Childhood

Michael Wyness

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745689470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia dello sviluppo

What is childhood? In recent years, a cluster of critical and complex ideas have emerged around the nature of biological, social and psychological growth in the early years, reflecting the changing nature of adult - child relations, and political and cultural understandings of childhood in the twenty-first century. In this clear and concise book, Michael Wyness offers fresh insights into the current state of play within childhood studies. Drawing on work from a number of disciplines including sociology, geography and history, he discusses the contested terrain of theoretical and research advances with particular attention to the notion of children's agency and the concept of global childhoods. Key conceptual debates are illustrated through a range of contemporary issues that affect children and adults, including inequality, child abuse, ill-health, child labour, sexualization and identity formation. This book will appeal to students and academics within the fields of sociology, education, geography, history and childhood studies.

1
Conceptualizing Agency

Children's agency has become a direct challenge to hitherto dominant ideas on children's development that effectively define agency as a status assumed by children once they leave childhood. Moreover, a developmental focus on the acquisition of agency privileges biological and psychological factors over social factors. Thus agency has not only been associated with children when they leave childhood and enter adulthood, but biological and psychological growth towards this end point. In the first part of this chapter I explore recent work within the field of childhood studies where agency has achieved almost paradigmatic status. It has become a key assumption in analyses of children and childhood at local and global levels. In challenging the developmental and ‘cognitivist’ focus, empirical research has drawn on the concept of children's agency within a diverse range of social and cultural contexts, from UK-based children developing religious and spiritual agency through to Indian children of sex workers using their political agency to try to improve conditions for themselves and their families (Hemming and Madge 2012; Sircar and Dutta 2011). Children's agency has thus become an embedded feature of empirical research on children and childhood. However, within sociology, arguably the dominant discipline within childhood studies, there is some conceptual ambiguity over the nature of children's agency. In part this is due to agency's taken-for-granted status, a largely assumed conceptual starting point. The political and moral commitment to agency and its attractiveness as an empirical focus has led to the neglect of a more thorough theoretical grounding (Valentine 2011). A cursory conceptual inventory of the field identifies an individualist and romanticized strand of theorizing where thinking around children's agency represents the search for the unmediated adult-free voice of the child (Hart 1997; Franklin 1997). Within this framework children are often viewed as being constrained, exploited and controlled by parents, teachers and other adults. Children's agency is hidden, muted or marginalized as adults seek to regulate children's lives. This is set against an emerging social model within sociology where children's agency emerges from ongoing relations between children and adults (Oswell 2013). There is here a more positive inter-generational basis to children's agency. In the first part of the chapter I critically examine the individualist approach to children's agency from a social and relational perspective. The focus on agency here is on three dimensions: agency emerging from inter-generational relations; the embodied and emotional nature of children's agency; and its moral character.

In the second part of the chapter I go beyond sociological thinking and discuss the possibilities of the social nature of children's agency from other disciplinary vantage points including history, anthropology and geography (Rosen 2005; Montgomery 2008; Zeiher 2003). The popularity of children's agency for scholars from a range of disciplines within childhood studies offers further evidence of the shifting ontological and epistemological status of children and childhood. While adult researchers make certain assumptions about children's capacities and competence, rather ironically there is less evidence from children themselves as to what agency means to them. In the final section we discuss children's own conceptions of agency. Drawing mainly on their experience in schools, children provide a distinctive approach to agency in the way that they reflect on how they experience their schooling and understand the implications of having their agency recognized by teachers in school.

