Children’s art: Work or play? Preschoolers considering the economic questions of their theatre performance

Children face to face with economy: Victims or victors?

EXTRACT 1

It seems that the appreciation of children’s art, as well as the appreciation of all art, may be measured in currency – and even the children themselves recognize that. During the theatre project, the children were aware of and interested in various issues of producing, marketing and advertising. The children began spontaneously to discuss the finances of our performance: they contemplated whether they should ask for an entrance fee and how high it should be. They also suggested ways of marketing the DVD of their performance. The financial questions came up at the children’s own initiative, as in extract 1. In this article I use concurrently the concepts of economy, finances and consumer culture. I am aware of the fact that they are not synonymous, but in this particular context it is not relevant to separate them. The focus is on the way children encounter the world of economy, which includes the issues of marketing, advertising and producing.

In earlier times, the notions of child and childhood were determined for instance by the church and the state, but at present they are mainly defined by consumer culture and the media (Kenway and Bullen, 2001: 61). The world, it is said, is on the threshold of what is variously described as the information society, consumer culture, or risk society (Keller and Kalmus, 2009: 356). This has led to debates filled with anxiety and concern. Consumer culture appears to be uncontrollable, immoral, superficial and unpredictable by nature. Its impact on children can only be conjectured. A threatening image has emerged: maybe childhood itself is disappearing (Buckingham, 2000). On the other hand, the fear may arise out of the strangeness of this new culture that involves children but easily leaves adults behind. Instead of panic, the positive aspects of the new culture should be considered. Concerning the discussion regarding consumer society there is the dichotomy between a passive, manipulated child and an empowered, creative child in charge (Cook, 2008: 230; Keller and Kalmus, 2009: 355).

There is the view that consumer culture has the potential to empower children. It seems, on the basis of my research material, that children have the motivation and potential to achieve also an active role in the field of economy. Juliet Schor discusses in her book Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004) the downsides of this notion of empowerment. Schor points out that the core of the new discourse on child empowerment is the idea that advertisements and products generate a feeling of power among children. There is also the assumption that children need to feel independent and able to master their environments, which are usually controlled by their parents. Schor wonders if this leads to undermining self-worth: getting certain products may become vitally important to children’s happiness. Brands and products begin to determine who deserves to have friends, fame, social status and so on (Schor, 2004: 11, 179). Schor (2004: 203) ventures to claim that a dilemma exists in this environment in which children have been set free – it is increasingly dominated by ‘a toxic consumer culture’.

Another interesting dichotomy is in the discussion on the adult world’s relationship with the one children are living in. The traditional authoritarian model is in the process of transformation: this time children are the authorities on the new media and digital culture since they know more about it than their parents (Tapscott, 1998: 251). This transformation provokes reorganizations of social relationships and issues of power and authority. It also questions the conventional terms of adults’ world and children’s world. Typically there is a concern about the disappearance of the boundary between these two worlds. The fear arises from the notion of a corrupting adult world which, in the romantic understanding of childhood, threatens the purity of children (Buckingham, 2000; Schor, 2004). The fear concerns the issues related to my research data – the children are clearly involved in the financial world of adults.

But the opposite interpretation is also worth considering. Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen argue in their book Consuming Children: Education – Entertainment – Advertising (2001) that the duration of childhood has been extended and children have become segregated from the adult world. This is a result of the power of advertising and media which separate children both from adults and from one another by providing them with temporary identities predetermined by the market economy. Kenway and Bullen are also concerned with the fact that school education remains at the margins of children’s identities. According to them, this arises out of the polarization between adults and the young and between youthful pleasure and school education (which includes adults). One strategy for improving the situation might be to offer children ways of understanding how they are using consumer culture as a resource in identity building and how they are used by consumer–media culture at the same time (Kenway and Bullen, 2001: 61, 151, 168). This is an aspect worth noting: instead of being horrified by the fact that the economy invades children’s world, it might be beneficial to capitalize on the resources and let children deal with and learn from it.

Positive aspects of the new culture have been proposed. In his book After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media (2000), David Buckingham pays attention to the fact that it is not necessarily childhood which is dying, but the idea of childhood. By this he means the nostalgic fantasies in which childhood is the nest of innocence and freedom. It is regrettable that the new media allow children to become easily involved with the properties of the adult world: for instance sex and violence. But as Buckingham points out, resistance to children’s passive rebellion against a controlling adult world through the use of media cannot be the solution. It is the wrong direction to begin to deny children’s active role in creating their own culture and to treat them as simply passive victims (Buckingham, 2000: 35, 39). Helena Saarikoski (2009), focusing in her study on Finnish Spice Girls fans, also emphasizes the positive aspects of consuming. Saarikoski points out that fan consumption is not only about actualizing the logic of the market economy or capitalism. It can also be playful, communal, physical, emotional and enjoyable. Saarikoski suggests that the process of learning to become a consumer can be seen as part of the initiation to adulthood with regards to finances and consumer culture. In this kind of society, buying products is a prerequisite for social status and participation (Saarikoski, 2009: 237).

