Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia and author of “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children” writes in the NYT about how new technologies, corporate greed, and the pharmaceutical industry are threatening childhood.  Moral panic about childhood has a familiar face, and ever since Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and his planned War on Children, we are right to be suspicious of those who crusade against new media and technologies “for the sake of the children.”  What worries me most is the double standard in effect: we are tethered to our electronic devices, constantly texting and talking, yet we become upset when children mimic our behavior.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/opinion/corporate-interests-threaten-childrens-welfare.html?_r=1

There is reason to believe that childhood itself is now in crisis.

Throughout history, societies have struggled with how to deal with children and childhood. In the United States and elsewhere, a broad-based “child saving” movement emerged in the late 19th century to combat widespread child abuse in mines, mills and factories. By the early 20th century, the “century of the child,” as a prescient book published in 1909 called it, was in full throttle. Most modern states embraced the general idea that government had a duty to protect the health, education and welfare of children. Child labor was outlawed, as were the sale and marketing of tobacco, alcohol and pornography to children. Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children.

By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform.