibility.

Ages two to five mark the early childhood/preschool age period of children’s development. By age three, although children’s body weight is only 20 percent of its adult size, children’s brain size is 80 percent of its adult size. By age five, children’s lexicon contains approximately 5,000 to 10,000 words and the syntactic complexity of their language increases significantly. Further developments in children’s self-concept and increased narrative skills facilitate children’s ability to form and share information about past events (autobiographical memory). Problem-solving skills involving planning and the use of strategies also emerge. Between ages three and five, children’s ability to distinguish their thoughts and beliefs from others, known as “theory of mind,” develops. Young children’s egocentrism affects their view of the world, themselves, and others and is reflected in their inability to effectively coordinate their actions with their peers in play contexts. Play during the early childhood years is “parallel” in nature, defined as two or more children engaged in related activities in close physical proximity to each other. Although parents actively structure and facilitate the social lives and experiences of their children during this period, peers also serve as influential forces.

The hallmark of the middle childhood period is the transition to formal schooling. Although many children attend daycare and/or preschool during the early childhood period, the first day of school marks a cultural passage around the world. Children’s physical growth is slow, yet consistent during this period. Between ages five and seven, children’s thought shifts from egocentric to concrete operational thought—children are now capable of abstract thinking and understanding and interpreting the thoughts and beliefs of others. Executive functioning capacities, including their conscious ability to control and inhibit their actions, as well as problem-solving, reasoning, working memory, and attention further develop. The peer group becomes increasingly important, as children spend more than 40 percent of their day with peers. Children are labeled by their peers; categories such as “popular” and “rejected” emerge, as well as the consequences of such social status labels. The development of the self-concept in relation to self-esteem and self-competence as well as moral understanding and beliefs also play integral roles during this period. From a developmental perspective, childhood ends with the onset of puberty.

In addition to legal, biological, social, and developmental definitions of children, one must also consider the impact of the sociohistorical and sociocultural context in which children develop. Children learn by actively participating in cultural activities that promote their growth. Opportunities to learn are embedded in activities at play, school, and work contexts. However, the opportunities afforded to children vary as a function of their cultural upbringing, including the social and economic status of their community and the belief systems regarding their participation in cultural activities.

Children are the product of complex interactions between their genes and the environments in which their development is nested, including, but not limited to, family, school, and community contexts, and the broader cultural belief systems espoused by their nation. Children’s experiences and outcomes set the stage for their future development and adjustment in the next stages of human development: adolescence and adulthood.

SEE ALSO Attachment Theory; Child Behavior Checklist; Child Development; Development; Developmental Psychology; Family; Family Structure; Parent-Child Relationships; Self-Awareness Theory; Stages of Development

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berk, L. E. 2006. Child Development. 7th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Cole, M., S. R. Cole, and C. Lightfoot. 2005. The Development of Children. 5th ed. New York: Worth Publishers.

UNICEF. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. http://www.unicef.org/crc/.

Vasta, R., S. A. Miller, and S. Ellis. 2003. Child Psychology. 4th ed. New York: Wiley.

Joann P. Benigno

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

77. Children

See also 153. FATHER ; 281. MOTHER ; 307. PARENTS .

bastardism, bastardy

the condition of being a bastard.

filicide

1. a parent who kills a son or daughter.

2. the killing of a son or daughter by a parent. —filicidal , adj.

hyperactivity

abnormal or excessive activity or constant excitability, especially in children. —hyperactive , adj.

misopedia, misopaedia

an abnormal dislike of children. —misopedist, misopaedist , n.

pedagogics, paedagogics

the science or art of teaching or education. Also called pedagogy . —pedagogue, paedagogue, pedagog , n.

pederasty, paederasty

a sexual act between two males, especially when one is a minor. —pederast, paederast , n.

pediatrics, paediatrics

the branch of medicine that studies the diseases of children and their treatment. —pediatrician, paediatrician , n.

pedodontics, pedodontia

a branch of dentistry specializing in children’s dental care. —pedodontist , n.

pedology

the branch of medical science that studies the physical and psychological events of childhood. —pedologist , n. —pedological , adj.

pedophilia

a sexual attraction to children. —pedophiliac, pedophilic , adj.

pedophobia

an abnormal fear of children. —pedophobiac , n.

postremogeniture

the quality or condition of being the youngest child. See also 239. LAW .

primogeniture

the quality or condition of being a firstborn child. See also 239. LAW .

prolicide

1. the crime of killing one’s own children.

2. a parent who kills his own children. —prolicidal , adj.

tecnology

pedology.

ultimogeniture

postremogeniture.

unigeniture

the quality or condition of being an only child.

children Childlessness was such a disaster that the Hebrews could regard it only as a punishment from God (Gen. 20: 18); but children in abundance (Ps. 127: 5) were a mark of divine blessing, and, in the case of sons, the means of perpetuating the family line and taking on the father's trade to ensure prosperity. Although mothers usually chose a child's name (1 Sam. 1: 20) it was the father who gave religious and practical instruction (Exod. 10: 2; Ecclus. [= Sir.] 30: 1–13), and discipline was severe (Prov. 13: 24). Christians are sometimes addressed as ‘children’ (Gal. 4: 19; 1 John 2: 1), a practice they perhaps connected with Jesus (John 21: 5). And they referred to themselves as ‘children of God’ (Rom. 8: 16) to denote the special relationship with God which they inherited as the people of the new covenant.

107. Children (See also Youth.)

1. Pan, Peter determined always to remain a little boy. [Br. Lit.: J.M. Barrie Peter Pan ]
2. Pancras, St. boy saint, patron of young boys. [Christian Hagiog.: Brewer Dictionary, 799]
3. olive branches humorous appellation for children. [O.T.: Psalms 128:3]
4. snaps, snails, and puppy-dogs’ tails “what little boys are made of.” [Nurs. Rhyme: Mother Goose, 108]
5. sugar and spice “what little girls are made of.” [Nurs. Rhyme: Mother Goose, 108]

chil·dren / ˈchildrən/ • plural form of child.

Children See Family and Children.

children •Aran, Arran, baron, barren, Darren, Karen, Sharon, yarran •Biafran, saffron •plastron • Saharan • Sumatran •heron, perron •rhododendron • chevron •Aaron, Charon, Dáil Eireann •apron •matron, patron •Libran •decahedron, dodecahedron, octahedron, polyhedron, tetrahedron •children • citron • grandchildren •stepchildren • godchildren •schoolchildren •Byron, Chiron, environ, Myron, siren •sporran, warren •squadron • Cochran •Andorran, Doran, Lauren, loran •cauldron •Kieran, Madeiran, schlieren •Honduran, Van Buren •Aldebaran • Auberon • Acheron •Cameron, Decameron •cateran, Lateran •veteran •dipteran, hemipteran •lepidopteran • Lutheran