Principe (psychology, Ursinus College) examines the consequences of raising children in today's unnatural environments and ways parents can realign childhood to a more natural state. She explains the science behind the way children's brains develop, how the biology of human evolution makes parts of contemporary life unfit for today's children, how evolutionary pressures have shaped the brain, how natural selection has designed children's brains to learn, and how childhood experiences wire the brain. She argues that childhood is what makes the human species unique and that speeding it up is a bad idea. Drawing evidence from psychology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, public health, and landscape architecture, she outlines seven recent changes in children's lives that are having negative effects on their development, such as technology, too much organization in their lives, staying inside, and lack of play, and the underlying cultural assumptions and how they have been driven by aspects of human thinking and media myths. There is no index. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)