Between a child who is always within arm's reach and a young person who is largely their own, there is a stretch of about eight years that gets markedly less attention than either. This section covers it. The edges are deliberately soft — it begins where the toddler years end and finishes where the teenage section takes over, and no birthday decides either.
The fact that organises everything here is that this is when a child starts being somewhere an adult is not. Walking to school, swimming, cycling on a road, a friend's house, a park, a phone, a changing room. That single shift changes the nature of almost every subject in the section: safety at this age is about judgement rather than latches, because a road, a river or a group of other children cannot be made safe in advance. The work moves from removing hazards to handing over the ability to read them.
It is also the quietest-looking part of childhood, which is why so little is written about it. Advice is dense for babies, dense again for teenagers, and thin in the middle, on the apparent grounds that nothing much is happening. What is actually happening is that the habits which turn out to be durable are being set — how much a child moves, how they eat, how they sleep, what a screen is for, how they handle losing, and above all whether they mention it when something has gone wrong. None of that announces itself, and all of it is easier to influence now than later.
The audience shifts across the span too. At five, the parent is doing the reading. By eleven, the child frequently is. So the later material here is written to be read by either, which is why puberty sits in this section rather than with the younger children: most of the questions about it are asked by the person it is happening to, and a page written over their head is no use to them.
Safety material for this age also sits under health and safety, which covers the whole span of childhood rather than one age band, and schooling has a section of its own under parenting.
One thing is worth stating once here rather than repeating throughout. The habit of telling someone is built in these years, out of very small incidents — a lost jumper, a fallen-out friendship, a bad mark, a broken window. What follows a child's account of those is what determines whether, at fifteen, they mention something that actually matters on the day it happens rather than three weeks later. It is the least dramatic work in this section and the most consequential.