Politics Of Childhood Research Articles

Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness During Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Some sociologists argue that non-intact family structures during childhood have a negative effect on adult children's civic engagement, since they undermine, and in some cases prevent, the processes and activities through which parents shape their children's political attitudes and orientations. In this paper, we evaluate this hypothesis on the basis of longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In a first step, we construct various measures of family structure during childhood, and perform both cross-sectional and sibling difference analyses for different indicators of young adults' civic engagement. Both exercises reveal a significant negative relationship between growing up in a non-intact family and children's political engagement as adults. In a second step, we implement a novel technique – proposed by Oster (2014) – for evaluating robustness of results to omitted variable bias. The distinctive feature of this technique is that it accounts for both coefficient movements and movements in R-squared values after the inclusion of controls. Results suggest that our estimates do not suffer from omitted variable bias.

Mapping children's politics: the promise of articulation and the limits of nonrepresentational theory.

Reflecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in children's geographies has focused attention on the meanings of the political. While supportive of work that opens up new avenues for conceptualizing politics beyond the liberal rational subject, we provide a critique of research methods which delink politics from historical context and relations of power. Focusing on the use of nonrepresentational theory as a research methodology, the paper points to the limits of this approach for children's political formation as well as for sustained scholarly collaboration. We argue instead for a politics of articulation, in the double sense of communication and connection. An empirical case study is used as an illustrative example.

Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Karen Corteen and Phil Scraton argue that the notion of childhood is inherently flawed: “No issue reveals the contradictions within the politics of childhood as starkly as that of sexuality, its definition and regulation. As ‘non-adults,’ children are assumed to be asexual. While they are socialized into gender-appropriate roles from birth, a universal feature of patriarchal societies, they are expected to retain a sexual naivety. Yet the images which surround them, implicit and explicit, of hegemonic/dominant masculinity and emphasized/subordinate femininity are all pervasive and all persuasive. The daily experiences of children and young people are contextualized by constructions of masculinity and femininity which are both gendered and sexualized” (76). Because of the large number of episodes broadcast, we examine only seasons one and two of Supernanny (both the UK and U.S. versions). These seasons were chosen largely for their availability: US seasons one and two are available on DVD. The UK episodes were purchased directly from Ricochet. Please note: the episodes contained on the DVDs may differ from those broadcast on television. Here we draw upon Ron Becker's observation that “regardless of the family, all problems are rooted in incompetent parenting” (184). The U.S. version utilizes split screens so that the viewers are able to see the parents' reactions as they watch the footage. Deery argues that the participants of makeover television “capitulate … to the rule of the expert and the power of the camera.” We will discuss the latter when we turn to the shifts in point of view that underpin the learning journey of Supernanny. See Hoyles, Postman, and Jenks. See Zelizer, Hays, and Stearns. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCatherine FowlerCatherine Fowler is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Otago University, New Zealand. She is editor of The European Cinema Reader, co-editor of Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, and author of a monograph on the British filmmaker Sally Potter.Rebecca KambutaRebecca Kambuta is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Film, and Communications Department at Otago University, New Zealand. Her doctoral dissertation traces the figure of the unruly child through film, news media, and reality television. She has also written on the makeover genre in her MA thesis, “Televising Transformation: A Close Analysis of Extreme Makeover and The Swan.”

Children's Political Representation: The Right to Make a Difference

AbstractWhile children's rights have made significant gains in recent decades, children and youth continue to wield relatively little power in determining the nature of their societies' rights as such. This article sets out to explore what it might mean for children to enjoy genuine political representation. While it is often acknowledged that children should possess political rights to participation, voice, and citizenship, we argue that there is a need also for their more specific right to representation in democratic government. Furthermore, this right can be realized only if the very notion of representation is rethought along post-modern lines in light of children's particular experiences: as a right not so much to exercise autonomy as to make a political difference. The article examines recent movements toward children's involvement in policy-making, children's parliaments, and children's voting, and then makes practical proposals for enabling children's fuller representational empowerment.

Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films (review)

Reviewed by: Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films Kathy Merlock Jackson (bio) Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films. By M. Keith Booker. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. In Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films, University of Arkansas English professor M. Keith Booker revisits familiar material. The author of Drawn to Television: Prime Time Animation from The Flintstones to Family Guy and May Contain Graphic Material: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and Film, Booker understands animation and the child audience and lends his expertise to uncovering the subtext of the Disney oeuvre. In his "Personal Prologue," Booker writes, "I am, among other things, a professional academic film scholar and, yes, I should admit up front that I am an unrepentant leftist egghead intellectual. But I'm also a dad, and I've come to understand that the complexities and responsibilities associated with being a parent to kids who watch movies need to be dealt with by all parents, eggheads or not, and of whatever political persuasion" (xiii). The persona of Booker as intellectual-father permeates his analysis. Often written in first person, the book provides a highly personal reading of Booker's and his three sons' responses to Disney films and particular elements in them, such as music, magic, racial and gender roles, humor, or effects. The book is divided into five chapters. In the first, Booker considers the feature animated films that Walt Disney oversaw, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Jungle Book (1967), released the year after Disney's death. In the second, he assesses the studio's output after Disney, including "the virtual wasteland in the production of children's animated film" (37) until the release of The Little Mermaid in 1989 sparked a renaissance. The third chapter addresses Disney's relationship with Pixar and foray into digital animation, and the fourth considers Disney's competitors, especially DreamWorks, which Booker regards as farther to the left than Disney and slightly more subversive. Booker concludes with a chapter titled "The Politics of Children's Film: What Hollywood Is Really Teaching Our Children." Throughout, he emphasizes that children's films can have a "profound effect at the level of promoting certain fundamental attitudes and basic expectations concerning what the world is like and how one should live in it" (175). Much of the book consists of Booker's synopses of films and his and sons Benjamin's, Skylor's, and Adam's opinions of them, but the book is [End Page 324] most interesting when it delves into ideology. Booker traces many Disney themes: innocence, finding one's place, finding a mate, friendship, maturation and responsibility, the importance of naturalness and authenticity, and the fleeting nature of childhood. He notes that Disney differs from Pixar in its emphasis on magic over technology and from DreamWorks in its advocacy of destiny over choice. "[T]he most consistent ideological message embedded in children's film," Booker writes, "has to do with the promotion of an individualist mind-set…. not particularly surprising, given that individualism is probably the central constitutive component of the official ideology of the United States as a nation and of capitalism as a system" (175). Booker presents a literate interpretation of the values inherent in the animated feature films children watch, augmenting his work with a useful bibliography and filmography. While one cannot disregard the role that these popular films and the messages that they send play in a child's life, Booker's argument would be strengthened by placing animated films in a larger cultural context, relating them to live-action films, television, books, computer games, and other media, as well as related issues in childrearing and education. Films do not function in a vacuum but rather reinforce the lessons that children receive from other cultural influences. Booker ends his study with a call for parents to actively watch films with their children, ask pertinent questions, discuss values, and encourage critical thinking. One cannot argue with this sound advice. Kathy Merlock Jackson Kathy Merlock Jackson is professor and coordinator of communications at Virginia Wesleyan College, where she teaches courses in media studies and children...

The new politics of childhood

Minister for Children and Families, Sarah Teather MP, has made her first statement outlining a vision for early years care and education with an attempt to distance the coalition from past government failures.

Medicating children: ADHD and pediatric mental health

* Acknowledgments * Introduction * An Introduction to ADHD * A Survey of the Evolution of ADHD and Pediatric Stimulant Use, 1900--1980 * The Transformation of Mental Disorders in the 1980s: The DSM-III, Managed Care, and Cosmetic Psychopharmacology * ADHD and the Politics of Children's Disability Policy * The Backlash against ADHD and Stimulants * Current Questions about Stimulant Treatment for ADHD * Conclusion * Notes * Selected Bibliography * Index

