Parents and educators will discover a wealth of information to inspire and help “make childhood a better place.”
An informative road map for those who want to maximize their children’s material environment.
When architecture critic Lange (The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, 2014, etc.) had her first child, she “came to see each successive stage of childhood development as an opportunity for encounters with larger and more complex environments.” Her approach is primarily historical and design-focused as she explores five specific topics that make up the “designed-for-childhood environment”: blocks, house, school, playground, and city. Corrugated cardboard boxes appeared in the 1870s, and children quickly saw their appeal as playthings. Wooden beads and blocks gained popularity around 1900. Blocks designed by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, became popular when Milton Bradley began manufacturing them in the 1870s. Lange then traces the development and sophistication of blocks from the Danish LEGO (leg godt or “play well”) to “Minecraft” to Zoob, each crucial to stimulating children’s imaginations. Next up is house; as the author writes, children “need furnishings couched to their frames but also to their abilities.” The high chair dawned in the 1830s, followed by kid-size dishes. In 1929, Parents magazine featured the “Whole-Family House.” Lange teaches us about Maria Montessori, the “magic of the storage wall,” and the significance of Peter Opsvik’s multipurpose Tripp Trapp chair. School focuses on how “pedagogy and architecture go hand in hand.” The first spaces in America called “play grounds” were created in Boston in 1885 out of piles of sand, and the first jungle gym was installed in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1920. Lange argues that “segregating children’s play from the flow of urban life creates its own problems.” She hands out A ratings to cities (Rotterdam, Oslo, Seattle) who are redesigning city spaces in terms of children’s welfare. Disneyland gets an A-plus for its exemplary “child-friendly outdoor environment.”
Parents and educators will discover a wealth of information to inspire and help “make childhood a better place.”Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-635-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
An intriguing but weakly argued introduction to an underexplored subject. Youcha (coauthor, Drugs, Alcohol, and Your Children, 1989) contends that today's conflicts over day care are nothing new- -indeed, that children have always been looked after by complex and various combinations including relatives, older siblings, employers, paid strangers, intimately known slaves, servants, and settlement-house workers. She convincingly uses historical example to challenge the amnesiac contemporary notion that biological mothers have always been full-time care-givers. She also wrestles with some psychologically complicated historical situations: the colonial apprentice/master relationship (children as young as six could be hired out); Southern black ``mammies'' and white mistresses raising, often wet-nursing, each other's children; child factory labor; 19th-century utopian communities like the Shakers, in which children were the responsibility of the whole community and individual parent/child attachments were frowned on. She also examines 20th-century upper-class solutions like boarding schools and nannies, foster care, and postWW II comprehensive day care institutions. Her examples do add nuance to received wisdom about what constitutes traditional motherhood. But Youcha's narrative is inconsistent: Sometimes she tries to describe situations objectively; sometimes she adopts a decisively opinionated slant; her interpretations often falter and backpedal. Writing about the antebellum South, she cites evidence that children could become more attached to their mammies than to their mothers, yet in comparing the mammy to today's nannies, she discounts that possibility. She changes her tone abruptly, too, in characterizing the utopians as by turns unfeeling and progressive. There is ample evidence that their child-care practices were both of these things, but Youcha doesn't weave contradictory elements together. A solid use of provocative historical cases to raise new questions in the contemporary child-care debates, but with its rough style and chaotically veering judgments, it doesn't provide answers.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19336-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
Candid and inspiring.
Redbook editor-in-chief Morrison finds a bigger, more honest and balanced self amid the ruins of her marriage.
The author had recently been fired from her magazine job, had an infant son and a house in Brooklyn when her husband sighed and pronounced, “I’m done with this.” To his credit, he didn’t bolt or have an affair, but stayed put until they ironed out the divorce process—though it would take a toll. In a firm, bell-clear voice, Morrison charts her passage from misery to redemption. It wasn’t easy, and the story plays well on her confusion—circling, revisiting, contradicting—reading like a tumult of self-recrimination. Hardly a shrinking violet, she lived at a somewhat cool remove, not trusting happiness. She worked too much; nothing was ever enough; she was volatile and dramatic: “The distance between my brain and my mouth is very, very short.” Yet that brain is capacious and active, and Morrison emerges as a sympathetic character, overthinking, overwhelmed and not blind to the irony of “running a magazine all about women and love and marriage and stuff…Isn’t it rich?” There is plenty of unhappiness in these pages—not self-indulgent, but revelatory—and it all leads to genuinely hard-won epiphanies that are gratifyingly modest and useful for readers in similar situations—don’t marinate in anger; beneath fear is solid ground; fix the immediate problems, often things happen “just because”; optimism and forgiveness work wonders. If her comparisons are sometimes unsettling—“divorce is no virus; it’s lung cancer”—readers will get the drift.
Candid and inspiring.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9556-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
