University of Mississippi

 

 

 

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CHAPTER IV: Digital Natives 

A look at 222 years of children’s magazine development and publication in the United 

States—from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution—reveals that the only constant 

is change. Supremely adaptable magazines for children meet the challenges of the day—whether 

that day is in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twenty-first century.  

“Magazines keep up with the times. Magazines adapt to a changing world; they match 

what today’s kids need.”

1

 

Status and Role 

Magazines are an important part of the written record of American civilization and an 

invaluable resource about the tastes, manners, habits, interests, and achievements of any period 

of United States history. The social historian has no richer source. “Our present will some day be 

the quaint past at which possible survivors of future wars can be amused or aghast, but which 

they cannot neglect, in the pages of our magazines,” Wood wrote.

2

 

Through the centuries the role of children’s magazines has progressed from providing 

“dreary moralizers” for little adults to providing cheery “edutainment” for cosseted children. The 

earliest periodicals were an outgrowth of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the shift 

away from the medieval conception of children as miniature adults who needed to have the devil 

beaten out of them.

3

  

 

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