The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies [1 ed.] 1473942926, 9781473942929

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THE SAGE Encyclopedia of

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES

Editorial Board Editor Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden

Associate Editors Sarada Balagopalan Rutgers University–Camden

Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus

Matthew Prickett Independent Scholar

Editorial Board Tatek Abebe Norwegian University of Science and Technology Jill Bradbury University of the Witwatersrand

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein University of Reading Ingrid Palmary University of the Witwatersrand

Erica Burman University of Manchester

Ann Phoenix Institute of Education, University College London

Lise Claiborne University of Waikato

Bengt Sandin Linköping University

Marisol Clark-Ibáñez California State University San Marcos

Oddbjorg Skiær Ulvik Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science

Raquel S. L. Guzzo Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas Karl Hanson University of Geneva

Hans Skott-Myhre Kennesaw State University

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES 1 Editor Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden

FOR INFORMATION:

Copyright © 2020 by SAGE Publications, Ltd. © Introduction and editorial arrangement by Daniel Thomas Cook, 2020

SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 18 Cross Street #10-10/11/12 China Square Central Singapore 048423

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All trade names and trademarks recited, referenced, or reflected herein are the property of their respective owners who retain all rights thereto. Printed in the UK. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cook, Daniel Thomas, 1961- editor. Title: The SAGE encyclopedia of children and childhood studies / editor, Daniel Thomas Cook, Rutgers University. Description: Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications, Inc, 2020. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019057010 | ISBN 9781473942929 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781529721829 (epub) | ISBN 9781529721959 (epub) | ISBN 9781529721690 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Children–Encyclopedias. | Child psychology– Encyclopedias. | Pediatrics–Encyclopedias. Classification: LCC HQ767.84 S34 2020 | DDC 305.2303–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057010

Acquisitions Editor: Natalie Aguilera Editorial Assistant: Umeeka Raichura

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Development Editor: Sanford Robinson Production Editor: Astha Jaiswal Copy Editor: Hurix Digital Typesetter: Hurix Digital Proofreaders: Ellen Brink, Caryne Brown, Theresa Kay, Scott Oney Indexer: Integra Cover Designer: Candice Harman Marketing Manager: Chazelle Keeton

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Contents Volume 1 List of Entries   vii Reader’s Guide   xv About the Editor   xxiii Contributors  xxv Introduction  xxxv Entries A 1 C 173 B 91

Volume 2 List of Entries   vii Entries C (Cont.) 447 F 741 D 589 G 809 E 683

Volume 3 List of Entries   vii Entries H 887 M 1073 I 939 N 1123 J 1011 O 1153 K 1033 P 1179 L 1045 Q 1319

Volume 4 List of Entries   vii Entries

R 1335 V 1629 S 1391 W 1647 T 1539 Y 1683 U 1607 Z 1739 Index   1741

List of Entries ABC Books Abortion Addams, Jane ADHD. See Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity ­Disorder (ADHD) Adolescence Adolescence, History of Adolescent Pregnancy Adoption, History of Adoption, Transnational Adoption, Transracial Adultism After-School Centers Age Age Assessment, in Migration Age Compression Age of Consent Ageism Agency AIDS Orphans Andersen, Hans Christian Anorexia Nervosa Anticipatory Socialization Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children Antislavery Movement, Role of Children Apprenticeship Apps (Mobile Applications) Ariès, Philippe Artificial Insemination Assent, Children’s, in Research Asylum, Children as Seekers of Attachment Theory Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Autism, Child Development, and Theory Autism and Neurodiversity Autonomy

Babysitting, U.S. History of Baptism Barbie Doll Bechstein, Ludwig. See Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Beings and Becomings, Children as Benjamin, Walter Bernstein, Basil Best Interests Principle Bettelheim, Bruno Better Baby Contests Bilingualism and Multilingualism Binet, Alfred Binge-Watching Biopolitics of Childhood Birth Birth Control Birth Order Blank Slate, Children as. See Tabula Rasa Boarding Schools Borders, National Bourdieu, Pierre Bowlby, John Boyhood Boyhood Studies Breastfeeding Bronfenbrenner, Urie Brownies’ Book Buddhism Bullying Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept Bullying and Parents Bullying and Teachers Bullying in Schools Capitalism and Childhood Care, Feminist Ethic of Care, Institutional Caregivers, Children as Care-Work

Babies’ Rights Baby, Social Construction of Baby Farms vii

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List of Entries

Carroll, Lewis Child Child Abuse. See Abuse and Child Abuse Child Actors in Film and Television Child Actors in Theater Child and Youth Activism Child as Method Child as Other/Stranger Child Attachment Interviews Child Beauty Pageants Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective Child Depravity Child Domestic Work Child Labor Child Labor in Europe, History of Child Marriage Child Mortality Child Neglect Child Pornography Child Pregnancy Child Prodigy Child Prostitution, Sex Work Child Psychology, Clinical. See Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Child Soldiers Child Study Child Suicide Child Trafficking Child Welfare Childcare Child-Centered/Child-Led Research Child-Centered Design Child-Friendly, Concept of Child-Friendly Cities Child-Headed Households Childhood Childhood, Anthropology of Childhood and Architecture Childhood and Nature Childhood as Figuration Childhood Embodiment/Embodied Childhood Identity Constructions Childhood in Western Philosophy Childhood Insanity Childhood Nostalgia Childhood Poverty Childhood Publics

Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising Childhood Studies Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives Childing Childism Children and Art Children and Borders—Cyprus Children and Borders—Palestine Children and International Development Children and Nationalism Children and Social Policy Children and Technology Children and the Law, United States Children and U.S. Adoption Literature Children and Youth in Prison Children as Citizens Children as Competent Social Actors Children as Consumers Children as Legal Subjects Children as Philosophers Children as Photographers Children as Political Subjects Children as Victims Children as Witnesses Children as Workers Children at Risk Children in Postcolonial Literature Children in Romantic Literature and Thought Children Living With HIV in Africa Children Who Murder Children’s Bodies Children’s Bureau, United States Children’s Consumer Culture. See Children as Consumers; Child Consumption: A Vygotskyan Perspective; Consumer Socialization Children’s Culture Industry Children’s Cultures Children’s Drawings and Psychological Development Children’s Geographies Children’s Hospitals Children’s Libraries in the United States Children’s Literature Children’s Mobility Children’s Museums Children’s Music Industry, U.S. Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights Children’s Perspectives

List of Entries

Children’s Radio Children’s Rights Children’s Rights, Critiques of Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on Children’s Social Participation, Models of Children’s Television, U.S. History Children’s Time Use Children’s Voices Children’s Work Christianity Citizenship Classroom Discipline Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Clothing, Children’s Colonialism and Childhood Columbine (High School) Massacre, U.S. Communion, Holy Community of Learners Concerted Cultivation, Parenting Style Conduct of Everyday Life Consent, Children’s, in Research Consent, Sexual Consumer Socialization Corporal Punishment Counseling Children CRC. See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Critical Children’s Literature Studies Critical Legal Studies Critical Pedagogy Critical Race Theory Critical Realism Critical Theory, the Child in CRT. See Critical Race Theory Cultural Capital Cultural Politics of Childhood Cyberbullying Darwin, Charles Day Care Death, Children’s Conceptions of Death Rates, Children’s, Historical Deleuze, Gilles Depression Development Developmental Psychology Developmentality Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) Dewey, John

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Diaspora Childhoods Dickens, Charles Different Childhoods Digital Childhoods Digital Literacy Digital Media Digital Mobile Technologies Disabilities Disabilities, Children With—Global South Disability Studies Disability Studies in Education Discipline and Childhood Disney Distributed Violence Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara Dolls, U.S. History of Dolto, Françoise Domestic Chores Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of Domestic Workers, Children as Early Childhood Education Early Marriage Ecological Approaches. See Bronfenbrenner, Urie Ecology and Environmental Education Education Education, Child-Centered Education, Co-operative Education, Inclusive Education and Nationalism in Late Imperial China Education for All (EFA) Education Versus Care Emerging Adulthood Emotion Regulation (Children) Emotional Intelligence Enabling Education Network (EENET) Enlightenment and the Child Ennew, Judith Erikson, Erik Ethics Ethnicity Ethnography Eugenics Evolutionary Developmental Psychology Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition Family Family Photography Fashion, Children’s

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List of Entries

Fatherhood Fathers/Fathering Federal Indian Boarding Schools, U.S. ­Architecture of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Feminism Feral Children Fetal Personhood Film, the Child in Folklore, Children’s Food Studies and Children Foster Care, U.S. Foster Parenting Frank, Anne Freire, Paulo Freud, Anna Freud, Sigmund Froebel, Friedrich Gay and Lesbian Parenting Gender Gender Identity Gender Independent Children Generation Gap Generational Approach Generational Conflict Generationing Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924 Gesell, Arnold Gifted Children Girl Power Girlhood Girlhood Studies Girling Girls Global North Childhoods Global Politics of Childhood Global Politics of Orphanhood Global South Childhoods Global Womb Globalization of Childhood Governmentality Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Growing Sideways. See Queer Childhoods Growth Habitus Hall, Granville Stanley Health

Health Care Hidden Adult, in Literature Hinduism Hine, Lewis Historical Methods History of Childhood Home Learning Environment Homeschooling Homeless Children and Youth Homes, Institutional Hope Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine Human Capital, Child as Human Capital Theory Human Development Index Human Rights Identity Imaginary Companions Immigrant Children Immigration In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Inclusion in Schools Indigenous Childhoods Infancy Infant Mortality Rate. See Child Mortality Infantilization Innocence Institutionalization of Childhood Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Intelligence Testing Intergenerational Learning Intergenerational Relations Interiority International Child Saving International Child Welfare Organizations International Children’s Aid Organizations International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) Interpretive Reproduction Intersectionality Interviews iPad Isaacs, Susan Islam Judaism Juvenile Courts Juvenile Courts, U.S. History Juvenile Delinquency

List of Entries

Juvenile Justice, International Juvenocracy/Juvenocratic Spaces Key, Ellen Kindergarten Klein, Melanie Korczak, Janusz La Leche League Lacan, Jacques Language, Social, and Cultural Aspects Language Learning/Acquisition League of Nations Least-Adult Role in Research Lego Life Mode Interview Lindgren, Astrid Literacy/Literacies Literature, Golden Age Literature for Children. See Children’s Literature Locke, John Mannheim, Karl Material Culture, Children’s Media, Children and Medicalization of Childhood Mental Health, Child Mid-day Meal Militarization Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Milner, Marion Miniature Adulthood Minority Group, Children as Modernity Montessori, Maria Montessori Schools Moral Development, Cultural-Developmental Perspective Mothers/Motherhood Moveable Books Mulberry Bush School Narrative Research Method Narratives, Children’s National Identity Native American Children, Religion and Spirituality Natural Growth, Parenting Style Nature Versus Culture Nature Versus Nurture

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Neurocognitive Development Neuroscience Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) Numeracy Learning in Early Childhood Obesity One-Child Policy, China Opie, Iona and Peter Orphan Care Orphan Homes Orphan Trains Orphans Orphans and Orphanages as Childcare in the United States Out-of-School Children Paganism Parental Advice Literature Parenthood Parenting Parenting Children Parenting Studies Parenting Styles, History of Parents of Children With Disabilities Parents With Disabilities Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC Participation Rights, UNCRC Participatory Action Research Participatory Research Methods Pedagogy Pediatrics Pedophilia. See Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Peer Culture Peer Group Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich Peter Pan Philosophy, the Child in Philosophy for Children Photo-Elicitation, Research Method of Photovoice, Research Method of Piaget, Jean Piaget’s Interview Methods: From Clinical to Critical Picture Books Play, Theories of Play Therapy and Autism Playground Movement, U.S. History Playgrounds Playrooms

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List of Entries

Pocket Money Political Geographies of Youth Political Rights of Children Popularity Popularity, Social Media and Popularity and Gender Postcolonial Childhoods Posthumanism and Childhood Postman, Neil Postmodern Childhoods Power Relations in Research Pregnancy Priceless Child Private Schools Professional Conversations With Children Protection Rights, UNCRC Provision Rights, UNCRC Psy Disciplines Psychoanalysis, the Child in Psychosocial Studies Puberty Quantitative Methods Queer Childhoods Queer Children, Representations of Queer Studies Race and Childhood in U.S. Context Racial Formation Racial Innocence, Child and (U.S. History) Racism Reality Television Recapitulation Theory Reflexivity Refugees Reich, Wilhelm Relational Violence Religion and Children Representations of Childhood in Early China Reproductive Choice Residential Child Care Resilience Restavek Riot Grrrls Rites of Passage Roma Children Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Same-Sex Parenting Save the Children

School Desegregation, U.S. School Dress Codes School Readiness School Story, The School Uniforms School Violence Schooling Schooling, Gender, and Race Scouting, Boys Scouting, Girls Sea Hospitals Self-Esteem Self-Starvation. See Anorexia Nervosa Sesame Street Sex Education, Psychoanalysis in Sexual Citizenship Sexual Exploitation of Children Sexual Orientation Sexualities Education Sexuality and Childhood Sibling Rivalry Slavery, United States Social and Emotional Learning Social Exclusion and Bullying Social Inclusion Social Media, Children’s Use of. See Digital Media; Digital Mobile Technologies; Media, Children and Social Welfare Regimes Social Work Socialization Socialization Paradigm Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Sociology of Childhood Special Education Spencer, Herbert Spielrein, Sabina Spinoza, Baruch Spock, Benjamin Sport Stage Theories of Development Standpoint Theory State Socialism, Childhood During Steiner, Rudolf Stepparents Strange Situations. See Attachment Theory; Child Attachment Interviews Street Children Street Children, History of

List of Entries

Structural Violence Subjective Well-Being Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Sully, James Sunday School Supplementary Schools Surrogacy Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Sutton-Smith, Brian Tabula Rasa Teddy Bear Teen Magazines Teenage Fathers, United Kingdom Teenage Mothers. See Adolescence Pregnancy Teenager Television Series Teenagers Temple, Shirley Theme Parks Time, Concept of, in Children Time and Childhood Toilet Training Toys Toys, Digital Toys, History of Toys, Optical Toys, War Toys and Child Development: Montessori, Piaget, and Vygotsky Transgender Children Transitions Transnational Childhoods Transnational Families Transnational Migration Trauma-Informed Care Tween Unaccompanied Minors, Migration UNCRC. See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Undocumented Children United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

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Universalism Universalization of Childhood Violence Virtual Materiality Visual Methods Vocational Education Vulnerability of Children Vygotskij, Lev. See Vygotsky, Lev; Zone of ­Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev) Vygotsky, Lev Waldorf Schools War and War-Affected Children Watson, John B. Welfare State Well-Being, Children’s White House Conferences on Children (US) Wholeness Approach Winnicott, Donald W. Women and Children Wordsworth, William Workhouses Working Children Working Children’s Movement Young Adult (YA) Literature Young Lives Study Young Offenders Young-Girl, Theory of Yousafzai, Malala Youth Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S. Youth Clubs Youth Culture Youth Gangs Youth Justice Youth Sexting Youth Studies Youth Studies, Birmingham School Youth Work YouTube Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

Reader’s Guide Age Identities/Age Positions

Teenage Fathers, United Kingdom Teenagers Transgender Children Transitions Tween Women and Children Young-Girl, Theory of Youth

Adolescence Adolescence, History of Age Age Compression Age of Consent Ageism Baby, Social Construction of Birth Order Boyhood Child Prodigy Children as Citizens Children as Consumers Children as Legal Subjects Children as Philosophers Children as Photographers Children as Witnesses Children’s Mobility Emerging Adulthood Feral Children Generation Gap Generational Conflict Girl Power Girlhood Girling Girls Growth Infancy Infantilization Innocence Minority Group, Children as Native American Children, Religion and Spirituality Orphans Peer Culture Peer Group Puberty Queer Childhoods Roma Children

Areas of Study/Fields of Interest

Biopolitics of Childhood Boyhood Studies Childhood in Western Philosophy Childhood, Anthropology of Childhood Studies Children’s Bodies Children’s Culture Industry Children’s Cultures Children’s Geographies Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Critical Children’s Literature Studies Critical Legal Studies Critical Pedagogy Critical Race Theory Critical Realism Cultural Politics of Childhood Developmental Psychology Disabilities Disability Studies Ecology and Environmental Education Enlightenment and the Child Ethnicity Evolutionary Developmental Psychology Feminism Food Studies and Children Gender Girlhood Studies Global Politics of Childhood xv

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Reader’s Guide

Global Politics of Orphanhood Medicalization of Childhood Mental Health, Child Parenting Studies Pediatrics Philosophy, the Child in Philosophy for Children Political Geographies of Youth Postcolonial Childhoods Posthumanism and Childhood Postmodern Childhoods Psy Disciplines Psychosocial Studies Queer Studies Social Work Sociology of Childhood Virtual Materiality Wholeness Approach Youth Studies Youth Studies, Birmingham School Children’s Rights

Age Assessment, in Migration Asylum, Children as Seekers of Babies’ Rights Best Interests Principle Child Domestic Work Child Labor Child Labor in Europe, History of Child Mortality Child Trafficking Child Welfare Childhood Poverty Children and Youth in Prison Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights Children’s Rights Children’s Rights, Critiques of Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on Citizenship Disabilities, Children With—Global South Domestic Workers, Children as Ethics Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924 Globalization of Childhood Immigrant Children Immigration Participation Rights, UNCRC

Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC Political Rights of Children Protection Rights, UNCRC Provision Rights, UNCRC Transnational Childhoods Undocumented Children United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC) Well-Being, Children’s Education

After-School Centers Boarding Schools Classroom Discipline Disability Studies in Education Early Childhood Education Education Education and Nationalism in Late Imperial China Education for All (EFA) Education, Child-Centered Education, Co-operative Education, Inclusive Education Versus Care Enabling Education Network (EENET) Homeschooling Intergenerational Learning Kindergarten Language Learning/Acquisition Literacy/Literacies Mid-day Meal Montessori Schools Mulberry Bush School Numeracy Learning in Early Childhood Out-of-School Children Pedagogy Playrooms Private Schools School Dress Codes School Readiness School Uniforms Schooling Schooling, Gender, and Race Sexualities Education Special Education Supplementary Schools Vocational Education Waldorf Schools

Reader’s Guide

Environments and Geographies

Child-Friendly Cities Childhood and Architecture Childhood and Nature Children and Borders—Cyprus Children and Borders—Palestine Children and International Development Children’s Museums Children’s Hospitals Children’s Libraries in the United States Home Learning Environment Playground Movement, U.S. History Playgrounds Family and Childrearing

Adoption, History of Adoption, Transnational Adoption, Transracial Babysitting, U.S. History of Caregivers, Children as Childcare Child-Headed Households Diaspora Childhoods Family Fatherhood Fathers/Fathering Foster Parenting Gay and Lesbian Parenting In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Intergenerational Relations Mothers/Motherhood Parenthood Parenting Parenting Styles, History of Parents of Children with Disabilities Parents with Disabilities Restavek Same-Sex Parenting Sibling Rivalry Stepparents Transnational Families Histories

Juvenile Courts, U.S. History Modernity Orphan Homes

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Orphan Trains School Desegregation, U.S. Slavery, United States State Socialism, Childhood During Street Children, History of White House Conferences on Children Workhouses Institutions and Organizations

Care, Institutional Care-Work Children and Social Policy Children and the Law, United States Children’s Bureau, United States Children’s Music Industry, U.S. Day Care Disney Federal Indian Boarding Schools, U.S. Architecture of Foster Care, U.S. Health Care Homes, Institutional International Child Welfare Organizations International Children’s Aid Organizations International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) Juvenile Courts Juvenile Justice, International La Leche League League of Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) One-Child Policy, China Orphans and Orphanages as Childcare in the United States Scouting, Boys Scouting, Girls Sea Hospitals Social Welfare Regimes Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Sunday School Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Welfare State Youth Clubs

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Reader’s Guide

Key Thinkers and Cultural Figures

Addams, Jane Andersen, Hans Christian Ariès, Philippe Benjamin, Walter Bernstein, Basil Bettelheim, Bruno Binet, Alfred Bourdieu, Pierre Bowlby, John Bronfenbrenner, Urie Carroll, Lewis Darwin, Charles Deleuze, Gilles Dewey, John Dickens, Charles Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara Dolto, Françoise Ennew, Judith Erikson, Erik Frank, Anne Freire, Paulo Freud, Anna Freud, Sigmund Froebel, Friedrich Gesell, Arnold Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Hall, Granville Stanley Hine, Lewis Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine Isaacs, Susan Key, Ellen Klein, Melanie Korczak, Janusz Lacan, Jacques Lindgren, Astrid Locke, John Mannheim, Karl Milner, Marion Montessori, Maria Opie, Iona and Peter Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich Piaget, Jean Postman, Neil Reich, Wilhelm Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Spencer, Herbert Spielrein, Sabina Spinoza, Baruch Spock, Benjamin

Steiner, Rudolf Sully, James Sutton-Smith, Brian Temple, Shirley Vygotsky, Lev Watson, John B. Winnicott, Donald W. Wordsworth, William Yousafzai, Malala Measurements

Death Rates, Children’s, Historical Human Development Index Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Intelligence Testing Young Lives Study Media

ABC Books Apps (Mobile Applications) Binge-Watching Brownies’ Book Children and Technology Children’s Radio Children’s Television, U.S. History Digital Mobile Technologies Digital Childhoods Digital Literacy Digital Media iPad Media, Children and Moveable Books Picture Books Riot Grrrls Sesame Street Teen Magazines Teenager Television Series Theme Parks Toys, Digital YouTube Medical Discourses and Practices

