Constructions of Childhood in India

Exploring the Personal and Sociocultural Contours

Ravneet Kaur

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book explores the dominant constructions of childhood as perceived by children and adults in contemporary Indian society. It unveils the everyday lived experiences of children within family life to explain the meaning of childhood and the position of children as social groups.

Based on detailed qualitative study, this volume discusses the themes and issues that impact dominant constructions of childhood. It establishes childhood as a structurally constructed category and sheds light on how key social differences influence the diverse experiences of childhood. The book critically examines how children, as social actors, contribute to the structural space of childhood through the recognition of their own experiences, voices, and ways of interpretations. Further, it also compares and analyses childhoods of today with those of the past generations.

Engagingly written and nuanced, the book will be of great interest to teachers and students of education, childhood studies, elementary education, sociology of education and social psychology. It will also be useful for teachers of teacher training institutions, policymakers, educationalists, education professionals, parents and researchers working with children and childhood studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003097044-1

We tend to become so habitual to children’s presence around us that we seldom stop to ponder over “who” and “what” is a child? When we think about children, what are the most striking images that come to our minds? Do children align perfectly with these perceived images that adults carry about them? As individuals, how do children live and experience their childhood? Are children entities in their own right? What is childhood as a life stage all about? Does the form of childhood remain static and universal or does it change over time and place? These unanswered questions, which continue to intrigue parents, grandparents, students, teachers and those working closely with children, became the starting point of this book.

As the quest to seek answers to these questions began, soon it dawned that in the existing academic discourse and literature on childhood, there appears little consensus about many of the issues related to childhood. There seemed to be a widespread tendency to routinize and naturalize childhood. In fact within everyday rhetoric and many theoretical discourses, childhood is often taken for granted. Perhaps “everyone” “knows” about childhood, yet there seems to be certain tentativeness about how to define who a child is and what childhood is. What came across was that since it is part of “normal life”—its utter “thereness” seems to foster a complacent attitude about it (Jenks, 1996). These claims made on childhood through common-sense reasoning appear conventional rather than disciplined (Garfinkel, 1967; Schutz, 1964). What came to the fore as universally acceptable was the view that childhood is an important period of life since childhood experiences are known to impact adulthood as a life stage as well. Another important view that found articulation was that childhood in itself is not a homogeneous category (Buckingham, 2000), and there are many contradictions in formulating a single, binding definition of childhood and its usage for different memberships and privileges.

The present chapter aims to introduce the conceptual framework which guided the research undertaken to explore the personal and social constructions of childhood. The insights gained from the research become the core matter of this book. Most of the theory has been drawn from Childhood Studies, Developmental Psychology, studies in the Sociology of Childhood and from the lived experiences and ground realities of children’s lives.

Among the dominant ways of understanding childhood, the major paradigm for studying children got established through Developmental Psychology (Walkerdine, 2009; Woodhead, 2003), where there is extensive reliance on the development metaphor (Hogan, 2005). Taking this ahead, Burman (2008) has highlighted that within the academic imagery of the disciplines of Developmental Psychology, Child Development and Education, childhood has traditionally been understood in terms of development and progression. Most educational policies across the world rest on the developmental approach to childhood (Woodhead, 2006). This approach largely draws on the works of Piaget (1968), Kohlberg (1969, 1971) and Erikson (1950) among others, in which, universal features of change and growth through predictable chronological age and stage-based theories are identified and described. The developmental paradigm is based on the idea of predetermined stages leading towards the eventual achievement of logical competence. They encapsulate the idea that children are “human becomings”, in a state of “not yet being” (Corsaro, 2011; James & Prout, 1997); lacking the skills, capacities and powers of adults (Archard, 2004); and thus on a stage-like journey to adult competence which is characterized as rational, mature and responsible (Verhellen, 1997; Walkerdine, 1993). Bruner (1986) added that through the communal processes of culture, what children gradually appropriate is the adult world. Jenks (1992) laid emphasis on an evolutionary model, where the child developing into an adult represented a progression from simplicity to complexity of thought and behaviour. However, he highlighted the fact that there may be diversity of childhoods on the way to adulthood (Jenks, 1996).

