Ideologies Of Childhood Research Articles

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Drawing on empirical material from fieldwork among young children living with their families in two Norwegian reception centres for asylum-seekers, this article compares their realities to the norms and realities for other children in Norway. Children’s spatial and social situations within the centres stand out in stark contrast to Norwegian childhood ideology and norms. The authorities explain the divergence in terms of migration management, and the spatiotemporal and social positions of ‘asylum-seekers’ in relation to those of ‘children’ within the nation-state are brought to the fore in the article. The perceived political dilemma between migration control and Norway’s image as a promoter of children’s rights is highlighted, and the authors suggest that the dilemma may be less real than is widely assumed.

Empowering the Child: Children's Rights, Citizenship and the State in Contemporary China

Previous articleNext article No AccessEmpowering the Child: Children's Rights, Citizenship and the State in Contemporary ChinaOrna NaftaliOrna Naftali Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 61Jan., 2009 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/tcj.61.20648046 Views: 365Total views on this site Citations: 24Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright The China JournalPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jieyu Liu Childhood in urban China: A three-generation portrait, Current Sociology 70, no.44 (Apr 2021): 598–617.https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120985861Min Zhang “Make them mature properly”: Protective restriction of children from the adult world in China's suburban schools, Children & Society 36, no.44 (Dec 2021): 691–706.https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12527Peng Xu Rethinking Children’s Rights in Chinese Early Childhood Education Provision: Progress and Prospects, (Apr 2021): 69–84.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68241-5_6Marek Tesar, Zhen Phoebe Tong, Andrew Gibbons, Sonja Arndt, Adrienne Sansom Children’s literature in China: Revisiting ideologies of childhood and agency, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 20, no.44 (Dec 2019): 381–393.https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949119888494Juha Hämäläinen, Honglin Chen, Fang Zhao The Chinese welfare philosophy in light of the traditional concept of family, International Social Work 62, no.11 (Aug 2017): 224–239.https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872817721736Xuan Li Chinese Fathers in the Twentieth Century: Changing Roles as Parents and as Men, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 26, no.44 (Nov 2018): 331–350.https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2018.1534138Lixia Qin, Mario Torres Challenges to measuring Chinese students’ perceptions of freedom of expression: An application of Rasch analysis, Citizenship, Social and Economics Education 17, no.11 (Mar 2018): 35–55.https://doi.org/10.1177/2047173418763911Nóra Kovács Transnational Migrant Entrepreneurs’ Childcare Practices from the Carers’ Perspective: Chinese Children in Hungarian Homes, (Jun 2018): 25–42.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90942-4_3Mario S. Torres, Lixia Qin Chinese high school students’ perceptions of freedom of expression: implications for researching emerging civil liberties in global educational contexts, Asia Pacific Education Review 18, no.11 (Feb 2017): 53–64.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-017-9470-0Sharon To, Charles C. Helwig, Shaogang Yang Predictors of Children's Rights Attitudes and Psychological Well-being Among Rural and Urban Mainland Chinese Adolescents, Social Development 26, no.11 (May 2016): 185–203.https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12195Chau-kiu Cheung Preventing physical child abuse by legal punishment and neighbor help, Children and Youth Services Review 71 (Dec 2016): 45–51.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2016.10.024Lixin Ren, Carolyn Pope Edwards Contemporary Chinese parents’ socialization priorities for preschoolers: a mixed methods study, Early Child Development and Care 186, no.1111 (Feb 2016): 1779–1791.https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2015.1132418Yang Hu, Judith Burton, Bob Lonne Empowering Children Left Behind in China, Asian Social Work and Policy Review 10, no.22 (Mar 2016): 175–184.https://doi.org/10.1111/aswp.12086Stig Thøgersen “I will Change Things in my Own Small Way”: Chinese Overseas Students, “Western” Values, and Institutional Reform, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 44, no.33 (Sep 2015): 103–124.https://doi.org/10.1177/186810261504400305Minhua Ling “Bad Students Go to Vocational Schools!”: Education, Social Reproduction and Migrant Youth in Urban China, The China Journal 73 (Jun 2015): 108–131.https://doi.org/10.1086/679271Linliang Qian Consuming “the unfortunate”: the violence of philanthropy in a contemporary Chinese state-run orphanage, Dialectical Anthropology 38, no.33 (Aug 2014): 247–279.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9352-3Charles C. Helwig, Sharon To, Qian Wang, Chunqiong Liu, Shaogang Yang Judgments and Reasoning About Parental Discipline Involving Induction and Psychological Control in China and Canada, Child Development 85, no.33 (Nov 2013): 1150–1167.https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12183Avital Binah-Pollak Discourses and practices of child-rearing in China: The bio-power of parenting in Beijing, China Information 28, no.11 (Mar 2014): 27–45.https://doi.org/10.1177/0920203X13517617Ing-Marie Johansson The rights of the child and ethnic minority families in Sweden, China Journal of Social Work 6, no.33 (Nov 2013): 262–275.https://doi.org/10.1080/17525098.2013.840797 Minli Liao, Jun Sung Hong Child labor in the People’s Republic of China: An ecological systems analysis, International Social Work 54, no.44 (Jul 2011): 565–579.https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872810382804Andrew B. Kipnis Subjectification and education for quality in China, Economy and Society 40, no.22 (May 2011): 289–306.https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.548950Charles C. Helwig, Shaogang Yang, Dingliang Tan, Chunqiong Liu, Tiffany Shao Urban and Rural Chinese Adolescents’ Judgments and Reasoning About Personal and Group Jurisdiction, Child Development 82, no.22 (Mar 2011): 701–716.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01531.xOrna Naftali Recovering Childhood: Play, Pedagogy, and the Rise of Psychological Knowledge in Contemporary Urban China, Modern China 36, no.66 (Sep 2010): 589–616.https://doi.org/10.1177/0097700410377594Orna Naftali Caged golden canaries: Childhood, privacy and subjectivity in contemporary urban China, Childhood 17, no.33 (Sep 2010): 297–311.https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568209345612

