Childhood Scholars Research Articles

‘Generation Z’ and ‘second generation’: an agenda for learning from cross-cultural negotiations of the climate crisis in the lives of second generation immigrants

ABSTRACT Cross-cultural negotiations of environmental knowledge in children and young people’s lives have received minimal attention in children’s geographies and wider childhood scholarship, despite interests in child and youth environmental concerns and learning that predate the school strikes for climate. This viewpoint articulates an agenda for advancing research in this area in light of youth-led articulations of ‘climate crisis’, beginning with exploration of how second generation immigrants encounter, interpret and negotiate the climate crisis in everyday life. The viewpoint situates this agenda in academic and popular arguments to diversify and decolonise environmentalism amid increasingly polyvocal responses to the climate crisis.

Editorial: Child-Animal Relations and Care as Critique

Childhood scholars have for some time worked toward the idea that instead of being situated in their own micro worlds, waiting rooms, or margins, children should be viewed and accounted for as full participants of society. This special issue aligns with this aspiration, while broadening the notion of what counts as society. It asks how to live and care in a society that does not consist of adult human individuals only, but instead counts children and other-than-human animals in the realm of the social and the societal. By inviting authors to think about child-animal relations and care, we wish to shed light on the ways in which other animals are relevant for human children’s lives, and vice versa, and to argue for the importance of these relations for society in the conflicting times we live in now.

A Critical Reconstruction of Caring Acts between Korean Mothers and Children during Their Play Activities

In order to understand the mother-child relationship, care is important. Caring acts can be actualized when two subjects—the cared-for and the one-caring—interact. To contribute to understanding the ways in which caring actions can be identified by both child and mother during their play activities, this qualitative study examines Korean mother-child play interactions from a critical perspective through the basis on the typology of caring acts (Korth, 2003). For this purpose, two Korean motherchild dyads who are living in the U.S. were recruited. Observations of play activities of the two mother-child dyads and face-to-face in-depth individual interviews with two mothers were conducted for seven months. The results suggest that Korean mother-child caring relationships may be reciprocated through the child’s active engagement in the caring relations as well as the mother’s. Implications for early childhood scholars and professionals working with diverse families are discussed, as well as future directions for research.

A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity ed. by Mary O'Dowd, June Purvis

Reviewed by: A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity ed. by Mary O'Dowd, June Purvis Kathryn Gleadle A History of the Girl: Formation, Education and Identity. Edited by Mary O'Dowd and June Purvis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. xiii + 266 pp. Cloth $99.99, paper $99.99. This wide-ranging collection, which consists of an introduction and twelve further chapters, originated in a panel on girlhood history that took place at the Congress of the International Committee of Historians held in Jinan, China, in 2015. The fourteen contributors have taken diverse approaches to their task. June Purvis, for example, has experimented with an analytical group biography in her discussion of the political socialization of the Pankhurst sisters, while a fascinating essay by Isobelle Barrett Meyering outlines the ways in which the voices of girls themselves constituted a challenge to twentieth-century sex role socialization theory. Two chapters are jointly authored exercises in comparative history, exploring young women's lives in China and Europe. Alison Mackinnon's contribution also has an ambitious range, incorporating data from the Anglophone world as well as Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and China in her exploration of female higher education. Notwithstanding the temporal and geographical breadth of the book, intellectual coherence has been achieved through attention to the themes of education, work, and life cycle. Treatment of these issues varies considerably, as one might expect. Yan Hu's study of the "Biopolitics of Dai Girls" includes a case study exploring "the girls' perspective," which focuses on two individuals aged nineteen years and twenty-four years—ages that might be considered "adulthood" in some contexts. Hu's approach, rooted in oral interviews, could be characterized as "optimistic" in the emphasis she places on young females' ability to make active choices in employment and migration decisions—part of a "globalisation from below" perspective. Sophie Brouquet, another "optimist," [End Page 497] also points to the freedom and greater mobility enjoyed by pre-marriage teenage girls, this time in early medieval Europe. In contrast, Oluwakemi A. Adesina emphasizes the acute vulnerability of migrant girl hawkers in mid-twentieth century Lagos. A number of chapters tease apart the social categorization of "girlhood" itself. Mary O'Dowd uses psychological literature on adolescence, suggesting the utility of a tripartite approach to female youth—distinguishing between the different stages of "preteen" (from age nine or ten to thirteen); "middle teen" (from ages fourteen to seventeen or eighteen); and "early adulthood" (from the late teens to the early twenties). While O'Dowd argues for the benefit in applying these modern theories of adolescence to earlier historical periods, Ann Waltner and Mary Jo Maynes underline the cultural specificity of conceptions of life course development. In early nineteenth-century China they observe how the resilience of household production and the practice of early female marriage brings into question the whole concept of female "youth." It has, they indicate, "no precise counterpart in Chinese history" (78). Two studies contend that government policy and social reform can play a key role in demarcating the stages of "girlhood" and young womanhood. Asha Islam Nayeem concludes that colonial educational policies (especially the introduction of age-stratified education) enabled the category of "girl" in Bengal. Alison Mackinnon points to the significance of female higher education in shifting the boundaries of "girlhood" and "womanhood" through establishing "new transition points into womanhood." However, whereas Georgeta Nazarska's chapter on Bulgarian girls finds that educational outcomes contributed to wider processes of social modernization (a finding that also resonates with Nayeem's argument), Mackinnon cautions that in many contexts, female education is not necessarily accompanied by progressivism in other areas of social reform. Marja van Tilburg strikes a similarly cautious note in her reading of nineteenth-century Dutch advice books. Although only a small number of texts are cited, van Tilburg's thesis, that the advent of the concept of "adolescence" at the end of the nineteenth century actually narrowed the discursive landscape for young females, is thought provoking. The majority of the chapters appear to emerge from an intellectual engagement with women's studies and women's history rather than from childhood scholarship per se. The latter has, in recent years...

Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics by Naomi Morgenstern

Reviewed by: Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics by Naomi Morgenstern Josh D. Williams (bio) Wild Child: Intensive Parenting and Posthumanist Ethics. By Naomi Morgenstern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. In this book, Naomi Morgenstern carefully crafts her conception of how recent cultural developments question the humanistic perception of the human as autonomous and distinct from nature. Her claim is that these developments “have helped precipitate a posthumanist encounter with the ethics of reproductive choice and with the figure of the wild child” (2). Using literary analysis, she focuses on how parents interact with their children and their choice to reproduce in several texts explicitly showing parent-child relations. Throughout the book Morgenstern skillfully traces the relations between parents and children to call attention to the ways in which parents within the primary texts engage their children to move them toward humanness, with explicit attention given to the effects on the parents themselves. Using a posthuman theoretical framework, she shows how these sources offer a means of questioning reproductive choice and how parents must deal with wild children who remain in their natural otherness. She thus explicitly follows the posthumanist theoretical leanings of Cary Wolf, who defines posthuman not as “after humanity” but as distinctly contrary to ideas of human autonomy and agency persisting from humanism. In the introduction, then, Morgenstern establishes her book as challenging humanist ideals, troubling the cultural understanding of [End Page 115] humans as autonomous, rational, distinguished beings. She accomplishes this work by turning to literature and literary analysis. Following her introduction, Morgenstern uses each subsequent chapter to closely analyze a primary text that reveals a situation of intensive parenting and angst around reproductive choice. The first chapter, “Is There a Space of Maternal Ethics?,” investigates Emma Donoghue’s Room to highlight the contractual obligation that reproduction forces on mothers to raise the child into an established human adult: “no child can survive without at some point holding someone (a parent, a guardian) hostage in order for it to come into being” (67). Following her focus on motherhood, chapter 2, “Postapocalyptic Responsibility,” considers the possibility of the end of patriarchal dominance within the social sphere through analysis of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Chapter 3, “Maternal Love/Maternal Violence,” brings race and slavery into the conversation about parental ethics, focusing on reproductive choice in relation to slavery. Thinking with Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Morgenstern addresses the ways in which black bodies, particularly those of children, present a new form of alterity for white people because slaves have no rights. Moving further into her argument, the fourth chapter, “‘Monstrous Decision,’” explores tensions between viewing reproduction as a choice versus viewing it as a mandate. Discussing Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, Morgenstern cleverly draws on the frightening possibility of children becoming criminals to explore the dangers of reproductive choice and the violence of relating to another being. The final chapter, “Dis-ap-peared,” concentrates on how children become beings to be protected but do not possess rights as fully human individuals. Through discussing Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana,” Morgenstern finds that children embody an interstitial space: “Between consent and nonconsent . . . one encounters the figure of the child as quasi-rational, quasi-consensual, quasi-animal” (171). Following this positioning of the child, Morgenstern’s afterword conceptualizes the ways in which animals (and subsequently the “wild child”) disturb and disrupt what it means to be human, giving particular attention to language and speech acts. For scholars of childhood and children’s literature, Morgenstern’s claims about the wild child disrupting the boundaries of the human seem most beneficial. Within her introduction, the link between wildness and children is explicit: “Wildness names the child’s absolute otherness with respect to any version of human being or human relation that has come before, but, as such, the ‘wild’ child also names the very possibility of a future for something like a human being” (29). While this assertion is explored in detail within the introduction, Morgenstern relatively neglects this line of argument within her chapters, focusing rather on the parents and on relational aspects from the parental point of view...

