Contesting Childhood

Michael Wyness

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135709181
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on work from within the developing field of childhood studies, this text examines theoretical and policy driven understandings of the current position of children in society. Through an analysis of policy reforms and professional initiatives within educational child care and legal contexts, the author examines different, potentially competing viewpoints of childrens social position. Chapters are devoted to a number of related themes, including child policy and moral ambiguity, the limits to child protection, the individualization of schooling and childhood and citizenship.

1 Childhood in Crisis
Decline or Reconstruction?

Introduction

In a recently published article Norbert Elias (1998, p. 16) refers to the ‘anachronistic insistence…on the family as a simply unchangeable and eternally identical human figuration’. The concern for bedrock social and moral certainties—their dissolution and attempted resurrection— has led some social commentators to identify ‘the family’ and its disappearance as a primary source of social breakdown. Elias (1998) goes on to argue that this is an insistence on the nuclear family. This view obscures any realistic understanding of the range of problems that family members currently face. In effect, he is saying that as social analysts we need to move beyond a nuclear frame of reference and address the possibility that individuals arrange their domestic lives in qualitatively different ways.

What Elias is pointing out is the way in which commentators reaffirm a single nuclear version of family within a social context where the nuclear family becomes increasingly less relevant. We can draw a parallel between this alleged crisis of ‘the family’ and the purported crisis of childhood. Just as diagnoses and prescriptions are expounded within a nuclear family frame irrespective of the particular problems faced by parents and children, so problems such as delinquency, video nasties and sex abuse are examined with reference to an undifferentiated model of the child which takes little account of the concrete circumstances of different groups of children. Social scientists, policy makers and ‘child workers’ draw on theories, principles and speculations based on a dominant conception of childhood made up of characteristics such as innocence, naïvety and vulnerability. Moreover, a single conception of childhood becomes a reference point for the evaluation of children's behaviour and those institutions and individuals who have responsibilities towards children.

Of late, much of this evaluation of childhood has converged on the idea that it is in crisis. To simplify matters, I want to argue that this ‘crisis’ rests on the idea that children are out of place. This can be taken literally to mean that children are less likely to be found within the adult-regulated confines of the home and school. We can also think of it in the metaphorical sense that children are more challenging and less subservient, less likely to accept the unconditional nature of relations with parents and teachers, in other words, children's social positions can no longer be taken for granted. Some might conclude from this that children's attitudes and behaviour no longer conform to a ‘universal and natural’ model of childhood. For many this is tantamount to saying that childhood has disappeared.

An alternative way of viewing childhood is to suspend judgement on the contemporary condition of childhood on the grounds that problems and crises attributed to children can be recast in terms of social change. There is then less need to rescue childhood, for the ‘universal and natural’ conception of childhood is less relevant now. We need to reframe the circumstances within which childhood is found to be in trouble and concentrate more on how children and childhood might be changing. Children and childhood, then, need to be reconceptualized, some might say reconstructed. At the very least we need to attempt to understand the changing nature of children's lives and examine the possibility of more contested versions of childhood. From this point of view we might speculate that children rely less on generational difference as a reference point for self-identity. We might pursue this point further. Children are less likely to be treated as subjects to be disciplined and controlled than they were, say, during the post-war period because we are more likely to view them now as competent social actors who participate in the shaping of their social environments.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine crisis and reconstruction as two dominant themes within the sociology of childhood. In the first part I will argue that the problem of childhood not only parallels the loss of family’ refrain but appears to be deeply implicated in the problem of family. I thus address crisis, first of all, with reference to the alleged breakdown in family relations. I go on to examine a second key element within the ‘crisis of childhood’ thesis: the diminution of the child's world of play. In the second part I explore the possibilities of reframing childhood within theories of late modernity. Although existing work on late modernity offers few possibilities for the reconceptualizing of childhood, I will outline the key themes that run through the ‘new sociology of childhood’, which have strong family resemblances to theories of late modernity. I address relatively recent attempts to reposition the child conceptually and empirically. Three areas are addressed: (a) the socially constructed nature of childhood, (b) the problem of the invisible child and (c) the recognition of childhood in terms of social agency.

