News & Events They Study Childhood

Introduction

“Childhood is a short season,” wrote the renowned actress Helen Hayes. Short in years, maybe, but long in intensity, complexity and impact. Yet children have historically warranted little research, save for the field of psychology. This is changing. These days, a significant number of Amherst faculty are studying aspects of childhood through a variety of fields. One even helped launch the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, the discipline’s founding journal. We brought together four scholars—Solsiree del Moral, Dominique Hill, Carrie Palmquist and Karen Sánchez-Eppler—and asked them to reflect on their research. Their surprising insights follow… 

The Participants

Solsiree del Moral, associate professor of American studies and black studies, is the author of Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952. Currently, she’s working on a history of the youth incarcerated in state institutions in 1940s–1950s Puerto Rico.

Dominique Hill, visiting assistant professor of black studies, is a scholar-artist whose scholarship foregrounds the body as site and tool. Her research agenda involves representation and imaginative productions of black femininity and girlhood.

Carrie Palmquist, assistant professor of psychology, examines the ways that young children behave in pedagogical situations. Among her publications, she has explored preschoolers’ spatial reasoning and ability to trust, and the impact of pretend play on childhood development.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler, professor of American studies and English, is the author of Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. A decade ago, she helped launch the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, the founding journal for this ever-expanding field.

Kathy Whittemore, the College’s senior writer, is today’s moderator.

 A Childhood Studies department: Likely at Amherst one day?

Whittemore:
I’m here today because we are trying something new: a childhood roundtable discussion. What does that mean? I have four professors here who each are studying one aspect of childhood. We’re going to have a conversation about what they’ve learned and look at the bigger picture.

Karen is one of a group of scholars who launched the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth in 2008. It was a diverse, multidisciplinary bunch. There was no such thing as a Department of Childhood then, but when I visited the journal’s website [recently], I noted that several editors came from their university’s Department of Childhood Studies. So, my first question to the group: Can you envision such a department at a liberal arts college like Amherst someday?

Sánchez-Eppler:
I think it’s perfectly plausible. In some ways, it’s actually easier for interdisciplinary departments to exist at liberal arts colleges. That is one of our great advantages, a kind of crossing and space for more exploratory curiosity. In the same way that there’s a black studies department or a [Department of] Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, there could easily be a childhood studies department.

Dominique and Solsi and I are part of a working group that’s tried to develop education studies at the College, and that feels to me like the better priority for Amherst at the moment. It does a lot of the things that I want childhood studies to do.

Palmquist:
I think that Karen’s right that having interdisciplinary opportunities at small liberal arts schools is fantastic and much more likely. But coming from a department with a large major, with lots of students, I know that people are also busy and taxed. So, I think that prioritizing things that have broader implications, like education studies, where you can draw on lots of different future goals for students, might be more popular.

Sánchez-Eppler:
Though I will say, I just came from my first children’s literature course of this semester, where 80-something people signed up. So there is a lot of interest, especially at this entering-adult-lives moment for our students. I think there’s a lot of thinking about their younger selves: how they got to be where they are, what that means. All those things are alive in them, and there’s a lot of curiosity and yearning there.

Hill:
I often skate in-between spaces as an interdisciplinary scholar, and when I think about childhood studies, I also think about my orientation, which is more of a critical youth-studies vantage point, a bridge that doesn’t create a stark distance between childhood and adulthood. So I related to what you were saying, Karen—that that work could find home in a place like Amherst. I’ve talked to a number of students who were interested in youth culture, how youth use art as resistance, which also connects to literature and literary work.

Race and gender are categories for analysis, so why not age?

Whittemore:
I’m going to quote from something Karen wrote: “I believe that age, just as much as class, race or gender, provides a salient category for analysis, and that paying attention to age changes not just what we see, but what questions we ask and our very methods of interpretation.” So, to the rest of you: do you share Karen’s belief about the importance of age as a category? And how does that play out in your own research?

Palmquist:
For developmental scientists, age is pivotal to our research. People think that I know about the whole lifespan, when in fact I really only know about things under age 12, and my specialty is kids between ages 3 and 5. We think a lot about how age affects development, and what we might expect to see happening at different ages, and what that means for cascading effects later on. Karen’s quote resonates quite a bit with me.

del Moral:
I’m a historian by training, and so one of my main interests is archival work and finding sources. When I was doing research on Puerto Rican children and youth who were incarcerated in adult jails and prisons in Puerto Rico, I felt an immediate sense of social injustice. And I thought, “Why am I reacting?” It’s because I understood childhood to be different than what it was understood to be at midcentury.

