NEW ORLEANS —A little boy with a plastic dinosaur toddles over to his teacher at Clara's Little Lambs Preschool Academy, in the Algiers neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi. “Oooooh!

The history of childhood "is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awake," writes Lloyd deMause in The History of Childhood. "The farther back in history one goes, the lower the level ...

What is your earliest memory? By the time children are two years old, they are able to answer questions about recent events, although they often need careful prompting to retrieve memories. Over the ...