Idea Of Childhood Research Articles

Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

Dzieciństwo: projekt w kryzysie

This article considers the idea of crisis as one of the key tools for conceptualizing the ambivalent nature of childhood. Although crisis narratives have been an inseparable part of describing childhood, the concept of a crisis (an end, a death) of childhood itself may refer to such different phenomena as slave labor or lack of access to education on the one hand, and the consumerist lifestyle and media addiction on the other. The author focuses mainly on the idea of the disappearance of modern childhood derived from Postman’s concept. Childhood is viewed in connection with the concept of childhood’s toxicity, the dichotomy between over-controlling and ignoring childhood, and the idea of childhood being inappropriate. The article concludes that although some of the problems signaled as part of the crisis diagnosis have a negative impact on the development of young people and require solutions, the idea that childhood en bloc is in crisis is rather an expression of the collapse of the classic vision of childhood, and thus of the hierarchical, dichotomous relationship between childhood and adulthood that it is based upon. The relationship thus defined does not leave much conceptual space for recognizing the complex and ambivalent nature of childhood, or for describing the changes in childhood and adulthood and their mutual determinants.

From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford

Reviewed by: From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940 by Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford Felicia Bevel From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940. By Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. x + 263 pp. Cloth $56.25, e-book $56.25. The construction of colonial girlhood in British settler societies emerges front and center in Michelle J. Smith, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford's From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children's Literature, 1840-1940. Drawing from magazines, periodicals, novels, advertisements, and other print culture from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, this analytically robust text brings together the growth of white settler societies and the emergence of girls' print culture to examine the ways that white girlhood was central to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand's emergence as modern nations. Age, as the authors show, is a critical analytic for understanding the culture of empire. This book is not only concerned with the construction of colonial (white) girlhood but also with the idea of childhood itself—how it was used, for example, to define indigenous people as childlike and thus inferior. This book therefore follows in the footsteps of Caroline Levander, Anna Mae Duane, and [End Page 163] Margaret Jacobs, who have each explored how racialized and gendered constructions of children and the category of childhood have been used to support various political projects. By arguing that age is an important lens alongside race and gender in unpacking the ideological work of settler colonialism, it is also in dialogue with texts such as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Organized into three sections, From Colonial to Modern also provides a useful model for doing transnational work, striking a careful balance between the national and transnational while also giving equal weight to each of the three societies under review. While the first section, "Empire and Transnational Flows," emphasizes the transnational in its overview of the circulation and consumption of girls' print culture, the next section, "National and Transnational Dynamics," turns to national differences in the construction of colonial girlhood shaped by family formation, the environment, and racial dynamics in each country. Finally, the third section, "Modernity and Transnational Femininities," draws out the tensions between national and imperial belongings as it turns to the role of girlhood in each society's development as a modern, consumerist nation. This transnational lens, however, does not blur national differences but instead considers nation-specific meaning making, which "incorporates national distinctiveness within a shared network based on imperial belonging" (69). The strength of From Colonial to Modern lies in its intersectional approach, particularly in its careful attention to race, age, and gender throughout the book. From a close reading in chapter 3 of a 1907 song called "The British Empire Girl," which imagined the colonial girl as having pearly white skin, to a discussion in chapter 9 of a 1925 photograph of a Maori girl that relegates her to an uncivilized past, the authors consistently present an intersectional analysis of the layered relationship between whiteness and national identity, as the title indicates, from the colonial period to the age of modernity. This analysis surfaces most clearly in chapter 5, "Race and Texts for Girls," which expertly illustrates how indigenous girls were frequently characterized in colonial books as tragic victims of failed interracial relationships and/or receivers of white girls' civilizing care. By discussing the relationship between white and indigenous girls in colonial fiction, Smith, Moruzi, and Bradford also effectively illustrate how racial ideology was at the heart of white girls' gendered role in settler colonialism—to not only reproduce the settler colonial state by giving birth to future white citizens but also to mother supposedly childlike indigenous peoples. This emphasis on the racialized and gendered construction of girlhood, however, is at times at the expense of examining the influence of real girls on [End Page 164] their own representation in...