It is not crucial to take sides on the question of children’s status either as victims or victors as regards economic issues. As Daniel Thomas Cook (2004) puts it ‘the question is beyond either/or’. Children are certainly bounded by the consumer culture and finances, involved in them, affecting them and affected by them. Quotations in the next section illustrate how.

Children as producers: Worth one euro or ten thousand?

I now take up examples in which children led discussions on finances. The following situations began in the middle of a discourse on other issues concerning the theatrical performance – it is worth noting that as a rule, the directors did not start to discuss finances. In the first extract the directors nevertheless struck up a conversation about marketing the performance:

EXTRACT 2

(Children and directors are discussing making a poster and a programme.)

In the extract above one of the children, Vernon, speaks out forcefully. He thinks that the permission to charge is a self-evident fact. He also announces that the kids themselves need to earn from the performance – this establishes the fact that children’s getting profit from their own performance is not at all obvious. All children are excited about the promise of getting the earnings for themselves, and girls even begin to fantasize about the concrete cash. Children appear here as actors who are aware of their right to both make decisions and earn from their work.

In economics, four established functions for money are traditionally identified: money as the means or medium of exchange, as a unit of account, as a standard of deferred payment and as a store of value. In popular culture and language money stands for many things – it is a symbol of success, a source of crime and it makes the world go round (Begg et al., 2003: 367). The dream about earning money is not unfamiliar to children. Minna Ruckenstein (2009) has been interviewing Finnish children under the age of 7 about money and consuming. Ruckenstein emphasizes that children separate very naturally money from its economic meanings and this indicates how money is intertwined with cultural issues. The children interviewed stated that they dream about getting more money. They felt that without money they cannot govern their own lives as much as they would like to. Money appears as something which contains power and enables economically useless children to become useful (Ruckenstein, 2009: 87–8, 100–1).

One distinctive issue is the notable lack of academic interest in the symbolic meanings that both adults and children create around products they consume (Martens et al., 2004: 158), and this concerns both the products and all other aspects related to consuming as well – as we can observe from Ruckenstein’s (2009: 100–1) example. Also in extract 2 from my research, data, money and the price of the tickets gain a significance other than the literal meaning. Money is a sign of appreciation and status, and marks children’s position as genuine actors in an artistic project. This transpires indirectly from children’s emphasis on their need to ‘get money too’. It can also be interpreted from the fact that children themselves constantly open the discussions on finances. The next extract resumes the discussion on the price of the tickets:

EXTRACT 3

(Children and directors are discussing practical issues concerning the performance.)

Vernon ponders on the price question on grounds of the fact that a movie costs money – he compares their performance to any movie. His comment demonstrates how professional the children find their own performance. Joseph in turn is worried about the possible scenario in which nobody wants to attend because of the entrance fee. He acknowledges the implications of charging for the tickets: some people are price-conscious or possibly cannot afford it, so that the price of the tickets could be a crucial reason in considering whether to attend the performance or not. This shows how profoundly and from how many different angles children can actually evaluate the consequences of their economic decisions – they are not simply focusing on how to charge as much as possible. The next discussion concerns the amount to charge:

EXTRACT 4

(Children and directors are discussing practical issues concerning the performance.)

Again the question is about the ticket price. The other director begins to joke about the amount to charge, and the children respond to the joking by gesturing exaggeratedly. Then the children consider the options seriously for a while, until Vernon starts to joke about 100-euro tickets again. Tobias concurs with Vernon’s playfulness and raises the charge to 10,000 euros. The last effort to go on joking is the suggestion that the price should be 1 euro. In a joking way, the children are possibly acting in the role of trickster. Helena Saarikoski (2009: 158–60) observed that children usually act as tricksters to hedge the ominous questions of adults. On the grounds of extract 4 this may also apply to positions in which children have to decide on the price issues, which may not be overly easy for them. All in all, when children discuss issues concerning finances and marketing, the nuances of playfulness and fumbling enter the scene. The children in a way take a stab at experimenting with the potential power and the role of decision-makers in the project.

