Childhood and Youth Studies

Paula Zwozdiak-Myers

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781844450756
• eBook ISBN: 9780857252098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book introduces the inter-disciplinary study of childhood and youth and the multi-agency practice of professionals who serve the needs of children, young people and their families. Exploring key theories and central ideas, research methodology, policy and practice, it takes a holistic, contextual approach that values difference and diversity. It examines concepts such as identity, representation, creativity and discourse and issues such as ethnicity, gender and the ?childhood in crisis? thesis. Furthermore, it challenges opinion by exploring complex and controversial modern-day issues, and by engaging with a range of perspectives to highlight debates within the field.

Part 1

Social and cultural
perspectives of
childhood and youth

1 Social constructions of
childhood

Will Coster

Learning objectives

By the end of this chapter you should be able to respond to the following questions:

• Is it possible to have children without childhood?
• Is childhood a modern invention?
• Why does society construct childhood?
• How does society construct modern childhood?
• How do constructions of childhood differ?
• What factors influence our current view of childhood?

Introduction

Each of us has experienced not one, but two childhoods: the first as a biological state of growth and development and the second as a social construction, which is to say as an institution that has been socially created. If this is true, then it follows that childhood is dependent on the nature of a society into which an individual is born and will vary from place to place and time to time. In the last half of the twentieth century a number of thinkers and writers in a variety of fields began to consider the ways in which this process of constructing childhood has been carried out, both in the past and today, and what the implications are for our experience of childhood and for current and future generations of children. If we accept this thesis then it follows that we can understand childhood only if we comprehend how it has been formed and how it varies and changes. These themes are explored throughout this chapter.

Children without childhood?

If childhood is constructed then it must be possible for there to be children without childhood. The idea may seem extraordinary, but it is possible. We take it for granted in modern western societies that there is a state we call ‘childhood’. It is a commonplace of our language about the young and enshrined in law, both national and international, where special protection is offered to persons usually under the age of 18. In part, such persons need these legal protections because they do not have the full rights of a citizen: the right to own property, to be a legal entity who can go before the courts and to participate in such events as elections. But what of societies where these rights were not given to all adults or even to none? In such a world the distinction between child and adult might seem less important. Such a view is dominant in a large part of the modern world where citizens have limited or no active rights in the accepted sense.

It is worth considering that this is also a good description of most societies in the past: even the relatively recent past. Democracy, in the accepted modern sense of participation in free elections, was extended to all women in Britain only as recently as 1928, and civil and legal rights have retained elements of a society run by men and by a small social elite until within a few decades of the present day. The very concept of human rights is also relatively recent in historical terms, dating largely from the late nineteenth century, and has been incorporated into British law only within the last two decades. As a result we should not be surprised if the extension of protection to children was not a major concern in most of our history. The very idea of children’s rights was not clearly formulated until the 1980s. With few rights for most citizens, the rights of the child, now so widely accepted, were hardly considered an important issue by anyone.

This appreciation of the relatively recent changes in ideas about children raises a number of important issues. Most important of these is the suggestion that if the nature of childhood is linked to changes about the nature of rights for adults and children, it is possible that childhood as a state is a very recent construction. If that is the case perhaps then it is a mere ‘invention’, much as we have invented democracy, capitalism or even, some would argue, the motor car. It is this possibility that led a number of investigations into the past of childhood in the twentieth century.

REFLECTIVE ACTIVITY 1.1

Children and rights

Consider what rights modern children have in law under the following headings.

• What types of laws protect children today?
• What rights do adults have that children do not?
• At what age do children begin to gain rights?
• At what age do they lose the protection that laws give them?

Now consider how this makes childhood a different experience from adulthood. Do these differences mark childhood from adulthood as a distinct and clearly defined state?

The invention of childhood

The issue of whether modern childhood is an invention began to occupy a number of historians from the 1960s onwards who, for the first time, began to seriously consider the history of children and childhood. The most important of these thinkers was the French medievalist Philippe Ariès whose investigations led him to state that in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist (1962: 125). While infants had to be cared for by parents, nurses or servants, Ariès believed that the evidence suggested that once they were old enough partially to fend for themselves, children were simply treated as if they were smaller adults. Thus childhood, in the modern sense of a separate and protected state, did not exist. He argued it was not until the modern period that this idea of ‘childhood’ came to be significant.

