Childhood Innocence Research Articles

Australian primary school teachers’ responses to students with same-sex/gender parents

ABSTRACT As part of their everyday experiences in schools, primary school teachers will engage with same-sex/gender parents. This study seeks to explore Australian primary school teachers’ experiences in which they have engaged same-sex/gender parents and the ways in which they have responded. Concepts of childhood innocence, hetero-cis-normativity and visibility/invisibility can reproduce cultural norms of ‘mum and dad’ families, but in the real world there is great variation in family make-ups including same-sex/gender parents. Teachers’ decisions about how to respond to same-sex/gender parents vary depending on personal, institutional and/or cultural beliefs and practices. We argue that teachers and schools need time, resources, and support to a) unlearn social norms about ‘family’ and b) to create practices that are socially just for children and their same-sex/gender parents. All children and families should be recognised in education policy and practice.

‘Ambiguous play’: Understanding the right to play – a case study of street-connected children in Kathmandu

The article considers street-connected children and their right to play. By drawing on a qualitative case study involving interviews and focus groups with NGO workers and children who lived on the streets in the Kathmandu valley, this article explores play, its role in children’s lives and the applicability of the UNCRC Article 31. We argue that play forms an important part of street-connected children’s lives, helping them to develop friendships and solidarity. However, in some instances play becomes ambiguous, associated with risk and crime. We propose the notion of ‘ambiguous play’ to explore this further. For these children, play is closely related to survival, to earning an income and engagement in crime, which can, at times, be considered a form of enjoyment or fun. This takes discussions into ambiguous areas, in stark contrast to normative notions of play associated with childhood innocence, deeply embedded within wider ideals of childhoods, rooted in coloniality. We reflect on this in light of ethical and moral dilemmas related to ambiguous play as well as implications for research, policy and practice.

#Protecttranskids?” The (Im)possibilities of advocating for trans-inclusive policies and practices while protecting children

Contemporary battles over transgender rights reinvigorate the figure of the innocent, ignorant, and vulnerable child at risk and in need of protection. However, critical childhood scholars have shown that not all children are deemed innocent, but rather innocence has always been raced White. Given this, I ask: What does the innocent child rhetoric do to trans activism and trans (early childhood) pedagogies? I unpack how the premise of innocent children pervades responses to anti-trans backlash. Likewise, childhood innocence also thwarts early childhood teachers’ pedagogical efforts to disrupt gender stereotypes. I argue that the mobilization of childhood innocence whitewashes our policy and practice efforts toward trans justice; and call for more promising, intersectional avenues toward gender justice.

Roald Dahl’s legacy: The language playground for sharing beliefs about children’s competencies

Roald Dahl was a British author, born in Wales of Norwegian parents, and has been one of the most popular authors of children’s literature. Almost all of his books for children have been adapted for films, theatre and musicals. He played with language skillfully and humorously and inspired both children and adults to read. Drawing from Nodelman’s theory of the hidden adult and proposing a new hypothesis of the hidden child engaged in creating fiction for children, this paper will address Dahl’s legacy in the genre of children’s literature and discuss Dahl’s beliefs in children’s abilities to think, act, plan and play at the same time. Dahl’s texts are a playground in which implied child readers can grasp abstract concepts and differentiate between reality and fiction. Dahl acknowledged that children are observant of adults’ activities but pretend not to be to keep the appearance of an innocent child, the role assigned to them by adults. His works for children have grotesque characters, fantastic plots and subversive language, all of which occasionally make adults frown with disgust. Despite many attempts to censor (albeit successfully) or even ban his works, Dahl’s stories continue to attract new audiences, entertain them, make them laugh. By using a multidisciplinary approach to present linguistics, educational and sociocultural influences of some of the most popular Dahl’s works for children, it will be demonstrated that Dahl shared his beliefs in children’s competencies and that his contribution to children’s literature in this respect is favourable and undisputable. /Keywords: Roald Dahl, children’s literature, beliefs, children’s competences

A new materialist (re)configuring of sexuality, age and the discourse of ‘childhood innocence’

AbstractThis article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking enduring debates that cohere around children, sexuality, age and ‘childhood innocence’. A new materialist ontology of sexuality and Karen Barad's concept of spacetimemattering are employed to conceptualise sexuality as an emergent becoming of relational material‐discursive forces. Within this paradigm, mobilisation of arguments about ‘sexual innocence and readiness’ become a matter of entanglement of contingent ‘things’, ‘spaces’ and ‘ideas’, that includes young people's own sexual knowledge. We consider how this reorientation shifts the contours, debates and possibilities of sexuality education beyond restrictive ‘age‐appropriate’ narratives.

