The author lists historic examples as counters to envisioned idyllic childhoods (ex:kids working dangerous jobs). I think his examples run into a few issues. 1

The author lists historic examples as counters to envisioned idyllic childhoods (ex:kids working dangerous jobs). I think his examples run into a few issues. 1) His strongest examples of child death causes are highly local. ex: Labor caused deaths. The opportunities for kids to work new, dangerous jobs are local to that region. They're also local to many other regions but the driver is corporations that are headquartered in that region. Going back decade by decade, those corporate presences are less and less. ex: Health caused deaths. What we know of historical child death rates comes times/places when human population is the densest (when records are better). Groups outside of this metric include per-European indigenous people - people who's death rate skyrocketed when Europeans appear in their lives. To be fair, I can't find data on child deaths for per-discovered indigenous people. But absent two massive drivers of disease death, lower death rates seem like a thing that would be. 2) The authors comparisons are super limited. The structure of child development has taken many 10k years to socially evolve and it encompasses much of Earth's landmass. His arguments concentrate on the last two centuries of industrial nations. This minuscule sliver doesn't represent ~100% of when and how historical child development happened (commonly among paleolithic peoples). The author's piece isn't poorly written but I think it's value about explaining how things really sucked for kids in some places, 150 years ago. As far as ideal childhood environments go, we need to look outside of the areas he's considering. (one potential ex): https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/616928895/how-to-get-your-kids-to-do-chores-without-resenting-it https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288... ref: I spend a lot of time thinking about Euro/US lives from my birth back to 1800, because genealogy.