Plural of childhood; multiple periods of early life from birth through adolescence.
From 'child' + '-hood' (a suffix meaning state or condition, from Old English). The plural became common in modern contexts discussing developmental psychology and comparing childhoods across cultures.
The concept of 'childhood' as a distinct life stage is actually relatively recent—before industrialization, children were mostly treated as small adults, so the idea of multiple distinct 'childhoods' worth studying only emerged in the last 200 years.
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