Time, Subjectivity, and Modernism in E. Nesbit's Children's Fiction

Time, Subjectivity, and Modernism in E. Nesbit’s Children’s Fiction Susan Anderson (bio) Long appreciated as an innovative writer, E. Nesbit has been recognized for a vigorous depiction of children: a refreshing and original break with previous styles of children's writing. Yet her place in the popular imagination is as a writer of amusing Edwardian period pieces, as evinced by recent radio profiles of her and adaptations of her work, which, as costume drama, engage with the pleasures of nostalgia. This article interrogates this apparent contradiction by placing Nesbit in the historical and cultural context of modernism. The popular nature of Nesbit's output and its mass-produced, serial format initially could seem to exclude her from a consideration of literary modernism. As Randall Stevenson notes, however, "the philosophy, literature and social fabric of any age are more validly considered developing in parallel, rather than in 'planes' one above the other" (13), and children's literature can, and should, be incorporated into this holistic approach. Children's literature should not be seen as responding to wider forces as filtered down from the higher plane of modernist adult culture but instead should be seen as itself a factor in an interactive model of cultural change and development. It is therefore useful to examine it in tandem with other evidence of historical developments in culture, and this article places Nesbit's children's fiction within this wider context, showing how her writing engaged with a number of concerns usually associated with canonically modernist writers. After initially discussing examples of the nostalgic response to Nesbit, I focus on three ways in which Nesbit negotiates issues of time and modernity. First, I examine the importance of the railway as an emblem of connectivity in The Railway Children. Second, I discuss how her work engages with questions of subjectivity and language. Finally, I examine the instability of childhood experience in relation to the encounters Nesbit charts between her protagonists [End Page 308] and different historical times in The Story of the Amulet. In Nesbit's work, the novelty and bewilderment of childhood form an analogue with the experience of the modern subject. Anita Moss, in her compelling discussion of Nesbit's relationship to Romantic ideologies of childhood, asserts that Nesbit's breakthrough novel, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, "stands squarely between Victorian and modern children's literature" (226). My discussion will show how Nesbit is a forward-looking writer whose relationship to the modern is as important as the influence she drew from the past. Adapting Nesbit: Nostalgia and the New Most of Nesbit's children's fiction has been adapted into television and radio serials and/or films. Notable BBC versions include the BAFTA-nominated 1991 version of Five Children and It (dir. Richard Callanan and Marilyn Fox) and the 1979 production of The Enchanted Castle (dir. Dorothea Brooking). Nesbit's The Railway Children, arguably her most popular book, has received several screen adaptations, including the extremely successful film version of 1970 (dir. Lionel Jeffries), which was re-released in 1997. These adaptations maintained the Edwardian setting, unlike a 2004 film version of Five Children and It (dir. John Stephenson), which set the story during World War I. This change of setting is the exception rather than the rule for Nesbit adaptations, however, and the wartime setting nonetheless maintains the story's place in a vaguely imagined "past" lacking in specificity.1 Such costume dramas engage with Nesbit's work as nostalgic in two ways. First, they almost always recreate the Edwardian setting, with period costumes, antique artifacts, defunct vocabulary, behavior, attitudes, and so on. Second, they create a nostalgia for the time of childhood itself, an idealized Romantic space of innocence and simplicity.2 These are undoubtedly factors in the success of the screen adaptations, success that has helped to maintain the high profile of Nesbit's books in Britain and their status as "classics." In a recent radio profile entitled The Railway Children(2005),3 Nesbit's biographer, Julia Briggs, visited the author's childhood home, exploring the haunts of Nesbit's childhood and discussing their relationship to locations in her writing. This historical research was interspersed with the...

