Introduction: Childhood in world history -- Childhood in agricultural societies : the first big changes -- Childhood in the classical civilizations -- Childhood in postclassical world history : the impact of religious change -- Contacts and contrasts in the postclassical world -- Forces of change and the modern model of childhood : developments in the West, eighteenth century to 1914 -- Alongside the modern model : the pressures of colonialism -- Japan adapts the new model : a process of change in Asia -- Childhood and communist revolutions -- Childhood in the affluent societies, twentieth and twenty-first centuries -- Children in the developing world -- The dislocations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries : children face war and violence -- Globalization and childhoods -- The dilemma of children's happiness -- Conclusion: Childhoods from past toward future.