Views Of Childhood Research Articles

As práticas adultocêntricas nas políticas públicas destinadas às infâncias no brasil: pistas para aproximações de um devir-erê

This article problematizes work practices with children, analyzing especially adult-centric practices and the ways in which they characterize public policies aimed at childhood in Brazil. Our study was based on the cartography method, which made it possible to monitor the uncertain psychosocial landscapes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It used methodological concepts from Institutional Analysis and the Sociology of Childhood, which intersected with elements of Afroperspectivist philosophy, such as represented among the Ibeji and the Erês. The methodological tool adopted was the Conversation Circle, carried out online, which operated as a group apparatus characterized by welcoming and sharing, where it was possible to gather and analyze data on adult-centric practices among workers from different public agencies in health, social assistance and education, aimed at children in the state of Espírito Santo. Research diaries were also produced, which were referred to in the analytic process. The text identifies several aspects of Erean adult’s views of childhood, and offers insight into the knowledge and practices that contribute to the process of becoming-Erê, a possibility that can be exercised at any stage of life.

Toys between the Ludic and the Pedagogical Perspective in Late 19th Century Romania

The paper proposes to identify what the 19th century brought as novelties in the “life” of toys, seen as items dedicated explicitly to children; I have focused, naturally, on the Romanian case. By correlating the accounts to which I had access, I was able to outline certain evolutions in the manufacture, use, purchase, and characteristics ascribed to toys in that period. I have noted, first of all, the social differentiation in terms of toy consumption. The lower classes – defined by their views of childhood, material resources and well-delimited systems of gratification/rewarding – used more or less the same games and toys. Wealthier classes recorded a more diversified consumption, with urban influences, while the children of the elites became increasingly familiar with the offers of the Western world, brought directly from the source or just copied here. Another highlighted aspect is the increase in standardisation and even the industrialisation of toy production.

The Historical Development of Out-of-School Education in Light of the Subculture of Childhood

The article examines the relationship between the development of the subculture of childhood and the evolution of out-of-school education. It identifies the historical stages of the influence of the subculture of childhood on the nature of extracurricular learning and development. We analyze the concepts of the “subculture of childhood” and “out-of-school education” in light of how they have influenced each other. We apply modern approaches to define these concepts. We consider various views of childhood as an independent phenomenon as well as how teachers have regarded children during different historical periods. We examine the main components of the world of childhood as they have been identified by ethnographers and teachers, including the concept of children’s folklore, which has come into its own as a distinct field of study, and games as the initial stage of child socialization. We consider various kinds of games. We consider the early history of how out-of-school education has been organized as a social activity that is aimed at ensuring the harmonious personal development of children by giving them the creative initiative and freedom of choice. We determine the stages and trajectories of the development of extracurricular education, which include folk learning, activities advanced by progressive public organizations and communities, and state-based offerings that are connected to the development of the subculture of childhood.

Views of childhood and knowledge of children

Views of childhood and knowledge of children

Insanity, philanthropy and emigration: dealing with insane children in late-nineteenth-century north-west England.

The historiography of asylums and insanity is dense, and some topics have received much scholarly attention but others, such as insanity among children, have been largely neglected. Children by no means formed the majority of asylum populations, but they still suffered from mental impairment and were admitted to these institutions in significant numbers. Identifying the various experiences of insane children is the central goal of this research, but the asylum will not be the sole emphasis. The focus is to place child mental deficiency within a broader context of extramural care. By examining workhouses, the role of family, and philanthropic attempts to deal with insane children, this article will move beyond current historical thinking on the topic; traditional views of childhood, insanity and charity will be challenged, and will show that a much wider world than the locality was accessible to the insane child.

