"Challenges in the History of Childhood"

Peter Stern looks at the social history of everyday people, but he finds it perticularly challenging to study the history of childhood there are three main reasons for this difficulty they are:
1) accessing childrens voices
2) missing topics
3) learning from the past
Accessing Childrens voices is hard because everything made for children is made by adults, even when adults are thinking about their past it is still from your adult perspective. Also children are able to communicate but they are always communicating with adult so it would still be an adults interpretation of what that child is saying. Stern goes on to say that it is easier to hear the adolescent voice becuase they actually know how to communicate and they are older so they are at an age that they want their voice to be heard.
Missing Topics: Stern says that people can only imagine how life looks for children because you can only talk about your own perspective and look at your own perspective. He says that friendships and siblings are untouched in the history of childhood and the children that is does have history on is mainly from the working class and that the history favors a European background.

I find that it is important to study the history of children just because people learn from the past and it is easy for history to repeat itself and in many cases we have improved from history therefore we would not want history to repeat. Things like child labour are things that we would not want to repeat.