The girl in the photograph, Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro, reads from the Torah as part of her bat mitzvah, a rite of passage ceremony, at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York City. Prior to this day, she attended classes in Jewish history and tradition, Hebrew, and recitation at the Reform synagogue, where girls now participate in a rite formerly reserved for boys, the bar mitzvah. Following the service, the family and guests, including several girls who were adopted by American families from the same orphanage in China, celebrated at an elaborate party.

At age 12 or 13, a Jewish girl becomes a "bat mitzvah" which literally means "daughter of the commandment." Bat mitzvah marks the time when a Jewish child is old enough to perform the mitzvot (commandments) and is considered an adult in the religious community. Neither the bar mitzvah for boys, nor the bat mitzvah for girls are formal religious ceremonies. The bat mitzvah observance is not carried out in Orthodox and Chasidic synagogues where women are not allowed to lead prayers.

Learning about Jewish history, customs, and holidays is a way that modern Jewish communities seek to transmit tradition and law to a new generation. The spirit of the bat mitzvah also includes choosing service to the community, representing engagement with the larger world beyond the family and living according to the values of their faith.

A piñata is a decorated container of paper or clay that contains sweets, small toys, fruits, and nuts. It is the object of a game played in Mexico at children's birthday parties and at Christmas celebrations, in which blindfolded children take turns trying to break the piñata with a stick to release the treats.

Yet the piñata has a long history. Piñatas are typically made of paper-mâché, and are attributed to China where paper originated. Marco Polo is believed to have seen Chinese paper figures of bulls and other animals covered with colored paper and filled with seeds. When struck with a stick, the seeds spilled out. As part of the ritual, the paper creation was then burned and its ashes gathered for good luck. Polo likely brought the idea to Italy, where by the 14th century it was associated with celebration of Lent, and acquired the Italian name pignatta or "fragile pot." This custom spread to Spain in subsequent centuries, but involved a clay pot called la olla, derived from a colloquial Arabic word for a terracotta water jug. Paper decorations and ribbons were wrapped around the pot to make it festive.

Missionaries brought the custom to New Spain, where it encountered a similar tradition. To honor the Aztec god of war, a decorated, filled pot was broken in the temple at the feet of the god's statue. Catholic missionaries employed the colorful piñata custom to teach Christian religion. A traditional Mexican shape for piñatas is a spherical shape with seven conical points symbolizing the seven deadly sins—greed, gluttony, sloth, pride, envy, wrath, and lust. Inside the piñata, however, were tempting sweets and treats, representing the pleasures of life. The person wielding the stick of virtue represents faith, which can defeat evil, and the treats represented the hope of reward.

This symbolic piñata became traditional at Christmas, and is shown here. Today, piñatas come in the shape of animals, cars, and cartoon characters. Making piñatas for children's parties is a major industry, especially since the custom continued to spread around the world.

Visual images provide valuable material for the exploration of childhood, youth and history. Propaganda posters from the People’s Republic of China (1949-present) are particularly rich, offering images that are both bold and subtle, and which many students find as nicely accessible sources to explore. The posters offer a sense of the ways in which a Chinese state and the individual artists it employed sought to use the image of the child to gain a broader public investment in political movements and to define new visions of the revolutionary cause, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Exploration of the imagery of children in these posters provides useful sources through which to explore the ways in which images of children would come to signify broader social and political meanings and to potentially inspire both youths and adults in their own definitions of self-identity.

This image appeared following the arrival of a Chinese reform agenda and the end of the Maoist campaigns. Entitled, "Studying for the mother country, 1986," it presents a girl at the center of an image that invokes many of the official "four modernizations" (specifically, industry, technology, agriculture, and defense) that were proclaimed by a new leader, Deng Xiaoping, as the primary goals for building a strong Chinese nation. Students may explore the ways in which the busy detail of this image represents themes of industrialization, urbanization, national progress (as symbolized by a space program, among other projects), as well as the combined imagery of the flag, the doves around it, and, importantly, the tools that the girl herself thoughtfully wields.

Visual images provide valuable material for the exploration of childhood, youth and history. Propaganda posters from the People’s Republic of China (1949-present) are particularly rich, offering images that are both bold and subtle, and which many students find as nicely accessible sources to explore. The posters offer a sense of the ways in which a Chinese state and the individual artists it employed sought to use the image of the child to gain a broader public investment in political movements and to define new visions of the revolutionary cause, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Exploration of the imagery of children in these posters provides useful sources through which to explore the ways in which images of children would come to signify broader social and political meanings and to potentially inspire both youths and adults in their own definitions of self-identity.

