Imagination and Multimodality: Reading, Picturebooks, and Anxieties About Childhood

In September 2006, 110 British psychologists, children’s authors, educationalists, scientists, and doctors wrote to a national newspaper insisting on the need for an urgent debate on child rearing in the twenty-fi rst century. The letter raised alarms about corrosive infl uences on childhood: about children’s freedom to play, their use of time, and the authenticity of their experiences of adults and of the world about them.