In this episode of The Children’s Table, we explore children’s hideouts. Why are we so obsessed with them? We think about how adults have romanticized the idea of kids’ hideouts in sources ranging from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the nineteenth century to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the twentieth to rental advertisements in t…

In this episode, we’re talking about sex education! This fraught topic reveals much more about adult anxiety than it does about what young people need to know about sexuality. We look at well over a century of cringe-y, weird, (sometimes) wonderful, and outright harmful sexual education curricula, from the 1890s to the 2020s, from hygiene books to …

Get your quarters ready! Dust off your Super Nintendo! Perfect your avatar’s hairstyle! In this episode, we’re continuing our exploration of secret and hidden childhoods by talking about video games. While video games have long been at the center of adult anxieties about childhood, they also invite young people into vibrant virtual spaces. In a con…

In this episode, we talk about how adults might think they are hiding alcohol—and their own relationship to alcohol—from children, but with decidedly mixed results. Special guest Dr. Elizabeth Marshall explains that in our adult anxiety to keep things hidden from children, we wind up actually making things more dangerous, not less. Elizabeth Marsha…

In this episode, we’re talking about children’s secret languages: linguistic spaces where young people not only protect their own private thoughts from adults but also create new categories of meanings that eventually shape the language we all use. From the secret languages twins speak solely to each other, to Pig Latin and internet slang, we celeb…

Welcome back to The Children’s Table! In this third season, we’re thinking about hidden childhoods, and this first episode asks us to think about how age itself is a murkier concept than we might first imagine. We interview Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard, who ask us to think about how Americans often impose a sort of “double age” on young pe…

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Brigitte Fielder, whose scholarship focuses on African American literature and culture of the nineteenth century – when real life offered plenty of terrifying material, particularly for Black children. Dr. Fielder shares her research on how children are held up as sites where racial histories are constructed, revisit…

In this episode, we will consider how children imagine themselves in relation to the invisible, the supernatural, and the spooky. Along the way, we’ll ask: how do children describe their encounters with fear, with terror, or with the supernatural? How do adults remember their childhood fears? What are some of the stories and legends young people sh…

We’re excited to welcome a guest to The Children’s Table! This episode features Dr. Cristina Rhodes, an Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University, PA, where she teaches courses on culturally diverse literatures of the United States, ethnic literature, and academic writing. Hear Dr. Rhodes talk about the diversity of El Día de Los Mu…

Pictures hold the promise of capturing a moment in time—a promise that is especially enticing when the subjects are children, who always seem (to parents at least) to be growing up too fast. Today we’ll consider how images of children were used not just to capture a happy memory of a childhood moment, but to capture the very spirit of children who …

This episode explores moments when adults become completely consumed by the specter (see what we did there?) of children in spiritual danger – and spiritual danger so severe that it threatens their physical well-being. Where do these fears come from? How do our ideas about children’s vulnerabilities feed those fears? How do adults act on their anxi…

Being a young person can be pretty frightening — things are uncertain, and adults can be untrustworthy. For children in the past, violence, and the fear it caused, was a part of everyday life. And then there were other, less mundane threats -- from the world beyond! It seems that kids have always enjoyed (or, well, not enjoyed) a particular connect…

This episode explores how often lesson plans devised for American children reflect adult biases about nation, race, and religion. Where did our current educational standards come from? What power do students have to shape what their schools teach them? Who decides what is written in the textbooks children read? We have some surprising answers. For …

We like to imagine schools as places where children are encouraged to explore their environment, to learn new things, and to expand their imaginations. But for many schoolchildren, both in the past and in the present, learning is a process distorted by fear of physical punishment. In this episode, we explore the history behind the belief that some …

If you’ve attended school in the U.S. in the past 50 years, physical education probably has an oversized influence on how you think about the school day—for better or for worse. As we are constantly reminded by popular culture, physical education has been a rite of passage for school children for generations. Today’s episode turns to Enlightenment …

We have talked about how we imagine children through the lessons we feel they need to learn. In this episode, we’re thinking about another part of the schooling process—how to get children to do the work we’ve decided it’s important for them to do, whatever it is! Systems for motivating children reveal what adults think children want. What children…

In this episode we discuss how often children's lives are lost to history, and then celebrate one particular child who defied the odds. James McCune Smith went on to become the first African American to earn an M.D., but before that he impressed his teachers, met the Marquis de Lafayette in New York City, and joined other African American students …

If you want to see what a culture hopes for, or is afraid of, look at their lesson plans. What we decide to teach--and what we decide to avoid teaching--tells us a lot about what a society believes in. In this episode, we ask: how do our ideas about children and childhood impact curriculum? How do changes in curriculum reflect changes in what adult…

Children are usually considered bystanders to history. The Children's Table podcast seeks to set the record straight. Three professors draw from their teaching and research to reveal the surprising roles young people have played in history, politics, and culture in the past and in the present. The Children's Table podcast premieres on September 15t…