An Introduction to Early Childhood

Tim Waller, Geraldine Davis, Tim Waller, Geraldine Davis

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473905108
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Put together by an outstanding author team, including many authors from the University of Northampton, An Introduction to Early Childhood is a much loved book that helps you explore all the major themes in early years education and care, while providing you with real insight into the changing world of early childhood.

To further support your study, this edition has been expanded to include five new chaptersincluding The History of Childhood, Play and Creativity, Children and the Media, Leadership and Management, and Reflective Practice.

This book further supports your study with outstanding learning features including:

· Chapter objectives and introduction immediately introduce you to chapter concepts saving you time

· More case studies provide deeper insight into how theory works in practice

· Research in context boxes show how recent research is changing the world of early years

· Reflective questions encourage you to think like a reflective practitioner

· Chapter summaries aid your revision by recapping core concepts covered in each chapter
· Further reading and recommended websites direct you to additional resources to further support your study.

This book also comes with a new companion website with access a wealth of additional resources including:

• Child Observation Videos givestudents apeek into a real Early Years settings and insight into child behaviour. These track particular children at different stages in their development, showing videos of the children 12 months apart in order to observe their development. Great basis for seminar discussions and student assignments.
• Employability podcasts providing hints and tips about going on your first placement and getting your first job
• Podcasts from chapter authors providing deeper insight into key topics
• Free SAGE Journal Articles to deepenstudents? understanding on core topics
• Web links directing to useful websitesfor further study and support in practice.

Part One

Histories and Theories of Childhood

1. A History of Childhood	Michael Wyness
2. Modern Childhoods	Tim Waller
3. International Perspectives	Libby Lee-Hammond with Tim Waller

1

A History of Childhood: Adult Constructs and Children’s Agency

Michael Wyness

Key chapter objectives

• To explore the historical nature of contemporary childhood

• To discuss a history of childhood in two ways: as the historical development of childhood as a set of powerful ideas about how to think about, relate to and treat children, and as an examination of the historical impact of children

Introduction

This chapter explores two interrelated themes within the history of childhood: the historical development of childhood and work that focuses on the historical impact of children within local, national and global contexts. While there is clearly a relationship between the idea of childhood, and the embodied ‘real’ child and his or her social environments, there remains a question mark over the extent to which children themselves play any part in the historical development of their childhoods. The distinction between ‘childhood’ and ‘children’ is thus important: the former emphasises the development of adult thinking on the ‘physiologically immature’, or what we commonly refer to as children. The issue here is how childhood was shaped as a powerful set of ideas about the treatment and expectations of children and the nature of adult–child relations. Much has been written about how the modern idea of childhood developed through the intersection of ideas and sentiments at political, social, economic and moral levels (Ariès, 1962). The latter, on the other hand, emphasises embodied versions of childhood – children as flesh-and-blood social actors. Much less has been written historically about the roles that children themselves played in their social environments.

This chapter will explore these two approaches to the history of childhood. I will first discuss the historical development of childhood with reference to the theory of social constructionism and a number of historical conceptions of childhood that reflect growing concerns over and interest in the nature of childhood. Secondly, I move on to examine the role that children themselves played in the history of childhood. In the final section I bring these two themes together and argue that the inclusion of work on the history of children provides a more informed and broad-based overview of how childhood has developed historically.