The Shape of Things to Come and what to do about Tom and Mia: Interrogating the OECD’s International Early Learning and Child Well-Being Study from an anti-colonialist perspective

In this article, I discuss the International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS), which is currently being rolled out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. I summarise the development of IELS and the critique that has been voiced by early childhood scholars, professionals and advocates. I then move to an aspect of IELS that has so far been absent from the discussion: the actual conduct of the test, using the two stylised child characters Tom and Mia. I provide a provisional reading of the Tom and Mia imaginary through the lens of post-colonial and neo-colonial analysis. Applying the concept of colonisation as a frame of reference opens a space for introducing resistance and anti-colonial practices as productive forces to challenge the global hegemony. I draw on Pedro Sotolongo’s concept of the power of marginal notions to argue that experiences made on the margins of society, both geographically and socially, offer very practical alternatives to reconceptualising early childhood education, and services for young children, families and communities.

Poverty and Family Troubles: Mothers, Children, and Neoliberal “Antipoverty” Initiatives

Conditions of impoverishment underlie many family “troubles” and the family is often a site of antipoverty interventions. Feminist scholars have provided a series of trenchant critiques of neoliberal initiatives which purport to tackle familial poverty but have the effect of retraditionalizing gendered divisions of labor, as well as sidelining demands for social and economic justice for women. Taking one article as an in-depth case study, this article considers what happens to “the child” in such feminist critiques. I suggest there is a tendency to posit neoliberal antipoverty initiatives as benign for or even of benefit to children. The unintended consequences are to position impoverished women against impoverished children and to naturalize childhood at the same time as contesting motherhood. In troubling the family in this way, I argue for the productivity of complementing feminist critiques with critically oriented childhood scholarship to better understand the operations and impacts of neoliberal antipoverty initiatives.

Critically engaging discourses on quality improvement: Political and pedagogical futures in early childhood education

This article is a commentary developed by three early childhood teacher educators who are concerned about the negative consequences of contemporary policy trends in the United States. The commentary critically examines the influence of quality improvement in early childhood as it relates to environmental rating systems and the use of teacher performance assessments, more specifically, the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale and the Teacher Performance Assessment. The article concludes with a potential vision for early childhood scholars and practitioners—building solidarity to function as an emerging, powerful, ethical community of early childhood curriculum workers that thrives without consensus.

Getting on their level: Preschool teachers embodying the ideal preschooler

An ethical commitment to liberating children has led childhood scholars to overlook pedagogies that afford children’s active participation. This article thus shows how preschool teachers contribute to less hierarchical moments of intergenerational interaction with their students, facilitating opportunities for agency. Teachers do so by embodying the ideal preschooler, becoming readable to children as affiliative through their bodies. The author describes these practices and highlights the ideological contexts that facilitate their emergence, and then explores contexts that limit, constrain, or change them.

Early childhood education in the outdoors in Aotearoa New Zealand

Early childhood care and education services in Aotearoa New Zealand drew initially on the Frobelian model of the kindergarten or ‘children’s garden’. Later models such as the Kōhanga Reo movement, the highly respected curriculum Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa, and the Enviroschools programme are grounded in te ao Māori, Māori worldviews, that feature a strong connectedness to place, and a deep sense of a spiritual inter-relationship with the land, mountains, rivers, and oceans. This article considers how the imported Scandinavian/European/UK models of ‘forest schools’ might fit within this context. To illustrate early childhood education in the outdoors in Aotearoa (New Zealand) we draw upon research conducted in early childhood settings in this country that illuminates children’s experience in the outdoors. We draw upon critical early childhood scholarship to theorise this situation of forest schools emerging in Aotearoa, along with influences from the forest school movement evident in existing New Zealand early childhood services. The article suggests that traditional Indigenous Māori worldviews and knowledges give meaning and contextualised authenticity to ‘forest schools’ approaches in early childhood education in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble by Pamela Tyler

