Growing Up in a Changing Society

Ronnie Carr, Paul Light, Martin Woodhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317858409
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The final reader in the Child Development in Social Context series shows how the study of child development is inevitably bound up in more ephemeral cultural ideas about the nature and needs of children and in the educational practices that rise from these ideas. Some readings point to the dangers which can arise from the meeting of science and cultural values, using for illustration studies of the role of psychological theory in reinforcing social attitudes to child care inside and outside the family. Other readings look at children's initiation into that relatively recent cultural invention, the school, and the relationship with their learning at home. There are studies of their social development in classroom and playground, with particular emphasis on ethnic relationships.

Part one

Concepts of childhood, concepts of parenthood

Introduction

The lesson of history and anthropology… [is]… that many varieties of development are possible, and that our notions of maturity, attachment, abilities, stages of development – even the notion of childhood itself – are very specific to our culture.

(Ingleby 1986: 301)

We consider ourselves a ‘child-centred’ society. Patterns of care, health provision, schooling and recreation are based on elaborate conceptions about the nature and needs of children at each stage from conception to maturity. Developmental psychology plays a major part in elaborating these conceptions through theory, systematic observation and controlled experimentation. It is this scientifically-informed concept of childhood that in large measure defines our expectations of parenthood, as well as the roles defined for those professionally assigned to promoting children's interests, notably their teachers. Unfortunately scientific descriptions all too readily become translated into cultural prescriptions, and theoretical conjectures into universal certainties. The first three chapters invite us to step back from this process and recognize various respects in which the concept of childhood, the tasks of parenthood and teaching, and even theories of child development may all be culturally located.

Levine and White (Chapter 1) offer a very broad historical/anthropological perspective on the way late-twentieth century concepts of childhood are associated with urbanization, industrialization, declining birth and infant mortality rates, the growth of mass schooling and the rise of public interest in children. Whereas in agrarian societies children are an important economic asset, and are rapidly initiated into specific valued skills and social relationships, childhood is a period of protracted immaturity in western societies; children are valued for their capacity to reciprocate love and affection and the emphasis of their rearing is on broad-based play and learning in preparation for an uncertain future.

The increasing attention paid to psychological aspects of development is closely linked to the rapid growth of child psychology this century, especially in North America. In Chapter 2 Kessen suggests that not only is it our conceptions of childhood that should be recognized as a cultural invention, but also this ephemeral status extends to the supposedly scientific discipline of psychology itself. Even if psychologists choose to practise their trade in a laboratory setting, with all the apparent clinical control of white-coated technicians, the subjects they study, the research questions they ask and the concepts they apply to interpreting their data are necessarily imported from the culture-drenched outside world.

Later in the chapter Kessen makes the radical claim that the influence of dominant cultural values even extends to that most basic of assumptions – that the proper unit of analysis for child psychology is the child: ‘Impulses are in the child; traits are in the child; thoughts are in the child; attachments are in the child’. To Kessen's list we might add that according to the culture of individualism, ‘needs’ are also believed to be within the child. The place of children's needs in psychology and social policy is the subject of a close study by Woodhead (Chapter 3). He argues that the device of identifying ‘children's needs’ has enabled professional, policy-makers and child care experts alike to make apparently objective statements about immutable laws of childhood, which in many cases represent little more than the projection on to children of a complex of cultural values and attitudes. The challenge in providing an adequate theory of childhood is to disentangle the scientific from the evaluative and the natural from the culture.

REFERENCE

Ingleby, D. (1986) ‘Development in social context’, in M. Richards and P. Light (eds) Children of Social Worlds, Cambridge: Polity Press.

1 Revolution in parenthood

Robert A. Levine and Merry I. White
Source: R. A. Levine and M. I. White (1986) Human Conditions: The Cultural Basis of Educational Development, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ch. 3.

During the past 200 years, the conditions of child development in much of the world have changed more drastically than they had in millennia – perhaps since the spread of agrarian conditions after 7000 BC. The history of this recent change can be traced numerically, with school enrollments rising and infant mortality rates falling; when countries industrialized, populations moved to the city and families reduced their fertility. It can be told as a moral tale, with the elimination of child labor and illiteracy, when parents and public policy-makers alike recognized the rights and expanded the opportunities of children. It can be, and often is, looked upon as a struggle for the welfare of children which is not yet won, particularly since many of the conditions abolished in the industrial countries, e.g. high infant mortality, illiteracy and child labor, still exist in the Third World.

However one regards this shift, it represents a fundamental change not only in the means by which children are raised but also in the reasons for which they are brought into the world and the goals which they pursue during their lives. It is a change we are only beginning to understand in terms of its history, its causes and its contemporary directions. This chapter provides an overview of its major elements, particularly in the West, and considers its implications for the comparative analysis of parenthood and child development.

The social changes we review have undermined the agrarian conceptions of the life span […] particularly the centrality of fertility and filial loyalty in the social identities of men and women. This shift has occurred in the industrial countries of the West, Eastern Europe and Japan. It has been occurring, and continues, in certain countries of the Third World, though not uniformly within those countries. That the shift deserves to be called ‘revolutionary’ can hardly be disputed; the question is whether it should be thought of as one revolution or many. Are all the socio-economic, demographic, educational and ideological changes involved but different aspects of one comprehensive process of social transformation (e.g. ‘modernization’) or separable processes that happen to be linked in particular historical cases? Are the sequences and outcomes of recent change – particularly in Japan and the Third World – replicating those of the past, particularly of nineteenth-century Europe and the United States?

