children

In Post-Soviet Russia, Children Have Been Propaganda Instruments

by Clementine Fujimura

Russian regimes since the fall of Communism have inherited and created crises of mass orphanage; their policy responses to parentless children have been informed by politics and nationalism at the expense of child welfare. Removal of orphans from Ukraine to Russia is just the latest instance. 

Authors Call for a Rethink of Birth and Motherhood

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington makes an assertive argument that the United States has a long history of official involvement in motherhood, from making reproduction near-compulsory for white women on one side of the color line to eugenics and sterilization on the other. 

Fraught Family Reunification After the Holocaust

by Rebecca Clifford

"A tenth of Europe's pre-war population of Jewish children survived the Holocaust. Many sought and achieved reunification with their families, but reunification did not usually end the trauma endured by this "fragment of an entire generation."

Qanon Misdirects Our Attention Away From The Real Threats To Children

by Paul M. Renfro

"Moral panics like QAnon work to distract from less outrageous, far more insidious sources of harm. Even worse, they contribute to punitive policies that separate and hurt families, perpetuate mass incarceration and keep people in a state of fear."

The Children’s Nutrition and Dental Clinics of Mobile: Public Health, Volunteerism, and the Color Line during the Great Depression

by Daryn Glassbrook

The Depression did not create a hunger and malnutrition crisis in the United States. It brought to the fore deep-seated structural weaknesses in our economic, political, and health systems that enabled this crisis to boil over.

All the History I Learned in my Youth Came from the American Girl Doll Books

Learning about history can come from unexpected places. The information booklets sold with the author's dolls may have drawn on more historians' expertise than her school textbooks did. 

How the Disappearance of Etan Patz Changed the Face of New York City Forever

by Paul Renfro

Concerns about the “safety” and “security” of specific children—particularly those who resemble Etan Patz—played a considerable role in New York’s extraordinary late twentieth-century transformation.

8 Podcasts About Civics and U.S. History

School Library Journal recommends history and civics podcasts for kids. 

How We Got to Sesame Street

by Jill Lepore

The beloved children's program grew from the need to use the overabundance of televisions to fix the dearth of preschools in 1960s America. Jill Lepore assesses how the show has changed along with society.

Modeling Grief: the Death of Children in Historical Perspective

by Maria E. Doerfler

As students of the history of emotions have argued, even the deepest and most primal feelings require models for experiencing one's own suffering and for responding appropriately to others’. The relative lack of such models in contemporary American society contrasts sharply with other eras' approach to voicing bereavement.

Children in the ancient Middle East were valued and vulnerable — not unlike children today

by Shawn Flynn and Kristine Garroway

The choices that societies make concerning the treatment of children can bring about the greatest of debates and prompt significant political action. 

The long history of parents complaining about their kids’ homework

by Rebecca Onion

If you find yourself stressed, annoyed, and furious about your child’s homework this fall, it might help to know that you are participating in a great American tradition.

Uncovering the History of Child Psychiatry: A Conversation with Deborah Blythe Doroshow

by Kylie Smith

Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America’s Troubled Children explores the development of Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) for “emotionally disturbed” children. 

Not having kids is nothing new. What centuries of history tell us about childlessness today.

by Rachel Chrastil

The long history of childlessness can help us to debunk myths, tell our stories and expand the range of our possibilities. 

Why We Need Better Children's History Books

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Assembling a coherent narrative that inspires students to image a different world is much more complicated than a Wikipedia search. Teachers can only carry out this task if they have access to narrative histories that are decolonized.

The myths behind the push to resurrect child labor

by Oenone Kubie

Why is there a significant push to resurrect child labor. 

The Story of the Dionne Quintuplets Is a Cautionary Tale for the Age of ‘Kidfluencers’

by Shelley Wood

The pitfalls and payoffs of advertising directly to children have consumed psychologists, pediatricians, marketers and anxious parents for the better part of a century, but the ethics of using children and babies for product endorsement has received much less attention.

Children Are At Risk. Why Aren’t We Doing More?

by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Kriste Lindenmeyer

100 years ago Woodrow Wilson launched a federal initiative to improve children’s health and welfare. He called it Children’s Year. It’s time for another.

The Wild Children of Yesteryear

by Jon Grinspan

Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Children are Sexual Creatures

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory and three other books. In 1985, the founder of modern American sex education gave a controversial speech about erections in fetuses. To Mary Calderone, who had started the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States back in 1964, new evidence about arousal in male fetuses demonstrated once and for all that children were sexual beings.Nonsense, said conservatives. To critics of sex education, childhood was — or should be — a time of sexual innocence. Racy movies, TV shows and magazines made kids prematurely interested in sex. And so did sex education, which robbed them of their natural virtue and replaced it with tawdry thoughts and feelings.I thought of this debate as I read the comments by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, during the House debate on Monday over a bill that would ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. According to Burgess, fetuses do not simply experience sexual arousal; they actively arouse themselves.