Reviewed by: New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble by Pamela Tyler Elizabeth Parish Smith New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble. By Pamela Tyler. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 225. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6322-1.) Pamela Tyler's subtitle captures the imperfections but resilience of generations of benevolent women, their long-lasting institution, and, ultimately, their city of New Orleans. With unrestricted access to the "voluminous" records of the Poydras Home, originally an orphanage and now a retirement community, Tyler sculpts a fascinating history of an institution's evolution to serve its community (p. ix). As the home celebrates its bicentennial, its women administrators have proved themselves time and again "both tender-hearted philanthropists and hard-headed businesswomen" (p. 64). Before readers meet the women behind Poydras, Tyler offers a brief overview of orphanages in the 1800s and 1900s, material that will likely surprise the popular audience she welcomes. The "grinding poverty" of the nineteenth century forced families to surrender children to orphanages, often with hopes of withdrawing them later (p. 2). As a result, "orphans" commonly had one surviving parent, if not two. New Orleans's Female Orphan Society thus provided broad forms of social support when it opened in 1817, and it continued to do so until developments such as social work and mothers' pensions in the early twentieth century changed attitudes about orphanages. The Anglo-American women who operated Poydras were among the city's social and economic elite. Tyler resists provincializing local history and connects their work to female reformers across the nation in the nineteenth century. What distinguished Poydras managers from their counterparts, though, was their institution's enviable financial stability, largely due to early gifts from Louisiana planter Julien Poydras. The able management of his legacies funded the home for decades, and Tyler stresses that business acumen and savvy legal maneuvering "became an essential part of the women's apparatus for success" while also "press[ing] the limits of gender propriety" (p. 28). Poydras's gifts, however, exposed the racism that runs as a tragic thread throughout the [End Page 411] institution's history. Endowed by "one of the largest slaveholders in antebellum America," the institution used enslaved labor and, after transitioning to caring for the aged, accepted only white women until late into the twentieth century (p. 30). Tyler's most substantive chapter concerns tensions between Catholic and Protestant women in the mid-1800s. Most administrators were Protestant, but the home accepted Catholic girls and hosted Sisters of Charity as staff members. In reoccurring episodes, though, religious disputes triggered "a breakdown of discipline" among residents and employees (p. 68). This contentious time in the institution's history, Tyler reminds us, demonstrates the insoluble ties between life in Poydras and the world outside its gates. Tyler's final chapters concern the period after 1960, when the institution rechristened itself the Poydras Home for Elderly Ladies. She supplements Poydras records with oral histories to carry readers through "the crucible of Hurricane Katrina" in 2005 (p. 172). Throughout the book, she maintains a tricky balance between honoring and critiquing the home, but she could further interrogate race in Poydras's more recent history. For example, Tyler notes that it was not until the 1980s that "the elderly" replaced "white Protestant females" in admissions, a long-overdue revision that warrants greater scrutiny (p. 167). Tyler introduces her book as "the story of an institution. … [and] the tale of a small coterie of New Orleans women, the unpaid board of managers of Poydras" (p. vii). The former is a success, sure to interest scholars of gender, childhood, reform, religion, and southern cities. Yet one wishes for more on the individual women themselves, akin to what Tyler accomplished in her book Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes: Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920–1963 (Athens, Ga., 1996). If the obstacle is a lack of sources, a discussion of these limitations would be of interest to readers and, in fact, affirm her portrayal of Poydras as a monument to women's uncelebrated work over generations. Nevertheless, Tyler successfully engages audiences in many venues. Elizabeth...

Implementation of a mentoring component embedded within an early childhood scholarship programme

ABSTRACTThis study examined the implementation of a pilot mentoring component as part of a college scholarship programme for child care teachers. The purpose of the mentoring programme was to encourage the application of course material in the student’s classroom. Programme documents, interviews, surveys, and field observations were used to compare the actual mentoring implementation to the design. The pilot programme took place in a Midwestern state, with 3 mentors representing three rural community colleges working with 40 child care providers. Stakeholder perspectives were reported and descriptive output data revealed the variances in the implementation of this mentoring initiative. Lessons learned from this study are shared to inform future child care and educator mentoring initiatives.

The (im)possibilities of dialogue across feminism and childhood scholarship and activism

The relations between those positioned as women and as children, and the political and intellectual consequences of how we conceptualise these connections, has received only scant attention. In this article we describe a symposium and on-going project which aim to bring together community-based and academic scholars to debate the intersections and perceived antagonisms between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. We trace how these intersections have been debated in the literature and outline the potential benefits and pitfalls of encouraging further connections between these fields. Drawing on our symposium experience, we also outline the challenges involved in bringing together academic and community-based scholars and activists, and consider the implications for similar future endeavours.