Global Convergence and Divergence in Childhood Ideologies and the Marginalisation of Children

Global Convergence and Divergence in Childhood Ideologies and the Marginalisation of Children

“Kiddies' Delight”

Children, as the key defining members of the traditional nuclear family unit, played a central role in traditional Australian ideas about home provisioning, home cooking and family food. As the objects of twentieth century “professional mothering,” children formed the primary focus of many women's time and effort; furthermore, as the future stewards of the Lucky Country much nation-building focused on those community institutions devoted to their care and development. As such, children and the idea and ideology of childhood are strong presences in Australian community cookbooks. Yet their presence in these books is not limited to such passive roles. Children appear in community cookbooks as recipe contributors, as consumers, as arbiters of good taste, and as budding literati. A genre embedded in the structures of community and family life, community cookbooks contain some unusual insights into Australian childhood.

Childhood and Schooling in an Indian Village

This article explores the ideology of childhood and schooling in an Indian village primary school, in an attempt to understand the importance of authority in the relationship of the teacher to the student, and of discipline in the process of schooling. Ethnographic data from a village school and popular folk literature are analysed and interpreted. The identities of teacher and student are found to be elaborated to include traditional and everyday identities through which pedagogic authority becomes naturalized. The perceived need for discipline emerges from an understanding of childhood-as-play in opposition to adulthood-as-work. Schools are expected to discipline children’s playfulness. Yet the school is not a totalitarian, coercive institution. The children and teachers refer back to and recreate the local ideology while making sense of and giving meaning to their activities in school.

Childhood Ideology in the United States: A Comparative Cultural View

Childhood ideology functions in each nation as a complex of ideas about what children are like and how best to teach and socialise them. One important domain of childhood ideology concerns ideas and practices related to children's development and behaviour management. Drawing from an analysis of popular childrearing magazines and early childhood education materials in the United States, this cultural study describes contemporary American mainstream beliefs concerning children's early emotional and behavioural development. In particular, the paper explores themes of emotional expression, autonomy, individuality, power, and consumerism. Some comparisons with Japanese views on child development and emotional/behavioural socialisation are also made. The paper suggests that popular ideas and techniques of emotional and behavioural management in the United States in both families and early childcare environments reflect a dominant ideology of children that has potentially negative consequences for children's welfare. Furthermore, childhood ideologies, while retaining culturally specific values and ideas neither remain static nor exist in isolation from one another. The paper questions the global diffusion of a Western-style professionalised discourse of child psychology that may not be applicable to all nations and their children.

"What Will Become of Our Young People?" Goals for Indian Children in Moravian Missions

Eighteenth-century European writers showed heightened awareness of childhood and children, expressed frequendy in sentimental or romantic terms. Historian Hugh Cunningham lists key aspects of this sensitivity to children, which had its roots in the Renaissance and Reformation and emerged in the mid-nineteenth century's ideology of childhood. He includes: a belief in the importance of early education; . . . concern for the salvation of the child's soul;... growing interest in the way children learn; and ... sense that children were messengers of God, and that child? hood was therefore the best time of life. An exemplar of this type of think? ing was Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, the leader ofthe Moravian church in the eighteenth century. Emphasizing the child's connection to the divine and portraying childhood as special stage of life, he wrote in 1739: Children are little royal majesties. Baptism is their anointing, and from then on they should be treated as none other than king by birth. Zinzendorf wrote numerous religious works for children and about childrearing, demonstrating deep concern for early education.1 For Zinzendorf and the Moravians in general, the child offered everyone model of what the good Christian should be. Thus, not only did Zinzendorf focus on early childhood education, but he also asked adults to look to children for their own religious education. In this sense, the child became both the teacher and the student. The child offered an example of simplicity (Einfalt) and through humility and meekness verified Jesus' injunc-

