We know that today's child is different from the child of earlier times. Although he is essentially always the same, he acquires new identities influenced by the social context in which he lives. Margaret Mead discovered in Samoa that a child's character is often defined by the environment in which he or she has grown up.

How are current social contexts affecting children's development ? Are today's children as happy as those of the past? Is childhood still the least problematic age?

Let's see what the way of life is like for many of today's children:

-They are not on the street, but in enclosed spaces, where they spend many hours in front of a screen;

-They fill their free time with extracurricular activities imposed by their parents, for fear that they will later fail in a very competitive society;

-They hardly play. Lack of time and the consumerism of the Internet prevent it. In the past, games were invented by the children themselves and were played live: "Dad, I'm playing tag races on place with my friends". Now, on the other hand, games are virtual: "Dad, I'm playing tag on Nintendo".

-The traditional idea of childhood as the age of innocence is disappearing, mainly due to the vast and uncontrolled information that reaches the child with his or her mobile or tablet connected to the internet.

These attitudes contrast with those of only 50 years ago, which originated in the 17th century. The child was no longer seen as a miniature adult, but as a differentiated person with an entity of his or her own. Subsequently, this conception of childhood was revalued with the arrival of modernity (18th-19th centuries), in which interest in the world of the child resurfaced. That childhood is the one evoked with nostalgia by Antonio Machado in his poem "Portrait" (1906).

"My childhood are memories of a courtyard in Seville,/ and a clear orchard where the lemon tree grew."

Many years later the poet evoked her again in his last verse, found by chance in a crumpled piece of paper in his pocket, after his death in exile in Colliure: (1939) "These blue days, and this sun of childhood".

Does childhood now also leave us with traces and memories that are source of happiness? I think not so much, but there are exceptions. The filmmaker Robert Redford, after retiring, made films only for children, moved by the nostalgia of lost childhood. He stated in an interview: "Childhood is a world of magic. I want to recapture that magic that is being obscured by technology by awakening the child in me".

That magical childhood is also being lost because it is no longer seen as "being-child," but as "not-yet-adult." Easy access to virtual images turns children into consumers and encourages them to value information obtained from the internet more than the guidelines and norms established in the family and school.

Today's children feel self-sufficient; they believe that they do not need adults' financial aid to get information, since with the computer they can get to know everything. This attitude is creating unprecedented behavioral problems for them. For example: attention deficit, hyperactivity, anxiety, social phobia.

Narodowski (1999) argues that media culture is provoking new child identities, such as, for example, that of the "hyperrealized childhood": children go through a vertiginous period of infancy at the hand of new technologies, acquiring an instrumental knowledge superior to that of many adults.

This pretended realization staff through activism is nothing more than an escape from childhood. It especially affects children between the ages of six and ten, traditionally considered "the age of the schoolboy," because at that time the child feels the desire to learn and willingly strives to achieve it.

Many children today spend several hours a day on the computer, not to learn and know, but simply to learn about curiosities and have fun.

New technologies enhance valuable skills applicable to learning, such as the search for information, but if misused they can curb some of the talents necessary for harmonious growth, including imagination. Add to this excessive extracurricular activities, and result results in overwhelmed and stressed children who watch the clock almost as often as the "executives" of business.

Hyperachieving children are not usually precocious. Their apparent superior maturity simply expresses an accelerated childhood that may end up distorted.

 A possible formula to get out of this status would be the following: less internet and use of mobile at early ages and more reflection, quiet reading and creative leisure. This implies moving from vertigo to ecstasy.