Rejecting ‘the child’, embracing ‘childhood’: Conceptual and methodological considerations for social work research with young people

This article examines how the social studies of childhood can inform social work research. The first half of the article considers how notions of ‘childhood’ as a social construction diverge from normative, uniform and universal ideas of what might otherwise constitute ‘the child’. The second half then considers this discussion in regards to social work research. It considers the extent to which childhood scholarship has been used within the discipline of social work and illustrates this point by drawing upon recent empirical contributions to the foster care literature in the UK.

Wombs at risk, wombs as risk: Fat women’s experiences of reproductive care

ABSTRACTUsing the Foucaultian concepts of biopower and biocitizenship, critical scholars of childhood “obesity” have shown how fat mothers are labeled as “risks” not only to their children, but also to the State. Such discourses are salient even for fat women who have yet to birth children, as fat women’s “poor utero environments” are now imagined as “at-risk” spaces for babies particularly by the medical community. Critical theorists are only beginning to trace how such discourses of in-utero risk impact fat women who are attempting to conceive and who are pregnant. The authors add to this nascent scholarship by relating the results of a Canadian study exploring the weight-related healthcare experiences of fat women accessing reproductive healthcare while attempting to conceive, while pregnant, or while giving birth. Participants described how fetal risk was ubiquitously emphasized by healthcare professionals who continuously communicated fat women’s unfitness as mothers. At the extreme, participants described experiences resonating with so-called “hard” eugenic practices, wherein participants were routinely denied certain procedures that would have allowed them to attempt conception, including the removal of birth control devices. The authors suggest, then, that current medical biopolitics of “maternal obesity” are one inflection of a “new eugenics” that not only produces and manipulates life, but also prevents it all together.

“Many a time and oft had I broken my Neck for their amusement”: The Corpse, the Child, and the Aestheticization of Death in Shakespeare’s Richard III and King John

deaths of the two princes of Richard III (1592) and young Prince Arthur in King John (1595-96) are pivotal moments in the dramatic structure of both plays. As with many of Shakespeare's children, their deaths are of more consequence, in terms of plot, structure, and overall narrative design, than their lives, and their dramatic significance is disproportionate to their relatively small number of lines. They not only precipitate the downfall of the main protagonists and drive the plots to their denouements, but they also create an absence into which the other characters can project their adult fantasies of childhood. These three young children have provided inspiration for paintings, films, historical novels, popular television dramas, and documentaries across the centuries. A morbid fascination with their premature demise reached its apotheosis in the nineteenth century, yet there is still a tendency to sentimentalize and aestheticize their deaths even today. With the discovery of King Richard III's body in a Leicester car park in 2012, there has been renewed interest in the fate of the two princes. James Northcote's 1785 painting of The Murder of the Princes in the Tower, which was inspired by Shakespeare's play, remains one of their most enduring images (see figure 1). (2) However, although the deaths of both Arthur and the princes have provided inspiration for artistic fetishization, both in and beyond the theatre, the dramatization of their deaths in Shakespeare's texts is remarkably understated. princes of Richard III die offstage, and Arthur's accidental death is notable more for its bathetic absence of sentimentality rather than for any feeling of pathos it evokes. desire to aestheticize the deaths of these three children is therefore less an authentic interpretation of the original texts and more a reflection of a voyeuristic-scopophilic fascination arising out of a larger impulse to preserve and extend fantasies of childhood innocence--a fantasy that, as childhood scholars including James Kincaid and Anne Higonnet have observed, is shadowed by titillation, eroticism, and violation. (3) If childhood innocence is the opposite of adult sexuality, then it risks, according to this critical perspective, becoming alluringly off-limits. Kincaid explains as follows: see children as, among other things, sweet, innocent, vacant, smooth-skinned, spontaneous, and mischievous. We construct the desirable as, among other things, sweet, innocent, vacant, smooth-skinned, spontaneous, and mischievous. There's more to how we see the child, and more to how we construct what is sexually desirable--but not much more. (4) deaths of the doomed young princes of Shakespeare's Richard III and King John are only constructed in this fetishistic way retrospectively through the rhetoric of the adults. To aestheticize their deaths in visual form is thus to undermine the intention of the original text. But more crucially, it also risks evoking the equivocal fantasy of childhood that Kincaid describes. In this essay, I argue that Shakespeare deliberately creates a dissonance between the idealizing rhetoric surrounding his three young princes and their embodied presence by refusing to sentimentalize or fetishize the deaths. desire to make manifest what the plays obscure, to fill the absence with a body, reflects culturally and historically specific concerns surrounding childhood and what it represents rather than a faithful interpretation of Shakespeare's texts. In this essay, through a dialectical analysis of dramatic and artistic representation and close textual reading, I examine both the dramatic significance of this absence and the various and changing ways in which it has been filled. Through a brief history of the shifting fortunes of these children, I explore the ways in which their deaths have been fetishized and aestheticized, and consider the small but growing movement toward a return to the de-idealization of childhood that Shakespeare intended. …

