Children Taken Seriously

In Theory, Policy and Practice

Jan Mason, Toby Fattore

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781843102502
• eBook ISBN: 9781846420993
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

In Children Taken Seriously, leading researchers and policy makers consider how children can be recognized as social actors rather than passive consumers or victims. Using children's own views and experiences as a starting point, they explore how children can be involved as partners in the decision-making processes that affect them, in social work, education, health care and broader social policies.

Chapters on the theoretical background draw parallels between developments in children's and women's rights, and discuss communication issues and social and sexual constructions of children. Other chapters explore issues of policy and practice in a variety of areas, from Family Group Conferencing and child protection to child labour and notions of active citizenship. Highlighting the important role of schools in empowering children, the authors discuss children's engagement in and participation in their own education and how children's rights theory influences debates over discipline.

This accessible and thought-provoking book is a rich source of insight and ideas for social workers, teachers, mental health professionals and anyone working with children.

PART 1

Theory

CHAPTER ONE

Women’s Studies/Childhood Studies

Parallels, Links and Perspectives

Leena Alanen

Introduction

The ongoing project of constructing a sociology of childhood may be seen to have started more or less in the 1980s, and concurrently in several countries. It first appeared in the form of a few isolated voices drawing critical attention to the ways in which children were (re)presented in the empirical and theoretical knowledge of the discipline: hardly at all, marginally at best, and when treated then merely as an ‘afterthought and as a support for the main construction’ (Jenks 1982, p. 13), and in any case not taken seriously and studied ‘in their own right’ (Hardman, as early as 1973, p.85). The worlds that sociologists studied were seemingly populated by adults only.

As such messages were carried forward they grew into critical self-reflection, leading first to a closer inspection of sociologists’ research practices, in order to find out how this ‘invisibilization’ of children was, in fact, produced.

The most obvious practice is, of course, the plain explicit exclusion of children as the empirical objects of study even when the issue was one or another aspect of children’s lives. Pseudo-inclusion was another common practice. Here children are, or at least seem to be, a genuine concern, but in the end they disappear from view. This occurs by way of treating children as ‘dependent variables’ of, or appendages to, some category of adults (such as parents). Pseudo-inclusion occurs also by way of focusing merely on those who ‘have’ children, take care of or work with them, or in some other way participate in the organizing of children’s everyday life conditions. Pseudo- inclusion is the case also when the focus is on the institutional regimes (family, school, child-work professions) under or within which children are subsumed, instead of focusing on children living and acting within these regimes.

On these grounds it is now possible to call sociology’s conceptual practices to account for these faults. The notion that was held particularly responsible for them was ‘socialization’ – perhaps naturally, for the simple reason that ‘socialization’ had long been foundational to sociological understandings of what children and childhood are. From the classical texts of the discipline to the latest textbooks, children were (and continue to be) depicted as non-social, not-yet-social or in the process of becoming social and therefore outside the province of sociology (see Ambert 1986). The perspective on children provided by ‘socialization’ was now seen to be, first, inherently adult-centred, or ‘adultist’, because children came into view only from the viewpoint of adults and their specific concerns; and, second, it was an inherently ‘forward-looking’, or anticipatory, perspective in its interest in what children were going to be, and not in what they currently were: social becomings, not social beings.¹ Sociology, in summary, was in a number of ways and for several reasons, massively adult-centred – adultist – and therefore partial and even biased (e.g. Goode 1986; Waksler 1986).

The project now became one of bringing children and their perspectives into sociology. Turning away from the adultist and forward-looking perspective suggested that the new approaches now needed to be ‘child-centred’: they would focus directly on children, as speaking, acting and experiencing subjects with their own perspectives to the world in which they – and we – live.

This launching stage in the field of Childhood Studies bears comparison with the beginnings of Women’s Studies. Some 15 to 20 years earlier, another wave of critique and subsequent corrective refocusing of research had appeared in social science (as in science in general). Then, feminists had observed the remarkable and parallel absence of women and women’s issues in both the theoretical and the empirical subject matter of science, despite its prevailing beliefs and pretensions to scientific truth and objectivity – this was, of course, a clear inconsistency. By bringing this to general awareness and by demanding that it be redressed, feminists posed ‘the “woman question” in science’ (Harding 1986 p.29; 1991, p.49).

As a public issue, the ‘woman question’ was not a new one: it already had a history. But it was only in the 1970s that the issue was brought inside academic institutions, by the force of the second wave of the women’s movement, with a new social consciousness and a new political analysis of women’s oppression as a sex. With this analysis in mind it soon became obvious that equality did not prevail in academia either, in its institutions and in the knowledge produced in them. ‘Sexism’ – the unequal treatment of people based on their sex – existed even here. The posing of the ‘woman question in science’ marked the political identification and the opposition to this situation, and the emerging scholarship of Women’s Studies was the practical response, aimed at reconstructing both the institution and the knowledge.