The challenge in childhood studies is finding sources that allow us to, as best as possible, identify the voices, perspectives, consciousness and values of children and youth. And these materials are often filtered through the lens of adults who produce the materials.

But when I found children’s voices, it became a story of social injustice and the marginalization of the poor. So, approaching the study of midcentury Puerto Rico through the case study of children radicalized and changed for me my interpretation of modernization policies. And that’s been a complete transformation in how I approach the topic, through the childhood studies lens.

Whittemore:
Solsi, did you begin by looking through the adult perspective, then sort of make a roundabout toward the children’s perspective?

del Moral:
Well, I stumbled across the children’s perspective when I was writing the last chapter of my first book, working in the archives.

Sánchez-Eppler:
She found all these great letters.

del Moral:
They were just honest and clear and direct and painful, right? So, I found these letters that I was able to develop into a chapter for my first book on education. I just was overwhelmed by that.

Sánchez-Eppler:
These were letters that children wrote to the governor.

Whittemore:
Can you tell us a little bit about the letters, Solsi?

del Moral:
In the 1950s, the Puerto Rican Congress approved financial aid for elementary and middle school children. Luis Muñoz Marín was the populist governor at the time. The children would write to him: “I’m from a humble family. My father and my mother are invested in our schoolwork. I try as best I can to make it through the school day, but sometimes I faint for lack of food in the afternoon. Is there any way you would consider granting me a small fellowship so I can feed myself?” Or they write letters asking for shoes so that they can walk. Or they’ve grown in the past year, their clothing does not fit, but they really, really want to finish their degree.

These are really heartbreaking letters that reflected the poverty of the children on the one hand, but their commitment and their family’s commitment to access education. So, those were letters that I stumbled upon, thankfully, in my first book.

I want to find children’s voices through their letters, through their writings, so I can get their perspective. Not the perspective of the secretary of education or the governor. That’s the distinction.

Palmquist:
And you said that those were hard to find.

del Moral:
Yes.

Finding childhood source material is truly challenging

Palmquist:
I was just sort of curious about changing perspectives on the value of children’s voices. Do you think that they were hard to find because, for a long time, people just didn’t think that children had much to share, so they didn’t save them? What’s your sense about that?

del Moral:
Well, they were hard to find because childhood itself is not a category of analysis in the organization of archives.

Palmquist:
So it continues to be an issue.

Sánchez-Eppler:
When I started writing Dependent States, I used a lot of children’s diaries. And I would go to the Library of Congress and say, “I would like to look at your children’s diaries,” and they would say, “We don’t have any children’s diaries.” And then you would sit down and find people’s ages and you would do subtraction and figure out, “All right. This is someone who was 10 years old when they….”

I think of it as like doing women’s studies in the ’70s, where, again, you are finding systems weren’t structured by gender. So you were guessing on the basis of people’s first names. “Is this a woman, right?” So, in a similar kind of way, you have to figure out people’s ages. The materials are collected for some other adult participant, but then there’ll be this kind of childhood detritus that comes along with it.

I think it’s a particular thing about Marín, that in his brand of populism, that the children wrote to him and that the government made a box of those, right?

del Moral:
Well, he was a popular governor, so they saw him as the father of the nation and so they appealed to him in that capacity. It was always familial. Purdue has an excellent photographic collection in the general archive for the 1940s and ’50s, because the government was going through a stage of industrialization and modernization. The intention of the photographs, state-sponsored, was to document progress, right? So, let’s document the building of schools as they transition from wood to cement buildings. Let’s document the building of homes, public schools, health clinics, new neighborhoods. It was about cement. Cement was modernization.

So I went through all the photographs and when there was a school building, there’s children on the corner. If there’s a health clinic, there are mothers and children lining up. If it’s about workers, there are children who are bootblacks or newspaper vendors or they’re washing cars. If it’s about this magnificent new cement street, there are children playing or working in the streets.

Children were everywhere. But it was not a category. So then I realized I just have to adjust my lens and I have to think, “Where would the children be?”

