The Future of Childhood

Alan Prout, Alan Prout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134518661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

In this ground-breaking book, Alan Prout discusses the place of children and childhood in modern society. He critically examines 'the new social studies of childhood', reconsidering some of its key assumptions and positions and arguing that childhood is heterogeneous and complex. The study of childhood requires a broad set of intellectual resources and an interdisciplinary approach. Chapters include:

• the changing social and cultural character of contemporary childhood and the weakening boundary between adulthood and childhood
• a look back at the emergence of childhood studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• the nature/culture dichotomy
• the role of material artefacts and technologies in the construction of contemporary childhood.

This book is essential reading for students and academics in the field of childhood studies, sociology and education.

1 Changing childhood in a
globalizing world

We want to hear the voices of young people, influencing and shaping local services; contributing to their local communities; feeling heard; feeling valued; being treated as responsible citizens

(Children and Young People’s Unit, 2000: 27)

Introduction

Towards the end of the twentieth century there developed a pervasive sense that the social order was fragmenting under the pressure of rapid economic, social and technological change. Social theorists expressed this sense of change through terms such as ‘late modernity’ (Giddens, 1990, 1991) and the ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992), arguing that it arose from the destabilization of the institutions holding modern social life together, which altered the bases of identity and meaning. In this chapter I will argue that childhood is also affected by this destabilization. In particular the distinction between adults and children, once firmly established as a feature of modernity, seems to be blurring. Traditional ways of representing childhood in discourse and in image no longer seemed adequate to its emerging forms. New ways of speaking, writing and imaging children are providing new ways of seeing them and these children are different from the innocent and dependent creatures that appeared to populate the first half of the twentieth century. These new representations construct children as more active, knowledgeable and socially participative than older discourses allowed. They are more difficult to manage, less biddable and hence are more troublesome and troubling (Prout, 2000a).

In this chapter I will explore the sources of these shifts in representation, arguing that the modern notion of childhood is changing as the social and economic conditions that produced it, and within which it was implicated, are themselves undergoing significant destabilization. At the centre of this process is an increased awareness of the diversity of childhood. This comes about for two reasons. In the first place the social, cultural and economic conditions within which children live and grow up are increasingly diversified. Second, and just as important, various socio-technical developments in communication have led to a proliferation of images of this diversity. Childhood difference is becoming more visible. This has had paradoxical effects, both homogenizing and differentiating the local construction of childhood and, as a result, fragmenting and undermining once stable notions of what childhood is and what it should be. The heightened interdependencies of the contemporary world mean that the local social and economic conditions of childhood, in the rich countries as well as the poorer ones, are linked by global economic, social, cultural and technological processes.

Childhood and modernity

Contemporary childhood is changing in ways that leave conventional representations of it struggling to capture its new realities. In the rest of this chapter I will explore some of the reasons for this. However, in order to understand what follows, it is first necessary to examine contemporary childhood in its historical context. This context is rooted in the political, economic, technological, social and cultural changes that took place in Europe from about the eighteenth century onwards, which gave rise to the belief that history was entering a distinctive ‘modern’ era. This complex set of interlocking changes, part material practice and part mode of thought, has come to define what is meant by modernity. In the political sphere it is associated with the rise of the nation state as a territorially bounded unit of sovereignty, within which political power is legitimized by secular rather than religious beliefs and exercised through a complex state bureaucracy.

In economics modernity is associated with the rise of capitalism: the large-scale, industrial production of commodities for the market, on the basis of private property, monetary exchange, and capital accumulation, which came to dominate national and international economic life, gradually displacing or incorporating other economic systems. Associated with this was the decline of traditional social hierarchies, such as those based on feudal rank and their replacement by and incorporation into a new, more dynamic social division of labour. Partly as a consequence of the rise of the nation state and capitalism, new classes and status groups, especially the middle and working classes, began to appear and assume central importance. Traditional relations between the sexes were changed and new forms of gender and sexual relationships developed. New identities were created and contested as urban living allowed new social and cultural possibilities, freeing people from old forms of social control. In ‘pre-modern’ social formations, change, although sometimes sudden and brutal, was generally slow paced. ‘Moderns’, in contrast, became accustomed to change that was fast paced, unpredictable and open-ended and, partly as a consequence, a new mentality that orientated to the future was encouraged. Secular and materialist beliefs challenged traditional religious ones and created cultural conditions permeated by rationalist and individualist ideas and values. The Enlightenment championed scientific and rational thought, repositioning nature as a comprehensible and controllable set of resources, and paving the way for the growth of modern technology.