Childhood in Crisis

Decline of Family and Authority

I referred earlier to a set of popular descriptions of childhood. Sociologists have drawn on the characteristics of naïvety, corruptibility and innocence in defining the child as a social incompetent who needs to be brought to a state of sociability and morality through the benevolent authority of parents, ideally those within the nuclear family (Parsons, 1965). The crisis of childhood in these terms rests on the assumption that the problem lies not within the child but in the way the child is socialized. Parents are no longer able to provide the moral and social resources which propel the child out into society. The process of socialization becomes increasingly difficult because parents fail to establish secure moral and social boundaries for their children. Children themselves illustrate this failure in the way that they behave and in their attitude to a whole range of things. As the Newsons comment,

Parents are in fact chronically on the defensive over their parental role because the responsibility laid on them is not only limitless but supremely personal. Our children are a walking testimonial or advertisement for the sort of people we are; doubly so, since they advertise both heredity and their environment [sic].

(Cited in Harris, 1983, p. 240)

In my earlier work with families, I have commented on the way some parents articulated difficulties they had with their children in terms of relative ‘powerlessness’ or a general decline in adult authority, particularly within the home and school (Wyness, 1997). Now I am not attempting here to provide illustrative evidence of the ‘childhood in crisis’ theme, for there were other parents who took a more agnostic line in viewing adult-child relations in terms of change rather than decline, views incidentally that bring us closer to the idea of reconstruction, an alternative interpretation of modern childhood discussed later in the chapter. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a growing set of popular beliefs that children no longer conform quite so easily to the rosy post-war images of childhood and the nuclear family. The press coverage of a recent case of a 12-year-old boy taking his father to court for ‘smacking’ him provides an example of this. The headline for The Times read ‘Boy denied glory of seeing his father tried for smacking’ (4 September 1996, p. 11). The case did not go to court, according to the author, on the basis of evidence admitted to the Crown Prosecution Service by a doctor. It is worth quoting the report:

[The solicitor] for the teacher [the father], said: ‘He was simply administering lawful and reasonable chastisement’. The incident had been referred to a number of doctors, one of whom said the boy was ‘a 12 year old who will bask in the glory of his accusations’ and that it would be an unmitigated disaster for the family.

The implicit message here is of a precocious child irresponsibly invoking his rights against his father, his guardian and socializer, with family breakup a possible outcome. The position of the child, the parent-child relationship and the child's perceived ability to draw on the state in bringing the parent in line are key elements in my analysis of adult-child relations in this and the following chapters. For the purposes of this chapter and the following section, I address sociological treatments of family and the institution of childhood from quite ideologically diverse perspectives. In what follows I want to address the problem of childhood and family from differing political viewpoints. Let us begin with the problem as seen from a right-wing vantage point.

We can trace the current critique of family and childhood to the early 1970s with the publication of the Black Papers, a series of critical commentaries on the comprehensive system of schooling in Britain. The central concern running through these pamphlets and books was the alleged decline in curricular and pedagogic ‘standards’ in British state schools. But the proponents of educational change took families and politicians to task for an alleged decline in standards of behaviour among the young. As one prominent critic asserted:

children are growing up in a welfare state where it appears that everything in school is free: it is a world where they follow their inclinations and where things are not right or wrong but merely a matter of opinion and where there are virtually no rules.

(Johnson, 1971, p. 99)

Judgements here are sweeping in attributing blame at the level of the state, the family and the classroom. But the fundamental problem, at least with reference to an alleged decline in behavioural standards, appears to lie with the inadequate role that adults play in structuring children's moral and social development. Adults are no longer willing or able to provide children with clear moral guidelines. The adjective ‘permissive’ normally precedes a description of parenting and the position of teachers and, in a broader sense, the character of British and American culture.

