Introduction
A UNIVERSAL CHILD?
CONCEPTS OF CHILDHOOD AND THE REALITY OF CHILDREN
Lorraine Fox Harding
This forthcoming book is contracted to be written for Palgrave Publishers Ltd. (formerly
Macmillan) with a target date for submission of January 2005. The book explores concepts of childhood and childhood’s reality, addressing the extent to which notions of a ‘universal childhood’ are sustainable: that is, the extent to which some continuity across time and space is detectable in the variety of concepts of childhood and experiences of actual children. The book attempts to offset a current emphasis on fragmentation, difference and diversity, and perhaps an assumption of infinite flexibility and variety, by re-evaluating a possible universality of concepts and experience which may underlie difference. Implicit in the approach is a suggestion that while ‘childhood’ and ‘actual children’ may be distinguished, concepts of childhood draw on empirical knowledge of actual children, while conversely such concepts of childhood themselves shape the treatment and experience of children.
Below is the draft first chapter of the book. The section ‘Structure of the book’ (pp. 15 – 20) gives an outline of the book’s contents, although currently the outlines for Chapters 2 - 6 are not finalised.
Biographical note:
I have been researching and teaching in the area of child care policy, children’s rights, and child and family issues, for over 20 years. The current book is a development of my thinking on ‘children’s rights’ in law and policy and the ideas about children and childhood which underpin such law and policy.
Introduction
This book is about childhood. By this word I mean both the actual characteristics and experiences of children, the lived state of childhood that children inhabit, and the way that these things are commonly perceived. The general intellectual background from which I approach this topic – social science, broadly defined – would usually make an important distinction between these two topics, that is actual children/their actual childhoods, and the construction of these by those who observe and define and describe. Indeed, commentators from other disciplines, social historians for example, may make a similar distinction. Cunningham (1995), who wrote a scholarly work about childhood in Western Europe from 1500 to 1800, makes it clear that his book is based on a distinction: ‘between children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas’ (p.1). That is why both ‘children’ and ‘childhood’ appear in his title, although a history of childhood is easier than a history of children because evidence is more easily accessible on how people thought about childhood than on the lives of children themselves (as opposed to the lives of their parents). Those who espouse a recent school of thought which may be characterised as supporting ‘children’s rights’, would not only make a distinction of this kind between children and notions of childhood, but would see something actively oppressive to real children in the idea of ‘childhood’ commonly held and acted on in western societies. ‘Childhood’ may disadvantage actual children; for Holt (1975), writing in a 1970s liberationist context, it was like a prison to be escaped from, while Franklin (1995), a later children’s rights advocate, referred to childhood as a social construct often mythologized as a ‘golden age’. Yet the modern conception of childhood can stifle and oppress; it has excluded children from the world of adults and made schooling the major focus of their lives. This is in fact no ‘golden age’, as Franklin’s edited collections (1986, 1995) aim to make clear. Sociological writings in the 1990s, while expressing things rather differently, essentially took a similar view: ‘childhood’ as popularly constructed is a different matter from living, observable children with their needs, behaviour and experiences. So recent sociologists of childhood James, Jenks and Prout (1998) celebrate the emergence of children as social actors and individual beings in their own right in the sociological literature and elsewhere (although noting that this was developing in parallel with increased control over children as ‘different’). They challenge the link between discourses and the reality of childhood: ‘While everyday discourses of childhood seek to explain the “truth” of childhood’, the authors say, they themselves aim: ‘to explain and deconstruct those very discourses that have established taken-for-granted “truths’ about childhood’ (p.9). Presumably these ‘discourses’ have got it wrong. Concepts of the child that are not sociological (termed ‘Presociological’) are relegated to ‘the dustbin of history’ (p.9). The critical analysis of ways of defining and understanding children tends to predominate in sociological writings on childhood. It is implied that these definitions, adult/child distinctions and so on, have little objective base. So Stainton Rogers (2001), commenting on the social construction of childhood, says that: ‘the “realities” that we take for granted ……. are not things-out-there-in-the-world that we merely observe. Rather, they are constructed by human meaning-making’ (p. 26). The (non-sociological) dominant framework for understanding childhood may be counter-posed against some deeper insight that sociological writers claim to have.
