The protean Joyce Carol Oates

Here she asks: what is childhood? “A biological condition? A span of years? A social construct? An ever-evolving compendium of myths that represent society’s projections of its ideals and anxieties onto its youngest, most vulnerable members? As our personal recollections of childhood are likely to be highly unreliable, taken as much from family albums and photographs, family tales and obfuscations as from direct memory, so our collective history of childhood is likely to be sentimental and simplified, a kind of cartoon nostalgia for an idealized past that never was. As Steven Mintz argues in this often fascinating and massively documented exploration of four centuries of American childhood, “there has never been a time when the overwhelming majority of American children were well cared for and their experience idyllic. Nor has childhood ever been an age of innocence, for most children”. More.