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Politics of Childhood

Aarmazed that despite her prolonged invalidism and two previous miscariages she was able bear child at age forty-three, Elizabeth Barrett Browning viewed her son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning--nicknamed Pen--as something akin fairy changeling, and her prolific letters document remarkably indulgent attitude toward the behaviors and capacities of children. She believed that children should never be forced study, that they would come all that is needful their own time. She admonished her sister Henrietta, herself the mother of young son, rush the boy's studies, for a child learns most when he plays. (1) Rather reluctantly, she began teaching Pen read at age four only he chose it himself, and to give him the opportunity of amusing himself with story-books, fairy tales and the rest-but she emphasized, not beginning his education!--the fairies forbid it. I have forgotten my liberty-plans. (2) Her educational philosophy was decidedly non-utilitarian--when she planned teach Pen something useful, she realized with amusement that she was thinking of mythology. (3) Pen himself sometimes demanded practical skills: nearly six and envying his male cousin's accomplishment, he asked his mother teach him count 100. She refused, though Robert (naughty Papa), she noted ruefully, provided the instruction out of spite. (4) For some biographers, references differences between Robert and herself on the subject of childrearing--especially on Pen's education, hair, and clothing--represent evidence only of breaches the Brownings' marital harmony, but also of EBB's irrationality, foolishness, even hysteria. (5) Certainly her plentiful and detailed accounts of Pen document maternal adoration which might have seemed excessive anyone who was Pen's mother. (6) But besides illustrating her devotion--often delightfully leavened by humor--her letters about Pen actually map finely observant, coherent, sophisticated, and remarkably modern or post-modern attitude toward childhood. Moreover, her discussions of Pen delineate her deep understanding of the politics of childhood: they reflect her developing ideas of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, on the one hand, and of the constructed nature of gender, on the other. As Dorothy Mermin observed her groundbreaking study of the poet, the more unusual aspects of Pen's upbringing arose from EBB's honor the rigid distinctions of gender, nationality, and class that she hated the English and her desire raise him what she termed a citizen of the world. (7) My discussion will trace these threads EBB's correspondence about Pen, and then consider several poems and letters which she relates her politics of childhood her own politicized woman poet. Deirdre David, Gary Kelly, and Lynda Nead, among others, have written persuasively about nineteenth-century uses of motherhood powerful symbol for nationalism-representations which, Elizabeth Fay remarks, the symbolic mother is generally employed as metaphor for nationalism melding her private role mother with her public of mothering the nation ... way that is reassuring rather than transgressive. In EBB's work, however, be mother is have immensely transgressive potential, for Fay observes relation Romantic writers, whereas in the middle-class perspective, maternity produces gentlemen and ladies ... radical society, maternity is somewhat dangerous because it produces citizens. (8) EBB's insistence on the importance of play and refusal set her son Pen organized study of reading and math expressed her view of the boy essentially joyous and attuned transcendent values. In these respects her attitudes echo familiar Romantic tenets, and, particularly, the educational philosophy advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose writings helped revolutionize conceptions of the child. …

The Rights of Children, the Rights of Nations: Developmental Theory and the Politics of Children's Rights

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), U.N. General Assembly (1989) is a major breakthrough in defining children as fully human and working to ensure them the attendant benefits worldwide. While children's rights as equal human beings may seem obvious in the 21st century, the politics of establishing and ensuring such rights are contentious. The CRC is a brilliant negotiation of conceptions of the child and international relations, yet certain tensions in the children's rights process lead to a lack of clarity in a global situation that continues to leave millions of children at risk. Analyzing the CRC and related practices from a developmental perspective can help identify obstacles to the advancement of children's rights, especially those related to opportunities for rights‐based thinking and the exercise of self‐determination and societal‐determination rights. In this article, I offer a qualitative analysis of children's rights in the context of what I refer to as the CRC activity‐meaning system. I present a theoretical framework for considering this system of policy and practice as enacted in the CRC treaty and related monitoring, reporting, qualifying, and implementing documents. A discourse analysis of conceptions of the child and those responsible for ensuring their rights in seven representative documents (including the CRC Treaty, a report by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, minutes of a U.N. Security Council meeting, reports by a State‐Party, and a report by a civil society group in that country) reveals tensions inherent in the CRC activity‐meaning system.1 Emerging from this analysis is a tension between children's rights and nation's rights. Created in part via explicit and implicit assumptions about child development in the CRC as these posit responsibilities across actors in the broader CRC system, this tension challenges the implementation of children's rights and the development of children's rights‐based understandings. I use this analysis to explain why future research and practice should address the development of children's rights‐based understanding not only in terms of maturation or socialization but also as integral to salient conflicts in their every day lives.

The body as a battlefield: approaching children's politics

This article discusses the active role of children in everyday politics. Distinct from empowerment, it is suggested that children can be political on their own terms. The article focuses on revealing the social production of childhood, which takes place in the confrontation between child policy and children's own politics. Children's bodies are found to be both the main focus of policy practices and a central avenue of children's own agency. Hence, children are understood to be not only objects of policy, but also embodied political subjects. Using the example of Finnish child evacuees’ experiences during the Second World War, it is shown that, despite their positions in policy fields, children do act as political selves. Using the ideas of Michel de Certeau and Carl Schmitt, it is argued that there is an autonomous politics to children which can be recognized as a significant means of coping in their everyday lives. On these grounds, the article sets out to use Pierre Bourdieu's concept of political struggle in considering childhood spatialities in more detail. Overall, children's politics are understood as a wider geographical concept which requires further examination.

