Childhood

Contemporary museums define educational programs for children as a central and straightforward component of their stated missions. We problematize these programs in our critical discussion of the role of the museum as a source of non-classroom education and the centrality of these lessons in the maintenance of the museum as an organization. Our exploratory study investigates educational programs for children within two traditionally adult-centered museum settings in the US: (1) an architectural museum in a mid-sized city and (2) an art gallery on a university campus. We compare the organizational goals of the two museums with respect to their programs for children and the attempts of museum educators to accomplish these goals through specific programs. Based on interviews with museum officials and field observations, we argue that museum programs attempt to promote both cultural and content lessons to children and teachers through school tours within museum spaces and that their success is tied to the training and beliefs of tour guides, the suitability of museum spaces for children as a participatory audience, and the techniques used to control children’s social behavior.

The article describes a case study of children and young people’s participation and the attendant effects on professional practice and child-adult relations. The authors consider the findings under four headings: professional learning, child-adult relations, childhood memories and the spatial dimensions of change. Evidence indicates that adults and children were finding new ways of working and relating and that these processes were inherent in efforts to reconfigure space. The analysis shows how adult and child identification, relations and associated constructions of childhood and adulthood were connected. We argue that changes occurred in and through the shaping of real and imagined places.

The general European discourse of childhood presents children as innocent and vulnerable, but within this discourse different images of ‘the perfect child’ exist. In this article ideals for upbringing are studied as they are represented in French, German and Dutch printed advertisements for children’s products. The sample consists of 290 advertisements collected in the period 1995-8 from women’s magazines, and the analysis is both quantitative and qualitative. Different interpretations of play, intellectual development and well-being are central in the ads. The differences found in the ads point to the fact that significant differences exist with regard to what ‘good’ childhood is.

The article is based on a longitudinal qualitative study carried out by the author on children and their families in two areas of Belgrade (Serbia) in 1993-4 and 2000. Its goal is to provide an insight into how everyday life is structured and constructed for children by their family habitus. There are significant distinctions in how families from different social strata use their resources and thereby provide different cultural contexts for children. The main conclusion is that family habitus has a strong influence on allocation, distribution and the use of family resources and thereby structures the everyday life of children. At the same time, it activates different kinds of capital for (and by) children and thereby constructs different childhood practices.

This article presents quantitative and qualitative accounts of relational discourses in a random sample of approximately 4100 texts written by Irish young people (aged 10-12 and 14-17 years). The existence of such discourses is indicated by references to family and friends. The article shows that although the majority refer to such ties in their texts, less than one-third mention best friends. It also shows that references to such relational discourses were affected by age and gender. A continuum of relatedness can be identified: with 10- to 12-year-old girls at one end of the continuum and 14- to 17-year-old boys at the other end. The implications of such trends are briefly discussed.

This article tries to analyse the evolution over the past 40 years of children’s domestic work and its representations in urban Côte d’Ivoire, and, particularly, how these practices evolved from family work linked to educational processes, into the kind of wage work that exists today. Listening to the children themselves, the aim is to find out how the petites bonnes (young maids) perceive their situation as workers, how they make it their own and how they see their future.