In this approach, then, actual individual children and their lives, feelings and experiences are one thing, while (adult) concepts, constructions, representations, perceptions, attitudes, indeed stereotypes, concerning childhood (and its different-ness) are another. The latter concepts, on an extreme reading, may have little connection with actual children and may serve perhaps to distort and harm them, rather as racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic and other characterisations – or caricatures – are thought to inflict injustice and pain on those groups who are on the receiving end. Thus children’s reality and received ways of thinking about childhood are thought to diverge, usually to the child’s detriment. Actual childhood, or childhoods in the plural, only loosely connect with common social concepts of ‘childhood’.
But is it like this? Are concepts of the child and childhood as abstract, arbitrary and disconnected from empirical observations of real children, as is surely being implied? Is childhood nothing more than: ‘a variable of social analysis’ (James and Prout, 1997, p. 8), or: ‘a social construction which is both culturally and historically determined’ (Goldson, 1997, p. 2), ‘a category’ (Stainton Rogers, 2001, p. 8), or: ‘a structural concept ……. alongside other structural forms and divisions within society’ (Goldson, p. 20)? Or, are there some features of what it is to be a child and adolescent which are commonly observed, which may be characteristically found across human societies both present and historical, and which do broadly (although not in every detail) support the various societal concepts of what childhood ‘is’? Are there, in fact, frequently observed patterns in the state of being young, which in general differentiate the young from older people, and which lend some validity to the social constructions surrounding childhood as a guide to what children are like; are there patterns on which those social constructions may in fact have been built? That is, social constructions may be not merely social but might reflect something observed and general, even universal, about human childhood, something which may, furthermore, have a developmental and a biological base. For example, many cultures recognise a distinct shift in childhood at around age seven and again around age twelve (Thomas, 2000, p. 11). Is this based on characteristic developmental shifts that occur at these ages? So, while it may be acknowledged that social constructions of childhood do exist and do affect how children are seen and treated, these same constructions may in some sense be produced by the character of childhood, as well as helping to produce it. In other words, perhaps children and ‘childhood’ influence each other in mutual interaction.
These are large questions. This book has no definitive answers but attempts to raise some questions about childhood which are downgraded by accepted social science assumptions that imply, too often, that all is explained by what is ‘social’ and that the biological, including the genetic, has no place.
However in this chapter I will first consider as context a possible ‘crisis’ in childhood and child-adult relations around the turn of the millennium, interrogating briefly the ‘newness’ of crises of childhood in societies. The chapter will then move on to introduce some characteristics of social science writings on children/childhood, including the argument that childhood is structured by society and the more recent insistence on children as ‘social actors’, and will consider some challenges to the social science approach based on an argument for developmental universality in children/childhood alongside difference and diversity. The debate will be returned to in subsequent chapters. The introduction will then make a basic point about universal and majority patterns. Lastly it will outline the content of the rest of the book.
Millennial concerns
Around the turn of the twentieth and twenty first centuries – which is also of course the cusp of the second and third millennia – there has seemed to be an unusually high level of concern surrounding children, youth and childhood. One piece of evidence for this is that books like this one, on childhood, have become much more common! The latter years of the last century and the first few of the new one saw a proliferation or academic texts in the social sciences in this area (see bibliography), while both influencing and being influenced by this tide of writing, presumably, were the numerous courses in higher education on a childhood theme (including whole programmes on childhood studies). One theme in this concern is of deleterious change and loss. For example, Foley et al’s ‘Foreword’ to their edited collection Children in Society (Foley et al, 2001) comments that the authors are struck by changes affecting children and the current sense of a ‘loss’ of childhood, with children thought to be too close to the world of adults, including its commercialization and the mass media. They refer to a ‘crisis’, as does Scraton (1997), but it must be noted that for some the crisis is in quotation marks, it is a perception held by others, an image – ‘of disintegration, or even disappearance, rather than change’ (Foley et al, 2001, p.1); a picture which has ‘masked the structural and material realities which oppress young people’ (Scraton, 1997, p. xiii). It is, perhaps, a distraction from the real problems surrounding childhood.
