Politics Of Childhood Research Articles

Small Wars: Cultural Politics of Childhood

CONTRIBUTORS: Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli Philippe Bourgois John A. Brett Caroline B. Brettell Donna M. Goldstein Matthew C. Gutmann Michael Harris Daniel Hoffman Jill E. Korbin J. S. La Fontaine Leonard B. Lerer Lynn M. Morgan Susan Niermeyer Maria B. Olujic Mary Picone Elizabeth F. S. Roberts Carolyn Sargent Nancy Scheper-Hughes Meira Weiss Linda M. Whiteford

Feminine Language and the Politics of Children's Literature

Feminine Language and the Politics of Children's Literature

Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood:Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood.

Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent. eds. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. iv. 429 pp.

Political Advertising and Public Mood: A Study of Children's Political Orientations

Political advertising can cause changes in children's political attitudes and affect their involvement in politics by momentarily altering their levels of "public mood." We define this concept and present results from a study in which we use the tone of political advertising to induce change in the public moods of young children. Results support the hypothesis that advertising tone affects public mood. These changes in feelings, in turn, mediate attitude change in some political orientations. In addition, while advertising tone does not significantly affect children's desire to vote as a main effect, it moderates the role of psychological resources. Children high in political efficacy are stimulated by negative advertising, whereas children low in political efficacy lose enthusiasm for voting. No such differences are observed for children who view positive ads.

Politics of childhood, childrens rights, and intergenerational relations

One of the more decisive questions in the discussion of human living conditions, which then also produces the most diverse answers, concerns the relation between violence and civilization. In this context the treatment of childhood and of childrens rights is a crucial issue of this century. We live in a period of socialism, the womens movement, intercourse, individualism. Are we not entering the period of youth? (Benjamin 1991, p. 9), asked Walter Benjamin 80 years ago, shortly after Ellen Key had program-matically declared The Century of the Child (Key 1978). Aries, in his history of childhood and family life in the Ancien Regime, investigated the generalization of social control and subsequent new forms of intervention into social relations (Aries 1978, pp. 556–8). They concern:

The Politics of Childhood and Children’s Literature: A Critique

This paper critiques the politics of childhood and children’s literature by arguing that childhood is a construct by the adults that disavows the materiality of children in society. In consequence,...

Gilded Palace, Gilded Playpen: Louis Xv's Use of Palatial Space To Control His Rebellious Children and Their Politics 1

Behind the splendor and glitter of eighteenth-century Versailles existed a contentious and dangerous hotbed of royal family politics. Throughout the second half of his reign, Louis XV experienced opposition and intrigue from his children, particularly from his son, Louis the dauphin, and his eldest surviving daughter, Adélaïde. Fortunately for the king, this intrigue of family politics took place within the environs of Versailles, an environment that was his to control. Louis XV was able to use this palatial space to oversee and counter his children's politics and intrigues. I suggest that in the final analysis, Louis XV communicated his satis faction and displeasure within the transformations he made at Versailles.

Children's Political Jokes

Jokes accompany us invisibly from early childhood, and to a certain extent we can assert that we live in a society that is made up of potential tellers of jokes and people who listen to them. Probably every adult person knows that children love to tell jokes. Many parents remember the day when their 4- or 5-year-old youngster first uttered the memorable phrase, "Daddy, let me tell you a joke." Some parents might be charmed, others might be surprised, but on the whole the occasion was perceived as natural and ordinary, no cause for special concern except maybe for a few thoughts such as, "I hope he hasn't picked up anything bad in that kindergarten…."

Haroun and the Politics of Children's Literature

Haroun and the Politics of Children's Literature

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: Its Relevance for Social Scientists

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child: Its Relevance for Social Scientists

Families of nations: patterns of public policy in Western democracies

Part 1 Economic policy and social protection: changing course in economic policy - the English-speaking nations in the 1980s the politics of price stability - why the German-speaking nations are different worlds of welfare and families of nations. Part 2 The Politics of labour supply: coping with economic crisis - labour supply as a policy instrument gendered labour force participation. Part 3 Families and families of nations: the politics of childhood - the rights of children in modern times why divorce rates differ - law, religious belief and modernity conclusion - beyond the lonely nation state.

