Book Review: Children’s Literature and Childhood Discourses: Exploring Identity through Fiction Cermakova A and Mahlberg M (2024) Children’s Literature and Childhood Discourses: Exploring Identity Through Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, p. 280. ISBN: 9781350177000, £90.00 (ebk).

Ideas of childhood and children are arguably at the very centre of child protection policy, theory and practice, and yet very little attention has been placed on discourses of children and childhood in this field. In this paper we begin to examine how discourses of childhood are reproduced in a child protection context by looking at the talk of practising child protection workers and supervisors in Ontario, Canada. We found that child welfare workers' talk about children suggests that two discourses about children dominate: a discourse of the child as vulnerable and in need of rescue and a discourse of the child as a rights‐bearing individual. We will argue that both these discourses contribute to a symbolic extraction of the child from the family and in this way they function to distance workers from the emotional impact of their practice with parents and children. We will consider the implications of this conceptual extraction of the child from the family and make a case for a more complex understanding of children that reflects the intertwined relationship between parents and children. Lastly, a practice approach to child protection that helps workers to absorb the subjectivities of both children and their parents will be proposed.

This article examines discourses of childhood drawn from press reports, parliamentary debates and government-sponsored reports concerning the Travelling People, an indigenous ethnic minority population in Ireland. Discourses of childhood are located within a changing Irish political economy and shifting Traveller-related policy. The case study reveals how discourses of childhood articulate with, and often reinforce, inferiorizing discourses of racism, gender and class. It is argued that critical analyses of the discourses of childhood can simultaneously challenge naturalized constructions of `the child' and other discourses of social inequality.

An attempt to trace back the history of childhood that governs a contemporary global vision of how a child should grow up in order to become a happy, healthy and educated adult must confront the question that has been driving historians apart for some considerable time now. Did past societies perceive of younger members of the society as children or minors — that is, as a class of human beings fundamentally different from adults — and did they possess concepts of childhood similar to those prevalent in Western industrialized societies of today? Or are we rather witnessing a historically specific form of modern childhood that crystallized into a childhood norm in Western societies in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Prout and Allison, 1997: 17)?KeywordsChild WelfarePrivate SphereInternational TreatyInternational PoliticsLegal ProvisionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The author of the article discusses the sensitive topic of the social taboo of death with regard to the process of the child’s education and development, with particular focus on the use of thanatological literature as a factor shaping the child’s personality. The text presents the perception of the death phenomenon by children, and the essence as well as functions of thanatological literature. It also shows the impact of child and childhood discourses on four well-known literary works for children (at the kindergarten and pre-school age), dealing with the discussed topic. The selected research method consists in qualitative analysis of the content. The works have been selected due to their popularity and presence in scientific publications on the topic of death in children’s literature. Analytical categories of the selected literary works include subjective and objective approach to the child and childhood. The first approach is consistent with the perspective of sociology of childhood and the post-colonial theory, as presented in the article, whereas the second approach refers to the mainstream developmental psychology and the colonial theory. Based on the analysis of content values of the four literary works, it can be concluded that respect for the child’s subjectivity and the value of their voice supports development of the youngest, among others, in the aspect of dealing with the sensitive topic of death.

Children, bears and childhood discourses
 This essay discusses texts that consider the meeting between children and bears. It looks at both meetings between two real individuals and the meetings between the child and the bear within one and the same individual, resulting in the teddy bear, and the clothed and talking bears of children’s literature. These themes are studied in their historical context and analyzed with respect to the literary intertext and different childhood discourses.
 The introduction provides a short presentation of the term »discourse« and how it is used as an analytical tool within research into the culture of children.
 After presenting Hansen’s »Little Alvhilde« from 1829 and von Braun’s poem »Strong in his Innocence« from 1851 – supposedly based on a real event - Tegnér’s song »Mother’s little Olle« from 1895 is analyzed with respect to its predecessors. The analysis shows how the discourse »the innocent child« takes its form even here, but also how Tegnér develops the »childish« perspective and the tonal and rhythmic qualities of the text, as well as the portrayal of the bear. This portrayal is less frightening in Tegnér’s song, probably because the fear of bears had begun to decrease, and the Romantic Era’s idealized view of childhood had also begun to influence the view of the bear.
 That section is followed by a discussion of the meeting between girls and bears in general, and in particular the meeting of Bella and the bear in Nyblom’s story »An Innocent’s Wandering« from 1912. We see how the same view of childhood, the innocent child, lives on but is also broadened to take in the discourse of the free child. The next section looks at, among other issues, how a story like »Goldilocks and the Three Bears« changes along with a changing view of the real bear as a threat, and the growth of the teddy bear »industry« from around 1900 and onward. The essay concludes with an analysis of how the teddy bear and the theme of Olle and the bear are used and understood during the opening years of the 21st century.