Critiques of old scholarship and attempts at reconstruction have appeared in the history of social sciences even before this,² and since the emergence of Women’s Studies the critical tradition has only continued. After feminists, other social movements, such as those of people of colour, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, postcolonial and native peoples, and others, have each in turn criticized science for gaps in its knowledge and for distorted understandings of ‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality, postcolonial relations, and so on (e.g. Albrow 1990; Krüger 1987; Nicholson 1990). As in the case of the feminist challenge, these critiques have been followed by new fields of critical investigation: witness Black Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Native Studies – all with the aim of intervening within the existing knowledge in the interests of their own particular constituency.

Placing the critique of adultism in science within this tradition of critical interventions means arguing that children now also constitute a social category that has been ‘done wrong’ – with similar consequences of absenting them and distorting their social place and contributions. It also means that for the new Childhood Studies, parallels and even models exist that suggest possible routes to proceed along, and conceptual tools to try out in developing a sociology that this time will take children seriously.

In everyday social life, women and children are, of course, socially linked in many ways, and they share a number a social characteristics (see e.g. Alanen 1992; 1994; Oakley 1994). This alliance of women and children already suggests possibilities for using the achievements of feminist scholarship as a resource for developing the new field of Childhood Studies. A closer examination of the stages through which Women’s Studies have gone reveals that even more is to be gained from reading Women’s Studies and Childhood Studies in parallel, and looking for links and perspectives for developing the latter. To me, the concept of gender is one powerful resource to be borrowed from Women’s Studies and made useful for Childhood Studies. Children, too, are gendered, of course, but the usefulness of the notion of gender lies beyond this. For gender is essentially a relational concept, as is childhood. In a sociological sense, ‘children’ and ‘adults’ name two social categories that are positioned within a generational relation to each other. So here elaborations on the relational logic of gender, as it has been developed within Women’s Studies, provides inspiration also for rethinking childhood relationally.

The main part of the following chapter consists of a rather compact analysis of the development of feminist scholarship. I organize this development into stages, and then read the achievements of each stage in relation to Childhood Studies. Based on this, three succeeding stages leading from one to another can also be recognized for Childhood Studies:

1.The stage of critique and child-centred research.

2.The stage of developing generational concepts specific to a sociology of childhood.

3.The stage of theoretical reconstruction by means of developing a children’s standpoint.

The chapter ends with the suggestion that constructing a ‘children’s standpoint’ opens up issues of generational power to consider, not only by researchers in their research contexts, but also in the everyday practical politics of childhood, where it may provide a more comprehensive and effective instrument than respecting ‘children’s own perspectives’.

Women’s Studies/Childhood Studies: Parallel departures and developments

There exists, then, a clear parallel between Women’s Studies and Childhood Studies already in the beginning stage of each. Just as feminism had entered the field of science with the criticism that a ‘sexual politics’ reigns in its institutions, causing a systematic male-centredness in its knowledge, sociologists of childhood have presented a parallel critique of adultism in social-science knowledge. Critique called for ‘better’ science, in both cases.

In the case of Women’s Studies, the new research began with the twin task of (1) filling the gaps observed in existing knowledge, and (2) revising it for its biases and distortions. Also, completely new issues needed to be studied reflecting a range of women’s long neglected concerns, such as housework, childbirth, mothering, incest, abortion, rape, domestic violence, heterosexuality, sexual harassment, pornography and equal rights. Also a number of mainstream topics, such as (paid) work, power, political participation, modernization or class structure, were in need of re-examination because women’s part in them had been missing; re-examinations, in turn, lead to reinterpretations, especially when new empirical findings could not be fitted into existing analytical frames and theories.

Observations of children’s marginal place, if not absence, in social science was a similar point of departure for organizing Childhood Studies. The critique of adultist bias and partiality, and the claim that childhood is a social phenomenon deserving to be studied in its own right, parallels with the feminist challenge, as does the recent upsurge of new research with its direct focusing on children. Here we can see the logic of the first stage of academic feminism – adding of women into science – repeated. Now children, too, were ‘added’ to existing accounts of social life where previously only adults has been identified as actors.