Abortion AIDS Orphans Anorexia Nervosa Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Autism and Neurodiversity

Reader’s Guide

Autism, Child Development, and Theory Birth Birth Control Child Neglect Child Pregnancy Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Child Suicide Childhood Insanity Depression Eugenics Fetal Personhood Health Neurocognitive Development Neuroscience Pregnancy Reproductive Choice Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

Breastfeeding Child Actors in Theater Children and Art Children’s Time Use Children’s Work Counseling Children Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) Domestic Chores Inclusion in Schools Language, Social, and Cultural Aspects Orphan Care Parenting Children Pocket Money Residential Child Care Socialization Sport Toilet Training Youth Work

Movements

Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children Antislavery Movement, Role of Children Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History Child Study Human Rights International Child Saving Save the Children Working Children’s Movement

Religions

Baptism Buddhism Christianity Communion, Holy Hinduism Islam Judaism Paganism Religion and Children

Objects and Material Culture

Barbie Doll Clothing, Children’s Dolls, U.S. History of Fashion, Children’s Lego Material Culture, Children’s Teddy Bear Toys Toys and Child Development: Montessori, Piaget, and Vygotsky Toys, History of Toys, Optical Toys, War Practices

Apprenticeship Bilingualism and Multilingualism

Representations

Child Actors in Film and Television Childhood as Figuration Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising Children and U.S. Adoption Literature Children in Postcolonial Literature Children in Romantic Literature and Thought Children’s Literature Death, Children’s Conceptions of Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition Family Photography Film, the Child in Folklore, Children’s Hidden Adult, in Literature Literature, Golden Age National identity Parental Advice Literature

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Reader’s Guide

Peter Pan Popularity, Social Media and Popularity and Gender Queer Children, Representations of Reality Television Representations of Childhood in Early China School Story, The Young Adult (YA) Literature Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S. Research Methodologies

Assent, Children’s, in Research Child Attachment Interviews Child as Method Child-Centered Design Child-Centered/Child-Led Research Children’s Drawings and Psychological Development Consent, Children’s, in Research Ethnography Historical Methods Interviews Least-Adult Role in Research Life Mode Interview Narrative Research Method Narratives, Children’s Participatory Action Research Participatory Research Methods Photovoice, Research Method of Piaget’s Interview Methods: From Clinical to Critical Power Relations in Research Professional Conversations with Children Quantitative Methods Reflexivity Visual Methods Social Issues and Controversies

Artificial Insemination Baby Farms Better Baby Contests Bullying Bullying and Parents Bullying and Teachers Bullying in Schools Child and Youth Activism Child Beauty Pageants Child Marriage

Child Pornography Child Prostitution, Sex Work Child Soldiers Children and Nationalism Children as Victims Children as Workers Children Who Murder Columbine (High School) Massacre, U.S. Corporal Punishment Cyberbullying Discipline and Childhood Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of Early Marriage Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Gender Independent Children Gifted Children Homeless Children and Youth Juvenile Delinquency Militarization Obesity Race and Childhood in U.S. Context Racism Refugees School Violence Sexual Citizenship Sexual Exploitation of Children Social Inclusion Street Children Surrogacy Teen Pregnancy Transnational Migration Unaccompanied Minors, Migration Violence War and War-Affected Children Working Children Young Offenders Youth Gangs Youth Justice Theories and Concepts

Adultism Agency Anticipatory Socialization Attachment Theory Autonomy Beings and Becomings, Children as Borders, National Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept Capitalism and Childhood

Reader’s Guide

Care, Feminist Ethic of Child Child as Other/Stranger Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective Child Depravity Child-Friendly, Concept of Childhood Childhood Identity Constructions Childhood Nostalgia Childhood Publics Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives Childing Childism Children as Competent Social Actors Children as Political Subjects Children at Risk Children’s Perspectives Children’s Social Participation, Models of Children’s Voices Colonialism and Childhood Community of Learners Concerted Cultivation, Parenting Style Conduct of Everyday Life Consent, Sexual Consumer Socialization Critical Theory, the Child in Cultural Capital Development Developmentality Different Childhoods Distributed Violence Emotion Regulation (Children) Emotional Intelligence Gender Identity Generational Approach Generationing Global North Childhoods Global South Childhoods Global Womb Governmentality Habitus History of Childhood Hope Human Capital, Child as Identity

Imaginary Companions Indigenous Childhoods Institutionalization of Childhood Interiority Interpretive Reproduction Intersectionality Juvenocracy/Juvenocratic Spaces Miniature Adulthood Moral Development, Cultural-Developmental Perspective Natural Growth, Parenting Style Nature Versus Culture Nature Versus Nurture Play, Theories of Play Therapy and Autism Popularity Priceless Child Psychoanalysis, the Child in Racial Formation Racial Innocence, Child and (U.S. History) Recapitulation Theory Relational Violence Resilience Rites of Passage Self-Esteem Sex Education, Psychoanalysis in Sexual Orientation Sexuality and Childhood Social and Emotional Learning Social Exclusion and Bullying Socialization Paradigm Stage Theories of Development Standpoint Theory Structural Violence Subjective Well-Being Tabula Rasa Time, Concept of, in Children Time and Childhood Trauma-Informed Care Universalism Universalization of Childhood Vulnerability of Children Youth Culture Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

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About the Editor Daniel Thomas Cook is Professor of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University–Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., and a founding faculty of that program. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and has worked in a number of fields including leisure studies, consumer studies, history, and communications. Cook’s work focuses on moral configurations of childhood vis-à-vis the commercial and economic cultural fields. In particular, he explores various ways in which tensions between “the child” and “the market” play themselves out in various sites of children’s consumer culture, such as advertising, food, rituals, clothing, and media. He has

published articles and book chapters spanning childhood theory, consumer society, motherhood, play, leisure, and urban culture. Author of The Commodification of Childhood (Duke University Press, 2004) and The Moral Project of Childhood (New York University Press, 2020), Cook also is editor or co-editor of a number of books, including Reimagining Childhood Studies (Bloomsbury, 2019; co-edited with Spyros Spyrou and Rachel Rosen); Children and Armed Conflict (Palgrave, 2011; co-edited with John Wall), and Symbolic Childhood (Peter Lang, 2002). Cook has served as co-editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research since 2008.

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List of Contributors Tatek Abebe Norwegian University of Science and Technology Mel Ainscow University of Manchester Amanda Ajodhia Independent Scholar Deborah Albon University of Roehampton Priscilla Alderson University College London Kristine Alexander The University of Lethbridge Ameera Ali York University Pam Alldred Brunel University London Ansgar Allen Sheffield University Akilah S. Alleyne University of Delaware Birgit Althans Leuphana University Lüneburg

Deniz Arzuk Linköping University

Jane Eva Baxter DePaul University

Lori J. Askeland Wittenberg University

Beauvais Clementine University of York

Susan J. Atkinson Leeds Beckett University

Colleen S. Bell Hamline University

Ana Luisa Baca Lobera University of Puerto Rico

Katherine Bell Wilfrid Laurier University

Limin Bai Victoria University of Wellington

Adriana S. Benzaquen Mount Saint Vincent University

Jo Daugherty Bailey Metropolitan State University of Denver

Stephen Bernardini Rutgers University–Camden

Meredith A. Bak Rutgers University—Camden

Liam Berriman University of Sussex

Sarada Balagopalan Rutgers University–Camden

Sharon Bessell The Australian National University

Lisa Baraitser Birkbeck, University of London David Barnouw Independent Scholar Veronica Barnsley University of Sheffield

Michael W. Apple University of Wisconsin

Kristin A. Bates California State University San Marcos

Vinnarasan Aruldoss Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Dubai

Rachel Carson Berman Ryerson University

Simon Bailey University of Kent

Norman Anderssen University of Bergen

Sonja Arndt University of Waikato

Jenny Berglund Stockholm University

Amy L. Best George Mason University Tamara Bibby Independent Researcher Tyler Bickford University of Pittsburgh Barbara Biglia Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Tara Batista Columbia University

Julia C. Bishop University of Sheffield

Besa Bauta New York University

Kaitlin A. Black Clark University

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Contributors

Sarah Black Western University

Doris Bühler-Niederberger University of Wuppertal

Victoria Chantseva University of Paris 13

Caralyn Blaisdell University of Strathclyde

Ryan Bunch Rutgers University–Camden

Lara Bober Independent Scholar

Marcia J. Bunge Gustavus Adolphus College

Kristen E. Cheney International Institute of Social Studies

Gail Boldt Pennsylvania State University

Anne Bunting York University

Caroline Bond University of Manchester

Erica Burman University of Manchester

Jordi Bonet i Martí UdG

Rachel Burr University of Sussex

Mats Börjesson Stockholm University

Julian Burton Rutgers University–Camden

Michael Bourdillon University of Zimbabwe (Emeritus)

Kate Cairns Rutgers University–Camden

Elizabeth Heger Boyle University of Minnesota Jill Bradbury University of the Witwatersrand

Jane Callaghan University of Northampton Peter Callery University of Manchester Josianne Campbell Independent Scholar

Ben Bradley Charles Sturt University

David Cardell Stockholm University

Sara Bragg UCL Institute of Education

Richard Carothers Partners in Technology Exchange Ltd (retired)

Deborah P. Britzman York University Rhonda Brock-Servais Longwood University Gilles Brougère University of Paris 13 John Broughton Teachers College, Columbia University

Ariel E. Carter Campbellsville University Eric M. Carter Campbellsville University Wesley V. Carter Campbellsville University Claudia Castañeda Emerson College

Fraser Brown Leeds Beckett University

Yasemin Cava-Tadik University of Georgia

Susan A. Brown University of Manchester

Nur Cayirdag SUNY Mohawk Valley Community College

Charlotte Brownlow University of Southern Queensland

Asta Cekaite Linköping University

Ruth Cheung Judge University College London Elizabeth Chin Art Center College of Design Sophina Choudry University of Manchester Miranda Christou University of Cyprus Lise Claiborne University of Waikato Cindy Dell Clark Rutgers University–Camden Brittany Closson-Pitts Florida State University Margaret M. Coady University of Melbourne Karen Coats Illinois State University Tom Cockburn Edge Hlll University Neil Cocks University of Reading Cati Coe Rutgers University–Camden Caroline Cohrssen University of Melbourne Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden Kevin J. Cooley University of Florida Su Corcoran Research Associate Matías Cordero Arce Independent Scholar William A. Corsaro Indiana University

List of Contributors

Jill Coste University of Florida

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Chiara Diana Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

Jo Frankham Liverpool John Moores University

Brittany Cowgill University of New England

Marcio Dias Universidade Federal de Uberlândia

Katie Fredricks Rutgers University–Camden

Gerald Cradock University of Windsor

Tom Disney Northumbria University

Sarah Crafter The Open University

Josephine Dolan University of Gloucestershire

Sean Creaney Lecturer

Joan Durrant University of Manitoba

Fabrice Cregut Independent Scholar

Frederika A. Ellers Independent Scholar

Meghan Crnic University of Pennsylvania

Carl Emery University of Manchester

Luís Armando Gandin Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Jakob Cromdal Linköping University

Grace Enriquez Lesley University

Ina Gankam Tambo Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic Rutgers University–Camden

Lauren Erdreich Beit Berl College

Macarena García-Gonzalez Center for Educational Justice

Elizabeth Ann Danto Hunter College

Kerry-Ann Escayg University of Nebraska–Omaha

Julie C. Garlen Carleton University

Anandini Dar Ambedkar University Delhi

Lisa Farley York University

Pascale Garnier Paris 13 University

Shosh Davidson Gordon College of Education

Tobia Fattore Macquarie University

Dianne Gereluk University of Calgary

Joanne Faulkner Macquarie University

Charnjot Kaur Ghuman Ryerson University

Vanessa Fay Clinical Psychology

Andrew Neil Gibbons Auckland University of Technology

Natalie Coulter York University

Adam William John Davies University of Toronto Juan Francisco Dávila Universidad de Piura

Alison Gaines Independent Scholar Michael Gallagher Manchester Metropolitan University Sally Ann Campbell Galman University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Robbie Davis-Floyd University of Texas

Craig Fees Planned Environment Therapy Trust

Valérie-Inés de La Ville University of Poitiers

Lynn Fendler Michigan State University

Simona Giordano University of Manchester

Patrice Natalie Delevante Independent Scholar

Monica Flegel Lakehead University

Davide Giuriato University of Zurich

Tuba Demir-Dagdas University of Alabama at Birmingham

Miriam Forman-Brunell University of Missouri–Kansas City

Wayne Clifton Glasker Rutgers University–New Brunswick

Dympna Devine University College Dublin

Nick J. Fox University of Sheffield

William Gleason Princeton University

Meghan M. Gillen Penn State Abington

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Contributors

Kristen P. Goessling Penn State, Brandywine

Terry Hanley Independent Scholar

Richard House Independent Consultant

Abbie Goldberg Clark University

Karl Hanson University of Geneva

Neil Howard University of Bath

Deborah Golden Beit Berl Academic College

Flora Jean Harmon Texas A&M University

Andrew John Howes University of Manchester

Marnina Gonick Mount Saint Vincent University

Willie Carl Harmon Texas A&M University

Keng-Yen Huang New York University

Ben Harris University of New Hampshire

Philipp Hubmann University of Zurich

Mia Harrison The University of Sydney

Christina Huf University of Muenster

Roger Andrew Hart The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Natasha Hurley University of Alberta

Laura J. Goodfellow University of Manchester Angél Gordo Universidad Complutense de Madrid Lucas Gottzén Stockholm University Pablo Gracia Trinity College Dublin Christopher T. Green The Graduate Center, CUNY Anat Greenstein Manchester Metropolitan University Leslee J. Grey City University of New York Queens College Jaclyn Griffith Independent Scholar Liv Mette Gulbrandsen Oslo Metropolitan University Christina Gustafsson Uppsala University Raquel S. L. Guzzo Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas Hanne Haavind University of Oslo Janette Habashi University of Oklahoma

Jessica Faye Heal Independent Scholar Mariane Hedegaard Copenhagen University Jennifer Helgren University of the Pacific Jennifer Henderson Carleton University Sarah Hennessy Western University Amy Henry Rutgers University–Camden Colin Heywood University of Nottingham Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody RMIT University Charlotte Højholt Roskilde University Rachel Holmes Manchester Metropolitan University Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa Occidental College

Sophie Hadfield-Hill University of Birmingham

Amanda Holt University of Roehampton, London

Margaret A. Hagerman Mississippi State University

Anna Holzscheiter Freie Universitaet Berlin

Bruce Hurst University of Melbourne Álvaro Moreira Hypolito Universidade Federal de Pelotas Seyma Intepe-Tingir Independent Scholar Antonella Invernizzi Independent Researcher Zeynep Isik-Ercan Rowan University Burcu Izci Florida State University Heather Jaksic University of Manitoba Helle Strandgaard Jensen Aarhus University Lene Arnett Jensen Independent Scholar Cordelia Jervis Cardiff Metropolitan University Lauren Jervis York University Viktor Johansson Örebro University Rebecca John Independent Scholar

List of Contributors

Katherine Johnson RMIT University, Melbourne City Campus

Walter Omar Kohan State University of Rio de Janeiro

Ithel Jones Florida State University

Sirkka Liisa Komulainen South Eastern University of Applied Sciences

Kathleen W. Jones Virginia Tech Peter E. Jones Sheffield Hallam University Benjamin Rene Jordan Christian Brothers University Chloe Joslin Campbellsville University Lucas Kalfleish University of West Georgia Veronika Kalmus University of Tartu Smruthi Bala Kannan Rutgers University–Camden Asma Khalid Fatima Jinnah Women’s University Tauhid Hossain Khan Jagannath University Randa Khattar Western University Ayesha Khursid Florida State University Wilma King University of Missouri Anne Behnke Kinney University of Virginia

Kristina Konstantoni University of Edinburgh Jill E. Korbin Case Western Reserve University Franz Kasper Krönig Cologne University of Applied Sciences Manasi Kumar University of Nairobi

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Hilde Liden Institute of Social Research Manfred Liebel University of Applied Sciences Potsdam Ton Liefaard Leiden University Leonel Lim National Institute of Education, Singapore Kriste Ann Lindenmeyer Rutgers University–Camden Valeria LLobet CONICET / UNSAM

Marlies Kustatscher Independent Scholar

John Loewenthal Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Molly Ladd-Taylor York University

Maude Louviot University of Geneva

Eve Marie Lamendour Université de La Rochelle

Remy Low The University of Sydney

Beryl Langer LaTrobe University

Anna Lundberg Malmö Institute for Studies of Migration Diversity

Cath Larkins University of Central Lancashire Marta Larragueta Universidad Camilo José Cela Aude Le Guennec Heriot-Watt University Nick Lee University of Warwick

Eva Lupold Rutgers University–Camden Marta Luxán Serrano University of the Basque Country Michelle Lyttle Storrod Rutgers University–Camden Catriona Ida Macleod Rhodes University

Karl Kitching University College Cork

Dafna Lemish Rutgers University–New Brunswick

Arie Kizel University of Haifa

Madeleine Leonard Queen’s University Belfast

Sara Magalhaes University of Porto

Andrea Kleeberg-Niepage European University Flensburg

Karìn Lesnik-Oberstein University of Reading

Berglind Rós Magnúsdóttir University of Iceland

Natascha Klocker University of Wollongong

Amanda E. Lewis Professor

Rachel Maina Kenyatta National Hospital

Laurel Koepf Taylor Eden Theological Seminary

Melissa Li Sheung Ying University of Alberta

Mahsa Manavi University of Tehran

Jan Macvarish University of Kent

xxx

Contributors

Diane Marano Rutgers University–Camden

Sylvia Meichsner Independent Scholar

Charlotte H. Markey Rutgers University–Camden

Susie Miles University of Manchester

Anah-Jayne Markland York University

Zsuzsa Millei University of Tampere

Urszula Markowska-Manista University of Warsaw & University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

Patricia H. Miller San Francisco State University

Deborah Marks Northern School of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Claudia Michaela Marquis University of Auckland Jackie Marsh University of Sheffield Shirley Martin University College Cork Jessica Martucci University of Pennsylvania Patricia Nabuco Martuscelli University de São Paulo Hiroaki Matsuura Shoin University Rachel Maunder University of Northampton Cynthia Maurer Independent Scholar

Élisa Narminio-Gielen Waseda University & Université Libre de Bruxelles Marie Clark Nelson Linköping University Jan Newberry University of Lethbridge Craig Newnes Independent Scholar

Susan A. Miller Rutgers University–Camden

Hadas Nezer-Dagan The Open University of Israel

Tina Miller Oxford Brookes University

Julie M. Nicholson Mills College

China Mills University of London

Olga Nieuwenhuys University of Amsterdam

Mary Louise Mitsdarffer Rutgers University– Camden

Conceição Noguiera University of Porto

Nolwazi Mkhwanazi University of the Witwatersrand Heather Montgomery The Open University Adi Moreno Independent Scholar Sian Angharad Morgan The Cambridge Psychotherapy Practice

Sevasti-Melissa Nolas Goldsmiths, University of London Danielle A O’Connor University of Alberta Lindsay O’Dell The Open University Yinka Olusoga The University of Sheffield Signe Opermannn University of Tartu

Virginia Morrow University of Oxford

David Oswell Independent Scholar

John R. Morss Deakin University

Carol Owens Independent Scholar

Johanna Franziska Motzkau The Open University

Jeanne Veronique Pache Independent Scholar

Karin Murris University of Cape Town

Véronique Pache Huber Université de Fribourg

Otesetwe Musindo University of Nairobi

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Western University

Jay Mechling University of California, Davis

William Myer Independent Scholar

Ingrid Palmary University of the Witwatersrand

Jessica Medhurst Independent Scholar

Majia H. Nadesan Airzona State University

Amy Noelle Parks Michigan State University

Jane McCamant University of Chicago Jane Ribbens McCarthy Open University/ University of Reading Beth Ellen McIntyre Independent Scholar Kenneth McLaughlin Manchester Metropolitan University

List of Contributors

Jennesia Pedri Simon Fraser University

Heather Sarah Price University of East London

Rachel Rosen University College London

Emily Pelletier Queensborough Community College

Steven Pryjmachuk University of Manchester

Maria Roth Babes-Bolyai University

Rebecca Raby Brock University

Annadis Greta Rúdólfsdóttir University of Iceland

Marjatta Rahikainen University of Helsinki

Roberta Ruggiero University of Geneva

Jessie B. Ramey Chatham University

Mónica Ruiz-Casares McGill University

Anna Rastas University of Tampere

Katherine Runswick-Cole Manchester Metropolitan University

Kirrily Pells UCL Institute of Education Rosemarie Pena Rutgers University–Camden Helen Penn Thomas Coram Research Unit, University of London Michelle Salazar Perez New Mexico State University Nathan H. Perkins Loyola University Chicago Eva Bendix Petersen Roskilde University Daniel W. Phillips Campbellsville University Mandy Pierlejewski Leeds Beckett University Sarah M. Pike California State University, Chico Michael Gerard Plastow The Freudian School of Melbourne Andrea Platte TH Köln, University of Applied Sciences Lydia Plowman University of Edinburgh