In spite of their joking around, children seem to have quite a realistic understanding of a reasonable price. Three euros could be a decent price for a small performance by amateurs, and 15 euros could be quite a suitable price for a performance by professionals. Based on the discussions above, the children at the age of 6, or at least some of them, are to some extent aware of the economics and of the ways in which consumer culture works. They are capable of estimating, generating ideas and planning the details of marketing their own performance. In this case the children are empowered, not objects but active subjects of consumer culture: they have assumed the role of marketers, not the ones who are marketed to. The following extract gives another example in which children share their marketing visions:

EXTRACT 5

(Sam, Tobias and director 2 are having a discussion after the theatre project.)

The children are excited about inventing ways to keep their performance alive by the aid of the world of economy. The director assumes that the aim is to earn money, suggesting ‘And then you would get some money’ but the children disregard the comment and keep on talking about the practical implementation. The performance was videotaped, and here the children would like to ‘take them [videotapes] to the shops’ and to video rental places. They even plan how ‘they’ – I assume the children mean workers in the industry – would use the videotape of the children’s performance as a model and then a machine could manufacture a hundred videotapes and DVDs. The discussion has some amateurish features, but it still follows roughly an economic logic. The children, again, are selecting the role of active actors, makers and producers.

In prior studies, the discussion on the roles of children in economy is quite confusing and divided. Some notice a problem, which can be formulated as a paradox about the participation and role of children: at the same time as the ideas of the priceless and economically useless child gain strength, children’s growing purchasing power strengthens their role as consumers (Keller and Kalmus, 2009: 357). Deborah Levison (2000) argues in her article ‘Children as economic agents’ that in the world of economy children are not being treated as agents and that economists generally ignore evidence suggesting that children use what power they have to try to achieve outcomes they prefer. Levison points out that economists sustain the invisibility of children by recognizing them in particular, convenient roles such as recipients of care, but never as actors or as givers of care (Levison, 2000: 125–6). But opposite points of views exist as well: it has been claimed that children have become thought of and treated as social agents by marketers, parents and academics because of their increasing participation in commercial life as consumers (Cook, 2004: 151).

It is essential to see the circumstances also from the children’s perspective – instead of concentrating on the marketers’ point of view only. As David Buckingham (2000: 203) writes about children’s participation in the media – and why could it not be generalized to the whole consumer society – two types of participation can be identified. One is participation in production itself, and the other one is participation in the formation of media policy and the management of media institutions. Since children have an intense relationship with consumer culture, it would be justified also to promote the latter kind of participation. Based on the preceding extracts, could there be something worth paying heed to in the knowledge, capacity, creativity and will children have with regard to economy? Conceptualization is the key: children may be seen in the artistic process either as players or workers, which shapes our attitudes towards children’s position.

Children’s performance: Play or work?

There has to be a difference between amateurs, who do theatre as a hobby, and professionals, who make a living by doing theatre; but when it concerns children as makers of a theatre performance, the issue goes beyond that. One spectator left us feedback: ‘It is quite nice to watch children playing, but that is not yet a performance.’ The feedback becomes intelligible if we reflect on the general perception of childhood. David Buckingham (2000: 9) explains that the cultural representations of childhood say much more about adults’ and children’s fantasies of the idea of childhood than about the realities of children’s lives. According to Buckingham, they are also often filled with nostalgia for a past Golden Age of freedom and play. On the grounds of this nostalgia, it is not surprising that there is a tendency to prefer understanding children’s potential work as play. The question whether children’s performance is about play or work is essential when deliberating the economic value of children’s art as well. Vernon touched on the issue in extract 3, in which he compares their performance to any movie. Likewise in extract 5, Sam and Tobias consider that a videotape of their performance could be sold in any store. They are not joking around – children really seem to think that their performance is equal to any other performance or movie. Would they believe that if they were ‘just playing’?

After the rehearsal process director 2 asked the children if they had been acting as their characters during their leisure time. No one admitted to it. Listening to the interviews reveals that children systematically and without hesitation deny playing the characters beyond the rehearsals, as Emily and Sofia do in extract 6. The interviews also show that director 2 has difficulties in accepting this. She asks the children again, repeating herself, almost like trying to get an affirmative answer: ‘Elsewhere? Didn’t you ever play [at being the characters]?’

