Growing up : childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the age of television / Neil Sutherland.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

By laying out the structure of children's lives and their childhood experiences in such settings as the home, the classroom, the church, and on streets and in the playground, the author describes how English-Canadian children grew up in 'modern' Canada.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Sutherland's Children in English-Canadian Society (CH, Oct'77) describes the history of state legislation concerning children's welfare. In this new book Sutherland, the premier practitioner of sociological study of children in Canadian society, uses mostly oral evidence from adults who were children sometime between 1910 and 1960 to reconstruct their experience of childhood. This is "thick description" in its richest possible manifestation, as it is reconstructed from interviews with more than 200 people, most of whom were from Vancouver, BC, working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. Some comparative data were gathered from people in Halifax and Toronto. Sutherland begins with a masterful methodological assessment and then skillfully weaves interpretive constructions from numerous quotations of interviewees. These portrayals of childhood experiences have the ring of familiarity to them as they reveal children's paid and unpaid work, schooling, being reared by surrogate parents, relationships within their families and with gendered authority, class, ethnic, and religious practices, and the ways in which they perceived the space of neighborhood and home. The concluding chapter conveys the sense that continuities of childhood over the period, despite changing physical environments, are more evident than discontinuities. An informative, fascinating, and very useful study. All levels. M. J. Moore; Appalachian State University