How to bait Chinese children through advertising

[dArKeR]

By Bradley Winterton

The history of attitudes toward children in the West has undergone some strange changes. Or, to be more exact, it underwent one big change, and is now in the process of drifting back to where it was before.

For centuries children were considered simply as small adults. They frequently worked as soon as they were able to do anything useful, and -- something that perhaps surprises us most these days -- the age of sexual consent was 12. This, at least, was the case for long centuries in the UK. People just looked at the young, saw that nature brought on puberty at about that time, and effectively said "So that's how nature has arranged things," and set their laws accordingly. When Juliet marries Romeo in Shakespeare's play she is 14.

The big change occurred some time in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. People began to see childhood as a special, even magical time. The Romantic poets exalted childhood as a time of peculiar grace, certainly in England, and for William Wordsworth, for instance, the child was a species of visionary.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2004/07/11/2003178603