A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

This week's cover stories on the joys and perils of childhood today are the children of Boston Correspondent Melissa Ludtke. A former kid herself (in Amherst, Mass., in the 1950s), she wondered what it was like to grow up in a world vastly different from the one she knew as a youngster. Ludtke located the five marvelous children whose lives form the centerpiece of the stories and spent a total of four months living with them. "My interest in children's issues began with a teenage-pregnancy story that I helped report in 1985," she relates. "The experience convinced me that for all the work of sociologists, psychiatrists and researchers, children are best able to articulate what makes them the way they are. But we know little about how such issues as working mothers, single-parent homes, drug abuse, sex and economic hardship affect youngsters."

With that in mind, Ludtke set for herself a remarkably sensitive task: to look at the world through the eyes of youngsters. Her idea was to find a few fairly typical children and live with them 24 hours a day -- go to school with them, watch television with them, eat and sleep in their homes. The first challenge was to find a selection of interesting children from various income, ethnic and geographical groups. Initial guidance in that quest came from Dr. Robert Coles, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his study Children of Crisis, and from Marian Wright Edelman, who heads the Washington-based Children's Defense Fund.

Ludtke grasped the magnitude of her commitment one winter morning in Prenter, W. Va. "There I was, sleeping in a room with the three Nelson children, sharing a bed with one of them, Nancy. At 5:30 Nancy got up and our day began. At the time, their father was a miner and their mother a homemaker. By my next visit, three months later, Mr. Nelson had been laid off from his job and was taking care of the kids, while Mrs. Nelson had entered the job force for the first time in her life."

Ludtke's months in the kingdom of the young convinced her of two things. First, children do not remain as they are for very long: some of her subjects have grown visibly since she lived with them (though the ages in the stories have not been changed). Second, something is missing in the lives of many children nowadays. "They are looking for someone -- parents, teachers, ministers -- to set limits and impose discipline," she says. "Without walls to bounce against, children seem lost."