Picturing childhood : the myth of the child in popular imagery / Patricia Holland.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface: Twenty-first-century childhood and the routine spectacular -- Introduction: Pictures of children: images of childhood -- 1. There's no such thing as a baby ... or is there? -- 2. Superbrats in the charmed circle of home -- 3. Ignorant pupils and harmonious nature -- 4. The fantasy of liberation and the demand for rights -- 5. No future: the threat of childhood and the impossibility of youth -- 6. Crybabies and damaged children -- 7. Gender, sexuality and a fantasy for girls -- Postscript: Escape from childhood.

"Patricia Holland looks anew at debates and mythologies about children and childhood that have circulated from the 1970s to the present. She reveals that, with disputes over children's rights in the 1970s, child sexual abuse in the 1980s, disruptive children in the 1990s, and precocity consumerism and violence against children in the 2000s, the rotational image of childhood innocence survives only as a form of kitsch." "She considers popular imagery in relation to news education, welfare, charity and consumer culture and discusses the implications that all this has for the ways in which adults treat children, for children's place in our society and indeed for a better understanding of the nature of childhood itself."--BOOK JACKET.

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