Conceptualizing agency

Agency is often assumed to reflect dominant Western liberal values of self-determination, rationality and independence (Ling 2004; Boyden 1997). Moreover, these are normally seen to be characteristics of fully formed individuals or adults, with children aspiring to this status following carefully arranged and regulated developmental trajectories. Children are viewed as dependants until they grow into adulthood, with their social and moral development closely following their biological and psychological growth. Acquiring independent status, for example, implies that children develop through very specific cognitive stages. According to developmental psychology children move from an early sensory-motor stage where they engage with their environments using their senses to the much later ‘formal operative’ stage where in adolescence they view the world in more abstract rational terms. The latter is viewed as the embodiment of these Western values of rationality and independence with successful negotiation of these stages a precondition for acquiring agency (Burman 2007). A more recent strand of thinking on the relationship between childhood and agency within childhood studies has tended to ignore developmental thinking and view the child as well as the adult as the autonomous independent individual. In Chapters 3 and 4 we will discuss the limitations of this model in terms of globalizing processes. Here I want to focus on this individualist model of childhood and agency where there has been a shift from the individual autonomous adult towards identifying the conditions and the circumstances within which children can become autonomous individuals freed from the regulatory constraints of adults (Lee 2001). I want to pursue the analysis of agency here through a discussion of children's participation, which has both a theoretical and empirical significance, within the field of children's studies. We need to be careful not to conflate agency and participation (see Chapter 2). Nevertheless, it is usually assumed that children exercise agency when they participate. Participation has developed out of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and has come to mean ‘children expressing their views freely and (having) them taken seriously’ (Landsdown 2010, p. 11). Whether we are talking about children in the home, in school or in many cases in the work-place, agency here implies children having the capacity, the space and the opportunity to have some involvement in decision-making processes.

The individualistic strand of thinking has generated an over-romanticized conception of agency. This is evident in a number of ways. Firstly, there is a search for authentic forms of participation, particularly with respect to children's voices. For some the search for authenticity has become a ‘fetish’, an end at all costs (White and Choudhury 2007). Hitherto, it has been argued that adults have played a dominant, even overpowering role in children's lives (Kitzinger 1997). This argument is extended to participatory initiatives where ostensibly adult involvement and agendas are less prominent. The structuring and regulating of participatory initiatives by adults has led to critical commentary on the artificial and often tokenistic nature of children's involvement (Hart 2008). School councils, for example, are viewed as typical participatory initiatives found in most schools in the UK. They have often been criticized as having little power to advance children's interests, being limited to highly structured discussions about the ‘charmed circle of lockers, dinners and uniform’ (Baginsky and Hannam 1999, p. iii). Partly as a response to this, researchers and professionals are developing strategies for restricting adult influence from channels of communication within a number of institutional and social settings, granting children a degree of autonomy in articulating their interests from a genuinely child-focused perspective. In more institutional contexts this means that children have more agenda-setting powers, with adults in the background acting as facilitators. Pinkney (2011), for example, analyses children's voices in terms of relations that English welfare professionals have with child clients. One respondent, a children's rights officer, discusses the difficulties of uncovering the child client's ‘pure’ voice. Pinkney (2011, p. 41) goes on and speculates: ‘an impure voice in this scenario might be one that was mediated, muffled, directed, coached, constrained or interpreted’. The ‘purity’ of the child's voice here is associated with the absence of adult involvement or the limiting of adults' interpretive powers. While there are issues with children's ability to speak for themselves, various authors have taken issue with this idea that the child's voice can ever be free from adult distortion or mediation (Thomas 2007; White and Choudhury 2007; Lee 2001). Children's voices are always mediated or arising out of ongoing dialogue with others.

Thus issues of authenticity merge with the search for the unmediated child's voice. This is children's agency that is not regulated; children's participation that is not compromised by the actions of adults. A dominant motif within childhood studies is the participating child in search of an authentic unmediated voice within a social and political space relatively free from adult intervention. Lee (2001) has questioned the idea of the child being able to acquire an unmediated voice. If we associate participation and voice with a move towards individual autonomy, then we are starting to see the autonomous adult as the benchmark from which assessments of the participating child are made. In other words, in searching for children's unmediated voice, we might want to focus on the ways in which adults are able to demonstrate this model of agency. This poses considerable problems. Lee (2001) argues that postmodern social theory of the past thirty years has focused on the ‘incomplete’ nature of adulthood. Adults have to rely on others in order to get their messages across; their understandings of the world are always mediated by other people and objects. The search for an authentic adult voice is seen as a fruitless task for it is always filtered through a range of media and resources. Thus the search for the authentic unmediated voice of the child must suffer a similar fate. In a complex media-driven world both adults' and children's voices are heavily mediated.

