Volume 21, Number 18 · November 14, 1974
The Massacre of the Innocents
By Lawrence Stone
The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology (Metabletica) John Holt)
by J.H. van den Berg, translated by H.F. Croes
Dell (new edition scheduled for Spring, 1975, with an introduction by
Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life
by Philippe Ariès, translated by Robert Baldick
Vintage Books, 447 pp., $3.25 (paper)
Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early Modern France
by David Hunt
Basic Books, 229 pp., $6.95
The History of Childhood
edited by Lloyd deMause
Psychohistory Press, 450 pp., $12.50
In the year 1974 one does not have to be a historian to sense that things are getting worse. Indeed, for the first time it is possible to see the face of Doomsday peering out just around the next corner, whether it takes the form of World Government by Universal Torture, or The Bomb, or Demographic Explosion, or just Running Out of Everything. But now comes Mr. deMause with some good news at last. With all the fervor and conviction of a nineteenth-century believer in the March of Progress, he tells us that in one aspect of human life, which he is confident is the key to all others, things have been getting better and better for the last two thousand years: this is the way we treat our children. He demonstrates this in Table 3—a graph of childhood felicity in which the curve turns upward after 1300, sharply upward after 1700, and is now rising almost vertically under the influence of books like A. S. Neill's The Free Child and R. D. Laing's The Politics of the Family.
Review, 6920 words
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