This chapter asks how disabled children’s childhood studies constitute alternative forms of authority to the dominant discourses of disability and childhood. Studies concerned with impairment and child development discuss disabled children in problematic terms and, it is suggested, these are not studies of their childhood. The dominant discourses of childhood and disability that emerged in the global North continue to have worldwide authority and impact in presenting disabled children in deficit and negative terms (Oliver & Barnes, 2012). The authority of these discourses is based on the positivist methodologies used. In England, they continue to be endorsed by policy, patterns of service provision and professional practices, but the links between concepts, policy and practice, and how we can be as people, are complex, and Foucault’s work is used to analyze these links.

This paper adds to the limited evidence base around documentary representation of the wishes, feelings and views of children and young people involved in the child protection system. It presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of 114 documents relating to 28 children and young people in the North of England who were the subject of a child protection conference (CPC) due to having experienced significant harm or the high likelihood of significant harm occurring. Three dominant and interlayering discourses were identified: a discourse of childhood, a discourse of participation and a discourse of professional social work practice. While some children and young people came to life in the reports and were afforded a unique identity, others were invisible and their views were marginalized. The findings support a dominant discourse of the unseen and unheard child, with participation normally mediated by power relationships between adults and children, and which marginalizes the experiences of children through a structurally constructed lens of risk and vulnerability. The findings signify the need to establish assessment practices and case reporting systems in which children are heard themselves as well as reported on by others.

Children/Childhood

Childhood studies per se is an interdisciplinary domain of knowledge generation. It draws from different fields of knowledge (disciplines) within social sciences and humanities like history, anthropology, sociology, geography, literature, and law apart from interdisciplinary domains like gender studies, cultural studies, film studies, and others. Notably, the sociopolitical transformations which influenced shaping of childhood as a modern phenomenon also resulted in the emergence of “the child” as a philosophical concept in modern times. This emergence along with efforts toward pedagogization and psychologization of childhood by the end of the nineteenth century set in motion discursive deliberations on childhood in the academic sphere especially within the western European context (with a difference between the continental and Anglo-Saxon version). Evidently, academic disciplines and specializations of social pedagogy, psychology, and pediatrics were forerunners in setting forth an academic construction of childhood by the beginning of the twentieth century. “The child” became an object of study in such academic deliberation. This stature of “the child” led to its academic portrayal as a passive recipient of disciplinary and socialization mandates over larger span of the twentieth century. In this scheme, childhood was deemed to be a transformative zone, where the child reached finality in adulthood. Such a construction of childhood under academic influences furthered the notion of a universal modern childhood. Childhood studies as it is known today became formalized in the 1990s with the consolidation of the new sociology of childhood. It marked the reconstruction of childhood which characterized a paradigmatic shift within the discourse of childhood. Formalization of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) provided an impetus in this direction. Childhood therefore soon featured as a contested terrain especially among historians, sociologists, and psychologists. The reconstruction entailed a transformation of the figure of the “child” from its earlier psychologized version. The new sociology of childhood challenged such academic construction of childhood. It advocated for children as active agents of their own societies beyond their passive existences. This paved a new pathway toward the theorization of children and childhoods. This bibliography is organized into four sections. General Overview on Childhood Studies contains a brief introduction to the topic of childhood studies. Interdisciplinarity summarizes the significance and debates surrounding the topic within academic discussions. Postcolonial-Postmodern Interdisciplinarity directs the reader toward an understanding of interdisciplinarity in terms of the postcolonial and the postmodern, and finally Interdisciplinarity in Childhood Studies charts the course of childhood studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor in itself.

