The aim of this book is to offer a more satisfactory analysis of the meaning of childrenâs agency than those that exist in the current literature. Unlike existing books and journal articles, this book will take a critical psychological approach, while referencing and critiquing a wide range of other disciplinary sources. The psychological approach we adopt is strongly influenced by modern developmental theory and is thus relational and systemic. In this way, we will argue, it is highly compatible with, although different from, the recent relational turn evident in childhood studies and other branches of the social sciences.
The definition of agency
It might be useful at this point to note the dictionary definition of agency. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, agency is: âThe faculty of an agent or of actingâ. Other meanings given refer to someone or something given the power to act, e.g. an estate agent or a travel agency. Agent comes from the Latin agere, to act or to do. However, when agency is used to refer to a mode of human activity, the word typically means more than simply âactingâ or âdoingâ. It often implies activity that is intentional or under the control of the doer. Thus Raeff defines agency as âaspects of action that a person controls or regulates him/her selfâ (2017, p. 477) and Sokol and colleagues describe agency as âa personâs autonomous control over his or her actionsâ (2015, p. 284). But, as we will see, the definition of (human) agency is contested and the concept or construct is used very differently by different writers and within different disciplines.
A new interest in agency
From an academic perspective agency is a topic of discussion in many disciplines including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, psychology and developmental science. Agency has been comparatively neglected by psychologists for reasons we will expand on later. Suffice it to say that most psychologists subscribe to a positivist worldview and avoid ascribing human actions and behaviours to causes that cannot be observed or measured, particularly non-material causes such as agency. There are exceptions to this general statement and we will discuss them in Chapter 3. Writing in 2011, Chirkov claimed that âin recent years modern psychology has been experiencing an increase in interest in the topics of human autonomy, self-determination, free-will and agencyâ (2011, p. 609), and, as psychologists, we happily belong to this movement.
Agency and the linked concept of free will have always been issues for debate in philosophy and this continues to be the case. In recent years philosophical debates have often been influenced by findings from biological and human sciences, such as the new research into evolution and genetics (e.g. Dennett, 2003). Since the 1980s the discoveries emerging from neuroscience have prompted discussions within the sciences and in philosophy about the extent to which free will (and agency) is or is not an illusion (Crick, 1994; Wegner, 2002; Tallis, 2016).
Childrenâs agency
In the past, studies of agency rarely mentioned children. Children were often seen as incomplete adults and thus incomplete agents, since common connotations of agency were the capacity to reason and form oneâs own judgements and the ability to act with autonomy. On the grounds of their assumed limited capacity to reason or to act autonomously, children were not seen as a relevant focus for discussions around agency. However, in the 1990s with the advent of the new sociology of childhood and, separately, with a shift in theoretical emphasis in developmental psychology, childrenâs agency has become a topic of interest in academia. Childrenâs agency is a now central topic in theories focused on children and childhood and is also a key concept in current research, policy and professional engagement with children. In this book we will use the term âchildrenâ to encompass the years 0â18, as employed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), while recognising that there are important distinctions to be made within this wide sweep of ages, such as âbabiesâ, âinfantsâ, âpre-schoolersâ. When it comes to older children, terms like âadolescentsâ, âteenagersâ, âyoung peopleâ or âyouthâ are often used. We note that the categories âchildâ and âyouthâ overlap as far as the UN is concerned, with âyouthâ covering the years 14â24.
It is an explicit tenet of the ânewâ sociology of childhood that children should be positioned as agents and social actors rather than as the passive recipients of âsocialisationâ to be shaped and moulded by others (James and Prout, 1990, 1997). Agency is also a central concept for the field of child rights studies (Quennerstedt, 2013) and is frequently employed and deployed by advocates for childrenâs rights and childrenâs participation (Reynaert, Bouverne-de-Bie & Vandevelde, 2009; Percy-Smith & Thomas, 2010).