Interrupting the Critical Line from Rationalism to Romanticism

Interrupting the Critical Line from Rationalism to Romanticism Lissa Paul (bio) Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr.Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. The best essay in Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, a collection edited by James Holt McGavran, Jr., is "Romancing the Moral Tale: Maria Edgeworth and the Problematics of Pedagogy" by Mitzi Myers. With a brilliant mix of scholarly breadth and compassionate, critical insight Myers illuminates a world that is usually opaque, even to children's literature specialists. Although the essay appears in the middle of the book, I am situating it at the beginning of the review, not just because the essay is an exemplary work of criticism, but because it offers a glimpse of what the collection might have been. With the provocative collision of romancing, moral tale, and pedagogy in the title, Myers interrupts the traditional straight and narrow line from rationalism to romance. She questions beliefs received from Harvey Darton (and often parroted by children's literature scholars) that didactic tales are undifferentiated, boring aggregates and not up to the original art of the romantic writers. Through her analysis of Maria Edgeworth's Simple Susan as a "nurturing fantasy masquerading as rational moral tale" (111), Myers demonstrates how to read moral tales against the grain and so release forgotten "maternal pedagogies" and a "plurality of meanings." She shows how to open up relations "between nurturance and autonomy, connectedness and individuation, child and parent, dependence and dominance, feeling and reason, and, finally, between experience and the discursive practices that configure or constitute it" (98). When Myers explains how late twentieth-century poststructuralist criticism destabilizes the privileging of nineteenth-century romanticism over eighteenth-century rationalism, she is explaining [End Page 210] how we can revise our assumptions about the period—and so discover readings unlike the ones we knew. Myers is joined in this endeavor by other contributors to the book, particularly Jeanie Watson, Alan Richardson, Patricia Demers, Michael Hancher, Phyllis Bixler, and Anita Moss. All write about un(dis)covering received ideological assumptions—and that, it seems to me, is a good reason for assembling a collection of critical essays about romanticism and children's literature in nineteenth-century England. To demonstrate what I think is best about the collection, I will focus first on the critical lines in essays by Richardson, Bixler, and Hancher. With those examples up front, my difficulties with the collection as a whole will be easier to explain. In "Wordsworth, Fairy Tales, and the Politics of Children's Reading," Alan Richardson uses a New Historicist approach to explore how the didactic writers of the early nineteenth century did not so much censor the fairy tale as appropriate it. He reveals the blurring of genre distinctions. Like Myers, Richardson shows that the boundaries between the fairy tale and the didactic story are not as clear as they have been assumed to be. And that contention opens up a radical new project for children's literature criticism. He suggests a possible direction: "Rather than maintain a simplistic opposition between didacticism and fantasy, indoctrination and a negative 'natural' education—a model inherited from the Romantics themselves—critical studies might profitably develop more complex approaches attuned to the intricate politics of literacy and education in the Romantic period" (49). In the same spirit of redefining relations between rationalism and romanticism, Phyllis Bixler uses the insights of feminist theory to focus on the community of mothers in The Secret Garden. She reads beyond the subjugation of Mary within the story and extrapolates why Mary continues to be celebrated by female readers despite the way she apparently recedes into the background of the narrative. Bixler reads the feminist "webs of symbolic imagery"—especially the house and garden—as "a celebration of nature's power, . . . a primarily female power" (209). To use the terms of "ecriture feminine," Bixler "thinks through the body" in order to reveal a feminist reading of "the maternal body" in The Secret Garden. Another essay that awakens alternative interpretive strategies for reading nineteenth-century children's literature is "Alice's Audiences." Michael Hancher takes the old problem of trying to...

The Politics of Children's Literature Criticism

The Politics of Children's Literature Criticism Audrey Beisel (bio) and Ian Wojcik-Andrews (bio) John Stephens . Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction. New York: Longman, 1992. The first priority is to understand how the ideology of any given book can be located. Above all, such an understanding is important for teachers, especially primary school teachers and English specialists. Their task is to teach children how to read . . . so . . . that child will not be at the mercy of what she reads. Peter Hollindale, "Ideology and the Children's Book," Signal 55 (1988): 19. To what extent does contemporary children's literature criticism infantilize rather than politicize the child? To what extent does it articulate a classic power struggle (this time over language) between the haves (adults) and the have-nots (children)? John Stephens's Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction, an intellectually challenging book that uses many modern critical theories to explore the efficacious relationship among language, ideology, and children's literature, raises a multiplicity of (perhaps unanswerable) questions. Is the book too difficult, too theoretical? For whom was the book written? What is its intended audience? What is its relation to the child reader, ideal or real? Does Language and Ideology, and other similar critical studies—Nodelman (1992) and Hunt (1991)—articulate the kind of contradiction Jacqueline Rose eloquently spoke of in The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction, the fact that "Peter Pan . . . gives us the child, but it does not speak to the child" (1). And if children's literature criticism is likewise an impossibility because it speaks in an unspeakably difficult language that only literary specialists might decode, precisely what language must young people be armed with in order to protect themselves in an increasingly violent new world order? What language will produce a more equable redistribution of the world's resources, from the elites to the masses? Where is the critical language—of resistance, struggle, and empowerment—that politicizes rather than infantilizes young people, and [End Page 220] what is the role of the intellectual Left in the dissemination of that critical language for the young? Such questions belittle neither John Stephens's work in general nor Language and Ideology in particular. Stephens has made several valuable contributions to children's literature in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly and in Children's Literature (1993). Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction continues those worthwhile contributions. Stephens's thesis and overall aim—clearly set out in his introduction—is an important one, particularly in these days of political correctness: language, ideology, and children's literature are intimately related, he argues. Further, "[a] narrative without an ideology is unthinkable: ideology is formulated in and by language, meanings within language are socially determined, and narratives are constructed out of language" (8). Childhood is a function of adulthood meaning. Adulthood is a function of childhood meaning. Both are a function of language. Moreover, we would argue, they are related not in any kind of unspoken relationship, as the gay and lesbian children's literature that articulated the egalitarian and thus controversial vision of New York's Rainbow Coalition curriculum dramatically showed. Whether it be a liberal or Leftist agenda looking to articulate a socialist vision through the lens of a humane and caring curriculum or a conservative, right-wing rejection of both that vision and its humane embodiment in a democratic curriculum, the triumvirate of language, ideology, and children's literature shapes and organizes the socialization of the child into the adult. Young people must know that while children's literature is immensely enjoyable as art, it is also immensely powerful as ideology—what Althusser called an ideological state apparatus. Subsequent chapters in Language and Ideology, though often difficult ironically because of Stephens's wide-ranging use of complex theoretical terminology, nonetheless convincingly argue that, "[a] narrative without an ideology is unthinkable" (8). For example, in chapter one, "Ideology, Discourse and Narrative Fiction," Stephens incorporates the theoretical work of Aidan Chambers, Peter Hollindale (the summary of Hollindale's essay on ideology is good), Wolfgang Iser, and Wayne Booth to discuss the relationship between narrative and ideology in Steven Kellog's The...

Book Reviews

Peace & ChangeVolume 17, Issue 3 p. 363-373 Book Reviews First published: July 1992 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0130.1992.tb00589.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War Stein Tonnesson. Left Face: Soldier Unions and Resistance Movements in Modern Armies David Cortright, by David Cortright and Max Watts. Guides to Library of Congress Subject Headings and Classification on Peace and International Conflict Resolution Judith A. Kessinger. The Politics of Children's Survival by George Kent. Citing Literature Volume17, Issue3July 1992Pages 363-373 RelatedInformation

The Politics of Children's Survival.

