How new is the "new" social study of childhood? The myth of a paradigm shift

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 553-576

  Ryan, Patrick J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 45749159010     PISSN: 00221953     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/jinh.2008.38.4.553     Document Type: Review

References (108)

1. For this school of thought, see Allison James and Alan Prout (eds.), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (London, 1990);
2. Gareth B. Matthews, The Philosophy of Childhood (New York, 1994);
3. Berry Mayall (ed.), Children's Childhoods: Observed and Experienced (London, 1994);
4. William Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood (Thousand Oaks, 1997);
5. James, Chris Jenks, and Prout, Theorizing Childhood (New York, 1998).
6. References to a "new paradigm" can be found throughout the literature, but see especially the articles and editorials in the journal Childhood: A Journal of Global Research;
7. Jens Qvortrup, Childhood as a Social Phenomenon: Lessons from an International Project (Vienna, 1991), 11.
8. See also James and Pia Christensen (eds.), Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices (London, 2000), 3-4;
9. Qvortrup, "Sociology of Childhood: Conceptual Liberation of Children," in Flemming Mouritsen and idem (eds.), Childhood and Children's Culture (Odense, 2002), 43-78.
10. More recent reflections on the "new" field are Allison and Adrian James, Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy, and Social Practice (London, 2004);
11. Prout, The Future of Childhood: Towards the Interdisciplinary Study of Childhood (New York, 2005). The current social study of the child is more diverse and less programmatically organized than the discussion herein can acknowledge.
12. In his review of Peter B. Pufall and Richard P. Unsworth, Rethinking Childhood (New Brunswick, 2004), Qvortrup claims, "A couple of decades ago a few scholars, most of them from Europe, began to talk about a new paradigm for research in childhood.
13. It soon developed into a larger interest gathering hundreds of scholars around the world and from several disciplines." Qvortrup laments that only one of the collection's contributors is from the inner "circle," the "founding parents," of this new field of sociological study, thus setting up his criticism of Pufall and Unsworth's collection for failing to support the "main pillars" of the "paradigm" (Children & Society, XIX [2005], 338-339).
14. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962);
15. Michel Foucault (trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith), The Archeology of Knowledge (New York, 2003; orig. pub. 1969).
16. Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood, 4;
17. Qvortrup, "Childhood as a Social Phenomenon Revisited," in Manuela de Bois-Reymond, Heinz Sunker, and Heinz-Hermann Kruger (eds.), Childhood in Europe: Approaches-Trends-Findings (New York, 2001), 217, 223.
18. James and Christensen, Research with Children, 2000, xi;
19. Qvortrup, "Conceptual Liberation," 45-50.
20. Childhood researchers have offered a number of different ways to deal with the dualisms. Qvortrup's approach closely parallels Anthony Gidden's concept of "structuration," in The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, 1984).
21. See Qvortrup's call for a "macroanalysis" of childhood in Childhood as a Social Phenomenon and in "Macroanalysis of Childhood," in James and Christensen (eds.), Research with Children, 77-97.
22. A second route, advocated by Prout, The Future of Childhood, 10-11,
23. and Nick Lee, Childhood and Human Value (New York, 2005), attempts to circumvent modern dualisms more fundamentally. Lee coins the term "separability" to articulate a space between the polar ideals of children as autonomous rights-holding individuals, and parental and state legal coverture of children. A third approach is provided by Hecht, At Home in the Street and After Life, who examines dualism's power to create the fictions by which we live.
24. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 187-188, claims that natural science cannot dissolve "inescapable frameworks." According to Taylor, the most entrenched dualism is good/bad, which emerges from the human need to fashion an identity. Taylor situates the subject-object dualism within modernity, but he also seems to ground his metaphysics in ahistorical assumptions about identity and childhood that emerged from this dualism.
25. The historical relationship between the liberal ideal of the competent individual and modern childhood, which Taylor takes as transcendent, is historicized in Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, 2005).
26. James, Jenks, and Prout, Theorizing Childhood, 3-36, 206.
27. In 2004, Allison James and Adrian James refined Figure 1 by introducing law as a mechanism of temporal continuity and change between the four quadrants in Constructing Childhood, 48-77.
28. Prout, The Future of Childhood, 68-69, has since criticized it as merely "heuristic play" that does not help to transcend the dualisms of modernity.