Sánchez-Eppler:
When we were editing the journal, I felt like part of my job was to look at what people were doing and say, “You know, that really is about children, right?” There are children in it, but it wasn’t how people were conceptualizing or organizing that work. And I think that is, in part, historical, and it’s also a status thing: it doesn’t feel as important to say that it’s about children as to say it’s about cement. Or modernization, I guess.

Whittemore:
Carrie, you have been studying preschoolers, so you don’t even have the virtue of accessing letters being written.

Palmquist:
No, they’re not very good writers.

Whittemore:
So, that poses its own challenges, I’m sure.

Palmquist:
Sure. Yeah, I think part of why I was curious and asked Solsi that question, about whether [lack of childhood as a category] has some sort of value judgment about childhood, was that we have to design studies to tap into what children are thinking about before they can really explicitly talk about their thought processes in a sort of meta way. This can often come across as very simplistic to adults. Very game-like.

A lot of my research involves hiding things under cups and asking kids to look for those items. We, as developmental psychologists, do spend quite a bit of time trying to explain how that actually taps into a much deeper, broader, theoretical question.

Whittemore:
I’ve always loved how, when you have studies that are about babies, the measuring tool is how long they stare at something.

Palmquist:
Right, exactly. Luckily, over decades now of using eye tracking and gaze, data people are pretty much on board most of the time, that that’s a legitimate way of measuring what babies are thinking. But it’s been a long road to get people to agree on that. That’s another great example.

Children and the idea of the body

Whittemore:
Fascinating. I’m going to do a little bit of a switch here. Dominique does a lot of work with the body “as a site and a tool.” When we talk about childhood and the body, can you speak to this in terms of your own research and experience?

Hill:
Sure. I’ve been listening, and I’m just thinking about the category of the child and archival research, but also the ways that bodies then either afford the entry into that marker of child or an exclusion out of it. So, my work is really around looking at black girlhood; its particular relationship to childhood. But thinking about the ways that the body has been used as a marker of difference, of determination: Are you feminine enough, are you not? Are you smart? Is age a salient mark?

I’ve been wrestling with your statement, Karen. Is “child” a salient category to use to research? Yes—and at the same time, it’s a troubling category. Particularly because there was a research report that just came out: “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” conducted by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty [and Inequality]. It looked specifically at the ways that teachers look at black girls. And after age 5, black girls are adultified in terms of teachers thinking they need less help, thinking they’re likely more sexually active. So, the level of innocence is retracted from them.

So, age is one important space to look at. But looking at the ways that a body then dictates a stripping away of a childhood and childhood being more than simply age. Age is also about how we understand and how we excuse away mistakes and behavior. It becomes a troubling space. I think about the body as a mediator, a mitigator of that conversation, but also as a tool that we can use to resist that same categorization. We can use it on both sides.

Sánchez-Eppler:
I wanted to say something about the prior two conversations: those eye movements and these body conversations are about ways of carrying meaning that are not verbal, and how powerful and important that is as parts of our being. I’m an English professor—it’s all about words. And this, kind of coming to recognize these other spaces of meaning that are not about words, feels like an important piece of that. So, I think those two bits are very enmeshed.

Did your own childhood lead you to childhood studies?

Whittemore:
We’re going to leave the academic realm for a minute and get a little bit personal. I’d like to ask each of you about your own childhood and if it pushed you in the direction of studying childhood in some way—if you can access a clear line or maybe a murky line.

Sánchez-Eppler:
I’m sure there are lots of things about my own childhood that are relevant, but it’s pretty clear to me that it was my motherhood that got me into studying childhood things. I was teaching a course on the literature of 19th-century American social reform movements, the abolitionist and feminist movements. I had to include temperance, because that was the largest social change movement of the mid-19th century, in terms of numbers of people involved.

And I went to the C level stacks at Frost [Library] to look at what 19th-century temperance literature we had. There were two whole shelves bought by an Amherst temperance society in the 1820s through ’50s. Many of the materials still had uncut pages. Nobody else, as far as I could tell, was very interested in looking at them.

A lot of them had this scene of a drunken man climbing into bed with a child, who would kiss him and say, “Promise me that you won’t drink anymore.” And that would be the source place for this temperance redemption idea. I thought, “No. The relationship between being in bed with young children and alcoholism is not about redemption. It’s about abuse.” And what’s going on, over and over and over again: these different temperance writings, speeches, poems, sentimental stories—they all have this scene in them. So, I thought, “I want to figure that out.”

