The armored child

Not long ago, babies were only fitted with helmets if they were born with irregularly shaped heads. But in recent years, entrepreneurial manufacturers have expanded the market, creating helmets designed for any children whose parents want to protect them from scrapes and bruises while they’re learning how to stand upright and walk. These helmets have names like ThudGuard, SoftTop, and Baby No Bumps. Some even come with decorative Mickey Mouse ears.

The baby helmet is just one piece of the protective armor being built around childhood these days. There are soft pads to shield babies’ knees from irritation while they’re learning how to crawl. Specialty feeding spoons change color when the

food is too hot. GPS devices track babies’ movement in real time. The Safety Turtle antidrowning alarm alerts you when they get into the water.

As these products proliferate - perhaps you’d like to dress your baby in a full-body jumper with special pockets that make it impossible to drop him? - so does the sentiment that perhaps we’re going too far, and that parents have let their protective instincts get the best of them. In books, magazines, and parenting blogs, a divisive public debate has placed safety-conscious moms and dads on the defensive against a chorus of critics who believe America’s children are being crippled by paranoid overprotection.

At the center of this debate, as the authors of books like “Free Range Kids” and “Too Safe For Their Own Good” will tell you, is a worry that contemporary parenting trends are producing a generation of weaklings, kids so insulated from the world around them that they’ll never learn to navigate risk or handle pain. And though on the surface the debate concerns the future of childhood, it is also built on a belief about the past: that being a kid used to be radically different than it is today - more free, more rough-and-tumble, and on a deep level, better.

Over the past 20 years or so, historians specializing in childhood have forged a body of work that has begun to change how we see that past. The experience of childhood has, indeed, changed dramatically over time. And though