Abstract
Any book covering the vast conditions and contexts of children’s lives must capture ongoing tensions between the rhetoric and the reality of childhood as both social environment and lived experience for different children. The editors explain at the outset of this handbook that they provide a ‘state of the art overview’ of the literature, debates, key positions and new perspectives in particular subjects in childhood studies. The 28 chapters then delve more deeply into six areas that enable the editors to situate their overview of childhood studies research in an analytical framework. In the very last chapters the real significance of childhood studies is shown. With the global recognition that children possess human rights, children are able to mobilize a legal status beyond that guaranteed by the state and thus childhood itself contests the very nature of sovereignty and citizenship. Kaufman and Rizzini (‘Closing the gap between rights and the realities of children’s lives’) demonstrate that the changing conditions of childhood are themselves instrumental in effecting the new ‘set of global norms . . . emerging’. Like all good conclusions, this final chapter compels the reader to loop back to the editors’ introduction and reconsider both real and ideal childhoods. Although it could be used as valuable reference material, this collection goes far beyond a reference book.
The appearance of ‘the new’ childhood studies in the 1980s, as outlined in ‘Why social studies of childhood? An introduction to the handbook’, responded to changing conditions surrounding childhoods. In making this observation from the perspective of prominent theorists, Qvortrup, Corsaro and Honig emphasize the importance of a history of particular ideas. They note demographic, legal, socioeconomic and globalized shifts in the ways children were becoming more valuable (within shrinking families) and more visible (within transnational families) as participants in the social world, less as problems to be rectified through policy, and more as participants in larger, global contexts with their challenges for all humans. In addition to children’s own lives, Qvortrup argues in the first chapter, ‘Childhood as a structural form’, childhood itself, and its future, is of interest as societies undergo changes producing new structural relations. Societal changes, such as differential adoption of new technologies, reposition social groups as they impact culture. Structural developments therefore interact with cultural variability. Interdisciplinary analyses of such generational positionings tell more about the future of childhood than developmental models of children’s growth to adulthood ever did. And investigating children’s life worlds within childhood, suggests James in ‘Agency’, next, allows an understanding of children’s perspectives on globalized challenges. Children’s lives are in themselves of interest with all their ordinary, everyday realities, differences and available roles (see also Woodhead, next, ‘Child development and the development of childhood’). The right to access active roles in societal decisions and structural changes is not yet fully ensured, but does give advocates a basis on which to claim that children are active in constructing their own contribution to the social order.
Childhood studies also appeared at the time that new social movements generated identity-centred critiques of the structure and agency debates displacing the dominance of development and deviance perspectives to allow for the voices of difference. Many of these chapters introduce the reader to the earliest researchers who went to children’s worlds to immerse themselves in ways that children related to those in their lives, with both autonomy and awareness of a role in the reproduction of the wider institutional order. Honig, in ‘How is the child constituted in childhood studies?’, then takes such ethnographic understandings of children within their culture and considers whether ‘generation’ acts as the epistemological and empirical key to study the conditions of childhood. It is more useful, he argues, than studying children as the future adults of any generation, but only if ‘generation’ takes as its object of knowledge the relations between children of a generation or with adults of a different generation to tell us ‘how the child is possible’. After raising the issue of empirical knowledge of childhood among children, these chapters are followed by the last of the first section: ‘Method and methodology in childhood research’ by Lange and Mierendorff. It is an excellent review of methodological considerations essential for any researcher beginning a study of and with children; the authors conclude that although the methodological toolkit has not changed much from more traditional social science investigations, the now prevalent ‘ethnographic attitude’ means that the tools are used in completely new ways, such as recording visually ‘the discovery of the body’ and the physicality with which children interpret their worlds (see also Fingerson, ‘Children’s bodies’ in Section IV).
Section II provides extensive historical detail on representations of the child within the family across time and in the socioeconomic context. Hendrick’s ‘The evolution of childhood in Western Europe c.1400–c.1750’ is a fascinating account of the emergence of the child as the psychologically located self ultimately entwined with the upheaval of social identity through the industrialization of Western Europe. Gillis notes in ‘Transitions to modernity’ that time shared living with children has diminished in the 20th century while events dedicated to bringing children together with adults in a family, thereby constructing ‘family time’, have become evident. Zeiher continues, in ‘Institutionalization as a secular trend’, tracing the evolution of an increasingly deinstitutionalized childhood into late modernity. Jensen’s ‘Pluralization of family forms’ ends the section by asking if the way that family relations are diversifying really attends to children as children, despite opening up space for relationships with fathers, in that it is children in these families who commute not to work but to and from parental homes.