The Politics of Childhood in Ellis's Three Wishes

In The Politics of Childhood in Ellis's Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, Wafaa Hasan outlines the recent controversy in Canada over the restrictions that shape literature. Using Neil Postman's and John Locke's conceptions of childhood, Hasan unpacks the ways in which Ellis's Three has threatened popular conceptions of childhood. Specifically, as her analysis shows, Ellis's work redefines the boundaries of children's fiction by heterogenizing childhood experience and by affording its readers -limited but consequential -authorial agency. Further, Hasan asserts that Three liberates the idea of childhood as a developmental stage of ignorance by revealing the ways in which the child is a subject position that is applicable to different age groups (particularly adults who are racially or politically marginalized) and is often characterized by subordination. In the end, Hasan's article serves as a response to the censorship Ellis's text endured in 2006, highlighting and questioning the fervent investment some Ontarian adults have had in securing the illusion of apolitical and innocent childhoods. Wafaa Hasan, The Politics of Childhood in Ellis's Three Wishes page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 10.2 (2008): Thematic Issue, Racialized Narratives for Children. Ed. C. Richard King and John Streamas

Elizabeth Eckford's Appearance at Little Rock: The Possibility of Children's Political Agency

In 1957, Hannah Arendt argued against the legally enforced desegregation of public schools in the American South. She argued that African Americans had mistaken schools and education for a site of political debate, when they properly belonged to a social realm instead. This article disagrees and reconsiders Arendt's separation between the social and political realms. Arendt also took exception to the role Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old, played in this debate. It is argued here that Elizabeth Eckford's actions were deeply political and give rise to a need to consider the possibility of children's political agency.

The Politics of Childhood and Asylum in the UK

This article considers the general treatment of asylum‐seeking families with children in the UK, focusing on the government's practices and public reactions to these measures. It first describes both the exclusive asylum framework, based on institutionalised suspicion, welfare restrictions and detention, and the inclusive child policy framework, based on recognising children's rights and protecting all children. The article then investigates the implications for policy‐making that these radically opposed regimes have for those who fall between the two categories, i.e. asylum‐seeking children. To this end, we examine more closely three asylum practices — Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004, detention of accompanied asylum‐seeking children in immigration removal centres and removals. Our analysis indicates that the government's attempt to fully include families within the restrictive asylum framework has been somewhat frustrated by the mobilisation of a wide range of public actors. As such, despite its supposedly ‘legally unconstrained’ room for action, the government has recently agreed to partly review its policy standards for asylum‐seeking families, apparently aware of the potentially damaging effects of being seen as disregarding children's rights and needs. On the other hand, the government does not seem inclined to question the current asylum framework and the assumptions on which it is based. Consequently, the asylum system for families is likely to remain based on ad hocarrangements conditioned by the scale of the protests.

The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments

The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments

"I am spinning this for you, my child": Voice and Identity Formation in George MacDonald's Princess Books

