The Children's Table Podcast

In this episode of The Children’s Table, we explore children’s hideouts. Why are we so obsessed with them? We think about how adults have romanticized the idea of kids’ hideouts in sources ranging from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the nineteenth century to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the twentieth to rental advertisements in the twenty-first. We then

In this episode, we’re talking about sex education! This fraught topic reveals much more about adult anxiety than it does about what young people need to know about sexuality. We look at well over a century of cringe-y, weird, (sometimes) wonderful, and outright harmful sexual education curricula, from the 1890s to the 2020s, from hygiene books to picture books to Don’t Say Ga

Get your quarters ready! Dust off your Super Nintendo! Perfect your avatar’s hairstyle! In this episode, we’re continuing our exploration of secret and hidden childhoods by talking about video games. While video games have long been at the center of adult anxieties about childhood, they also invite young people into vibrant virtual spaces. In a conversation with Professors Derr

In this episode, we talk about how adults might think they are hiding alcohol—and their own relationship to alcohol—from children, but with decidedly mixed results. Special guest Dr. Elizabeth Marshall explains that in our adult anxiety to keep things hidden from children, we wind up actually making things more dangerous, not less. Elizabeth Marshall is an associate professor

In this episode, we’re talking about children’s secret languages: linguistic spaces where young people not only protect their own private thoughts from adults but also create new categories of meanings that eventually shape the language we all use. From the secret languages twins speak solely to each other, to Pig Latin and internet slang, we celebrate the innovative (if clande

Welcome back to The Children’s Table! In this third season, we’re thinking about hidden childhoods, and this first episode asks us to think about how age itself is a murkier concept than we might first imagine. We interview Dr. Holly White and Dr. Julia Gossard, who ask us to think about how Americans often impose a sort of “double age” on young people that assigns differen

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Brigitte Fielder, whose scholarship focuses on African American literature and culture of the nineteenth century – when real life offered plenty of terrifying material, particularly for Black children. Dr. Fielder shares her research on how children are held up as sites where racial histories are constructed, revisited, and reimagined, from Harriet

In this episode, we will consider how children imagine themselves in relation to the invisible, the supernatural, and the spooky. Along the way, we’ll ask: how do children describe their encounters with fear, with terror, or with the supernatural? How do adults remember their childhood fears? What are some of the stories and legends young people share when it comes to the otherwo

We’re excited to welcome a guest to The Children’s Table! This episode features Dr. Cristina Rhodes, an Assistant Professor of English at Shippensburg University, PA, where she teaches courses on culturally diverse literatures of the United States, ethnic literature, and academic writing. Hear Dr. Rhodes talk about the diversity of El Día de Los Muertos (and how kids’ media

Pictures hold the promise of capturing a moment in time—a promise that is especially enticing when the subjects are children, who always seem (to parents at least) to be growing up too fast. Today we’ll consider how images of children were used not just to capture a happy memory of a childhood moment, but to capture the very spirit of children who are no longer here to make any