The Social Construction of Childhood

Hello.

My name is Karen Wells,

and I'm a professor in the Department

of Geography at Birkbeck University of London,

where I teach and do research on childhood studies.

So in this section,

I'm going to talk about the key concept or the key framing for childhood studies,

which is the idea that childhood is socially constructed.

Now this idea of the social construction of an identity might be familiar to you from

other social categories that you've or social identities

that you've been discussing within your course work.

In sociology, for example,

the social construction of race and social construction

of gender are widely accepted concept within sociology.

But for childhood it is slightly different because the

question of social construction is one which says that

how we are in the world, what's expected of us,

our assumptions about our capacities and dispositions, about our competencies,

that these are shaped by society and indeed by culture,

and that this is these are the primary force is often related to demands

of politics and demands of economics which determine how we behave in the world

and that therefore, what we often or what, perhaps in common sense,

thinking is thought of as biologically rooted.

For example, gender differences are in fact, socially constructed.

This is the difference that we're trying to

capture in this idea of social construction.

So the question that emerges for Children or

arises for Children is our Children so biologically

different two adults that we can say that

there is certainly a social construction of childhood.

But there is also a biological difference between Children and adults, which

constrains the scope for that social construction.

And this is one of the key debates within childhood studies

and the question of the social construction of childhood.

Now,

childhood studies emerges through a large extent out of feminist

theorising about the place of gender in the social world.

And we can see the ways that feminist theorising has come into childhood

and more or less directly brought concepts from that field

into understanding the place of Children in the world.

And there's a kind of, uh, you might say,

a strong tendency within childhood studies,

which says that Children are exactly the same as

adults that the expectations that we have of Children,

inasmuch as they are diminished in relation to adults,

are expectations based on what is sometimes called adult is, um,

a discrimination against Children, which parallels sexism and racism.

And it's this adult is, um,

that produces the very idea that there are people called Children

in the same way that racism produces the idea that humanity

is divided into different kinds of people based on race.

Or that sexism produces the idea that humanity is divided

into categories of people based on something called gender.

So that's one version of childhood studies that very

strongly argues for the four social construction of childhood.

Then somewhere, uh, moving more towards psychology and education.

And the socialisation of the family is a view that,

because Children are still developing there is biologically developing.

There is a difference between them as categories of humans

and these other Clearly, we might say,

social fictions about categories of humans as divided

by race or organised by race or gender.

So the idea of childhood is socially constructed,

begins this field of childhood studies, Um, in the kind of late eighties,

though there was in fact, an earlier period of a move towards thinking of childhood,

are socially constructed in the seventies,

which aligned itself with various other kinds of liberation movements and argued

for the kind of liberation of childhood that the schooling of society,

as Ivan Village

called it

and a strong move towards thinking about Children as oppressed subjects

who should be liberated from oppression through their own actions.

In the same way that the civil rights

movement was fighting for struggling for the rights of

African Americans in the US or the same way

that the colonial movements were struggling for independence,

Um, and that feminist movement were struggling for

equality, gender equality in society.

So there was this earlier kind of move which didn't really come into academia,

about thinking of Children as

these oppressed subjects

that disappeared, Um,

and for various reasons which we perhaps don't need to think about now.

But we're really to do with this fundamental difference between

Children and humans and to do with their capacity.

And agencies are common to talk about in a moment, um,

and the extent the limits to which we can push the argument that Children are, uh,

entirely sovereign subjects who are entitled to

a full occupation of politics and economics,

society and culture.

In the late eighties

and the theorising of childhood emerged as a movement or as an academic trend,

really coming from sociology and anthropology,

One of the key theorists in childhood studies.

One of the originators, you might say of childhood studies,

Allison James is in fact an anthropologist,

and it's very much from anthropology and kind of

cultural sociology that the idea of childhood studies begins,

and what childhood studies does at that point is

it positions itself in terms of academic disciplines,

in opposition to

psychology

and in opposition to education

and the and the sociology of the family.

So those three domains are seen as domains, where Children are treated as objects

and where the main concern of the theorist and of

the researcher is to understand not who those Children are,

but in a way, what their deficiencies are,

which might lead to subsequent deficiencies in adulthood.

In other words, they were interested in who were these Children become,

what kind of adults will they be?

And that in the sociology of the family, in the sociology of education

and in psychology,

these were the dominant research agendas about who Children would become.

So what childhood studies wanted to say was we we should think about

Children as a social group in the same way that we think about,

um, women, for example, as a social group.

And we should be attending to what their lives are like now in the here and now,

not who they will become, but who they are,

not what they want in the future or what not what

they want so that they can become particular kinds of adults,

not what they need, so they can become particular kinds of adults.

But what do they want and need now,

which will lead to their kind of full flourishing as Children in childhood?

Um and so that was That was the kind of,

I guess,

the theoretical imperative towards developing a model

of the social construction of childhood.

And, um, it coincided with the emergence of

the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,

and so that we also had at the same time as we had this kind of academic, um,

energy towards thinking in new ways about Children and childhood.

There was also a policy direction,

which was leading to other people outside of academic academia,

thinking about new ways of talking about Children and childhood

and these two things kind of converged on an appreciation of the

socially constructed nature of childhood in one

specific sense which everybody agrees on,

which is that just as gender is different,

it practised differently in different societies and

cultures and in different times and spaces.

So his childhood practise differently in different

times and spaces in different historical periods

and different

geographically situated cultures and societies.

So though we can say that there is,

perhaps we can say there is a universal category of person called Children,

a universal stage of the life calls called childhood.

How that concept is filled with content depends on the specific dynamics

in any particular time and place.

And it's in that sense that most theorists

would now agree that childhood is socially constructed.

I just want to end with a note about Philippe Aries, who has, in my view and undeserved

centrality in this debate

because he is cited, and he was cited in, uh,

James Jenks and Prouts kind of original text.

He is cited as the person who demonstrates

the strong view of the social construction of childhood

because in a particular reading of his book,

the argument is made that he is saying that childhood

did not exist before the Middle Ages in Europe.

I don't want to, uh, develop that debate too much,

but I would just end with the point that all

historians almost uniformly disagree with Philippe areas about that claim.

And all historians

have shown through close empirical work that childhood as a stage of the life course

and as a social and cultural phenomena

has existed historically in all time periods.

Um, and

that existence is probably also almost certainly rooted in

the fact that there is a biological difference between Children adults,

which therefore shapes,

and that biological different shapes,

the constraints of their capacities, competencies and, indeed,

their vulnerabilities.