Preface Patterns of Mortality Individual Factors Household Factors The Child Survival and Development Movement Criticism of Child Survival Programs Food Poverty War Repression Population Alternative Social Systems Should Children be Treated as Human Capital? Motivating The Powerful Children's Survival and Community Development Localized Multiparty Planning Laws and Institutions Selected References Index

The Politics of Children's Literature: The Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Racism in the United States is an issue that is usually considered too sensitive to be dealt with directly in the elementary school classroom. When African Americans and European Americans confront each other in children's literature, the situation is routinely described as a problem between individuals that can be worked out on a personal basis. In the few cases where racism is addressed as a social problem, there has to be a happy ending. This is most readily apparent in the biographical treatment of Rosa Parks, one of the two names that most children in the United States associate with the civil rights movement in the South of the U.S., the other being Martin Luther King, Jr. Over the past few years, during school visits I make, I've talked with children about the civil rights movement. One of the things I ask the children

The Politics of Childhood: Wordsworth, Blake, and Catechistic Method

It is not coincidental that authors of eighteenth century's two most influential educational treatises-Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Rousseau's Emile-were also major political theorists of their age. The interrelation between political and educational discourses-the constitution of state and construction of its citizens-runs back at least to Plato's Republic, which Rousseau called the most beautiful educational treatise ever written, but during modern era Europe, with schooling less and less confined to an elite and with informal spread of literacy among an increasingly mobile population, education and indeed childhood itself were politicized as never before.' The ongoing debate on uses and dangers of literacy and popular (if not yet mass) education became during later eighteenth century what Raymond Williams has called most central issue in history of our culture.2 And as concept of childhood became defined (if not fact produced) by education, new children's literature and literary representations of childhood, including Romantic idealizations of child, reflected no less than did contemporary education theory politics of literacy.3 As education broadened later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, its methods and function shifted significantly. The Renaissance emphasis on dialectical argument, related to rise of an entrepreneurial class requiring intellectual flexibility, yielded to mechanical production of set answers, obedient behavior within educational setting, and (for lower classes) passive literacy.4 Catechism replaced dialectic as exemplary mode of a process which Michel Foucault describes as disciplining of society, as school became a machine for learning analogous its functions of regulating and observation to prison and factory.5 While this shift affected even schooling for elite-eighteenth-century grammar schools, for example, emphasized formal training by drill and repetition, and oral

The History of Childhood Since the "Invention of Childhood": Some Issues in the Eighties

One approach to the history of childhood examines change in private dispositions toward the young. Another approach concentrates on the proliferation of public institutions for managing child life. The history of sentiments has led to a futile debate over the relative extent of dispositional change or continuity in feeling for children without considering the ways in which notionally primordial or elemental dispositions were constructed or contaminated by the norma tive, politicized meanings of childhood The upshot is that the symbolic politics of childhood, arising from intergroup moral conflict, returns to haunt current interpretations in the guise of timeless psychological or bio-social truths. Study of the official processing of children errs in the opposite direction, losing sight of the personal thought and action of children and their parents, as if their historical experiences were fundamentally comprised of policy and administration. Actual children vanish and an implausibly intrusive account is offered of policy itself. Family history, especially accounts of agrarian and working class family strategies, helps put each history of childhood in a more realistic context and may bridge the two.

Mapping the Child's Political World

Mapping the Child's Political World

Influence of Significant Others' Perceived Voting Behaviors on Children's Political Socialization

This study investigated the relative influence of parents, peers, and teachers on children's voting behavior. 66 children in grades 3, 4, and 5 were interviewed about their voting preferences and perceptions of significant others' voting preferences. Analysis indicated that mothers and fathers held the most important positions of influence over their children relative to voting. Discussion focused on the implications of these findings for political socialization of children.