Victoria Rawlings University of Sydney Heather Reel Rutgers University–Camden Jacqueline Reid-Walsh Pennsylvania State University Karen J. Renner Northern Arizona University Joel P. Rhodes Southeast Missouri State University Chris Richards formerly Institute of Education, University of Lon

Cinthya Saavedra University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Kate Sapin University of Manchester Roger Saul University of New Brunswick Ellin K. Scholnick University of Maryland John Schostak Independent Scholar Jessica Schriver Rutgers University–Camden

Richard Riddell Bath Spa University

Teresa Segura-Garcia Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Jessica Ringrose UCL Institute of Education, University College London

Jane Selby Charles Sturt University

Briana Pocratsky George Mason University

Guillermo Rivera Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

Nicoletta Policek University of Cumbria

John Roache University of Manchester

Anastasia Polkonikova-Wamoto University of Nairobi

Celia Roberts Lancaster University

Shauna Pomerantz Brock University

Toby Rollo Lakehead University

Michele Poretti University of Teacher Education Lausanne

Clare Rose The Royal School of Needlework

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Erwin Dimitri Selimos West Shore Community College Emily Setty University of Surrey Michael Shire Hebrew College William Simms University of Manchester Carol J. Singley Rutgers University–Camden Annika Skoglund Uppsala University

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Contributors

Johanna Sköld Linköping University Hans Skott-Myhre Kennesaw State University Stephanie Skourtes Independent Scholar Karen M. Smith University College Dublin Leslie Smith Independent Scholar

Oddbjorg Skjær Ulvik Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science

Randi Wærdahl Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science

Deborah Shine Valentine University of California, Los Angeles

Amanda Claudia Wager Lesley University

Elizabeth R. Valentine Royal Holloway, University of London

Matthew Waites University of Glasgow John Wall Rutgers University–Camden

Lynne Vallone Rutgers University–Camden

Nduku Wambua University of Nairobi

Edward van Daalen University of Geneva

Hanne Warming Roskilde University

Bert Van Oers VU Amsterdam

Samantha Warner Salford University

Erik van Ommering Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Saskia Warren University of Manchester

Wouter Vandenhole University of Antwerp

Lisa M. Warwick University of Nottingham

Bruno Vanobbergen Ghent University

Amy Webster University of Cambridge

Ashley Stewart-Tufescu University of Manitoba

Donna Varga Mount Saint Vincent University

Lynn Y. Weiner Roosevelt University

Shurlee Swain Australian Catholic University

Christos Varvantakis University of Sussex

Heather Switzer Arizona State University

Colleen A. Vasconcellos University of West Georgia

Jana Tabak State University of Rio de Janeiro

Stephen Vassallo American University

Tran Nguyen Templeton University of North Texas

Vera Veldhuizen University of Cambridge

Marek Tesar University of Auckland

Farah Virani-Murji York University

Eleni Theodorou European University Cyprus

Radhika Viruru Texas A&M University

Nigel Thomas University of Central Lancashire

Anthony A. Volk Brock University

William Thompson MacEwan University

Diana Sakurako Volonakis University of Geneva

Rebekah Willett University of Wisconsin– Madison

Cheryl Thurber Independent Scholar

Jessica Ann Vooris Amherst College

Julian Williams University of Manchester

Roger Smith Professor of Social Work Brigitte Søland Ohio State University Dorte Marie Søndergaard Danish School of Education Anna Sparrman Child Studies Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus Garth Stevens University of the Witwatersrand

Thomas S. Weisner Emeritus, UCLA Karen Wells Birkbeck, University of London Phyllis A. Wentworth Wentworth Institute of Technology Elisabeth Wesseling Maastricht University Kristina West University of Reading Samantha White Rutgers University–Camden

List of Contributors

xxxiii

Pamela Robertson Wojcik University of Notre Dame

Tara Woodyer University of Portsmouth

Elisabeth M. Yang Rutgers University–Camden

Caitlin Wood Fanshawe College

Yuwei Xu University College London

Obadia Yator University of Nairobi

Martin Woodside University of the Arts

Vita Yakovlyeva University of Alberta

Margaret Zeddies George Mason University

Introduction The Perspective and Interdisciplinarity of C ­ hildren and Childhood Studies

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies represents but one moment of instantiation of a field which has fought for its identity and legitimacy over the last four decades. It is a field that continues to burgeon with the establishment of numerous academic journals, universitylevel departments and degree programs, research centers, and scores of conferences, colloquia, and seminars of all description. Fueled in large part by the passage of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, studies of children and childhood have gained significant footing in areas beyond psychology and education as the focus of research and inquiry turned to exploring the social, legal, cultural, and political lives and contexts of children existing in diverse circumstances. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and feminists proved central to the emergence of what came to be known as the “new studies of childhood” largely by challenging accepted conceptions of childhood as a linear sequence of developmental stages or of social growth, whereby children’s behavior progressively evolves from simplicity to complexity, from irrationality to rationality. In place of this view, childhood studies enunciates a standpoint that takes children to be active subjects who engage in the creation and interpretation of their own lives in various ways; it encourages the understanding that childhood itself is something socially, historically, and s­ituationally constituted, instead of primarily biologically given and universal. The child, so conceptualized, never stands still—culturally, ontologically, or politically— but is to be problematized and re-problematized with each new insight and each novel approach brought forth. More than anything else, childhood studies offers a lens—a way of knowing—rather

than factual knowledge alone, and it is this angle of vision that constitutes the particular, definitive contribution of this field-in-the-making. Such a stance toward one’s subject matter and field demands that scholars and practitioners, as well as agencies and governments, account for and consider the place of children in their schemes and practices and to account for them as necessary and constitutive, rather than contingent and epiphenomenal. In the process, those engaging in children and childhood studies continue to embark upon significant interventions in theory and method, which are made possible when children and childhood are positioned at the center of consideration. Central to this posture toward children and childhood is a belief that knowledge cannot be contained within a disciplinary boundary. Engaging in childhood studies thereby necessarily entails the pursuit of interdisciplinary investigation and transdisciplinary thinking. Researchers and practitioners hail from many fields and apply their studies widely—for instance, from applied health professions to those concerned with social justice, from communications and media perspectives to literary theory and archaeology, from psychology to postcolonial studies. Many scholars and practitioners work at the intersection of law, politics, and advocacy in studies of transnational migration; others seek to comprehend and make visible the changing practices and understandings of children’s domestic labor, education, and caretaking. As well, the ways in which children are implicated in religious institutions and practices, alongside the ways they come to know and understand religious experience and concepts, presents yet ­ another of dimension of the field represented in this encyclopedia.

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Introduction

To be sure, issues and identities regarding ­gender, ethnicity, race, social-economic class, geographies, sexualities, abilities/disabilities, among others, inform these studies in complicated and ­ provocative ways. To that end, the reader will find robust clusters of entries which address, for instance, issues of gender, gender expression, transgender and queer childhoods as well as informative treatments related to children and adults with disabilities, the variety of digital media, the material cultures of childhood, and the multiply articulated aspects of children’s rights. Yet, as many have learned over these decades of field building, interdisciplinarity does not arrive ready-made as a simple admixture or cocktail of desirable views and concepts. Disparate concepts and positions from varied conceptual quarters do not often find easy fit with one another, even when many expend sincere effort to make a space that is inviting to a wide swath of perspectives and traditions. On top of it, institutional myopia, professional defensiveness, and a lingering, generalized sense that issues of children and childhood remain secondary to the important concerns of society— despite significant lip service and ideological bluster to the contrary—these, combined, make for significant headwinds against which to struggle. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies arose as an effort to provide a space for these many views, traditions, and perspectives to gather and be made available to a wide audience. The project embraces the differences in approaches and emphases represented in the many entries, refusing to avoid the difficulties and discomfort of multidisciplinary engagement. For the strength and lure of childhood studies resides in these struggles and will never be absent from them.

Using the Encyclopedia Cognizant of the many strands and tensions of the field, we did not seek to enforce a particular ideological conception or insist upon a singular disciplinary vocabulary. Authors were invited to write from their own knowledge base so as to help continue to nourish a field and community of practice. The contributing authors worked hard to strike a balance between intellectual honesty, quality, and a readable text suitable for a reference work. We

hope the reader will be delighted by the depth and breadth of the kinds of materials that have been included and by the varied writing styles herein. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies is comprised of over 1 million words in approximately 600 entries, written by hundreds of contributors from several dozen countries. Given the nature of a reference work, there necessarily will be some redundancy between entries, but such a publication is not intended to be read fully from front to back. Understanding that interdisciplinarity does not reside in any one entry or in any one text, the idea is that the reader comes to the encyclopedia with nagging problems or driving questions which spur investigations into the various, interrelated, articles and topic areas. The interdiscipline, in this way, can be found in the dynamism of the relations between the entries and the problems and questions the authors pursue and the reader brings. The interlocking Cross-References and the listing of Further Readings provided for each entry are intended to make each entry a steppingstone to other investigations. We sought to compose the entries with the idea that they could serve as perhaps a classroom reading on a subject—not as an end point but as a point of departure. To that end, the encyclopedia is accompanied by a Reader’s Guide of themes to help chaperon users through various topics and issues: Age Identities/Age Positions Areas of Study/Fields of Interest Children’s Rights Education Environments and Geographies Family and Childrearing Histories Institutions and Organizations Key Thinkers and Cultural Figures Measurements Media Medical Discourses and Practices Movements Objects and Material Culture Practices Religions Representations Research Methodologies Social Issues and Controversies Theories and Concepts

Introduction xxxvii

Conclusion The work of scholarship can entail many efforts— reading, writing, teaching, disseminating. It also involves gathering and gleaning ideas, perspectives, and approaches into a large catchment in order to sort, arrange, and present to others. In many ways, the work of editing an encyclopedia is like that of gathering and gleaning. Care must be taken to collect the meticulously arranged thoughts and formulations of others which have unfolded over time and strive to re-present them in a somewhat new and simple form so that larger ideas and perspectives become accessible to many. One lesson to be taken away is that no matter how many words or how many entries one is given, “full” coverage is impossible because the phenomenon to be covered and addressed continues to expand and transform with every word written about it. My hope is that this project does not simply ossify into a momentary culmination of knowledge but will serve as a pivot point that inspires new angles of vision and ways of thinking.

Acknowledgments Such a massive undertaking would not have been possible without the efforts of many people. I thank Chris Rojek, original Commissioning Editor at Sage, for his foresight and perseverance, which initially brought this project to light. Erica Burman served as an original Co-editor of the first phase of the project, and Daniela Casselli was an initial

Associate Editor. Both regrettably had to step away from their duties early on, but their contributions are appreciated and evident throughout this work. Sarada Balagopalan and Spyros Spyrou brought their characteristic insight, intelligence, and rigor as Associate Editors to the endeavor, and it is all that much better because of their efforts. Matthew Prickett performed yeoman-like labor as Managing Editor, keeping all the various aspects of this large, often unwieldy, venture moving in the right direction. Matt also stepped in as Associate Editor, making his contribution on both the production and editorial sides of things. The various members of the Editorial Board provided the depth and breadth of expertise necessary to be able to forge this work out of the vast range of scholarship in the field. None of this would have been possible without their dedication and energy. Lidong Xiang gave valuable aid in gathering and organizing many of the images, and Smruthi Bala Kannan expertly helped manage the flow of entries at a crucial time. Finally, I wish to acknowledge Development Editor Sanford Robinson and Leticia Gutierrez, Systems Coordinator for SAGE Reference—and all those who worked on this project—for their dedication, expertise, and support. Sage Publications is to be commended for putting its resources into this massive effort of helping to define—and, indeed, to cultivate—children and childhood studies. Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden, NJ, USA

A ABC Books ABC books come in many formats, shapes, and sizes and are some of the earliest texts given to children. For cultural historians of childhood, they are also significant in that the books are very revealing of the society that produced them. This is perhaps an inadvertent by-product of the overtly pedagogical aim in teaching the letters. Alphabet books have a long history stretching back before the invention of printing in the West and include beautiful manuscript abecedariums with illuminated alphabets in Latin. These were directed to noble and clerical audiences, not specifically to children; only a few people could read Latin, and most education was connected with religion. For children, hornbooks existed in the medieval period and were popular until the 18th century. In the early modern period when printing was widespread, ABC books formed part of the cheap print of the period. These include hornbooks, battledores, chapbooks, and primers. Except for the last type, these artifacts are not all books in the usual sense; they were not bound volumes—in other words, a codex. Studying examples of these show the opposing ideologies pervasive in this period. The hornbook is a fascinating artifact (see ­Figure 1). It is a small three-dimensional object shaped like a small paddle or racket with one piece of paper with the letters of the alphabet on it. The paper is fixed by tacks to the wood and

Figure 1  Hornbook image, circa 1800 Source: Courtesy of Special Collections, The Pennsylvania State Libraries.

protected from children’s fingers by animal horn. Wealthy children had etched ones of silver or ivory. Because the earliest hornbooks had the letters preceded by the cross, the format became known as the crisscross row. Battledores, originally made of parchment stretched over a frame, and later ones made of folded cardboard were popular until the 19th century; these consisted of a pictorial alphabet and prayers on both sides. Primers originally signified a prayer book and many began with an alphabet. The most famous early ABC book is the New England Primer published from around 1687 and a popular 1

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Abortion

compendium until around 1830. Measuring 4.5 inches by 3 inches, it contained religious poems, instructions on how to learn to read, a rhyming pictorial alphabet, the Ten Commandments, and so on. By contrast, the secular chapbooks including nursery rhyme ABCs were often bawdy and provide present-day readers glimpses of an uncensored world populated with prostitutes, drunks, gamesters, and thieves. The context for the bimodal teaching of the letters during this time derived from 17th-century pedagogues such as John Amos Comenius and John Locke. Comenius, particularly in Orbis Sensualium Pictis, argued for and demonstrated how essential images and words were to teaching children their letters and about the world. His ABC book was unusual, for it was organized by sound and was evidence of his belief of learning through play. From the mid-19th century, the spread of playful learning of the ABCs was reinforced by the development of color printing and new techniques in mass book production. Famous book illustrators such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane produced large, elaborate ABC books for children. These beautifully crafted books aimed toward middle-class audiences. ABC books proliferate today in different formats ranging from sturdy board books for young children to elaborate large picture books. They are a cross-cultural phenomenon and exist in many languages, most based on the Roman alphabet. The format has also been adopted for languages not based on Latin, such as Chinese. Some ABC books imply a sophisticated audience in that they distort and mix the alphabet in ingenious ways that would appeal only to older children who know their ABCs or adults. A good example of a combined numbers and alphabet picture book is the sophisticated, funny, and mainly image-based The Numberlys. Using minimal words, vivid graphic style, monotone, and vivid color, the book also necessitates a reader to engage with first the width and then the height of the book in order to learn a fantastical invention of the alphabet. Although the question of who is the intended audience is striking in books such as this, scholars such as Perry Nodelman argue that even the simplest of alphabet books necessitate a complicated engagement with objects, visual images, and

sounds, hence the act of decoding any alphabet book is like engaging with a puzzle. He argues that this dimension invites creative writers and illustrators to produce intriguing and unusual books. There is some experimentation in multimedia and multimodal alphabet books, including apps and e-books. Notably, this includes devising books for children with visual disabilities. Hearkening back and extending the ideas of Comenius with his belief in the importance of the combination of the aural with the textual and the pictorial, there are instances of interactive alphabet books such as The SENSEsational Alphabet. These developments, including braille and tactile books, are important endeavors in continuing to widen the diversification and inclusiveness of the genre. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh See also Children’s Literature; Hidden Adult, in Literature; Moveable Books; Picture Books

Further Readings Demers, P. (Ed.). (2009). From instruction to delight: An anthology of children’s literature to 1850 (3rd ed.). Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press. Joyce, W., & Ellis, C. (2014). The numberlys. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Nodelman, P. (2001). A is for . . . what? The function of alphabet books. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 1(3), 235–253. doi:10.1177/14687984010013001 Rofe, A. (2006). The sensesational alphabet. Signal Mountain, TN: Waldenhouse. Willoughby, D., Evans, M. A., & Nowak, S. (2015). Do ABC books boost engagement and learning in preschoolers? An experimental study comparing eBooks with paper ABC and storybook controls. Computers & Education, 82, 107–117. doi:10.1016/j. compedu.2014.11.008 Zipes, J., Paul, L., Vallone, L., Hunt, P., & Avery, G. (Eds.). (2005). The Norton anthology of children’s literature: The traditions in English. New York, NY: Norton.

Abortion Abortion, otherwise known as the termination of pregnancy, is a common procedure throughout the world. Research on the occurrence of abortion

Abortion

indicates that the rates of abortion do not differ significantly between countries with liberal abortion legislation and those with restrictive abortion legislation. Women have always found, and continue to find, ways to terminate an unwanted and unsupportable pregnancy. In contexts of restrictive laws, however, women often resort to unsafe abortion, which can lead to significant morbidity and mortality. Unsafe abortion is defined by the World Health Organization as a termination of pregnancy performed in unsafe medical conditions or by an unregistered practitioner or both. Pregnant teenagers who wish to terminate a pregnancy face challenges similar to those faced by women in general, as well as difficulties unique to being minors or youth. Similar to women in general, teenagers are faced with decision making about the outcome of the pregnancy, negotiating access to the procedure, going through the procedure, and managing social and interpersonal issues related to the pregnancy and abortion. Unique to young people are negotiating cultural understandings of young people’s sexuality and pregnancy, dealing with potential additional barriers (e.g., in countries where parental consent is required to access a legal abortion), and negotiating potential health care provider negativity. This entry discusses these issues, together with input on debates regarding the psychological consequences of abortion.

Decision Making Concerning the Outcome of a Pregnancy Research on abortion often focusses on the reasons women wish to terminate a pregnancy. Reasons tend to centre on the following: economic issues; the need to continue with work or schooling; abandonment or lack of support from partner, family, or both; not being able to care for a(nother) child; and health or psychological problems. Reasons may, of course, cut across these categories. The focus on reasons for terminating a pregnancy sidelines the seldom-asked question of why women would want to continue with a pregnancy. The silence on this question forms part of what feminists have called maternormativity: the taken-for-granted assumption that the role of women is to reproduce and that women who fail to do so will be unfulfilled and unhappy.

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Although this is true for women in general, there is a twist in this assumption when it comes to teenage women. Pregnancy amongst teenagers is frowned upon in many parts of the world, with ‘teenage pregnancy’ seen as a ‘social problem.’ In relation to decision making about abortion, this creates a slightly different picture. The pregnancy may be automatically assumed to be unplanned and unwanted (even if not by the young woman herself). In this light, the question of why the young woman would decide to continue with the pregnancy may be raised. In addition, reasons for deciding on an abortion may not be called for; age, in and of itself, is often viewed as sufficient reason to wish to terminate a pregnancy. Much research has concentrated on the reasons for deciding on an abortion, but other research has homed in on the decision-making process. Some of this research looks at internal processes (such as weighing the consequences of each pathway), whereas other studies concentrate on the interpersonal processes engaged in. Much research points to the fact that women tend to not make this decision alone and that even when they do not consult significant others in their lives, they take into consideration what they believe these people would say or recommend. Research also shows that the decision-making process may not feel like an active choice but rather a situation in which there is a lack of options. In some circumstances, the decision to have an abortion may be made by someone other than the woman herself. Partners and family members may insist on an abortion or on the continuation of the pregnancy. In the case of teenagers, parents may feel that it is their right, duty, or obligation to make the decision and to ensure that the young woman carries out their wishes. In these situations, there are power relations that clearly shape and constrain the decision-making process. However, this is not to say that power relations operate only when partners or family members exercise direct influence on the decision. As noted earlier, women tend to consider relationships even when making the decision themselves. A key difficulty with young women is that the pregnancy is often not detected early. The decision to terminate the pregnancy may thus be delayed to later in the gestation period, resulting in more barriers to accessing an abortion. Even in countries where

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Abortion

women are allowed to request an abortion, this consent is time limited; a termination of pregnancy after 12 weeks of gestation usually requires the recommendation of health service providers. In addition, second trimester (3 to 6 months into a pregnancy) abortions are more complicated medically.

Negotiating Access to the Procedure In addition to going through the process of decision making, the young woman needs to gain information on how to access the procedure. In countries with restrictive abortion legislation, this generally involves one of two routes: (a) trying to obtain permission for a legal abortion on the grounds permitted in the legislation (very few countries ban abortion outright; most permit it under certain circumstances); (b) consulting with trusted others about providers who will perform the procedure illegally or about abortifacients that can be used to self-induce. The first option is often not taken up, especially if the procedures for gaining permission are onerous, which is frequently the case. The second option usually involves the use of local providers or abortifacients, although various international initiatives (such as Women on Web) have been set up to enable women in these countries access medical abortion assistance through the post. Even where abortion is legal, negotiating access is not necessarily easy. In many instances, women, young women in particular, lack knowledge about their legal rights to abortion and where to access abortion clinics. In many countries, public health information on abortion services is inadequate. This lack of knowledge may result in young women accessing unsafe abortion, even in instances where they could receive a legal abortion. Even with sufficient knowledge, negotiating access may be complicated. Distances to abortion clinics may be great (e.g., in the United States, some women have to cross into different states to access abortion; in South Africa, clinics tend to be located in urban areas). Referral staff may feel negatively about young women being pregnant and may have objections to abortion. They may refuse to provide information on services or alternatively provide misinformation. In circumstances where abortion is legal, young women may still face negativity from health service providers. This frequently has to do with

these health service providers’ views of sexual activity amongst youth. Providers may have moral objections to young people engaging in sex or believe that young people are irresponsible for not using contraception consistently. These attitudes may filter into the health care encounter, with providers shaming young women for being pregnant and coercing them into long-term reversible contraception in future. Termination-of-pregnancy clinic staff members can, in many instances, act as gatekeepers, even when, ostensibly, all requests should be provided for. In circumstances where there is a great demand for services, staff members are forced to prioritise. In the case of minors, this may have contradictory effects. Some clinic staff may fasttrack requests by young women on the basis that childbirth in such circumstances is unacceptable; in others, as alluded to earlier, staff members’ negative opinions about youth sex and reproduction may contribute to their constructing a number of subtle barriers. In countries in which abortion is legal, the legal locus of decision making may differ. For example, in South Africa, a woman may request an abortion up to 12 weeks of gestation. In contrast, the British legislation requires that a health service provider make the decision. The former legislation is a rights-based approach, whereas the latter is a health-based approach. As indicated in research, both of these approaches have their drawbacks.

