Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood

Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood

Allison James, Alan Prout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317593812
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

When the first edition of this seminal work appeared in 1990, the sociology of childhood was only just beginning to emerge as a distinct sub-discipline. Drawing together strands of existing sociological writing about childhood and shaping them into a new paradigm, the original edition of this Routledge Classic offered a potent blend of ideas that informed, even inspired, many empirical studies of children's lives because it provided a unique lens through which to think about childhood. Featuring a collection of articles which summarised the developments in the study of childhood across the social sciences, including history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, feminist and developmental studies, scholars and professionals from developed and developing countries world-wide shared their knowledge of having worked and of working with children.

Now with a new introduction from the editors to contextualise it into the 21st century, this truly ground-breaking text which helped establish childhood studies as a distinctive field of enquiry is being republished.

Chapter 1 A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems

DOI: 10.4324/9781315745008-2

Alan Prout and Allison James

Introduction: the nature of childhood

The title of this volume, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, captures the spirit within which it is conceived. First, we discussed in the introduction what we there called the ‘emergent paradigm’. In this chapter we present it in precisely this light: an emerging and not yet completed approach to the study of childhood. Second, the title encapsulates what we feel to be the nature of the social institution of childhood: an actively negotiated set of social relationships within which the early years of human life are constituted. The immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful are a fact of culture (see La Fontaine, 1979). It is these ‘facts of culture’ which may vary and which can be said to make of childhood a social institution. It is in this sense, therefore, that one can talk of the social construction of childhood and also, as it appears in this volume, of its re- and deconstrution. In this double sense, then, childhood is both constructed and reconstructed both for children and by children.

Attempting to describe and analyze the quality of that experience, researchers have, over the years, begun to develop new approaches to the study of childhood. One of the forerunners of this ‘emergent paradigm’, Charlotte Hardman, in 1973 compared her work on the anthropology of children to the study of women, arguing that ‘both women and children might perhaps be called “muted groups” i.e., unperceived or elusive groups (in terms of anyone studying a society)’ (1973: 85). In this discussion we suggest that the term ‘muted’ is indeed appropriate. The history of the study of childhood in the social sciences has been marked not by an absence of interest in children — as we shall show this has been far from the case — but by their silence. What the emergent paradigm attempts is to give a voice to children through, as Hardman suggested, regarding ‘children as people to be studied in their own right, and not just as receptacles of adult teaching’ (ibid. 87).

In what follows we trace the origins of this approach, analyze its benefits and outline some issues confronted in its further development. We show the ways in which the socio-political context made possible alternative approaches to childhood study as the experience of childhood changed for children. We locate these changes in relation to the new theoretical directions taken by the social sciences, described by Crick as ‘a shift from function to meaning’ which made possible the study of social categories rather than groups (1976: 2). Finally we point to the potential which the ‘emergent paradigm’ has for future developments in childhood sociology.

At this juncture it is useful, therefore, to reiterate what we see as the key features of the paradigm_

1. Childhood is understood as a social construction. As such it provides an interpretive frame for contextualizing the early years of human life. Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies.
2. Childhood is a variable of social analysis. It can never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender, or ethnicity. Comparative and cross-cultural analysis reveals a variety of childhoods rather than a single and universal phenomenon.
3. Children's social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective and concerns of adults.
4. Children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live. Children are not just the passive subjects of social structures and processes.
5. Ethnography is a particularly useful methodology for the study of childhood. It allows children a more direct voice and participation in the production of sociological data than is usually possible through experimental or survey styles of research.
6. Childhood is a phenomenon in relation to which the double hermeneutic of the social sciences is acutely present (see Giddens, 1976). That is to say, to proclaim a new paradigm of childhood sociology is also to engage in and respond to the process of reconstructing childhood in society.

