The book you hold in front of you is not a collection of advice for parents, not a practical guide to raising children. This is a look at the phenomenon of childhood through the eyes of an anthropologist. Childhood is a stage of the life cycle between infancy and adolescence that only humans have. So where did it come from? And why is it needed from an evolutionary point of view - for growth, development, learning or something else? The author tries to answer these questions by exploring that fascinating boundary where biology meets culture, where parents and their children are pushed in one direction by their nature and in the other by culture. The author expresses the hope that, after reading this work, parents and everyone involved in raising children in one way or another will think about what they do, why they do it this way and not otherwise, and that perhaps there is other ways to help our children enter adulthood than those accepted in our Western culture.