Abortion Stigma Women who decide to terminate a pregnancy often deal with stigma surrounding abortion. Abortion stigma has been defined as a negative attribute ascribed to women who seek to terminate a pregnancy, which marks them, internally or externally, as inferior to ideals of womanhood. Because the ideals of womanhood differ across social and cultural contexts, abortion stigma is variable and plays out in different ways. In some contexts, mistimed entry into motherhood (e.g., amongst teenage women) may be seen as more shameful than terminating a pregnancy. In other contexts, abortion may be associated with contagion and disgrace. In contrast, in some contexts, abortion may be seen as an acceptable form of fertility control (these countries have been labelled as having ‘abortion culture’).

Abortion

Research shows that women who terminate a pregnancy experience fear of social judgment, selfjudgment, and a need for secrecy. Secrecy is particularly a feature when women have to access unsafe and illegal abortion. It is also a key issue for young women who wish to conceal their pregnancy as well as the abortion. The stigma associated with abortion and the consequent need for secrecy has been associated with increased psychological distress and social isolation.

Additional Barriers: Parental Consent Pregnant teenagers with unwanted or unsupportable pregnancies tend to face significant complications in accessing termination of pregnancy services. In some countries, where abortion is legal, a minor needs parental consent to receive the service. In places where judicial bypass (where the minor approaches a court to provide permission in lieu of parental consent) is permitted, this process may delay the procedure until the pregnancy is past the cut-off date for legal terminations of pregnancy. Even in countries where parental permission is not required, parents and extended family may feel that they have a right to decide on the outcome of the pregnancy, putting pressure on the young woman in one direction or the other. The sexual partners of the young women may also feel that they are entitled to impose their own views or, alternatively, may provide her with little support in her decision. Proponents of parental consent argue that abortion carries substantially more risks for young women than for adults; therefore, the advice and counseling of an older and wiser person is required. Opponents point out that the lack of methodologically sound research makes the answer of whether there are greater risks involved in teenage or adult termination of pregnancy far from clearcut. Opponents of parental consent argue, furthermore, that requiring young people to gain parental permission for an abortion may itself have extremely adverse effects: the possibility of sparking family conflict, rejection, or punishment; enduring the bureaucratic procedures required (obtaining parental consent or judicial bypass); delaying the abortion procedure, hence increasing the risks; and young women accessing unsafe abortion to avoid having to involve their parents.

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Proponents of parental consent argue that because the cognitive abilities of teenagers are not fully developed, young women are not sufficiently competent to make a decision about abortion. Opponents counter this argument by indicating that the social contexts within which the decisions are being made need to be considered. Research has shown that with regard to decision making as related specifically to abortion, younger women do not differ from the older women in terms of measures of competency. In addition, opponents argue that if parental consent is required for abortion, then so should it be required for carrying a pregnancy to term, which equally well carries particular consequences and responsibilities.

Health and Psychological Consequences of Abortion The negative health consequences of unsafe termination of pregnancy are reasonably clear-cut: Unsafe abortion has been shown to contribute significantly to morbidity and mortality, and been called a ‘preventable pandemic.’ Little research has been conducted on the psychological consequences of unsafe abortion. What is clear is that young women suffer disproportionately from unsafe abortion as a result of their unmet need for contraception, sexual coercion in relationships, and unwanted or unsupportable pregnancies. There is some controversy concerning the health consequences of legal abortion. Some researchers suggest that even under medically controlled conditions, having an abortion is worse than carrying a pregnancy to term (e.g., increased risk for future preterm delivery, placenta previa, breast cancer, and infertility). Other researchers argue, however, that abortion carries fewer risks than childbearing. There is also considerable debate concerning the psychological consequences of legal abortion. Some research points to negative effects, such as fatigue, guilt, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction. Researchers have disputed a recognisable psychological disorder, called postabortion syndrome based on the symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder. Considerable concern has been raised in relation to studies finding negative psychological effects for women who have an abortion, including a lack of (a) consideration of the women’s functioning prior to the abortion,

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(b) meaningful comparison between women who undergo an abortion and women who have an unwanted pregnancy and give birth, and (c) consideration of the circumstances under which the abortion was performed. The weight of expert opinion over the years, based on methodologically sound research, points to legal abortion in the first trimester not posing a significant threat to mental well-being. Some researchers have argued, however, that these kinds of results do not take teenagers into consideration and that because of their developmental status, young women are more prone to negative psychological outcomes than older women. Recent research has, however, not upheld this hypothesis. Catriona Ida Macleod See also Birth Control; Fetal Personhood; Reproductive Choice; Sexual Citizenship

Further Readings Bloomer, F., & Pierson, C. (2018). Reimagining global abortion politics: A social justice perspective. Bristol, United Kingdom: Policy Press. Grimes, D. A., Benson, J., Singh, S., Romero, M., Ganatra, B., Okonofua, F. E., & Shah, I. H. (2006). Unsafe abortion: The preventable pandemic. The Lancet, 368(9550), 1908–1919. http://dx.doi .org/10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69481-6 Hanschmidt, F., Linde, K., Hilbert, A., Riedel-Heller, S. G., & Kersting, A. (2016). Abortion stigma: A systematic review. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 48(4), 169–177. http://dx.doi .org/10.1363/48e8516 Kumar, A., Hessini, L., & Mitchell, E. M. H. (2009). Conceptualising abortion stigma. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 11(6), 625–639. http://dx.doi .org/10.1080/13691050902842741 Macleod, C. (2011). Adolescence, pregnancy and abortion: Constructing a threat of degeneration. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Sedgh, G., Singh, S., Shah, I. H., Åhman, E., Henshaw, S. K., & Bankole, A. (2012). Induced abortion: Incidence and trends worldwide from 1995 to 2008. The Lancet, 379(9816), 625–632. http://dx.doi .org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61786-8 Shah, I. H., & Åhman, E. (2012). Unsafe abortion differentials in 2008 by age and developing country region: High burden among young women.

Reproductive Health Matters, 20(39), 169–173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0968-8080(12)39598-0 Warren, J. T., Harvey, S. M., & Henderson, J. T. (2010). Do depression and low self-esteem follow abortion among adolescents? Evidence from a national study. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 42(4), 230–235. http://dx.doi.org/10.1363/4223010

Addams, Jane Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a social reformer and peace activist, best known for her work at Hull House, a Chicago settlement house, she cofounded in 1889. Addams was a prolific author and speaker, active in many progressive causes, and was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931. Hull House itself and much of Addams’s own political advocacy work concerned the welfare and education of children. Addams was a member of the first generation of American women to be college educated, and she pioneered ways for women of her class to be involved in social activism. After spending many years, uncertain of a vocation, Addams was inspired by visiting Toynbee Hall settlement house in an industrial neighborhood of London. She and her college classmate Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House the very next year in 1889. Addams continued to lead Hull House until the end of her life, though over time she became increasingly involved in national and international issues. Addams worked for women’s suffrage and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. She lost some of her national popularity and influence because of her uncompromising pacifism during the First World War, but her reputation recovered by the late 1920s as the political climate moderated, and by the time of her death from cancer in 1935, she was again widely admired and considered the mother of social work. Addams understood poverty to be caused by the social and economic forces of industrialization, in contrast to the more traditional view that  poverty stemmed from the moral failings of poor individuals. She founded Hull House in a

Addams, Jane

Figure 1  Jane Addams, Circa 1924 Source: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public Domain.

working-class, immigrant neighborhood on Chicago’s west side and began to provide various services to people in the neighborhood. The house grew to serve also as a center for social research and political advocacy. Addams was determined that Hull House would not be a charity organization, but that its residents—middle-class and welleducated—would live and work with the working-class people from the surrounding neighborhoods, being in community with them, with both groups learning and teaching in turn. Addams and her Hull House colleagues sought to provide cultural and social resources to immigrant families, and they began by providing practical aid to mothers and children with day care, kindergarten, playground facilities, and as they became more established, English classes, women’s clubs, and groups and classes for the arts. Hull House maintained close ties to the newly formed sociology department at the University of Chicago. Hull House workers conducted surveys

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on many aspects of labor and living conditions, seeking to uncover the causes of suffering and patterns of oppression that their work could help ameliorate. Addams herself, who regularly contributed to professional sociology journals and invited University of Chicago faculty to lecture at Hull House, formed a link between the world of social work, which used sociological data for practical purposes, and the world of professional sociology, which used data for theoretical purposes. The general pattern that developed in ­Chicago at this time, that social work was done by women and sociology by men, would persist as both fields matured. From their day-to-day life and from their survey work, Addams and her Hull House colleagues were intimately familiar with the immigrant and working-class experience of the city, and so wellpositioned to advocate for a variety of issues, many of which were focused on the welfare of children. Hull House residents helped to establish the first juvenile court in the United States. They advocated for compulsory education and childlabor laws and lobbied for the formation of a federal bureau of children. The first two heads of the U.S. Children’s Bureau were Hull House residents Julia C. Lathrop and Grace Abbott. Addams was personally involved in a variety of issues relating to children. Addams worked with the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education and advocated for public playgrounds. Like many turn-of-the-century reformers, she was concerned with the crowded conditions of orphanages. She worked for the implementation of mother’s pensions to allow widows to keep their children at home. Addams used her place on the Chicago School Board to advocate for school architecture that included the gymnasiums and auditoriums that would allow schools to function as community centers outside of school hours. Though her close colleague, John Dewey, is thought of as the quintessential progressive educational philosopher, Addams herself was a serious educational thinker. In recent years, scholars have recognized her 1910 autobiography Twenty Years at Hull House as an important statement of child-centered educational philosophy. Both Addams and Dewey were strongly influenced by the work of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and

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Friedrich Froebel, who emphasized the importance of play in learning and the necessity of allowing children to follow their own interests. Addams believed that traditional forms of schooling had become too isolated from the realities of work and community life. She envisioned education that would be grounded in the cultures and life experiences of children, which would allow them opportunities for self-expression but which would also prepare them for the industrial society in which they lived. Jane McCamant See also Childhood Poverty; Children’s Bureau, United States; Dewey, John; Juvenile Courts, U.S. History; Pedagogy; Playground Movement, U.S. History; Social Work

Further Readings Addams, J., & Lagemann, E. C. (1994). On education. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Hamington, M. (2009). The social philosophy of Jane Addams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Knight, L. W. (2005). Citizen: Jane addams and the struggle for democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schaafsma, D. (2014). Jane Addams in the classroom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

ADHD See Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Adolescence Adolescence is the noun, socially conveyed, to designate the period of time between childhood and adulthood, most commonly situated between the ages of 13 and 17 years old. Adolescence is, therefore, a “socially constructed” period of life that is most often naturalized by psychosocial events signified by society into a standardized developmental path. This path has been historically constructed and reflects an essentialist view

based on an ordinary, white male, Western middle-class experience of youth that fails to ­ acknowledge the variety of personal experiences during this period of time. One explanation possible for this thrust of the concept of adolescence was the need to create a latency period created by capitalist trends of society for more specialized and schooled workers who would delay their entrance into the labour market. This entry deconstructs the construction of a mainstream approach to adolescence by contrasting it to a social constructionist, feminist, and more diversity-focused conceptualization.

Discursive Construction of Adolescence The discursive construction of adolescence is known to have begun in the 15th century, but not until the late 20th century did it became recognized and universally acknowledged as a “developmental period in life.” Because of its visibility, some biologically determined physical transformations—framed as puberty, which describes the process of physical changes through which a child body matures into an adult body (namely, capable of sexual reproduction)—were considered the beginning milestones of adolescence. The end of this “developmental period” is to be achieved through maturation and cognitive achievements turned into “established” lifelong personal, professional, and social projects. Moving away from a deterministic perspective and a sense of mandatory normalcy, it must be acknowledged that, despite being a moment that is culturally determined, physical changes often include the growth of body hair, increased perspiration and oil production (both on hair and skin), and great physical growth (in height and weight). In girls, it might also include breast and hip development and onset of menstruation. For boys, it could include the growth of testicles and penis, occurrence of wet dreams, and deepening of voice. Nonetheless, the lens through which biological changes are read need to be systematically analysed by a critical framework that advocates what is natural or biological as being socially constructed as well. In a Western-based perspective, some cognitive achievements can also be preferentially stimulated —such as the capacity for abstract thought, more

Adolescence

focus on intellectual challenges and interests, and moral reasoning. As for culturally different or more deprived environments not considered by the mainstream approaches, the cognitive challenges can translate into the acquisition of skills more directly linked with some culturally specific needs. Besides, metacultural and intercultural approaches to “adolescence” need to be claimed to properly situate its knowledge. Norman Kiell’s book The Universal Experience of Adolescence—largely influenced by the first research works conducted by American psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall in ­ 1904, which resulted in a two-volume work, Adolescence—contributed to the recognition of this standardized, positivist conceptualization. As a ­ maturationist, Hall emphasized that psychological and behavioural patterns were biologically determined, internal to the individual, and ignored any contextual influences. His findings led to the conceptualization of adolescence as a troubled time made of quick and chaotic, physical and psychological, transformation—a stereotyped and misleading affirmation that is still considered a universal truth. This myth about adolescence as a chaotic, vulnerable, or at-risk population creates an inaccurate image based on a general conception that disregards the diversity of the adolescents’ characteristics, attitudes, and behaviours and cultural contexts, as mentioned earlier. Even though some adolescents are particularly vulnerable (due to personal, cultural, and contextual characteristics), adolescents are not all the same. A disseminated perception of sameness may be not only deceiving to viewers but also to the adolescents themselves. This sense of “sameness,” of “normalcy,” puts up an idealized standard that many adolescents believe they have to correspond to. Rooted in idealized models, these standards may have an impact on adolescents’ sense of identity, body image, or self-esteem. The more aware of the power imbalances they are, the more they may be susceptible to discrimination, group segregation, and stigma. Most often these occurred as a result of belonging to diverse categories that are either social valued or viewed as less powerful. Finally, it is also necessary to acknowledge the importance attributed to peers and social interactions and the role of schools as contexts of (self-)

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construction of identities. Schools have been identified as one of the settings that most truthfully replicate the social hierarchy, divisions, and power imbalances present in society. Diversity and intersectionality are, hence, often important frameworks for approaching adolescence and deconstructing the fixed images and roles, stereotypically attributed to boys and girls and their intersection with racialized, classed, and sexualities positionings, among many others.

Mainstream Views of Adolescence The growing importance of this conceptualization has sparked the interest of many researchers. The first contributions came from a mainstream, essentialist, and pessimist point of view. In their Handbook of Adolescent Psychology, researchers Richard Lerner and Laurence Steinberg proposed a threephase organization for the history of the scientific, mainstream study of adolescence development. Their first phase ranged from 1904 to 1960 and can be described, according to the authors, as a period of the “grand” theories of development, where clashing conceptions (e.g., nature vs. nurture) converged. Reductionist models based on deficits conceptualizations that were atheoretical and more descriptive also characterize this phase. Other theories at this time came from authors such as Sigmund Freud and his psychosexual approach, which conceptualized a genital stage beginning in puberty; Jean Piaget with his ­cognitive-developmental approach (based on thought achievements); and Erik Erikson with his identity development approach (by identity crisis solving). Cultural-driven approaches were also presented during this phase, such as those formulated by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Harry Sullivan. Those reiterated the dependence of demands and cultural expectations that bring distress to adolescence, focusing on obstacles to which adolescents should positively respond during this stage in life. In addition, the importance of peers and significant others was emphasized as having an important role in assessing the “adequacy” of the trajectory of adolescents. A second phase in the construction of discourses of adolescence can be seen between 1960 and 1990. During this time, there was a turn to multivariate longitudinal studies, and some special

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attention was drawn to the plasticity and diversity of adolescents. Therefore, some tension between a focus on the individual or on the context arose from the establishment of more dynamic developmental systems models. These characteristics are typified by the works of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan on moral development approaches based on moral dilemmas. Kohlberg’s work focused exclusively on boys, whereas Gilligan’s work incorporated girls’ experiences as well. Other significant research was undertaken by Robert Selman, with his five stages of moral reasoning for developing a social perspective, and Albert Bandura, proposing his social learning theory based on the reciprocity between the individual, the behaviour, and the environment in learning behavioural patterns. Finally, the third and last phase can be traced from 1990 to current formulations. This phase is characterized by (a) the investment of more applied developmental science; (b) a greater focus on the link between research and its practical application, especially by developing youth program; and (c) youth-applied policies on the attempt to stimulate a positive youth development. Several authors— Richard Lerner, David Hamburg, and Laurence Steinberg, for example—continue to develop this last approach to conceptualizing adolescence. These current proposals address adolescence as a developmental phase influenced by the multiplicity of contexts in which adolescents are raised and perceive adolescent development as a network of relations between systems and subsystems, ranging from the biological to the social and cultural to the historical. Despite being less problem oriented and more focused on diversity, these approaches do not respond fully to the intersectional features of adolescence. As presented, the development of various approaches has greatly contributed to the thinking about adolescence, but they also exhibit several limitations. All these mainstream conceptualizations are rooted in a modern approach based on an androcentric view and on a conceptual essentialist stiffness that created extreme and dichotomized versions of the individuals—good/bad, normal/abnormal, and so on. A sense of normalcy and standardization was stereotypically disclosed, making use of some selffulfilling prophecies that corroborated this cloak of sameness that excluded most people.

These biased approaches not only exclude female and gendered experiences but have also forgotten and made invisible any racialized, classed, or sexualities positions detouring from this cherished standard. Therefore, any deflection from these data would automatically create, and label, adolescents as an at-risk, deficit population. The pressure on measurements and of standardizing age-appropriate developmental stages behaviours led to labelling individuals, resulting in social categorization and dichotomization, social segregation, and stigma. Finally, the gender-biased core limitation of the approaches led to absent or asymmetrical conceptualizations of women’s development by always comparing them to a male standard, which resulted in an unequal perspective of women’s and men’s development.

Future Paths in the Study of Adolescence As argued earlier, adolescence is a discursively, socially, constructed designation that is heavily determined by contextual, sociohistorical, and personal factors. The same as all discursive and socially constructed concepts, adolescence will continue to evolve in close interaction to local, contextual, and historical realities. Some recommendations have been made by the latest research considering the need for new models of perceiving and constructing adolescence. Despite most of the focus being on health issues—disregarding other adolescent rights such as education, protection, and participation—some research indicates contributions that can be made towards a diverse conceptualization of adolescence, in which subjectivities and personal positionings are taken into account. To this outcome can be added the need to embrace adolescence as a constructed discourse in the course of life that does need special attention and to be overly problematized. The deconstruction of stereotypes and myths associated with adolescence put to terms the sense of sameness and a standardized “normalcy” that creates barriers and assigns otherness to stigmatized positionings. Otherness and diversity may also be made more visible. Distinct ways of being adolescent must be acknowledged, both by peers and adults, promoting equal valorisation and acceptance of nonstandardized models.

Adolescence, History of

Adolescents should have more voice and visibility, even an organized agenda that values this period of life and puts them in more direct contact with their communities, stakeholders, and ultimately, decision makers. Efforts of feminist researchers such as Erica Burman, Celia Roberts, or Pedro Pinto have made visible the importance of pursuing the deconstruction of the stereotyped conceptualizations of adolescence that persist and of welcoming more diversity-focused, intersectional, culturally engaged approaches that render visible all subjectivities and positionings as equally cherished and valued. Because culturally accepted views on “adolescence” are as diverse as the cultures, relations, and subjects that define them, current approaches to this “phase” of life must be questioned in relation to their pertinence in the present and for the future. Adolescence “beginnings and endings” are becoming more and more fluid, so chronological frontiers should also be permanently looked at as provisory. Conceição Nogueira and Sara Isabel Magalhães See also Boyhood; Development; Girlhood; Teenagers; Tween; Youth

Further Readings Beauvoir, S. (1972). The coming of age. New York, NY: Putnam. Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2001). Sexying the body. New York, NY: Basic Books. Lerner, R. M., & Steinberg, L. (2009). Handbook of adolescent psychology (2 vols.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Pinto, P., & Macleod, C. I. (2019). A genealogy of puberty science: Monsters, abnormals, and everyone else. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Roberts, C. (2015). Puberty in crisis: The sociology of early sexual development. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. https://doi .org/10.1017/CBO9781316221853 Stainton Rogers, R., & Stainton Rogers, W. (1992). Stories of childhood: Shifting agendas of child concern. Lewes, United Kingdom: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Swanson, D. P., Edwards, M. C., & Spencer, M. B. (2010). Adolescence: development during a global era. Burlington, MA: Academic Press.

