Word: childhood
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Some things about this age of change are unchanging. If childhood is about magic, 13 introduces mystery: Joan of Arc began hearing celestial voices when she was 13. Into the age of innocence, 13 brings sexuality: early versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story were tales of seduction in which her cape was a symbol of menstruation. Shakespeare's Juliet was 13, unready for love perhaps but, by the standards of her age, more than ready for marriage. Tom Sawyer is thought to have been 13 when he got "engaged" to Becky Thatcher. It is an age of prodigy...
...tricky even to talk about teenagers before 1941, when the term is believed to have first appeared in print (in an article in Popular Science Monthly). Our notions of childhood are relatively recent innovations, and when parents lament that today's children "grow up too fast," it is worth asking "Compared with when?" For centuries, children were valued more for their economic than emotional contribution to family life. As late as 1708 in Britain, a child of 7 could be hanged for stealing, and some of the most dangerous factory jobs could be performed only by children because of their...
...childhood spent at school and play, while a modern idea, used to end more abruptly than it does now. The biggest year for teenage births in U.S. history was 1957--not because of some epidemic of premarital sex but because the median age for marriage was 20, and many brides were teenagers. A 13-year-old leafing through the pages of Seventeen magazine in the mid-1950s would have been paging through ads for furniture because she reasonably expected to be married and starting a family within a few years. So while today's 13-year-olds are exposed...
...Keep up the family rituals that have always sustained you all: family dinners, church, camping, skiing and watching the same dumb TV shows. Thirteen-year-olds need to feel that they can touch their own childhood frequently and be nourished by traditions they know well...
Being a tourist at home has allowed me to relive much of the childhood that I had forgotten. I knew when I decided to go to Harvard that I would be expanding my horizons and seeing things I had never seen before; I just didn’t expect those new experiences to be so close to my own backyard...