From the Editors’ Desk

<p>Learning How to Inherit in Colonized and Ecologically Challenged LifeWorlds in Early Childhood Education: An Introduction</p><p>The complex and intensifying ecological challenges of the 21st century call for new ways of thinking, being, and doing in all sectors of our society, including early childhood education, and the Aboriginal environmental humanities offer alternative ways of being present and acting in the world. Accordingly, in September 2014 we gathered for three days in Victoria, British Columbia, with leading Indigenous and environmental humanities scholars and a group of 40 early childhood scholars, educators, and students to mobilize these perspectives in the early education of young children. This special issue presents eight articles inspired by the conversations that took place at the “Learning How to Inherit in Colonized and Ecologically Challenged Life Worlds” symposium.1</p>

Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960. By Marilyn Irvin Holt (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2014) 214 pp. $34.95

The history of childhood is an interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on age as a central category of analysis. To understand better the lives of children in the past and the cultures that defined them, childhood historians often integrate the methods and concerns of the social sciences, media and cultural studies, educational and intellectual history, and material-culture studies. Much recent childhood scholarship has converged on the post–World War II period, examining the influence of politics, institutions, and the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s on young people. Books in this vein include Mickenberg’s work on radical children’s literature, Delmont’s study of American Bandstand, and de Schweinitz’s research on children and the civil-rights movement.1 Holt’s Cold War Kids is a helpful contribution to this growing historiography.Holt seeks to understand the ways in which the presidential administrations of Truman and Eisenhower “reacted to special problems and needs associated with children and teenagers” (3). In particular, she examines the national discourse surrounding issues of education, health, and welfare in the postwar era. Faced with the prospect of growing prosperity and peacetime after years of depression and war, government entities took stock of the nation’s children and, in Holt’s words, asked, “Were existing programs enough, or did circumstances call for additional legislation and funding?” (7)Holt organizes her narrative around the 1950 and 1960 White House Conferences on Children and Youth. Though not the first of their kind—Theodore Roosevelt launched the series in 1909—the postwar conferences were notable for their new focus on “all children,” not just the economically and socially disadvantaged, as well as their call for more federal involvement in the lives of children. Holt recounts the planning, proceedings, and outcomes of the conferences by drawing extensively on archival materials housed at the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries. Her first chapter provides a useful history of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, and her three subsequent chapters concentrate separately on the topics of education, child welfare (delinquency and dependency in particular), and health (namely, nutrition, disease, and physical fitness).The book is at its best when Holt situates the work of various federal bureaus, committees, and departments within a larger cultural context. For instance, we learn that the President’s Council on Youth Fitness worried that television and suburban car culture might be contributing to the “subtle physical erosion” of America’s children (134). In her section on adoption, Holt explains how the efforts of the U.S. Children’s Bureau resonated with the postwar “obsession” with marriage, children, and family (82). At other times, the book could benefit from greater engagement with secondary sources that have already covered some of the more familiar ground in Cold War Kids, especially with regard to education in the 1950s (Kliebard, Clowse, Foster, and Hartman, for example, would all be vital resources for this kind of study).2

Conceptualizing Critical Qualitative Research In/Against Global Neoliberalisms

In the fall of 2010, a group of early childhood scholars concerned with the impact of neoliberalism on those who are younger met to discuss the situation and the various performances of neoliberalism in diverse local spaces. The global condition (as entangled neoliberal assemblages) requires new critical qualitative research perspectives and conceptualizations, unthought methods, and ways to center traditionally marginalized theories and understandings. This article introduces, and overviews, the qualitative research used by the various scholars in different locations around the globe from within a theoretical perspective that predominantly employs the Deleuze/Guattari notion of assemblage as applicable to qualitative research.

The theoretical costs of ignoring childhood: rethinking independence, insecurity, and inequality

Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in “the social studies of childhood,” sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology’s relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children’s perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children’s perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory.