During the second half of the twentieth century, why did it become increasingly uncommon to encounter British children playing in the streets? Why did British parents, teachers, social workers, and urban planners come to view children as fundamentally fragile and in need of protective enclosure within the family home? In his recent book, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement, Mathew Thomson examines the segregation of British children from the outside world between 1945 and the end of the 1970s. Unlike other historical work on post–World War II childhood (including studies tracing the prominent cultural impact of John Bowlby's attachment theory), Thomson foregrounds the spatial manifestations of the contemporary preoccupation with children's complex developmental needs and perceived emotional and psychological vulnerability. He brings new attention to the important ways in which emerging concern for children's psychological health and emotional welfare prompted the creation of a wide array of specially designed child-oriented spaces. From the virtual space of the children's television program to the outdoor space of the adventure playground, children's worlds increasingly became subject to careful planning and management.

Lost Freedom is a welcome addition to a growing body of work exploring how wartime and postwar innovations in British psychiatry and psychology supported a massive transformation in the meaning and experience of childhood. Recent historical studies have shown that psychological developments were central to both a widespread postwar cultural idealization of the mother-child relationship as an emotional panacea, as well as a popular condemnation of institutions—including nurseries, hospitals, and sanatoria—as psychologically stunting (see Michal Shapira's The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Post-War Britain and Margo Vicedo's The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America, both published in 2013). Thomson turns our attention to related, yet previously overlooked, areas of contentious postwar debate surrounding child health and safety, including reactions to violence on television, anxieties about the growing volume of automobile traffic, widespread panic over the sexual abuse of children, heated discussions of the vandalism of young people, and the creation of new political movements for children's rights. While Thomson identifies profound ambivalence at the heart of efforts to balance children's perceived needs for freedom and protection, he concludes that a host of imagined threats to the safety and well-being of children always ended up dominating public opinion and social policy.

Tracking the origins of this deep transformation in “the landscape of the child” to the traumatic experience of total war, Lost Freedom begins by examining the rising preoccupation with the “deprived” child during and immediately after World War II (fueled by studies of evacuated children and Bowlby's work on “maternal deprivation”). Thomson argues that the anxieties of British adults following the horrors of the so-called Good War—and their own loss of innocence—were largely projected onto children, who were seen as emotionally fragile, defenseless, and in need of protection. The book's central chapters move away from the direct orbit of psychological experts and focus on how popular concern for children's vulnerability was cultivated by a host of other key groups, including television producers, teachers, social workers, and town planners. All shared a common preoccupation with the impact of the environment—in all of its social and technological complexity—on the hearts and minds of Britain's youngest citizens. Thomson thus not only importantly uncovers the pervasiveness of psychosocial thinking in the decades after World War II but also provides a new view into how the postwar obsession with children's subjectivity very often expressed itself in the production of new spaces for children to live, learn, and play. The final two chapters reveal a revised commitment to “landscape thinking” in the late 1960s and 1970s, one that was much more focused on understanding the child's unique point of view and subjective experience of his or her environment. While radical movements for children's rights and educational reform took issue with British children's sheltered, home-centered lives, Thomson reveals that many of their criticisms were overridden by new panic in the mid-1970s sparked by the pedophile rights movement and fears of child sexual abuse.

Although a recurring concern for child protection features prominently in Thomson's account, it is weighed against a consideration of children's complex relationship to freedom. He points out that alongside children's decreasing access to the world beyond home, children's perceived emotional requirements changed the organization of the family home and approaches to child rearing, institutions like the school and the hospital, as well as planned public spaces like parks and playgrounds. Moreover, children's developmental needs became the focus of a host of new political demands, new commodities, new forms of play, and new modes of entertainment, all seeking to provide children with a managed (and thus safe) freedom. It is ironic that during those decades that children lost free access to the outside world, freedom itself was repeatedly spotlighted as an essential component of healthy development.

Lost Freedom sheds new light on decades that have lacked solid footing in modern British historiography. In bringing the cultural preoccupation with the figure of the child to the center of historical inquiry, Thomson helps us better understand the peculiarities of post-1945 modernity. In the mid-twentieth century, the figure of the child came to function as a highly emotive symbol of a better (less war-prone and more politically stable) future. Thomson reveals that its force in the social imaginary stemmed from new beliefs about the malleability of the self and the transformative influence of the environment that were predicated on an elimination of clear distinctions between public and private, individual and community, and personality and political ideology. Thomson's Lost Freedom will thus appeal not only to scholars working in the histories of children and childhood, but also to those more broadly interested in the history of the welfare state, the politics of psychology, changing meanings of emotion and family life, and the history of modern efforts to secure healthy human development.