Childhood

If you want to get a handle on the status of children in today's society, you might start by considering this: Of the hundred or so people still barricaded inside the armed Texas compound ruled by cult leader David Koresh, 17 are said to be children.And each of these children, said Koresh, has expressed a desire to die along with him.It is a claim that boggles the mind.Question: Is there anyone out there who really believes that children, cult members or not, are capable of making such a decision?

"The Liars' Club," by Mary Karr. 320 pages. New York: Viking. $22.95Describing her experiences at about the age of the heroine's bratty little sister in the TV series "My So-Called Life," Mary Karr, in her memoir "The Liars' Club," recounts a childhood too harrowing for prime time. Raped twice before she is 9, she is also menaced by her mother, who makes Mary and her slightly older sister Lecia the targets of her desperate self-destructiveness and at one point hallucinates having murdered them.

Poverty, evictions and other troubles forced Jaime Jezovnik's family to bounce from neighborhood to neighborhood across Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. She attended 10 elementary schools in five years, leaving her unable to remember the names of friends or teachers and incapable of viewing school as anything but a sanctuary from a volatile childhood. Prompted by the instability of her girlhood, Jezovnik studied sociology and dreamed of a career as a public defender for young people. But a college job took her instead to a classroom at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School for juvenile offenders.

I hate this guy Marcel Pagnol.What a wonderful childhood he had! Who couldn't turn out great and end up in the snooty-tooty French Academy with a childhood like that? But what about the rest of us, with our normal, crummy childhoods? It isn't fair.The second installment in Pagnol's wondrous youth has just reached the Charles, following on the heels of the first. "My Mother's Castle" follows on "My Father's Glory" so exactly, in fact, that it begins on the same day where the first one ended.

FOR progressives, a favorite metaphor for history is that of a train roaring down a railroad track. Time marches on, never looping back, and coming to an end when all is fair and equal. In recent years, the cause of children's rights has been adapted to this model of history. Every legal right awarded to children is seen as moving society down a new track. Every effort to ''empower'' children to preserve their right to ''choose'' is seen as forward progress.Old World waysBut on the time line of history, this reform effort is having the opposite effect.

BOSTON -- Now that we have repealed welfare, I have a modest proposal. Let's go all the way and rescind childhood.Childhood has become far too burdensome for the American public to bear. It isn't good for the country. It isn't even good for children who are captured in an unwholesome and prolonged state of dependency.The whole idea of childhood, it should be remembered, is nothing but an anachronistic leftover from the original liberals. Before the so-called Enlightenment, before Rousseau, before the left-wing conspiracy of 18th-century do-gooders, the young were dressed, worked and looked upon as short adults.

WashingtonHere we are at the family room.There's a turquoise vinyl couch, fake wood paneled walls, a large black-and-white television set, a hula hoop in the corner, an Easy-Bake oven on the coffee table, "The Game of Life -- A Family Game" spread out on the floor.But the scene, although part of a new exhibit at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, is too familiar to be history.For baby-boomed America, this is our life. This was our childhood. And these are our memories.Captain Kangaroo and civil defense drills.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The tiny, drawn face lighted up, remembering last Christmas -- the Christmas before his childhood ended."My daddy bought me a green bicycle with a bell. Can you take me back to find it and my daddy, too? I am going back, aren't I?"Zoran Lekic, 7, then burst into tears, knowing there would be no going back. His mother and sister are dead -- raped and killed while he watched. His father has disappeared.Now he lives at a refugee transit center where the staff is so overworked that it lacks time to help him deal with the trauma that keeps him awake most nights.

THE HUMAN WHO was Christopher Robin died this month, but the real Christopher Robin will live forever in the Hundred-Acre Wood, playing with and consoling Winnie the Pooh and his other animal friends, as long as there are children to sit on a parent's knee and listen in wonder.The wide-eyed, mop-haired son of British author A. A. Milne inspired the beloved tales about Pooh and Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger and their young companion 70 years ago. They remain enduring children's classics, revitalized for later generations by films of Walt Disney.

Noah Adams, host of National Public Radio's news program "All Things Considered," coaxes a tender melody from a black Kawai baby grand. It is "Traumerei," Robert Schumann's heartfelt reminiscence of childhood.Mr. Adams can make himself cry playing "Traumerei." He thinks about mad Schumann, alone and dying in a 19th-century asylum. The piece rescued Mr. Adams' first year of piano. He was 52 then, frustrated by computer teaching programs and learn-by-ear methods."Up until I found 'Traumerei,' I really didn't want to practice," he says.