A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization

Abstract

A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental Thinking, Categorization and Graphic Visualization By André, Turmel Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2008 ISBN 9780521879774 (Hardback), 9780521705639 (Paperback) , 362 pp , £19.99 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, childhood came to be thought of as a science. Measurement, categorisation and statistical techniques offered hope that infant mortality could be reduced, child health improved, IQ assessed, a ‘normal’ pattern of child development established and appropriate measures taken for those children who in one respect or another fell outside the norm. These processes have already been quite widely studied and Turmel makes no claim to add to our stock of knowledge. His aim is more ambitious, it is to understand these developments sociologically. ‘A sociologist has to keep himself from doing history’, he reminds himself. Sociology does not have a particularly distinguished record with respect to childhood. Turmel notes perceptively that in the late nineteenth century there grew up a division of labour between psychology, which focused on children and sociology where the emphasis was on the family. Children were of interest to sociologists for the processes by which they were socialized into adulthood, in the child as becoming rather than as being. This gelled well with psychology’s insistence from the 1920s onwards that there were fixed developmental stages through, which all children progressed on the road to adulthood. Turmel acknowledges that the new sociology of childhood since the 1990s has changed that emphasis, but he thinks sociology’s reach with respect to childhood needs to be extended. He wants to integrate it with general sociology arguing that there cannot be any account of the social, which omits children. The way in which a sense of a normal childhood and of developmental stages became established was through the ‘social technologies’ of graphs, charts and tables. These, proliferating from the late nineteenth century, provided a visual inscription of normality and development, most famously not only in the weight-height-age charts but also in graphs of normal mental development. By this means, the ‘childhood collective’–‘parents, teachers, paediatricians, nurses and welfare activists, social workers’ came to have a common view of childhood. Turmel stresses that the acceptance of this common view was not uncontested, although most of his rather slender evidence on this topic comes from psychologists who rejected the dominance of developmental thinking rather than from parents or children. And indeed his overall argument depends on the triumph of developmental thinking through the ‘childhood collective’, an instance as he sees it of the type of rationalisation that Max Weber delineated. Childhood, thoroughly chaotic in structure at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, without a body of accepted fact or theory and facing the challenges of high infant mortality, morbidity and delinquency became stabilized through measurement, graphic visualisation and the triumph of developmental thinking, its epitome the work of Gesell and Piaget. The bite, for example, was taken out of delinquency by redefining it as ‘maladjustment’. Turmel is undoubtedly describing and analysing crucial developments in the history of childhood, as a body both of ideas and of practice. In the century, he covers from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, experts on childhood, primarily psychologists, gained a dominance in the field, which at some level impacted on the lives of nearly all parents and children. What Turmel never considers is whether there remained alternative views of childhood; for example, a romantic view of childhood as properly happy and protected, rather than as a series of obstacles to be surmounted if abnormality was to be avoided. His case would also be stronger if it was better-written. ‘I shall … focus on the consequences of the delimitation of criteria, standards, for this appears to be the core of the hybrid circulating in a given collective’ is a not atypical sentence. If historical sociology is going, as Turmel hopes, to have an influence across disciplines, it needs to be more accessible to readers.