Childhood as an object of study has been seen as the creation of Philippe Ariès (1914–84), a French agricultural development expert by profession and free-lance historian in his spare time. His L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, first published in 1960, was issued two years later in English, under the misleading title Centuries of Childhood – misleading because to English-speaking readers it appeared to be a study of childhood in isolation, rather than a study of the child in the family. Where other historians of the family have sought to identify the development of affectivity primarily by studying the relations between husband and wife, Ariès, unconstrained by the conventions of professional academic history, had the brilliant idea of tracing changes in family structures via the emotional relations between parents and children.

The book was an attempt to answer the question whether the idea of the family has diminished in the face of the twin processes of modernization and industrialization as divorce, once unknown, proliferates and parental authority is eroded. Ariès’s answer is that as ‘a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotions’, the family only arrived in the early nineteenth century. Physical changes in domestic housing allowed the modern nuclear family, which Ariès sees as emerging at this period, to cut itself off from the world. Publicness, defined as sociability, is therefore held to characterize the Ancien Régime, while privacy, defined as the retreat into the home and into self-sufficient family relationships, is seen as a modern condition.

Privacy now is ideological: it gives priority to the particularistic relations between parents and children which are a hallmark of modernity. For Ariès, the pre-modern family is an institution for securing the continuation of the patrimony, for providing training in conduct and thereby inculcating respect for the good order of society. None of this requires the emotional bonds between its members that characterize the modern family, which understands itself as organized round its love for the children. Ariès generally acknowledges that parents loved their children in the pre-modern era, but argues that parental love was not thought of as a defining feature of family life.