History of Childhood in Canada
Authors: Gleason Mona , Myers Tamara 
Published: May 2014

The history of childhood and youth in the Canadian context emerged in the 1970s under the rubric of the new social history. The field was first animated by scholars seeking to historicize the colonial state’s, along with civil society’s, various interventions into the lives of young people. Foundational works focused on the progressive reform impulse to expand the state’s responsibility for children and improve children’s status within the settler colonial nation. This first wave of scholarship, which came out of the history of the family and the history of education, emphasized the history of adult attitudes toward childhood, colonial state policies, and the growth of the welfare state, and it helped to establish young people’s presence within broader themes in social history, particularly family, education, welfare, and delinquency studies. Much of this work offered a critique of the colonial state and its myriad actors for class, race, and gender biases inherent in late-19th- and early-20th-century child-centered initiatives and child rescue. Complementing studies of turn-of-the-19th-century reform projects undertaken to save children and childhood, critical studies of the Canadian colonial project have exposed how residential schooling for Indigenous youth was central to white supremacist colonial state formation and, ironically, connected to the ambition of rescuing children from poverty and dissipation. A second wave of historical work has been more concerned with teasing out how children and youth contributed to, and responded to, change over time. Contributory works put children into immigration history by focusing on juvenile migration schemes; into labor history with child workers; and into the realm of political and ethnic history by identifying youthful student strikers. This burst of activity in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated how age as a category of analysis could reveal historical agency on the part of young people and contribute to a deeper understanding of childhood as experience. Books and articles included in this bibliography from this era were the result of extensive archival research, particularly with textual sources produced by adults. Building on the contributory works, scholars then began to emphasize children’s experience and perspectives as significant in their own right, which required different sources and methodologies. To get at experience and perspective, historians have read archival materials such as court records “against the grain,” interviewed adults about their childhoods, used memoirs, popular media, and material culture, and interpreted actions of children to deepen our understanding of them as historical actors. The historiography in the Canadian context continues to widen and deepen with new articles, monographs, and essay collections published each year. Scholars continue to tackle the many opportunities for further research in several areas, including more regional representation, and more attention to children’s engagement with popular culture, and the perspective of children from nondominant groups, including Indigenous, Black, working-class, immigrant, and refugee children, apart from the professionals who intervened into their lives.