The Children's Table Podcast

In this episode of The Children’s Table, we explore children’s hideouts. Why are we so obsessed with them? We think about how adults have romanticized the idea of kids’ hideouts in sources ranging from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the nineteenth century to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the twentieth to rental advertisements in the twenty-first. We then look to historical sources to think through how and why children have sought out hiding spaces — including an interview with some very thoughtful young people about the role of privacy in their lives. Head to thechildrenstablepodcast.com for images and further reading.

In this episode, we’re talking about sex education! This fraught topic reveals much more about adult anxiety than it does about what young people need to know about sexuality. We look at well over a century of cringe-y, weird, (sometimes) wonderful, and outright harmful sexual education curricula, from the 1890s to the 2020s, from hygiene books to picture books to Don’t Say Gay Bills that want to take books away, and we ask: why are we still getting so much wrong—and what’s going right? For a reading list and associated images, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

Get your quarters ready! Dust off your Super Nintendo! Perfect your avatar’s hairstyle! In this episode, we’re continuing our exploration of secret and hidden childhoods by talking about video games. While video games have long been at the center of adult anxieties about childhood, they also invite young people into vibrant virtual spaces. In a conversation with Professors Derritt Mason and Angel Matos we ask how these digital worlds might invite children, teens (and even adults!) to imagine new environments — or re-imagine the world around them? Together we consider how video games make new stories and new modes of storytelling available to young people. Derritt Mason, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Educational Leader in Residence at the University of Calgary, teaches and researches at the intersection of children’s and young adult literature, media and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality. They are the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture and co-editor with Kenneth Kidd of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality, which won the Children's Literature Association Edited Book Award in 2021. Angel Matos, an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, is an expert in youth literatures, queer studies, and screen cultures, with interests in queer young adult literature and culture, teen cinema, video games, Latinx cultures, and theorizations of time and space. His work primarily explores the queer possibilities and limitations in texts and media created for teen audiences. He is the coeditor, with Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula Massood, of the book Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures. For a reading list and associated images, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/ Correction: This conversation mistakenly describes the protagonist of the game Spiritfarer as nonbinary. However, the character, a young woman named Stella, does not identify as nonbinary, We regret the error.

In this episode, we talk about how adults might think they are hiding alcohol—and their own relationship to alcohol—from children, but with decidedly mixed results. Special guest Dr. Elizabeth Marshall explains that in our adult anxiety to keep things hidden from children, we wind up actually making things more dangerous, not less. Elizabeth Marshall is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses on children’s literature and popular culture. Marshall is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (Routledge, 2018) and co-author with Leigh Gilmore of Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing (Fordham, 2019). Her interdisciplinary research on childhood has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections. For related readings and images, please visit thechildrenstablepodcast.com

In this episode, we’re talking about children’s secret languages: linguistic spaces where young people not only protect their own private thoughts from adults but also create new categories of meanings that eventually shape the language we all use. From the secret languages twins speak solely to each other, to Pig Latin and internet slang, we celebrate the innovative (if clandestine) ways young people have devised to express themselves. For a reading list and images related to this episode, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

Welcome back to The Children’s Table! In this third season, we’re thinking about hidden childhoods, and this first episode asks us to think about how age itself is a murkier concept than we might first imagine. We interview Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard, who ask us to think about how Americans often impose a sort of “double age” on young people that assigns different meanings to someone’s chronological age depending on their race, class, and gender. After the interview, we think aloud about how we have bent the definitions of childhood for poor children from 19th century London streets to twenty-first century California farms. To learn more about the concept of double age, be sure to check out the special issue of JHCY edited by Dr. White and Dr. Gossard, out the fall of 2022. For a reading list and images related to today’s podcast, please visit Dr. Julia M. Gossard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Associate Professor of History, and Distinguished Associate Professor of Honors Education at Utah State University. A specialist in eighteenth-century childhood and youth, her book, Young Subjects: Children, State-Building, and Social Reform in the 18th-century French World, was published in 2021 with McGill-Queen’s University Press. She currently is working on three additional book projects, including an edited collection, forthcoming from Routledge, titled Encountering Childhood in Vast Early America. That collection is co-edited by our second guest: Dr. Holly N. S. White. Dr. Holly White is a historian of the social and legal history of childhood, youth, and age in the early republic. She works at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture as the Assistant Editor of Digital Projects and OI Publications. Her first book, Protecting the Innocents: Legal and Cultural Debates About Age and Ability in the Early United States, is forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press.

