Childhood as a moral project

Childhood confronts one inescapably as a moral problem. To contemplate childhood necessitates engagement in and with moral discourses. One cannot speak of, speak to, gaze upon, consider or analyze any particular child, or various childhoods, without entering into and becoming entangled with morally infused vocabularies concerning the rightness and wrongness, appropriateness or inappropriateness of one’s actions and, indeed, one’s thoughts. Every decision made on behalf of a child favors some aspects of the world over others. No word or deed directed at a child, no object intended for a child’s possession or space crafted for children’s use, no image fabricated for their eyes or sound made resonant for their ears, no amount of attention or inattention paid their activities, voices or perspectives—in none of these can neutrality reside. Childhood, in this way, abhors and disallows moral agnosticism. It poses problems which cannot be ignored and which must be dealt with, negotiated, and handled in some manner—be it by institutions and structures or by people.

The moral field of childhood marks and recognizes no positions outside of it (cf. Bourdieu, 1993). There exists no place beyond which to stand apart from the evaluative frames, which establish the universe of discourse in the first place. As such, childhood arises as a moral project for all—regardless the “side” taken on a debate or issue—for, everyone, it seems, stands on the “side” of children. Marketers, ministers, pedagogues, pundits, parents, politicians, and scholars alike crowd together under the penumbra of self-assurance that their efforts are in line with promoting good or correct childhoods. Virtually every children’s product on the market asserts some sort of educational, developmental, nutritional, ludic, creative, or social benefit, even as psychologists, consumer activists, and others counter with their own versions of a proper childhood for which to strive. Such battles wage on, sometimes with almost ritual cadence, skirmish after skirmish, all sides convinced not only of the rightness of their position but also of its moral basis and accuracy. No one, it appears, ever takes an unabashedly immoral posture toward children and childhood when pondered from their own standpoint.

Conceptualizing childhood as moral project and problem turns attention away from identifying particular instances of and judgments about the rightness or wrongness of this or that behavior and trains the attention on childhood itself, on childhood writ large. It focuses investigation not so much on any specific prescription or proscription regarding children—although these are crucial to the examination—but more directly on the ways in which childhood itself requires ethical determinations of one kind or another for its existence. That is, childhood, in the manner conceptualized here, does not exist apart from the moral entanglements about it found in rhetoric, in admonitions about proper childhoods or in advice encountered at any given time about any particular concern (e.g., sexualization, violence, media exposure, discipline, indulgence, etc.). Indeed, such entanglements are not obstacles on the way to determining correct or appropriate childhoods; rather, they constitute the very childhoods at issue, providing the materials from which they are constructed, lived, and defined in contemporary public and private cultures. Hence, at this level of thought and from this perspective, there can never be outright “solutions” to the moral problem of childhood, only perhaps resolutions to moral questions within given childhoods.

As ongoing uncertainties, children and definitions of childhood require ceaseless attention and monitoring, ranging from large-scale, institutionalized beliefs about the “nature” of children and childhood, to the structuring of the early life course in terms of education, learning, and play, to the minutiae of everyday practices of feeding and clothing children. Those who wittingly or unwittingly serve as agents on behalf of children—who arrange their semantic and material lives in some way—commit profoundly moral acts on a daily basis to the extent that their actions necessarily invoke a set or system of beliefs, which are moral in nature, directionality, and thrust (Cook, 2002: 7). Efforts at fending off and regulating the uncertainties posed by a never-ending stream of children are woven into the fabric of social life and social structure (see Ryder, 1965). Core, longstanding social institutions such as marriage, the family and education not only require the promise or presence of biographical children to feed their existence, but they also are thereby required to expend effort on child-related definitional matters as a matter of course. That most babies are greeted as a “promise”—that is, in promising terms—appears to be emotionally as well sociologically necessary, but the promise most widely and effortlessly kept is that of the uncertainty which accompanies every new life and every anticipation of a new life.

It is the incessant necessity to expend effort (semantic, political, cultural) on determining the good from bad, the appropriate from appropriate, with regard to children that makes for what I am calling the moral project of childhood. The idea of a moral project speaks to collective or collaborative efforts—by institutions and structures or by people and social processes—which work in different and often contradictory ways to realign existing practice and belief with one another. As a noun or thing, a “project” denotes generally a collective, perhaps collaborative, enterprise, sometimes with specific plan or design, and certainly with a goal. People together engage in projects—a research project, a civic project, and so on: As an action or verb, to project is to cast forward, to consider ahead of oneself or of the current moment or situation. It may be useful to think of a project as a form of active, shared conjecture. Efforts undertaken with children, often in the name of childhood, may be done so by individuals interacting in and attending to what may be delimited, specific contexts and situations—perhaps at home or in school—or they may be taken up by institutions and grand social efforts such as the long term, historical development of a school system, juvenile justice system or commercial industries. The idea of “collaborative” work, here, should be taken loosely to refer to efforts of different parties working in the same direction or cultural arena, purportedly toward the same goal—and not necessarily purposively or collusively sharing and directly interacting on a singular thing, a singular project.

The moral project of childhood, as I intend it, speaks to the varied efforts over time by various parties to determine, arrange, or otherwise deem appropriate (or inappropriate) the boundaries and dimensions that make up the childhoods at hand, and thus of childhood generally. In this way and from this point of view, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) participates in a moral project of childhood as it defines, promotes, and seeks to enforce generally—though often contested—shared notions of the good and the bad, the right and the wrong in relation to certain conceptions of children. On the other hand and in another way, a parent making a decision about the kind of food her child should eat or negotiating over what sorts of media entertainment to consume also partakes in a moral project of sorts. School system regulations that proscribe behavior on playgrounds or civic laws that disallow unaccompanied minors on public streets past certain hours draw upon particular versions of correct and appropriate (raced, classed, and gendered) childhoods. Contributions to moral projects may also include informal talk among adults about another’s parenting practices or the shock and dismay expressed by newscasters when they report on sexual liaisons between minors and their school teachers. The “child” serves as the focus of moral projects when the Boy Scouts of America limit (or, now allow) openly gay and lesbian persons from participating as members or leaders in the organization. For that matter, the entire global toy-media industry—from internal research to theories of development and of play, from product conception and design to outsourcing of manufacturing, from packaging to promotion, including the multiple and overlapping legal statutes which may or may not regulate playthings for kids—all these together denote, encode, and enact ethical precepts, which themselves speak to some presumed or theorized concept of the nature of children and childhood.

A moral project is not a thing in itself and possesses no specific content. Rather, the idea of childhood as a moral project arises from and represents a perspective and an approach to the framing and reframing of the childhoods at hand—those that are lived today, those that are researched and conjectured and those that come to one by way of passed-down story, rumor and innuendo (i.e. history, heritage). Conceptualizing childhood as a moral project in this way seeks to shift discussion, investigation, and debate away from battling over which childhoods are correct and where others went wrong, and moves into an analytical and philosophical space that enables recognition of the mutual constitution of “good” and “bad” childhoods, of “right” and “wrong” practices. To that end, the idea of childhood as moral project takes up and engages in a form of metaethical theorizing—as opposed to normative theorizing (Frankena, 1963; Gerwith, 1960)—problematizing the epistemological, semantic, and perhaps metaphysical bases and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice (Sayre-McCord, 2014). In consequence, the “child” itself—alone, isolated, circumscribed—would diminish in its capacity as a moral rhetoric for action and thought, allowing attention to turn to the epistemolical, political, and ideological battles waging underfoot.