Socialising Children

A. James

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230300330
• eBook ISBN: 9781137317339
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on children's narratives about their everyday life this book explores how children come to understand the process of socialization at home, at school and in the neighbourhood as an embodied and biographical experience.

1

Personal Lives

This is a book about children: about how children learn about the social world, the sense they make of it and the ways in which their experiential sense-making might shape the things that they choose to do, the opinions they express and the perspectives on the world that they come to embrace and embody. The book draws on data generated with children and adults in the United Kingdom, at different points in time and across a range of social contexts, but what it has to say about the processes of children’s learning about the social world will hopefully have a wider theoretical resonance that can transcend the limitation of these particularities. And it is, therefore, with this bigger aim in mind that the overarching intention behind this book is to provide an account of processes of socialisation. However, although I engage with a wide range of different concepts and theoretical approaches to socialisation along the way that may further their discussion within the social sciences, my desire is not just to initiate a new academic debate. Above all, I want to provide an account of socialisation that is child-centred and that can contribute to the field of childhood studies. Thus, the ideas I shall go on to present will not only be articulated through children’s voices but also be explored from their standpoint (Alanen 2001a). However, though all children belong to the shared generational space called childhood, which contextualises many of their day-to-day experiences, as we shall see, as individuals they also have views and perspectives that are differentiated not only by gender, ethnicity, age or health status but by the different and particular circumstances of their own biographies. My focus throughout, then, is on individual children and their experiences and what these might tell us, more generally, about being a child and the process of growing up.

Thus the title of this book – Socialising Children – is, first and foremost, intended to capture children’s active participation in processes of socialisation: to show that children are social and how, through their socialising, they come to know and understand the world and their own place within it. But the ambiguity in the title permits another reading – it points to the process of socialising children, something that is done to them by others. And the uncertainty this produces is deliberately provocative. It allows me scope to consider the extent to which children are – or are not – objects on which society writes its script as is so often popularly assumed; it enables me to evaluate the balance that might need to be struck between children’s biological and cognitive development and their own social learning; to consider the structuring consequences that institutions such as the family and the school are said to have for children’s everyday experiences and, indeed, for childhood itself; and, in turn, therefore, to examine children’s experiential encounters with the generational space of ‘childhood’ as it unfolds in particular times and places. In short, it allows me to develop further the cultural politics of childhood (James and James 2004) as children themselves come to know and experience it.

Whether or not this approach amounts to a re-theorising of the concept of socialisation will be for others to judge. What it certainly will do, however, is enable some consideration of what the concept of socialisation entails both for society as a whole, for parents and families, and, most significantly perhaps, for children themselves. And this is an important task for, while the concept of socialisation seems to have gone out of fashion within the social sciences, it has become increasingly popularised and politicised as an everyday kind of concept.¹ And in that process the concept has shifted from being concerned with the ways in which ‘society’, in all its diversity, is reproduced and/or changed to a much more individualised and narrow focus on explaining and changing people’s social conduct. Another outcome from this volume is therefore political: what might be the implications for society as a whole of seeing socialisation from children’s own perspectives?

This shift in focus undoubtedly reflects changes in the global political climate since the 1970s, with the rise of neoliberalism leading to what Moss (2012) has called the marketisation of childhood. This places great value on ‘targeting, reducing social risks and markets as well as emphasizing other values including individual choice, flexibility, competition and private provision of services’ (2012: 133). Importantly, it also points fingers of blame. Most evidently, this can be seen when socialisation – commonly presented within populist discourse as something done to children by adults – is said to have ‘failed’. In the United Kingdom, for example, so-called feckless parenting is highlighted by politicians as the cause of ill-disciplined children roaming the streets at night; and teachers are held to account when children miss the educational targets set for them or school life is disrupted by ‘anti-social’ elements drawn from the child population. No more evidence of this trend is needed than the hue and cry that erupted about parenting, following the riots that took place in London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom in the summer of 2011. That children as young as 11 were on the streets at night, looting and rioting, was taken as a sure sign that their socialisation had failed. A Guardian/ICM poll, commissioned shortly afterwards as part of the Reading the Riots study, found that 86 per cent of the public cited poor parenting as the main cause of the riots. Writing in the popular press, the columnist Melanie Phillips said:

There has been much bewildered talk about ‘feral’ children, and desperate calls upon their parents to keep them in at night and to ask them about any stolen goods they are bringing home. As if there were responsible parents in such homes! We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents. Of course these parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds too.