In “Protect the great results of the Cultural Revolution, 1974,” a cohort of determined youth in red armbands replace adults and offer their own voices to a new definition of the revolutionary cause through the posters and slogans they paint. Gender is a theme of particular value here, both in comparison with "The happy life Chairman Mao gave us, 1954" image and "Studying for the mother country, 1986". In this poster, we find a determined teenage girl leading the way rather than serving the table.

Visual images provide valuable material for the exploration of childhood, youth and history. Propaganda posters from the People's Republic of China (1949-present) are particularly rich, offering images that are both bold and subtle, and which many students find as nicely accessible sources to explore. The posters offer a sense of the ways in which a Chinese state and the individual artists it employed sought to use the image of the child to gain a broader public investment in political movements and to define new visions of the revolutionary cause, particularly during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Exploration of the imagery of children in these posters provides useful sources through which to explore the ways in which images of children would come to signify broader social and political meanings and to potentially inspire both youths and adults in their own definitions of self-identity.

This image, "The happy life Chairman Mao gave us, 1954," offers a domestic scene which appears surprisingly familiar to many students in its presentation of a happy family meal. Students have commented upon the ways in which children seem to symbolize the peace and material prosperity of China after the revolution of 1949. And yet, the prominence of the image of Mao himself is also noted – indeed, one student has insightfully observed that Mao himself appears to be joining the family at its very own dinner table.

These photographs come from The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946 website, a collection of photographs that provide a perspective on childhood in a period that bridges the conclusion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the rise of a new 20th-century republic in China. Morrison, a native of Germany, spent time as a resident of Beijing where she built a rich collection of photographs of daily life during the 1930s and early 1940s. Among many topics, Morrison was particularly interested in street scenes and composed photos of shops, commerce, street-side entertainments, and the daily life of local residents. Included among these are a good number of images of children. These three images focus on the street-side sale of toys, sold by adults to children and also sold by children as seen in the third image. An exploration of these images raises intriguing issues regarding some of the material objects that made up a child's daily life (or part of a special occasion) as well as the social roles attached to their production, sale, and consumption. Indeed, it would seem – unlike the patterns of toy consumption enjoyed by children in a later day – that these roles overlapped greatly.

These photographs come from The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946 website, a collection of photographs that provide a perspective on childhood in a period that bridges the conclusion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the rise of a new 20th-century republic in China. Morrison, a native of Germany, spent time as a resident of Beijing where she built a rich collection of photographs of daily life during the 1930s and early 1940s. Among many topics, Morrison was particularly interested in street scenes and composed photos of shops, commerce, street-side entertainments, and the daily life of local residents. Included among these are a good number of images of children. These three images focus on the street-side sale of toys and on the children who admired and sometimes purchased the various objects. An exploration of these images raises intriguing issues regarding some of the material objects that made up a child's daily life (or part of a special occasion) as well as the social roles attached to their production, sale, and consumption. Indeed, it would seem – unlike the patterns of toy consumption enjoyed by children in a later day – that these roles overlapped greatly.

The Yin Yu Tang house provides a perspective on childhood in a period that bridges the conclusion of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the rise of a new 20th-century republic in China. The house was built for a merchant family named Huang at the turn of the 19th century and, with the consent of later generations of the Huang family, would be painstakingly deconstructed, moved, and rebuilt to open in 2003 as a permanent exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.

The museum offers a virtual tour of the house that serves as a useful tool for exploring the lived space and material culture of a family setting, as experienced by adults and also, as detail of the exhibit reveals, by children. Students may explore this virtual exhibit as if they are setting foot in the house themselves, gaining their own perspective on the domestic space that certain children experienced as well as the household objects that were dedicated to a child’s management and education.

Isaac Taylor Headland (1859-1942), a resident of Beijing and a scholar at Peking (Beijing) University, joined other contemporaries interested in both popular culture and folklore in collecting and transcribing Chinese children's rhymes. The rhymes were shared by nurse-maids who cared for the children of expatriates living in the city as well as through interviews of kids who sang in the streets and neighborhoods of the city and surrounding region. The text, which includes both English and Chinese versions of the rhymes as well as photographs, offers an interesting perspective on popular culture, social roles related to gender and family, as well as the material culture of daily life in turn-of-the-century China.