“La destruction est notre manière de bâtir”

Abstract This article examines Quebecois author Kevin Lambert’s debut novel, Tu aimeras ce que tu as tué, a disquieting story of slaughtered children who come back to the Canadian town of Chicoutimi to live normal lives in it before destroying it. The apocalyptic dimension of this tale of destruction lives up to the etymological root of apocalypse, apokalyptein (“to uncover, disclose, reveal” in Greek) by centering the narrative around a revelation of the violence that is inherent to heteronormative culture but occulted by its position of dominance. This violence, which targets the figure of the innocent child, the standard-bearer of heterosexuality in its reproductive futurity, is, through the prophetic rage of the narrator, a child named Faldistoire, turned back upon the respectable adults who stamp out not only the lives of children but their nonnormative desires and impulses—their freedom. The novel puts forth apocalypse as a model for the work of literature itself—revelation that rends normative reality in order to replace it with something else.

“with my love”: the colonial legacy of racialized pedophilic pornography in the atlantic world

This essay provides a critical analysis of early-20th-century American postcards, focusing on the portrayal of black and white children as an aesthetic tool of white supremacy and pedophilic racist pleasures. These representations not only reflected but also perpetuated colonial ideologies and racial stereotypes, directly influencing educational practices and policies, and contributing to a social environment where discrimination and sexualization of children was normalized. The article begins with the contrast in the depiction of white and black children, revealing a pattern in which white children were often fetishized as embodiments of innocence and purity, while black children were subjected to pornified portrayals that reinforced negative stereotypes and sought to ensure the continued intergenerational subjugation of African Americans in the afterlife of slavery. A significant aspect of this analysis delves into the role of the zealous purity crusader Anthony Comstock in shaping societal views on childhood innocence and obscenity during the Progressive Era. As a U.S. postal inspector, Comstock wielded influence over public discourse and policy, particularly through his campaigns against the distribution of what he considered morally objectionable representations. This examination extends to the racial implications of Comstock’s adult-centric actions, exploring how they contributed to the differential treatment of black and white children in both media representations and broader societal contexts. The article argues that these images were not merely passive reflections of societal beliefs; rather, they were active tools used to shape and influence the educational and socialization processes of children, and they contributed to the perpetuation of Jim Crow violence, which was manifested through the sexual assault, castration, and lynching of black youth. Furthermore, this essay examines the broader socio-historical context in which racist and pedophilic images were produced and circulated. These postcards are still trafficked today under the false designation of ‘Black Memorabilia,’ reaching significant prices as vintage collector’s items, but the article reframes them as a genre of child pornography. This perspective critically challenges prevailing narratives that may sanitize or downplay the exploitative and violent nature of these images. This essay urges a reconsideration of these consumer items’ historical significance as instruments intricately complicit in sustaining colonial structures and ideologies surrounding childhood innocence in North America. Within this analytical framework, the dehumanization of black children through pedophilic pornography reflects a long heritage of anti-child violence in Western traditions and the colonial strategy of exploiting children of color as a lucrative mechanism for profit and libidinal pleasure.

Souring palatable formations in DAP: Toward unfamiliar relations with child development in early childhood teacher education

ABSTRACT Drawing upon Ahmed’s (2006) analysis of how institutional documents become nonperforming, this article argues that teacher education must create opportunities for emerging educators to grapple with the pedagogical consequences of understanding the fourth edition of Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs (2022) as a nonperforming text. I contend that as DAP works to moderate universalising developmental knowledges in the name of fostering social justice, DAP reproduces taken-for-granted epistemological relations and hierarchies that maintain dominant understandings childhood and early childhood education. First, I position DAP as a nonperforming text and articulate a mode of nonperformance specific to early childhood education: palatability, built of a rhetoric of childhood innocence and a politics of niceness. I then show how two of DAP’s formations of child development enact nonpeformativity through palatability, illustrating how DAP reiterates status-quo connections between child development and early childhood education. To conclude, I propose souring palatability as a proposition that emerging educators might speculate and experiment with while engaging with DAP.

Paternal mortality: The neglected but an impending global pandemic!!!

Men have always been in the eyes of the storm over the years and across all history, losing their lives with reckless abandon just to save their community, family, wives and children that their death no longer generates any emotions or concerns. Little wonder then, that during crises and war times the attention is only directed towards “innocent women and children” as if the men are guilty of the destructions that befall the society.The realization of the impending annihilation of the male gender necessitated this editorial so as to save the male species from total extinction. The concept of “paternal mortality” is a novel idea that may not have been written in social and medical texts, hence, this editorial that tends to raise the awareness of this impending catastrophe.

A SEMIOTIC INVESTIGATION OF THE MEANINGS ABDUCTED FROM THE CHILDREN’S DRAWINGS OF WAR: STORYTELLING THROUGH DRAWINGS

Drawing is a vital tool used in understanding people, especially children, with the use of visual media as a means of expressing their emotions, as well as the use of different forms of images that emerge on a drawing surface. Therefore, it is significant to understand that children can use different forms of drawing media to articulate their inner feelings as well as making their thoughts understandable to others. This study, based on the belief that the art works of child survivors furnish materials for analysis, focuses on meaning-making of the drawings of the child survivors of war through semiotics investigation, thereby exposing the stories of war through the lens of the child survivors. This made use an analytical research design to investigate the poster narratives drawn by the participants who were living in the two temporary shelters of Marawi last September 2020. The researcher had meaningful meaning-making of the drawings and the findings of the study include: conceptualization of the masjid (mosque) as a sanctuary during war; definition of religion as a wellspring of resiliency, demarking peace as the absence of war, and highlighting the role of kambangsa (clanship) amidst danger, and from all of these, a grand narrative of the child survivors of Marawi Siege was written. The meanings abducted from the drawings led to the narratives of the child-survivors- narratives that may have been left unspoken and unheard after all these years of trying to live a normal life as young, gentle and innocent children of the city. This supported the claims that children are thinkers with knowledge of their own sensations, thoughts, beliefs and other mental states. Finally, this study implied that drawings are rich sources for semiotic discourse despite the limitations at hand.

‘We fear the repercussions from parents’: primary school parents and teachers’ perspectives on the inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues in the English primary school curriculum

ABSTRACT This paper reports on findings from a survey conducted within a larger collaborative project, working with primary school teachers and parents to normalise conversations about LGBTQ+ issues in four English primary schools. Survey data from 96 teachers and parents highlight different perspectives on the inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues. Existing research shows teachers are often reluctant to address such issues, signalling various concerns, including fear of a negative parental reaction. Using quantitative analysis of Likert items combined with a qualitative analysis of open-ended comments, the study shows differences in perceptions between teachers and parents, and among participating parents. The findings show teachers are willing to address LGBTQ+ issues within the primary school curriculum with support from the majority of parents. Parental opposition to teaching about LGBTQ+ issues appears to be associated with some parents’ religious views and limited engagement with members of the LGBTQ+ community. Parents’ concerns largely focused on notions of childhood innocence and perceptions of age-appropriateness for teaching about/engagement with LGBTQ+ issues.

Seeds of Change: Negotiating Hierarchies in Seed Picturebook Stories

How tiny seeds are represented in children’s literature has long eluded critical attention, although they are frequently foregrounded in the words and images of children’s picturebooks. Drawing upon critical plant studies, new materialism, and Kathryn Parsley’s notion of “plant awareness disparity”, this article analyzes three contemporary seed picturebook stories, namely Jory John and Pete Oswald’s The Bad Seed (2017), Cristiana Valentini and Philip Giordano’s Stay, Little Seed (2020), and Jen Cullerton Johnson and Sonia Lynn Sadler’s Seeds Of Change: Planting a Path to Peace (2011). With a focus on the verbal and visual representations of seeds and their poetic relationship with children, the analysis of the three seed stories reveals the empowering nature of seed narratives which represent seeds as anthropomorphized characters or symbolic motifs, but most essentially, as agentic beings with vibrancy. These stories exhibit the poetic entanglement of seeds and children in an agentic assemblage of collective vulnerability, which not only blurs the line between the human and vegetal, but also negotiates power hierarchies embedded in the world ruled by adults. Thus, I argue that seed stories reveal the agentic power of seeds by crafting various forms of poetic entanglements between seeds and children. Although the child-seed entanglement may not entirely deconstruct an asymmetry between adults and innocent children as well as between matured plants and tiny seeds, this study offers an alternative perspective that counters the perception of seeds and children as vulnerable and controlled.

Espousing the innocence of paediatric patients: an innocent act?

Since the 19th century, innocence has been a hallmark of childhood. The innocence of children is seen as both a sanctity worth defending and a feature that excuses the unavoidable...