This question, even in specific regard to family life, has concerned sociologists for a long time, but many of them chose to resolve it by positing a unitary process, driving history in a single direction – in advance of strong empirical evidence. In retrospect, theories of global modernization, like the classical Marxist stages of history, seem examples of what Hirschman (1979) has called ‘paradigms as a hindrance to understanding’: they prevented taking diversity seriously enough, until evidence of diversity overwhelmed the very theories that had denied their importance. Fortunately, social scientists have brought a wealth of new evidence to bear on questions of historical change in family life and the conditions of child development in social and cultural settings throughout the world. This evidence points to a history of the family changing in response to specific local conditions rather than moving in one preordained direction.

The abandonment of unilinear evolution as a conceptual framework for analyzing social change in family life does not mean the denial of recurrent trends that can be documented and are clearly significant. On the contrary, those broad trends must be the starting-point for our inquiry. We begin with a brief consideration of the radically diverse perspectives from which children are viewed in the contemporary world, both in the private contexts of family life and the public contexts of national and international policy. Then we ask: How did it come to be this way? How did human societies develop such differing perspectives on children? In our view, this amounts to asking how -given a world with primarily agrarian perspectives only two centuries ago – did some societies move so far from these perspectives? […]

THE MEANINGS OF CHILDREN: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

In contrast with agrarian values, the cultures of industrialized countries, particularly their middle-class subcultures, tend to value parent-child relationships which provide unilateral support – economic, emotional and social – from parents to their children, with parents not expected to receive anything tangible in return. The period of such support in Western societies has been lengthening, from childhood through adolescence into adulthood, and the proportion of family resources devoted to children increasing.

Table 1.1 Advantages of having children: per cent mentioning economic utility

	Urban middle
	class	Rural
Japan	2	11
Taiwan	3	36
Philippines	30	60

Source: Arnold et al 1975: Table 4.4

The current state of the evidence has been summarized by Hoffman and Manis (1979):

[The] economic value of children is particularly salient among rural parents and in countries where the economy is primarily rural. In addition, children are often seen as important for security in old age. Children are valued for this function, particularly where there is no official, trusted, and acceptable provision for the care of the aged and disabled.

In a highly industrialized country like the United States, however, with a government-sponsored social security system, children are less likely to have economic utility. Even their utility in rural areas might be lessened because of rural mechanization and the greater availability of hired help. And, since the cost of raising children is higher in the more urban and industrially advanced countries, children are not likely to be seen as an economic asset. (Hoffman and Manis 1979: 590)

When a national sample of Americans was asked about the advantages of having children, only 3.1 per cent of the white mothers with more than twelve years of schooling gave answers involving economic utility (Hoffman and Manis 1979: 585). The rest of that sub-sample mentioned a variety of social, emotional and moral benefits. The responses of East Asian mothers to this question help to place the American figure in a global context [Table 1.1].

In the industrial countries, Japan and Taiwan, the proportion of urban middle-class respondents mentioning the economic utility of children is virtually identical to the more educated white mothers in the United States, despite differences in culture. In the Philippines, a largely agrarian country, the proportion of the urban middle class perceiving economic benefits in children is ten times higher. Within each of the three Asian countries, with national policies of old-age assistance held constant, the rural proportion is at least twice as high as that of the urban middle class. While such figures from one limited question are only suggestive, they show the magnitude of the differences in attitudes and their powerful association with agrarian life both within and between contemporary countries.

The fact that the majority of middle-class parents in industrial countries expect no tangible return from children is paradoxical, not only from the perspective of utilitarian economics, which assumes that substantial investment must be motivated by the expectation of material return, but also from the viewpoint of agrarian cultures, in which reciprocity between the generations is a basic principle of social life. It does not seem paradoxical to most Westerners, who take it for granted that the parent-child relationship is exempted from ideas of material return and long-term reciprocation.

Indeed, the Western notion that the welfare of children should represent the highest priority for society as well as parents and that children should be unstintingly supported without calculation of reward – a revolutionary idea in world history – has established itself as an unchallengeable principle of international morality. The most fervent support for the idea, however, continues to come from northwestern Europe and the United States, where the public defense of children is an established cultural tradition, religious and secular, generating symbols used to arouse intense emotions, mobilize voluntary activity and subsidize programs of action.

What is most remarkable about this basically Western ideology that has been accepted in international forums as a universal moral code is that it entails a passionate concern with the welfare of other people's children. In other words, it presumes that the current well-being and future development of children are the concern and responsibility not only of their parents but also of a community – local, national and international – that is not based on kinship. Westerners are proud, for example, of the long and ultimately successful campaign against child labor waged by reformers in their own countries, but their ideology requires that such benefits be extended to all children everywhere. In some Western countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada, there is more concern with, and activity on behalf of, poor children in Third World societies than there is among the privileged segments of the latter societies. This gap in cultural values belies the apparent consensus embodied in UN declarations and points to the radical disagreement about practices such as child labor that would emerge if Western reformers tried harder to implement their ideals as global programs of action. How did the West acquire its contemporary cultural ideals concerning parent-child relationships and other people's children? That is the question to be explored in this chapter, in terms of four topics: (a) the shift from agrarian to urban-industrial institutions, (b) the demographic transition, (c) mass schooling, and (d) the rise of a public interest in children.

THE SHIFT FROM AGRARIAN TO URBAN-INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS

The industrialization of Europe and North America made its primary impact on the family through the rise of wage labor and bureaucratic employment as alternatives to agricultural and craft production, the consequent separation of the workplace from the home and of occupational from kin-based roles and relationships, the migration from rural villages to concentrated settlements where jobs were available, and the penetration of labor market values into parental decisions regarding the future of child...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Child Development in Social Context 3
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Part one Concepts of childhood, concepts of parenthood
• Part two Frameworks for child care
• Part three Expectations in early education
• Part four Pupil perspectives on classrooms and playgrounds
• Part five Gender, ‘race’ and the experience of schooling
• Name Index
• Subject index