Educação, infância e escola: a civilização da criança

Este texto busca entender o processo de construção do conceito de infância numa perspectiva sociológica e histórica, uma vez que a ideia de infância que se desenvolveu e que chegou até nossos tempos não exprime seu fundamento histórico, tendo como consequência a dissimulação das dimensões social e política das relações entre a criança, o adulto, a sociedade e do próprio processo formativo. Diante disso, alguns questionamentos são feitos: quais são as bases históricas e sociais de tais relações? Qual o sentido e significado da infância? E qual é o estatuto epistemológico do conceito de infância? Sendo assim, analisar as transformações sociais, políticas e culturais denominadas por Norbert Elias como processo civilizador, tendo como pressuposto que a infância é construção histórica definida pela condição social de ser criança e não um fato natural, pode contribuir para superação do problema da naturalização/desnaturalização da infância e compreender o surgimento desta e dos modos como as relações entre adultos e crianças se estabeleceram ao longo da história. Para este autor, a infância é um curto período de tempo onde a criança deverá aprender aquilo que a sociedade levou séculos para internalizar. Desse modo, a civilização das crianças é a sua educação para autorregulação que deve se realizar na escola.

Infância e limiar em Walter Benjamin

Este estudo de natureza teórica busca evidenciar aspectos da infância presentes na obra de Benjamin, a partir da ideia de limiar. Encontramo-nos com ela em lugares do pensamento onde o filósofo se detém sobre a importância das zonas limiares e dos locais de passagens para uma experiência com o moderno. Tais lugares do pensamento sinalizam e indicam marcas que contribuem para conferir à infância sua modernidade, bem como abrem caminho para pensar os sentidos da infância no tempo presente. Nossa hipótese é de que a ideia de infância é atravessada por núcleos conceituais e imagéticos importantes na obra do autor, como força mobilizadora, tanto desses conceitos como da ideia de infância. Foram encontrados sinais de um pensamento que brinca com as noções constituintes da imagem da infância da qual fala o autor. É justamente esse "brincar filosófico" o que aproxima a noção benjaminiana de infância de ideias densas e conceitos importantes, no contexto de suas reflexões, como a noção de limiar.

Charles Dickens and the Child Narrator: Literary and Sociolinguistic Reflections on A Holiday Romance (1868)

The works of Charles Dickens (1812–1870) are remarkable for his meticulous attention to the polyphony of surrounding society. This literary tendency is evident in his Condition-of-England novels, as well as in Dickens's works aimed at a young readership; in the stories contained in A Holiday Romance (1868), the Victorian writer offers some enlightening reflections on the idea of childhood in Victorian culture. This paper offers an analysis of the innovative choices that characterize this Dickensian novella, especially dwelling upon its literary and sociolinguistic features. In A Holiday Romance, Dickens depicts four child narrators who express themselves using a language typically suited to their young age: baby talk. By using these young narrators, Dickens testifies to the increasing importance of children's voices in the Victorian age—hence, to a socio-cultural legitimation of childhood. Inasmuch as this literary and sociolinguistic innovation is limited by the adult author's perspective on the issues discussed in the novella, the representation of children in A Holiday Romance is stained by the romantic idea of the "innocent child." In addition to this, the adult voice implicitly invites young readers to follow the example of naïve and submissive childhood provided in the novella. Despite the criticisms against it, A Holiday Romance is an innovative text, insomuch as it offers a plausible representation of children during the Victorian age, even according to its author; while writing to his American publisher, Dickens stated, "the writing seemed to me so like children's, that dull folks…might perhaps rate it accordingly" (Dickens, Letters of Charles Dickens 402–403).

Children without Childhood - Proletarianization of Children and Its Implications

Aries's famous book Centuries of childhood (1962), has influenced the widely acknowledge view that the concept of childhood is a social and cultural construction. Cross-cultural and historical researches have asserted that the idea of childhood has varied across different cultures and epochs thus belying the universal conceptualizations of childhood. Hermeneutical readings of historical and sociological texts have encouraged me to construct the notion that there are children who live out their lives without childhood – both in the past and in the present. In addition to this I deconstruct the notion of 'universal childhood' and make the following assertions: that in the medieval period childhood as we understand it today may not have existed; that childhood could be said to be a modern invention; that in the postmodern childhood is fast disappearing. I argue that in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, two contrasting trends emerged regarding children, viz. the notion of child centeredness (among the emerging middle classes), and increasing proletarianization of children (among the lower classes). The 20th century has seen a reduction in child labour due to legislations regarding children, compulsory schooling and the Welfare state. Despite this, today there are millions of children living without childhood. In the 21st century, there are one billion children still living in conditions of poverty resulting from neo-liberal policies and the unequal World order. I further argue that recovering childhood is insidiously connected as much with structural changes as economic ideologies and collective legislations.