For a substantial period of time, most discourses on children remained largely Eurocentric (Raman, 2000) and were characterized by the will to reason (Cannella & Viruru, 2004). In fact, there is a predominance of the developmental paradigm and the use of Western discourses in understanding childhood in India as well. One of the reasons for this could be the absence of documentation of any other ways of looking at childhood. Vasanta (2004) acknowledges that published accounts of childhood development patterns in non-Western societies are few. Sharma (2003), who undertook a review of studies on childhood in the Indian context, concluded that “the lack of systematic longitudinal data on Indian children has been coupled with the importation of Western developmental psychological categories for understanding children” (Sharma, 2003: 42). Psychologists too expressed the view that in India what is known about the normal and abnormal childhood experiences is relatively little (Mohanty & Prakash, 1993; Pandey, 2001; Viruru, 2001), but the beginning of systematic engagement with the study of uniqueness of childhood has begun of late (Mohanty & Prakash, 1993). The more recent research done in the Indian context is beginning to take cognizance of the limited universal, age-related characteristics of development and build criticism about them.

What can be seen is that basically, the assumptions of the traditional developmental theories that viewed childhood as universal, uniform and fixed, rather than being a sociocultural phenomenon influenced by culture and context, have in the last decade been challenged, and alternate approaches to understanding childhood have been floated (Saraswathi, Menon & Madan, 2018). The section that follows presents some of them, particularly those that impacted the envisioning of the research undertaken. The text that follows begins by deconstructing the myth of the universality of childhood, focuses on multiple childhoods and presents arguments in support of socially and historically constructed notions about childhood.

1.1 Childhood as socially constructed

This approach to the study of childhood is committed to the view that “child” is not just a “biological” category and childhood is not necessarily a “natural” phenomenon (Aries, 1962). It emphasizes that children are socially constituted (Jenks, 1992; Qvortrup, 1993; Stainton Rogers, Hevey, Roche, & Ash, 1991), and childhood is a culture-specific (Misra & Srivastava, 2003) socially constructed “construct”. This approach anchors to the work of James and James (2004) who explicated the socially constructed nature of childhood. It finds roots in the new paradigm of childhood studies (James & Prout, 1990). It highlights the view that it is not possible to imagine universal and invariant characteristics of childhood (Aries, 1962; Gergen, Gloger-Tippelt & Berkowitz, 1990), neither can childhood be seen as static and timeless. Childhood varies as a function of time period and space (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998). The notions of childhood thus need to be situated and understood through a cultural lens, its varying social contexts (Jenks, 1996) and processes through which human development takes shape (Sharma & Chaudhary, 2009). There is no finite form of childhood and this has been established historically (Aries, 1962) and cross-culturally (Mead & Wolfenstein, 1954; Whiting & Whiting, 1975). James and Prout (1997) support this by explaining that the immaturity of children may be a biological fact of life, but the manner in which this immaturity is understood and provided with a meaning depends on the cultural context in which it is situated. Each culture defines children and childhood differently and these beliefs mediate what it means to be a child as well as when childhood begins and ends (Richards & Light 1986; Schaffer 1996; Woodhead, Faulkner, & Littleton, 1998). These particular cultural constructs are a product of the long-term evolution of the cultural consciousness of people over centuries. Such constructs shape how people behave with and relate to children (Kakar, 1979). Children too learn to think, feel, communicate and act within the cultural practices and processes of a particular sociocultural context.

Saraswathi (1999), in her research on childhood, focused on the socialization settings, processes, outcomes and ways of studying childhood in the sociocultural matrix. She highlighted that out of the three models of socialization (Jahoda & Lewis, 1987) that had emerged from European thought—the unfolding model (based on the belief of inherent potentials for which nurture only provides a forum); the moulding model (with emphasis on shaping, training and dominance of nurture); and the interactive model (which acknowledges the role of both nature and nurture), the last two models are what govern most of the research on socialization and stand as best representations of Indian ethnotheories about children and their development. She added that the Indian psyche sees the child as born with basic predispositions (based on his genetic makeup and also carry over from his previous birth). The role of the family is to nurture the child so that his potentials are actualized and negative tendencies constrained.

