Aspects of childhood considered in new publications

The police and court activity following widespread participation in the recent riots in England perhaps accentuate these general concerns, given the young age of those involved.

An academic analysis of the state of the subject of the history of childhood may be seen in an open access paper here. There three questions are posed for those interested in childhood: first, who is included in the history of childhood? Second, why does the history of childhood matter? Third, how should we do the history of childhood?

The general argument is that all historians of childhood need to reflect upon modern developmental concepts of childhood which purport to tell us what children of different chronological ages can think, understand and feel.

Another recent study is a book generously available free of charge online. It is an account of the modern playground, drawing on the archival materials of social reformers, park superintendents, equipment manufacturers and architects in Britain, and beyond, to chart the playground’s journey from marginal obscurity to popular ubiquity.

In exploring the evolution of play space design, the book shows that the ideal playground has long represented a space where changing conceptions of nature, health, childhood, commerce and technology have all been played out.

It covers the development of garden gymnasiums in the 1890s, increasing standardisation in the interwar period, the impact of progressive education, pioneering female designers and the adventure playground movement in the twentieth century, and more recent challenges to the playground’s status in terms of health and safety.

Expectations of ordinariness hide a history of children’s place in public space – one shaped by implicit social, political and environmental values, and by government intervention in spaces and lives across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

These publications offer current understanding of what may, for the non-specialist, appears to be far more mundane than it ought to do. Moreover, these publications may counter the real danger, perhaps, that children come to be seen, separately from adults, merely as a consumer, or focus, group.