Constructing childhood historically

Recent innovations in the study of children and childhood owe a considerable debt to the work of social historians, such as Edward Shorter’s (1976) The Making of the Modern Family and his argument that motherhood is a product of modernity; Lloyd DeMause’s (1976) thesis on the changing nature of parent–child relations; and Neil Postman’s (1982) ‘rise and fall’ of a technologically driven American childhood. But it is the work of social historian Phillipe Ariès (1962) that is most influential in challenging the biological basis to childhood, in arguing childhood is a product of modernity. Modern childhood is often taken for granted as a universal feature of societies largely because processes of growing up and development are assumed to be predominantly based on the biological unfolding of the child as a future adult. Children’s emotional, social and moral wellbeing are inferred from this process of ‘growing up’, with childhood an all-encompassing and ever-present feature of societies and historical periods that incorporates these processes. Ariès (1962) challenges this powerful conception of childhood through a historical analysis of the rise of powerful adult ideas and sentiments, ways of expressing adults’ feelings and emotions towards children. According to Ariès, in medieval times childhood did not exist:

The idea of childhood … corresponds with an awareness of a particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval society this awareness was lacking. That is why as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his [sic] mother, his nanny or his cradle rocker he belonged to adult society. (1962: 125)

Ideas and sentiments that eventually separated children from adult society developed slowly over time, but from the 16th to the 19th century Ariès charts the way that these adult conceptions of the ‘physiologically immature’ converged on the idea of childhood. Moreover, these ideas started to affect the way that children were treated and heavily influenced the nature of relations between adults and children inside and outside the home. In effect, Ariès argues that by the 19th century children were necessarily segregated from the adult population in order that they go through an extended period of nurturing and development before being ‘released’ into the wider society as adults.

Ariès based his argument on an inferential approach to his data: the development of childhood is drawn from a range of literary and visual representations of family life, schooling and child’s play. Ariès inferred from a range of artistic representations the meaning of childhood and, by tracing the historical changes in these representations over several centuries, was able to discern how those meanings changed over time. To take one example, Ariès documents trends in family portraits from the 12th to the 19th century. The child in the earlier period was depicted as ‘a man on a smaller scale’, with a similar-shaped body and clothing because children were not perceived as being anything other than miniature adults (Ariès, 1962: 10). This is compared with the later period where family portraits denoted a much stronger conception of the child as physically distinct from adults, with ‘child-like’ features within the family, with the adult parental gaze downwards on the child, suggesting a powerful protective circle within which the small, vulnerable child is able to develop. The child became literally and metaphorically central here: ‘[it] was in the 17th century ... that the family portrait … tended to plan itself around the child’ (Ariès, 1962: 44). Ariès’ work is significant because he provides us with the idea that modern societies were characterised by the development of adult sentiments towards children. Rather than adults being indifferent to children, children became the focal point in both families and schools, and in time they also became a critical feature of policy making.

If we explore this concept of adult sentiment and interest in children, it becomes clear that there were considerable differences in how adults actually perceived children and thus major differences in how childhood was conceptualised. In effect we can distinguish between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ in terms of the way that adults started to view children differently from themselves – what we might call a concept of childhood. At the same time, children can be viewed separately from adults in different kinds of ways; in other words a number of different generational distinctions can be made – what Archard (2004) refers to as different conceptions of childhood. Archard (2004) revises Ariès’ argument in that he emphasises the different adult rationales for the segregation of children from the adult world. I want to go on and discuss these differences with respect to four dominant conceptions of childhood: the innocent child; the troublesome child; the child as an investment in the future; and the developmental child.

The innocent child

The concept of innocence came to be associated with children’s lives and their essential being through the work of French philosopher Emile Rousseau in the 18th century and in England in the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries through the work of the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Blake. Rousseau counterposed the child as a ‘noble savage’ with the negative and pernicious influence of society. In his famous text Emile (1762), Rousseau writes that childhood was the quintessential embodiment of nature that was irrevocably lost as children grew up. In particular this essential goodness was compromised as children were influenced by schooling: education taught children to conform to the rules and structures of society. Rousseau argues that in order to retain this innocence, within broad protective constraints children should be allowed to express themselves and thus draw out their creative instincts.

This comparison between the essence of nature and the artifice of society was later reaffirmed through the Romantics’ focus on innocence and purity set against an equally powerful image of the exploitable child labourer in the early part of 19th century industrial Britain. Wordsworth associates childhood in a spiritual sense with nature; Blake evokes darker images of this ‘nature’ having a fleeting presence in our lives as children are confronted by the material realities of poverty and hardship. Both symbolically equate childhood with all that is good and unsullied (Hendrick, 1997).

