Madeleine Leonard - The Sociology of Children, Childhood and Generation

• Madeleine Leonard

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In recent years, there has been a strong movement towards establishing childhood studies as a multi-/inter-disciplinary subject. Childhood researchers from sociology, psychology, law, education, anthropology, geography, medicine, and the list is ever growing, all subscribe to outlining the complementary fit within and between disciplines and their contribution to enhancing understanding of children and their everyday lives. But it remains unclear whether childhood studies is a newly emerging academic field or simply the gathering together and rebranding of what is already known, albeit in diverse disciplines, about children and their childhood (Kehily, 2008). While the wide-ranging perspectives that characterise childhood studies are laudable, at times, the role of specific disciplines gets somehow lost. The particular contribution of sociology to childhood studies tends to become engulfed within the myriad inter-disciplinary approaches, making it difficult to ascertain the core contribution of sociology to current thinking on children and childhood. Alanen (2012), for example, argues that we need a robust base strongly embedded in existing disciplines such as sociology to effectively contribute to genuine inter-disciplinary understandings of childhood, while Prout (2005) reminds us that inter-disciplinarity does not mean non-disciplinarity, hence prioritising certain disciplines over others becomes a worthwhile exercise.

The purpose of this book is to firmly acknowledge and illuminate the distinctive contribution of sociology to debates on children and childhood. The influential Danish sociologist Jens Qvortrup (2009: xiv) argues that the sociology of childhood continues to pose and debate the following questions: should we talk about the sociology of children or the sociology of childhood; how should we balance agency and structure in our analyses; is childhood mainly to be seen as a small-scale phenomenon or are children and childhood interesting also for and as a part of the larger social fabric?. The aim of this book is to address these questions and outline and critically evaluate the body of sociological theory and empirical research which attempt to answer these questions. While these issues have been individually dealt with by the plethora of books on childhood studies, few have attempted to bring together these questions within the one volume.

This does not mean that the book will simply focus on work produced by sociologists. In an ever-increasing inter-disciplinary climate, such a narrow focus would not take us very far. Hence, the book will draw on work from a range of disciplines, including development psychology, anthropology, history and geography, but evaluate these contributions through the lens of sociology and privilege accounts which demonstrate the usefulness of sociological approaches to children and childhood. Sociological theories of childhood reflect discourses on children and their childhoods and how these feed into social, cultural, economic, political and legal definitions, and indeed how these discourses are context- and time bound. While childhood is commonly defined by age, various sociologists have illuminated the fallacy of simplistically reducing childhood to chronological age through their comparisons of the competing and contradictory meanings of age across different societies and cultures. As Thorne (2007: 150) puts it, age is an embodied form of difference that is both materially and discursively produced and embedded in relations of power and authority. Hence, age should not be reduced to a biological process. Rather, different societies structure and order age differently and use a range of formal and informal processes to define and regulate acceptable age-related behaviour. For example, the age at which a child can legally smoke, drink alcohol, have sex, get married or commit a crime varies across different societies. The UK has one of the lowest ages for criminal responsibility in the world, as 10-year-old children can be arrested and taken to court if they commit a crime. The age of criminal responsibility is much higher in other European countries, set at age 13 for France, 14 for Italy, 15 for Denmark and 16 for Spain. The age of consent for sex also differs, with Austria, Germany, Portugal and Italy setting the age at 14, France, Denmark and Greece at 15 and the UK, Cyprus, Finland, Norway and Switzerland at 16. These examples suggest that age is as much a social construction as it is a biological process. In line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, henceforth referred to as CRC), the age range applied to children in this book is 018 years. However, for the most part, the research that the book draws on relates to children under 16 years of age. There are a number of terms that can be applied to describe children, including infants, toddlers, tweens, teens and adolescents. Children is a more generic term as is the term young people, and these two terms are the ones that will be used most frequently throughout the book, and, for the most part, the term young people will be applied to older children.