Conceptualising Child-Adult Relations

Leena Alanen, Berry Mayall, Leena Alanen, Berry Mayall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134579426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Conceptualising Child-Adult Relations focuses on how children conceptualise and experience child-adult relations. The authors explore the idea of generation as a key to understanding children's agency in intersection with social worlds which are largely organised and ordered by adults. The authors explore two interconnected themes: how children define the division of labour between children and adults, and how far children regard themselves as constituting a seperate group. This book is ground-breaking in its focus on the variety and commonality in children's lives and views across a broad range of contexts. It provides innovative theoretical approaches to the growing study of childhood by homing in on intergenerational relations as a main concept, and draws attention to links across the main sites of children's lives such as the home, neighbourhood and school. Moreover, for policy related issues, this book provides food for thought about the social conditions and status of childhood, and the factors structuring it.

1 Introduction

Berry Mayall

An edited collection…

A collaboration towards a book

This book has been some time in the making. Leena Alanen and Berry Mayall first began to plan it in early 1996 when they were both working at the Department of Child Studies, Linköping University in Sweden. Their discussions grew out of their previous work; Leena had taken part in the Nordic One Parent study, Berry in UK studies on children’s lives at home and school. They shared an interest in the work of the Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project—Leena had worked on the Finnish report (Alanen and Bardy 1990). Out of these discussions came the idea for a book which drew on studies from a range of societies, both majority and minority, where a common thread was the collection of empirical data with children about their everyday lives. Such a collection of papers would be the basis for theoretical exploration of childhood.

As editors we wanted the book to develop through collaboration. This would allow us to provide a concerted effort towards conceptualising childhood as a relational concept; at more practical levels it could lead to some consistency across the chapters. We established an e-mail list of contributors to exchange information, and held meetings with individual contributors as convenient. We also held three group meetings: in Finland (summer 1998), in England (spring 1999), in Germany (autumn 1999). These contacts allowed us to understand each other’s interest in the topic and to work towards some common ground. We were able to discuss draft chapters and to consider relationships between the chapters.

All the contributors are well established researchers, and all are interested in the ‘new childhood studies’. They come from varying backgrounds as regards discipline or departmental siting, and their areas or fields of study vary. Between them they have allegiances or histories in anthropology, sociology, psychology, education studies and social policy work. But it is reasonable to say that the core discipline under-pinning this book is sociology.

Purposes of the book

In this book we aim to consider child-adult relations using data collected with children. In particular we aim to focus on generational issues in child-adult relations. In seeking to develop understandings of childhood as a relational concept, we may initially identify three interlinked components of the concept, which may help in the exploration of child-adult relations at local and larger-scale levels. In each component, notions of childhood are at issue, and within and across the three components, time past, present and future require to be taken into account.

Firstly, at local levels, individual children and adults must interrelate across age divisions, power inequalities and (in families) household norms and needs. On the latter, the interactions and negotiations may be understood within a framework of a common enterprise—the household and the well-being of household members. At school child-adult relationships in the present intersect with the formal purposes and informal customs of schools, established in the past and looking to the future. An issue that arises here is possible gaps or conflicts between young people’s experience of their lives and the adult assignment of characteristics to them. Those called children may not—or not in all contexts— define themselves as children; and, as discussed in, for instance, Chapters 5 and 9, evidence of children’s moral agency does not square with adult mistrust of children’s moral competence. Children’s notions of their own and family history, as well as children’s present and future, are critical issues here.

Secondly, relationships are also constituted between social groups: the social group children and the social group adults interact across the generations. Here we may be centrally concerned with notions of ‘childhood’ and of ‘adulthood’; how people understand these and the distinctions between them; how they construct, legislate for, or enact behaviour at group level between the two groups. These understandings have their roots in time past—which throw long shadows forward—and they are re-negotiated and transformed through interactions between the groups. For instance, in Chapter 7, Helen Penn gives a dramatic example of such transformations, using the case of Outer Mongolia. The interests of the social group children may differ from those of the social group adults; and the impacts of social policies and norms will vary as between those two broad groups. Social demands made of the social group children may focus on time future, as well as on time present (or on time present in relation to time future).