Major strands in the alarmist re-conceptualization of children signalled by various authors are: a perceived undesirable erosion of child-adult boundaries, a shift in the balance of power between adults and children, and the loss of childhood’s separate space. Growing up too fast in the world of sex and drugs was the sub-title of one book (Winn, 1984), and Growing up in the age of electronic media was Buckingham’s (Buckingham, 2000), his main title being: After the death of childhood. However Buckingham himself, while recognizing significant change in the meaning of ‘childhood’ and in children’s lives, sees boundaries as eroded in some areas but strengthened in others, and is positive about media and new technologies. Writing almost two decades earlier, Postman (1983) was not – his book The Disappearance of Childhood expressed fears about the homogenization of child and adult lives, largely thanks to television![1] He wrote before the age of the internet but: ‘attributes a determining significance to technologies’ (Buckingham, 2000, p. 26). In the age of television as opposed to print, adult control was thought to be inexorably weakened. There has also been particular anxiety surrounding the children of parental separation and divorce, which is a whole area of debate and research in itself (see, for example, Smart et al, 2001). It is possible to be positive – Foley et al (2001) note that ‘other voices’ indicate change for the better in childhood (p.1). Idealizations and nostalgia concerning the past get in the way of the perceptions of today; less demarcation of ‘childhood’ might in fact be better for children. The growth of the children’s rights movement is perhaps a progressive sign (p.4). It may be noted that demands for children’s rights may call on the similarity of children and adults for part of their justification; the competence of children can be advanced as support for their claims – or the claims put by adults on their behalf – for more autonomy, to be consulted, to participate in systems and decisions that affect them, and so on (for a recent example, see Franklin, 2002; see also Archard, 1993; and, much further back, Holt 1975). Less demarcation may lead to more empowerment. (It is another question whether ‘empowerment’ is a ‘good thing’).
Nevertheless – children are also under attack and condemnation. The same authors comment on this development in millennial times. Scraton refers to a perception that: ‘“Childhood” is in “crisis”, children lack appropriate discipline, parental control or professional guidance’ (Scraton, 1997, p. vii). Buckingham, in summarising the complexity of changing childhood, notes that children have been subject to greater surveillance and control (p. 79); they are threatening as well as threatened, seen as a danger to others, and childhood: ‘acts a focus for broader concerns about social change, “indiscipline” and moral collapse’ (p. 76). A particular popular discourse about children’s antisocial behaviour may be identified with the 1990s. The hideous torture and murder, in early 1993, of a toddler, James Bulger, by two ten year old boys, may have been a defining moment in the perception of children in the UK. There are many sources on this notorious case (see, for example, Hay, 1995; King, 1997, Chapter 5); and the particularly vindictive reaction of the British press and public has been much commented on (see, for example, Franklin and Petley, 1996; Davis and Bourhill, 1997); a similar (though by no means identical) case in Norway attracted a far less punitive media response (Franklin and Larsen, 1995). Within Scraton’s collection Davis and Bourhill (1997) devote a chapter to the recent ‘demonization’ of children; and while the Bulger case was not the only factor in this, it: ‘unleashed a moral outrage unprecedented in its emotive force’ (p. 45). Goldson (2001) also writes in strong terms about the demonization of children and the contribution of the Bulger case to this. Thus in some respects children were being construed as dangerous and out of control, as showing increasingly unacceptable, and indeed criminal, behaviour, as potentially monstrous, and suitable for adult punishments; all this recalling the co-existence of evil and innocence in notions of childhood as developed from at least the Reformation/Renaissance period and described by Aries (1962) (Aries’s work will be returned to in Chapter 1). It was perhaps not so much that the ‘end’ of childhood innocence took place in the 1990s (Scraton, 1997) as that its innocence faltered in the presence of ideas suggesting much darker qualities.