Social Construction Of Childhood Research Articles

Childhood and Family in Contemporary Children's Fiction: Resilience, Agency, and Emerging Gender Norms

New awareness of re-thinking childhood in the emergent field of childhood studies inspires production of new discourse on social construction of childhood in literature. This paper looks at contemporary children’s literature in the Philippines from this perspective and within the context of the globalization and transnationalization of care giving. Its interrogation of selected children’s books and literature for young adult reveals that the traditional concept of childhood is now being challenged and resisted. Cognizant of the need to sustain this direction of literary production, this paper posits that children’s literature in the country should mainstream this new thinking so that it can become a meaningful venue for Filipino children’s socialization and construction in light of the increasingly complex world that children need to deal with.

Mapping Students' Lives: Children's Geographies, Teaching and Learning

The relatively new field of children's geographies builds on the theoretical foundations of human geography, critical geography, and spatial theories to examine the places and spaces children inhabit and create. This article reviews four major themes in children's geographies relevant to education: exclusion and agency, the social construction of childhood, children's geographies across the globe, and children's spaces beyond the classroom. Children's geographies' unique perspective on the spatial experiences of young people offers new ways to understand issues in education theory, pedagogy, and practice.

An overwhelming sense of injustice? An exploration of child sexual abuse in relation to the concept of justice

This article explores the relationship between justice and child sexual abuse, developing a broader theoretical conception of justice than that customarily applied. The traditional legal perception of justice as the attempted prosecution of alleged perpetrators is widened to encompass justice as initial prevention of abuse, the fair treatment of children by the criminal justice and child protection systems, and the subsequent after-care and compensation of abused children and adults. Concepts of justice are therefore examined within a chronological lifecourse trajectory, as well as being extended from traditional notions of due process and desert to include understandings of justice as human rights, ‘fair shares’ and liberation. Particular social constructions of childhood are revealed to be highly significant regarding how justice is perceived and operationalized. Therefore, the interaction between perceptions of justice and responses to child sexual abuse is examined, relative to wider understandings of childhood.

Reflections of a Researcher on the use of a Child-Centred Approach

Abstract The ‘new’ sociology of childhood has drawn academic attention to the relationship between the social construction of childhood and the place of children in research. Recent shifts in thinking have allowed for children to be regarded as active social agents who make choices and negotiate their social and intellectual pathways around existing adult controls. Thus, academics have had to begin to consider how research can be conducted with children rather than on them. This paper reflects on the experience of undertaking child-centred research and debates the extent to which children can, in reality, be central to all elements of the research process. It refers to the author’s own research experiences in order to highlight the factors which serve to facilitate and inhibit research with children. Crucially, the author engages with the notion that child-centred or child-focused research requires that children are active rather than passive partners to the researcher.

The ‘picaninny wage’. An historical overview of the persistence of structural inequality and child labour in South Africa

This paper considers the recruitment of children and youths in colonial and post colonial South Africa. It explores the early legislation that transformed the nature of childhood in pre-colonial South Africa, and contributes to emerging scholarship on social constructions of childhood. The paper draws attention to historical shifts and continuities in the nature of child labour, and in relation to economic exploitation, racial oppression and childhood agency. Spanning the eras of pre-colonial relations of production, child slavery in the 1600s, and children's work under colonial rule in the mining, domestic service, and agricultural industries, this paper considers the differential configurations of the labour demands of children. Working against the tendency to regard child labour as a sentimental human rights issue, this paper provides a critical perspective against which to focus on contemporary debates about the rights of children in post-apartheid South Africa, and redress the participation of children in processes of total social reproduction.

Children These Days, * Nicola Madge, * Bristol, The Policy Press, 2006, ISBN 1861347839, 17.99

My impression on first reading this book was that it was of limited application, as it dealt mainly with the views of white English children. On re-reading the book, I found it to be a modest contribution to the child rights movement. If children’s views are to influence policies and services, then their views need to be collected and explored in a scientific manner. The title of the book is a tongue-in-cheek double take on the stereotypic response of adults to children’s behaviour or attitudes that they find offensive. The underlying twin objectives of the book are to challenge the stereotypic view of children and to give a snapshot of the views of a sample of children living in contemporary England. Data were collected from 2,000 pupils from eleven primary and secondary schools and 500 adults in England via the use of self-completed questionnaires. The book comprises ten chapters. The first is rather philosophical and deals mainly with the social construction of childhood—a debate that mirrors that of the radical youth movement of the 1980s. The second deals with the research methodology. The next seven chapters follow a similar structure, comprising a general discussion of the literature and data adduced to support the points made, and each deals with the themes emanating from the research: the experience of contemporary childhood in the UK; the thin line between control and protection; the status of children; the perceived relationship between children and adults; and children’s priorities for action and change. The last chapter—‘Findings and messages’—draws together the major findings and teases out the implications for policy and practice in children’s services.