It is clear that these six points represent merely a rough outline of the potential which the ‘emergent paradigm’ may hold for the study of childhood. Much more work needs to be done to integrate, theoretically develop and empirically elaborate these parameters. It is not certain whether these constitute the radical break with the past, as is sometimes claimed by those who are perhaps a little too enthusiastic for the study of childhood to be given recognition and status within mainstream sociology. Whilst it is certainly true that sociologists have devoted little attention to childhood as a topic of interest in itself and that many of the key concepts used to think about childhood are problematic, it is misleading to suggest that childhood is absent from the discourse of social scientists. On the contrary, ‘the century of the child’ can be characterized as such precisely because of the massive corpus of knowledge built up by psychologists and other social scientists through the systematic study of children. If the concept of childhood as a distinct stage in the human life cycle crystallized in nineteenth century western thought, then the twentieth century has seen that theoretical space elaborated and filled out with detailed empirical findings. Technologies of knowledge such as the psychological experiment, psychometric testing, sociometric mapping, ethnographic description and longitudinal surveys have all been applied to childhood and structured our thinking about children. They have also, and centrally to the concerns of this book, led to the growing imposition of a particularly western conceptualization of childhood for all children which effectively conceals the fact that the institution of childhood is a social construction (see Boyden, this volume). It is our task here, then, to situate what is new in the context of what has passed in order to judge its efficacy for contemporary concepts of childhood.

The complexity of the background to the emergence of the ‘new’ paradigm necessitates that we adopt an essentially thematic rather than historical account of the developments which allowed for, and at times precluded, changes in thinking about childhood. It is clear that psychological explanations of child development, announced early on in the twentieth century, have until recently dominated childhood study. They both supported and were supported by child-rearing/training practices, bridging the gap between theory and practice, parent and child, teacher and pupil, politician and populace. It is therefore predominantly developmental psychology which has provided a framework of explanation of the child's nature and indeed justified the concept of the naturalness of childhood itself. During this period, however, alternative voices have been raised, in the ideologies of populist movements and from changing paradigms within the social sciences. But for a long time these have gone unremarked and unheard or, indeed, have been silenced. The question now arises as to their salience in the 1990s, when, really for the first time, a reconstituted sociology of childhood has become more than the promise of a possibility. To begin to unravel the strands of these debates we begin at the beginning with the dominant explanatory frameworks.

Dominant and dominating accounts

A key concept in the dominant framework surrounding the study of children and childhood has been development and three themes predominate in relation to it: ‘rationality’, ‘naturalness’ and ‘universality’. These have structured a mode of thought which stretches far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of psychology, influencing not only sociological approaches to child study but the socio-political context of childhood itself. The concept of ‘development’ inextricably links the biological facts of immaturity, such as dependence, to the social aspects of childhood. The universality of social practices surrounding childhood, which is the central focus of contemporary critiques, was consequently regarded as relatively unproblematic until the late 1970s. Resting on the assumed naturalness of childhood there was in fact little theoretical space within which to explore alternatives.

This dominant developmental approach to childhood, provided by psychology, is based on the idea of natural growth (see Jenks, 1982). It is a self-sustaining model whose features can be crudely delineated as follows: rationality is the universal mark of adulthood with childhood representing the period of apprenticeship for its development. Childhood is therefore important to study as a presocial period of difference, a biologically determined stage on the path to full human status i.e., adulthood. The naturalness of children both governs and is governed by their universality. It is essentially an evolutionary model: the child developing into an adult represents a progression from simplicity to complexity of thought, from irrational to rational behaviour. As an explanatory frame, it takes its inspiration from an earlier era, from the dawning of a scientific interest in society. During the nineteenth century western sociological theorists, the self-elected representatives of rationality, saw in other cultures primitive forms of the human condition. These they regarded as childish in their simplicity and irrational in their belief. Following on from Comte's theory of social evolution the ‘savage’ was seen as the precursor of civilized man, paralleling the way that the child prefigured adult life. Tylor, for example, argued that he could apply ‘the often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their moral as to their intellectual condition’ (1871: 31). The proximity of the savage to the natural world made Rousseau's child of nature an apt metaphor for social evolution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The model of child development which has come to dominate western thought similarly connects biological with social development: children's activities — their language, play and interactions — are significant as symbolic markers of developmental progress. As activities they are seen to prefigure the child's future participation in the adult world. Little account is given of their significance to children's social life or to the variation which they reveal in the social context of childhood. The decreasing ‘irrationality’ of children's play as they mature is taken as a measure of an evolving ‘rationality’ of thought, charting the ways in which ‘primitive’ concepts become replaced by sophisticated ideas. The powerful and persistent influence of this explanatory framework can be illustrated through considering the impact of Jean Piaget's work on child development. In this respect it is significant that Piaget acknowledges the inspiration which Levy-Bruhl's work on ‘primitive’ thought had for the development of his own ideas. As Paul Light remarks, it is Piagetian approaches which have dominated work on cognition during the last quarter of the century, totally eclipsing ‘earlier theoretical positions which attempted to ground an account of cognitive development in the child's social experiences’ (1986: 170). In Piaget's account, child development has a particular structure, consisting of a series of predetermined stages, which lead towards the eventual achievement of logical competence. This is the mark of adult rationality. Within such a conceptual scheme children are marginalized beings awaiting temporal passage, through the acquistion of cognitive skill, into the social world of adults.