“So Truly Afflicting and Distressing to Me His Sorrowing Mother”: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia

In 1781, Lowry Wister produced an eight-page account of her three-year son’s death from small pox. Lowry Wister’s narrative offers important insights into the emotional landscape of mothering, mourning, and religion in late eighteenth-century America. Religious and cultural prescriptions stressed restraint throughout the mourning process, and in particular admonished women to avoid excessive displays of grief. Lowry Wister’s emotional struggles as a “sorrowing mother” enable us to examine the relationship between individual experiences and prescribed expressions of grief and mourning. While eighteenth-century conventions stressed quiet resignation to God’s will, emerging cultural changes increasingly enabled – indeed, encouraged – women to give public voice to their private emotions. By the nineteenth century, sentimental views of childhood, along with a culture of mourning, inspired parents – especially mothers – to give full expression to intense feelings of loss and sorrow. Lowry Wister’s narrative reveals how women responded to and negotiated various religious, cultural and literary conventions that shaped their understandings of motherhood and mourning. Her narrative illustrates the various ways in which individual women challenged cultural norms and helped usher in new forms of emotional and literary expression. Comparisons of Wister’s narrative to other eighteenth-century women’s writings on grief and mourning further illuminate the interplay between cultural convention and individual expression.

The contemporary Gothic: Literacy and childhood in unsettled times

This paper argues that the revival of the Gothic as an expression of contemporary tensions and issues has significance for our views of childhood and, as a consequence, for literacy and literacy education. While the ways in which Gothic literature and other Gothic popular culture forms are used to speak to these tensions have shifted across time and place, they have, regardless, proved an enduring forum for the articulation of uncomfortable issues and anxieties. Constructions of childhood and the world in which children live are positioned within these larger social, economic and political currents and, more specifically, are cornerstones of perceptions of literacy, education and the literate citizen’s identity. It is from this stance that this paper examines the seepage of the Gothic into popular culture for children. The paper begins by acknowledging the significance of the contemporary Gothic and then moves on to consider how deeply the Gothic has seeped into popular culture, by examining a range of Gothic toys. If the contemporary Gothic revival is a marker of anxiety around identity, trust, authenticity and, to some extent, childhood itself, then how does this impact on the kinds of literate practices and moral economies associated with children? The paper explores this question.

The death of a discipline or the birth of a transdiscipline: subverting questions of disciplinarity within Education Studies undergraduate courses

As non‐teacher training courses in UK higher education in Education Studies have grown and developed in recent years they have received enormous interest. All of these Education Studies degrees claim to integrate a number of disciplines using an interdisciplinary or a multidisciplinary paradigm. Traditionally the systematic integration of disciplines within courses has created a range of lenses for focusing upon issues such as in medical sociology and health. However, by their very nature, Education Studies courses are complex and influenced by a number of factors such as the socio‐economic climate, political factors, changing technologies and the contemporary views of childhood as well as the changing and evolving socio‐constructions of childhood. Currently, Education Studies courses integrate a number of disciplines to investigate the learning process in context. There is a trend for Education Studies degrees to shift between terms of disciplinarity such as multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. This paper examines the nature of Education Studies degrees and tries to provoke the debate about the mono, inter, and multidisciplinarity nature of Education Studies. The paper promulgates that Education Studies by its nature and complexity cannot seek identity with any one of these approaches. It will suggest that, given the complexity of the context it serves to match, that instead Education Studies is embedded within transdisciplinarity.

‘All You Need Is Love, Love… Love Is All You Need’

This paper retells the story of the events that led up to the murder of James Bulger. It then explores the contribution of the video footage, captured on the surveillance equipment, to the construction of the ensuing moral panic. What then follows is a description of how the murder fed into wider cultural and political anxieties around children and childhood. These fears led directly to a change in the law in which the age of criminal responsibility was fixed at 10 years old. The last section of the paper explores Christian views of childhood and refers particularly to the work of the Religion, Culture and Family Project, University of Chicago and Rowan Williams. The paper finally argues that a new theology of/for children needs to be developed, one which is essentially concerned with the reproduction and recreation of society itself.

