WHEN we talk about what happened in Manchester last week, often what we speak about is children – how we feel about them, what they mean to us, how, following the news, what we wanted to do was hold our little ones close. It’s not a new sentiment. It’s one that comes up whenever a child goes missing, or we see images of a refugee child washed up on a beach, or when we learn of appalling stories of abuse. But here it was again, wrapped in the fluffy kitten ears of a pop star, and utterly heart-breaking horror.

The events of last week have been a reminder of was how, as a culture, we feel about children and childhood. Many called the bombing of the Manchester Arena, during an Ariana Grande concert attended primarily by children and young people, an attack on the “way we live”. This is often said following a terrorist attack, but in this particular case there was an added element. Our culture’s heart beats not just for its children, but also for the childhood that, at its most ideal, we attempt to create for them – protective, nurturing, fun, optimistic. Childhood, we know, is what shapes the adult, and hence it is an arena we want to protect – from both actual trauma and knowledge of the harsh realities of the world.

Children count in all cultures, and historically speaking, parents have always loved their children. But the way that children are valued and perceived, has changed in Scotland, the UK and more widely, over the past 100 years or so. The way we prize that period called childhood, as well as the way many children experience it, has altered.

Next week, the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry starts its public hearings, in which victims of historical abuse in state care will be invited to come forward. Though the inquiry has been controversial, and, in the years of its development, the subject of many grievances by victims, it is one of many similar inquiries across the globe that make a statement about how we feel about children, and the protection we should afford them. Nothing like this inquiry could have happened 50 years ago. Even the term "sexual abuse" wasn't really used within social work and other fields until the 1980s.

The inquiry, therefore, is one of many state acts which reveal a great deal about our changing attitudes. Children matter, it attempts to say. Those whose childhoods were stolen from them by abuse, also matter. It’s part of a story of modern child rights that includes the Jimmy Savile inquiry, legislation against corporal punishment, and most importantly the United Nations Convention On The Rights Of The Child, the most ratified convention in the world. We now even talk of a childhood "right to play".

We have come a long way from the society that locked up its young offenders in adult prisons, and saw children as young as 12 being hanged; from one that allowed children to work in mines and go up chimneys; an era when young child bodies were literally gobbled up and mutilated by the machines of the industrial mills.

All this should mean that children today have it better than in any other generation in European history. But is that so? On some levels it’s inarguable that things are better. Children, in spite of our concerns about obesity, lack of exercise and sedentary digital lifestyles, are healthier than they have ever been. At the start of the 20th century, 150 out of every thousand babies born would not live to see their first birthday, but by 1968 that figure had fallen to seven in thousand, and, in Scotland today, it now stands at around four per thousand.

In the 1890s in Glasgow, one in seven babies died before aged one, mostly from common childhood diseases such as measles and diarrhoea.

Most of us, if we look back through our families, see this same story of child mortality played out, in a more or less extreme form. Graveyards up and down the country speak of those losses. My aunt tells me of a cemetery in Coldingham where on the graves of our family, names repeat within a generation. Mary, lost at just a few months old, and another Mary, her sister, gone at 21: it was a common practice in those times to name a child after one already lost.

For most of us in the UK, it’s hard to imagine now what it is to lose and lose and lose again.

The shape of the family, as a result, was entirely different. Thomas Allan, my great grandfather and a farm labourer, was one of 15 children, married to Margaret Henderson Clark, also one of 15. I’ve no doubt that a few of their siblings would not have made it through their early years. Those big families of yore were characterised by multiple losses. And while it's commonly supposed that, because so many of their offspring died, parents' emotional investment in their children was lower, some historians dispute this. Just because the grief had to be quelled and subdued as families got on with surviving and providing for those left, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

The large family is long gone, laid waste by a combination of economics, women’s liberation and the contraceptive pill. We are now in an era of high-investment parenting, in which most of us have fewer children.

I, for example, come from a family of five siblings, but have only two children. They are, of course, my pride and joy. But that does not mean that I spend more time with my children than my mother did with hers. Since I work, I spend less, though, as my mum has pointed out, with only two children that’s not necessarily less on each. Meanwhile, my children’s father has already spent many more hours with his sons than his father did in all his lifetime.

Over the last century or so, the child has gradually moved from the outer reaches of our culture, where he or she was barely considered a person, towards its centre. This is part of a wider trajectory which dates back far into history. The 18th-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau is often credited with inventing childhood, when he rejected notions of "original sin", and introduced the idea that children are innately innocent. Between 1600 and 1800 there was a remarkable change in attitudes towards children, which has been documented by many historians, including Lawrence Stone, who wrote of a “steady linear change over the last 400 years” in growth in concern “for children”.

