The Design of Childhood - by Alexandra Lange (Paperback)

About the Book

From building blocks to city blocks, an eye-opening exploration of the ways children's playthings and surroundings affect their development-now featuring the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning essays.

Book Synopsis

From winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism

From building blocks to city blocks, an eye-opening exploration of the ways children's playthings and surroundings affect their development-now featuring the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning essays.

Parents obsess over their children's playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but their toys, classrooms, and playgrounds are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades-even centuries-of ideas about good child-rearing versus bad. What is the Good Toy? Is it wooden, plastic, or even digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can our built environment help children cultivate self-reliance? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle.

Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning design critic Alexandra Lange reveals the surprising histories behind the human-made elements of our children's pint-size landscape. Her fascinating investigation shows how the seemingly innocuous universe of stuff affects kids' behavior, values, and health. Along the way, she reveals how years of decisions by toymakers, architects, and urban planners have helped-and hindered-American kids' journeys toward independence. Seen through Lange's eyes, everything from the sandbox to the street becomes vibrant with meaning. The Design of Childhood will change the way you view your children's world-and your own.

Review Quotes

"Lange has a perceptive eye for how spaces are designed-and for whom . . . [The Design of Childhood] is essential." --The Los Angeles Times

"[Lange] might be the most influential design critic writing now. She brings her considerable powers, both as an observer of objects and spaces and as a writer of sentences, to The Design of Childhood." --The Los Angeles Review of Books

"[Lange] shows that the desire to foster children's creativity is not always served by the increased sophistication of playthings . . . [She] details the transformation of homes, schools, and cities to include space for play" --The New Yorker

"Her writing seamlessly connects architecture to broader social issues like parenting, neurodiversity, and accessibility, making it enjoyable to a wide audience outside of our often solipsistic discipline" --The Architect's Newspaper

"A captivating design history." --Nature

"Lange skillfully explores how the design of children's toys and built environments reflects evolving philosophies of child-rearing and development . . . Powerfully remind[s] readers of the importance of constructing spaces that make all people, including children, feel both welcomed and independent." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Alexandra Lange is a design critic and author. Her essays, reviews and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications including Architect, Bloomberg CityLab, Harvard Design Magazine, and Metropolis, as well as in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, was published by Bloomsbury US in 2022. Lange was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a 2025 Fellow at MacDowell. Also in 2025, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She lives in Brooklyn.