Karen Wells - Childhood in a Global Perspective

For David Lawrence McKuur 19602006

Copyright Karen Wells 2015

The right of Karen Wells to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2009 by Polity Press

This second edition first published in 2015 by Polity Press

Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8497-0

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wells, Karen C.

Childhood in a global perspective / Karen Wells. -- Second edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-7456-8493-2 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-8494-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Children. 2. Child development. 3. Children--Social conditions. I. Title.

HQ767.9.W457 2014

305.23--dc23

2014018503

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This book is about children and childhood in a global context. In it I connect childrens experiences to concepts of childhood, drawing on research about childrens lives across the globe. I show how concepts of childhood shape childrens lives and how children, in turn, shape concepts of childhood. These concepts or ideas about what children should and should not do, of where children are safe and where they are at risk, and of where childhood begins and where it ends have been the central theme of the new social studies of childhood (James and Prout 1990; James et al. 1998; Jenks 1996). These studies have been important in advancing our understanding of how childhood is shaped by cultural and social practices and processes. However, with one or two exceptions, existing studies have focused on national contexts and have been dominated by accounts of North American and European childhoods. In an increasingly globalized world, a focus on national contexts has to be supplemented by an understanding of how local practices are impacted on by global processes and that where people live affects how they live. It is the task of this book to show that where children live affects what kinds of childhood they have and to explore how global flows and structures, including flows of capital, the activities of international NGOs and structures of international law are reshaping childhood.

The new social studies of childhood, whether from a historical, spatial or social perspective, have established that childrens lives are shaped by the social and cultural expectations adults and their peers have of them in different times and places; what concept of childhood prevails in any specific time or place is shaped by many factors external to a child, including the complicated intersection of age with race, gender and class. Childhood is socially constructed, and childrens lives are profoundly shaped by constructions of childhood whether in conformity, resistance or reinvention.

The new sociology of childhood generally situates its staring point as the publication of Allison James and Alan Prouts 1990 edited collection Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Childhood and the subsequent publication with Chris Jenks of Theorizing Childhood (1998). Their work was prefigured by Jenks much earlier edited reader of key texts on The Sociology of Childhood (1982) and his later Childhood (1996).

The new sociology of childhood established a field of inquiry about children (the lived experiences of children) and childhood (the concept that informs expectations and attitudes towards children) that sought to understand childrens lifeworlds as they were lived. This focus on children as they are, rather than how their childhood experiences might shape the adults they may become, differentiates the sociology of childhood from other social science disciplines, particularly education and developmental psychology, that have been most engaged with the academic study of children and childhood. Allison and Adrian James contend that childhood is the structural site that is occupied by children as a collectivity. And it is within this collective and institutional space of childhood, as a member of the category children that any individual child comes to exercise his or her unique agency (James and James 2004: 15). They argue that the term child, which is often used, especially in policy discourse, in place of children, as if all childrens experience could be collapsed into a singular, uniform experience, dismisses childrens uniqueness. The use of the term the child, as for example in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, makes us think of the child as an individual lacking collective agency.

In Constructing Childhood James and James claim that only the sociology of childhood recognizes childrens active agency in contrast to the more structurally determined accounts of childhood change offered by historians of childhood and the family, by developmental psychologists, social policy specialists, socialisation theorists and others (James and James 2004: 17); but perhaps this is overstating disciplinary differences. Histories of childhood and children are not only structurally determined, they also attempt to record and account for the interplay between childrens agency and the social structures that organize and constrain their lives. Similarly, the sociology of childhood has to consider how social structures constrain or at least shape the lives of contemporary children. One attempt to do so is William Corsaros concept of interpretive reproduction (Corsaro 2005).

James and James also note that childhood, whilst a specific moment in the life course with common experiences, is also embedded with differences that fracture or cut across the shared experiences of children and shared concepts of childhood in any particular time or space (James and James 2004: 22). Whilst this is clearly the case, the challenge of depicting and analysing how childhood is shaped by other social identities, including race, class and gender, has not been actively taken up within the contemporary sociology of childhood; the childhoods of white and middle-class children have remained the central subject of the sociology of childhood. An early exception to this is John and Elizabeth Newsons classic text