Adolescence, History

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Adolescence, derived from the Latin adolescere, that is, to grow, has a long history, but its emergence as a major social, pedagogical, and academic concern may be traced to the second half of the 19th century. From then on, despite ongoing disputes about its characteristics, scope, and relevance, adolescence has established itself as a natural and allegedly universal feature of the process of growing up, embodying evolving conceptions about the transition from childhood to adulthood. This entry examines the rise of adolescence as a category of discourse and intervention and explores the controversies that have accompanied it.

The Concept of Adolescence The concept of adolescence traditionally referred to a specific phase in the life of aristocrats, variably associated with the virtues of young knights and with the perils of court life. From the late 18th century onward, though, it gradually acquired new and broader connotations. If the premises of this evolution may be found already in JeanJacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762), where the philosopher compares adolescence to a second birth and to a tidal wave, the figure of the adolescent, expressing certain ideas about the physical and psychological changes affecting all young people of a certain age range, emerged only in the last decades of the 19th century, in conjunction with the industrialization of Western societies and with the institutionalization of compulsory schooling. In preindustrial societies, age was a relatively poor guide of individual development. Young people typically left home before puberty, often spending several years in boarding schools or as servants or apprentices in the house of masters, situations where they enjoyed a certain degree of independence. The economic, demographic, and social changes that accompanied the process of industrialization, nevertheless, brought the lives of young people under increasing adult control, deeply affecting their position in society. Since the mid-19th century, the decay in the tradition of apprenticeship, the massive rural exodus of young people, and the growing difficulties encountered by many of them in accessing an

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increasingly selective and competitive job market, where large organizations and bureaucracies required new competencies, made the prolongation of schooling an unavoidable, albeit not always successful, means of social ascension. The drop in mortality and fertility rates, for its part, radically transformed the composition of middle-class families as well as their ideals and parenting practices. Children became the object of increasing emotional attachment, the preservation of their innocence grew into a major concern, and puberty came to be perceived as a dangerous period, synonym of vigor, passions, and indiscipline. In this context, leaving home, a place growingly associated with ideas of protection and intimacy, increasingly appeared as a risky endeavor. As a result of these evolutions and of the progressive development of public schools, most young people stayed home longer, usually until they married or entered adult jobs. The educated middle classes were also more and more skeptical about the capacity of increasingly urbanized societies to adequately socialize young people. School surveillance and discipline were strengthened in order to ensure pupils’ socialization and instruction as well as to repress the manifestations of puberty. Significantly, the first revolts of high school students, opposing teaching practices perceived as restrictive or infantilizing, date from this period. The extension of secondary schooling and the splitting of primary and secondary education, furthermore, contributed to the physical separation of teenagers from other age groups (children and young adults), ultimately setting the ground for the identification of adolescents with teenagers attending secondary schools. Even though the experiences of adolescence varied according to gender, race, and class, by the turn of the 20th century, policy makers, youth workers, and middle-class parents growingly saw adolescence as a phase of character building and training, requiring supervision, support, and the protracted segregation of young people from the adult world.

The Scientific Discovery of Adolescence The scientific discovery of adolescence, if not its invention, dates back to this epoch. It is usually attributed to the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who published in 1904 his seminal work

Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. Like many of his contemporaries, Hall, one of the leading figures of the emerging child study movement, was inspired by Darwin’s evolutionism and believed in the capacity of the scientific inquiry into the child’s mind and development to enlighten the progress of mankind. According to his evolutionary psychology, individual biological and psychological development would reflect the historical evolution of humanity. He saw adolescence, in particular, as a new birth, as a unique transitional period bearing enormous possibilities for growth and creativity but also characterized by storm, stress, instability, and raging hormones, recapitulating a recent developmental leap of the human race on its move from savagery to civilization. Accordingly, adolescents’ potential and vitality had to be safeguarded if the young had to reach their fullest maturity, which implied promoting the professionalization of teachers, moral education, gender segregation, the improvement of child-rearing practices, and the sublimation of boys’ sexual instincts. Hall’s conception of adolescence was criticized by numerous academics of the time, who disagreed with his view of personal growth as a succession of stages as well as with the evolutionary and racial underpinnings of his theory. As from the 1920s, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead set out to challenge Hall’s psychological theories, which they saw as ethnocentric. Based on fieldwork in Samoa, Mead argued, in particular, that adolescence varies across cultures, that it is not necessarily a time of crisis and tensions and that, therefore, nurture prevails over nature. According to this line of thought, which resonates with recent ethnographic critiques of psychological theories of adolescence, Hall’s model appears as an attempt to universalize a particular, time- and space-specific way of conceiving and organizing the transition from childhood to adulthood, namely that of early 20th century, White, middle class, North American society. Despite these critiques, Hall’s ideas of adolescence captured popular imagination and were enthusiastically embraced by many parents, educators, and youth workers, who promoted their universalization beyond the middle classes. From the late 1930s onward, as adults strived to ensure the suitable development of adolescents through

Adolescence, History of

increasingly sophisticated pedagogies, social work, and parenting, the segregation of a growing proportion of teenagers in high schools and in organized leisure activities enhanced the frequency and significance of peer relations, leading to the emergence of specific teenage cultures, or subcultures, frequently rejecting established values and norms. In the booming economy of the decades following World War II, teenagers also became the main target of the flourishing entertainment and fashion industries, transforming adolescence into a market and reinforcing its distinctive features. Adolescents, thus, came to be seen as a group possessing its own language, music, dance styles, clothing, literature, and magazines, with significant variations according to gender, race, and social class. While the evolutionary narrative underpinning Hall’s theory has become largely obsolete, many of his core assumptions, and in particular the idea that adolescence inevitably entails crisis and turmoil, have marked the study of adolescence until today. In fact, the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and the spectacular development of neurosciences since the 1990s have contributed to strengthening the dominant understanding of adolescence as a natural, mainly biological and psychological, stage within a process of maturation, ultimately ending up, if properly managed and encouraged, into the achievement of rational, stable, and responsible adulthood. To be sure, the hormonal account of adolescence now coexists with increasingly popularized neuroscientific narratives of the adolescent brain, which emphasize turbulence, emotional immaturity, and risk-prone behaviors, associated, namely, with suboptimal connections between the reward centers of the brain and those in charge of rational considerations (i.e., the prefrontal cortex). As the recent emergence of categories such as preadolescence and postadolescence suggest, the boundaries of adolescence are also constantly renegotiated. In particular, while the gradual lowering of the onset of puberty, made possible by improvement in nutrition, destabilizes the lower age limit of the category, neurosciences show that cerebral maturation extends up to the age of 25 years, well beyond the teen years. Yet adolescence remains dominantly portrayed as a problematic, troubled, uncertain, and rebellious transitional period, a conception that has significant implications when it comes to designing policies and pedagogies on behalf of young people.

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The history of adolescence, hence, is one of liminality and controversies. The category’s trajectory must be read in light of the historical transformations of Western societies. In fact, there would be no adolescence without the conviction that puberty is associated to crucial developmental stakes, justifying the growing segregation and supervision of young people. Yet scholars have noted that debates about adolescence seem to be trapped into intertwined binaries (childhood vs. adulthood, nature vs. culture, and savage vs. civilized), making it hard to grasp its relational and hybrid manifestations. In this respect, recent interdisciplinary research associating neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and anthropology points toward promising directions. It underscores that adolescence is not biologically determined nor a simple cultural construct. If it is real, in the sense that it exists both as an object of discourse and as a device organizing countless aspects of young people’s lives, including education, leisure, and health care, its characteristics result from the complex interaction between biology and its social, economic, cultural, and institutional environment. Michele Poretti See also Adolescence; Child Study; Hall, Granville Stanley; History of Childhood; Neuroscience; Tween

Further Readings Choudhury, S. (2010). Culturing the adolescent brain: What can neuroscience learn from anthropology? Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2–3), 159–167. doi:10.1093/scan/nsp030 Feixas, C. (2011). Past and present of adolescence in society: The ‘teen brain’ debate in perspective. Neuroscience and Behavioral Reviews, 35, 1634– 1643. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.02.013 Gillis, J. R. (1981). Youth and history: Tradition and change in European age relations, 1770-present. Cambridge, MA: Academic Press. Kett, J. F. (1977). Rites of passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the present. New York, NY: Basic Books. Lesko, N. (1996). Denaturalizing adolescence: The politics of contemporary representations. Youth and Society, 28(2), 139–161. doi:10.1177/0044118x96028002001 Palladino, G. (1996). Teenagers: An American history. New York, NY: Basic Books.

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Adolesecent Pregnancy

Adolesecent Pregnancy Adolescence, the period of transition from childhood to adulthood, encompassing the development to sexual and psychological maturity and relative economic independence. According to the World Health Organisation, adolescence is the duration of years that spanning the ages of 10–19 years, and girls generally begin ovulating between ages 12 and 13 years. At this age, also known as puberty, most girls are in the lower grades of secondary schooling. This entry provides a specific focus on adolescent pregnancy in Kenya. Though Kenya is neither a unique case study of adolescent pregnancy nor necessarily representative of how this phenomenon unfolds across the globe, it is discussed here as a situated example that illustrates the various dimensions of teenage pregnancy, which may resonate to a greater or lesser extent in relation to other national and cultural contexts. The following sections discuss the prevalence of adolescent pregnancy in Kenya, the risk factors and the stigma associated with it, as well as its effects on health and schooling. (Hereafter, the terms ‘adolescent’, ‘teenage’, and ‘teen’ are used interchangeably.) In Kenya, when an unwanted teenage pregnancy occurs, parents of the girl child become disappointed because raising the money to pay for school fees is often a struggle, and a pregnancy forces the girl to discontinue her education. The social obstacles to achieving sexual and reproductive health by adolescents in Kenya are poor education, high poverty, food insecurity, rigid social norms, high exposure to sexual and gender-based violence, poor health facilities, and little social and familial support. Adolescents are initiated into sex by their peers with limited knowledge of contraceptive methods. Some of the barriers to contraception teenagers experience include the cost of contraception, negative judgemental attitudes of health providers, and shame and stigma associated with sex at a young age. In Kenya, the debate on whether to introduce sex education in schools from upper primary levels shows that parents are now concerned about leaving this vulnerable population to engage in trial and error on matters of sexuality. This has led to some discussion on the pros

and cons towards the introduction of sex education in schools from upper primary grades, notwithstanding the cultural and religious views within the society. In addition, some lawmakers have argued that introducing family planning methods to those aged 16 years could minimise the number of teenage pregnancies. Though most parents have not embraced this concept, as they fear this might mean encouraging adolescents to initiate sexual activities, practical solutions to mitigate teenage pregnancy is being debated within the society.

Overview of Adolescent Pregnancy In Kenya, according to the 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, most of the youth are reported to initiate sexual intercourse at a median age of 18 years for female and 17.4 years for male. Sexual initiation by age 15 years stands at 15% for female and at 21% for male adolescents. Pregnancy at this age is viewed as failure of maternal care and parental guidance in Kenyan or African social context. This creates marital disharmony as blame is apportioned to the mother who might have done all within her capabilities to avoid the occurrence, thus causing distress in the family setup. Teenage pregnancy is more common in girls who are raised by a single parent, are of lower socioeconomic status, or come from families who use or abuse alcohol and drugs such as psychoactive substances. Owing to poverty and naivety for some of the adolescent girls, basic needs sometimes push them to engage in transactional sex with older men. Continued sexual engagement with older men could predispose teenage girls to unplanned and unwanted pregnancies with the risk of contracting HIV. From the authors’ experience at Kangemi and Kariobangi health centres, when administering group interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT-G) to postpartum adolescents to mitigate depression and HIV-related stigma, it was discovered that most of the clients found themselves pregnant during their first sexual relationship with a man and acknowledged that their naivety and lack of knowledge on sexual health and contraception resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. In most cases, older men are responsible for the pregnancy. In agreement with other related previous studies, adolescents fear unwanted

Adolesecent Pregnancy

pregnancy more than sexually transmitted infections or HIV, despite not being keen to practise protected sex. In Kenya, education on sexuality still faces resistance because of cultural practises, whereby discussing sex with the young is seen as taboo. In some communities, such as the Maasai, prearranged marriages of teenage girls with older men is rampant and places government and nongovernmental authorities advocating against teenage pregnancy at loggerheads with such communal practises. Female genital mutilation/cutting also contributes to teenage pregnancies since young girls who have undergone this ritual are seen as being ready to negotiate for consensual sex with their male partners, despite being physically, cognitively, and biologically unready to make informed choices.

Prevalence of Adolescent Pregnancy According to the United Nation Population Fund, 26% of adolescents in Kenya become mothers between 15 and 19 years of age. Donatien Beguy and colleagues found out that about 41% of these pregnancies in Kenyan urban slums are unintended, 26% are mistimed, and 15% are unwanted. These unintended and early pregnancies also make adolescents prone to sexually transmitted infections and HIV. In some instances, those with an unwanted pregnancy are more likely to resort to abortion, which is illegal and often done by unskilled attendants, leading to any of several pregnancy and birth-related complications.

Risk Factors Associated With Adolescent Pregnancies Single parenting is seen as a predisposing factor when teenage girls compensate for the missing father by way of seeking attention for emotional attachment and perceived security from the male partner (father figures), which may advance to intimacy as time goes by. Dysfunctional families where parents are not available to offer protection to their children and unhealthy peer pressure where young girls are introduced to unprotected sex by older colleagues is a common phenomenon. Low socioeconomic status potentiates teenage girls to engage in transactional sex. In addition,

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knowledge and information on issues pertaining to sexuality is lacking because of cultural hindrances in the society and in schooling. Female genital mutilation/cutting creates a perceived adulthood for young girls, thus being allowed to negotiate for sex despite a power imbalance with the opposite gender because of differences in age and affinity to money as a source of influence. There is also a pernicious myth amongst some communities that having sex with young girls could heal an individual from HIV, and this makes adolescent girls more vulnerable.

Health Outcomes of Teenage Pregnancy Higher infant–maternal mortality rates are reported amongst teenagers because their bodies are biologically immature and physically underdeveloped to support the process of pregnancy. The children given birth by adolescents may present with low birth weight, malnutrition, congenital deformities, and intellectual disabilities associated with difficult labour. Postpartum depression is also reported to be higher amongst teenagers than for the general population, which could be explained by challenges associated with transition of adolescents to early motherhood and a lack of protective resources: finances for food, housing, and clothing. In addition, malnutrition is common in children born to teenagers because of lack of adequate food or poor feeding practises. Other complications associated with underdeveloped physical body structures of adolescents could predispose them to Caesarean sections and obstetric fistula, which is one of the most severe childbirth-related complications, and in extreme cases can result in the loss of the baby during delivery.

Stigma and Other Difficulties Associated With Adolescent Pregnancy Many teenagers who are undergoing pregnancy drop out of school because of the ridicule they experience from peers. School administrators often view the adolescent mother’s behaviour as promiscuous, and she is seen as a poor role model to other pupils and students. Owing to the financial challenges of providing for their children, teenage mothers respond to the stress by engaging in drug

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Adolesecent Pregnancy

and substance abuse. Teenage pregnancies in most communities is seen to be an outcome of an adolescent’s living a promiscuous life. The pregnant adolescent is seen as a social deviant. Teenagers who engage in unprotected sex may experience unintended or unwanted pregnancy, and worse still, become infected with HIV. The opportunistic infections associated with HIV reduce the quality of life of this young population; HIV-related stigma (internal and external) may make their lives unbearable. Those who procure abortions in some instances will remain haunted by traumatic experiences of post-abortion syndrome. In Kenya, cultural norms hinder the process of sex education, and hence, in most instances, adolescents acquire information on human sexuality through peers and other uncensored forums. It is worth noting that a significant proportion of adolescents undergoing pregnancy end up being forced out of their homes to stay with relatives or engage in domestic labour for pay. This is a worrisome trend because it indicates an increase in child labour practises, which in itself is against the laws of Kenya.

Impact of Adolescent Pregnancy on Education Adolescents in Kenya between ages 10 and 19 years are usually school pupils, from grade 4 up to grade 12. A pregnant girl may lose education, become unemployed and without income, and lacking in future prospects. Most of them drop out of school to engage in casual jobs with meagre income, and as time progresses, some may engage in transactional sex involving older men who have no intention of marrying them. Those adolescents who try to conceal their pregnancy by wearing confining garments may thereby cause poor childbirth outcomes and subsequent health problems for the child.

Strategies to Deal With Teenage Pregnancy Adolescent girls and young women require friendly sexual and reproductive health services; hence, there is a need to establish school- and collegebased sexual health services. Youth-friendly reproductive health services can help adolescent girls to access information on human sexuality and make

available family planning methods where necessary, thus reducing teenage pregnancies within the society. Adolescents who are postpartum can be supported by (a) empowering them to accept their motherhood status; (b) helping them to set up short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals; (c) encouraging the use of long-term birth control; and (d) advocating return to school or vocational training. Awareness should also be promoted of the existing laws that criminalise sex with an underage person, so as to curtail occurrences involving older male partners. Another approach that the Ministry of Education in Kenya has recommended is the use of educational counsellors who are to be posted to schools with the intention of enhancing counselling services at all times.

The Way Forward Amongst the measures that have been advocated by concerned professionals to deal with adolescent pregnancy are the following: Sex education should be taught in secondary schools as part of the curriculum. Community-based organisations need to focus on return-to-school programmes for teenagers after the baby’s birth. Affected teenagers should be encouraged to undertake training on self-care, income generation, child feeding and nutrition, and parenting skills. In addition, advocacy for abandonment of female genital mutilation/cutting in Kenya is needed at community levels, and awareness of parenting skills should be shared with all parents in the community through village chiefs, ‘barazas’, religious groupings, and other social forums. Specific psychotherapy intervention for perinatal depression in teenagers is needed; currently, the most evidence-based intervention, according to Laura Mufson and colleagues, may be IPT-G. The IPT-G addresses four important areas of life: (1) loss and grief (losing meaning in life); (2) conflicts and disputes (problems relating with other family members and society); (3) life transition (change of roles from student to early motherhood); and (4) loneliness and social isolation (group members of the adolescent’s social circle have changed). Community health volunteers can be trained on IPT-G to empower adolescent mothers to address psychosocial issues associated with pregnancy considering the mother’s physical and emotional immaturity.

Adoption, History of

Parents, caregivers, and the entire community have a role in providing social and emotional support to adolescents to enable them to transit gracefully to early adulthood. Hence, society as a whole shares responsibility for understanding the causes and consequences of adolescent pregnancy and for ensuring the health and well-being of teenage mothers and their children. Obadia Yator and Manasi Kumar See also Childhood Poverty; Children’s Rights; Early Marriage

Further Readings Beguy, D., Mumah, J., & Gottschalk, L. (2014). Unintended pregnancies among young women living in urban slums; evidence from a prospective study in Nairobi City, Kenya. PLoS One, 9(7), e101034. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0101034 Mufson, L., Moreau, D., Weissman, M. M., & Klerman, G. L. (1993). Interpersonal therapy for depressed adolescents. New York, NY: Guilford Press. National Bureau of Statistics-Kenya and ICF International. (2015). 2014 KDHS key findings. Rockville, MD: KNBS and ICF International. United Nation Population Fund. (2013). Motherhood in childhood: Facing the challenge of adolescent pregnancy. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https://www .unfpa.org/publications/state-world-population-2013

Adoption, History

of

Adoption is the practice of raising a child, one not biologically related to the adult in question, as one’s own. Adoption refers to both finding a home for a child in need and finding a child for a family who wants one. In its earliest stages, families adopted a child to continue the family lineage if biological children were not possible. Adoptions were carried out in the interests only of the adopting family, as in ancient Rome. Eventually, however, adoption became a solution to problems of children’s welfare, especially with the emergence of social services and social workers focused on the needs and rights of children. This entry provides a brief history of selected adoption practices, from antiquity to the modern day.

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Early Concepts of Adoption People have been practicing adoption, or some form of it, since before recorded history, but it is difficult to learn about practices when no record is left. One of the first acknowledgments of adoption appeared in the Code of Hammurabi in 2285 BCE. Stories from myth and scripture also reference adoptions such as the adoption of Moses by Miriam, the Pharaoh’s daughter, and the adoption of Heracles by Hera in Greek mythology. The Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks also recorded instances of adoption. In ancient Rome, rites of family religious worship were a main reason for adoption. The center of religious worship was the home, and each home had household gods. Worship depended on the presence of a male, so sometimes families adopted to gain a son. Central to Roman law was that the adoption must imitate nature: That is, the adoptee had to be at least a generation younger than the adopting father (only men were allowed to adopt until 291 CE). The child also took the father’s family name. Equally important was continuing the family lineage. Romans had a special kind of adoption for this purpose, called adrogation, or the adoption of an adult male who then became the adopting party’s legal heir. Many societies placed explicit priority on producing a male heir. In China, for instance, sons historically took care of parents in their old age and tended to their graves, which kept the spirit from purgatory in the afterlife. Followers of the Shinto religion in Japan have similar beliefs, with ancestors as objects of worship.