At the time, this thesis was widely accepted and built upon, partly because it fitted with the prevailing view of the past, particularly the distant past, as a cruel and unpleasant place. In particular Lloyd de Mause in a survey of the development of childhood stated that the history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only just begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused (1974: 2). Perhaps the most eminent historian of the family in this period, Lawrence Stone (1977) added to this view by arguing that the very high mortality rates among children in the past until very recently meant that parents could not ‘invest emotional capital’ in their children. As a result, he argued, they did not show affection for their offspring and consequently avoided the worst emotional damage that such attachment would inevitably involve if or when the child died.

It was not long before a number of historians began to challenge this view of attitudes to children and towards childhood as a state. Linda Pollock (1983) and Ralph Houlbrooke (1984) demonstrated comprehensively the abundance of evidence of affection for children and suffering at their loss by parents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shulamith Shahar (1990) perhaps provided the best counter to the Ariès thesis by demonstrating just how distinct and important childhood was as a state in the Middle Ages. Ariès seems to have been largely unaware of just how much was written about children and their natures in the period and his argument revolved around assumptions about the depiction of children in medieval art, where they are usually shown as smaller versions of adults dressed in adult clothing. Such a view makes some sweeping assumptions about both art and society, and such depictions, even if accurately described, may reflect artistic convention and ability as much as social norms.

However, this is not to say that the childhood that existed in the past was the same as modern childhood: it clearly was not. The fact that different societies in different times have distinct ideas about childhood indicates the ways in which childhood is contingent on the nature of a society and that the idea of childhood can be changed and reconstructed over time. What is important is to understand what those conditions were, how they came about and what forces led to that construction.

REFLECTIVE ACTIVITY 1.2

The conditions of childhood in the past

Read the following extract from an interview with John Birley from the Ashton Chronicle on 19 May 1884, recalling the working conditions of his childhood.

Our regular time was from five in the morning till nine or ten at night; and on Saturday, till eleven, and often twelve o’clock at night, and then we were sent to clean the machinery on the Sunday. No time was allowed for breakfast and no sitting for dinner and no time for tea. We went to the mill at five o’clock and worked till about eight or nine when they brought us our breakfast, which consisted of water-porridge, with oatcake in it and onions to flavour it. Dinner consisted of Derbyshire oatcakes cut into four pieces, and ranged into two stacks. One was buttered and the other treacled. By the side of the oatcake were cans of milk. We drank the milk and with the oatcake in our hand, we went back to work without sitting down.

Now consider the following issues.

• Why might small children be useful in running an industrial cotton mill?
• What were likely to be the effects on a child of this life in terms of education, physical development and mental health?
• Until the late nineteenth century most people accepted that this was a normal life for the children of the poor. How might they justify such attitudes?
• Could such children be described as having a childhood in the modern sense?

Why childhood is constructed

Examining the exploitation of child labour in the past is a reminder about why childhood might be constructed in a particular way. The key issue is who has to gain by regarding children from a perspective that makes useful their employment for very little or no wages, just as some might wish to be able to exploit the labour of women and the poor in general. The origins of the idea of social constructionism lie in observations about how a minority who made up a ruling elite were able to contain and exploit a majority. This issue concerned Karl Marx who pointed to the importance of ‘ideology’ as a force for maintaining the status quo. He and subsequent writers observed the ways in which a series of ideas that suited the aims of the ruling classes was spread and popularised among the population in general. They were often presented as ‘natural’, ‘fixed’ or ‘traditional’ even if they fitted circumstances that we know were relatively new or novel (Marx and Engels: 1970).

In nineteenth-century Britain a series of laws was passed aimed at improving the working conditions of children. Most of these limited the hours which children could be forced or allowed to work, backed up by a series of inspections of workplaces. In a debate that resonates with modern arguments over the exploitation of labour in the developing world, a frequent reason for objecting to such acts was that industry could not function without child labour. Thus radical change to the exploitation of child labour was impossible without bringing down the British economy. Such a view suggests how the exploitation of children could be linked to an ideology that supported the status quo. There was also an attempt to enlist support from the parents of these children by arguing that they provided vital income for their families and that the children were gainfully occupied and thus made a useful part of society. It seems that many of the poor, who might struggle on the edge of economic survival, accepted these arguments. In Marxist terms they had absorbed the prevailing ideology. It might be added that the same ideology also gave them absolute authority over their children in a world where they had authority over very little else.

In the formulation outlined by Antonio Gramsci, they had accepted the prevailing hegemony that pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Part 1: Social and cultural perspectives of childhood and youth
• Part 2: Childhood and youth development
• Part 3: Difference, diversity and multidisciplinary perspectives
• Part 4: Researching childhood and youth
• Appendices
• Index