誰にでも「幼少期」があるというのは普遍的事実です。しかし、21世紀に儒教文化圏の中国に誕生した子、植民地時代に奴隷を親に生を受けた子、産業革命期の英国で児童労働者となった子、それぞれの子ども時代が全く異なる経験であろうことは想像に難くありません。つまり「幼少期」の概念は、性別や社会的階級、宗教、民族、地域のほか、経済的事情等により大きな幅が生じるのです。子どもが文明社会の重要かつ時に不都合な真実を映し出す存在であることを踏まえ「幼少期」がどのような要素で形成されるのかを概括します。
　　

• A wide-ranging, global history of children and youth
• Investigates the differing experiences of young people across time and place
• Explores the evolution of a "global childhood" of shared assumptions, experiences, and values
• Describes how societies perceive the roles of young people in forming and preserving cultural values

 
While children are a relatively unchanging fact of life, childhood is a constantly shifting concept. Through the millennia, the age at which a child becomes a youth and a youth becomes an adult has varied by gender, class, religion, ethnicity, place, and economic need. As author James Marten explores in this Very Short Introduction, so too have the realities of childhood, each life shaped by factors such as education, expectation, and conflict (or lack thereof). Indeed, ancient Roman children lived very differently than those born of today's Generation Z. 

Experiences of childhood have been shaped in classrooms and on factory floors, in family homes and orphanages, and on battlefields and in front of television sets. In addressing this diversity, The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction takes a global, expansive view of the features of childhood that have shaped childhood throughout history and continue to shape it now. From the rules of Confucian childrearing in twelfth-century China to the struggles of children living as slaves in the Americas or as cotton mill workers in Industrial Age Britain, Marten takes his inspiration from the idea that the lives of children reveal important and sometimes uncomfortable truths about civilization.