England and the Lack of Adoption In England in the Middle Ages, adoption was neither acknowledged nor allowed in the law or social practices. Instead, society operated on the principle of primogeniture, in which the eldest male child inherits the family’s wealth. The society placed a very high priority on blood lineage. Because an adopted child did not share the birth family’s genetic makeup, he or she was not seen as a possible heir. Even so, a look at the treatment of children and poor people provides a background for understanding the adoption laws that came later. As England entered an economic downturn in the 1500s, the poor faced increased hardship.

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Adoption, History of

Before he died in 1547, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, cutting off an important source of charity for many communities and turning out hundreds of monks who then became homeless. This, combined with a rising population and inflation leading to low wages, made for a high number of unemployed and homeless people. Such individuals were often viewed as vagabonds, regardless of whether the person was purposely living as a nomad, could not find employment despite their best efforts, or could not work because of a disability, illness, or other condition. This definition did not exclude poor or homeless children. The government saw poverty as a threat to stability and often equated vagabonds with criminals. As punishment, a vagrant may have been placed in the stocks for a few days, banned from town, enslaved, or (in extreme cases) executed. Under Queen Elizabeth, a series of statues was passed, referred to as the Poor Law of 1601. Not all parts of the law were successful or enforced. One statute required that parents either provide for their children or indenture them. The law also called for building more workhouses and hospitals, which was in some ways a much more charitable solution than those of the 1500s. The workhouse, a place where people performed manual labor in exchange for room and board, became a very popular solution to poor people begging or living on the streets. Workhouses bore some resemblances to prisons: Residents were referred to as inmates, and men, women, and children lived separately, all in cramped and often unsanitary conditions. By the 1770s, England had over 2,000 workhouses, often attached to parishes. By 1840, nearly half of the workhouses’ residents were children. Sometimes, instead of being sent to a workhouse, children without parents were sent to live with other families as indentured servants—also called apprenticeship or putting out. Even middleclass families sometimes sent their children to be apprenticed by another family, ostensibly to learn discipline, and develop trade skills, but this undoubtedly eased, at least temporarily, the economic strain of having the child in the house. Children could also be apprenticed without their consent or consent of their families. The law that preceded the 1601 Poor Law made it legal for a man to take a vagabond child, regardless of

whether he or she had parents, and apprentice the child until the child reached age 24 (for men) and 20 (for women) years. England’s attitudes toward adoption traveled to its colonies that later became the United States. Informal options, in which someone adopts a child in practice, without going through the legal process (which did not exist at that point), are said to have been common then. However, because this was not a legal process, there are few records to show how common informal adoption was. Also common was the inclusion of godchildren as heirs in the absence of biological children. Thomas Jefferson succeeded in lifting the law of primogeniture in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1783. The United States began to write adoption laws in the 1800s, but England did not have an adoption law until 1926.

The United States: Adoption as Children’s Welfare Around the mid-19th century, adoption became more an issue of children’s welfare than it had been. This was during the same time European immigrants came in large numbers to the United States, particularly Eastern cities such as New York. As the population exploded and the country became more industrialized, more and more people were homeless simply because of overcrowding. Even if children weren’t orphans, they often ended up sleeping on the street for lack of space in their families’ tenements. Similarly, schools were overcrowded; more and more children were out and about, perceived by others as delinquent. People tended to view the destitute not only as unfortunate but as somehow morally lacking—a view not much different from the perception of vagrants in the English Middle Ages. Charles Loring Brace, who founded the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in 1853 in New York City, shared this view as well. The CAS helped move welfare away from public institutions such as workhouses and almshouses, which basically functioned like prisons. Sometimes, because police arrest delinquent children, children found themselves incarcerated in actual prisons. Although the CAS did not have the most empowering view of children, it did mark a shift in public opinion. The attitude toward

Adoption, History of

society’s responsibility to help children in need became more charitable. The CAS is perhaps best known for its practice of sending children in need of homes on trains westward, where they joined farming families as foster or adoptive children. Whereas the Eastern cities could not produce enough jobs for everyone, the Midwest had a labor shortage. These orphan trains were a practice from 1853 until 1929. It’s estimated that around 150,000 children took part in this program before it ended. The CAS was not able to conduct very much follow-up on what happened to these children once they were adopted. It is hard to say whether the children were accepted as truly part of the family or if they were seen simply as more free labor. More and more, though, private agencies such as the CAS focused on placing children with a suitable adoptive family. The first comprehensive adoption law on the books in the United States was a Massachusetts law in 1851. This law put the best interests of the child at the forefront and allowed a judge to determine whether the adoptive parents were suitable candidates. The motivation behind this law was said to have been the rights of adopted children as heirs, should the adopting parents die. Many other states modeled their adoption laws after this Massachusetts law.

The Indian Adoption Project At times, people in power used concern for others’ welfare as a way to advance xenophobic and assimilationist agendas; this happened especially where children were concerned. One blatant example of this was the Indian Adoption Project that began in the late 19th century. During this time, the federal government began to express concern that Native Americans needed to become civilized. They referred to this conundrum as the Indian Problem. The government, including the newly created Bureau of Indian Affairs, saw Native Americans as savages, needing to be set on the path to Christianity. The best way to do this, they believed, was to indoctrinate the children with the ways of the dominant society and religion. In an 1881 law, Congress declared school attendance mandatory for Native children. To make this possible, Native children were taken from their families and placed in boarding or mission schools, where they were not allowed to

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speak their native languages, wear their usual clothes, or observe their religions. Families who did not comply were refused their allowances of food and clothing from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the 1930s, the government began to close down the boarding schools because they were becoming expensive to operate. During this same time, the government was taking more and more rights and resources, especially land, away from tribes. Between 1887 and 1934, Native American land shrank from 138 million acres to 48 million. Many children, upon the schools’ closures, found that they did not have families to return home to or that their families could hardly financially support them. This meant that social workers were tasked with the decision of what happened to these children and with whom they would live. Many Native families depended on single mothers or extended relatives to take care of the children. The social work system viewed these options as inferior to the traditional nuclear family with two married parents, a working father, and a stayat-home mother. Social workers did not consider that children may be better off living with their blood families even if the families did not fit into this mold. So between 1959 and 1968, a total of 395 Native American children were placed in White families. By the 1970s, between 25% and 35% of Native American children had been adopted by White families. Finally, in 1978, Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act. The act requires that a child’s tribe or the Bureau of Indian Affairs be informed before an adoption takes place and requires the child’s tribe’s permission. It also states that placement for the child within the same tribe is the first priority and that placement of the child outside the Native American culture is a last resort.

Transracial and Intercountry Adoption After World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s, Americans generally experienced more economic prosperity. More adults found themselves able and wanting to be parents. At the same time, more children were also born to unwed mothers who sometimes gave the children up for adoption. An increase in both prospective parents and prospective adoptees meant that adoption became more popular. Also starting in that same postwar period,

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Adoption, History of

families began to adopt children from countries different from their own and of different races. In the wake of World War II, many children in Europe, especially Greece and Germany, were orphaned. For about 5 years following the war, there was a wave of adoptions of those children into American homes. Similarly, in the decade following the Korean War, American families adopted many of the 100,000 Korean children who lost their parents in the war. One American couple, Harry and Bertha Holt, traveled to Korea in 1955 and adopted eight Korean children. The next year, they started Holt International Children’s S­ ervices, which became and still is a large intercountry adoption agency. In the 1960s and 1970s, intercountry adoption continued to be popular, with the highest number of intercountry adoptions taking place in 2004. In 2007, the National Survey of Adoptive Parents found that 40% of adopted children in U.S. households were of a different race or ethnicity than their adopted parents. More and more parents may be adopting outside of their race because of the popularity of intercountry adoption and the overrepresentation of children of color in the foster care system. Also, although there used to be a large stigma about adoption, that is less so the case. Fewer families find it important to adopt a child who looks like he or she could be genetically related to the family. Eastern Europe and China became very prominent countries from which Americans adopt. According to the National Survey of Adoptive Parents, about 25% of adopted children in the United States in 2010 were adopted internationally. Just under half of those children came from an Asian country. Globally, the United States adopts the largest number of children from other countries. But other countries with smaller populations may adopt at higher rates, according to the 2010 census data. Transracial adoptees can face unique issues, sometimes feeling disconnected both from their adoptive family and from their culture of origin. Even the most loving families sometimes need guidance on how best to support a child facing these challenges. One reason international, or intercountry, adoption has become popular is that domestic adoption is declining since its mid-20thcentury peak. In the United States, fewer and fewer

children are becoming available for adoption domestically, likely for several reasons. There is less stigma against single and unwed mothers, so fewer women facing an unplanned pregnancy may be considering adoption. In addition, since the decision of Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion has been federally legal, and the number of abortions did increase after this. Although people have been practicing abortion, much like adoption, for millennia, it has been legal for only this relatively short period of time, and it is difficult to gauge its effect on the adoption rate. Also, more women have access to contraceptive care than in the past, so this could also have contributed to fewer unwanted pregnancies. As of the 2010 census, about 93% of children in American households are biological children of the householder. The other 7% is made up of adopted children and stepchildren. Stepchildren, incidentally, have become the largest contingent of adoptees, as blended families become more and more common, and stepparents often choose to legally adopt a stepchild. Alison Gaines See also Adoption, Transnational; Adoption, Transracial; Foster Care, U.S.; Orphans; Social Work; Workhouses

Further Readings Adamec, C., & Pierce, W. L. (1991). The encyclopedia of adoption. New York, NY: Facts on File. Batista, T., & Johnson, A. (2017). The Children’s Aid Society: Early origins of youth empowerment in the U.S. foster care system or paternalistic prevention? Journal of Family History, 42(1), 67–80. doi:10.1177/ 0363199016681608 Brosnan, J. F. (1922). The law of adoption. Columbia Law Review, 22, 332–342. Brumble, K., & Kampfe, C. M. (2011). The history of adoption in the United States: A focus on the unique group of intercountry transracial and special needs children. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 24(2), 157–162. Kreider, R. M., & Lofquist, D. A. (2014, April). Adopted children and stepchildren: 2010. Current Population Reports, P20–572. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Presser, S. B. (1972). The historical background of the American law of adoption. Journal of Family Law, 11, 443–516.

Adoption, Transnational Rathbone, M. (2005, March). Vagabond! History Review, 51, 8–13. Stark, B. (2018). When genealogy matters: Intercountry adoption, international human rights, and global neoliberalism. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 51, 159–210.

Adoption, Transnational Interdisciplinary scholarship refers to the permanent legal transfer of guardianship of a child from his or her family of origin to another person or family across national boundaries as transnational, international, and intercountry adoption, interchangeably. The systematic practice of transnational adoption (TA) began with a series of child-saving initiatives enacted during and after World War II that aimed to rescue children from a warring and war-torn Europe, mostly from Germany. This entry discusses the history of, processes for, trends in, and critical themes for research about transnational adoption.

History of Transnational Adoption After significant public debate in both the United States and Germany in the early 1950s, Mable Grammer, an African American journalist living in U.S. Occupied West Germany, was authorized by special consideration of the U.S. Refugee Act to facilitate by proxy adoptions of dual-heritage German–African American children to the United States. Historians’ accounts vary, and although estimates reach nearly 4,000, no reliable statistics exist for the actual number of adoptions of Black German children to the United States and Scandinavia, which extended into the mid-1960s. Black Germans are a finite group and the only known cohort to have been adopted by primarily middleclass African Americans, many of whom were military families living in Germany at the time. TA became institutionalized, however, in the wake of the Korean War. Since that time, the United States is consistently the primary receiving country of foreign-born adopted children. In their petition to adopt eight Korean children, Harry and Bertha Holt precipitated the Act of September 26, 1961, amending the Immigration and

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Nationality Act (INA). Subsequently, the Holt’s facilitated many other Korean adoptions. As a direct result of their efforts, children born outside the United States who are adopted by American citizens are not subjected to the same level of bureaucracy and strict limitations that regulate the immigration of other foreign nationals. Operation Pedro Pan (Cuba, 1960–1962) and Operation Babylift (Vietnam, 1975) are important to mention because of the highly charged controversies that surround them. Over 14,000 children were sent to the United States from Cuba by fearful parents as Fidel Castro ascended to power after the Cuban Revolution. Estimates suggest that at least half the children grew up in Catholic group homes, and many of the children were united with relatives living in Miami. Only a relative few of the children were adopted by Americans. In stark contrast, 3,000 children were airlifted from Vietnam near the end of the war and delivered to waiting adoptive families. During the initial flight launch, the airplane crashed and more than half the 300 babies on the plane perished. Many were children of American GIs and local women who were afraid for their children’s lives as well as their own should their dual-heritage offspring be discovered by the Viet Cong. A contemporary, international public understood these initiatives, like those involving Black German and Korean children before them, to be humanitarian rescue missions. Subsequently, the motivations for the transnational adoptions of all these children have been called into question. Ongoing discourse challenges whether these adoptions were in the children’s best interest or primarily politically motivated. The postwar generations of adoptees have now reached adulthood and are sharing their life experiences in literature and film. Interdisciplinary adoption scholars, many of whom are also adoptive parents, and increasingly, transnational adoptees, rely extensively on the testimonies of adult adoptees to inform their research. Parents, teachers, and school and medical records provide additional data and insight for many quantitative and ethnographic studies. Researchers routinely interview adoptive parents, teachers, and social workers. The voices of children in adoption studies are elusive. Birth family members are the least represented, their absence amplified in the transnational context. Asian adoptions dominate both

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academic and public conversations, although as TA trends shift and more adoptees reach adulthood, interest in adoptive cohorts from other sending countries is expanding.

Transnational Adoption Processes and Trends Transnational adoptions are necessarily closed rather than open adoptions, which is increasingly an option available only in domestic cases. Once the central authority in the sending country confirms that a child is legally orphaned and that any living birth parent(s) willingly and without payment or coercion has surrendered all rights to and responsibilities for the child, an adoption can be finalized and the child’s birth record amended. Adopting parents often elect to change both the child’s first given name and surname at this time. The child’s original birth record is then sealed, and from that moment on, it is as though his or her former life and biological relations never existed. All ties between the child, first families, and country of origin are completely and irrevocably severed. Revised birth records reflect as if the adoptee was the natural child of the newly adoptive parent(s). Many if not most transnational adoptees are social orphans, meaning they were relinquished for adoption by at least one living biological parent or close kin. Sometimes, for adoptions finalized in the child’s birth country, U.S. citizenship is conferred immediately. A further amendment to the INA, the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (CCA), permits adopted children born outside the United States to automatically obtain U.S. citizenship, provided they are under 18 years of age and will reside permanently in the country. Despite the protections assured by relevant amendments to immigration laws, research reveals that children sometimes slip through the cracks, rendering their citizenship rights tenuous. Although infrequent, some adoptees have been deported back to their countries of origin, mostly as a penalty for minor criminal offenses. TA is a dynamic and evolving social phenomenon that responds to political and societal shifts. TA laws and best practices have changed dramatically since the 1950s and 1960s. The growing and controversial discourse on surrogacy and in vitro

fertilization (IVF) frequently involves transnational contexts. Perspective shifts against secrecy and toward cultural and ethnic identity preservation are evidenced in the gradual shifts in the laws permitting adult adoptees access to their original birth and adoption records, and in the advice given to potential adopters about how to optimally foster the healthy development of children’ identities, senses of self, and ethnic and cultural pride. More than 1 million children have been adopted from one country to another since World War II ended. TA occurs not only in response to war and political upheaval but also as a result of lacking or nonexistent family welfare policies, natural disasters, and extreme poverty. Trends in TA, which reached its apex in 2005 and has since consistently declined, are attributed to myriad sociopolitical and economic factors, including globalization, fluctuations in the interrelations between sending and receiving nation states, and allegations of corruption. The United States, Europe, and Canada are primary receiving nations, and the United States and Sweden account for the longest sustained TA activity. The United States is responsible for more transnational adoptions than all other receiving countries combined. Adoption scholars often cite history professor Wayne Carp for his work on adoption history and Peter Selman, an international adoption expert from Newcastle University and statistical adviser to the U.N. Hague Convention on international adoption, for his statistical research and insight into TA trends. Drawing on Selman’s work, the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs reports that 233,934 overseas adoptions occurred between the years 1999 and 2011, with the overwhelming majority of children younger than 3 years of age. Although Korea is the sending country with the most sustained history, having exported over 170,000 children to the United States as of 2010, global trends, according to Selman, occur based on social, political, and naturally occurring catastrophic events. Between 2003 and 2010, the top four sending countries were China, Russia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia. Since then, TA from all but one of these countries, China, has been halted. TA is a complex and highly controversial social institution with lifelong implications for children

Adoption, Transnational

and their family members on opposite sides of what is commonly referred to as the adoption triad or what adoption psychologist Amanda Baden calls adoption family networks. These phrases relate to the adoptee’s centrality amid both original and adoptive nuclear and extended families. The Christian Alliance for Orphans, founders of “Orphan Sunday”; prominent advocate, adoptive mother, and Harvard Law professor, Elizabeth Bartholet; and former Senator Mary Landrieu envision TA as a child rescue imperative. The Children in Families First Act of 2013, introduced by Landrieu and reintroduced in 2014, was referred to the Senate to the Committee on Foreign Relations, and no subsequent action has been taken. At the other end of a wide spectrum, TA opponents such as journalist Kathryn Joyce argue that TA is a baby-selling industry that is consumer driven by the family-making desires of white, middle-class, infertile couples. Research confirms that women delaying childbirth to pursue careers in industrialized societies has contributed to high infertility rates and that easier access to contraception has limited the availability of adoptable healthy, white infants. Single motherhood is not as stigmatized as it once was, and unmarried women more often opt to raise their children alone rather than relinquish them for adoption. Potential adopters who are unmarried and same-sex couples sometimes find that it is easier for them to adopt overseas than to navigate the complicated system regulating domestic adoption. TA ultimately represents a relatively small percentage of the overall numbers of annual adoptions in the United States. Importantly, as the demand for foreign-born children has grown, so has the potential for fraud and corruption. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCA), enacted in 1993, is the key international regulatory agreement governing TA. The HCA was established to set and monitor standards of practice designed to protect children from trafficking, kidnapping, and prostitution. The HCA stipulates that ratifying countries establish a central authority responsible for certifying private agencies, overseeing adoption processes, verifying that birth mothers have not been paid for their children, and providing evidence that reasonable effort has been made to seek a

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permanent home for each child in the country of his or her origin. In the United States, the Department of State is the central authority. The U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs maintains an elaborate website that is updated regularly with adoption statistics, policy changes, investigative reports, critical alerts, and resources for potential adopters. Signatories of the HCA are not obliged to participate in TA, nor are nonsignatory countries forbidden. The Republic of Korea, which has the longest history of cooperation with the United States, has been a signatory since 2013 but has not yet ratified the convention. Countries that are not party to the HCA are called non-Convention countries. As of 2018, 98 countries had ratified the HCA. Nepal and Russia are signatories but have not yet ratified the convention. The Hague Conference on Private International Law provides statistics, country profiles, and updates on its website. The HCA is silent on the issues of identity and culture, which the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) identifies among children’s inalienable rights. Notably, the United States is not a signatory of the UNCRC. The tensions between the two conventions are reflected in vibrant scholarly debates. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), in recognition of the important roles that ethnic and cultural heritage play in the healthy development of children’s identities, issued a statement stipulating that TA is warranted only as an option of last resort. Thus, some scholars interpret the positions of the UNCRC and UNICEF as opposing TA. The 2010 UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children state, All decisions concerning alternative care should take full account of the desirability, in principle, of maintaining the child as close as possible to his/her habitual place of residence, to facilitate contact and potential reintegration with his/her family and to minimize disruption of his/her educational, cultural and social life. (Article 11)

Other regulatory conventions such as the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the

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Child prioritize culture and heritage and are even more overtly positioned against TA. In some collectivist and Islamic cultures, adoption policies often reflect the view that except under extreme circumstances, permanent guardianship of parentless children should be given only to extended kin or other cultural community members. Some cultures prioritize institutional care over TA.

