The children’s gate is an entrance to Central Park that leads to the playground. Gopnik explores that entrance in metaphor and experience as he recounts his family's return from Paris to New York——a seemingly secure, almost oddly child-friendly New York—in the fall of 2000. Gopnik describes not a city but an extended urban family, and a home charmed by the civilization of childhood. It's a charm that is simultaneously protect from, challenged by, and even shaped around the event that is soon to follow.