Thirdly, adults belong to a different generation from children. Adults, born at a point 20 to 40 years before their children, carry with them knowledge, assumptions and experience acquired during their trajectory through their lives, and influenced by social forces in operation during their life span to date. The impacts of time past are therefore an important focus of study here. Thus in Chapter 4, Helga Zeiher analyses the impacts of past understandings of motherhood (and of childhood) on children’s childhoods in Berlin now. As a later generation, children have been subject to social forces belonging to a later historical period than the generation of their parents. One small example, from the UK, is the character of school experience, for social policies and practices on school-based education have changed dramatically since parents of school-age children went to school. Children seem more accepting of current education practices than their parents (Kelley, Mayall and Hood 1997). So, whilst interactions between adult social groups may also reflect differing histories, interactions and negotiations between children and adults may perhaps be regarded as characterised more profoundly by generational difference.

Developing theoretical ideas about such issues constitutes an important strand in childhood studies and we devote the next chapter to a theoretical analysis of key areas. In Chapter 2, Leena Alanen analyses the concept of generation and suggests generation as a system of relationships among social positions. Thus children and adults are the holders of specific social positions which are defined in relation to each other and are defined within specific social structures. For instance, the family generational structure is a nexus of connections between those assigned to ‘child’ and those assigned to ‘parents’; and this nexus both affects the actions of the people holding these positions, and is affected by their actions. Within the structure of the school, similarly, the actions of ‘children’ or ‘pupils’ are affected by the complex of relations in force, as are the actions of ‘teachers’, and at the same time, that complex of relations is affected by the actions of the people acting within this generational structure.

These ideas about the significance of generation as a key concept for analysing childhood derive from the seminal work of Mannheim (1952 [1928]); for him a generation consists of people who are exposed (especially in youth—regarded as a formative period) to broadly the same set of historical, cultural and/or political events and movements. In some cases such a generation of people become what he terms a generational unit, where they not only share perspectives, but are aware that others share them, and then, in some cases work together (as for instance the French Impressionists). People refer to the 1968 generation as people (now moving towards old age) whose consciousness or identity was shaped at that time. In Britain, we may similarly think of ‘Thatcher’s children’ (Pilcher and Wagg 1996) as a generation of people in Britain whose ideas and purposes were formed in relation to social movements in the 1980s.

In exploring the generational structures within which childhood (and adulthood) is continuously produced and lived, an essential component of one’s understanding is that children are agents. That is, they are not merely ‘actors’—people who do things, who enact, who have perspectives on their lives. They are also to be understood as agents whose powers, or lack of powers, to influence and organise events—to engage with the structures which shape their lives—are to be studied.

Like other books in this Falmer series on childhood, this one includes studies covering a range of societies. This range opens up possibilities for theoretical analysis across childhoods. As contributors it has required us to discuss both as individuals and in group meetings ways in which child-adult relations are understood and operationalised in varying social conditions. It allows us and our readers to re-assess our assumptions, by problematising the dominance of studies from ‘western’ societies. It also allows us to consider the appropriateness of any one conceptualisation of childhood (or generational relations) in each of the conditions studied.

The research studies

Chapters 3 to 10 each draw on an empirical study where data were collected with children. All the studies concern the daily lives of ‘ordinary’ children, and the chapters consider children’s agency in intersection with the varying social contexts that shape the distribution of their time at home, out and about, and at school. The data are used to discuss generational relations— that is, we try to link up the empirical evidence of childhoods relations with adulthood, with the larger-scale social processes that may be thought to determine those relations.

Each chapter follows the same order. It starts with an introductory section outlining the social, historical, political processes which give rise to the researcher’s interest in the topic. A discussion on theoretical issues follows. The empirical study and its methods are described. The chapter then presents study data and it ends with a discussion.