EXTRACT 6

EXTRACT 7

In extract 7 Johanna is interviewed individually. She likewise unambiguously denies playing her character in her leisure time. After that director 2 asks ‘Merely in our performance?’ Consequently director 2 is the one who determines implicitly that when children were performing, they were actually playing. Johanna hesitates when she answers ‘Mmm’ to the questions concerning her playing in the performance and in the rehearsals. It is impossible to conclude, based on the data, that her hesitation arises from the director’s rough assumption – this is only one possible interpretation. It would be interesting to investigate the language the directors used throughout the project, but unfortunately only part of the project has been recorded. However, the directors used definitions in a disorganized fashion: they could say ‘Now we will work on this scene . . .’ or they could assign children’s activity to childplay, as in extract 6. It is also worth considering if children find it embarrassing to admit that they are playing. Extract 8 takes up the issue of embarrassment:

EXTRACT 8

In extract 8 Niles strongly denies the possibility of playing in his leisure time. Joseph carries on and questions why he would ‘do that anyway’. The discussion reveals that for children play is something very different from rehearsing, acting and performing a theatrical piece. These cannot be compared. The possibility to categorize children’s activity as work is considerable. Hilary Levey (2009) investigates child beauty pageants and after-school learning, concluding that organized children’s activities could well be qualified as work. This is because activities also ‘produce transferable use value and create capital that contributes to the future production of goods and services’, as does schoolwork too (Levey, 2009: 195). Following her definitions, the children’s theatre project could inevitably be defined as work.

In extract 8 Niles also argues that he doesn’t possess any toys at all. Joseph claims that he has sold his toys and Niles concurs. The tone in the discussion is facetious – the children are probably joking about selling their toys. It is hard to believe that 6-year-old children would have, of their own volition, sold all of their toys. Instead they act as tricksters again (see Saarikoski, 2009) and this could be the result of unwanted questions from adults. Maybe play is something personal and secret for children, or maybe there is even something shameful about it. In any case it doesn’t seem to be suitable to tell adults about it. In extract 8 the world of economy replaces the world of play. Children treat playing and toys as a bygone period and replace it with the operation of consumer culture: they claim to have sold their toys.

EXTRACT 9

Vernon is obviously not ashamed about his playing. He really deliberates on the question and remembers that he once played at being a tiger, which is Tobias’ character. Then Vernon specifies that he played being a leopard, not exactly a tiger. For Vernon there is nothing shameful in playing, but he just hasn’t played his own character. For Paulina and Mindy there is nothing shameful in playing either, as extract 10 establishes:

EXTRACT 10

When director 2 double-checks ‘You haven’t [played being lions]?’, Paulina announces that they will play that next time she goes to Mindy’s house. The point in time of the interview was many weeks after the theatre performance, and based on the data, the children evidently hadn’t played at being their characters during the period over rehearsals and the performance. It is not a question of shamefulness about playing per se, but of something else. Is it because children do not equate the acts of playing and acting? Based on the extracts here, children seem to think that they were not playing when it concerned the theatre process.

In this analysis, the dichotomy of play and work, the facetious and the serious, is in the foreground, but does it have to be? In art theories it is largely admitted that playfulness is related to the process of making art, and making art as a professional is regarded as work. The product that an artist generates is also called a work of art. John Dewey argues in his book Art as Experience (1980 [1934]) that the opposition between play and work is useless, and children themselves are not at all conscious of this contrast. According to Dewey (1980 [1934]: 280), the dichotomy is a product of the adult life in which some activities are entertaining due to their contrast with work.

Dewey claims that both play and work enter the process of making art. Play appears as an attitude of freedom from any ends imposed by external necessity, but it transfers into work in the process of production. Dewey notes that no one has ever seen a playing child without becoming aware of the presence of both playfulness and seriousness. The philosophical interest and significance here lies in the opposition of freedom and necessity, of spontaneity and order. Dewey points out the idea that aesthetic experience is an escape from the pressure of reality: freedom seems to be found only when activity is set free from the control by objective factors. But the very existence of a work of art proves, according to Dewey, that there is no opposition between the spontaneity of the self and objective order. Desire can be fulfilled only through objective material, and that is why playfulness also involves an interest in an object. The opposition itself is an illusion: Dewey points out that the spontaneity of art is not one of opposition to anything but marks absorption, which is characteristic of aesthetic experience (Dewey, 1980 [1934]: 279–80).

Hans-Georg Gadamer has discussed play as the clue to ontological explanation in his book Truth and Method (1985; originally Warheit und Method, 1960). After investigating the concept of play and arguing against its subjective meaning, Gadamer separates play from a theatre performance. The essential feature is that playing in a theatre is not representation in the same sense as childplay. A theatrical performance is always representative of someone, while play is related to self-representation. Gadamer argues that play loses its true nature by becoming a show (Gadamer, 1985 [1960]: 94, 97–9). Taking Gadamer’s point of view into account, the children’s performance was no longer childplay. It had an audience and during the process of rehearsal, the children practised directing their performance to the viewers. The children were certainly working on it.