Critical Themes in Transnational Adoption Research Identity, belonging, search and reunion, and race and culture (which are often conflated in TA discourse) are critical themes in adoption research. Although no evidence suggests that adopted children develop their identities any differently than do nonadopted children, adoptees indeed face unique challenges. Transnational adoptions are nearly always transracial, and transracially adopted adults, both domestic and transnational, confirm the centrality of race, culture, and heritage in articulating their childhood experiences. Many argue that their adoptive parents’ colorblind attitudes impeded their ability to communicate openly and honestly about what was of paramount concern to them in childhood and to express difficulty as adolescents and adults in relating to their nonadopted ethnic peers. In 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers issued a strong statement against the growing number of transracial placements of African American children into white families. The Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994, however, forbids the consideration of race, color, or national origin in adoption placement determinations. Adoptive parents who are concerned to mediate their children’s loss of cultural identity and ethnic peer relations often turn to country-specific organizations and agencies such as Families With Children from China and Holt International that offer special programs, events, and roots trips for adoptees and their families. Baden suggests that in addition to the ways the Internet is revolutionizing birth family searches and postreunion communication, for some adoptees, social media networks provide a means of reculturation. Adopted is also understood to be a category of group affiliation based on shared experiences that

in varying degrees of salience is integral to identity and operates among and across adoptive cohorts. Powerful activist and adoptee support communities have emanated from and actively maintain what Eleana Kim terms virtual counterpublics. Exclusive participant and public social media networks also provide digital platforms for potential adopters and triad members to exchange information, share experiences, and provide one another with insight and emotional support. The Internet also provides opportunities for adoption professionals and scholars to connect in many useful ways. The Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI), however, reveals critical areas for concern with respect to the vulnerability and commodification of children and the commercialization of TA. The DAI, recognizing a dearth of scholarship, calls for intensifying research efforts along these lines and encourages enhanced cooperation among law enforcement authorities, policymakers, legislators, Internet companies, and adoption professionals. Rosemarie Peña See also Adoption, History of; Adoption, Transracial Children and U.S. Adoption Literature; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF)

Further Readings Baden, A. L., Treweeke, L. M., & Ahluwalia, M. K. (2012). Reclaiming culture: Reculturation of transracial and international adoptees. Journal of Counseling & Development, 90(4), 387–399. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.2012.00049 Briggs, L. (2017). How all politics became reproductive politics: From welfare reform to foreclosure to Trump. Oakland: University of California Press. Carp, E. W. (Ed.). (2004). Adoption in America: Historical perspectives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kim, E. J. (2010). Adopted territory: Transnational Korean adoptees and the politics of belonging. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marre, D., & Briggs, L. (2009). International adoption: Global inequalities and the circulation of children. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Adoption, Transracial Nelson, K. P. (2016). Invisible Asians: Korean American adoptees, Asian American experiences, and racial exceptionalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shackleton, M. (Ed.). (2017). International adoption in North American literature and culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Websites Donaldson Adoption Institute. Media, the Internet & adoption [archives]: https://www.adoptioninstitute .org/pubs_cat/media-the-internet-adoption

Adoption, Transracial Transracial adoption (TRA), like transnational adoption (which is almost always transracial), is a highly controversial and complex theme in the growing field of adoption studies. Scholars attribute the prolific growth in the numbers of children adopted across racial lines to the end of de jure segregation in the United States in response to the civil rights movement and the overseas child rescue initiatives during and after World War II, the United States–Korean War, and the United States–Vietnam War. This entry discusses the psychology of TRA, especially the impacts for biracial and bicultural children; international and national conventions governing TRA; and controversies about the practice. In the immediate postwar years, hundreds of Native American children were forcibly adopted into White families and communities where policy makers and social workers felt they would have more social advantages and would better assimilate and integrate into the majority culture. As a social and legal practice, adoption during the Cold War years was a direct reflection of American and Western European national identity (re)construction and the evolving views on sexuality, marriage, women’s rights, children, and childhood. Before the “Baby Scoop Era,” as this historical period is often called, most adoptions were informal kinship arrangements. As formal adoptions began to be more commonplace, race matching became the norm. Nonkin, legal adoption was in its infancy, and the majority of formal adoptions

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were closed. Original birth and adoption records were sealed as a means of protecting unwed White mothers and the children they relinquished from the social stigma attached to illegitimacy and adoption. It was then considered to be in a child’s best interest to keep secret his or her genetic origins, thereby shielding the adoptee from any shame or stigma associated with the circumstances surrounding his or her birth. Although transracial and transnational adoptions were also closed, the visual disparity between the child and his or her adoptive parents made it impossible to conceal the child’s adopted status from either the adopted child or others. Children begin to notice racial differences in early childhood and are sensitive to the hierarchies and privileges associated with skin color that play out in the social spaces through which they must navigate and negotiate their individual identities. Adopted families are socially constructed as nonnormative and for mixed-race, multicultural families even more so. Research supports that all adopted children experience a cognitive dissonance that must be managed to develop a healthy identity and positive self-regard. The challenge is more complicated in the TRA context. Well-intentioned adopters often see themselves as color-blind in an unconscious effort to quell their own implicit biases and normalize their child and their newly multiracial– multicultural families. Adoption psychologists argue strongly against this view and, moreover, maintain that color-blindness in TRA adoption is highly problematic with critical implications for children. Literature written and informed by actual adoptees overwhelming reveals that adoptees experience color-blindness as a painful form of erasure.

Psychology of Adoption Canonical texts in adoption psychology by psychotherapist Nancy Verrier and developmental psychologist David M. Brodzinsky suggest that in many ways the adopted child’s experience is a universal one. The separation of the child from the mother is an unnatural and traumatic event for both, with lifelong implications. Although ­children are indeed resilient, the adopted child grieves and undoubtedly struggles with issues of attachment,

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Adoption, Transracial

identity, and belonging differently than do nonadopted children. A spectrum of behavioral responses to being adopted manifests among adoptees and fluctuates commensurate with the salience of an adopted identity at different times over a life span. Certain life events, such as birthdays and becoming parents themselves, for example, may trigger emotional responses that are less pronounced at other times. Verrier and Brodzinsky sharply diverge in their views on infant cognition. Brodzinsky claims there is no awareness of adoption in infancy. Verrier’s primal wound theory challenges Brodzinsky’s view of infant amnesia and the belief that the newborn psyche is a tabula rasa. She argues that infants are keenly aware and profoundly affected by maternal separation; bonding begins in utero, and the postnatal interruption of the relationship between mother and child is indelibly imprinted in the child’s mind with critical and lifelong implications. Core issues for Verrier, emanating from the trauma of the initial separation of the child from the mother, include feelings of abandonment, attachment, and separation anxiety. Verrier contends that multiple placements, failed attachments, and frequent separations—all of which are prominent features of TRA experiences—precipitate a state of hypervigilance on the part of the adoptee as an anxious response to abandonment. Fear of rejection and further abandonment sometimes complicate adoptees’ ability to make and sustain healthy interpersonal relationships. Brodzinsky explores the adoption journey over the life span of the adoptee and proposes a psychosocial model of adoption adjustment. He employs Erikson’s life cycle model as a framework to explicate childhood developmental tasks in the context of adoption. Brodzinsky argues for normality; adoptee developmental experiences in juxtaposition to non-adoptee experiences are normal, but there are some unhealthy extremes. In such cases, which are often tragic, adoptees may be diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder (RAD). Children who are returned, rehomed, or given over to foster care postadoption are those most frequently diagnosed as having RAD and are often institutionalized because the disorder is extremely difficult to treat on an outpatient basis and the prognosis is poor. It is quite possible that some

children who end up in the correctional system are victims of this disorder and are never diagnosed. RAD is differentiated from David Kirschner’s adopted child syndrome (ACS) by the level of intensity. RAD and ACS are both controversial topics among adoption psychologists who resist pathologizing adoption. Highly regarded adoptions psychologists Amanda Baden and Harold Grotevant acknowledge the ubiquitous trauma and losses associated with TRA, although their work focuses more pointedly than Verrier’s or Brodzinsky’s on the specific intrapsychic and environmental aspects of identity development that differentiate the transracial/transnational experience from same race adoptions. Both Baden and Grotevant posit invaluable theories on adoptee assimilation, acculturation, biculturation, and reculturation, and examine closely the impacts of parental colorblindness on adoptees. Along with many other adoption psychologists and interdisciplinary adoption scholars, Baden and Grotevant contend that the racial and cultural diversity of adoptee extended family and social networks and the communities in which the children grow up matter. They assert that adoptive parents’ denial of racial difference, structural racism and implicit biases can be psychically injurious and render children totally unprepared to deal with the realities of living in a racist society. Moreover, Baden and Grotevant identify and explore the psychological impacts of both intentional and unintentional insults and racial microagressions that, too often, transracially adoption children are compelled to endure.

Policymaking Conventions and Controversies Inconsistencies in the regulations that govern adoption policy and practices fuel the sometimesvirulent debates concerning race and culture in the context of transracially adopted children’s wellbeing and identity. These are often interpreted to represent conflicting views on what exactly constitutes a child’s identity and to what extent an original culture ought to be prioritized and preserved. Domestic TRA discourse emanating from the U.S. context is primarily concerned with the adoptions of Native American, African American, and

Adoption, Transracial

dual-heritage children adopted into white families. In the transnational TRA context, Asian adoptions dominate both the scholarly conversations and public debates. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Article 8.1, identity includes nationality, name, and family relations. Voicing their concern about the growing trend in the transracial adoptions of African American children, in 1971 the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) issued a strong public statement. Subsequently, a number of other highprofile organizations advocating for the interests of African American children, including the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) issued similar statements, concurring with the NABSW. Joyce Ladner, a prominent sociologist and activist who is well regarded for her participation in the civil rights movement, provides invaluable insight on TRA from a contemporary African American perspective. After many years of considerable public debate, in 1978 the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to address assimilationist social welfare policies and effectively prohibit further transracial adoptions of Native American children. Subsequent conventions and laws enacted with transracial adoptions in transnational contexts in mind have a significant impact on domestic TRA. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCA), enacted on May 29, 1993, aimed to protect transnationally adopted children from abduction, kidnapping, trafficking, prostitution, and slavery. The HCA, however, is conspicuously silent on the topics of identity and culture. In 1994, the U.S. Congress passed the Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA) and in 1996, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, both of which prohibit any consideration of race, ethnicity, and national origin in all adoption cases. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) position is often interpreted to support the UNCRC identity rights language. The 2010 UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children states, All decisions concerning alternative care should take full account of the desirability, in principle, of maintaining the child as close as possible to his/her habitual place of residence, in order to facilitate

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contact and potential reintegration with his/her family and to minimize disruption of his/her educational, cultural and social life. (Article 11)

Courts challenged with interpreting these conflicting predicates are also expected to be culturally competent and sensitive to the relevant racial identity politics at play as they make best interest decisions on behalf of the child when certifying each adoption case. Race and racism affect the identity and social development of adoptees within and across racialized groups and cultures differently. There is no monolithic TRA experience even among siblings or members of same group cohorts. The sociohistorical circumstances that precipitate the adoption of particular racialized groups, however, create distinct narratives that are portrayed in literature, film, and visual media with real-life implications. Receiving and sending countries have unique historical politics, cultures, and religious traditions that distinguish how each racial and cultural group is defined discursively and constructs particular frameworks from which individual adoptees must negotiate their identities. Transracial adoptees often describe feeling socially isolated in childhood, not belonging to either culture represented in their extended adoptive family networks. Feelings of “not fitting in” that begin in early childhood, when children begin to distinguish racial differences and become aware of social hierarchies based on ethnic identity, have implications that extend throughout adolescence and continue into adulthood. A plethora of testimonies from adoptees who are fully assimilated into a privileged White habitus in their adoptive homes and communities reveal that they often find themselves alienated from their ethnic peers. They also claim that their adopting parents’ color-blind approach to race invalidated their experiences and precluded any open communication about race and racism within their families. Adoptees report being unsupported by their parents and dismissed as oversensitive when they report painful encounters with racial overtones in school or from extended family members. In addition, White adopters who elect to reject racial differences inside their own families are not always racially tolerant of others stemming from the same racial group as the adopted child, nor are the

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relatives, friends, and neighbors to whom the children are exposed. Despite the aversion to TRA expressed in the NABSW and CWLA statements and the insight drawn from adoptee memoirs, anthologies, and interview statements that inform adoption psychology research, vocal advocates argue that transracial and transnational adoption are winwin propositions. Parentless children and those whose biological kin are otherwise unable or unwilling to care for them are welcomed into homes of compassionate others who have the economic wherewithal to provide them with stability, education, and a standard of living otherwise unavailable to them. Proponents of TRA also contend that international adoption reduces the number of institutionalized children and concomitantly increases global tolerance and encourages multiculturalism. They acknowledge the dislocation of children’s cultural identity and social relationships but insist that children are resilient; their losses can be mediated and must be balanced against the acquisition of the protection and social and cultural capital that TRA affords. Furthermore, some propose that international adoption can and does serve as a means of economic support to sending countries. It is worth mentioning that private agency professionals, adoptive parents, and scholars, who have themselves adopted children from abroad, author much of the literature that supports both transracial and transnational adoption, including picture books and storybooks written for adopted children. Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor and adoptive mother of a Peruvian child, is perhaps the most vocal and ardent proponent of international adoption. Laura Briggs, chair of the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, argues that international adoption has a deleterious effect on the domestic fosterage and adoption of children who are considered to be less desirable, which translates to mean African American children and those with special needs. It is increasingly difficult to place these children in permanent, nurturing homes. Curiously, African American children represent the overwhelming majority of children who are adopted from the United States to Canada and Western European countries.

Briggs, who does not position herself as antiadoption, argues for a reexamination of foster care as a viable alternative with important advantages for the children. Briggs compares foster family arrangements with blended and stepfamilies that have become increasingly commonplace in American society and that allow children to belong to more than one family. She also suggests material advantages in the form of welfare entitlements for children in foster care such as medical and mental health benefits that are terminated once children are adopted. Briggs and other adoption scholars such as Sarah Park Dahlen, importantly, also explore the visual and literary portrayals of TRA and adoptees. They challenge images and narrative depictions of TRA that they perceive as implicitly (or overtly) racist or neocolonial and that position adopters as White saviors and birth mothers as nonnurturing or incapable of mothering. Also notable is the absence of children’s literature and scholarship relative to the growing community of non-Asian foreign-born adoptees who identify and are ascribed Blackness but are not considered or consider themselves to be African American. Rosemarie Peña See also Adoption, History of; Adoption, Transnational; Race and Childhood in U.S. Context; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF)

Further Readings Baden, A. (2016). “Do you know your real parents?” And other adoption microaggressions. Adoption Quarterly, 19(1), 1–25. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10 926755.2015.1026012 Bartholet, E. (2010). Permanency is not enough: Children need the nurturing parents found in international adoption. New York Law School Law Review, 55, 781–790. Briggs, L. (2003). Mother, child, race, nation: The visual iconography of rescue and the politics of transnational and transracial adoption. Gender & History, 15(2), 179–200. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ 1468-0424.00298 Briggs, L. (2012). Somebody’s children: The politics of transracial and transnational adoption. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Adultism Brodzinsky, D. M., Schecter, M. D., & Henig, R. M. (1993). Being adopted: The lifelong search for self. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Dahlen, S. P., & Wesseling, L. (2015). On constructing fictions and families. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 40(4), 317–321. https://dx.doi.org/10.13 53/chq.2015.0043 Grotevant, H. D., Dunbar, N., Kohler, J. K., & Lash Esau, A. M. (2000). Adoptive identity: How contexts within and beyond the family shape developmental pathways. Family Relations, 49(4), 379–387. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2000.00379.x Ladner, J. A. (1978). Mixed families: Adopting across racial boundaries. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Perry, T. L. (1993). Transracial adoption controversy: An analysis of discourse and subordination. New York University Review on Law & Social Change, 21(1), 33–85. Shackleton, M. (Ed.). (2017). International adoption in North American literature and culture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Verrier, N. N. (1993). The primal wound: Understanding the adopted child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway.

Adultism As sexism is to women, adultism is to children and young people. Some confusions about the term and some problems that adultism can amplify are considered in this entry. From the 1960s onwards, the campaign for women’s rights was advanced by two useful words. First, sexism succinctly identified the root of the problem of discrimination against women. It transferred the blame for women’s inferior status and their seeming lesser ability and lower intelligence when compared with men away from women themselves and onto powerful social structures of prejudice. Gradually these sexist structures are being identified and dismantled, and women have growing opportunities to show that they can be at least equal to men. The second useful word, feminism, turned what might have been a weak negative term about disadvantaged inferior women into the name for a powerful positive movement. Similar words linked to former weakness and shame have been transformed into slogans of strength and triumph, such as Black Pride and Gay Pride to fight racism and homophobia. Children have no such clear

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language to advance their status. Adultism and childism are seldom-used terms and, confusingly, childism sometimes denotes respect for children, like feminism, but sometimes denigrates them, like sexism. Similarly, adultism can mean positive respect for adults, or criticism of overbearing adults besides disrespect for children. The international power that adultism denotes of adults’ coercive control over children endures in practice partly because the theory and language needed to challenge it remain undeveloped and confused. Sexism and racism are now so well ­recognised that there are laws against them. Yet there are no laws against the routine denigrating of children, and even childish is assumed to be an  insulting word. Perhaps because all the discriminated-against adult minority groups are ­ now more protected, denigrating of children has increased; disadvantaged adults feel less shared solidarity with children than formerly, and they risk seeming childish themselves if they side with children. So childhood is still further isolated from adulthood than when, for example, children and women used to be scorned equally. Adultism has been the diagnosis for a supposed mental disease in promiscuous adolescents who commit adult crimes such as prostitution. This links to the way adult and adultism frequently denote libertarian and sexual concerns, from which children are expected to be excluded. This firm exclusion of children lends a useful moral veneer to what could seem to be immoral or amoral libertarianism. Protecting children, who are seen as too young to make choices or to guard themselves from dangers, can seem to be the caring, responsible moral side of the libertarian coin that would otherwise be purely selfish and lawless. Just as adults can exist only when there are children (otherwise everyone would simply be ‘people’), adultism depends on the inferior age group of children to validate claims that adults are superior and reliable and that it is therefore normal, natural, and moral that adults should control supposedly volatile irresponsible children. So adultism usually denotes prejudice against children and excessive respect for adults. Can adults be excessively respected? Do adults not show the highest levels of reason, maturity, wisdom, and altruism that human beings can achieve? Yes, some adults do, but many do not,

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After-School Centers

whereas many children and young people are reasonable, wise, and kind. However, although sexism and racism are clearly misguided and unjustly deny adults’ equal rights, children do not fully share this equality. And many children benefit from adults’ authority and responsibility provided the adults are respectful and benign. Adultism and developmentalism are problems when they falsely correlate virtue and ability with age. Adultism overestimates adults. It splits off their negative and failing qualities, and projects these onto children while assuming that all virtues such as being wise, kind, and reliable exist only in adults, and therefore adult control must not be questioned. Adultism works in self-fulfilling prophecies by setting unjustly high barriers and low expectations for children’s involvement in activities and relationships, increasing children’s likely failures and attributing these to their incompetence and their need to be subordinate. Jack Flasher identified adultism as the abuse of power over children through excessive nurturing, possessiveness, and restrictions by parents, teachers, psychotherapists, the clergy, police, judges, and juries. Erica Burman criticised imperial adultism, which treats childhood as a domain to be colonised and civilised and which shapes public understanding and policies that demean children through adult-centred paternalistic research and services. Adam Fletcher analysed institutional adultism at three levels: attitudinal, cultural, and structural. Donovon Ceaser found that adultism is so endemic that it even pervades programmes deliberately concerned with social justice that aim to increase equality. Adultism worked in one such programme, unnoticed by the adults, although not by the young people, intersecting with prejudices of race, sex, and class until Ceaser drew the organisers’ attention to these hidden influences. Barry Checkoway contended that young people internalise adultism, which causes them to question their own legitimacy and ability, their trust in themselves, and their trust in their peers, leading to their overdependence on adults’ approval. Violent forms of physical, sexual, verbal, and routine adultism set up complex chains of reactions of distress, anxiety, and anger for young people. Adultism limits their abilities to engage in peaceful, cooperative, mutually respectful, and democratic activities.

Adultism is sometimes said to ‘socially construct’ children, but as real human beings, children cannot be constructed like mindless passive Lego models. However, their beliefs, behaviours, and relationships as well as their sense of identity and how others regard and treat them can all be powerfully influenced by adultism. In many ways, adultism can damage not only young people but whole present and future societies. As with sexism, progress begins with naming and openly challenging the great problems of adultism. Priscilla Alderson See also Baby, Social Construction of; Child as Other/ Stranger; Childhood Studies; Developmentality; Infantilization

Further Readings Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Ceaser, D. (2014). Unlearning adultism at Green Shoots: A reflexive ethnographic analysis of age inequality within an environmental education programme. Ethnography and Education, 9(2), 167–181. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2013.841083 Checkoway, B. (1996). Adults as allies to young people striving for social justice. Detroit, MI: W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Flasher, J. (1978). Adultism. Adolescence, 13, 517–523. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_6 Fletcher, A. (2013). Ending discrimination against young people. Olympia, WA: CommonAction.