This was the general context within which the modern idea of childhood came into being, although inevitably, when stated this shorthand way, it sounds as if modernity came into being through some homogenous, smooth, uniform and continuous process. In fact it came about through a process that was heterogeneous, uneven, contingent and contested. It took a different form and path according to local circumstances. In some places old forms were often incorporated rather than completely displaced. For example, where France underwent the convulsions of a political revolution, Britain saw the incorporation of parts of the old landed ruling class into the emergence of industrial capitalism. In various places capitalism did not displace other modes of production but enveloped them, so that, for example, the emergence of British capitalism was intimately connected with the expansion of slavery in the Americas. In general, huge social conflicts were generated as groups resisted change or as new antagonisms were created. So, while Britain avoided a political revolution of the type experienced in France, it did experience intense social conflict in the shape of the Chartist movement, the emergence of the trades unions, the struggle for the vote and so on. Furthermore, while the general trend and direction of change was as summarized above, developments in different spheres (the state, the economy, etc.) occurred at different times and under the influence of many different factors which came into play at different times. It is an error, therefore, to treat modernity as reducible, even in the ‘last instance’, to some single driving force, such as the mode of production in the Marxist schemes of historical development or the inevitable outcome of a hypostatized ‘modernization process’. There was no single underlying modernization process that underpinned developments in all places and led inevitably to a single predetermined end point, albeit at different speeds.

As part of this process, unevenly, over a long period and shaped by specific sets of local circumstances a distinctly modern idea of childhood came into existence. Understandings of this process customarily begin with the ground-breaking historical work of Aries (1962). His argument is drawn mostly from French materials but the process he describes has been widely interpreted as common to most European societies. In essence he argues that between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries a new concept of children arose that paved the way to the modern idea of childhood. In medieval society infants were seen as vulnerable but after the age of about seven or eight children were seen and treated as ‘miniature adults’. According to Aries, these changes had three sources. First, was a changing emotional economy of the family, in which children became more valued and more protected. Second, and at a later stage, moralists identified childhood as an immature period, which meant that children were in need of extended discipline and training. Third, schools became age-graded institutions increasingly thought of as the place where children properly belonged.

These changes in belief, and the institutional arrangements through which they were materialized and put into practice, gradually spread through all social classes. Later historians (Cunningham, 1991; Hendrick, 1997a; Heywood, 2001; Pollock, 1983) have critiqued, modified and extended Aries’ basic idea, showing how modern childhood was formed through diverse discourses and practices around child labour, criminality and welfare. Cunningham (1991: 7) sums up the process thus:

between the late seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries there occurred a major and irreversible change in the representations of childhood, to the point where all children throughout the world were thought to be entitled to certain common elements and rights of childhood.

There is, however, a tendency towards essentialism in Aries’ account that can produce problems parallel to those found in the disappearance of childhood literature (see pp. 14–15). Archard (1993) discusses this as the problem of ‘presentism’. Archard rejects the view that because the treatment of children in the past differed from its contemporary version, then it can be concluded that there was no childhood. Rather, modernity produced a particular version of childhood, different in some important respects from that which preceded it and that which might follow. In this sense modernity did not ‘invent’ or ‘discover’ childhood. As I will argue in later chapters (especially Chapter 4) there are biological aspects of childhood that are translated into and stand in relation to its discursive dimensions, ensuring that some sort of extended juvenility marks the early period of the human developmental life course. However, modernity’s encounter with childhood did bring about a transformation in the way that childhood was understood. Stated briefly one could say that modernity constituted children as the ‘cultural other’ of adulthood (Christensen, 1994). In particular it put into place a framework of meaning that constituted childhood through a heightened, dichotomized and oppositional relationship between it and adulthood. These oppositions are familiar ones and they include:

Childhood Private Nature Irrational Dependent Passive Incompetent Play

: : : : : : : :

Adulthood Public Culture Rational Independent Active Competent Work

In Chapter 2, I will discuss how such a set of oppositions was implicated in the creation and development of childhood studies. However, the theme of oppositional dichotomies, and their apparently increasing inability to provide a framework for understanding contemporary childhood, runs throughout the whole of this book. The nub of my argument is that childhood studies must take a step from this modernist conception, if they are to become closer to the open-ended, interdisciplinary form of enquiry necessary to present-day conditions.

Childhood representations

As a first step in that argument I will first examine how contemporary childhood is changing and, because we live in a world that increasingly deals in visual imagery, I will begin with the issue of childhood representation in pictures. In an important study, Higonnet (1998) examines how children have been painted and photographed from the eighteenth century to the present. She shows how romantic representations of childhood, such as those found in the paintings of Reynolds and Gainsborough, were constructed through a semiotic opposition with adulthood. They project a vision of childhood that is defined strongly by what it is not. The childhood represented in such images is innocent because it does not, except by omission, refer to the bodies of adult pleasure. These pictures extract childhood from social life, Higonnet argues, because they tell no stories of adult life and its categories of social difference. They efface class and gender, presenting innocent children in the social limbo that was the ‘secret garden’ of idealized childhood.

