What are we even talking about?
On kiddos, who they are, when they are and why they are. In essence, asking that fundamental question: what is 'childhood'?
Today, we’re opening up the conversation by thinking about what ‘childhood’ actually is, and how different academic disciplines - specifically, history, psychology, law, education and sociology - make sense of it.
Google tells us that ‘childhood’ is what we go through when we’re children. While that technically isn’t untrue, it also isn’t entirely helpful. It might serve us better to look at more academic sources, like The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Children and Childhood Studies, which is an almost-2000-page cheat sheet for all things childhood related, and the basis for many of the discussions that will feature on Grown-ish. Let’s get into the nitty gritty…
“The notion of childhood refers to both a stage of life and a perception of children as different in nature from adults… In the 21st century, childhood is an established social category.” (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Hennessy, 2020, p. 298).1
When scholars tell us that something is a social category, it usually means that that thing doesn’t exist innately. As humans, we put the thing there, made a system of it, told everyone to go along with it, and that’s the reason it exists. While these systems might be loosely based on things that exist in nature, they aren’t inherently natural. A good example is gender, which is something we created based on what we know about chromosomes, hormones and genitalia. There are different sexes, but nothing in nature suggests that boys should like blue and that girls should like pink - we decided that on our own. So, we can apply this same frame of thinking to ideas of childhood. Children and childhood exist but, because humans are in charge of deciding what childhood looks like, it looks different across various identity markers (gender, race, religion, wealth, etc), cultures and time periods. To this end, the study of childhood has to be interdisciplinary, with scholars looking at it from lots of different perspectives to understand it holistically and properly.
Childhood in History
A pioneering scholar within this subfield of childhood studies was Philippe Ariès. He said his contentious piece back in the 1960s, claiming that ‘childhood’ didn’t exist until the 18th century. Drawing on his interpretations of portraits from the medieval times, he suggested that childhood wasn’t a distinct life stage from adulthood - kids were just tiny humans who had responsibilities as a part of the economic unit of the family. Radical, right? Many other scholars think it so, too. A lot of them pegged Ariès’ work to be way too subjective, instead drawing on written accounts like biographies and letters to finally draw the conclusion that childhood actually emerged in the 17th century, when Enlightenment thinkers perceived it as an important life stage based on ideas of health, psychology and education.
Childhood in Psychology
For a guy who didn’t talk much about childhood, John Locke is a pretty illustrious representative in the field of childhood studies. He claimed the child to be a tabula rasa (Latin for “blank slate”), in that human beings don’t have any innate knowledge or capabilities - the environment is what shapes us and makes us functioning members of society. While his theory is actually rooted in philosophy, it’s had key implications for how psychologists perceive childhood, which is as a progressive and universal stage of life during which children develop all of their cognitive, social, emotional and physical capabilities. In other words, children are blank slates, and adults can impose whatever they like onto these in order to shape a human being. In other other words, childhood is “governable”. But, newer branches of developmental psychology question these ideas because they tend to neglect social and political influences like gender, race and class. That’s why it’s important to consider childhood with that interdisciplinary lens we spoke about earlier - because no one approach will ever provide a panoptic view or a complete understanding.
Childhood in Law
It wasn’t until the 19th century that kids became recognised as a vulnerable group that needed to be protected from society’s troubles. People working in social reform took this idea on, taking strides to save disadvantaged kids from the troubles they were already facing. These measures are what underpin most of the systems, designed specifically to protect children, that are in place today. For example, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is known as the most comprehensive body of children’s rights statements to be produced to date. It’s what characterised the ‘birth to 18 years of age pipeline’ to be the childhood era, and also informed a lot of laws about voting, working and medicine with reference to the role that parents/guardians play in those domains (parents have to be implicated in these conversations because, after all, they do voice their children’s rights for them). To this end, we can deduce that the law serves to reinforce parental authority and to provide a safety net for kids. But of course, this perspective on childhood is not without its faults. For example, the emphasis of the child as a part of the family (ie; their parents’ kid, rather than just a kid) ignores the lives of independent children, like those who may be orphaned, emancipated or subject to other egregious troubles. Also, as influential as the UNCRC has been, it’s still strongly rooted in Western ideology (my fellow Desi kids - being 18 doesn’t mean much, does it?). This means it can be used as a pretty dangerous colonial tool in terms of the legislation, values and practices it encourages citizens the world over to follow.
Childhood in Education
Education played a big role in differentiating childhood as a distinct social category. When schooling became compulsory back in the 19th century, it changed the way we positioned kids in political, cultural and social ways. Educationalists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Maria Montessori understood these shifts to create a sense of ‘child-centeredness’, which essentially tells us that education is just an assistant to the development and formation of children, that kids themselves are largely in charge of. You’ll recall the psychologists saying that children are governable and shaped by external influences like behavioural conditioning, which parents are in charge of. The contrast between the notions of childhood in education and childhood in psychology is a good example of the ways in which different disciplines contradict each other depending on how they’re studying childhood.
Childhood in Sociology
As we all know, we live in a society, and sociologists have got much to say about it. The sociology of childhood emerged some 200 years ago, challenging traditional sociological notions of this life stage and emphasising its temporal, cultural and local contingency. To flesh out older, more binaric ideas of childhood within the social sciences (for example, the nature versus nurture debate), newer sociological conceptualisations try to find some middle ground, welcoming considerations about how human beings are not static - rather, their existence is material and relational. In sum, sociology positions kids as being active participants within the larger social structure, rather than passive recipients of what the system teaches. Childhood is no longer simply a social construction, but instead a more complex social category with a multitude of influences beyond what we, as human beings, decide it should be.
So, there we have it. This has been a brief overview of some of the most prominent disciplines within the field of childhood studies. Aside from the understandings which form the basis for this field, this post aims to emphasise the importance of using a panoptic vision in the social sciences, seeing things from all angles to get a grasp on the bigger picture - which of course, is what we’re all trying to do.
Signing off,
Grown-ish.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Hennessy, S. (2020). Childhood. In D. T. Cook (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies (pp. 298-305). SAGE Publications, Inc.
All photos are obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Very informative.