29. Cartesian diagrams can simplify complex realities, but they are not particularly useful in sorting out protean differences of opinion. For other examples of Cartesian charts, see Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), 201;
30. Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York, 1993),
31. which deploys Mary Tew Douglas' group-grid theory; Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1970).
32. The appropriateness of the label "social actor theory" may be debatable because "social actor theory" is often used within the field to refer to those studies that stress children's agency. In addition, the term is intended to cover the discursive approaches that focus on the social construction of childhood, and the structural approaches treat children as members of age-based groups.
33. Gesell opened the Yale clinic in 1911. On "normative summaries," see Arnold Gesell, The Mental Growth of the Pre-School Child: A Psychological Oultine of Normal Development From Birth to the Sixth Year (New York, 1925), 24-36, 376-397;
34. Dan Beekman, The Mechanical Baby: A Popular History of the Theory and Practice of Child Raising (Westport, 1977), 154-160;
35. Martin Woodhead and Heather Montgomery, Understanding Childhood: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Chichester, 2003), 99;
36. American Academy of Pediatrics, "Developmental Stages," http://www.aap.org/healthtopics/Stages.cfm (16 August 16, 2007).
37. Freud (trans. James Strachey), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York, 1962; orig. pub. 1905).
38. Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of Physical Causality (New York, 1930);
39. idem, The Child's Construction of Quantities: Conservation and Atomism (London, 1974; orig. pub. 1942).
40. For a defense of stage theories of childhood, see William C. Crain, "Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development," in Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications (Upper Saddle River, 2003; orig. pub. 1980), 188-136.
41. Freud (ed. Philip Rieff ), "Family Romances," in The Sexual Enlightenment of Children (New York, 1963; orig. pub. 1907), 41-46.
42. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets (Chicago, 1972; orig. pub. 1909), 8-9, 161.
43. Burrhus F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis (New York, 1938);
44. idem, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, 1972);
45. idem, Cumulative Record: A Selection of Papers (New York, 1972), 567-572.
46. For a recent debate about how to interpret "Baby in the Box," in Ladies Home Journal, 62 (October 1945), 30-31, 135-136, 138,
47. see Deborah Skinner Buzan, "I was Not a Lab Rat," The Guardian, 12 March 2004;
48. Martin Woodhead and Dorothy Faulkner, "Subjects, Objects, or Participants? Dilemmas of Psychological Research with Children," in Christiansen and James (eds.), Research with Children, 9-35.
49. Radical behaviorism is by no means defunct. See Jennifer Gonnerman, "School of Shock," Mother Jones, XXXII (2007), 36-50.
50. For a discussion of Inkeles and Parsons, see Corsaro, Sociology of Childhood, 8-11.
51. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York, 1963; orig. pub. 1950).
52. Margaret Mead, "An Investigation of the Thought of Primitive Children, with Special Reference to Animism," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, LXII (1932), 173-190;
53. Lev Vygotsky (ed. Michael Cole et al.), Mind and Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes (New York, 1978).
54. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford, 1959), v;
55. Philippe Ariès (trans. Robert Baldick), Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962), 128.
56. Barabara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York, 1986), 171, 187.
57. Unfortunately for Ariès, the frequently cited claim that in "medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist" is not usually quoted with the remainder of the sentence - "this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken, or despised" (128). Secondly, this claim only summarizes the first third of the book. The section in which it appears is entitled "The Two Concepts of Childhood," which conforms to the argument in the rest of the text that the "modern" concept of childhood - "the particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult" - "did not exist" in the Middle Ages. A truncated read-ing of Ariès remains current. See especially Albrect Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (New York, 2005).
58. For a critique of the backlash against Ariès, see James A. Schultz, The Knowledge of Childhood in the Middle Ages, 1100-1300 (Philadelphia, 1995).
59. For examples of the developmentalist reaction, see Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (New York, 1983);
60. Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990);
61. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York, 1993).
62. Oscar Handlin (ed.), Children of the Uprooted (New York, 1966);
63. idem and Mary Handlin, Facing Life: Youth and the Family in American History (Boston, 1971);
64. Philip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970);
65. idem, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York, 1977);
66. Glen H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago, 1974). Childhood and youth are central to the voluminous literature in sociology and history dealing with the American "tradition of individualism" and its contradictions.
