Key Issues in Childhood and Youth Studies

Derek Kassem, Elizabeth Taylor, Derek Kassem, Elizabeth Taylor, Lisa Murphy, Derek Kassem, Lisa Murphy, Elizabeth Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135265175
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Key Issues in Childhood and Youth Studies presents an informed and critical commentary on a range of key issues related to children and childhood, from birth to eighteen years. Challenging current orthodoxies within the adult world on the nature of childhood, it is an essential text for students of childhood and youth studies as well as those studying relevant professional qualifications in social work, teaching and health.

Exploring ideas from the historical development of childhood to the demonising of youth, it is divided into five clearly defined sections, each with their own editorial introduction which highlights the key themes. The sections focus on:

• the concept and creation of childhood
• child development
• ideas of risk, protection and childhood
• the politics of childhood
• international perspectives on childhood.

This invaluable textbook provides an overview of childhood and youth studies and encourages students to think about the issues discussed and to develop their own ideas. Each chapter contains student activities, key concept boxes, recommended further reading and a reflection exercise.

Part 1
Creating childhood

I know a lot about children – I used to be one.

— Spike Milligan

As the comment from Milligan above illustrates, in discussions about childhood and children all of us feel able to contribute because it is perhaps one of the few areas in life of which we all have had first-hand experience. No matter what the nature of our childhood, we have all been children, so we have all visited that ephemeral and elusive Neverland – whether as a lost boy or girl or as a fairy prince or princess. Due to this factor, all discussions about childhood and children, even academic debate purporting to rest upon empirical and objective data and research evidence, are bound to be subjective in nature to some degree.

As Murphy, et al. (2009: 131) point out, childhood is a difficult concept to define as it is socio-historically and culturally constructed. Therefore, not only will people from different societies and eras have very diverse understandings of what constitutes childhood, but the role of children within society and the obligations of society to children will be very varied.

This book sets out to explore, debate and analyse issues and factors which define and affect perceptions of childhood and the lives of children on an individual, societal and international basis. Within this part we will discuss the origins and construction of the concept of childhood and the child, and childhood identity, both historically and within contemporary society.

The first chapter by Clarke focuses on the debate concerning the emergence of the concept of childhood as played out in the works of social historians such as Ariès (1962) and Pollock (1983). Clarke outlines the sentiments approach taken by Ariès and his followers who assert that a change in feelings, and hence valuation, of the child from the seventeenth century onwards, driven to a large extent by expansion of education, led eventually to the child-centred family unit and society of the twentieth century. In other words, childhood is a construct dependent on socio-historical, political and economic factors, which only came into being from the seventeenth century onwards. After acknowledging the numerous criticisms of this approach, such as dependence on generalized and inaccurate sources, for example, paintings and religious tracts, Clarke suggests that, as the conceptualization of childhood in the late twentieth century is related to the destiny of the nation as a whole, it is indeed a social construct.

Pressler’s chapter explores three major images or models of childhood and the child which have evolved historically and are still prevalent in contemporary Western society. She suggests that these images – the angelic, the demonic and the small person models – are constructed by three discourses about childhood and children: the Romantic, the Puritan and the Rights-based discourses respectively. Pressler suggests that the first two models, in alignment with traditional developmental psychology, construct problematized and negative images of the child as dependent, morally immature and in need – as in a process of becoming rather than as a being. She concludes that in order to construct more positive images of childhood we must move towards more Rights-based discourses of childhood and contemporary developmental psychology which construct children as a people with a voice and with participatory rights in society (see also Chapter 4.3, this volume).

Kassem’s chapter focuses on an increasingly important group of children who are often ignored and almost invisible to the rest of society – children of mixed race or dual heritage. The chapter explores how society and those institutions directly responsible for children, such as the school system, respond to dual-heritage children and how these societal responses impact on the individuals who comprise this group, specifically in terms of how these children construct their identities. The discussion points out that, while this group is comprised of children from a large number of cultures and of ethnic group inter-mixing, it is frequently treated as homogenous rather than heterogeneous. The consequences of this are that when moves are made to cater for dual-heritage children, many individuals within this group are overlooked and marginalized.

Society’s inability, or indisposition, to meet the individual needs of children of dual-heritage can have a devastating impact on the way these children construct their identities and on how they view society and their place in it. As dual-heritage ethnicity is the fastest-growing population group in the UK at present, Kassem points out that it is vital that the needs of children within this group are meet.

References

Ariès, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Murphy, L., Mufti, E. and Kassem, D. (2009) Education Studies: An Introduction, Maidenhead, Berks: Open University Press.

