In pictures: A century of Scottish childhood

Little boys show off their Christmas presents, including astronaut suits and Space Hoppers, in Crown Street in the Gorbals area of Glasgow in December 1970. PIC: TSPL.

From the little girl posing on a plush chair with her two groomed dogs to the boys on their space hoppers in a Glasgow back court, these pictures really do speak a thousands words of Scottish childhood across the ages.

A BBC Scotland documentary, Growing Up in Scotland - A Century of Childhood, is currently looking at how children’s lives have changed in Scotland since the late 1800s.

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With war and poverty defining many a young life in the early 20th Century, the programme examines how education, mass manufacture of toys and better access to transport helped to alter the experience of children in Scotland over the generations.

A portrait of baby McKay and the two family dogs - September 1914. PIC Johnston Collection, Wick/BBC Scotland.

The demolition of slum housing and improvements in public health care were also fundamental to bring about change when Scottish cities boasted some of the worst child mortality rates in the British Isles.

In the early 1900s, two in five children born in parts of Dundee were not expected to survive, for example.

The third and final part of Growing Up in Scotland: A Century of Childhood will this Thursday look at welfare and how problem children were loaded into vans and taxis bound for remote island communities, to be fostered to local families, with few references or checks.

A WWI soldier from Caithness and his three children. PIC Johnston Collection Wick.

Such schemes continued into the 1960s with some Scottish children sent as far as Canada or Australia, without parental consent.

-Growing Up in Scotland: A Century of Childhood will broadcast on Thursday, March 9 at 9pm. The series is available on iPlayer.