Continuity and change in the visions of childhood in head start: Implications for early childhood teacher educators

This article explores continuity and change in the dominant social constructions of childhood, using a case study of Head Start, and examines their implications for the content of teacher education programs. I argue that it is important to understand how young children are viewed by society, because these understandings shape early childhood policy and practice, including the practice of teacher education. The main research questions are: What are the dominant views of childhood that have shaped the development of the Head Start program? What explicit attention might programs of early childhood teacher educators give to these views? After providing a brief history of the origins of Project Head Start during the War on Poverty, I discuss how the goals for Head Start, and for the children it serves, have evolved over the past several decades. I argue that there has been a shift from a holistic view of children's early development and learning to a more narrow view that prioritizes the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills. While there have been dramatic changes, there also have been aspects of continuity in how Head Start children have been portrayed over time. In particular, a deficit orientation in the conception of poor children's capacities and the perceived need for a compensatory approach to address their needs has persisted since the program's inception in the 1960s. The article concludes with possible implications of this analysis for early childhood teacher education.

Early Care and Education Policies in Sweden: Implications for the United States

The major lesson for the U.S. to take from Sweden is a fidelity to values that cherish children and that acknowledge the special nature of childhood, according to Ms. Kagan and Ms. Hallmark. IMAGINE a Swedish 4-year-old as he starts his first day of preschool. He enters a beautiful building with no concrete parking lot surrounding it, no fenced-in playground. Rather, his school overlooks a forest on one side and the seashore on the other. There is also a yard to play in, a pond, an herb garden, and a playhouse, and the entire school is surrounded by planting areas where he will observe and participate in the miracles of nature. His teacher is university trained and will engage him in activities that will develop and stretch his young mind as well as his young body. This little preschooler will help to plan his own activities, too: he will have access to a function room for reading, music, and art; a computer room and a library; and an open room for gymnastics and play when he is not taking walks through the forest or pretending that he has stepped back hundreds of years in time to trace the steps of his Viking ancestors. Of course, if he is not a native of Sweden, this preschooler will also be encouraged to share his own heritage with his classmates and to continue to speak his native tongue while he builds his skills in the language of his new country. What is so unique about this child's experience is that it is not unique. Almost all young children in Sweden, as well as their parents, are involved in preschool programs like the one described - programs that are guided by clear goals for children's development as well as clear pedagogical and curricular principles. Such settings are inspiring, and they yield great quantities of productive work by young children, including the following poem that describes the sentiments of a young child in the Swedish Bracelet preschool: Here, I am never afraid. Here, I am accepted and liked. Here, I know what I'm allowed to do and what I'm not allowed to do and why these limits exist. Here, others listen to me. Here, I meet tolerance and understanding and I am helped with the things I find difficult. Here, they see what I am good at and tell me. Here, I may try new ideas and make my own choice. Here, I can sense that what I think, feel, and wish is of importance. Here, I feel that I am accepted and that I am somebody. What does it take to produce such conditions? We maintain that in order for any nation to provide a system of rich and appropriate services for its young children, it must begin by discerning how it regards children and childhood. How does the nation think about childhood? What role do children assume in society? What are society's obligations toward children, and theirs, if any, toward society? The responses to such questions constitute a nation's social construction of childhood that guides its thinking about and policies for young children. Indeed, it might be said that a nation's success in developing a high-quality system of early care and education is predicated on the match between that nation's social construction of childhood and the services it proffers. Such a vision is not necessarily programmatic, such as a national curriculum or a set of national standards. Rather, the social construction of childhood is a set of beliefs and principles about children that frame policy stances. The United States has traditionally lacked such a clear, nationally held, collective vision of children and childhood. The result is a history of inconsistent and episodic policy starts and stops. One nation, however, for which the vision of children and childhood is very clear is Sweden. This keen perspective has translated into an early care and education system that is both exemplary and inspiring. While not adaptable in total to the U.S. context, the Swedish system provides a constructive counterpoint to U. …

Analysing the sexual abuse of children by workers in residential care homes: Characteristics, dynamics and contributory factors

