Yesterday I came across a charming thread on Twitter of people posting pix of their very little ones in museums and art galleries taking no notice of Ye Art and Artefactz, but totally absorbed by things like the bottoms of the display cabinets, the gratings for the underfloor heating, the tiles, etc etc, or just the potential of the floors for ( Read more... )

During a Twitter thread springing off the legitimate contention that prior to mass vaccination programmes there are a lot of tombstones for babies in graveyards - or at least, records of very young children on the family memorials.
So somebody contends that In Ye Old Days children were not loved then because parents did not become attached to ( Read more... )

At the weekend I came across a Twitter thread by someone who had been caught up in what they describe as a 'cult' of a shared online fantasy world, which came to take over their life almost to the exclusion of 'normal reality' -
And I thought, is this not really rather like the 'Brontes' web of childhood'* - one of the significant things being ( Read more... )

Partner and I were watching An Old Movie the other day.
Talking it over later, I remarked that I had first seen Old Movie in question in the second-run/revival cinema in my hometown, and that we had gone in at a relatively late point in the narrative and had - as was the custom in those days - sat sitting there, through the ads and the trailers and ( Read more... )

Why playtime for adults won’t bring your childhood back.
Is this a thing? No, really, is this a thing? If you live in Seattle, you may now participate in something called Adult Recess, which aims to recreate the joys of an American school break time, with kickball, hopscotch, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - but minus the bullying. “I ( Read more... )

I was somewhat rolling on the floor with mirth reading this: Summer is the perfect time to get children reading, but what if they refuse? Authors and experts reveal tips and tricks for every age group -
As That Child who had to be almost physically forced out of the house to play in the lovely sunshine and get her nose out of a book (I cannot ( Read more... )

It's a bit depressing when the people who are, apparently, judging an award in a particular generic field demonstrate a somewhat lacking knowledge of the longer history of that field:
Domestic dramas are crowding out adventures, warn children's book prize judges. The fictional children of the past frolicked on the heather-clad slopes of Kirrin ( Read more... )

The book that made me a feminist.
I mean, did they not realise that they were feminists before then?
I remember coming across the term in, it was either Girls' Crystal or Schoolfriend - which were not the girls' comics we had bought for us, but had passed along by, I think, my mother's friend along the street who had a daughter a few years older ( Read more... )

Studies show that children are better at identifying Pokémon characters than real animals and plants.
You know what? Let's us go back to the 1940s and all those evacuees who were grossed out at the revelation that milk came from cows rather than nice clean bottles.
Or to c. 1920 and the formation of various youth organisations which were about ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Boys will be Boys, which was still very familiar although it is many years since I last read it. Wonder if Turner would really have liked to be writing something a bit more serious about matters of popular culture; and would have liked to be nerdish in the archives of the publishing companies, because there are sometimes ( Read more... )