On a summer morning I watched the children playing and once in a while their actions made a picture and I took it. It had been going on like this for about a week and this day one of them finally looked up and said, “Daddy, how much longer are you going to make pictures of us before you go to work?”

That moment three years ago was the real beginning of this book. The idea I had thought about so long and circled about so warily and put aside so often now seemed a clear challenge. The pictures I was taking had a reason and a point: I had begun a photographic exploration of the world of childhood. 

A perceptive man once said that “to look at the world through the eyes of another would be true knowledge.” This is what I have attempted here. For three years I have tried to look with children rather than at them, and to see through their eyes-and in their forms and faces-the sense and meaning of the experiences that crowd each day when the world is young.  -The World is Young, 1958