Section III on generational relations is the heart of the text. It is an in-depth analysis of generation as culture, as structural order, as relational social category and as standpoint epistemology. Alanen (‘Generational order’) sets the terms of the analysis by challenging researchers to examine how persons who live through sociopolitical events that define their identity are then ‘generationed’ in ways that produce unequal opportunities and chances depending on the actions of the birth cohort that has gone before and depending on the actions of those who are ascribed ‘adultness’ and thus define ‘childness’. Mayall (‘Generational relations at family level’) develops the relational model within cross-generational family contexts, especially mentioning ways that children contribute to and alter family forms in the generational order. Olk (‘Children, generational relations and intergenerational justice’) focuses on ‘the process of generationing’ (producing the concept of future generations, for example) and in particular on ways that certain generations are treated and supported by the state at the expense of other, usually younger, ones. Hengst (‘Collective identities’) ends this section by asking how new technologies constitute generational shaping, such that layers of experience which add to determinate generational positioning in a particular historical time are derived in newer and different ways in contemporary media environments.
Children’s everyday lives are the focus of Section IV. Contrary to expectation, there is little evidence here of ethnographic richness. An opportunity was missed by the editors in not asking the authors in this section to develop within their work on children’s embodiment or play, to mention two themes, a generational analysis of physicality or mobility, for example. In ‘Children’s bodies’, Fingerson neglects children who live, learn, work and play with dis/ability in the everyday as today’s generations includes disabled children in the community, and childhoods in many countries are no longer cut short or spent in residential institutions. Dahlberg (‘Policies in early childhood education and care: Potentialities for agency, play and learning’) touches on neoliberal self-management acquired by the very young in their childcare centres in the West. McKendrick’s description of neighbourhoods (‘Localities: A holistic frame of reference for appraising social justice in children’s lives’) tells more about how children should participate in cities than how generational cultures may be shaping the ways they do not use neighborhood spaces. Rosier’s ‘Children as problems, problems of children’ and Frønes’ ‘Childhood: Leisure, culture and peers’ present relevant overviews, yet with overly macro-level theorization for a ‘local framework’ section.
Section V covers the ways children create cultural practices of their own. In one of the strongest chapters in the anthology, Nieuwenhuys (‘From child labour to working children’s movements’) deconstructs paradigms of childhood that construct children’s work as of moral benefit (unpaid schoolwork in the North) and trade and enterprise benefit to the globalized economy (low-paid labour in the South). Quoting the collective action of working children in a new social movement to end transnational exploitation, the words of the children lead Nieuwenhuys to demand that working children be part of agreements about children’s rights to work. Both Corsaro (‘Peer culture’) and Evaldsson (‘Play and games’) present fluid reviews of key literature depicting children’s everyday participation in how they do things together that provide many springboards for new researchers bearing an ‘ethnographic attitude’ (and a non-English language). In ‘Children as consumers’, Cook outlines the interrelationship between a generation’s peer culture and consumer culture which, especially through American television and merchandising, now harnesses childhood globally to promote discourses of choice and participation. The argument is thoughtfully expanded by Buckingham’s ‘Children and television’ with attention to research studies, including in-depth ethnography, while raising critical implications of asking children for their experiences of watching television without examining the cultural conditions of their lives. This critical point is taken up by Drotner, ‘Children and digital media: Online, on site, on the go’. Today’s children are called the digital generation, celebrating the innovative potential of digital media and its role in upskilling future generations. For those who fear distortion and harm in new ‘mediatized’ time–space social environments, Drotner points to article 13 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which protects the right of children to freedom of expression in whatever media they choose.
Thus, Section VI on children’s rights (Freeman) and place in the world (Bühler-Niederberger and Sünker) provides a fitting endpoint to the thematic sections. The reader is ready to consider afresh the significance of universal rights, in particular the right to transnational travel and mobility (Bailey). This anthology is deeply engaged with differential aspects of children’s social lives and the generational shaping of the conditions of childhood. Its editors have skillfully shown that generational analyses have important and unanticipated insights into social change. In the process, they have opened many doors to new ways to investigate the realities of children’s impact on this world.