新方东63 Passage16 有一个选项不理解，求问

Royzhang0929

In 1896 a Georgiacouple suing for (sue for: v.控告) damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told thatsince the child had made no real economic contribution to the family, there wasno liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, theparents of a three-year-old sued in New York for accidental-death damages andwon an award of $750,000.
The transformationin social values implicit in juxtaposing these two incidents is the subject ofViviana Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricingthe Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the conceptof the “useful” child who contributed to the family economy gave way graduallyto the present-day notion of the “useless” child who, though producing noincome for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet consideredemotionally “priceless.” Well established among segments of the middle andupper classes by the mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread throughoutsociety in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformersintroduced child-labor regulations and compulsoryeducation (compulsory education: n.义务教育) laws predicatedin part on the assumption that a child’s emotional value made child labortaboo.
For Zelizer theorigins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion ofchildren’s productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline inbirth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development ofthe companionate family (a family in which members were united by explicitbonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing theassessment of children’s worth. Yet “expulsion of children from the ‘cash nexus (cashnexus: 金钱关系, 现金(交易)关系),’ although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic,occupational, and family structures,” Zelizer maintains, “was also part of acultural process ‘of sacrelization’ of children’s lives.” Protecting childrenfrom the crass business world became enormously important forlate-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; thissacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentlesscorruption of human values by the marketplace.
In stressing thecultural determinants of a child’s worth, Zelizer takes issue withpractitioners of the new “sociological economics,” who have analyzed suchtraditionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, education, and healthsolely in terms of their economic determinants. Allowing only a small role forcultural forces in the form of individual “preferences,” these sociologiststend to view all human behaviors as directed primarily by the principle ofmaximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizesinstead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price.As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their“exchange” or “surrender” value on the market, that is, the conversion of theirintangible worth into cash terms, became much greater.


问题是It can be inferred from the passage thatin the early 1800’s children were generally regarded by their families asindividuals who
(A) neededenormous amounts of security and affection
(B) requiredconstant supervision while working
(C) wereimportant to the economic well-being of a family
(D) wereunsuited to spending long hours in school（C）
(E) werefinancial burdens assumed for the good of society


为啥选 C啊 ，C是什么意思呢？请做过的各位帮帮我吧！