The Cute and the Cool

The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, theproclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world oftreats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentleand affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desireto rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to thiscommercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberatelymanufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubledambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vib