Special Educational Needs and Inclusion

This article first offers an overview of policy contexts in the four countries of the UK. Second, it reviews recent research into perspectives on special educational needs and inclusion in the preschool years. Third, the rationale and research design of a study to investigate preschool educators’ perspectives on these issues are outlined. Five key themes are discussed: their personal experiences; their professional development; their views of childhood; their thoughts on inclusion and exclusion, and their beliefs and practices around the roles of parents. The article concludes with discussion of the importance of greater cross-system understanding of curriculum, pedagogy and educational ethos and identifies the need for further research.

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.

Child of Our Time. Variations in adult views of childhood with age

Recent events concerning children that have received much prominence in the media, such as the murder of James Bulger, the shooting of 5‐year‐olds in Dunblane, the presumed abuse of children in the Orkneys, have focused attention on what it is to be a child and on whether or not childhood has changed in the recent past. Questions easily spring to mind: When is childhood thought to start? When does it end? How is it best described? What, in fact, is it? Such questions have a direct professional relevance to all those involved in education, whether informal or formal, whether as recipients or providers, for on our views of who and what children are, will depend how we treat them and, indeed, how we regard ourselves. This paper seeks to investigate how attitudes towards childhood may be thought to change with age. The investigation is part of a larger doctoral study at Birmingham University School of Education seeking to analyse adult perceptions of childhood, by use of a range of research instruments, including questionnaire, interview and prose testimony. The questionnaire findings reported here are endorsed by the findings from interview and prose scrutiny which are reported in the larger study.

Chinese Views of Childhood. Anne Behnke Kinney

<i>Chinese Views of Childhood</i>. Anne Behnke Kinney

Humor in group psychotherapy

It is interesting that something as omnipresent in human behavior as humor has been so neglected in the therapeutic literature. It may be that when a parallel is drawn between adult forms of humor and children's play a red flag goes up in technological-industrial cultures, where is held in high esteem and play appears to be its antithesis. As the industrial revolution gained momentum, explanations of human behavior (both biological and psychological) tended to be sober and pragmatic. Darwinian theory underlies much scholarly thinking. Behavior is understood in terms of its direct value for the organism's survival in a given context. Since there is no apparent value of play to human survival, investigators of play or humor risk having their seen as nonsubstantive. An additional complication for investigators is the existing mythology that shapes our views of childhood. Despite considerable economic and sexual exploitation of children (particularly virulent during the early days of the industrial revolution), childhood maintains its aura as a time of innocence and ease. Freud (1960), a man both ahead of his time and in it, paints this picture of the idyllic nature of childhood: Jokes and humor then provide the adult with an euphoria which is nothing other than the mood of a period of in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical in general with a small expenditure of energy the mood of our childhood, when we were incapable of jokes and when we had no need of humor to make us feel happy in our life (p. 236). Freud felt that play was largely confined to childhood, because, as the faculty of reasonableness strengthened, it destroyed the premise for play. He hypothesized that jokes serve the clandestine purpose of continuing pleasurable play because they are protections against the criticism of reason and serve to inhibit critical judgment. Play and humor enter the dialectic between the pleasure and reality principles as rebels against the compulsions of reality. Perhaps the implication is that humor, a form of play, helps us to bear the great weight of the real world. But Freud did not honor humor along with work and love as the things which give human meaning.

Empowerment-based Practice with Children

This article provides an overview of historical shifts in thought concerning the status and rights of children and discusses the implications of these competing views of childhood for social work practice. A beginning definition of empowerment-based practice is offered that draws from the concepts of locus of responsibility and locus of control. Based on this definition, several principles for empowerment-based practice with children are proposed. Examples drawn from child welfare practice illustrate the application of these principles.

Views of Childhood in Children’s Literature over Time

Views of Childhood in Children’s Literature over Time

A Distant Prospect: Eighteenth-Century Views of Childhood. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar 13 October 1979

A Distant Prospect: Eighteenth-Century Views of Childhood. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar 13 October 1979

Changing Views of Childhood and Their Effects on Continuity in the Teaching of Drawing

Changing Views of Childhood and Their Effects on Continuity in the Teaching of Drawing

Changing Views of Childhood

Changing Views of Childhood