Sociology Now, Census Update

sins and would invariably go to heaven. English common law agreed: Because chil-
dren were innocent, they could not distinguish between right and wrong, and so they
should not receive adult penalties for their crimes. By the nineteenth century, child-
hood was being conceptualized as a time of freedom and innocence. Child labor laws
went into effect to ensure that children would not be put to work, and compulsory
education, the YMCA, Boy and Girl Scouting, and high school sporting activities
ensured that their lives would ideally consist of nothing but school and play.
There were gender differences in this new understanding of childhood. Boys
were given time to play among themselves and receive the education and skills they
needed for an adulthood in the world of factories and offices, while for many years
girls stayed miniature women. They rarely went to school or played outside; they were
expected to work alongside their mothers and older sisters in child care and keeping
house. Even today, most boys’ toys are about teamwork (balls and sports games),
building or managing (construction sets, erector sets, Legos, blocks), and conquest
(war toys, action figures), skills necessary for real-world businesses, while girls’ toys
are often about child care (dolls and stuffed animals), keeping house (kitchen sets,
toy appliances), and beauty (makeup, jewelry-making, nail and hair care sets).
One of the major elements of our beliefs about childhood as a stage of life is that
it is “innocent.” Thus, we believe that children’s actions do not carry the same con-
sequences as those of adults (and so we often prosecute juvenile crime differently from
adult crimes). We also believe that children must be shielded from information about
sex and death. In the middle and upper classes, adults began to strictly censure their
own behavior, as well as classroom lessons, toys, and children’s media, to ensure that
children would not lose their “innate” innocence. (The working classes and the poor,
who lived in more crowded surroundings, were less able to control what their chil-
dren saw and heard.)
Most of the concerns over childhood exposure to sex and death (or violence)
began near the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In his

AGE AND IDENTITY 351

Teen Sex

Rites of passage are typical experiences for most of us who move through childhood and on to

adulthood and beyond. These rites of passage have cultural and personal significance; one of

these rites of passage is becoming sexually active. Societal norms no longer dictate that sexual

activity should be engaged in only within the confines of marriage, and as premarital sex

becomes more accepted, the age at which young people first engage in sexual activity gets

younger. Despite this, there is an age limit before which most people believe youth should not

be engaging in sex. So, what do you think?

See the back of the chapter to compare your answers to national survey data.

11.1

What

do

you

think

❍Always wrong

❍Almost always wrong

❍Sometimes wrong

❍Not wrong at all

For those in their early teens, 14–16 years old, sex before marriage is:

?