“I am spinning this for you, my child”:Voice and Identity Formation in George MacDonald’s Princess Books Ruth Y. Jenkins (bio) Abstract By applying Julia Kristeva’s theories of the dynamic relationship between the semiotic and symbolic, Jenkins illustrates the complicated relationships between voice and identity formation that are central to MacDonald’s Princess books and his adolescent readers. Jenkins shows how the harmonic imagination that MacDonald constructs in The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1882) enable and replicate the process of identity formation. Consequently, rather than reiterate culturally prescribed scripts for fixed identities, narratives such as MacDonald’s Princess books may provide alternative descriptions and opportunities for non-conventional experience. George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1882) have long captivated readers of both children's literature and adult fantasy. Equally fascinated, scholars continue to direct critical attention toward these narratives from spiritual to folkloric, literary to linguistic perspectives.1 Recently William N. Gray, in "George MacDonald, Julia Kristeva, and the Black Sun," and Deborah Thacker, in "Feminine Language and the Politics of Children's Literature," have reexamined MacDonald's texts using current psychoanalytic theories of language and identity.2 Both apply the concepts of Julia Kristeva to his texts, but whereas Gray shows how Phantastes (1858) illustrates individual transformation from an object-relations perspective, Thacker reconsiders the Princess books through feminist reworkings of Lacanian theory. Although Gray and Thacker produce fresh readings of MacDonald's texts, neither sufficiently articulates the extent to which Kristeva's theories illuminate the richness of the Princess books in the context of his spiritual beliefs and identity formation. Kristeva's description of the dynamic relationship between the semiotic (noncommunicative articulations) and symbolic (signification) is useful for understanding the signifying process as it relates to identity formation. Like a thin membrane through which the semiotic permeates, the thetic phase functions as a "threshold" of language and organizes semiotic energy into the symbolic (Revolution 45); energy that cannot yet be so organized remains semiotic. The tic phase posits the signifiable object, the deepest structure of possibility (Revolution 54; Moi 99). Named "transposition" by Kristeva, this process highlights the passage from one sign system to another, a passage that involves an "altering of [End Page 325] the thetic position—the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one" (59). 3 Transposition, then, produces the "plural, shattered" quality of the object of enunciation, and consequently, "polysemy can also be seen as the result of a semiotic polyvalence—an adherence to different sign systems" (59-60). Understanding the polyvalence that occurs in transposition is central to recognizing the value of texts such as MacDonald's for the adolescent reader and even their significance as textual constructions. Although Gray does not consider Phantastes in the context of an adolescent audience, his reading of that text has implications for analyzing the relationship between those readers and the texts. Gray points to the failure of MacDonald "to follow through Kristeva's dialectic of the semiotic and symbolic" at the conclusion of Phantastes, a failure that results in a "precariousness of the subject-position" (891). I would like to suggest, however, that this "precariousness of subject-position" is key to understanding both MacDonald's vision and the value of his texts for adolescent readers. Kristeva posits that the "thetic originates in the 'mirror stage' and is completed . . . in puberty" (Revolution 62), psychological stages central to identity formation. Adolescents, at their own threshold to adulthood, negotiate various energies and drives—verbal, emotional, and physical—in their efforts to transition into socially functioning adults. Consequently, analyzing how MacDonald's Princess books illustrate the thetic phase may demonstrate their continued significance as adolescent literature. Kristeva compares the dialectical interplay between the semiotic and symbolic to weaving, yet she emphasizes that unlike finished cloth, this dynamic is not static (Revolution 5).4 The "threads" spun by semiotic drives produce the genotext, which creates poetic language; the "threads" from social, cultural, syntactic, and grammatical forces are the phenotext, which insures communication (5). Consequently, the genotext is the "advent'" of the symbolic and organizes "a space in which the subject is...

Re-generation games: The politics of childhood in urban renewal

Re-generation games: The politics of childhood in urban renewal

Politics of Children or Childish Politics?

We write in response to recent comments suggesting a lack of evidence supporting the decision of the College to make public statements about the mental health impact of prolonged immigration detent...

“Teach us something useful”: contested spaces of teenagers' citizenship

The introduction of compulsory citizenship education in England in September 2002 raises exciting new areas of interest in the politics of childhood and youth. Young people, in their early teens, inhabit a transitional middle-ground somewhere between childhood and adulthood and are ‘constitutionally’ excluded from many spaces of citizenship. The new curriculum is founded upon creating future responsible citizens. Concurrently many teenagers carve out their own spaces of citizenship within both their schools and communities. This paper explores the everyday political-spatial experiences of a group of 13–16 year olds within their schools and communities, highlighting the importance of relating the new curriculum to teenagers' needs and aspirations, as well as drawing valuable lessons from teenagers' own expertise and constructions of citizenship.

Speaking on Behalf of the College: The Politics of Children or Childish Politics?

Speaking on Behalf of the College: The Politics of Children or Childish Politics?

The Active Child Citizen: Lessons from Canadian Policy and the Children's Movement

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has advanced a model of active citizenry for children, which is difficult to reconcile with the still dominant Western notions of childhood that fetishize innocence and attribute passivity and incompetence to children. This article explores the manner in which state policy, Canadian courts, and children's politics in Canada have responded to the imaginary of the active child citizen. The Canadian government has provided limited political space to young people and has narrowly construed children's participation rights as limited to family law and juvenile justice. The reluctance of adult decision-makers to open up policy-making to the contributions of children has been further hindered by the current anti-democratic cast of neo-liberal governance. This article examines how quasi-judicial tribunals and the Canadian courts have invoked the Convention in their dealings with child asylum seekers, only to construct childhood participation and childhood protection as mutually exclusive. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the alternative model of children's citizenship revealed by the children's movement organization, Free the Children. In contrast to the relative failure of adult decision-makers to implement the participation rights of children, the contemporary children's movement advances a view of children as empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate and global citizens, who are nonetheless, like other marginalized groups, in need of special, group-differentiated protections.