The singularity of ‘the child’ who constantly appears in both the title and the text of Piaget's writings is constructed around the twin assumptions of the naturalness and universality of childhood. Children do not have to appear: ‘the child’, as the bodily manifestation of cognitive development from infancy to adulthood can represent all children. As heirs to a western intellectual tradition centred on scientific rationality, ‘the child’ represented a laboratory specimen for the study of primitive forms of cognition and, indeed, children were brought into the laboratory to be studied. Representatives of pre-rational phases, children of various ages were used to discover the sequential process of the emergent rationality of ‘the child’. Such an approach is consistent with the evolutionary perspective inherent in what Boas (1966) describes as nineteenth century cultural primitivism.

Piaget's work has been the inspiration for many other accounts of childhood and indeed for many social practices around children. For example it is his account of developmental stages in cognition which continues to inform contemporary western orthodoxies about child-rearing practices (see Urwin, 1985) and, as Walkerdine (1984) shows, it also lies at the heart of current educational thinking and practice. Indeed so much is this perspective incorporated into the everyday understanding of children in western societies that it is difficult to think outside it. For example, the common parental lament, ‘its just a phase s/he's going through,’ relies heavily on an implicit Piagetian model of child development, providing a biological explanation for a breakdown in social relationships. The challenge to this orthodoxy provided by contemporary approaches to childhood is the more remarkable given the pervasive dominance of developmental psychological models in everyday life.

The scientific construction of the ‘irrationality’, ‘naturalness’ and ‘universality’ of childhood through psychological discourses was translated directly into sociological accounts of childhood in the form of theories of socialization during the 1950s. At a time when positivism gripped the social sciences it offered a ‘scientific’ explanation for the process whereby children learnt to participate in society. Within structural functionalist accounts of society the ‘individual’ was slotted into a finite number of social roles. Socialization, therefore, was the mechanism whereby these social roles came to be replicated in successive generations. The theory puported to explain the ways in which children gradually acquire knowledge of these roles. However, it frequently failed to do so; ‘how’ socialization occurs was often ignored or glossed over by what Rafky describes as a ‘vague, somewhat muddled… excess of “psychologising”’ (1973: 44). Indeed, there is a great deal of theoretica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• preface
• preface to Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1 A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood?: provenance, promise and problems
• 2 Constructions and reconstructions of British childhood: an interpretative survey, 1800 to the present
• 3 Psychology and the cultural construction of children’s needs
• 4 A voice for children in statistical and social accounting: a plea for children’s right to be heard
• 5 It’s a small world: Disneyland, the family and the multiple re-representations of American childhood
• 6 Negotiating childhood: changing constructions of age for Norwegian children
• 7 Street children: deconstructing a construct
• 8 Who are you kidding?: children, power and the struggle against sexual abuse
• 9 Childhood and the policy makers: a comparative perspective on the globalization of childhood
• 10 Re-presenting childhood: time and transition in the study of childhood
• Notes on Contributors
• Index