The paper is a comprehensive study of ancient childhood. The author relies on the works of ethnologists, sociologists, and paleodemographers. The latter discipline has accumulated new data that allow us to continue M. Mead’s and I. S. Kohn’s ideas about the social status of the child in primitive and traditional societies, about a different understanding of the conflict of generations than the one built by psychologists from realities of the “civilized world”. The major focus is on materials of the Bronze Age cultures from the Northern Black Sea region. The author offers a new economic and cultural definition of a toy.