Biologically, a child (plural: children) is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority. "Child" may also describe a relationship with a parent (such as sons and daughters of any age) or, metaphorically, an authority figure, or signify group membership in a clan, tribe, or religion; it can also signify being strongly affected by a specific time, place, or circumstance, as in "a child of nature" or "a child of the Sixties".
Read more about Child: Legal, Biological, and Social Definitions, Socialization, Attitudes Toward Children, Age of Responsibility, One-child Policy, Child Mortality
Famous quotes containing the word child:
“The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we’re talking about motherhood we’re always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Your child...may not call you or other people names.... Don’t be tempted to gloss over this issue. You may be able to talk to yourself into not minding being called names, but this decision may come back to haunt you in later years. If you let a preschooler speak disrespectfully to you now, you’ll have a much harder time of it when your child is a preteen and the issue resurfaces, which it is likely to do then.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)