ABSTRACT
Childhood experienced major changes in the advanced industrial societies during the twentieth century. Two patterns predominated, and of course they interacted. First, societies in the United States, Japan and Western Europe continued more fully to implement what we have described as the characteristics of modern childhood. That is, they added commitments to schooling and further reduced at least the more traditional forms of child labor; they completed the dramatic reduction of child death rates that had begun in the late nineteenth century; and, with a few zigzags, they made a fuller conversion to low birth rates (Japan, in fact, joined this particular parade mainly after World War II, with government encouragement, at first relying heavily on abortion before turning to other forms of birth control). There were real changes involved in the fuller implementation, even though the principles had been established earlier.