This article analyses why workcrkhild s m l abuse occurs in residential children's homes. The importance of previously documented features, such as inadequate complaints and whistle blowing procedures, and poor vetting, training and supervision of stafi arc acknowledged. This exposition, however, concentrates on the tactics abusers employ to groom, entrap and silence children, whilst simultaneously controlling and silencing non-abusive staff. The success of these tactics is then contatualised within notions ojwebcrian rational-legal bureaucratic and charismatic power. as well as the location ofsomeabusers within entrenched pedophilenetworks. Contributory jactors, such as the enclosed and institutionaliscd nature of many settings and the inadequate, gendcrcd and haophobic manner in which stafloften deal with both sexuality and sexual abuse issues are also m i n e d and analyscd, as arc children's own gendcred prc-conceptions. Important theoretical constructions utiliscd include Goffman's theory of 'total institutions', the social construction ofchildhood, includingchitdhoodasdity and the concept of'organisation sexuality'.

Securing the Welfare of Children: Policies Past, Present, and Future

For the past century in the United States, the welfare of children has been considered a legitimate concern of government, but recent analyses have been critical of the efforts of the public child welfare system. This paper places the contemporary child welfare system, and its failures, in a sociocultural context, from an international perspective. The social construction of childhood is analyzed, and the ways that this construction marks children as a class in need of protection are discussed. Recent global demographic changes that affect the welfare of children are presented. Policies to secure the welfare of children are placed first in historical context, and then analyzed as they currently exist in fragmented late-industrial societies with multiple sites of authority. Following this analysis, future policy directions are recommended.

"The Kindergarten of New Consciousness": Gwendolyn Brooks and the Social Construction of Childhood

We watch strange moods fill our children, and our hearts swell with pain. The streets, with their noise and flaring lights, taverns, automobiles, and poolrooms claim them, and no voice of ours can call them back.... We cannot keep them in school; more than 1,000,000 of our black boys and girls of high school age are not in school.... It is not their eagerness fight that makes us afraid, but that they go death on city pavements faster than even disease and starvation can take them. As courts and morgues become crowded with our lost children, hearts of officials of city grow cold toward us. (Wright 136) I GIVE YOU MY GALLERY. So many boys. Boys. Lincoln West. Merle. Ulysses. Shabaka. Martin D. The Near- Johannesburg Boy. Diego. Kojo. Seven boys in a poolroom during schooltime. The Pool Players, Seven at The Golden Shovel- We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die Die Today, many such boys--their girl friends, too--EXPECT die soon. In Chicago. In New York. In Springfield, in Philadelphia. In Whatalotago, Alabama. In Detroit. (In Washington D.C.?) They do not expect become twenty-one. They are designing their funerals. Their caskets will be lined with Kente cloth. They choose their music: they want rap, they want Queen Latifah. (Brooks, Rep art from Part Two 123-24) In Report from Part One, Gwendolyn Brooks gives an account of her conversion Black [1] militancy at 1967 Fisk Writers' Conference. Impressed by energy and anger in work of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and others, Brooks recognized that there is indeed a new black today. Acknowledging that for most of her life secretly [she] had felt that be black was good, she writes that she had 'gone gamut' from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters a surprised queenhood in new black sun. I...am qualified, Brooks proclaims, to enter at least of new now (84). Since In Mecca (1968), Brooks has published her work exclusively with Black presses such as Broadside, Third World Press, and her own David Company, work characterized by a turn toward free verse as well as increasingly direct political content. Although kindergarten of new consciousness fostered in Brooks a new Black identity an d a new sense of Black people as her primary audience, her poetry, as she insisted in an interview with Claudia Tate, has always been 'politically aware' (42). Part of her political project has been a clear-eyed, tough, and compassionate look at plight of children. From A Street in Bronzeville (1945) present, Brooks's work has used image and voice of child negotiate a complex poetic strategy that explores as a position from which critique prevailing constructs of class and race. For Brooks, subject of childhood represents a means through which she can interrogate and unmask dominant notions of domesticity and child-rearing as part of her own radical social and poetic agenda. Childhood as a subject would gain force in '40s and '50s for other American poets, including Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Randall Jarrell. But for most poets subject of childhood was steeped in nostalgia, indicative of growing trend toward introspection among White intellectuals occasioned by rise of a newly psychologized self. By contrast, Brooks chose write about the children of poor, borrow title of her sonnet sequence from Annie Allen. Critic Gary Smith argues that, if Brooks's poetry about adults is bleak, her poetry about children is even more so (130): Her children do not exist in a pastoral world apart from socioeconomic and psychological problems that beset her adult characters. …

New Zealand children in the 1990s: beneficiaries of New Right economic policy?