For many centuries, however this concept of childhood was the preserve of the middle and upper classes. For working-class families living in poverty and struggling for survival, the ideal of a time of innocence, in which children could play and develop, was barely thinkable. Charles Dickens, and other social campaigners of his time, are key to childhood's story, and the shifting of it from being a middle-class concept to one which could be an ideal for all.

It’s a shift that has taken place not just here, but across Europe and the United States, and many other parts of the world. What is clear when we look at the trajectory of state policy, is that the way we treat our children, the rights we afford them, and the responsibility we take for them, is inextricably bound up with the way we view our society, and its progress. No wonder it matters so much to us.

One of the clearest indicators of how much we value the child, is how much we now fret about them. A culture of what sociologist Frank Furedi calls “paranoid parenting” has grown up, particularly among the middle classes. Hence, part of the story of modern childhood is that the changes and protections, have also brought with them some losses – and this, too, is something we fear. As much as we now worry about the dangers from paedophiles and cyber-bullies, we also fret that our children are now too cloaked in bubble-wrap, too watched-over, hyper-sexualised, their culture too commercialised, their independence curtailed.

Much has been written about how children are no longer free to roam in the way they did back in the old days, when they walked vast distances to school and in summer would be thrown out the door and not seen till teatime. Almost all of us have similar tales to tell. My grandfather left school at just 14. He told us of how, as a boy, he would cycle from Duns to Edinburgh to see the football match, buy a poke of chips, and then cycle back. My father, too, from five years old, was walking the mile to school on his own.

But for me, even letting my own sons, aged 10 and seven, walk the quarter-mile between home and school, and crossing roads, has represented a momentous act of letting go, only achieved in the last three months. Each send-off at the door is still accompanied by a small pang of fear. I watch other parents who let their kids roam the park and roads of Leith on an evening, with orders merely to be back by a particular time, and tell myself that it’s time we graduated to that, but do nothing about it.

Part of the worry is not about the actual safety of the child him or herself, it’s the sense that this is not what parents do – and when it’s not what other parents do, that inflates the sense of risk. However much you might try to persuade yourself that the risk is small, it niggles away, since what you are doing is breaking a modern cultural taboo. We are haunted by real-life warning fables such as those of Madeleine McCann or April Jones, sadly lost along the way. I’ve no doubt that, in years to come as we pack our children off to concerts, we will find ourselves incapable of pushing aside memories of the Manchester Arena, where many children, including eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos, died or were injured during the terrorist attack.

Recent times have, meanwhile, brought about a further shrinking down of the physical world explored by children. With the advent of the digital playground, there’s no need to go outside because there is the screen and endless entertainment at the swipe of a thumb. On one level this means that parents now have them wrapped up in the security of the home bubble. But even there, we parents perceive risk and harbour fears about predators, bullies and mental health issues, and we police their activities, setting up parental controls, removing devices from them at night, ever worrying over what lurks out there in the wild west of the web.

Not everyone thinks, however, that parents or children are so very different than they were 50 years go. Sometimes, when you talk to older people, they are keen to play down how much childhood has changed. My mother tells me that she believes that today's children are as responsible as ever, when given a chance. When she tells me how she looked after the house when her mother was ill, she notes how many young carers today are still looking after parents. Childhood, after all, is not a monoculture. It contains multiple vastly different experiences, determined by class, ethnic background, circumstance, and even the infinite differentiations in individual family culture.

“Children’s lives aren’t necessarily worse today and they weren’t necessarily rosy then or now," observes Viviene Cree, professor of social work studies at Edinburgh University. “The thing that’s affecting children most in Scotland today is the impact of the austerity agenda and the fact that more children are living in poverty.”

What we have still to crack, in spite of the many changes, is how to protect that minority of children who are at the frontline of abuse. As Cree points out, most of the children suffering from extreme abuse, mostly at the hands of family members, are not known about by social workers. “Three children died in Fife in 2014. The serious case reviews found that only one of them was known to social work. The other two came from nowhere and couldn’t have been predicted.”

The pain of Manchester is a reminder of what matters most to us. The good childhood, free from trauma, it one of our biggest ideals. No longer a gift only for the privileged, it’s what we want for all – and we are fiercely protective of it. Of course, many children will not have that perfect childhood, and, on some level, too much protection is not necessarily the healthiest thing when it comes to preparation for adult life. But, for many of us, the way we, as a society, value children – and not just our own – is a marker of our moral and ethical progress.

Last week's attack was devastating, not just because it triggered our parental fears and anxieties, but because it hit at something we believed in. Our children.