What are the issues faced in childhood and adolescence?
The letters and diary entries provide a powerful means of comparing an eighteenth-century childhood with that experienced by students of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. John Quincy Adams was not an average “kid.” He was exceptionally intelligent, and his family, although not wealthy, provided him with many unusual, and some unique, opportunities. As the oldest son, he took on many adult responsibilities when his father was away from home working for independence in Philadelphia. During most months between 1774 and 1777, he was chief assistant to his mother, Abigail, as she ran the family farm and cared for his younger brothers. Most of JQA’s writing postdates his father’s return from the two Continental Congresses, when the boy accompanied John Adams on his diplomatic voyages to Europe, but it is important to note that JQA spent important, formative periods without his father. Despite their distant temporal setting, the letters and diary entries collected in “One Pre