Reclaiming the Korean War Minor: Beyond a Politics of Childhood Innocence

Abstract: This essay employs the "Korean War minor" as a methodological lens to demonstrate the need for more Asian Americanist critique at the intersection of American childhood studies and empire studies. While scholars have shown how children and children's culture were central to advancing US Cold War policy at home and abroad, this body of research largely neglects to interrogate the centrality of whiteness to dominant constructions of children/childhood. Attending to childhood as a technology of racist, patriarchal, imperial power, I elucidate how the biopolitics of the Korean War produce juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies at the precarious boundaries of childhood, as not quite children but, rather, childlike . I grapple, in particular, with how to reclaim the "girl" from US military archives, as the rubric of the "boy-mascot" and "camptown woman" overdetermine and constrain how the girl is allowed to come into view. I develop and enact this decolonial practice of reclaiming the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl , a novel that is particularly invested in narrating the camptown girl into being. Fox Girl directs attention to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence and prompts a generative reconceptualization of childhood in relation to justice.

Chinos and palomillas: Comics, Childhood and Race in Colombia and Peru (1920-1940)

This article examines the comics Para los niños Mojicón and Pedrito, el indiecito estudiante, published between 1920 and 1940 in Bogota and Lima, respectively. I explore how these graphic narratives are part of a moral project within the prevailing white-mestizo social order. In this regard, I reflect on the concept of racial innocence, whiteness, and inferential racism in the construction of child characters and the playful spaces in which their actions unfold. Additionally, I analyse how the discourse of eugenics acts as a catalyst for anxieties and fears associated with race. I argue that the construction of these childhoods portrayed in the comics heavily relied on perpetuating such imagery, reinforcing the notion that healthy and innocent children were synonymous with whiteness. This text seeks to establish the connections between these urban experiences and the representations of childhood life in the Andean cities during the first half of the 20th century.

Város és biedermeier Petőfi költészetében

The term of Biedermeier – which was used to describe the interior style of the middle class at first and then it was connected to some of the literary phenomena in the first half of the 19th century – made it possible to interpret the culture of the modern city and the urban middle class – o’en creating an opposition between the city and its antithesis, the country. The questions connected to urbanitas were o’ften discussed in the most important space of the culture of modernity: the press. They published articles and reports on foreign cities as well as the forming middle class culture of Buda and Pest in the fast-spreading metropolitan journals. The city and the country are recurring themes in the poetry of Sándor Petőfi along with the different lifestyles and identities connected to them. The first collection of Petőfi, which was published on 10 November 1844, caught people’s attention because of the way the poet’s role was represented in it: Petőfi’s poetic identity is the innocent and moral child of the nation – he is the one who has just arrived in the city, showing what the people are really like. However, the collection entitled Poems 1842-44 does not represent the culture that could by described by sociological or ethnographic terms, but rather the folk culture seen through the lenses of a Biedermeier (urban) culture: Petőfi therefore constructed the image of the country for the city.

Intersectionality of Race, Class, and Politics in Tayari Jones's Leaving Atlanta

Tayari Jones's first novel Leaving Atlanta (2002) portrays the focus the African-American encounters in the Southern United States, particularly the ways in which their lives are affected by the inequitable structures in which they reside. Jones’s writing is a performance of her desire to bring the marginalized history of Blacks to the center and others to the margin. Leaving Atlanta is a narrative with three distinct voices that explores the process of maturing and highlights the government's failure to protect the black population in Atlanta during the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-81. Jones brings in all the historical past within the framework of ‘intersectionality’ to express the tragic incidents in a wider view. The objective of the paper is to delve into the interconnectedness between age, race, class, gender, and politics in the backdrop of the Atlanta Child Murders to provide justice for the traumatizing events that happened to innocent children. Jones opted to employ the viewpoints of youngsters in her novel in order to document the experiences of those young individuals who lacked the cognitive capacity to comprehend the intricate social and political milieu of Atlanta.

PERMAINAN TRADISIONAL DI ERA MODERN SEBAGAI SUMBER IDE PENCIPTAAN KARYA SENI LUKIS

The creation of the Final Project entitled "Traditional Games in the Modern Era of Ideas in the Creating of Paintings" is taken from the current state of traditional games. There are several factors that cause traditional games to be abandoned today; 1). Reduced children's play area, 2). The role of parents, 3). Enter the modern game. At this time traditional games are rarely played by children, because most children are more interested in playing smartphones. The process of creating this final painting work uses the theoretical basis of L.H Chapman, which mentions 3 stages, namely, 1). Efforts to find ideas or find sources of ideas, inspiration, 2). Enchane, develop and establish initial ideas, 3). Visualization into the medium. Objects in paintings and figures for children are depicted with decorative naive forms and the choice of colors uses bright colors which are expected to be able to express an atmosphere of joy. The child figures experience a change in facial anatomy, which is expected to represent the character of a child who is innocent and free-spirited and depicts innocent children who have not yet found their identity. In this painting, the author displays the atmosphere that occurs in each of his paintings.