In Sam Punch’s paper (Chapter 3), children’s agency is seen through the ways they seek to control and organise their use of time and space, within the limitations of the specific social ordering of subsistence households in rural Bolivia. She describes parental expectations that children contribute to household economic and social welfare, in domestic work, animal-related work and agriculture. Parents assume that children have obligations and responsibilities. Children in turn understand their contributions as important and valuable. Thus child-adult relationships can be seen as reciprocal or inter-dependent. Sam’s interest is also in what children make of these expectations; whether they, as studies in other societies argue, resist and negotiate. She shows that they do indeed have their own agendas and preferences for use of time and space; and that they employ strategies of various kinds in relation to the tasks they are asked to do: avoidance, coping, attempts at re-allocating the task.

Discussion of dependence, independence and interdependence in child-adult relationships is taken up by Helga Zeiher (Chapter 4). She describes intersections between changes in ideas about child-rearing and changes in the social situation of mothers in West Germany over the last third of the twentieth century. Alongside these developments, the mother as housewife has gradually lost its primary significance as women have entered paid (mainly part-time) employment. Taking up the intersections of these developments, Helga uses three case studies of families in West Berlin to analyse how children achieve their personal position in the inter-generational relationships of the household, by shaping their activities in the context of the demands, constraints and possibilities they face. Theoretically, the analysis centres on child-adult relationships understood within constellations of historical processes, that is, as cohort relationships.

Cléopatre Montandon (Chapter 5) takes a specific point in the history of child-adult relationships in her study of children’s experience of parents as educators at a time when education law in the canton of Geneva expects public primary schools to complement ‘family education’ and parents to support the school’s mission. Yet there is no consensus about the meaning of these terms. And whilst education reforms are based on ‘child-centred’ principles, children’s lives are increasingly controlled and ‘scholarised’ out of school hours. Cléopatre reports here on children’s thoughts, feelings and actions as regards the ways their parents educate them: their views on parental authority and control and the strategies they use to face parental demands; their responses to parental projects and plans for their futures; and their accounts of home-school relations. The chapter reveals complex intersections of past, present and future in children’s lives; parental practices now derive from knowledge and experience as participants in earlier cohort learning; children’s experiences now also intersect with their own and parents’ expectations and wishes for their futures. Cléopatre notes too relationships between the diversity of children’s home experience and the pluralism and rapid change of the wider society.

Developments in educational policy in England and Wales provide the social context for children’s experiences of learning at school, discussed in Chapter 6 by Pia Christensen and Allison James. These developments, including a National Curriculum, regular testing and competition between schools for custom, have meant that time has become an increasingly scarce resource at school. Pia and Allison explore the critical importance for children and teachers of control over time-use in relation to the social organisation and experience of schooling. Drawing on structuration theory, they show how the ‘school’ can be understood as an institution in process rather than as a fixed site of constraint; and how the ‘school’ is contingent on the everyday decisions and actions of both adults and children. Whilst adults at school have more control over time-use and space-use than children do, yet children act as agents in influencing their own experience. The chapter shows how they employed ‘time-shifting’ strategies, whereby, through modifying their attitudes to the work, they could alter the tempo of the day.

The changing culture of education in the UK—a wealthy minority society— is taking place in the context of global competitiveness. Mongolia—a poor majority world country—provides another example showing how such large-scale forces impact on children’s daily lives. Helen Penn (Chapter 7) describes how this traditionally nomadic and pastoralist society, a client-state of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1990, is now coping with the collapse of a system where basic universalist health and veterinary services and education services were provided. Nowadays, the herders must pay for such services and they do so through building up their herds; the only resource for the increased level of animal-care is children. As Helen describes, decreasing proportions of children now go to school, and many for only short periods. But at school, they are beginning to be exposed to the competitive, individualistic assumptions of the minority world. Thus children are not only learning a pastoralist life in a subsistence economy, but negotiating ideological change, from communism to market rhetoric. Whilst children have traditionally been taught to be respectful and obedient to adults, they are now faced with powerful minority world images of freedom and choices dependent on material goods, which they do not have.

