What is now known as the “new paradigm” of the sociology of childhood grew out of a rejection of traditional sociological and developmental psychological theories of childhood. Children in earlier sociological accounts were subsumed into accounts of the family, or the school – in other words into the major sites of socialization. Children were, therefore, most visible when they were being socialized. Socialization, which is sociology's explanation for how children become members of society, parallels developmental psychology, in that children progress from incompetent to competent adulthood through the process of acculturation or socialization. In both socialization theory and developmental psychology there was no view of children as active social agents; rather, children were seen (if they were seen at all) as passive recipients of socialization. In addition, both socialization theory and developmental psychology fail to see the child as existing in the present – instead the focus is on what children become. It has been said that socialization theory ignores children's role in socializing both themselves and others. In fact, it fails to take account of the child as a competent social actor. What was missing from sociology, then, was an account of the socially constructed nature of childhood which focused on children as social actors rather than passive “becomings.” The historian Phillipe Ariès (1962) noted that childhood as a concept has not always existed in the same way. Ariès discusses the development of the idea of childhood through reference to diaries, paintings, and other such historical documents and traces the changes in attitudes to children from those based for example on indifference, to coddling (the child as a plaything) to the development of psychological interest in childhood. The historical childhoods described by Ariès are very different from the modern, particularly western, conception of childhood to which we subscribe.