Childhood, thus, is a creation of society that is subject to change when-
ever major social transformations take place. The zenith of the tradi-
tional childhood lasted from about 1850 to 1950. Protected from the
dangers of the adult world, children during this period were removed
from factories and placed into schools. As the prototype of the modern
family developed in the late nineteenth century, proper parental behav-
ior toward children coalesced around notions of tenderness and adult
accountability for children's welfare. By 1900 many believed that child-
hood was a birthright--a perspective that eventuated in a biological, not
a cultural definition of childhood. Emerging during this era of the pro-
tected child, modern child psychology was inadvertently constructed by
the tacit assumptions of the period. The great child psychologists from
Erik Erikson to Arnold Gesell to Jean Piaget viewed child development as
shaped by biological forces.

Piaget's brilliance was constrained by his nonhistorical, socially de-
contextualized scientific approach. Whatever he observed as the genetic
expression of child behavior in the early twentieth century he general-
ized to all cultures and historical eras--an error that holds serious con-
sequences for those concerned with children. Considering biological
stages of child development fixed and unchangeable, teachers, psychol-
ogists, parents, welfare workers, and the community at large view and
judge children along a taxonomy of development that is fictional. Those
children who don't "measure up" will be relegated to the land of low and
self-fulfilling expectations. Those children who "make the grade" will
find that their racial and economic privilege will be confused with ability
( Polakow, 1992; Postman, 1994). Kinderculture joins the emerging body
of literature that questions the biological assumptions of "classical"
child psychology.

Living in an historical period of great change and social upheaval,
critical observers are just beginning to notice changing social and cul-
tural conditions in relation to this view of childhood. Categories of child
development appropriated from modernist psychology may hold little
relevance for raising and educating contemporary children. As child-
hood began to change in the 1950s, 80 percent of all children lived in
homes in which the two biological parents were married to one another
( Lipsky and Abrams, 1994). No one has to be told that families have
changed during the last fifty years. Volumes could be written specifying
the scope of the social transformation. Before the 1980s ended, children
who lived with their two biological parents had fallen to merely 12 per-
cent. Children of divorced parents--a group made up of more than half
of the U.S. adult population--are almost three times as likely as children

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