Speakeasy/WSJ - Are Video Games Killing Childhood?
Have video games changed the way children are entertained? Absolutely. Yet so did television and radio before them. Indeed, what we consider “childhood” has been a constant process of reinvention for many years. The romanticized childhood some perceive to be threatened is really an invention of the Post-World War II world when children were freed from working in the fields and summer vacation became a time of leisure. It is a reality “traditional childhood” dates back only 70 years—less than a blink in human history. And don’t get me started on childhood as it was in Dickens’s world.