More recently, this theme has run through Charles Murray's critique of family life (1990). Despite its moral connotations, the imputation of blame seems to be the analytical strategy adopted by Murray in identifying a breakdown in family relations. Blaming families draws him into identifying particular types of families found within what has been termed the underclass. Imported from the American inner cities via a series of articles in The Times, Murray's version of the underclass chimes with the political concerns over the cost of the ‘dysfunctional family’ to the state. According to this thesis, certain sectors of the population are culpable in creating a culture of deprivation and crime. Parents, in particular, are singled out for their inability to control or discipline their children. Economic variables such as income and unemployment are less significant as Murray seeks to draw the nineteenth-century distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. The underclass becomes the late twentieth-century version of the undeserving poor because their poverty is based on behaviour and lifestyle. In other words, members of the underclass are blamed for their drug taking, their criminal propensities, their rejection of work and, most important of all, their rejection of marriage because they choose these courses of action.

What is most worrying for Murray is how this lack of moral guidelines within underclass families affects children. ‘[L]ittle boys [were not] naturally growing up to be responsible fathers and husbands…and little girls don’t become adolescents naturally wanting to refrain from having babies’ (1990, p. 10). Children are not children within the underclass because parents do not exercise a ‘natural’ authority over them. The suggestion here is that underclass children fall outside the normal nuclear model of childhood. They are less subject to strong moral imperatives from parents. They are more exposed to the negative features of the adult world and exhibit all the hallmarks of the ‘precocious child’ or the ‘adult-child’. In these terms we can make sense of recent concerns over the ‘youthfulness’ of delinquency and the problems of children committing adult-like crimes. The child criminal is associated with the broader problem of the decline in adult authority.

The teenage mother, particularly the single teenage mother, in the ambiguous role of the adult-child, is another familiar reference point in the analysis of the underclass and the breakdown of family. The reproduction of the underclass rests on the ‘cycle of poverty’ thesis whereby parents transmit a culture of poverty to the next generation (Lewis, 1967). Young men and women learn little about moral commitment in that they are more likely to reject the moral requirements of sexual relations. Teenage mothers detached from the fathers of their children in turn provide few appropriate moral reference points for their children, as well as consigning themselves and their children to a life of welfare dependency. Yet within this school of thought the teenage mother is both a potent and ambiguous symbol of the undeserving poor. She is less likely to be formally accepted as a member of a disadvantaged group entitled to state support because of her membership of the underclass and her status as a child. There is an inconsistency here between the teenage mother as an irresponsible adult who has no moral right to welfare support and the teenage mother— particularly under the age of 16—as a child inappropriately engaging in sex who no longer fits the dominant conception of childhood in terms of family dependency and innocence.

In her perceptive critique of the American political right, Pearce argues that pregnancy may be a rational adult choice for many young working-class women (1993). Yet public campaigns deny the teenage mother a degree of voluntarism because they address teenage motherhood in the emotive terms of ‘children having children’. Pearce claims that this moral position is backed by institutional support. There are difficulties in setting up clinics for teenage mothers because this is perceived to be encouraging adolescent sexual activity. She also contends that public policy enforces teenage mothers’ dependency on their parents by making it difficult for them to set up separate households, by restricting their claims for income support and by forcing them to return to school as soon as possible after the birth of the child.

Many of these concerns can be identified within a left-wing standpoint. But whereas the right think in terms of reasserting a ‘purer’ form of capitalism, the left see that solution to the restoration of childhood as the source of its decline. They argue that the by-products of capitalism— consumerism and privatization—have superseded parents as cultural frames of reference for children. In an earlier text, Jeremy Seabrook (1982) invokes a romanticized notion of working-class community life that incorporates both a strong sense of the child's position within the nuclear family and the idea of separateness from the adult world. The loss of childhood here rests on the shift from an emotional and moral axis of support from parent to child to the material excesses of a consumer society. Parents, in effect, become victims of the market because, in the absence of moral commitment, they are forced to rely on their children's material dependency, the only remaining hold that they have over their children. Parents buy their children's respect by supplying them with the necessary accoutrements such as computers and trainers that keep their children ahead of their peers in the competition for social esteem.