This paper questions the extent to which New Zealand children have benefited from New Right economic policies and argues that the invisibility of children, the role of public concern about children and the social construction of childhood are factors which have facilitated implementation of these changes. Attention is drawn to the ways in which the personal and the political spheres intersect in children's lives. Rather than focusing on either the micro level of intervention in the lives of individual children or the macro level of societal change it is argued that the dualism itself must be transcended in order to move forward from the current position. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Historical Development of the Child Welfare System in Latin America

Using the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a powerful advocacy tool, the children's rights movement in Latin America has accomplished significant advances in the promotion of children's entitlements and welfare over the last decade. Specifically, there has been a measure of success in advancing legal reforms aimed at adjusting domestic laws to the standards set forth in the Convention. However, the recognition of formal entitlements in the new legislations has not been accompanied by a comparable improvement in service provision to the children of the poorer sectors of society, which constitute the vast majority of youngsters in this region. To a great extent, this lag can be explained by the structural constraints that limit the pace of reforms within the welfare state apparatus in developing economies, the legacies of past institutional arrangements and the contradictory ideological undercurrents present in the social construction of childhood in societies characterized by profound class cleavages. From this perspective, this article attempts to provide historical clues for the understanding of some of the challenges faced by most present-day child welfare systems in Latin America.

Pump Up the Volume

This article seeks to build on the theoretical advances made by the new sociology of childhood by exploring how recently postulated models of childhood might be applied to an analysis and understanding of an important issue relating to children and childhood which is currently the subject of considerable debate - the welfare of children in separation and divorce and the policy and practice issues surrounding this. It is argued that while these theoretical models offer some valuable insights, their explanatory power and applicability to issues affecting the lives of children can be considerably enhanced by an empirical focus on the role of law as a key influence in the social construction of childhood and by the addition of a temporal dimension to reflect the dynamic nature of such a process.

Global problems and the culture of capitalism

Global problems and the culture of capitalism

Old World News: The Greater the Ignorance, The Greater the Dogmatism

Sir William Osler's aphorism of a century ago still rings true of some parts of medical practice. It was brought to mind by a pair of articles in the last Hastings Center Report of 1997 that examined the abilities of children and adolescents to make decisions about their health care. Their conclusions seemed extraordinary when viewed from this side of the Pond. Lainie Friedman Ross argued that moves by the American Academy of Pediatrics to allow children a greater say in health care decisions as they mature were mistaken, and that parents should retain ultimate decisionmaking power until their offspring were eighteen years old. Robert Weir and Charles Peters offered, in American terms, a more liberal view, suggesting that cognitively normal adolescents have the capacity to make health care decisions and could even be able to make advance directives. Neither offered significant empirical evidence in support. This unwillingness to take children seriously--ostensibly to protect them, but often just to retain adult power over them--is part of an increasingly confused picture of childhood in the United States. The United States is one of only two countries worldwide not to have signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is also one of only six countries worldwide that judicially kill people for crimes committed while they were children. The impression given is that the United States is content to ignore how people elsewhere think about, or protect, childhood. One reads papers in leading American medical journals no longer just with concern, but sometimes with positive distaste for the way that primary work in Europe is ignored. The papers by Weir and Peters and by Ross show the dangers of such ignorance. Their reasoning is based largely in Piaget's ideas of child development, many of which are now thought to be wrong. They ignore the wealth of mainly European work on the meaning and social construction of childhood and on young children's experiences, and, in particular, a series of empirical studies by Priscilla Alderson on how health care decisions can be made with children.[1] Alderson showed that children as young as six or seven, with experience of a chronic disorder, could make informed, competent decisions about major surgical interventions. I recall, over twenty years ago, negotiating an agreement with someone even younger: a four-year-old girl with leukemia. In the days before Hickman lines, she needed a weekly IV for chemotherapy. The agreement was that she could scream as much as she wanted during needle placement, but would keep her hand still. She always kept her side of the agreement, because she was in control, and later added to it by giving a toffee to any doctor who got the needle in first time! …

The Social Construction of Childhood: Child Care and Education Policies in Italy and the United States

Welfare states and their policies have come to define and shape childhood experiences. This paper compares policies in Italy and the United States on the care and education of children from birth to 10 years of age. The two countries differ both in the extent of government intervention and the criteria they use to single out groups with particular needs. There are two main consequences of these different approaches: first, differences in the perception of a normal child's experiences; and second, differences in the definition by which social rights are granted. Families in the two countries employ different resources and encounter unique limitations in defining and satisfying their children's needs.

The Social Construction of Childhood: Child Care and Education Policies in Italy and the United States

The Social Construction of Childhood: Child Care and Education Policies in Italy and the United States