Kakar as early as 1979, in the Inner World, argued that the traditional cultural prescriptions relating to childhood possess an enduring continuity that influences caregiving in contemporary times, and so they must be factored in into any study of modern childhood. Burman (2008) too endorsed this idea. She saw the discourses of childhood being central to the ways in which the place and position of childhood is impacted. She argued that they are part of the cultural narratives that “define who we are, why we are the way we are and where we are going” (Burman, 2008: 67).

1.1.1 Social class as a dimension of socially constructed childhood

While collectivising children into childhood, there is an inherent threat of losing on the differences between children with regard to their gender, social class (Gittins, 2009), disability (James and Prout, 1997) and ethnicity (Ferreira, 2004). This section of the chapter discusses social class as one of the major dimensions that colour the social construction of childhood.

Social class is a significant variable that looks at social and economic disadvantage in childhood. Vasanta (2004) argued that there is a dominance of the middle-class white, male urban childhood as the norm in psychology, education, welfare policy and legislation for children. She thus emphasized an urgent need to rethink some of the prevalent notions about childhood, work and schooling and incorporate social class differences into the study of childhood. Cannella and Viruru (2004) emphasize that a universal claim that each child finds opportunities to play, experiment and discover their world are indeed exclusionary. Mehta (1997) comments that despite these being “universals” that bind children, they still work for exclusion. In his view, all children across cultures do not grow up in similar environments. Within cultural anthropology, Das (2003) and Nieuwenhuys (1999a) focus on the meanings children give to issues of violence and labour that affect them. Further, child labour and schooling have also been studied over time (Balagopalan, 2008). The micro-lives of 300 children and the processes involved in curriculum transaction by children belonging to working-class families, studying in government schools in Andhra Pradesh, India, were studied by Pappu and Vasanta (2010). The authors flagged lack of fit between quality and inequality in school education because much of educational theory assumes that every child in the classroom is the same. The study challenged the fixed meanings of childhood across economic classes and communities.

In addition to these, one needs to include the complex familial sociocultural milieu into the study of childhood. The variables of economic status, parental education and family type were used by Devi and Rani (1997) to capture associations between the quality of social environment and children’s intellectual performance. In upper-class urban homes, Chaudhary (1995) found that personal space, privacy and exclusion have become highly valued. Further, there are researchers who point out that child rearing practices were communicated within extended family ties, but with erosion of the extended norms, there appear to be class differences between mothers who rely on their mothers’ advice and those who reach out for professional help for raising their children (Jones, 1987; Vukelich & Kumar, 1985). Hence, child rearing must also be seen through the lens of social class. These studies are insightful as they highlight the apparent differences in the childhoods of children from different social classes and gender. They steered the inclusion of overall family environment into the present study on childhood and children within families.

Chaudhary (2004) very firmly reiterates the view that to understand childhood and socialization, the cultural setting is an important component that needs to be woven in. The family provides the first and the foremost institution within the social structure of which a child operates. She adds that culture plays a significant role in constructing childhood and adulthood. The process of construction of childhood and culture is a two-way process. The young child is an important participant in the construction and reconstruction of culture and vice versa. Thus, to understand childhood, it must be contextualized against the overall social dynamics of culture and contexts constructing it. For instance, dependency, emotionalism, compliancy and group mindedness are some of the defining characteristics of Indian culture that provide flavour to all aspects of the lives of Indians (Sharma & Chaudhary, 2009), including their notions pertaining to children and childhood. D. Sharma (2003) points out that while understanding the contemporary Indian family and society, the changes in the economic and socio-political life of Indians must also find space. Furthermore, the multiplicities of regional, religious and caste identities make it possible that within India many childhoods exist. Walsh (2003) highlights that the childhood on which most information is currently available in India is associated with the Hindu religi...