A few years back, one of my daughters introduced me to “Charlie Bit My Finger,” a home movie of two British brothers that at the time was YouTube’s most watched video. We watched it over and over, laughing hysterically at the climactic moment when the older brother’s grin turns to agony as he yells “Ow! Chowlie!” For a time in…
Kathleen McDonnell
Kathleen McDonnell has been writing for and about young people for more than two decades. She is the author of more than a dozen plays and five novels, including the well-regarded fantasy trilogy The Notherland Journeys and Emily Included, a true story about a disabled girl who fought for the right to be educated in a regular classroom. Her non-fiction includes Honey, We Lost the Kids: Re-thinking Childhood in the Multimedia Age, published by Second Story Press (revised edition, 2005).
Articles by
Kathleen McDonnell
Toxic Legacy
The chemical environment we are bequeathing to our children looks downright alarming October 2011
Since the early 1980s, there has been a steady stream of books decrying the state of childhood in the modern world. Psychologist David Elkind kicked things off with the publication of his enormously influential The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon in 1981, followed a couple of years later by Marie Winn’s Children Without Childhood and The Disappearance of Childhood by the esteemed social critic Neil…