Customer Reviews

A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Themes in History)

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Colin Heywood's History of Childhood is a brief overview of the state of the field as of 2001. In under 200 pages, Heywood traces the origins of scholarly interest in the history of childhood, summarizes Philippe Aries's classic work and the major critiques of it, and outlines current thinking on several major topics, including infancy, early childhood, the "third stage" (from age 7 through adolescence), children's labor, and education. Heywood's treatment of each topic is inevitably very brief, and while he cites numerous primary sources, he sometimes uses them uncritically. I did not learn much history from this book; if you're looking for an engaging overview of childhood in early modern and modern times, I would recommend Steven Mintz's Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood or something similar. The merit of Heywood's History of Childhood lies in Heywood's extremely clear and succinct laying out of the major themes and research questions in the field. It would be useful to a graduate student preparing for comps or to someone who is just beginning a research project on some aspect of the history of childhood.

This book is a good general start for studying children's history. I would have to say that it doesn't really seem to present anything new to the field. There are definitely a lot of other great books on children's history, and the discipline is growing. One site I found (childhistory.org) has a pretty good list of a variety of books that deal with the history of children and childhood, all of which are linked here to Amazon. Anyway, I look forward to more scholarly interest in something so fundamental to our lives as childhood.