Such images were popularized and widely diffused by both the artistic and commercial branches of illustration during the nineteenth and twentieth century. They are still with us. Although images of children virtually disappeared from modernist art of the twentieth century, the romantic legacy lives on in the images still used on birthday cards, biscuit tins and in the sort of advertising that wishes to convey a sense of unproblematic family life. It forms the essential template for the mid-twentieth-century family snapshot. Such imagery is concerned with maintaining the boundary between childhood and adulthood. It is part of a discourse in which childhood, as Holland (1992: 14) puts it, ‘as well as being different from adulthood, is its obverse, a depository of many precious qualities adulthood needs but cannot tolerate as part of itself’. Such images of romantic childhood project and imply the idea of childhood’s natural state: childhood as a time of innocence, free of cares and responsibilities.

But by the final decades of the twentieth century the domination of this sentimental ideal was under challenge. Victorian and Edwardian images of children, such as those created by the Reverend Dodgson, were being scrutinized (and denounced) for their now apparent sexual preoccupation. A well known TV newsreader in the UK was threatened with prosecution after an employee in a photo-processing laboratory reported that she had taken pictures of her children naked. In the US the Director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center was charged (though later acquitted) with ‘pandering obscenity’ after staging an exhibition of controversial photographs by the artist Robert Mablethorpe, some of which were of children.

These are merely the highly publicized tip of a much bigger iceberg. Less sensational but, perhaps, ultimately more important were new styles of photographing children identified by Higonnet:

In every branch of the media, whether ostensibly commercial or artistic, new images of childhood are appearing. The children represented in these new images are much more physical and challenging than the ones Romantic imagery accustomed us to, so much so that the entire Romantic definition of childhood is being called into question.

(Higonnet, 1998: 107).

In these contemporary images issues of gender, class, poverty, ethnicity and family life are signalled and (sometimes) confronted. The children are diverse. They are sometimes victims but they are also victors. They have emotional range. They are active, aware, judgemental and complex. As Higonnet rightly concludes, a new version of childhood is here being fabricated. It is a construction to be found in many examples of popular culture, including films such as Look Who’s Talking (in which toddlers are literally ‘given a voice’ to comment on and act in the social world). As Christensen (1999: 6–7) notes:

The central plot of all these productions is the constant contrast made between the world of children (and young people) and the adult world. Traditional (op)positions and commonly perceived conflicts of everyday family life get highlighted by twisting around ‘child’ and ‘adult’ power, control, competence and responsibility and by exaggerating elements of these dichotomous relationships. Such depictions often portray the embarrassing, weak and preposterous adult in relation to the lively, clever and smart child or demonstrate the adults’ shortcomings when confronted with children’s manipulative powers and alternative worldviews. The fictional representation of familial combats and their arbitrary solutions tend to favour children over adults and allows qualities such as logic and power to be dislodged from their usual site in the adult.

Usually, as Christensen also notes, this is a temporary reversal and the story line returns children and adults to their conventional roles and positions but, nevertheless, the possibility of slippage between child and adult has been dramatically opened up.

Images of global childhood

Images of active, canny, competent children are, however, but one of a multiplicity of childhood representations conveyed by the contemporary mass media. Although some of these repeat earlier sentimentalized versions, among this kaleidoscope of childhood representations are ones that forcibly remind the viewer that ideal childhood is unevenly distributed across the world. The consumers of images of children in distress are mostly located in the wealthy regions of the world but the children represented in them are not. While poverty, exploitation and malnutrition are to be found outside South America, Asia and Africa, it is these places that are most often represented through pictures of unhappy, hungry, exhausted and exploited children.

Images of the child victims of famine, natural disaster, poverty, war, burdensome work and cruelty have ambiguous effects. Their purpose is to make an emotionally powerful appeal to the rich, or the relatively rich, for financial aid, appealing to their consciences in the hope of credit card donations. However, in evoking the pity of the wealthy they also reinforce their sense of superiority. Hence non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others wage their campaign against ‘aid fatigue’, insisting on ‘positive images’ and struggling to show the determination, knowledge and energy with which children (and adults) confront their situations. Images of suffering children also underline an important element of the idealized discourse of childhood: these children exemplify the vulnerability and dependence that are projected as the natural state of childhood. At the same time they confront the viewer with the gap between the idealized image of childhood and the harsh realities of life for most of the world’s children.

In writing about the vast disparities between poor and rich children in Brazil, Goldstein (1998) comments that childhood in Brazil is a privilege of the rich and is practically non-existent for the poor. In a sense this is true. Rich Brazilian children share the same kind of experiences as many children in the developed world. For example, they attend school (or receive other forms of education) and their involvement in paid labour or the domestic economy is limited. In contrast,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Changing Childhood In a Globalizing World
• 2. Childhood Studies and the Modern Mentality
• 3. The Dualities of the Social
• 4. Childhood, Nature and Culture
• 5. The Future of Childhood
• Afterword
• References