Abstract
Punch and Tisdall’s edited collection is an important and timely contribution to childhood studies. It very clearly challenges some of the well-rehearsed orthodoxies of the ‘social studies of childhood’ and offers some overarching theoretical advances drawn from diverse empirical studies. Although the chapters are highly contextualised, the contributors and editors do an excellent job of outlining their relevance for social scientists working with children and young people within and across different settings.
The central argument put forward by the editors and respective contributors is that childhood needs to be considered relationally. Looking more carefully at the relationships children and young people have with others enables a robust critique of predominant ideas about childhood agency. All of the chapters take as their starting-point the need to unsettle the notion of childhood agency as it is currently conceived because it undervalues the interdependencies of the lives of children and adults. The influential notion of the child as social actor has tended to position children and young people as independent beings removed from their significant relations with other people and the contexts in which they are embedded. As a response to this shortfall, the collection illustrates how inter- and intra-generational relationships all offer opportunities and constraints for children and young people to act. In the afterword, Mayall frames ‘child-adult relations as relational processes, whereby children and adults negotiate each case, each decision and each modification’ (p. 108).
A great strength of the collection is evident in the geographical scope of the contributions drawn from Minority and Majority World contexts. Notable here is the editorial commitment to ensuring there is effective dialogue between the chapters and the literatures with which they engage (drawn from the Minority and Majority Worlds), rather than solely presenting discrete examples of research from different parts of the world. This results in a book which has some outstanding stand-alone chapters, as well as a clear thread which highlights their many synergies. Looking across Worlds in this manner can, for instance, expand conceptualisations of family as the chapters from Van Blerk and Payne cogently illustrate with their work on street children in South Africa and child-headed households (CHH) in Zambia, respectively. The chapter from Konstantoni in Scottish early childhood settings also draws attention to the interdependencies in young children’s peer relations and friendships in the Minority World in ways which disrupt existing understandings of Minority (individualistic) and Majority (collectivist/interdependent) World societies.
A particularly novel and noteworthy aspect of many of the chapters is the effort to connect the multiple spaces and relationships in which children and young people’s lives are implicated. In many instances, these are spaces and relationships which have been overlooked in previous research. For example, Van Blerk shows how research with street children has fixated on the micro-scale of the street, rarely drawing connections with wider society and more specifically the ties that these children retain with the home. Her research calls for a ‘broader understanding of street children that positions them in between the street and the home and most importantly connected to others in the wider family/community nexus’ (p. 90). Similarly, Payne’s chapter highlights the role of kin and non-kin (e.g. boyfriends, friends and neighbours) in providing support networks for CHH and cautions against assumptions about intra-sibling relationships as necessarily positive and supportive. Inter-generationality has attracted increasing interest in recent years from social scientists working with children and young people and this collection adds to this work, as well as calling for a more sustained focus on intra-generational relationships in and across various childhood contexts. Bacon’s chapter on the interdependencies of sibling and twin relationships, a topic which has been typically explored by psychologists, provides ‘an empirical basis for beginning to challenge a static notion of agency’ (p. 76). Indeed, the greatest strength of this collection is that its many theoretical interventions to childhood studies are explicitly emphasised, in ways which are not restricted by the specifics of the environment or relationships being researched. Connections are made across geographical scales, most overtly across Minority and Majority Worlds, and understood alongside wider socio-economic and political pressures and processes.
Another important aspect of the collection is its commitment to applying theoretical ideas about agency and relationships to practice, by outlining the policy implications of the research. This is especially clear in the chapters from Plows (child-adult interactions in youth clubs), Konstantoni (educators’ relations with young children), Payne (non-governmental organization [NGO] responses to CHH) and van Blerk (NGO responses to street children). They all illustrate the danger of making assumptions about children’s and young people’s inter- and intra-generational relations.
While the collection does successfully interweave debates from the Majority and Minority Worlds, the regional focus is ultimately restricted to research from the United Kingdom and South Africa. The dialogue between Worlds would be enriched by the inclusion of work from Asia, Latin America and beyond. However, this is a critique which could be directed at childhood studies research more broadly. The book should encourage others working in different parts of the world to engage with critical debates about children and young people’s agency, as well as their relationships.
I highly recommend this book as it offers more than simply a critique of the theoretical foundations, which have informed childhood studies for the last 25 years. It also provides scholars working with children and young people with some practical examples of how childhood and their relationships might be conceptualised in more relational ways going forward.