Secondly, the difficulties in finding a pure form of voice and thus an authentic form of children's agency are also encountered when conducting empirical research with children. In particular, the search for authentic data from children within their own social contexts is often hampered by the role that adult researchers play in structuring the research process (Mandell 1991). The aim of many researchers here is to minimize their roles as adults within the research context so that researchers are in a stronger position to generate ‘pure’ unmediated forms of data from child respondents. Mandell (1991) in an early ethnography of young children's cultures in the playground attempts to play the ‘least adult’ role by trying to become a member of young children's peer cultures, by refraining from taking part in ‘adult’ activities and by trying to pass herself off as a ‘friend’ of the children. The search among ethnographers of childhood for an authentic or ‘natural’ child's voice has proved somewhat elusive and in some respects futile. Various authors have stressed the power differences between the researcher and the children in physiological, psychological and social terms (Mayall 1996; Thorne 1993). Thorne (1993, p. 17), for example, refers to the language that adults use when in contact with children either as guardians, teachers or researchers, which accentuates the power differential between them and the children. In her reflections on working with young children she comments:

During one of my forays on the Oceanside playground, a boy came over and asked, ‘What ya writing?’…I responded, ‘I am writing down what you are doing. Do you mind?’ He warily edged away. ‘I didn't do anything’ he said. Another of my early explanations – ‘I'm interested in the behaviour of children’ – also brought defensive responses. I came to see that verbs like ‘doing’ and ‘behaving’, which figure centrally in the social sciences and child rearing, are both practices geared to social control.

Thus the very language that adults take for granted when talking to children can act as a barrier to generating authentic child-focused data. These visible and invisible differences are major impediments to ethnographers trying to enter children's cultures and elicit children's authentic voices. In some respects, then, children's agency and voice are irrevocably mediated. Whether this must lead to children's agency being subsumed within adult regulatory frameworks is another question. An empirical response to this question from other ethnographers is that the immersion in children's social environments means embracing their roles as adults (Ahn 2010; Corsaro and Molinari 2008). In their research on peer cultures within playgrounds Corsaro and Molinari (2008) played the roles of incompetent adults which allowed them to get close to the children while at the same time giving the children the upper hand in terms of the way they were able to induct the researchers into the various peer groups. This methodological approach challenges the dichotomous relationship between the powerful adult and powerless child and directs us towards reframing the analysis of agency. Rather than trying to identify the child's voice unfettered by the regulatory powers of adults, we should be exploring the way that children's agency is enabled through the kinds of relationships that children have with their social environments (Lee 2001). We are arguing here for the quintessentially social nature of children's agency.

The social relational nature of agency is an emerging strand of thinking within the sociology of childhood. Mayall (2002, p. 21) argues that there are two components to agency: children are, firstly, social actors by virtue of their social being, they are full members of society. Secondly, ‘action’ is more fully developed into agency, in that children's actions make a difference within a wide array of social contexts.¹ This conception of agency is confirmed by Oswell (2013, p. 3): ‘children are not simply beings, they are significant doings. They are actors, authors, authorities and agents. They make a difference to the world we live in’. Children as agents are immersed within the social world and thus embedded in relations within which they have a formative influence. The child agent is not only capable but also fully social. Agency cannot simply be equated with individual choice or individual autonomy (Valentine 2011), it needs to be viewed as a relational concept, an effect of complex shifting social arrangements. Corsaro's (2011) process of ‘interpretive reproduction’ emphasizes children's agency as a collective phenomenon. His empirical focus is young pre-school children who have agency in their capacity to create and sustain relations with their peers and thus generate a culture for children. Children within these cultures are meaning makers, they interpret the cues given by their peers and act accordingly in helping to reproduce the contexts within which children play and interact with others. From his observational data Corsaro (2011) identifies an ongoing ten...