In our program’s library, I came across a copy of Chinese Views of Childhood edited by Anne Kinney. I remembered reading (or at least skimming) the book a few years ago for a seminar, but since I had a couple of hours to kill proctoring a make-up exam from last semester’s history class, I did what any graduate student would do: I skimmed it again.
Given that family and the perpetuation of one’s line occupies so high a place in Chinese culture, there have been surprisingly few studies of childhood and children in Chinese history. Certainly, as Kinney notes in her introduction, part of the problem is sources. Children do not often leave writings of their own, and so we are left to observe childhood through the gaze of parents or as memories recorded in later life, thus the contributors to this volume should be commended for doing a lot with a little.
One observation (and I apologize, I left the copy at the library so I don’t have the exact chapter in front of me) was the importance of socialization rather than inheritance in childhood development, and that made me recall Ann Waltner’s 1990 study Getting an Heir: Adoption