이혼에서 파탄주의로의 전환 필요성과 법률개정 방안

In Korea, the Japanese Civil Code was used during the Japanese colonial period, and the Civil Code, a translation of the Japanese Civil Code, was applied until the Korean Civil Code enacted in 1958 was enforced in 1960. The Korean Civil Code is very similar to the Japanese civil law, and the number of articles is significantly smaller and lacks specificity compared to the civil laws of many Western countries. In the case of the divorce law, the deficiencies of such legislation are being supplemented by the interpretation of the courts. Divorce laws in the West, such as Germany, England, France, and the United States, have been revised in the direction of protecting the rights and interests of the parties through numerous historical changes and discussions since the 19th century. Based on the history of changes in various Western countries, Korea will also need to revise the civil law in the direction of fulfilling the state's constitutional duty to protect marriage and family life.
 Through counseling before marriage and divorce, the marriage and family system should be strengthened, and counseling and other educational programs should be activated so that a recoverable family can be saved. In order to minimize conflicts in a marriage relationship that has already been irretrievably broken and exists only legally, no fault divorce based on separation for a certain period of time should be introduced. And in order to protect innocent spouses and children who do not want to divorce, marriage should be terminated only if protective measures or agreements for innocent spouses and children are included in the divorce ruling, and divorce should not be allowed if the divorce threatens to cause economic, social and psychological difficulties for them.
 In addition, if legal separation system where the obligation to cohabit is exempted and a marriage is deemed to have broken down after a certain period of separation is established, I think it can serve as a buffer zone to encourage reunion after separation and also as a gateway from marriage to divorce. The legal separation system can alleviate the impact of divorce, and has an economic effect almost similar to divorce, except that the marriage relationship is legally maintained, so the parties can attempt reconciliation while stably separating for a certain period of time.
 I think it is desirable to unify the divorce procedure by incorporating the divorce by agreement system into the judicial divorce procedure to ensure that the rights and interests of the divorced parties are fully protected. As with the divorce laws of many countries that adopt no fault divorce, even if there is mutual consent to divorce, divorce must be conducted through a trial and should be granted only after court approval of an agreement regarding children and the financial effects of the divorce. Additionally, if a couple with minor children wants to divorce by agreement, counseling should be mandatory.
 In addition, according to the Supreme Court precedent, Korea's property division system has the main purpose of distributing the actual common property acquired during marriage, and the supportive nature such as consideration for the other person's livelihood security is added. Since the current support system is insufficient to protect spouses with poor economic status in that the system is not provided by law, a separate support system after divorce should be prepared like in many Western countries.
 As pointed out by the Supreme Court's ruling in 2015, the fact that the spouse responsible for breakdown of marriage is not allowed to file for divorce is also intended to prevent the other spouse from being expelled by the spouse in the bigamous relationship.

Nature and Childhood in Ruskin Bond’s Short Stories

Ruskin Bond, an eminent Indian author, is lauded for his ability to exquisitely capture the spirit of nature and the naivety of childhood in his literary creations. His short stories portray the deep influence of nature on the lives and experiences of his child protagonists. Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and William Blake envisaged an intimate connection between nature and childhood. Wordsworth portrays nature as a comforting retreat offering relief and revitalisation where childhood innocence is idealised. On the other hand, Blake juxtaposes childhood innocence with the grim realities of life, often using nature as a symbol for these opposing states. Bond's stories delve into the importance of nature by highlighting how various aspects of the world serve as a setting for his characters’ escapades. They explore how the distinct flora and fauna found in the Himalayan region play a significant role in shaping the characters’ perceptions and choices throughout their journeys. In addition, they focus on Bond’s portrayal of childhood, emphasising traits such as callowness, fortitude, and inquisitiveness exhibited by his characters. This paper examines how the young characters in Bond’s stories manoeuvre through the challenges of a fast-changing world and find comfort and knowledge through their interactions with nature. His storytelling not only encases the innocent and delightful aspects of childhood but also delivers a powerful message about the environment. It encourages readers to value, protect, and peacefully coexist with nature.