A brilliant and insightful cultural history of how the design of toys, clothes, furnishings, and other physical surroundings at school and at home affect a child's development.

Parents obsess over their children's food, their kindergarten curriculum, and their sports prowess, but the kitchens, classrooms, playing fields and bus stops where kids eat, learn, run and chat are as important as the activities themselves. From early in children's lives, environment shapes them. When you give a child a wooden toy over a plastic one, you are making a choice that will affect the child's behavior, values, and health. Wonderland offers a guided tour through children's pint-sized landscape, from the building block to the sandbox.

Playgrounds must become battlegrounds against obesity, as well as spaces for families to enjoy together. Classrooms should be gadgets to produce knowledge, rather than boxes where children are warehoused. Cities must be made more welcoming for all ages. Otherwise, we end up with hyperactive kids and housebound parents, helicopter moms and children with no place safe to ride their bicycles. Before children focus on the page, the screen, or the keyboard, kids need to build, climb, and even skin their knees in a three-dimensional world.

As a design critic, she extracts meaning from the look and feel of objects and buildings, connecting aesthetic choices to social effects. Lange also uses case studies to show recurring patterns and new inventions in the history of parenting, play and education. Each chapter of Wonderland addresses children, design, and space, and shows how toys, playrooms, classrooms, playgrounds, even different modes of transportation can help children's capabilities grow.