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Brigitte Fielder, whose scholarship focuses on African American literature and culture of the nineteenth century – when real life offered plenty of terrifying material, particularly for Black children. Dr. Fielder shares her research on how children are held up as sites where racial histories are constructed, revisited, and reimagined, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Misha Green’s HBO series Lovecraft Country, from minstrel shows to picture books to school curricula. Dr. Fielder is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and the co-editor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (U of Wisconsin P, 2019). Her work has been published in journals such as American Quarterly, Legacy, J19, and American Literary History, and in various edited collections. She is currently working on a book about racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for humanization and racialization. Follow Dr. Fielder on Twitter @BrigField. For images and readings related to our conversation, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/.

In this episode, we will consider how children imagine themselves in relation to the invisible, the supernatural, and the spooky. Along the way, we’ll ask: how do children describe their encounters with fear, with terror, or with the supernatural? How do adults remember their childhood fears? What are some of the stories and legends young people share when it comes to the otherworldly? And what are toilet ghosts? For a reading list and related images, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/.

We’re excited to welcome a guest to The Children’s Table! This episode features Dr. Cristina Rhodes, an Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University, PA, where she teaches courses on culturally diverse literatures of the United States, ethnic literature, and academic writing. Hear Dr. Rhodes talk about the diversity of El Día de Los Muertos (and how kids’ media gets it wrong, and gets it right), the relationship between futurity for Latinx youth and bodily transformation, the compelling story of 17-year-old Latinx activist Carmelita Torres, and the irrepressible spirit of current young Latina activists – and get some reading recommendations along the way. Follow Dr. Rhodes on Twitter @_crisRhodes, and find her research on the open-access sources Research on Diversity in Youth Literature and Latinxs in Kid Lit. See the reading list for more of Dr. Rhodes’s scholarship and links to some of the titles she mentions. For related images and further reading suggestions, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

Pictures hold the promise of capturing a moment in time—a promise that is especially enticing when the subjects are children, who always seem (to parents at least) to be growing up too fast. Today we’ll consider how images of children were used not just to capture a happy memory of a childhood moment, but to capture the very spirit of children who are no longer here to make any new memories. We'll move from the 1800s to the 1970s, from photo albums to fairy tales to nightmares, to think about the particular power of the photographed child. For related images and a reading list, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

This episode explores moments when adults become completely consumed by the specter (see what we did there?) of children in spiritual danger – and spiritual danger so severe that it threatens their physical well-being. Where do these fears come from? How do our ideas about children’s vulnerabilities feed those fears? How do adults act on their anxieties, and how do kids respond? We consider a range of texts across time that exemplify adults’ fears about children’s potential contact with the darker side of the supernatural – from Henry James’s unsettlingly knowing child protagonist Flora in Turn of the Screw to the images of endangered children circulated by conspiracy-driven organizations such as QAnon – but our conversation centers around a watershed cultural moment when adults' fears about children’s safety reached a fever pitch: the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. For related materials and a reading list, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/.