Is the trans child a queer child? Constructing normativity in Raising Ryland and I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition

Abstract While the gay child remains culturally unrepresentable, the last decade has seen an increasing number of representations of transgender children. In contrast to the incompatibility of sexuality and childhood presented by the gay child, I argue that normative conceptualizations of childhood are the very means by which the transgender child becomes available as a cultural representation. Situated at the intersections of queer theory, transgender studies and childhood studies, this article examines recent media representations of transgender children in the short documentary films Raising Ryland (Feeley, 2015) and I Am Jazz: A Family in Transition (Stocks, 2011) to discover which gendered ‘realities’ are representable as ‘real’ within the norms of language and culture, revealing how the idea of childhood itself governs possibilities for gendered being and becoming.

Children and how they came into fashion on printed textiles between 1770 and 1840

Abstract In the eighteenth century, education rather than childhood became a real challenge for the philosophers. The making of the ‘new man’ now came by way of childhood, at a time when the child is seen as an entirely separate being and an adult-to-be. The feeling of childhood, to recall the words of Philippe Ariés, is reflected in the printed textile. At the end of the eighteenth century, these representations evolved into the placing of the child at the centre of the family, reflecting the arrival of a middle-class society in which the child’s education became a real focus. Between the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, the presentation of childhood was changing, the fabric makers following the taste and motifs spread by the print process. Starting with the biggest French manufacturers between 1770 and 1840, we will see how the idea of childhood was spread via the fabrics designed to persuade the biggest number of buyers to choose them for their interiors. And we will see how, in the nineteenth century, these designs promoted a real dialogue centred on the child.

Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914 by Christopher Parkes (review)

Reviewed by: Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914 by Christopher Parkes Jane Rosen (bio) Children’s Literature and Capitalism: Fictions of Social Mobility in Britain, 1850–1914, by Christopher Parkes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. This book is an interesting contribution to the valuable series Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature produced by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford. Christopher Parkes’s premise is that the child emerged from the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century both as a victim of capitalist society and as a threat to it. This he claims is because the image of the child as exploited cheap factory labor and existing in deep poverty and misery led to the perception of capitalism as harsh and unsympathetic. As a result of this the child victim was a threat to it, making it vulnerable to forces which might attempt to destroy or replace it. He attempts in this book to assess the ways in which Victorian and Edwardian authors developed narratives that redefined the relationship of the child to [End Page 258] the marketplace and allowed it a more acceptable place in capitalist society, rendering the threat harmless. He argues that this was done by equating the spirit of capitalism with the spirit of childhood, and examines various authors, looking at the way in which both phenomena are defined by their common attributes of curiosity, invention and ingenuity. Parkes looks at the role of nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s literature, as well as of texts that represent childhood and children, in reconfiguring the child so that it cannot be a victim of capitalist society. He reassesses the dominance of British romanticism’s idea of childhood as separate and apart from capitalist society. As he puts it: “It has caused us to focus almost exclusively on what capitalist society has done to the child rather than what the child has done to the capitalist society” (7). He begins his analysis with a historical overview of the subject of the employment of young people, both male and female, in the nineteenth century, looking at the changes in employment practice which eventually allowed those with aptitude to pursue their ambition and to use their talents in order to achieve some social mobility. Further, the exigencies of the capitalist system required alterations to the profession’s management and recruitment, leading to changes in the education and qualifications required for certain roles. According to Parkes, one result of this was a move away from upper-class and major public school educated Civil Service officials to middle-class minor public school educated ones. This was obviously due to the overriding need of the expanding industrial capitalist system for a more educated workforce in general and for a practical and technically efficient middle-class hierarchy of overseers. Parkes continues by looking at two works by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He draws the reader’s attention to one of the themes in David Copperfield, the assumption that family business is the moral center of the economy, a theme that reflected the ideology of the time. Parkes asserts that Dickens shows in both novels that working-class children are not able to develop or even discover their natural talents as they are too involved in laboring for the family business. He points to Dickens’s place in the arena of British history, describing it as a time when there was a transition from family to corporate capitalism, thus necessitating the family’s use of the child’s talents in order to survive. Through the analysis of David Copperfield’s road in life and the close examination of Uriah Heep’s role in the novel, Parkes is able to show [End Page 259] that Dickens believes that social mobility is only possible for children born into solvent family businesses. He notes Heep’s experience in a charity school designed to turn working-class pupils into cheap and humble exploited labor. Heep recognizes the mixed message taught in the school, which also disseminated the idea of social mobility. When Parkes discusses Great Expectations he reiterates the danger to capitalist society...

