As a legal category, childhood was expressed as the age of “minority.” This was a temporary category exclusive to non-enslaved, white males. Throughout the French and Spanish empires, a minor was a “young man under the age of 25" who “did not yet have the administration of his own goods. In early modern England and British North America, minority was restricted anywhere below 21 or 25 years of age. In all of these regions, the key to minority was the lack of a legal identity. As a minor, boys were incapable of negotiating contracts or making other financial decisions independent of a guardian, parent, or master. They also could not serve in local governments before achieving majority status, nor could they own property.
Despite their legal codification, these ages mattered little in popular consciousness or in practice throughout much of the early modern period. Instead, childhood and adulthood were malleable, often based upon individual experiences, especially economic circumstances. If a young man failed to sufficiently provide for himself, he could have his childhood extended. For example, in early modern France, parents could send their offspring to juvenile detention centers for idleness or squandering their finances even after the child was 25. Conversely, a young man could shorten minority if he was able to establish himself early. For instance, a sixteen-year-old boy who was the inheritor of a large estate could have been deemed an adult upon his father’s death even if he had yet to reach the age of majority. Similarly, a successful young merchant under 25 would have been able to negotiate contracts on his own, essentially transitioning to majority, simply because he ran a prosperous business. In these cases, it was the ability of a young man to achieve economic solvency that was much more important to the attainment of majority than a certain age.
But an important shift occurred in how childhood and adulthood were legally and colloquially defined during the last half of the eighteenth century, starting in early America. As British North America experimented with representative government, moving away from subjecthood and toward citizenship, clearer laws regarding who could be a citizen, and along with it, an adult, were drawn. As Holly Brewer argues in By Birth or Consent, the biggest difference between a subject and citizen rested on the notion of consent. Only someone who possessed reason could consent. Children lacked the ability to reason and, therefore, were unable to consent. Adulthood, then, was marked by the exercise of reasoned consent.