At that point, I had two preschool-age children. And just the notions of the ways in which children are not powerful themselves, and yet play this really powerful social norming role for adults and as fictional things, sort of started grabbing me, and I started reading more.

And it was clear to me then, as I started doing that research, that I was interested in it because I had my own children. Having them had changed my life and disciplined me in different ways. But also, it made kinds of writing that I would not have found interesting before, utterly fascinating.

del Moral:
I’d like to follow up on what both Dominique and Karen said. The way that I had to read sources differently to get to the story of children and youth was to be aware of the children’s bodies. That meant that children who were released from correctional institutions were often sent home unbathed, dressed in rags. Sometimes tattooed and barefoot or with shoes with no shoelaces. So, the children’s bodies were one way that either social workers or parents could document the lack of control that children had over their bodies in state institutions and document the abuse that they suffered.

So, I became really aware of this when I saw one story in particular: A child was released from a state correctional institution for the holidays, and a social worker was responsible for delivering the child to his family. And when the child arrived, his head was wrapped, because he had suffered a cut, because he had been abused either by older children or a staff member. And he also arrived barefoot.

When the father received his child at his home from the social worker, he stood on his doorstep, called his neighbors and said, “Look at my child. The state was responsible for housing this individual, and you return him to me cut, bruised, in bandages and barefoot. I cannot trust the state, I condemn the state.”

Sánchez-Eppler:
I’m thinking too of the things Dominique was saying about being stripped of innocence and Solsi’s terrible stories reminding me of other terrible stories. I’ve been doing some work with the Works Progress Administration’s slave narratives, talking to elderly African-Americans who were remembering their childhoods.

And one of the stories was so chilling. A young girl speaks about feeling hungry, but her mistress leaves a peppermint candy by the sink every day so that when she does this cleaning, she needs to resist it. But then one day the girl eats it, and then this horrible abuse scene follows, in which she’s held down with the rocking chair. The mistress puts her neck under the legs of a chair and uses it to hold her down while she’s being beaten.

Rocking chairs are used for nursing and nurturing children, right? This peppermint candy is supposed to be a sweet, a pleasure, right? So these sort of markers of childhood innocence get explicitly used in that moment as torture tools. The explicitness with which innocence is not just stripped away, but used itself as a weapon. Which is in part to say that the process of studying childhood, or childhood studies, is not just a happier, easeful thing. It’s about looking at places of vulnerability.                  

Understanding what children are capable of, at what stage

Palmquist:
It’s so interesting to think about these stories from a cognitive place as well. We know that young children have very limited inhibitory control, for example—which is this ability to stop engaging in a tempting act or prevent yourself from engaging in a tempting act, in favor of a better outcome down the line. So, not eating that peppermint candy, because down the line that could lead to some kind of negative outcome.

And, again, thinking about how, in these situations, adults are capitalizing on the fact that kids aren’t yet at that cognitive place where they can engage in inhibitory control in that same way. And so, to put a jargony spin on your more eloquent way of saying, “capitalizing on their innocence,” it’s also physically and physiologically impossible for children to avoid these types of situations or to sometimes make what we would identify as the correct choice.

Whittemore:
Did anyone else want to talk about their own childhood or parenthood, in terms of drawing them towards their area of research?

Palmquist:
I actually ended up in my area of research not so much because of my childhood, but what I thought was unique about children. As a psychologist, I think one of the things that’s most interesting to me about children is that doing research with them allows us to look at what might be fundamental about humans in general. So that when we see behaviors or inclinations or thought processes, even in very young children, that might give us a sense of something that sets us apart as humans from other species. Because this is coming online very early on. And I remember early in college, discovering that way of thinking about children and realizing that they provided this wonderful window in which to really think about humans as a species. And I thought, “Well, that’s just fascinating,” and I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

Sánchez-Eppler:
And what connects us, too.

Palmquist:
Exactly.

Sánchez-Eppler:
Like in my children’s literature class, where today we’re reading The Runaway Bunny. Why it is that so much of what we want to say to children, we say through small animals?

