The Margins

As a more positive idea of the child became established, the relative weight of the margins, of deviance, of pathology; in other words, that part of the child population that was malfunctioning (whose development, abilities, and behaviour were not considered adequate) also grew. If from the 1990s onward, within the pedagogical and scientific discourse, the normal child became kind-hearted, creative, and sociable, the ‘abnormal’ and deviant subjects gained more prominence. The two figures of the juvenile delinquent and the disabled child gained increasing visibility, affecting both the scientific discussion and the institutional and administrative sphere. Nature, more distant from the normal child, returned forcefully in the juvenile delinquent and the disabled child, manifesting itself through these two figures in its most negative sides. Towards the end of the 1890s, the temporal margins of childhood were also the subject of scientific reflection by psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology: in 1897 a work entirely devoted to puberty came out, destined to influence international debate. This last chapter will therefore be devoted to the margins (so central and, in fact, all but marginal to defining normality), as well as to the end of childhood—to puberty and adolescence—which mark its temporal boundaries with adulthood and help define it.