Children, Structure and Agency

G.K. Lieten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135857165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'infanzia in sociologia

The child labour debate, the Child Rights Convention and the target of universal primary education in the Millennium Development Goals have drawn increasing attention to children in developing countries. Alongside, a debate has waged on the need for child participation and the appropriateness of spreading allegedly western norms of childhood. This book aims to uncover the daily life of children in selected areas in Vietnam, India, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Nicaragua and Bolivia against the background of those debates.

Children, Structure and Agency takes a close look at the activities, the aspirations and the deliberations of hundreds of poor children in the age category from 9 to 14, on the basis of a dawn-to-sunset observation over a couple of days. By empowering children to make people listen to them, children can play a more an active role in their community. The book addresses the issue of such child agency and the structural constraints to that agency.

This text would be of interest to child-centred development aid organisations and scholars dealing with issues of child participation, child rights, child labour and education.

1
Tradition and Child-Centred Approaches

All communities have social practices into which its members are inducted from an early age onwards; this is referred to as the process of primary socialisation, with gender-sensitive and age-defined roles and rituals. In the past, local communities used to be relatively stable and individual roles and functions were acquired through the imitation of the existing norms and practices. The individual was expected to act socially. The participation of the child meant that it adhered to the tradition and to the changes therein. Submission to hierarchy was paramount.

Most parents themselves, in hierarchically organised and autocratic societies, may never have been exposed to the ideas of rights and participation. Caste-ridden, tribal, and orthodox religious communities are usually organised, with the notable exceptions, around the authority of specified elders who see to it that tradition is observed. Growing up in a rural environment usually happens far away from the modernising impact of cities and hardly touched by the expanding opportunities of economic development. Ideas and models of a different behaviour or alternative choices, which could provide the impetus to pro-change activities from below, are often missing.

On the other hand, communities rather always have been changing. The unchanging idea of tradition often is a stereotype, imposed from the outside in order to essentialise local cultures as the Other. The use of those cultural stereotypes has often followed a static and homogenising view; cultures are seen as applying to all members of the community. The emphasis on dichotomies between developed and underdeveloped societies rather than on similarities across ethnic groups is the bottom line of such an approach.

The logic of such an approach implies that there are no universal values and norms, and that ‘Western ethnocentricity’ is at play if such norms are assumed to be applicable throughout the world. This assertion that the Western world is imposing its norms on developing countries has become prominent in some of the postmodernist literature of recent years; it has allowed scholars to argue that child labour is not necessarily repugnant, but that it is actually embedded in local cultures, and should thus be respected.

In the discussion on the concept of childhood, some have embraced the notion that a childhood involving protection and emotional care is typical only for Western cultures. This perspective takes as its starting point the assertion that children have rights not so much to protection as to participation and even to work. In developing countries, work is presumed to be part and parcel of the everyday existence of most children (Liebel et al. 2001; Liebel 2004; Cussianovich 2002, 2; James et al. 1998, 107 and 112). Jo Boyden (1997, 208), for example, has argued that taking Western childhood as a normative basis for remedial action elsewhere could potentially have damaging effects on poor families and their children. She postulates that the beliefs of ‘welfare and rights practitioners’ differ radically from those of parents and children. The former consider children who are absent from school, children at work or living in the streets, as aberrations that need to be rectified. The parents, Boyden adds, may not conceive it as a problem and may consider work as an integral part of normal socialisation: ‘In this respect, the move to set global standards for childhood and common policies for child welfare may be far from the enlightened steps anticipated by its proponents’.

The argument against imposing universal norms partially derives from the assumption that childhood is a pluriform concept and that the ‘Western’ idea of childhood should not find universal application. The work by Philippe Ariès (1964) is usually taken as the standard reference work. What Ariès has done is to show, on the basis of visual representations, that family life, which was formally a peculiarity only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, progressively extended into the entire society in the course of the eighteenth century. From the eighteenth century onwards, the family started to form as a separate and private reality, and the child acquired a different character: the parents are preoccupied with its education, its capacity building, its future (Ariès 1964, 457). This evolution was, for a long time, restricted to ‘the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the rich artisans, the rich workers’, and in the nineteenth century even ‘a big chunk of the population, the poorest and most numerous, lived as the medieval families, the children not staying with their parents’ (1964, 457).