Palmquist:
Exactly. Yeah, and I think we talk about it in terms of distinguishing ourselves from other species, but also the vast similarities between non-human primates, for example, and humans. Those connections can be very meaningful. I find that students often are surprised, because they think of kids as being incapable or not particularly complex. But then [the students] find that they have these abilities and it’s surprising and exciting for them, too. That’s how I ended up in this field.

Hill:
I don’t have a neat story. I started wanting to be a teacher. And I took grave issue with the teacher education program and its lack of attendance to the differences in the ways that children were treated. And so that got me interested in: How are young people actually making sense of their own lives? Are they able to see when their teacher, Miss Carrie, does this thing for this student and not for this other student?

And so I became really interested in that and then I became interested in what the teachers were learning about this. I realized they weren’t learning about this. And I was just appalled. And then I went to grad school for education policy and started to look at the way the body, specifically for black children, was hyper-visible and yet hyper-invisible, and so we wanted to explain away the body, fix the body up. And so that was kind of how I became very passionate about how the body has an answer. The body can teach us some stuff.

Then I looked at my own life and realized, yeah, I’ve had similar stories. I was the girl who was a nerd, but then I also, in black culture “had a mouth on her,” because I’m gonna ask a lot of questions. And so the body has always kind of been this thing that has shaped my life, but then also forged a doorway into me wanting to ask more questions about it and how youth were making sense of it, how youth were resisting how people were framing their bodies.

del Moral:
It’s not a personal childhood story that brought me to [studying] childhood. It’s my graduate training in Latin American and Caribbean history, where my advisors were focused on subaltern voices and the history of the marginalized. I don’t think it’s just my program; it’s my generation. I was trained in looking beyond policy and institutions to better understand the voices of individuals, whether class, race, ethnic— how these larger structures affect the ones that are left out the story.

When I said earlier I stumbled upon these sources [of letters], I had not considered before children’s voices. Once I had access to the materials, I think I’ve just become overwhelmed by the stories that they tell, and I have not been able to turn back.

Sánchez-Eppler:
So I told you the beginning of Dependent States, with these temperance tales. And I was maybe three-quarters the way through writing a book that was about the disciplinary work that the figure of the child did in different American reform movements—with not a single effort to have anything from a child’s perspective! I had started this childhood studies project, but I was reading things written by adults, in which children were figures.

My first book would have been absurd to me if I wrote about the abolitionist and feminist movements by using all white male sources. I never would have done that. But here I was, way into this second book, and then suddenly it hit me that that was the case. That’s when I went to the New York Public Library and started to find children’s writing, and it transformed that project, and a lot of the work that I’ve done since.

Kids have different criteria for trust than adults have

Whittemore:
Let me move on to quoting Carrie’s description of her work: “The process by which children learn from others is particularly important because much of what children need to know about the world cannot be learned through firsthand experience (e.g., the fact that the Earth is round). Instead they will simply listen to others and trust what they are told.”

Palmquist:
Yes. The focus of my research is primarily on how children come to identify good sources of information in other people. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never been into space. I’ve never actually confirmed that the Earth is round. Someone just told me that the Earth was round. I’ve seen pictures. Seemed like things were on the up-and-up, and so I agreed with them.

One of the big questions in our area is, “How is it that kids decide that someone is a good source of information and someone is a bad one?” If you are relying on bad sources of information, you could be adopting all kinds of knowledge that’s incorrect, inaccurate, inappropriate.

Sánchez-Eppler:
Do you really think that’s more true for children than for anyone else? It seems to me like most of what any of us know about anything is a question of trusting expertise, and therefore what the structures are that value and confer it.

Palmquist:
Yeah, I totally agree. What primarily drives our research is the question of how we prioritize different things over the lifespan. So, for example, as adults, we understand that expertise is very important. That you might not seem like a particularly nice person, perhaps, but if you know a lot of information, then you’re a worthwhile person to engage with on a particular topic.

But not every young child will prioritize expertise over familiarity or friendliness. They prefer to interact with someone who is familiar or who seems friendly and use that person as a source of information over someone who seems kind of neutral, maybe not particularly friendly, but really smart. And then that changes by the time kids get to be about 5 or 6.

I think this is one of those areas in which the complexity with which children evaluate other people is relatively surprising. The research suggests that they can keep track of interactions that they’ve had with people in the past and then use those interactions to determine who they want to interact with in the future.

