This excellent book investigates the fact that during the twentieth century in the United States there was (and still is) a powerful belief that there is a natural and benevolent fit between science and children: both were associated with “innocence, naturalness, purity, and timelessness” (4) and therefore science was a proper fit for childish curiosity and eagerness to learn. The author's aim, she writes, is to “ask how larger changes – in industrialization, in understandings of human nature, the professionalization of the sciences, and in America's position in the world – brought about an interesting shift in the ideologies surrounding children's science play” (5). At the same time, she takes due note of the gender expectations which saturated the relationship. While there were some limited attempts to include girls in this activity, boys were usually assumed to be more “naturally” attuned to both science and technology.

The larger changes of which she writes are investigated in five chapters, each focussed (in chronological order) on a significant institution or activity. Her first site of interaction between children and science is the Brooklyn Children's Museum which, during the early decades of the twentieth century, encouraged children to learn about, collect, and experiment with natural history. Her second focus is on what she calls “Science in the Basement,” the child's home laboratory and collection of commercially available science and technology “sets” such as Chemcraft and Erector (and, in Britain, Meccano). Her third is the organized effort to define, discover, encourage and honor scientific talent in the young. Each year during and after World War II the Westinghouse Science Talent Search sought out boys (and some girls) who were thought to show promise of developing into professional scientists. Whereas before the war it was assumed that all children were capable of and naturally inclined to scientific activities, in the context of wartime and postwar anxieties such promise seemed scarce and precious.

Chapter 5 is titled “Space Cadets and Rocket Boys: Policing the Masculinity of Scientific Enthusiasm,” and considers the popular culture, including such examples as science fiction stories and children's television serials, of the Space Age. In particular, the author Robert Heinlein is employed to illustrate the cultural worry over “juvenile delinquents” and “momism” which were assumed to be undermining the nation's need for bold thinkers and manly warriors. Finally, Onion investigates San Francisco's Exploratorium, opened in 1969. It was, she concludes, a reassertion of the belief that science was innocent and fun, not connected to war, corporate domination and environmental devastation, but only to that natural innocence which had always been seen as the essence of childhood. It is telling that outside as well as inside the United States, science museums are considered good places for parents to take their children.

In a Conclusion, Onion returns to the cultural trope that “kids are little scientists” (165); that is, full of curiosity about the world around them and willing to experiment. The worry that too few of these “little” scientists grow up to become “big” scientists manifests itself in our own time in the belief that not enough students enter the STEM fields in secondary and tertiary educational institutions. Blame can be widely shared: old-fashioned gender expectations, of course; poor teachers; too few role models; and so on. And “quite often,” Onion writes, “the assignment of blame carries within it a significant dose of nostalgia” (166). Recollections, most often by men, of boyhoods spent free of programmed activities and even parental (or any adult) close oversight, with the accompanying freedom to experiment and test their own interests and limits, assumes a past childhood in which children could develop those traits they would need in a scientific career. As she also notes, however, such romantic notions ignore the hard work and disciplined training which real scientific careers demand. Her book is an important example of how childhood studies can illuminate the cultural narratives which dominate current debates of important issues.