Childhood is the period of life when a person is a child, from birth until the teenage years. It is often remembered as a time of learning, play, and development.
“Childhood” combines “child” with the suffix “-hood,” which means a state or condition. The word has been used in English for centuries to describe the life stage before adulthood.
The “-hood” in childhood is the same one in neighborhood and brotherhood—it means a state of being. So childhood is literally “the state of being a child,” not just a time on the calendar. Many cultures see it not as a countdown, but as its own full, valid way of being human.
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