(Daily Mail 11 August 2011)

In the immediate aftermath, there was little discussion in the popular press about these children’s own decision-making that might have led them to take part in the riots. Their embodied experiences of living in families marked by poverty and social exclusion were also given relatively scant attention at the time.² It was the parents who were held to account, for failing to care for and socialise their children properly.

Indeed, so broad is the populist appeal of the term socialisation that it has now slipped easily into the vernacular to describe all kinds of learned behaviours (see, for example, in relation to the training of dogs (www.dogstrust.org.uk)). This would seem to imply, therefore, that what socialisation is, how it takes place and what its impact might be for society are questions with well-rehearsed answers. And yet what I want to propose here is that this is not at all the case.

Focusing on children, this book sets out from the suggestion that although we know that, in any society, children do, more or less, grow up to become the kinds of adults that society recognises as ‘adults’, doing the kinds of things that adults do in the ways that they do, as yet we still have no adequate explanation of that process as children themselves experience it. Somewhere along the line children have learnt to become ‘social’ people of a particular cultural kind. They have become girl or boy children and children of particular nation states and social classes. But exactly how that has happened is still not clearly understood and what children themselves make of that process is even less well known. Moreover, what import children’s understandings, embodied practices, emotional responses and cognitive reasonings may have for them as individuals, and therefore for the ways in which society unfolds through their participation in it, both now and in the future, is still in need of robust explication. For these reasons, therefore, I want to rescue the concept of socialisation from its more populist understandings. I want to revive it as an important sociological tool and insist that knowing how, rather than just what, children learn about the social world should once more become a critical field of social enquiry.

But I also want to breathe life into this particular dead horse for a number of other reasons. First, because the emergence and subsequent development of childhood studies as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry since the 1990s has alerted us to an overlap of interests between different disciplinary perspectives, leading to calls for more holistic approaches to understanding children’s lives (see also Chapter 2). Prout (2005) has argued, for example, that ‘childhood should be seen as neither “natural” nor “cultural” but a multiplicity of “nature-cultures” ’ (2005: 144). Thus, while the concept of socialisation has traditionally been part of sociology’s and anthropology’s armoury, it occupies similar epistemological territory, I would argue, to a range of other concepts now being used by, for example, cognitive psychologists. In addition, as I shall discuss more fully in Chapter 2, it not only sits relatively comfortably alongside more apparently fashionable sociological concepts – for example, those of habitus, structuration and social reproduction – but may even, when given new life, offer us greater heuristic purchase than these can on the process of becoming social.

Second, I want to resurrect the concept of socialisation because, given new intellectual clothes, it might enable us to see more clearly what the process of growing up looks like from children’s own perspective. In line with the idea that children are social actors with agency, an idea that is at the heart of contemporary childhood studies (James and Prout 1997a; James, Jenks and Prout 1998), the process of being and becoming social needs to be seen as something that concerns children themselves, both in the here and now and in relation to their futures, as adults in society. The Oxford English Dictionary, both in its concise and shorter forms, defines socialisation just as a one-way transitive process: to socialise is ‘to make’ or ‘to render’ social. However, in this book, I want to move away from seeing socialisation as something done to children; more insightfully, I want to ask how this process is experienced and made sense of by them. While a number of welcome forays along such a path have been made recently, as I discuss in Chapter 2, a sufficiently rigorous account of the process of socialisation, theorised from a child-centred perspective that is fit for the purposes of childhood studies, has yet to coalesce.

Third, by bringing the concept of socialisation under these new kinds of spotlights, I want to explore what value the apparently specialised study of children and childhood might bring to broader theoretical debates within sociology and anthropology – for example, to debates around structure, agency and social reproduction; to the theorising of identity and the politics of class, gender and ethnicity; to understandings of embodiment and the sociology of emotions; and to explorations of biography and the life course. It is over 30 years ago since Denzin suggested that

there will be no coherent sociological theory of self, society, social relationships and social structure until the sociologist has adequately grasped and understood the symbolic, interactional and linguistic foundations of the socialization process. The worlds of the child, whether hidden or private, public or open, serious or playful, constitute a set of obdurate realties to which all sociological theories must eventually return.