Children living in a subsistence economy may be unused to being asked their opinion; children in schools in many societies may be used to learning what they are told rather than participating in the construction of knowledge. Chapter 8 provides us with a dramatic case where children are commonly silent. In the minority world, discourses on child abuse, as Jan Mason and Jan Falloon explore, tend to be adult-centred; they are constructed without children’s contributions. By pathologising ‘abusers’ in contrast to ‘normal’ adults and families, and by defining children as victims, these discourses effectively emphasise child protection policy as the control of deviancy. In this chapter, unusually, we hear the views of young people living in ‘normal’ families (in Sydney). In their view, child abuse is the use of adult power to control children; it is a component of ‘normal’ adult behaviour to children; and it is institutionalised through the legitimation of unequal power relations between adults and children. The focus of the group discussions on the specific topic, child abuse, provided the young people with the opportunity to expand their arguments on a critical issue for them: adults’ unjust behaviour and children’s complementary understanding that adults regard them as not yet fully human.

Inter-generational relations are the focus of Berry Mayall’s study (Chapter 9), and, like the Sydney young people, her London sample stressed adult power and authority as essential components of these relations. She discussed with children how they understand the social status of childhood, parenthood and adulthood; and by asking them next to describe and discuss their daily lives, she sought to consider how well their (to some extent normative) accounts of childhood squared with their experiences. In particular, she found that children’s experience of their moral status was highly ambivalent; they were routinely suspected and disbelieved, yet also expected to be responsible agents; and they displayed in their accounts their competence in the construction and maintenance of relationships, in managing school work and in carrying out household jobs and childcare work. A striking feature of London children’s lives is the heavy restrictions placed by parents on their access to space outside the home and school. ‘Traffic danger’ and ‘stranger danger’ have become powerful factors here; the protection and exclusion of children and of childhood is taken to extremes, by comparison with many societies. This is the social context for the emphasis children put on their family as their principal source of comfort and happiness; and whilst to British ears that may seem obvious, a commentary on it is provided by Leena Alanen’s discussion.

In Chapter 10, Leena discusses her study of children living in a suburb of a central Finnish town. Social policies here have ensured that almost all parents work full-time, that housing is clean, safe and easily managed, that a substantial free meal is provided at school, that safe routes are provided from home to school and around the neighbourhood. Unlike London children, these go to school unaccompanied by adults, and organise their own time after school—at home, in the neighbourhood, and in various activities. These are the contexts for Leena’s analysis which shows that whilst all the children speak easily and warmly about family, friends, school and special interests, they divide up as to which of these domains is the main site of their activity and interest. Thus ‘being a child’ clearly means different things for children strong in each of the four domains; only the family children clearly identified themselves mainly as a child. Children whose allegiance was in the other domains had less to say about inter-generational issues. However, by dint of the material basis for their lives as dependents in adult-led households, all the children also occupied a distinct ‘child’ position.

Researching with children

Collecting data with children

This book provides instances of a wide range of methods of data collection. In each case, as they describe, the researcher/s worked towards methods and ‘tools’ as appropriate for the study aims, the topics under consideration and the social context within which data could or should be collected. For instance, Jan Mason and Jan Falloon aimed to tap into young people’s knowledge and understanding of child abuse. This is a sensitive topic and it was particularly important to ask the young people to participate fully in considering methods and siting of data collection. They themselves chose the format of group discussions, the composition of the group and the familiar site of the home. By contrast, Helen Penn aimed to consider childhood in the social context of life in the Mongolian steppes; and given time-limits, language barriers, and the complexity of the topic, she collected data through a range of methods: observation, a commissioned autobiography, discussions with adults, and with children via an interpreter, through study of official documents and of the historical context. In the Genevan context, it was possible and appropriate to interview children at home, and then with renewed permission at school. Leena, but not Berry, could accompany children on walks around the neighbourhood, since strangers are differently understood in Finland as compared to England.

In all, the chapters add to the growing literature on methods of research with children (for instance, Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998b; Sinclai...