The historical evolution in Europe thus suggests that the emergence of a new type of family, with a new type of childhood, was not culture specific. It was class specific and emerged and fructified in the midst of wider economic changes (towards modernity). Families in the developing countries today, possibly with the exception of tiny groups living on the margins, in areas that are geographically difficult to access, have made that transition from the ‘collective’ to the private: children are looked after within the households with the future of the individuals in mind.

The process of long-term historical evolution has led to new forms of socialisation; forms which emerged and which gradually entered mainstream society. Under the impact of development, modernisation, commoditisation, and spatial integration, changes in ideas, norms, and attitudes have come along and the socialisation process of children has thus become embedded in those new normative parameters. The process has become ingrained in the ‘private family’, rather than the community, as the nodal point of child welfare and education. It has also become entrenched in an economic environment where survival is a matter of acquiring the best competitive endowments in an expanding world. (See e.g., Katz 2004 on children in Sudan under the impact of globalisation.) The endowments relate to a proper education, good health, and access to the wider world. That apparently is what childhood is about, both in the developed world and in the developing world.

QUESTIONS OF CHILDHOOD: UNIVERSALISM AND INDIVIDUALISM

Breaking down childhood as a concept would help to distil the pan-cultural from the specific Western features underlying the concept (Fernando 2001, 20). In the debate on ‘childhood’, many authors have argued that childhood is a social construct.¹ Their paradigm is that ‘Western’ childhood is only one of the multiple constructs and that this construct should not be imposed as a general standard on all the children in the world. The various authors who defend the idea of multiple concepts of childhood are keen to stress that children should be understood within their own world order and without the imposition of the universal normative model. They thus appear to take an anticolonial stance, liberating childhood from the Western and colonising narrative. The CRC, they argue, has reinforced ‘Western’ norms under the garb of universalism. White (1999, 134), for example, argues that the official policies are ‘often based on static and universalising models of childhood’, and prefers to take the middle ground, resorting to cultural relativism as a tool of learning and understanding. Cultural relativism ‘in addition to the general principle of respect for the ways of life of others (is) a useful corrective to pseudo-universalistic notions’ (White 1999, 137).

The universal objectives and values of the CRC have been characterised, by a number of scholars, as being derived from Western values and Western lifestyles. William Myers (1999) sees in the CRC an excessive orientation towards the values of the North and West, ‘with too little recognition of values from other regions of the world’, and argues that despite the universal ratification, it has an ‘unmistakable rich country flavour, as well as a whiff of paternalism in which the powerful rich dictate how the poor should raise their children’. He also draws our attention to the fact that

‘the Convention incorporates a highly individualistic view of children and child development that typifies industrialised countries but does not accord with the majority of the world’s cultures, who tend to understand children as an integral part of the family and society, and as having responsibilities as well as rights’.

Some child-centred development aid organisations, possibly in their endeavour to be closer to the ‘community’, have taken aspects of that discourse on board, defending local cultures in their construction of childhood. The International Save the Children Alliance (2000), for example, has commented on childhood in the following antiuniversalistic manner: ‘There is no standard or universal way of being a child or of being in the state of childhood’. The state of being a child and the concept of childhood as a particular period in the human life cycle, the document states, can vary greatly from one society and culture to another:

Despite universal biological processes determining children’s maturation and development, there are also considerable differences in societies’ and cultures’ interpretations of these processes and in the ways in which social practices interact with biological processes to produce specific individual and cultural capabilities and identities. There are probably as many versions of childhood as there are children in the world, since children—like adults—are persons with individual experiences, ideas and capabilities despite the demands of our various cultures.

The theorem of childhood as a social construct has, in the above citation, developed further into childhood as a cultural construct and even as an individual construct (‘as many versions of childhood as there are children’), and as such reveals that the notion of childhood has become subject to cultural relativism. It is assumed that cultures, whatever a ‘culture’ means, are different all over the world and that all cultures have an innate right to autonomy and equivalence with other cultures.