Being a young person can be pretty frightening — things are uncertain, and adults can be untrustworthy. For children in the past, violence, and the fear it caused, was a part of everyday life. And then there were other, less mundane threats -- from the world beyond! It seems that kids have always enjoyed (or, well, not enjoyed) a particular connection with the supernatural, the otherworldly, the creepy, and the weird. In this season, we will explore those connections. Be prepared for scary stories of what happens when adults demonize children. Our first episode looks at moments in history when children were imagined as having one foot in both the natural and supernatural worlds. Sometimes children saw themselves as powerful ambassadors to the spirit realm — a realm, it seems important to point out, where there were forces even more powerful than the adults that otherwise ruled their lives. At other points, children were seen as the victims of supernatural forces, often working in tandem with evil adults. These narratives often resulted in adults telling themselves that they were empowered, indeed required, to take on the role of heroic avenger on behalf of beleaguered children. Come for the medieval children who could prophesy the future through crystals, stay for the nineteenth-century spiritualist children who claimed to talk to the dead! For related materials and a reading list, please visit https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

This episode explores how often lesson plans devised for American children reflect adult biases about nation, race, and religion. Where did our current educational standards come from? What power do students have to shape what their schools teach them? Who decides what is written in the textbooks children read? We have some surprising answers. For related materials and a reading list, please visit thechildrenstablepodcast.com

We like to imagine schools as places where children are encouraged to explore their environment, to learn new things, and to expand their imaginations. But for many schoolchildren, both in the past and in the present, learning is a process distorted by fear of physical punishment. In this episode, we explore the history behind the belief that some children require fear and pain in order to learn. Unfortunately, that belief is still with us, particularly when it comes to disciplinary measures deployed against children of color. We end the episode with a brief exploration of how some schools are seeking to offer alternatives to a disciplinary regime that has become so extreme critics refer to it as the school-to-prison pipeline. For related materials and a reading list, please visit thechildrenstablepodcast.com.

If you’ve attended school in the U.S. in the past 50 years, physical education probably has an oversized influence on how you think about the school day—for better or for worse. As we are constantly reminded by popular culture, physical education has been a rite of passage for school children for generations. Today’s episode turns to Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau to explore how eighteenth-century thinking about children’s bodies still resonates with how we think children should learn. We then explore other iterations of physical education, including the contortions of handwriting class and the heady dangers of adventure playgrounds. To find related materials and a reading list please visit our website: https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

If you want to see what a culture hopes for, or is afraid of, look at their lesson plans. What we decide to teach--and what we decide to avoid teaching--tells us a lot about what a society believes in. In this episode, we ask: how do our ideas about children and childhood impact curriculum? How do changes in curriculum reflect changes in what adults believe children are, what children want, and what children need to learn? In response to these questions, we explore the bizarre lessons embedded in nineteenth-century temperance curriculum, which was dedicated to teaching children what not to want (hint: alcohol!). We also examine the philosophy of German educator Friedrich Fröbel, who was dedicated to placing children’s wants at the center of the school day. Finally, we consider the ongoing struggle over how much say young people have in the content of the lessons that they are asked to absorb. For related materials and a reading list, please visit thechildrenstablepodcast.com

We have talked about how we imagine children through the lessons we feel they need to learn. In this episode, we’re thinking about another part of the schooling process—how to get children to do the work we’ve decided it’s important for them to do, whatever it is! Systems for motivating children reveal what adults think children want. What children do within those systems sometimes tells us something quite different. . . For a related materials and a reading list, please go to https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/

In this episode we discuss how often children's lives are lost to history, and then celebrate one particular child who defied the odds. James McCune Smith went on to become the first African American to earn an M.D., but before that he impressed his teachers, met the Marquis de Lafayette in New York City, and joined other African American students for advocating for change—all nearly forty years before the Emancipation Proclamation. For related materials, including a reading list, please visit childrenstablepodcast.com.

Children are usually considered bystanders to history. The Children's Table podcast seeks to set the record straight. Three professors draw from their teaching and research to reveal the surprising roles young people have played in history, politics, and culture in the past and in the present. The Children's Table podcast premieres on September 15th! https://thechildrenstablepodcast.com/