In just a little over 100 years, children's living conditions together with the very notion of childhood have changed dramatically in the Western world. Child labor has been banned and institutions for care and schooling have become the primary life world of children rather than the farm and the household. Children are today perceived as individuals in their own right, as maturing through various developmental stages, and as having certain undeniable social and legal rights in relation to both parents and society. This development can of course be thought of in terms of humanitarian progress. But alongside this development we can also observe an increase in the monitoring and governing of children's lives, to the point that childhood can be thought of as ‘the most intensely governed sector of personal existence’ (Rose, 1999: 123). Against the backdrop of humanistic development on the one hand and an increasing governing of childhood on the other, this chapter explores the historical transformations of childhood through the lens of a few overarching themes: industrialization and urbanization, children's path into public life and citizenship, changed notions of the child's nature and being, and the scientification of the child.