Whether controversial or taken for granted, pictures of children are everywhere - in magazines, newspapers and advertisements, on greetings cards and the Internet. "Picturing Childhood" demonstrates how these familiar images reveal a view of childhood which is constantly changing. With debates over children's rights in the 1970s, child sexual abuse in the 1980s, violent children in the 1990s and precocity and consumerism in the 2000s, the traditional image of childhood innocence survives only as a form of kitsch. Using images from a wide variety of sources, this text considers the popular imagery in relation to news, education, welfare, charity and consumerism and asks what implications does all this have for the ways in which children themselves are treated?

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Preface: Twenty-first-century childhood and the routine spectacular Introduction: Pictures of children: images of childhood 1. There's no such thing as a baby... or is there? 2. Superbrats in the charmed circle of home 3. Ignorant pupils and harmonious nature 4. The fantasy of liberation and the demand for rights 5. No future: the threat of childhood amd the impossibility of youth 6. Crybabies and damaged children 7. Gender, sexuality and a fantasy for girls Postscript: Escape from childhood Index

About the Author

Pat Holland is a freelance writer, lecturer and researcher in the history of television, photography and representations of childhood. Her publications include 'Family Snaps' (as co-editor), 'The Television Handbook' and forthcoming from I.B. Tauris, a study of 'This Week' and television current affairs.

Reviews

"Patricia Holland has a huge, eclectic collection of pictures of children and a terrific project: to write a serious commentary on the nature of childhood based on her collection... the many teachers and other educators who read this book, as I hope they will, must do their own thinking about what it means for them...this book comes as an unsettling professional challenge...Reading it, we must ask ourselves some difficult questions..." Mary Jane Drummond - University of Cambridge (The Times Higher Education Supplement)