Master-servant childhood: a history of the idea of childhood in medieval English culture

Master-servant childhood: a history of the idea of childhood in medieval English culture

Childhood and happiness in German romanticism, progressive education and in the West German anti-authoritarian Kinderläden movement in the context of 1968

The subject of this paper is the construction of childhood as a time of happiness in different historical periods. It first analyses the construction of childhood as a time of happiness in the German romantic period in the eighteenth century. Secondly, the paper discusses the construction of happy mothers and children in The Century of Childhood (1900) by the Swedish writer Ellen Key and thirdly, the idea of happy children in educational programmes within the movement of 1968 in West Germany, especially in the so called “Kinderläden” and within the alternative milieu of the 1970s and 1980s, also inspired by the US psychotherapist Jean Liedloff and her famous book In Search of Happiness Lost (1977). The paper focuses on differences and similarities in the construction of the happy childhood. It shows that the discussion about children’s happiness is part of the history of childhood and plays a decisive role in the pedagogical thought concerning childhood. The several discoveries of childhood in modern history were often connected with the idea of childhood as a happy time. In the twentieth century the discourse about children’s happiness is linked with the history of the psychological self and his education. A tendency to psychologise the self is an impact of the discourse.

O ideal cultural na definição da infância

The representations about the phases of life have been changing significantly in the last decades. Concerning to children, moves from the idea of childhood as a modern invention, to the suspicion that was disappearing. At academic debates many think that the issues related to these changes, at times separating, at times bringing adults and children closer, not paying attention to what operates as a cultural ideal: the significant young/youth. This article points out a certain way of significant and what it determines as a cultural ideal, having the speculative devices in mind, that currently define the place of childhood, as the Barbie device analised at the end of this article.

Lost Boys: The Infernal Youth of the Cinematic Teenage Vampire

Popular cinema in India has been identified as providing rich cultural texts for understanding the legitimization of ideological and political hegemony, especially through narrative-cinematic forms popular in the post-colonial Indian public sphere. An impressive amount of literature has explored the various trajectories of discourses regarding the post colonial nation-state, family, and the iconic presence of the mother informing the narrative organization of popular Hindi cinema. However, representation of boyhood within the specific narrative and visual rhetoric of popular Hindi cinema received little scholarly attention. This essay traces the representation of boyhood and adolescence - first, as predominantly integrated within the narrative of male protagonists' early life, a popular cinematic motifs in 1970s and 1980s which, interestingly enough, has somewhat disappeared from post-liberalization Hindi cinema; and second, as a discursively formed narrative agent with specific ideological and psychological connotations. Drawing analogies from a range of Indian literary works on and for children, I explore how concomitant cinematic tropes serve to reiterate and negotiate ideological and social codes interlacing gender, sexuality, class, and caste, not however without leaving fissures for subaltern agency. Keywords: BOLLYWOOD, HINDI FILM, CHILDHOOD, POSTCOLONIAL, IDEOLOGY, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, BARNA PARICHAY New normative discourses on the in nineteenth and early twentieth century India produced a number of texts that directly dealt with children's character formation. Such discourses recurrently conceived the notion of family as an isolated private domain, separate not only from the kinship system but also as a shelter from an aggressive and cruel outside world. discursive construction of the Indian depended heavily on the ways of powers and pleasures were distributed and in the process generated a radical separation between childhood and adulthood. child was central to this construction, as a new idea of childhood helped precipitate the new discourse of the family. The child came to be regarded as a person with distinctive attributes- impressionability, vulnerability, innocence-that required a 'correct/ protected, and prolonged period of nurture. It was only through a certain practice and strategy that the child's character-building exercise was to be pursued (Bose, 1995, p. 118). Hence, to be the ideal child, it was necessary for (the him is used deliberately, because, as we will discuss later, discourses almost exclusively referenced the male child) to avoid rash confrontation with various corrupting influences and to be subjected to a system of love, affection, discipline, and punishment. Interestingly, this discourse on childhood in India underscored the fact that the was envisaged as a realm that played the most valuable task of shaping the individual's life. As Satischandra Chakrabarti, in an influential, widely read book written in Bengali, Santaner Charitra Gathan (Building the Character of Child, 1912), writes: word Hie has given a new turn to the system. In earlier times, the principal question before the was how juniors would behave toward elders and superiors and how elders would behave toward juniors. Now the main subject of discussion is how every life in the family, especially the life of children, can be developed. is now a center for the development of life. (P- 2) customary belief prevailing in Indian household was that seniority was to be respected. father was a disciplinarian, a figure of supreme authority, and the children in return offered bhakti (devotional love) to their parents, a kind of love that gods are supposed to receive. It is noteworthy that this bhakti towards parents, especially the mother, became a recurrent narrative trope in popular Hindi cinema in immediately post-independence India, an aspect that signals the normative, disciplinary ideologies that the child was to internalize from birth. …