The ‘Goodes saga’ in Australian Football transformed Adam Goodes’ persona as a dutiful son of the sport into a polarising celebrity, most infamously through an encounter with a female teenage fan. In this article, we argue that the ‘Goodes saga’ exposed the contested nature of Indigenous celebrity stemming from settler anxieties about the unruly child and Indigenous statesman. Goodes transformed from a sports star, a dutiful ‘son’ of the sport to the national celebrity of a political statesman – a position of adulthood that might be described as characteristic of Eldership. Goodes’ self-manufactured celebrity persona, based in his concept of Indigeneity as ‘having a foot in both worlds’, was enacted through his mission to incorporate Indigenous cultural practices into the sport and wider settler-Australian culture. These actions were persistently disparaged through recourses to Euro-centric concept of the child and childhood as a state of innocence. We prompt readers to consider why the settler-public and its national institutions like the Australian Football League are so invested with surrounding Indigenous stars with a discourse of childhood. Why might the AFL and settler society more broadly consider the possibility that Aboriginal men might ascend to adulthood such a terrifying proposition?

The 2012 appearance on YouTube of a speech about banking reform prompted mainstream news coverage and hundreds of online comments, dwelling less on the content of the speech than on the speaker, Victoria Grant, a twelve year-old girl. A qualitative content analysis of over 600 comments revealed disagreement about children’s capacities as participants in political and economic discussions. Commenters’ mixed beliefs were linked to dominant, frequently contradictory, discourses of childhood. Victoria Grant was positioned as embedded in educational processes, as competent but often exceptional, as incompetent, and as innocent and therefore vulnerable. These conflicting yet emotionally charged narratives of childhood illustrate the concept’s rhetorical elasticity and flexibility. Despite advances in the cause of children’s social participation in recent years, most of these adult-centered narratives undermine the idea of children as legitimate contributors to economic analysis and political debate.

A number of ideas are taken for granted in education: there is a pre-analytic “international” understanding about aims and goals of schooling. The educational discourse is complemented by a parallel, rights-based understanding about childhood, of child labor and of child marriage. Often the Western way of understanding these concepts is clashing with local understanding. Here, we understand discourse not as an abstract phenomenon, but as situated practices that are dynamic, flexible, and changing. There is a dialectics of discourse, since the clash of various discursive practices results in adaptation and transformation. Discourse analysis can help understand and perhaps reformulate the discourse about schools: reinventing schools as protection, instead of being a “pre-packaged solution” to fight child labor or child marriage. A Western view of children as individuals with specific rights would not necessarily be appropriate in many contexts. Hence, we argue that instead of integrating local discourse into an international one, a third space could be generated, in which local discourse engage and interact with international discourse. Such third space could be more useful than trying to convince local communities about the righteousness of the international discourse. In such view childhood would be considered as continuous with adulthood, and the change from education to work not as an abrupt, age-determined shift, but as a gradual transition.

Policy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC’s renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating ‘a better life for all’ as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family and society in National Curriculum Framework (NCF) as it relates to children’s everyday contexts. I throw light on how the curriculum’s discourses relate to the diverse South African settings, child rearing practices and world-views, and how they interact with normative discourses of South African policy and global early childhood frameworks. The NCF acknowledges indigenous and local knowledges and suggests that the content should be adapted to local contexts. I argue that the good intentions of these documents to address inequities are undermined by the uncritical acceptance of global taken-for-granted discourses, such as narrow notions of evidence, western child development, understanding of the child as a return of investment and referencing urban middle class community contexts and values. These global discourses make the poorest children and their families invisible, and silence other visions of childhood and good society, including the notion of ‘convivial society’ set out in the 1955 Freedom Charter.

Historically, film adaptations of children’s texts have been heavily influenced by the dominant ‘Hollywood aesthetic’ of cinema. Chapter 3 focusses on four film adaptations that interrogate and/or offer alternatives to that aesthetic, through their adaptations of two ‘classic’ carnivalesque children’s texts: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Carroll, 1865 and 1872) and Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, 1963). Both texts implicitly interrogate official culture in ways comparable to the traits of carnival identified by Mikhail Bakhtin. Both have been interpreted from a diverse range of critical perspectives and shaped ways of thinking about childhood as a relative state of disempowerment and empowerment. The focus film adaptations envisage the carnivalesque spaces of Wonderland and the Wild Thing’s island as dystopian heterocosms, and by drawing analogies between discourses of childhood and contemporary global politics these films raise questions about the possibility of alternative world orders. Further, their mixing of film styles and genres results in films that offer a cultural alternative to the hegemony of mainstream children’s film.

Note No. 9 Research Briefing - Governing Young Citizens: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Social Policy