From critique to child-centred research

The first researchers within social science to take children seriously – as ‘persons in their own right’ and as the sociological equals of adults – often shared a background in ethnography, symbolic interactionism or phenomenological analysis (e.g. Mayall 1996; Prout and James 1990). Actors’ involvement in the construction of their own lives is foundational to such approaches. Therefore, the study of children’s work, cultures and social relationships has been ‘natural’ within them, as also has been the practice of suspending (as far as it goes) researchers’ own perspectives. Beginning from critique, then, a space was opened for investigations that start with the assumption that children are actively present in social life, and then goes on to explore their daily lives, relationships, experiences, identities, knowledges and cultures. Many new topics and issues have become researchable, and new interpretations on children and their lives have been added to existing knowledge.

The shift in the approaches and contents of the study of children has been remarkable enough to deserve the name of a completely new paradigm. Since the new paradigm was introduced, as in the book edited by Allison James and Alan Prout (1990), some of its ‘tenets’ have cohered so much as to rename it the ‘competence paradigm’ (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998b). This is the methodology for child-centred research that seeks

•to take children seriously as social agents in their own right;

•to examine how social constructions of childhood not only structure their lives but also are structured by the activities of children themselves; and

•to explicate the social competencies which children manifest in the course of their everyday lives as children, with other children and with adults, in peer groups and in families, as well as the manifold other arenas of social action. (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998a, p.8)

One significant feature, recurrently appearing in and strengthened through this child-centred research, is its tendency to play down many presumed differences between children and adults. Children, in and through this research, appear as ‘ordinary social beings’, in contrast to their previously assumed difference as social ‘becomings’ (Qvortrup 1985; Waksler 1991). Children are now seen to move and act in the very same world as other people do, and not only within these limited worlds of play, care and learning that have been especially ‘appointed’ for them. Their ordinariness is even more manifest in the range of capacities that this research demonstrates as theirs: interpretative skills, social and interactional competences, sophisticated knowledges and strategic thinking (e.g. Fine and Sandstrom 1988; Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998b; James 1993).

Evidence of children’s social ordinariness helps to de-emphasize the dissimilarities of children in comparison with adults, and highlights their similarities. Consequently, the completely separate study of children or childhood, with separate sets of methods, concepts and theories, begins to lose its justification and we are left with no clear reason for why the ‘normal’ conceptual apparatus of the discipline should also be inappropriate or unworkable in the case of children. This suggests a novel strategy – of ‘stretching’ – as a useful one for expanding the field of childhood research.

The sociology of work provides an example. By choosing to look at a number of children’s activities as work (instead of learning, play, or development), the range of meanings that normally, or conventionally, are attached to the activities in question is also ‘stretched’ to include even other meanings – in this case, social meanings of work. Stretching the notion of work does even more: by assuming and elaborating on specific activities as children’s work, new issues come into view for consideration, such as the social valuation of children’s activities, benefits and profits that accrue from their work, the distribution of these benefits, children’s relative positioning in the actual organization of work, as well as the consequences of their positioning for their own experiences and knowledge.

A stretching practice is, of course, open for extension to any of the sociological subfields: family sociology, sociology of knowledge, political sociology, sociology of social change. Also, any of the available theoretical framings in the subfield in question may be tried out, on the crucial condition that children are brought on stage and focused on as actors.

There are yet few examples of such conceptual practice in the sociology of childhood. The fact that the first cases have been in the sociology of work is hardly accidental: for if one chooses to signify particular activities as ‘work’, automatically a sense of ‘agency’ is attributed to the subjects performing those activities. Work, moreover, is immediately also a social activity, performed under particular social conditions. Signifying an activity expressly as work helps (perhaps more easily than any other signification) to preserve within the analytic frame the agency of those doing the work – in this case, children – and confines the research to the new ‘competence paradigm’.

We are reminded that conceptual stretching was frequently practised also during the first ‘add-on’ stage of feminist scholarship – as, for instance, in the conceptual move from ‘motherhood’ as a given, passive, perhaps ‘natural’ condition of being a woman to ‘mothering’ as a social activity or socially necessary work that is differentially, and unequally, divided between women and men and also economically and culturally devalued (Alanen 1992, pp.30–31).

Through stretching, what earlier appeared more as the effect of the work performed by other actors on or with children (such as parents, teachers, caretakers, or agents of socialization), now comes into view as children’s work on themselves, and even on others. This, of course, does not in any way invalidate or devalue the work of those others involved; rather, the investments of work in the activities in question have increased, as also has the number of ‘workers’ who interact and cooperatively produce a concerted wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Foreword
• Working Seriously Towards New Partnerships: An Introduction
• Part 1: Theory
• Part 2: Policy
• Part 3: Practice
• Appendix: Transcript Notation
• References
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index