In a recent paper, ‘Children of the market’ (1998), Seabrook explores the issues from the child's perspective. Taking a global line, he divides children into the unprotected and undernourished victims of the developing southern hemisphere, and, in the advanced North, victims of a satiated and overnourished market. Importantly, the latter are also victims of the alleged breakdown of family:

With almost half the marriages in the US ending in divorce, with the decay of even the nuclear family, the recreation of temporary units of half-brothers and sisters and step-mothers and fathers and ‘Mum's boyfriend’ or ‘Dad's girlfriend’, a terrible insecurity and anxiety are created in children, a sense of perishability of human relationships. In this context, the world of what money will buy, even the fleeting, evanescent world of fashionable garments, items of wear that will be discarded within a few months or weeks, comes to look more solid, more reliable than human ties and relationships of blood and bone.

(1998, p. 45)

In an earlier article, Harris (1977) refers to this as the development of the implosive family, an unstable set of relations between family members. He refers to two forms: the disintegrated family and the child-centred family. The former is characterized by minimal contact between members, with the home functioning more as a hotel. The latter, which Harris argues is more common, rests on the inversion of the dependency relationship with parents’ sense of self almost exclusively determined by their children.¹ Harris sees this as a form of child-centredness—an unhealthy dependency on the child; the vicarious development of meaningful adult identities through the process of child rearing; the disproportionate amount of time, money and emotional energy invested in the children (Harris, 1983). In both cases the implosion is a product of late capitalism which denies adults any real intrinsic satisfactions as either workers or parents.

With the rise in individualism and calculation in the 1980s in Britain many public utilities have been sold off into private hands. Marina Warner (1989) draws a parallel between the privatizing of resources such as water, gas and electric supplies which had previously been in state hands and the idea that childhood has been privatized in such a way that children, a common commodity, enter the language of the market as a scarce resource, in the demographic and economic senses. Population trends point to smaller families across the socio-economic spectrum. Yet choice, the new social reference point for investing in children, is monopolized by the affluent middle classes. Warner refers to the way working-class mothers, particularly single and teenage ones, are targeted by the political right in terms of their propensity to breed, which is supposed to reflect their dissolute lifestyles. At the other end of the spectrum, families allegedly imbued with what may be considered an economically thriftier mentality view their children as prospective private assets. Thus, unlike Murray who attributes ‘choice’ to the underclass as a means of differentiating individualistic from deterministic explanations of parental inadequacy, for Warner it is middle-class parents who ‘choose’ to have children on the basis of value and cost.

A final comment on left-wing thinking on family and childhood brings us to those who seem to have close moral as well as intellectual ties with the political right, the self-appointed ‘ethical socialists’. In the case of Dennis and Erdos (1992) the convergence rests on the ‘absent father’ thesis which asserts that the working classes have become more irresponsible and criminal because of a rise in the number of boys born into lone-parent households. Again there is reference to the weakening of moral ties within families and the spectre of the man-child, the boy with no male adult figure hovering above him to constrain and regulate his precocious appetites. Melanie Phillips, in her regular newspaper articles and book All Must Have Prizes (1996), makes similar claims by drawing on the figure of the ‘disordered child’. Recurring themes such as ‘prematurely sexualised children’, the ‘flight from parenting’ and the ‘no blame, no shame, no pain society’ indicate an alleged moral malaise rooted in a selfish individualism and adult society's inability to exercise authority over children. Children are disordered because they are not acted upon. To be sure, this lack of determinism for some children is rooted in forms of neglect and a lack of love and attention. But there is also an absence of moral commitment on the part of parents to define clearly and unambiguously the position that children must occupy until they are judged to be ready to make their own decisions. Children are thus disordered in the sense both being out of control and of being out of position within the social hierarchy.

From Marbles to Video Games: the Commodification of Play

‘The family’ is taken as one frame of re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Childhood in Crisis Decline or Reconstruction?
• 2: Social Policy and Moral Ambiguity
• 3: Child Sexual Abuse Protection, Prevention and Identification
• 4: Childhood, Agency and Education Reform
• 5: Childhood and Citizenship
• Conclusion
• Appendix A Comment on the Data
• Notes
• References