The quest for the good life in Rousseau's Emile: an assessment

Rousseau's Emile has attracted an avalanche of critical responses. His theme of negative education, or as he defines it, “well-regulated freedom”, has been denounced as outright manipulation in disguise, which instead of respecting the child's autonomy and dignity, places him at the whim of the teacher's machinations and stratagems. His recommendation that the child's imagination be curtailed (that he may not acquire desires which cannot be satisfied) is widely held to militate against one of the most cherished goals of education: the fostering of the natural curiosity of the child. Rousseau is also accused of professing an “ideology of childhood” which ignores the real needs of children. In the sterilized environment which Rousseau proposes for the growing child, affection, praise and approval, are some of the sacrifices made to this ideology. Furthermore, his views on women are considered degrading, outrageous and blatantly sexist.

Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual.

PART ONE: THEORETICAL ISSUES Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account PART TWO: THE WORLD-POLITY AND STATE STRUCTURE The World-Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State World-Polity Sources of Expanding State Authority and Organization, 1870-1970 Regime Changes and State Power in an Intensifying World-State-System Structural Antecedents and Consequences of Statism PART THREE: CONSTITUTING NATION AND CITIZEN Human Rights or State Expansion? Cross-National Definitions of Constitutional Rights, 1870-1970 Global Patterns of Educational Institutionalization On the Union of States and Schools World-Polity Sources of National Welfare and Land Reform PART FOUR: CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN INDIVIDUAL The Ideology of Childhood and the State Rules Distinguishing Children in National Constitutions, 1870-1970 Self and Life Course Institutionalization and Its Effects The Political Construction of Rape PART FIVE: RATIONALIZATION AND COLLECTIVE ACTION Comparative Social Movements Revivalism, Nation-Building and Institutional Change PART SIX: THE POSSIBILITY OF A GENERAL HISTORICAL THEORY Institutional Analysis

Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood

Over the last few years there has been a revival of public concern about child sexual abuse. A heterogenous child protection movement has evolved, promoting preventative work in schools and initiating projects such as the children's help line, ChildLine. There has been a major public information campaign, articles about child sex abuse have appeared in most women's magazines and there have been several TV documentaries. Central to all these branches of the campaign is the challenging of various miconceptions about child sex abuse: misconceptions about the nature and frequency of the abuse, the type of perpetrator and the role of the family (Adams and Fay, 1981; Justice and Justice, 1979). The movement seeks to replace old 'myths' with new 'facts'. The myth/fact scenario, however, serves to obscure the political dimensions of the 'new' approaches to child sexual abuse. Facts do not 'speak for themselves' and there are many questions to be raised about the images of manhood, womanhood, motherhood and family life that are emerging out of the campaigns. Some of these questions have been discussed elsewhere (Kitzinger, 1988), but here I want to focus on the images of childhood promoted in the public education programmes and the reporting of child sexual abuse in the media.

Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood

Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood

The social construction of teenage pregnancy: a problem in the ideologies of childhood and reproduction

Abstract There is a commonsense assumption that‘teenage pregnancy’constitutes some sort of a social problem. A neglected aspect of this social construction is explored. It is suggested that ideologies of reproduction go only so far in convincingly accounting for ambiguities contained in social constructions of teenage pregnancy and that appreciation of contemporary ideologies of childhood is also needed. Expressions of teenage pregnancy as a problem may then be understood as a matter of social pollution, located at the intersection of ideologies of reproduction on one hand and ideologies of childhood on the other.

The social construction of teenage pregnancy: a problem in the ideologies of childhood and reproduction.

The social construction of teenage pregnancy: a problem in the ideologies of childhood and reproduction.

The Ideology of Childhood and the State: Rules Distinguishing Children in National Constitutions, 1870-1970

In the modern world the social role of childhood is increasingly differentiated from adulthood and brought under the jurisdiction of the state. This is not primarily a social organizational process but an institutional or ideological one: the ideological rules of differentiated and state-managed childhood diffuse throughout the global nation-state system regardless of variations among nations in dimensions of organizational development. We show this by coding the constitutions of all nation-states since 1870 for references and rules concerning childhood. Our index summarizing these references rises sharply betaiveen 1870 and 1970. At any point, the index does not vary significantly among rich and poor, neix and old, or central and peripheral states. Ideological rules concerning childhood are weakly (and decreasingly) related to technical development, and strongly (and increasingly) related to the general authority of the state.