([1977] 2010: 5)

I share this view. These concerns rumble on quietly therefore, throughout this volume.

And finally, by looking at children’s own experiences of socialisation, exploring the sense they make of those experiences and the understandings of the social world that they draw from these (see Chapters 3–7) I would hope to demonstrate, in the final chapter, the practical significance that such an approach might have for those involved in making policies for children, whether this occurs at the level of the state or in individual familial contexts through the establishing of rules and routines for ways of being a child-in-that-family.

In sum, I wish to argue that, despite appearances, there is epistemological life left in the old horse that will yet benefit our understanding of the ways in which children learn about the social world. Drawing on recent theoretical thinking within sociology, anthropology and cognitive psychology, and incorporating a range of empirical material generated with children themselves across different settings, this book sets out, then, a manifesto for the ways in which the concept of socialisation might be reconfigured from a childhood studies perspective.

Towards a child-centred perspective on socialisation

In setting out the stall for this book, this chapter has already begun to hint at some of the difficulties and obstacles that are yet to be overcome in attempting to provide a child-centred perspective on socialisation. These will be encountered in more depth throughout this book as I try to pin down particular aspects of socialisation as children themselves experience it. There is, for example, the problem of treading a delicate path between sociological and psychological explanations of children’s learning and cognition. I also need to engage with the age-old sociological struggle about the relative weight to be given to the role of the individual and of society in accounting for what people do and why they do it. Importantly, I also need to find a way to reconcile the idea of ‘the child’, a singular term that is often used to represent the category of ‘children’, with the life experiences of any particular child. While any child is uniquely an individual, he or she also shares in some of the collective childhood experiences taking place for all children at any particular time in any particular society. Indeed, as we shall see, learning to be a child of a particular time and place is a key part of children’s socialising experiences, as well as their learning about what their future adulthood entails (Jenks 1996). Yet, inevitably, what this process of learning actually involves in children’s everyday lives, as I shall show, turns out to be different for different children. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise. How else can the infinite variation in children’s and adults’ behaviours and lives be accounted for?

This tension is core to what, elsewhere, we have described as the cultural politics of childhood:

although our day-to-day encounters with any individual child are necessarily informed by our broad understanding of the analytical concepts of ‘childhood’ and ‘children’, the term ‘child’ is not – and should not be – necessarily dependent upon them, nor regarded as co-terminus with them. The diversities that distinguish one child from another are as important and as significant as the commonalities they might share … However, as just a single instance of the generalised category ‘children’, … this child – the one who stands in front of us – may, or may not, through his or her actions, lead to shifts in our thinking about what children are and what childhood is like, thus also shaping our responses, as adults, both to that child and to children more generally.

(James and James 2004:16–7)

This book continues, therefore, to unpick the tangled cultural politics of childhood by focusing on processes of socialisation in order to understand not only what is going on in the life of any individual child but also how, as an individual, they are tied into and connected with other children. They too are becoming socialised as children into the structures, institutions, empathies, intergenerational relations and other social relationships that permeate the fabric of the society in which they live. To understand socialisation involves, at one and the same time therefore, a focus on the society as well as on the individual child, on the role of structure as well as on exploring the potential of children’s agency and on cultural continuities as well as on change. Trying to understand socialisation from a child-centred perspective clearly takes us into deep and muddy theoretical waters. These the next chapter explores in some depth, preparing the groundwork for what comes later. However, to guide us through the murk of these debates as they reappear throughout this book there remains one particular guiding light – the idea that in order to understand socialisation as children experience it I need to explore the personal lives of children as they unfold across the childhood phase of the life course. And for this inspiration I turn to the recent work of the sociologist Carol Smart.

Living a personal life

The initial impetus for the development of what has come to be known as the sociology of personal life (see May 2011) was Smart’s recognition that family sociology needed to be able to extend beyond its usual terrain to embrace the more contemporary ideas and practices of intimacy, friendship and other close relationships visible ‘out there’ in the social world. Somehow these social practices are family-like and yet, as Smart puts it, they can no longer be comfortably ‘squeezed into the existing te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Personal Lives
• 2. Key Concepts, New Understandings?
• 3. Family Lives
• 4. Interacting Lives
• 5. Embodied, Emotional Lives
• 6. Institutional Lives
• 7. Biographical Lives
• 8. Afterword: Towards a Child-Centred Perspective on Socialisation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index