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childhood



  • Deconstructing "The Child"

    by Jules Gill-Peterson

    Since the Victorian era, Anglo-American conceptions of childhood have worked ideologically to place children at risk of harm through the justifying idea of love, and hide the reality that only a tiny percentage of young people experience youth as protected, secure, and nurtured. 



  • Have Children Changed in Modern America?

    by Steven Mintz

    A recent argument for the general stability of children over the last century and a half misses the key point that "childhood" has been a fluid concept, and changes in how childhood is understood has necessarily affected the experiences of children. 



  • What Parents Did Before Baby Formula

    by Carla Cevasco

    "The formula shortage is not a victory for breastfeeding. It is a calamity for families who, like families throughout history, just want to feed their children."



  • Women Know You Can't Just Replace Formula with Breastfeeding

    by Laura Earls

    Breastfeeding advocacy is historically tied as much to a prescriptive and sentimental image of motherhood and maternal attachment as to concern for babies' health, and has long ignored physical and social obstacles to nursing. 



  • Toys are Ditching Genders for the Same Reason they First Took them On

    by Paul Ringel

    While social conservatives may bemoan the rise of gender-neutral toys as an attack on traditional values, the history of marketing to children suggests that the impetus for the change isn't coming from the "woke" but from the market. 



  • White Americans have Weaponized the Idea of Girlhood

    by Crystal Webster

    The concept of childhood has elastic boundaries; in a racist society, those boundaries stretch to portray whites as innocents deserving protection and Black youth as dangerous and susceptible to punishment.