ABSTRACT
The history of childhood is sometimes seen as being shaped, in a fundamental way, by the change of communication media. Neil Postman, for example, has argued that the rise of childhood was closely related to the emergence of print media because print created a separate world for adults that children could only access through a long process of learning. From the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, the distinction of a special sphere of childhood was established for ever larger parts of Western societies: “The period between 1850 and 1950 represents the high-watermark of childhood.” Since then, that special sphere has begun to disappear because electronic media make it impossible to keep the world of adults hidden from children. 1