Childhood in the discourse of the politics of equal recognition

The starting point of the analysis is the claim that the idea of childhood is not derived from immaturity as a biological fact of life but from the facts of culture. Childhood is a historical, social and cultural construct. It was 'discovered' retrospectively, after the moderns began ascribing more significance to everyday life, taking care of the little things in it - marriage, family, education. The idea of childhood, it is argued, is intimately connected with bestowing importance to everyday life and mundanity. Arguing in favor of a radical break with the 'misrecognition' of childhood - a representation based on an image that is constraining, humiliating, and often contemptuous towards children - the author provides a theoretical synthesis of the new paradigm in the sociology of childhood with Charles Taylor's politics of recognition. Coupling the idea of childhood with the politics of recognition results in the awareness that the world is no longer just the world of adults, that it has stopped being a reality inherent only to adult people.

I diritti dell’infanzia a vent’anni dalla Convenzione: prospettive di ricerca per un bilancio storico

A framework for the history of children’s rights within a pedagogical perspective enables us to watch your child in a new light, that only in the twentieth century began to emerge slowly buy up to a final takeover at the end of the century: the child understood as legal person, an active subject of rights and equal relationships that link him to the adult. Much has been written about the historical milestones that have paved the ideal and material changes to the twentieth-century idea of childhood, up to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child .

Childhood(s) in Purple Hibiscus

The current blossoming of fiction in contemporary Nigeria is, as many critics have pointed out, creating a ‘third generation’ of Nigerian literature. Defined using Waberi's (1998) famous words ‘children of the postcolony’, this writing is actually informed by the idea of childhood. This study argues that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus ([2005] 2006. Harare: Weaver), a text in this new dispensation, begins a discourse on childhood as ‘a set of ideas’ that engages, through alternative memory and the father figure, with what can be described as postmodern identities. Adichie's contemporaries, children spawned by literary and literal fathers, struggle with these fathers as critical memories in an attempt to delimit and transcend the symbolic boundaries carved out by identification with the father figure. In Purple Hibiscus, childhood equivocates its relation with this figure and problematises it in a manner that gives this childhood power, agency to consume hybridity, third spaces and, as Madeline Hron (2008. Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in Third-Generation Nigerian Novels. Research in African Literatures 39 [2]:29) puts it, ‘possibility and most importantly resistance’.

Innocence in _Wuthering Heights_: Nelly Dean's Idea of Childhood and Catherine

Innocence in _Wuthering Heights_: Nelly Dean's Idea of Childhood and Catherine

Children under Fire: Challenging Assumptions about Children's Resilience

This article examines perceptions of childhood and child development and theories of human responses to adversity that have arisen within the social and medical sciences and highlights their influence on policy and practice in the context of armed conflict. It highlights how the idea of childhood as a decontextualized and universal life phase characterized by dependence and vulnerability interacts with and is reinforced by a view of war-survivors as traumatized individuals, victims in need of remedial care. It argues for a paradigmatic shift towards understanding childhood as a highly diverse life phase shaped not simply by biological or psychological universals but also, and more importantly, by personal and environmental factors. This paradigmatic shift involves thinking about children as agents of their own development who, even during times of great adversity, consciously act upon and influence the environments in which they live.

When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment

Etude de la relation fondamentale entre l'enfance et la memoire etablie au siecle des Lumieres, tant dans le cadre litteraire de l'autobiographie chez Rousseau que dans le cadre de la psychologie empirique inauguree par Locke et developpee par Hume et Condillac. Examinant la decouverte de l'enfance dans la peinture de la Renaissance, dans la representation de l'enfant dans l'espace social de la communaute et de la famille, comme dans l'espace pedagogique de l'institution scolaire, l'A. montre que la psychologie empirique, d'une part, et le plaisir litteraire du souvenir chez Rousseau, d'autre part, participent a la constitution du sujet moderne propre a la philosophie des Lumieres