Where Have All the Children Gone?

Abstract

Despite declining infant-mortality rates and a cottage industry of publications devoted to improving parenting/childcare, birthrates in the U.S. and Western Europe continue to fall. But the present inquiry is directed less to the disappearance of actual children than to that more fragile and contested state of childhood. Changes in the spaces reserved for childhood might be compared to the erosion of Arctic ice due to climate change. In both, human factors play a contentious role. The examples cited below will show how children are susceptible not just to parental influences but also to other adults in the community and especially now to unprecedented cultural changes. How these transformations impact the evolution of parenting modes laid out by Lloyd deMause will be assessed in due course.