Rousseau and the Romantics emphasised the importance of innocence, with adults playing the role of protecting and nurturing this innocence within the child. The concept of innocence is in some respects synonymous with a modern concept of childhood. Adult perceptions of childhood generate the impulse to protect and care for children. Within a professional context this has been translated into child-centredness. Educational philosophy in the early part of the 20th century and its professional and practical counterpart later in that century has focused on the need to centre the curriculum and teaching approaches around the child. European and North American practice in early years and primary schooling during this period emphasised schools and teachers fitting in with the interests of the child. Thus, rather than children’s educational experiences being driven by the demands of an adult-structured curriculum, professionals were to try to work around the interests of children. Among other things, teachers were to nurture children’s creative capacities with a loosely structured curriculum having to work its way through the initiatives, interests and needs of children.

The troublesome child

It is not always clear that the need to regulate children, particularly those in adolescence, is a relatively recent concern. Shakespeare reminds us of the difficulties adults have in regulating the behaviour of teenagers:

I would there no age between sixteen and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. (The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene iii)

Moreover, Hobbes’ (1651) famous work Leviathan in the 17th century emphasised the importance of constraining the wills and appetites of individuals and set down a framework of thinking that emphasised the importance of institutions and authority figures in disciplining the less ‘civilised’ instincts of children. However, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries that these more puritanical conceptions of childhood became prominent, offering a clear contrast with the ideas of the Romantics. The influence of John Wesley’s Methodism and the later Evangelical movement of Hannah More were evident in the way that discipline rather than nurture became a dominant theme in the ways of relating to children. In the former case, the will of the child was to be broken, control and physical punishment characterising parental approaches to their children rather than opening up of spaces for their expression (Hendrick, 1997). This emphasis on control as well as protection became a dominant motif throughout the 19th century in England. Jenks (1996) talks about the powerful image of the Dionysian child, from the Greek god Dionysus who symbolises chaos and unpredictability. The child here is inherently evil and wayward rather than innately good.

One powerful idea about children here is that they are social incompetents, incapable of making the right moral choices and therefore in a position to be easily led by more charismatic and powerful friends and peers. Dickens picks up on this theme in Oliver Twist, his fictional characterisation of street life in London in the mid-19th century. But there was a more general public concern in England during this period. Hendrick (1997) refers to the concept of the ‘delinquent child’: children, particularly urban working-class children, were perceived to constitute a public order problem. Various campaigns were started and reports published to try to strengthen legislation to curb a perceived increase in the incidence of crime committed by children on the street. Juvenile delinquency became a separate category of crime and social policy at this time was concerned with getting ‘vagrants’ off the streets and back into the home. Working-class children were to be domesticated and brought in line with growing middle-class norms of childhood dependence.

Research in context

Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

The need to discipline and regulate children, particularly ‘children of the dangerous classes’, was a critical feature of public policy in Britain in the mid- to late 19th century onwards (Pearson, 1983: 159). The concept of socialisation was significant here, with delinquency attributed to inadequate parental socialisation and control, particularly in relation to working-class parents. This is a theme that continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, with periodic public anxieties in England centring on the behaviour and disposition of children and young people. Pearson (1983) in his classic study refers to these as recurring public fears that punctuate British history during this period. The late Victorian period was particularly important, with the foc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Advertisement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Praise for the book
• Acknowledgements
• About the editors
• About the contributors
• How to use the book and its online resources
• Introduction
• Part One  Histories and Theories of Childhood
• Part Two  Inclusion and Diversity
• Part Three  Learning and Play
• Part Four  Health, Wellbeing and Protection
• Part Five  Professional Working
• Part Six  Research and Reflection
• References
• Index