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The Design of Childhood : How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids - Alexandra Lange

The Design of Childhood

How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids

By: Alexandra Lange

Paperback | 30 April 2023

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A brilliant and insightful cultural history of how the design of toys, clothes, furnishings, and other physical surroundings at school and at home affect a child's development.

Parents obsess over their children's food, their kindergarten curriculum, and their sports prowess, but the kitchens, classrooms, playing fields and bus stops where kids eat, learn, run and chat are as important as the activities themselves. From early in children's lives, environment shapes them. When you give a child a wooden toy over a plastic one, you are making a choice that will affect the child's behavior, values, and health. Wonderland offers a guided tour through children's pint-sized landscape, from the building block to the sandbox.

Playgrounds must become battlegrounds against obesity, as well as spaces for families to enjoy together. Classrooms should be gadgets to produce knowledge, rather than boxes where children are warehoused. Cities must be made more welcoming for all ages. Otherwise, we end up with hyperactive kids and housebound parents, helicopter moms and children with no place safe to ride their bicycles. Before children focus on the page, the screen, or the keyboard, kids need to build, climb, and even skin their knees in a three-dimensional world.

As a design critic, she extracts meaning from the look and feel of objects and buildings, connecting aesthetic choices to social effects. Lange also uses case studies to show recurring patterns and new inventions in the history of parenting, play and education. Each chapter of Wonderland addresses children, design, and space, and shows how toys, playrooms, classrooms, playgrounds, even different modes of transportation can help children's capabilities grow.

About the Author

Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic whose essays, reviews, and features have appeared in design journals, New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Curbed, Design Observer, Dezeen, and many other publications. She received a PhD in twentieth-century architecture history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is the author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, and co-author of Design Research: The Story that Brought Modern Living to American Homes. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Industry Reviews
"Lange, an architecture critic, shows that the desire to foster children's creativity is not always served by the increased sophistication of playthings . . . [She] details the transformation of homes, schools, and cities to include space for play"
New Yorker

"[A] captivating design history."
Nature

"Lange's work brings together topics that are generally covered in isolation. You'll find plenty of books on playground design, school design or toy design. It's much harder to find anything that weaves those strands together for a broader view of how design has contended with evolving ideas of childhood . . . In this regard, her book is essential."
LA Times

"Lange skillfully explores how the design of children's toys and built environments reflects evolving philosophies of child-rearing and development . . . Powerfully remind[s] readers of the importance of constructing spaces that make all people, including children, feel both welcomed and independent."
Publishers Weekly

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