Childhoods: Growing Up in Aotearoa, New Zealand by Nancy Higgins and Claire Freeman, eds.

Abstract

 2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(1), 2014 Childhoods: Growing Up in Aotearoa, New Zealand Nancy Higgins and Claire Freeman, eds. (2013). Washington: Otago University Press, 325 pages. $47.50 USD. ISBN: 978-1-877578-49-6. This collection presents New Zealand as a country of paradoxes in its treatment of children. Its legal system attempts to be consistent with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—outlawing hitting children as a form of punishment, for example. Yet New Zealand also has some of the worst levels of child poverty and child health among high-income nations, with more than a quarter of its children living in conditions of disadvantage. Maori children are most likely to face multiple risks. In this sociopolitical context, this book examines children’s lives in New Zealand, past and present, including their changing environments, urban play, and use of media technologies. In “The Changing Environmental Worlds of Aotearoa New Zealand Children,” Claire Freeman explores the consequences for children that 86 percent of New Zealanders now live in cities. Increasingly, children live in houses with small outdoor lots, often separated from the street by high walls and fences, or in apartments that were not designed with the needs of children and their families in mind. A high percentage of homes, especially among Maori and Pacific Island families, are poorly heated and have dampness or mold. While New Zealand is celebrated for its natural beauty, and many adults remember exploring its beaches and bush in childhood, contemporary children’s opportunities for independent mobility and outdoor play have decreased as traffic has increased, and many children are chauffeured to school and sports by their parents. Nevertheless, many families remain committed to taking their children camping on vacations. In a study of 163 9- to 11-year olds in Dunedin, Freeman and her colleagues found that children were most likely to know many places in their neighborhood if they attended a local school, the school was less than a kilometer away, and they lived in a neighborhood with a clear identity and boundary. In “Technology Occupies Us: Children, Media and Aotearoa New Zealand Society,” Martha Bell and Victoria Farmer summarize a study which asked 58 10- to 13-year olds about their uses of television and other digital technologies. Over one-third of the children had television sets in their bedrooms, and when they were asked what they would do if they did not have a television, they said they would play video games, browse the Internet or instant message friends. In practice, many of them combined uses, such as being on the computer and phone at the same time as the television was on, or switched from one media to another across the day. Although the children recognized that screen time could stop them from doing other things they should be doing, making them “lazy” in their words, many of them saw it as a Book Review: Childhoods: Growing Up in Aotearoa, New Zealand 187 form of social connection that included shared viewing with family members as well as talking and texting with friends. A girl in a focus group summed up the typical high level of use: “I guess we’re growing up now in an age where we’ve got a lot of technology and we kind of depend on that because… that’s really the whole thing that occupies us.” A chapter on “Recollecting Childhood at School in the Early Twentieth Century” by Helen May and another on “Managed Childhoods: A Social History of Urban Children’s Play” by Christina Ergler, Robin Kearns and Karen Witten provide vivid, illustrated overviews of the changing environments of schoolrooms, school grounds, playgrounds and city parks. They tie physical changes to cultural changes, as ideas of progressive education reached New Zealand schools at the same time as ideas about supervised play extended beyond public schools into afternoon playtime. Despite new ideas about more supportive and creative environments for children, corporal punishment at school remained commonplace, and Maoris who attended compulsory Native Schools remember being strapped for any expressions of their native culture. In the early twentieth century, school yards and parks, physical...