Sánchez-Eppler:
I just feel like we’re living in a world, in a moment, where the notion that we make progress feels less and less convincing to me. It’s important to understand how much besides expertise goes into what it is we believe and think we know.

Palmquist:
Yes, and that some of it makes sense, but a lot of it doesn’t. There’s some really interesting research to suggest that children prioritize attractive individuals over unattractive ones, even if those attractive individuals have expressed a lack of expertise in a particular area. So that would suggest that for whatever reason, perhaps evolutionarily or something else, they have a motivation to seek out information from individuals who’ve been judged as more attractive.

We’ve just finished up a paper in the lab looking at what’s known as sort of “thin slice behavior”: this idea that we can use other people’s faces to judge who will be more or less competent. And our lab has shown that children make similar types of inferences about individuals’ competence based on whether their faces look more or less trustworthy. So if the face looks friendlier, happier, kids are more likely to say that that individual is going to help them and know more than someone who looks a little bit meaner.

You could very easily argue that that doesn’t seem like a great heuristic to use to evaluate who would be the best source of information. So I agree with you, Karen, that talking about it in terms of progress is maybe not particularly useful. Instead, we should think about all the different facets of how we’re judging individuals when we’re making these decisions. It’s quite complex.

Sánchez-Eppler:
I’m sorry. I just have today’s class in my head all the time. But one of the things we’re talking about is Aesop’s Fables. And all the early editions of Aesop’s Fables begin with a biography of Aesop, in which they stress both his low status as a slave, but also that he was a hunchback, crooked, head too big—so, all of these physical devaluing things. And then it says, “But he told these wonderful stories, and now you should listen to them.” It’s very interesting, given what you just said.

Palmquist:
Well, it’s very interesting. It violates all of what the data would suggest in terms of children’s assumptions about who a good source would be. And perhaps it suggests the role of adults to help children identify, “Well, this might be a good way to judge someone.”

Are women drawn to childhood studies more than men?

Whittemore:
So there are five women sitting here. I want to ask if childhood studies or topics draw more women than men.

Sánchez-Eppler:
It doesn’t nationally as a field. There certainly are lots of leading childhood studies figures who are men. Many of the women come through feminist work. I’ve found that thinking about childhood is a really powerful and useful place for thinking about power. But I also have sometimes wondered whether there was a kind of anti-feminist strand.

Linda Gordon [University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University] wrote an essay I admire in which she basically says, “If you pay attention to women’s rights, you will improve children’s rights.” And that the best way to improve the conditions of children is to pay attention to women’s needs and that it does not work the other way around. That paying attention to children’s needs often ends up criminalizing, devaluing, disempowering women.

del Moral:
Most of the Latin American historians who work on childhood have been women. But the anthropologists and sociologists who work with children are probably equally male and female. For example, there’s a recent book on street boys in the Dominican Republic, and the anthropologist was able to access that world because of his gender. He was able to work with boys and gain the trust of boys.

I think gender matters in terms of access and confidence and intimacy with your sources, but I would not say that the majority of the child studies scholars are women.

Whittemore:
Here we are at Amherst, speaking up about childhood studies. There’s actually a few more professors who couldn’t make it today who are also involved in childhood research. And also, obviously, this is where the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth was founded. So does Amherst have a particular footprint in this area of research that stands out?

Sánchez-Eppler:
I think what happened with the journal was that we had, prior to that, a Five College childhood studies faculty seminar that continues. So a bunch of people from the Five Colleges wanted to start a journal. And I do think that having done that has made people more cognizant.

But most people working in childhood aren’t trained in childhood studies. Psychology is really the rare field that, for a long time, has thought that childhood was important. And I think it is true, that because of that study group, which was started by Rachel Conrad at Hampshire, and then the journal, there have been more at Amherst who can say to people, “Oh, you know you are actually working on childhood.”

So maybe in that sense, [there is] a little bit more awareness. But, like Solsi was saying, there were children in all those pictures, once you started looking at the pictures. Any study of any human behavior or culture is going to have children in it. It’s just whether or not you care about that fact makes the difference. It’s about attention. It’s not about absence or presence. Children are present.

Whittemore: On that note, thank you so much for being here today. It was really enlightening.

Sánchez-Eppler: Thank you for getting us to talk to each other.