If childhood is a social construct, what does it mean? Is it a concept that is used as an analytical category in order to delineate a social phenomenon, in which case childhood need not have different meanings for different societies? Or is it a concept which has different meanings in different societies, in which case societies, diachronically and synchronically, have different childhoods? Qvortrup (2005a, 2) makes a reference to Ariès according to whom in the medieval and immediate postmedieval period children in Europe did not constitute a conceptual category. They were not perceived as a separate category with distinct needs and they were fully participating in adult society, in its work, its leisure, its public events: ‘the Arièsian vision was one in which children were a part of public life … and to be in the open space implied visibility, albeit not in the figure of children as a group or collectivity.’ The emergence of childhood meant that children started to live in a social sphere (the family, the school) that was separate from the world of adults and that took the distinct needs and capacity of the child into consideration. Qvortrup (2005a, 4) further suggests that the position of children, and the attitudes of adults towards children, was altered by the changes in the mode of production as a consequence of which the usefulness of children as direct producers declined and their usefulness as future producers, properly skilled, increased. It thus appears, at least in this interpretation, that childhood is a separate stage in life, the absence of which, for example in the case of severely exploitative child labour, would lead to a ‘lost childhood’ or a ‘stolen childhood’.

If the meaning of childhood is the stage distinguishing them from adults, then would there be scope for a variety of childhoods (or a variety of adulthoods) and the illegitimacy of imposing a universal norm of child rights (or a universal norm of human rights)? Children across the globe live different lives and the argument for a plurality of childhoods ‘has often been related to the global disparity between affluent and poor countries and regions, as well as to class divisions, variation between cultures and differences between cohorts’ (Frones 2005, 268). In this reading, the variety of childhoods is linked to the variety of children’s lives as social practice. In the sense of social practice there possibly are as many childhoods as there are children, but using such a connotation would make the concept analytically hollow. Children move along starkly different paths. Childhood, says Frones, is something which children do, and what they do can show marked differences, not only across cultures but also across class positions, age, and gender: ‘The synchronic patterns allow a variety of positions at each phase, a variety that is increasing with the differentiation of modern society, producing a correspondingly large number of possible diachronic tracks and paths’ (2005, 275). This actually is the paradox of the homogenisation of childhood within child-centred institutions and the differentiation in the actual world of children.

It is important to make that distinction between childhood as an analytical category, referring to the basic principles underlying the position of the child in society, and childhood as living practice: ‘Being a child is defined as belonging within the framework of childhood. The lives of children as social practice are represented by the processes of moving through childhood’ (Frones 2005, 281). That distinction is usually not made and leads many, including some child aid organisations, as the quote above illustrates, to the conclusion that children in developing countries have a different childhood and, moreover, that a Western ideal-type childhood should not be imposed on them.

The discussion on childhood, and the turn against universalism, carving out the legitimacy of a separate childhood for children in developing countries, misses the concrete point of the social relations and the institutional structures that a child is embedded in. Childhood in a squalid urban neighbourhood in Western countries may not be that different from the childhood experience and constraints in a poor neighbourhood in cities of the Third World. What is missing in the concept of childhood is the concrete analysis of how poor and/or ethnically marginalised children are made to remain in a state of childhood that, although institutions such as the educational system formally have become equivalent, puts them in a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the more fortunate children of the world. It is the social relations that provide some children in developing countries with a ‘Western’ childhood practice (school, leisure, music, sports, etc.) and others with a ‘traditional’ childhood practice (girls working in the kitchen and boys collecting garbage). A multitude of such distinctions within childhood also apply to children in distinctly different positions in the developed world. Defending the separate and specific childhood of deprived children then in fact would amount to defending, or at least condoning, their economic marginalisation. Children may remain bereft of a ‘Western’ type of childhood, not because of a different cultural perspective of childhood but because of the unfortunate impact of a globally lopsided economic development. In their case, universal ideals of childhood should not be abandoned for being alien or inappropriate (Rizzini and...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Development and Society
• Contents
• List of Tables and Boxes
• Glossary
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Tradition and Child-Centred Approaches
• 2 Country Specific
• 3 Methodology
• 4 Leisure and Daily Life
• 5 School and Education
• 6 Child Labour
• 7 Problems and Priorities in Development
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author
• Index