Written to accompany an 8-part Channel Four series, this book taps living memory to provide a social history of childhood during the 20th-century. It will evoke childhood memories of pleasure and pain, and reveal how, more than any other, this century has been the century of childhood. The authors chronicle the extraordinary change in the way we treat children from the "seen and not heard" days of the Edwardian era to the post-Spock liberalism of the 1960s and beyond. By drawing on many moving reminiscences the book gives a child's eye view of the experience of childhood. We hear, through first-hand interviews, tales of what it was like to grow up in the exclusive boarding school, the city slum and even in the orphange. All three authors now form an independent television company, Domino Films.