The disciplinary area that started as âthe new sociology of childhoodâ and expanded into childhood studies can be credited with putting the topic of child agency onto the academic map. In establishing the case for a new paradigm for understanding children and childhood, scholars like James and Prout (1990) and Qvortrup, Bardy, Sgritta and Wintersberger (1994) contrasted their approach with that of traditional sociology and psychology, both of which positioned children as passive vessels, waiting to be shaped into adequate members of society. While both disciplines were criticised for their lack of interest in children in their own right, developmental psychology came in for particular attack, mainly because it was more influential and had infiltrated important areas of practice such as education, child welfare and parenting. In relation to child agency specifically, psychologists had little to say for most of the last century, for reasons we shall elaborate later. They did utilise cognate concepts, such as mastery and self-regulation, that are relevant to a full understanding of agency but the idea of children as agents was antithetical to the ontological view of âthe childâ at that time (Hogan, 2005). But this has changed in recent years, as developmental psychology itself has changed. Agency is now a respectable topic for child psychology and developmental science (Kuczynski, 2003; Overton, 2015; Sokol, Hammond, Kuebli & Sweetman, 2015).
Problematising child agency
Mason and Bessell (2017) are among those who are enthusiastic about the achievements of the scholarship on agency to date, stating:
However, in recent years scholars have been expressing disquiet with the state of the field of childhood studies and its failure to properly interrogate key terms, such as agency. For example, Mizen and Ofusu-Kusi (2013) see childrenâs agency as âa much used but largely unexamined conceptâ (p. 363). Alanen (2018) exemplifies this perspective in the following statement:
In 2019 she went further and commented that when adherents of childhood studies express concern about the field being stuck, âthe most emphatically announced problem case seen to impede the overcoming of this âstucknessâ is the notion of (childrenâs) âagencyââ (p. 136).
Unresolved issues
As we have noted, what the word agency means remains a matter of debate. But when the concept was first employed by childhood researchers in the 1990s, this lack of clarity was rarely mentioned. Researchers, armed with the revolutionary idea that children are agents, simply searched for examples of children being active social actors or âagentsâ. Since the early 1990s many articles have been published that report empirical work aiming to give examples of child agency. Much of this work suffers from a failure to address the meanings of agency or from a simplistic notion of agency as a property of the child which needs only to be encouraged or revealed. These studies often demonstrate conceptual muddiness and a resulting confusion in how the term agency is used.
Thus, for a significant number of scholars, agency has become a contested and problematic term in child research (e.g. Esser, Baader, Betz & Hungerland, 2016; Spyrou, 2018). It should be noted that this concern about the meaning of agency and its use is not universal. A chapter on agency in the influential Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies published in 2009 does not present agency as a problematic term (James, 2009) and many journal articles and books have been published since that date that do not question the use of the concept. It has been argued by those calling for a review of the concept that when the idea of child agency was first introduced, it was presented in a way that was out of step with the contemporary post-modern theoretical context. Lee (2001), Prout (2005) and Oswell (2013) argue that, despite the popularity of post-modern and post-structuralist theories in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the kind of agency promoted in the early years of childhood studies belonged to a âmodernâ epistemology. Spyrou agrees that the early conceptualisation of agency was already dated in the 1990s and argues for a âpost-humanâ reframing of agency (2018). He identifies a âhumanistâ flavour to the childhood studies approach to agency. Spyrou, Rosen and Cook (2019) see the current conceptualisation of the child as agent as âstanding in the way of reaching for alternative ways of knowingâ (p. 4) They say that childhood scholarship has been âcomplicit in valorising childrenâs agency to the point of a fetishâ (p. 3) and that the ontological view of the child that results is one that is theoretically misconceived. We agree with their view that the concept of agency needs a theoretical overhaul but come to some different conclusions about how this should be done, as we will elucidate later. The 1990s formulation of child agency could also be classed as âromanticâ in its valorisation of the individual voice, the autonomous self and the idea of agency as intrinsic to each person. These are also issues to which we will return in later chapters.
In response to this situation, in recent years a number of childhood studies and sociology scholars have offered a critical analysis of the concept of agency as seen in childhood studies (Tisdall & Punch, 2012) and several have offered a new theoretical framework, focused in the main on relationality, which we will discuss in more depth later (Oswell, 2013; Esser et al., 2016; Alanen, 2018; Spyrou, 2018).
Why this book? Confronting unproductive tensions between disciplines
Despite the existence of justified and cogent critiques of the ânew paradigmâsâ approach to agency, many of which we would endorse, the reality is that most of these critiques and reformulations have come from a strongly sociological perspective. The authors of this book are both developmental psychologists, albeit with a strong social bent and a critical orientation towards much of traditional mainstream developmental psychology. Our position is that psychology has much to offer our understanding of child agency and we consider that we can set out a convincing case to back up that position. In doing so we lean on and refer to the work of our colleagues from childhood studies and sociology, who may or may not agree with what we have to say. We refer also to the recent upsurge in interest in agency on the part of developmental scholars and the empirical and theoretical work in psychology, not always referring to child agency as such, that can be brought to bear on a new approach to thinking about agency and children.
