The way we view children in this country has evolved over a period of a hundred and fifty years . My grandfather had to quit school and go to work when he was ten years old. He had to help support his family. Today, child-labor laws don’t allow this. Hiring a child is illegal for the most part, and education is mandatory.

Mandatory education is a good thing, we probably all agree.

Except….

When you make education mandatory, children are apt to no longer see it is a privilege. Instead they might think of it as an intrusion on their time. They’d rather be playing video games. (Or are my children different from other kids?)

So it’s not just society’s view toward children that has changed over the last hundred years. Children’s view of society, and their place in it, has changed. We hear about an entitlement mentality and I can see some of this in the teens I know. Many of them seem to see themselves as people who should be served, rather than as members of the family who need to work hard and contribute to the welfare of the family.

We don’t see boys and girls delivering newspapers and babysitting very much anymore. Our children are busy with homework or organized sports. Or with video games, and texting.

And even for older children…it seems that work is being delayed longer and longer I hear more these days about parents putting their children through college or about student loans than I hear of children working night jobs to put themselves through college.

Now, I don’t mean to bemoan the loss of the good old days. There is much about those days that wasn’t good. I’ve read the horrific stories of the children forced to work in the cotton mills or the coal mines. I know that children are vulnerable members of society and they need advocates to speak for them.

And I don’t mean to tell you that I’m a good mother and my children have learned to work hard and I have done things right. That simply isn’t true. There is a huge gap between what I believe and what I do, and my children are paying the price for my lame parenting practices.

But what I’d like to ask you is this: Have we, as a society, overcorrected when it comes to child labor? Have we overreacted to the horrors of children working as slaves in the mills and the mines and gone from viewing our children as people who need to help support the family, who need to sacrifice for their brothers and sisters, to viewing them as people we must serve and coddle until they are well into their thirties?

And a couple of bonus questions: How does society’s view of children affect the way we write for children today and how does it affect reader choices? Are thirty-year-olds reading YA books because they still feel like children?

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