I've never heard of this website until someone passed me this link.
The essay is a review of books regarding children's lives today, from a fresh perspective.
A plethora of recent books has set out to show that the modern world is damaging our children. The authors are allowing their rather romanticised view of, and nostalgia for, their own childhoods to influence their inquiry into how children’s lives have changed in recent times...Interesting Stuff.
...In many ways children’s lives have improved immensely over the years. In fact, only a few hundred years ago children could not even be said to have a childhood. The French historian Philippe Aries showed in the classic Centuries of Childhood that the idea of childhood simply did not exist in medieval society. ‘As soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society’, Aries wrote...
...It is true that the lives of most children today are very different from those of, for example, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and friends, with their many adventures - including getting lost in caves or playing pirates on the Mississippi river. But the changes we have seen in children’s lives over the last century, or even decade, are far from all for the worse...