We regret that there seems to be a continuing lack of awareness among child psychologists and developmental scientists of the work of scholars from the sociology of childhood and childhood studies. Childhood studies has brought the concept of agency to the forefront of its theorising as well as its empirical research. The discipline has engaged actively with ontological questions about the attributes of the child and how children are positioned as members of the category childhood. Childhood studies scholars have explored how childrenâs positioning in society alters their experience, their power and their rights. Such topics are largely absent from psychology and developmental science. Childrenâs contexts are considered by most developmental psychologists, especially those with a socio-cultural orientation such as Rogoff (2003) and Valsiner (2000), although it is not that long since they were not (see, for example, Kessenâs classic critique of child psychology from 1979 arguing that the American child should be seen as a cultural invention).
Our goal is to provide a stronger theoretical base for research and policy in relation to childhood agency. We consider that this cannot be done unless the psychological perspective is brought into conversation with current work in the social sciences. There have been signs of a level of rapprochement between childhood studies and developmental psychology. Statements supporting engagement with psychology in general and developmental psychology in particular can be found in the childhood studies literature (e.g. Prout, 2005). But such statements exist alongside an unfortunate continuing demonising of developmental psychology. For example, a 2018 book edited by OâDell, Brownlow and Bertilsdottir-Rosqvist entitled Different Childhoods has as its central focus a critique of the discipline of developmental psychology, which they see as a normalising enterprise that actively excludes and stigmatises the children who deviate from its rigid norms. They say: âInvoking ânaturalâ or biological explanations of development serves to construct âappropriateâ and âinappropriateâ developmental activities and, hence, normative and transgressive developmentsâ (p. 3). On the other hand, it has to be said that, for the most part, developmental psychologists neglect the social sciences and what they can contribute to the understanding of children. Although the comparatively new field of developmental science is âdeeply and broadly multi-disciplinaryâ (Lerner, 2006, p. 4), in reality the skew in developmental science is towards the biological sciences not the social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, human geography and childhood studies.
In this book we will present our argument for including psychological and developmental perspectives in any attempts to offer an adequate theory of child agency. We will argue that including a psychological perspective enriches our understanding of agency since agency is not a purely social or relational phenomenon. From a psychological perspective a dynamic-relational theory can still and must still find room for the individual and the functioning of the self. Also we argue that agency develops over time from birth into a not very clear point some time in childhood. When looking at child agency specifically, it is not good enough to lump all children (ages 0â18 years) into the same conceptual category. Examining agency developmentally also helps us to understand what agency is and how it is constituted.
We will also examine some of the practical implications of different theories of and different definitions of agency. How one thinks about agency is central to any ontological vision of the child or children and being clear about the ontological view of the child that one holds is not just an academic issue; it has very practical consequences for how children are positioned and treated in society. Seeing children as agents versus seeing children as not-agents, however we theorise these matters, has implications for how we (adults) act towards children, in the home, on the streets and in the realm of politics.
The structure of this book
In Chapter 2 of this book we will review the pioneering work conducted by scholars under the banner of childhood studies. We will examine the emergence of âthe new paradigmâ in the 1980s and 1990s and the place of agency in the sociology of childhood and childhood studies. We will track the research conducted on children as social actors and agents and discuss the distinction that emerged between social action and agency. We will proceed to outline how the construct of agency has evolved within childhood studies from agency asserted and exemplified to agency as an individual characteristic, to agency as socially enabled or constrained, and finally to agency as fluid and distributed. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of how the term agency is used in childhood studies â firstly as a counterpoint to the passive child and secondly as a platform for advocating for childrenâs rights. We will argue that the politics behind the idea of the agentic child need to be further interrogated.
In Chapter 3 of the book we will turn our attention to the insights on agency that have been offered by philosophers and theoreticians within psychology, neuroscience and the social sciences. Although these perspectives may not pertain to childrenâs agency specifically, we will argue that our understanding of childrenâs agency can be adva...
