Here are Steven Mintz’s suggestions for more reading on the history of childhood.
Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (2008)
Chudakoff demonstrates that children’s play has always been a subject of contention, with adults seeking to control the way that children spend their time and kids using play for their own purposes: as a physical and emotional release and a form of resistance and subversion.
Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (1999)
Cross traces a shift from toys that sought to educate children and prepare them for the adult world to toys that create a fantasy world separate and apart from the adulthood.
David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2015)
By uncovering children’s lives in diverse cultures, this book challenges narrowly, culture-bound conceptions of childhood.
Peter Stearns, Childhood in World History (2006)
Stearns places childhood in global-historical perspective and shows that the contemporary Western ideal of childhood–as a period devoted to play and schooling, sharply segregated from the adult world–is a historical anomaly.
