Just as a general response rather than a specific commentary on this revision of Aries' work, the process you describe is not dissimilar to the way we often narrate the ideal progress of the scientific method. E.g., a hypothesis that is ultimately falsified can nevertheless be regarded as a useful contribution to scientific knowledge because it directed research which helped produce a new and more sustainable hypothesis.

It's not quite the same for historians, but there's something like this going on at time for us. People sometimes imply that "historical revisionism" is merely ideology or intellectual fashion, one wave of historians coming in and undoing what the last wave of historians did simply to make their knowledge conform to present preferences. But most of the time, revision is product of dedicated research, driven by historians learning more from archives, informants and other sources and coming to believe that a previous interpretation was incomplete or inaccurate in part or in whole.

Aries' case might in some respect be similar to some of the historical research inspired by the writing of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault. Historians who have done more methodical archival research than Foucault was inclined to undertake have frequently found that his work was wrong in many important details: that the institutions that interested him formed at other times and in different ways than his accounts describe, or that they were more contradictory and complex than his more philosophical or theoretical critique was inclined to credit.

​

Nevertheless, most historians working from Foucault, even those quite critical of the accuracy of his account or the philosophical drift of his interpretation, give him tremendous credit for inspiring so much historical inquiry, and not merely in the sense of the need to set the record straight. Foucault gets credit for insisting that many institutions and phenomena had a history, and that this history was more important and more complex than a simple case of things got better and more elaborate as time went on. He forced many of us to recognize the extent to which we were captives of our own historical moment and therefore inclined to accept some underlying propositions about the world without ever examining them.

To cite just one example, Foucault's earliest work was on the history of madness. When he wrote it, most historians were influenced by modern psychological and biological understandings of mental illness that strongly naturalize it--that hold that mental illness is an invariant constant in human societies. So historians largely would not have thought of this as a topic calling out for historical research--that any history would simply be a triumphalist, whiggish account of how modern societies had come to a more scientific and rigorous understanding of mental illness and had reformed institutions for treating it, with further improvements to come. What Foucault suggested instead was that "madness" was an invention of modern Western society, connected to the rise of institutions with carceral power (that is, the power to involuntarily confine human beings with the authority of law based on some categorical claim about those individuals--that they were 'mad', that they were criminals, etc.). Once you start to think about it, even if you think he's wrong, you have a whole new research agenda. Is it possible for a past human society to have thought in completely different ways about mental illness? What's the evidence that mental illness is actually invariant over time? What would it mean to be mentally ill in a society with no concept of 'madness', in a society with no asylums or psychologists? Etc.

So Aries in this sense did something similar: he said, "We think childhood has no history, that it doesn't change. But childhood is a constructed category. Sure, yes, there are real and natural differences between an infant and a toddler, a toddler and an older child, an older child and a teenager, but how much of our present view of childhood is a construction that sits on top of that and affects everything we think and believe about childhood? What if people in the past thought differently about what defined childhood, or had radically different ideas about how to relate to children? What if therefore children thought of themselves differently?" Even if you almost completely reject Aries' substantive answers to those questions, the questions themselves don't go away, and any historian working on the topic has to credit Aries for asking them in the first place.