The ?hurried child?: The myth of lost childhood in contemporary American society

Abstract

The hurried child writers argue that childhood has changed fundamentally for the worse in contemporary American society. The authors assert that today's youth are too “adultlike”: they behave like adults and are treated as adults by parents, schools, the workplace, the media, and society in general. While offering some perceptive insights, the thesis poses numerous methodological, substantive, and empirical problems. These include (1) a limited historical perspective on the changing nature of American childhood, (2) a failure to identify exactly who the hurried children are, and (3) the use of a deterministic model and negative bias in their work. Our analysis indicates no large-scale destruction of childhood and adolescence hypothesized by the hurried child writers. For the vast majority of contemporary American children, the “hurried child” is more myth than reality.