Children don’t speak, think, or behave like adults. In a parallel fashion, the French don’t speak, think or behave like the English; the English don’t speak, think or behave like North Americans; and so on. This course takes this parallel seriously, exploring the lives of children, the life-spaces they inhabit, and commonly held ideas about children and parenting from a cultural perspective. We will treat childhood both as a cultural construction and as a distinctly constructed culture. We will pose a number of questions, including: How do children acquire knowledge of the cultures they live in and the knowledge needed to participate in these cultures? How important are parents in shaping the development of their children? What implications do different notions of childhood have for the developmental pathways of children? Special emphasis is given to representations of children and childhood in American culture.