The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child
in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping
endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent
time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our
earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at
heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the
childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty
but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple,
Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats,
toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute."
Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster
affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of
the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the
preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also
served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious
worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered
paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following
their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and
unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of
wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies,
comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures
of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview.
Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial
transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in
repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a
largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute
child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically
fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child
rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural
artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the
previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh
portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.
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