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Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from
Nature-Deficit Disorder Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books,
2006. Notes, suggested reading, index.
334 pp. $13.95 paper. ISBN:
9781565125223.
Conn and Hal Iggulden, The Dangerous Book for Boys. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Drawings,
photographs, charts. 270 pp. $24.95
cloth. ISBN: 9780061243585.
by Jay Mechling
[First Paragraph]
The tradition of making claims about
threats to American children began in
the late nineteenth century, when a group
of professional "child savers" emerged to
campaign for policies and programs meant
to protect children from the ravages of
modern cities and of modern industrial
capitalism. That tradition remained strong
through the twentieth century, and as the
culture wars heated up in the 1980s, many
of the battles were fought over children.
Worried adults came to see children as vulnerable
prey, and Neil Postman's provocative
book, The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), condensed adults' concerns by
blaming the mass media and commodity
capitalism for the loss of an innocent time
of life. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s,
many claims were made about threats to
children, from predatory marketing to
children to sexual predators on the Internet. |
