Is Childhood in Crisis?

Is childhood in crisis?

Introduction: What is Childhood?

The dominant and prevailing western representation of childhood conceptualizes an idealized world of innocence and joy; a period of fantastic freedom, imagination and seamless opportunity. Children are thought to occupy the space provided by a 'walled garden' which protects them from 'the harshness of the world outside' (Burr, 1995:22). The adult-child relation is said to provide protection: serving the 'best interests of the child' and meeting 'children's needs'. The adult is guardian and is charged with responsibility for the child's welfare. Such popular understanding and cultural representation is underpinned by a particular form of what Shamgar-Handelman (1994:250) refers to as 'emotional, value-laden and moralistic rhetoric' which accommodates an 'unquestioning, complacent acceptance of whatever social, educational and political arrangements have arisen to cope with them [children]' (Scarre, 2009: x).

This childhood 'reality' is questionable, demanding critical evaluation. Accordingly, concepts such as the 'good of the child', the 'best interests of the child' and 'children's needs' have been challenged (Rodham, 2006), as have idealistic representations of childhood as an unproblematic period of innocence, freedom, limited responsibility and minimal obligations (Postman, 2002; Winn, 2003). Moreover, the very nature and application of power which characterizes the child-adult relation and the uncritical acceptance of the protective imperative cannot be sustained.

This analysis moves the focus from notions of protection to concepts of exclusion, regulation and subordination whereby the 'walled garden' is reconstructed in a form within which childhood is experienced 'not as a garden but as a prison' (Burr, 1995:23), or what Gura (1994:102) describes as a 'virtual ghetto...a world cut off from the interests and activities of society at large'. This is not a world of freedom and opportunity but one of confinement and limitation in which children are 'wholly subservient and dependent', being seen as 'a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet' (Burr, 1995:15). Further, this can be a world of isolation, sadness, exploitation, oppression, cruelty and abuse (Campbell, 2008; Hall and Lloyd, 1993; Miller, 1997).

To dichotomize and juxtapose these theoretical models of the child-adult relation reveals fundamentally different ways of seeing and understanding the very essence of contemporary childhood. Paradoxically, however, such models as far as they are developed here, are essentially similar in that they rest implicitly on a biologically determined or naturalistic construction of childhood. In this context childhood is represented as a fact of human life with biology determining children's dependency on adults to provide care. The social, political and economic dimensions of the adult-child power relation are absent from this analysis. While immaturity and dependence may be biological facts of life, however, James and Prout (1997:7) contend that 'the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture. It is these "facts of culture" which may vary and which can be said to make of childhood a social institution.' (James & Prout, 1997, 38-172)

In this sense childhood is not a static, objective and universal fact of human nature, but a social construction which is both culturally and historically determined. The conceptualization of childhood as a social, cultural and historical construction is derived in the work of the French historian Philippe Ariès who claims that in 'medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist', as once the 'child' moved from the biological dependence of 'infancy' it 'belonged to adult society' (Ariès, 2002:125). Drawing on a range of medieval cultural evidence, including diaries and paintings, Ariès contends that children were indiscernible from adults as they dressed, behaved and conversed similarly, and were engaged in the same social activities and work. Effectively, they were miniature adults. According to Ariès' analysis the concept of childhood as a discrete life stage emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries as part of a process driven by two primary imperatives.

Historical analysis, involving identification, mapping and a critical examination of the processes within which childhood is constructed, 'discovered' (Scarre, 2009:7) or 'invented' (Suransky, 2002) has been central to contemporary debates. While this has been a complex task, fraught with difficulties (Jordanova, 2009; Pollock, 2003:65-6), it has formed the foundations on which to build critical analysis and to challenge prevalent ideologies and academic orthodoxies in relation to understanding children's experiences of childhood. (James & Prout, 1997, 38-172)

Childhood Crisis Analysis: Social Construction and Reconstruction

The central contention here is that at any historical moment childhood will be constructed around a complex interplay of competing social, economic and political priorities. This is not intended to negate the primary significance of biological relations, but to shift the focus from notions of naturalistic determinism to an analysis of the conceptual relativity of childhood within history. The limitations imposed here confine the historical analysis to a review of the constructions and reconstructions of childhood during the last two centuries. (James & Prout, 1997, 38-172)

The consolidation of industrial capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century comprised, in the words of Tobias (2007:255) a 'society in violent economic and social transition'. Indeed, the simultaneous processes of mushrooming urbanization and industrialization, massive population shift and internal migration, a developing political consciousness and militancy among sections of the working class, and the proliferation of abject poverty, destitution and homelessness, were material manifestations of a period of unprecedented social, economic and political change (see Engels, 2008; Hobsbawn, 2008; Jenkins, 2000). Within this climate of flux and uncertainty the prevalent bourgeois construction of childhood and its concomitant 'domestic ideal' (Mills and Mills 1990b) had little relevance (or application) to the material realities of the working-class child.

As the century progressed, however, a developing humanitarianism and revulsion against the working conditions of the child combined to initiate