67. Recent examples include James E. Block, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2002);
68. idem, "The Politics of Modern Childhood: American Socialization and the Crisis of Individualism," in Jim Goddard et al. (eds.), The Politics of Childhood: International Perspectives, Contemporary Developments (New York, 2005), 32-49.
69. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (Garden City, 1985), 61;
70. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York, 1988).
71. Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner published a book-length annotated bibliography of the history of childhood, American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (Westport, 1985).
72. On children, youth, and schools, see Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977), 38-62, 173-214;
73. Julia Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools: Chicago, 1900-1950 (New Brunswick, 1982);
74. J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York, 1985);
75. William Graebner, "Outlawing Teenaged Populism: The Campaign against Secret Societies in the American High School, 1900-1960," Journal of American History, LXXIV (1987), 411-435;
76. Reed Ueda, Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (New York, 1987);
77. Paula Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York, 1989);
78. Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Post-War Era (Philadelphia, 1990).
79. For a more detailed review of the educational literature in the United States, see Ryan, "A Case Study in the Cultural Origins of a Superpower: Liberal Individualism, American Nationalism, and the Rise of High School Life - A Study of Cleveland's Central and East Technical High Schools, 1890-1918," History of Education Quarterly, XLV (2005), 66-95.
80. Walter I. Trattner, "Street Traders: Little Merchants on the Road to Success? Or Exploited Youngsters on the Road to Oblivion?" History of Education Quarterly, XXVI (1986), 407-411;
81. idem, Crusade for Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago, 1970).
82. For the origins of childhood in early modern Britain and Anglo-America, see, especially, Christopher Hill's chapters "The Spiritualization of the Household" and "Individuals and Communities" in Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1967; orig. pub. 1964), 443-500;
83. Greven, The Protestant Temperament (New York, 1977);
84. C. John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens, 1992);
85. James Christian Steward, The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830 (Berkeley, 1995);
86. Brewer, By Birth or Consent.
87. Excellent overviews can be found in Colin M. Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (New York, 2003), 19-31;
88. Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (Harlow, England, 2005; orig. pub. 1995), 41-80.
89. Locke (ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov), Some Thoughts on Concerning Education; Of the Conduct of the Understanding (Indianapolis, 1996; orig. pub. London, 1693 and 1706, respectively), 24, 39-40, 51-61, 98.
90. Locke, Some Thoughts, 36;
91. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (ed. and trans. Allan Bloom), Emile or On Education (New York, 1979; orig. pub. Paris, 1762), 65-69, 74, 80-95.
92. Dorothy Johnson, "Engaging Identity: Portraits of Children in Late Eighteenth-Century European Art," in Anja Muller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century: Age and Identity (Burlington, 2006), 15.
93. See also the essays by Anthony Krupp on the psychology of children as social actors in the eighteenth-century journal Know Thyself, as well as the chapters by Christoph Houswitschka and Bernadette Fort.
94. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York, 1981; orig. pub. 1854), 76-83.
95. Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Theme in English Literature (Baltimore, 1967), 29.
96. Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (Eugene, 2000; orig. pub. 1849), 10-11.
97. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother's Book (Bedford, 1992; orig. pub. 1831), 72, 38, 110, 9, 22, 167, 128, 38; on self-denial, 4, 5, 134, 39, 15, 112, 113, 114, 120, 135, 109.
98. Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York, 1916), 146.
99. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi et al., Talented Teenagers: The Roots of Success and Failure (New York, 1993);
100. Donald Arnstine, Democracy and the Arts of Schooling (Albany, 1995).
101. Myra Bluebond-Langner, The Private Worlds of Dying Children (Princeton, 1978), 105;
102. George Herbert Mead (ed. C. Morris), Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago, 1934);
103. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, 1959);
104. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism; Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, 1969).
105. Carey's children lack both the mental development required to understand the difference between life and death and the perspective needed to manipulate social institutions. Susan Carey, Conceptual Change in Childhood (New York, 1985), 17.
106. Bluebond-Langner, Private Worlds, 210, 228-229, 119, 127-128, 204, 206, 234.
107. Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children (Boston, 1986), 7, 9, 26, 31-53.
108. Although he did not note the importance of childhood, my interpretation of Las Meninas and its relationship to the central paradox of human science is indebted to Foucault, Order of Things, 3-16, 312.