Even if we could define children’s performance as work based on Gadamer’s arguments, the conclusion is not unambiguous, nor has it ever been so. In her book Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985), Viviana Zelizer introduces the case of child actors in the USA. The debate dates back to the end of the 19th century. Zelizer (1985: 89, 92, 96) points out that child acting has been likened to any other illegal child work and disapproved of because of its commercial aspect, immorality and dangerous infatuation. On the other hand, its supporters have argued that unlike ordinary child labourers, the children loved working in the theatre (Zelizer, 1985: 92). Deborah Levison (2000) writes about children as workers in general terms and notes that this policy fails to consider the benefits of work for children. Children themselves, just like adults, value work that results in status, skills, responsibility and money. It is generally not acknowledged that children like earning their own money, and enjoy the independence derived from work, and are also proud to be contributing to their families. One of the reasons can be found from the definition of work: it is adult, therefore it is not-child, and in that way children who work are violating the boundaries of the separate and clearly defined adult/child spheres (Levison, 2000: 127–9; Ruckenstein, 2009: 91).

As Dewey has pointed out, the time for the opposition between play and work is over – the very confrontation is somewhat futile. The theatre project was a real, serious and work-like activity, and fun and play at the same time. Yet, what really matters is that children themselves emphasized the work-like features of their activity. They wanted to earn with their performance, they wanted to act as producers and they wanted to separate their activity from childplay. Generally, work you should get paid for, or at least such work that gives its doers the feeling that the earnings are indeed deserved. In the society we are living in, the economy determines the value of our acts and regrettably, often partially even the value of ourselves. What is essential is not necessarily the physical coin, but the symbolic meaning it carries with it.

Discussion

In the discussions analysed in this article, childhood has appeared as a site of dichotomies: the children could be seen as playing and working at the same time and could be seen as victims or as victors with regard to financial issues. Nevertheless, the children themselves pursued the position of active producers, decision-makers and earning workers. Children’s own perspective is essential and worth noticing, but not always easy to elicit (see Stolp, 2010). One important issue which marks my research as a whole is the epistemological question about children as producers of knowledge. Alongside the main goal of the article, I also hope to grasp and elaborate the specific nature of the knowledge children produce.

Putting money into the centre of children’s economic activity doesn’t merely produce knowledge about childhood and children, but also about money and economy, as Minna Ruckenstein (2009: 102) suggests. Earning money seemed to be an important issue for the children themselves in my research and they were enthusiastic about having conversations about it – the children were also eager to play with financial and marketing questions. Economy and its mechanisms in turn seemed to be moderately familiar to the children and their opinions for example on the price of the tickets were realistic. Money also had a symbolic meaning: it signified appreciation, status and value to the children. This did not emerge directly but indirectly, in the strength of the desire for profit. Economy appeared as a field to practise, experiment and play with.

The discussions of the children relate to many cultural phenomena of our society, like power, value, dignity and utility. The culture of money is also a culture of inequalities between peer groups, generations and genders (Ruckenstein, 2009: 102). I want to disclose that despite the child-centred basis of the theatre project, the adults – directors of the performance – were the ones who eventually made the financial decisions. As one of the directors, I could say that the reason for that was the lack of time, but actually I also recognize that we adults took our authority for granted. We were trying to follow the idealistic notion of child-centredness at first, but during the project we did not fully stick to our principles. It seems easier to decide among adults than to take heed of the perspectives of a group of children.

Eventually, adults decided not to have an entrance fee and instead to sell coffee and pastries during the intermission. The children got the profit from the sale, but again the adults decided to use the money for organizing a party for the children instead of distributing cash among them. Children didn’t question our financial decisions, but they were constantly asking about money and our decisions and trying to articulate their opinions. On the basis of the research material, it is obvious that if children are given power concerning the artistic content of a project, they will also try for power concerning productive and financial decisions.

Consequently, the plans of the children concerning financial issues remained just speculation and childplay, which did not lead to genuine implementation. This demonstrates something about the position or in a sense even about the value of children’s activity in our culture. Viviana Zelizer (2002: 383) raises the concern that multiple forms of children’s production remain ‘invisible, catalogued as child play’ although as a matter of fact many of these activities involve more than play by way of producing value. Maybe understanding and conceptualizing some of children’s activity as work could challenge existing conventions and help us to consider children also as active, productive participants, as Hilary Levey (2009: 210–11) suggests.