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Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children (review)

If this book has any faults, they are not serious ones. Heywood may be too conscientious about reporting on the great variety of relationships, family structures, experiences, and so forth, that he has discovered in the course of his extensive research, so that it is not always easy to get a sense of which predominated at various points in time and of overall trends. So too, Heywood sometimes reports too fully on the many individual documents he has encountered; occasionally, his text reads somewhat dryly as a string of loosely connected examples drawn from his various sources. Ultimately, Heywood concludes that the changes that took place in the experience of childhood as it evolved between the mid eighteenth century and the mid twentieth were a mixed blessing. On the one hand, children gained many new legal protections and material benefits and more opportunities were opened for them, but, on the other hand, they lost some of their traditional supportive social structures and some of their freedom and they came under increasing pressure to think and act for themselves. Growing Up in France adds significantly to our knowledge about the place of children in French society and, in doing so, it serves to enhance the reputation Colin Heywood has established as an erudite and insightful expert on childhood in France.