Pollock, L. H. (1983) Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1.1
The origins of childhood

In the beginning …

John Clarke

Introduction

The experiences of children, their lives and ideas have not played a major part in traditional approaches to history. Historians concerned with great events and great men and women have relegated children to a minor role, except when their fates affected larger concerns, such as the fifteenth century murder of the princes in the tower.

Alternatively, popular historians have constructed stories about the early experiences of usually great men which were seen as prefiguring their later greatness. Stories such as James Watt watching his mother’s kettle boiling and imagining the operation of the steam engine or George Washington’s honesty when accused by his father of chopping down a cherry tree were more to do with establishing aspects of the adult’s later character than they were about describing the nature of childhood at the time concerned. Mostly historians ignored childhood in favour of the activities of adults and, as with the experience of women, or the poor they could be accurately described as hidden from history (Rowbotham 1977). The movement to develop and extend the study of childhood can be seen as an aspect of the effort by some historians to recover the ordinary lives of the less powerful elements of society from what Thompson describes as the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ (1963: 12).

In recent years, however, questions about childhood and its meaning have come to concern a number of histor ians, most obviously in the debate about whether or not our idea of childhood is, in fact, just something which has been constructed in recent centuries – an artefact of modernity. It has been claimed by some theorists and researchers that until the modern period the current idea of childhood simply did not exist. This approach claims that what we now think of as childhood would not have made sense to our ancestors.

It is argued that between about the turn of the seventeenth century and the 1900s, the idea of childhood was invented, and came to be seen as a natural and universally recognized phase of life. This view is most often attributed to the French author, Philippe Ariès, whose book L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, translated into English asCenturies of Childhood, first published in the 1960s, has been a key element in discussions within the history of childhood ever since. Much of this debate has been highly critical and has involved historians identifying evidence to show that Ariès and his co-thinkers were wrong about the historical facts. However, it is clear that this debate has focused people’s attention on what was previously a seriously neglected area of history and has played a major role in the development of the history of childhood as a serious specialism.

Philippe Ariès: childhood as a modern invention

Ariès is associated with a school of history which attempted to shift attention from the kind of traditional history described above, which concentrated on the actions of rulers, warriors, inventors and politicians, onto different aspects of everyday life such as diet, family life or popular customs and practices. This perspective starts out from a view of history which attempts to create an understanding of how people from every part of society made sense of their own lives. This involved examining the question of how ideas and feelings, what the French call sentiments, change over time.

Ariès puts forward the idea that the modern world has a view of how people develop from birth to adulthood which is uniquely its own. To simplify, in Ariès’ view it could be said that before modernity the key age in development was seven as it was at this point that a person moved out of the family and its protection into a broader social world where they acted as if they were simply smaller versions of the adults around them. In a modern society, however, the age of seven was only a phase in a gradual move from infancy to childhood. Childhood itself was a special state of transition, neither infant nor adult, around which the whole structure of the family had come to operate. Modern society was typically constructed around a separate isolated family unit which was seen as existing primarily to meet the needs of the child. As this idea of the child- centred family is very familiar to us today, it is not easy to accept that it is a recent invention. However, Ariès argued that it is only the changes brought about by societies like Britain, France and the US modernizing their social structure, particularly the development of compulsory schooling, prescribed and provided by the state, which brings about the phase we call childhood.

Without the development of schooling and its consequences in extending the time children depend on their families, this idea of childhood would not have come into existence. Indeed, before modern society was created, it is not clear that there was such an idea at all. In his most extreme and controversial claim, Ariès states: ‘in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist’ (1960: 125).

Ariès based his argument on a number of sources of evidence, such as medieval writings on age and development, the portrayal of children and childhood in medieval art, ideas of how children should dress, as well as considering their games and pastimes. Most significantly of all, he studied the way moralists and others wrote about the idea of childhood innocence. This evidence led Ariès to develop his claim about the absence of the idea of childhood in medieval society. For example, his study of medieval art, particularly painting, suggested that in early medieval works children tended to be portrayed as if they were simply scaled down versions of adults. Painting in Europe in the Middle Ages was overwhelmingly dominated by Christian themes. The most common portrayal of a child in medieval European art was the picture of the infant Jesus in all the many paintings of the Madonna and Child. Ariès argues that these portrayals show Jesus as a small version of an adult – faces often have ‘older’ features and the body shapes are long, muscular and developed. It seems sometimes that it is only the size of the body relative to the surrounding grown-ups which shows that this is a child or ...

Table of contents

• Book Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Activities
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Creating childhood
• Part 2 The developing child
• Part 3 Children and risk
• Part 4 The politics of childhood
• Part 5 The global child
• Index