After-School Centers After-school centres are settings that provide a range of functions that can include care, leisure, play, or academic support for primary-school-age children outside the regular hours of school. After-school centres are important in the lives of children in an increasing number of countries. Although most of these services provide care for school-age children, they can differ in what other purposes they perform in the hours outside school. After-school centres have recently begun to attract increasing interest from academic researchers. The purpose of this entry is to

After-School Centers

provide an overview of research into these settings and their varied purposes. After-school centres typically operate in the hours immediately before and after school and can also operate during school vacations. These programs are provided in many geographic locations, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The term after-school centre is not universal. Such services have a range of names that are often unique to each locality, including afterschool programs, all-day schools, leisure-time centres, out-of-school care, out-of-school hours care, school-age care, school-age child care, and student care centres. In addition, the term school-age educare is increasingly used in research literature. In many locations, after-school centres have a relatively short history. In Australia, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, these centres became more common during the 1980s and 1990s to support the increased participation of women in their workforces. In Germany, such settings have become popular only more recently. Swedish leisure-time centres however, have a longer history, having been provided since the early 20th century. Historically, after-school centres have not attracted much attention from researchers. This is likely due to its low social status in many locations, which see it positioned as ‘just care’ and a subject little worthy of investigation. However, in the last decade, there has been a significant increase in academic research, particularly from Nordic countries. Given the lack of research, it is difficult to provide a comprehensive account of this setting. The functions that after-school centres provide differ across locations. Most commonly, afterschool centres are also conceptualised as places of leisure and play where children are free from the discipline and work associated with school. Children in such settings typically engage in a range of activities, including sports, arts, crafts, games, play, and socialising. However, in some locations, after-school centres are assigned greater responsibility for contributing to educational outcomes. In North America, programs often have an educational and redemptive focus, aiming to provide additional academic support to children from disadvantaged communities. Similarly, in Singapore and Korea, centres endeavour to support

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children’s academic progress by providing homework and academic support. These purposes attributed to after-school centres are likely not singular. Although centres in many locations have a play and leisure focus, it is an increasingly accepted proposition that they also serve an educational purpose. Some governments such as those in Sweden and Australia impose curriculum requirements that focus on how centres contribute to children’s development and education in areas such as identity, social skills, and citizenship skills. It is simplistic, however, to suggest that the purposes assigned to after-school centres are passively accepted and reproduced by practitioners and children. The actions of practitioners and children can influence life in after-school centres. How practitioners interpret key concepts such as play, leisure, citizenship, and education can differ, which then influences program content. Similarly, children have an active engagement with programming practices. Despite the intentions of practitioners, children can repurpose activities, spaces, and materials to meet their own requirements, therefore influencing what centres provide. Also, how societies and governments conceptualise after-school centres can be complex and change over time. For example, in their literature review, Jennifer Cartmel and Amy Hayes describe steady change in the accepted purpose of afterschool centres in Australia since their popularization in the 1980s. Initially, programs had a recreational and diversionary focus. However, with an increase in the number of women in paid work, programs have progressed to general custodial care programs with a broader play focus during the 1980s and 1990s. Most recently, neoliberal approaches to governance initiated services positioned as productive sites of education as well as care and leisure. Changes in workforces and social and political beliefs have also influenced approaches to after-school provision in other countries. The complexities unique to after-school centres distinguish them from other care and play settings. These programs cater to a broad age range, typically from 5 to 12 years of age. This contrasts with the narrower age ranges served in other early childhood education and care settings. For many after-school centres, how to provide for this broad age range in a single setting can be challenging.

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Age

The complexities related to age are evidenced by a small number of studies concerned with the oldest children who attend these centres. As children age, they are generally considered increasingly capable of self-care and arguably less suited to after-school centres. Studies from Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom indicate that older children, particularly those 10 years and older, are less likely to attend centres. They can be considered more difficult to program for and more likely to have negative opinions about after-school centres. Although an emerging site of research, afterschool centres are important in the lives of increasing numbers of children. Continued research will provide valuable knowledge that can inform policy and delivery of programs. Bruce Hurst See also Education Versus Care; Out-of-School Children; Youth Clubs

Further Readings Bae, S. H., & Jeon, S. B. (2013). Research on afterschool programs in Korea: Trends and outcomes. International Journal for Research on Extended Education, 1(1), 53–69. Cartmel, J., & Hayes, A. (2016). Before and after school: Literature review about Australian school age child care. Children Australia, 41(3), 201–207. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/cha.2016.17 Ecarius, J., Klieme, E., Stecher, L., & Woods J., (Eds.). (2013). Extended education—an international perspective: Proceedings of the international conference on extracurricular and out-of-school time educational research. Opladen, Germany: Budrich. Haglund, B., & Anderson, S. (2009). Afterschool programs and leisure-time centres: Arenas for learning and leisure. World Leisure Journal, 51(2), 116–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/04419057.2009.9674594

Age Age is the chronological measure of the length of time that has passed since a person’s birth. However, in children’s lives, age plays multiple, important roles that go beyond a simple

measure of lifespan. It acts as a marker of developmental progress and forms part of a child’s identity. Age has a governing influence over many aspects of children’s lives. In domains such as education, medicine, and research, it is used to organise and classify children into categories and groups. Age is also a means of governing children’s social and civic participation. In Western, industrialized societies, measuring and monitoring children’s age is taken for granted. However, not all cultures conceptualize children and age in the same way. In addition, the way Western cultures think about children and age has changed. This entry details some of the main research and theoretical debates with respect to age and its relevance to the lives of children.

Chronological Measures of Age Chronological measures of age play a dominant role in Western children’s lives. Children’s ages are generally recorded in years, and often for very young children, in months. By the time they attend school, most children are able to demonstrate an awareness of their age or birth date. The recording of birth dates and organisation of children according to chronological age are deeply embedded in governmental practices. For many families, a child’s increasing age is cause for acknowledgment; birthdays are observed and often celebrated with parties, gifts, and food. Some birthdays are associated with rites of passage that afford the birthday greater significance. These rites of passage differ across cultures. Age seems to have more significance in children’s lives than the lives of adults. A child’s age carries with it an array of information that allows adults to make assumptions about his or her physical, social, emotional, and cognitive capacities. When considered alongside other forms of knowledge such as class and culture, knowing a child’s age also allows adults to make inferences about other aspects of the child’s life, such as level of education, where he or she was educated, and what other activities the child participates in. For adults, age seems less important. Their age is less predictive. Adults are deemed developmentally complete,

Age

and therefore increases in age do not seem to carry the same significance. Despite the dominant role that age plays in most Western, contemporary childhoods, children’s ages appear to only take on greater importance in the 19th and 20th centuries. As an example, Howard Chudacoff details the growing significance of age in the United States. Before the mid-19th century, children’s ages were measured more practically. Rather than calculated in years, age was gauged by a child’s capacity to perform tasks around the home or in employment. Historical documents from that period contain few references to age-related social practices such as birthday celebrations. Chudacoff believes a number of emerging factors contributed to increased age consciousness. In the mid- to late-19th century, family sizes decreased, meaning that children were more likely to have similar-age siblings, therefore sharpening the distinctions between child and parent. A rise in paediatric medicine from the 18th century contributed to children being seen as a separate class. Public schooling became more widespread, and schools became larger, which led to the organisation of school children into same-age grades and children spending more time with same-age peers. The use of clocks also became more widespread, leading to increased collection of statistical data about children, in particular their birth dates. This contributed to researchers and governments realizing the significance of age in social and medical research. This increasing age consciousness was evidenced by a range of phenomena, including more widespread celebration of birthdays and an increase in the number of childspecific institutions.

Age and Government Policy and Law To see age as simply a mathematical measure of the length of a life underestimates its social importance and effects. Age also plays an important role in research and in the development of policy and law by government. These other uses influence how societies think about children and the ­institutions they create for them. One of the most ­influential applications of age measures was by developmental theorists. Developmental theorists sought to reveal natural laws governing

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development by mapping biological changes in children against age. Developmental psychology was made possible by measurements of time and age. Postmodern thinkers such as Chris Jenks and Erica Burman argue that developmental theorists have been so influential that Western cultures have internalized their ideas. When adults learn the age of a child, they reflexively associate that age with an assortment of familiar developmental characteristics. In this way, Jenks says age functions as a proxy measure for the expected behaviours and cognitive capacities of children. Burman describes how developmental theories have also been deployed to classify children into age groups. In Western cultures, children are broadly classified into age groupings or life stages founded on development theories. Although the age ranges that define them may differ across settings, terms such as infancy (01–1 or 2 years), early childhood (2–4 years), middle childhood (5–12 years), and adolescence (12–18 years) are widely understood and used. This shared understanding includes not just the developmental characteristics of each group but also the ages it comprises. These age groupings have become important organizational tools in many social institutions such as education, medicine, government, and research. Age groups also exist outside developmental theories. Other age categories have formed across different social and cultural contexts and don’t necessarily correspond with the more commonly employed life stages discussed in the previous paragraph. In education systems in countries such as New Zealand and the United States, children approximately 10 to 13 years are known as middle school or junior high school students and can attend different educational facilities. In afterschool centers in Australia, children aged 10 to 12 years are called older children and considered distinct from others. Age categories can be specific to particular social institutions as well as geographic locations. Marketers categorise children into particular age groups or market segments. Another example is tween (9–12 years), which has its origins in advertising. Age groups can also change over time. For example, adolescence is an age grouping that gained recognition only in the late 19th century.

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Age

Age and Societal Structures Age plays a significant role in the structuring of societies. In education in particular, the structuring role age has is well documented. Commonly, schools and preschools stratify children according to age, placing children in same-age cohorts. Jenks describes how this can have multiple effects. Age stratification in schools means that children are more likely to socialise with same-age peers, narrowing the friendship choices available to them. It can also influence the types of activities available to children. Within an education setting, classroom activities are targeted towards particular ages. Although the intent is to target activities to a particular level of development, it can similarly narrow the activities available to a child. Activities deemed inappropriate for a child’s age group become unavailable to them. Governments also use age and age categories as a means of governing children and their activities. Age offers a relatively efficient measure by which governments can legislate for children. It is accepted as reflecting a child’s maturity and is much simpler than more complex and individualized developmental assessments. Allison James and Alan Prout assert that one of the most significant ways governments use age is to define childhood itself. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a convention agreed to by all but two member states of the United Nations, defines a child as somebody 18 years or younger. Member states implement this definition in the development of policy and law. Whereas the UNCRC applies age to provide a universal definition of child, member states sometimes have other localized practices that use different ages to define childhood. Governments enact age in ways that go beyond defining who is a child. Age is deployed to govern access to resources, services, and legal and citizenship rights. The ways in which this occurs differs across locations and can be a consequence of history and how children are conceptualized. Acknowledging these differences, age can determine many things, such as when a young person can vote, drive a car, attend school, leave school, commence employment, access financial support, live autonomously, have sex, marry, or give medical consent.

Age has particularly significant implications for children who break the law. Individual countries can have different approaches to determining the age at which children become culpable for their actions and the penalties that apply. Governments can also apply age to govern children’s leisure activities. Censorship and ratings regimes can place age limits on what books, audio and visual media, video games, and toys children are entitled to access. This structuring role played by age means that it can be an important part of a child’s identity. Children associate themselves with the coded social and developmental knowledge that accompany measures of age. Children identify themselves with recognizable, socially constructed age categories such as “school child,” “tween,” or “teenager.” In particular, as they age, children are able to identify as increasingly mature, something that carries great social currency in cultures that value and privilege maturity. Very young children can be eager to claim the status of being a “big” girl or boy. Transitioning to a higher level of education can also carry great significance for similar reasons. Despite appearing universal, chronological measures of age are not practised in all cultures. In contrast to the chronological measures of children’s age common in the West, Bernardo ­Bernardi describes the age class systems adopted by some cultures. In such systems, young children are assigned membership in an age class, which is a cohort of individuals at a similar stage of life. The individual and other members of their age class then progress together through all their culture’s socially practised life stages as a single cohort. In an age class system, each life stage has its own accompanying rights and privileges that all members of the cohort gain access to as they pass through the various life stages. Progress from one life stage to the next, particularly from childhood to adulthood, is often accompanied by rituals or rites of passage. Bernardi says age class systems are widespread in East African countries, including Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. They are also practised in some Central and South African countries and in parts of Asia. James, Jenks, and Prout argue that Western age practices and traditions are instead more

Age Assessment, in Migration

individualized. Although some institutions, in particular educational institutions, group children in same or similar age cohorts, children do not remain in the same cohort for life. Children move through different stages based on a possible range of factors, including chronological age and developmental or educational progress. Similarly, access to some social privileges are not guaranteed after progression to a designated age or stage. Social privileges can be distributed on an individual basis and influenced by factors such as gender, class, academic achievement, or socioeconomic status.

Age and Research Age plays a prominent role in research. It is frequently a variable in medical and psychological studies and can play a structural role in setting the boundaries for research projects. However, age itself is rarely the focus of research and something that is not often subject to critical examination. Age does appear to have attracted more attention in recent decades. Bruce Hurst See also Age of Consent; Childhood; Developmental Psychology; Sociology of Childhood

Further Readings Aapola, S. (2002). Exploring dimensions of age in young people’s lives: A discourse analytical approach. Time & Society, 11(2-3), 295–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0961463X02011002007 Bernardi, B. (1985). Age class systems: Social institutions and polities based on age. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Burman, E. (2008). Deconstructing developmental psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. Bytheway, B. (2005). Ageism and age categorization. Journal of Social Issues, 61(2), 361–374. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2005.00410.x Chudacoff, H. P. (1989). How old are you? Age consciousness in American culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). The temporality of childhood. In A. James, C. Jenks, & A. Prout (Ed.), Theorizing childhood (pp. 59–80). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press.

Age Assessment,

in

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Migration

Age assessment and disputes about age usually become an issue at the point that separated or unaccompanied child migrants claim asylum or enter a ‘host’ country. In many destination countries, age is important because children, considered to be those under the age of 18 years old, are entitled to better protection in the form of education, health, and welfare support. Adults may say they are children to benefit from these provisions, and children who are incorrectly identified as adults may be placed in risky situations. Many countries have introduced age assessment policies and practices as a means of ‘proving’ chronological age. But determining age is notoriously difficult. This entry discusses the range of social, political, and personal reasons that age assessments, and their subsequent dispute, can be so problematic. Age assessment of asylum-seeking children is a key policy issue and a site of tension between immigration control and social care. The focus of immigration control is on reducing migration into a country and the role of social care should be to ensure an appropriate level of care, particularly in the case of children. The Separated Children in Europe Programme suggests that age assessment should be used as a last resort, should never be forced, and must respect the dignity of the individual; in case of doubt, the asylum seeker should be treated as a child. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees emphasises a need for accuracy and dignity in assessment. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child further adds that assessments should be conducted in a safe, fair, and gender-sensitive manner. Regardless of the degree of guidance available, research suggests significant differences between what is supposed to happen and what does happen in practice. There has been the suggestion that a culture of disbelief surrounds age assessment for asylumseeking children, made worse by institutional pressures to reduce immigration numbers. Countries have different policies and processes for determining age assessments. For example, in the United Kingdom, Home Office policy states that if there is little evidence to support the a­ pplicants’ claimed age and that their

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Age Assessment, in Migration

‘appearance/demeanour’ puts their childhood status in doubt, they should be treated as an adult. In the United States, there is no exact procedure for determining age but the Flores Settlement Agreement states that in the absence of official documentation, ‘if a reasonable person’ concludes an adult is acting as a minor, he or she should be treated as an adult. Overall, there are broadly three main approaches. The first has been described as nonmedical and usually relies on the asylum-seeking child providing documents. Assessors also base judgments on physical appearance and interviews with the child. The second is essentially medical and involves a physical examination that might include bone or dental radiology. The third approach attempts to integrate these two. Research has shown that none of these approaches are foolproof, and some countries place more or less emphasis on particular aspects (e.g., lending more weight to the interview than to physical characteristics and vice versa). Furthermore, there continue to be grave concerns about how age assessment is conducted. The research suggests that officials prefer official documentation as proof of age. But, this requirement is problematic because children who are fleeing persecution and war often leave very rapidly and retrieving necessary documentation is not always possible. In cases involving agents, traffickers, or smugglers, children may be given false documentation. In some situations involving traffickers, children have been told to say they are adults so they do not come under child protection services. They then ‘disappear’ into adult systems. Research evidence suggests that some children have had their documents taken away from them by officials during their initial age assessment screening, which can lead to later problems with other services. Even official documentation can lead to confusion and misunderstanding because of the way calendars and dates of birth are calculated in different countries of origin. Overall there is considerable evidence that many officials simply do a rapid visual assessment. The problem is that physical appearance is not a good indicator of chronological age, and even radiology and dental examinations are open to misinterpretation or abuse. For example, skeletal age is determined by the form and size of bones, such as the degree of fusion of the

epiphyses, the rounded end of a long bone. In the hand, epiphyses fusion is considered to be completed by 17 years of age in girls and 18 years in boys. However, this figure represents only the mean age and there is a 2- to 3-year error margin. This is not helpful when the crucial age limit is 18 years of age. In addition, there are geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic influences on physical maturation. For instance, diet and type of activity, such as involvement in physical labour, can affect physical development. Even worse, child migrants find visual assessment degrading and stressful as officials look closely at their bodies. Research has found that assumptions about what children are like and how children should behave influence age assessments. Children who are described as having an attitude, are too sullen, or won’t make eye contact are perceived as ‘adultlike’ and therefore suspicious. Some age disputes have been made based on language ability. For example, the age of children whose nonnative language was deemed overly proficient has been disputed. Here, there may be a clash between conceptualisations of childhood in host countries and children’s experiences. Difficult or traumatic preflight and flight experiences, as well as diverse global childhoods, may lead to demeanours and practices that do not match an official’s understanding of childhood. Although many professionals work hard on behalf of asylum-seeking children, the evidence provides many examples of a lack of care and empathy, particularly at the point when children are assessed for age. Examples in the literature include cases in which statutory obligations to private interview rooms, access to food and drink, and legal or social care support were not fulfilled. For asylum-seeking children, chronological age may have previously held limited importance in that it is not always a key signifier of social adulthood. Some migrant children may not realise the significance of the age assessment process. However, there is the impression from immigration officials that asylum seekers have a good understanding of the system and seek to abuse that system. This point is highly contested in the research. Others report that even when they are assessed as children, they live with a fear of ‘aging out’ of

Age Compression

child protection systems and the uncertain future this represents. Indeed, some researchers contend that an age-graded welfare and asylum process does not fulfil policy goals of meeting children’s ‘best interests’ or achieving ‘durable solutions’ for asylum-seeking children or societies more broadly. Sarah Crafter and Rachel Rosen See also Asylum, Children as Seekers of; Borders, National; Child Trafficking; Unaccompanied Minors, Migration

Further Readings Allsopp, J., Chase, E., & Mitchell, M. (2014). The tactics of time and status: Young people’s experiences of building futures while subject to immigration control in Britain. Journal of Refugee Studies, 28(2), 163–182. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu031 Aynsley-Green, A., Cole, T. J., Crawley, H., Lessof, N., Boag, L. R., & Wallace, R. M. M. (2012). Medical, statistical, ethical and humans rights considerations in the assessment of age in children and young people subject to immigration control. British Medical Bulletin, 102, 17–42. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bmb/lds014 Crawley, H. (2007). When is a child not a child? Asylum, age disputes and the process of age assessment. Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. Retrieved from http://www.ilpa.org.uk/data/resources/13266/ ILPA-Age-Dispute-Report.pdf Kenny, M. A., & Loughry, M. (2018). Addressing the limitations of age determination for unaccompanied minors: A way forward. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, 15–21. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.childyouth.2018.05.002

Age Compression Age compression was first formulated in the 1990s as a marketing concept targeting children as consumers for products of older age groups. In the educational discourse, age compression is one of the narratives that attribute the disappointment of normality expectations regarding the behavior of ­children and adolescents to a disintegration of physical, biological, psychological, and social time. The underlying assumption of a relative coherence of the numeric age of children with the various

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aspects of their development in the form of age groups is part of everyday communication, underpinned by mainstream developmental psychology and institutionalized by educational policy. Age compression attributes the asserted collapse of formerly seemingly more stable or fixed age groups to societal innovation, especially in the form of new media and new economic strategies: Children behave like teenagers because of their premature exposure to mediatized experience or forms of consumption that are not yet pedagogically or psychologically vetted and supervised. In its originally economic context, the concept of age groups is theoretically rather unproblematic. The continuum of numeric age is pragmatically divided into sections that allow economically instructive generalizations that can be evaluated and adjusted. The success of these marketing strategies is reflected by a risk discourse in the mass media and pedagogic advice literature with special attention to digitalization and sexualization. The risk constructions are typically gendered in such a way that certain forms of media use are supposedly rather dangerous for boys, whereas certain forms of clothing, makeup, or dance styles are seen to endanger girls. In all cases, a perceived hiatus between a complex notion of age and a fuzzy idea of age appropriateness is the source of the particular danger. Pedagogic practice is confronted with these constructions on a daily basis. At what age is it appropriate to own a tablet computer or a smartphone? Is it okay for a 5-year-old to watch Star Wars? How should one interpret 6-year-old girls imitating or reproducing symbols or practices in music videos associated with sexual behavior? Both parental questions and educational professionalism demand answers from pedagogues. Unlike the discourse on developmental inappropriateness, the notion of age compression puts emphasis on the societal, especially economic, factor in the definition of appropriateness. However, age compression can hardly be understood as an analytic or even as a critical concept. The insight into the contingency, historicity, and constructedness of age groups and the critical stance toward the commercialization of childhood integral to the concept of age compression is less than half-hearted. The underlying assumption is still that there is a normal, healthy, at least not yet corrupted relationship

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Age of Consent

between chronological age and developmental age, which is in itself a conflation of organic, psychological, and social development. Targeting children as consumers is more affirmed than criticized by implicitly seeing non-age-­compressed marketing and consumerism as normal. Besides these theoretical problems, the empirical basis for the concept of age compression is no less questionable as soon as it is supposed to describe not just a marketing strategy but its success in terms of observable changes regarding the development of children and adolescents. For example, it would have to be considered that the innovative technologies children supposedly engage in earlier than their generational predecessors are in many cases no longer innovative but rather a natural part of their lifeworld. It is not only the concepts of age groups that are highly problematic but also that of innovation in socialization. Children obviously do not grow up in the world their parents grew up in as children. Comparisons of the age of the children’s exposure to certain experiences is flawed in principle; the experiences do not have the same meaning. Thus, the seemingly straightforward observation of KGOY (kids getting older younger) rests on various presuppositions that involve a complexity of various factors and employ vague concepts. Its intuitiveness and plausibility are drawn from manifold anecdotal evidence. But also the diametrically opposite case for an extension of childhood can be made with reference to the same type of evidence. School teacher and author John Taylor Gatto, for example, spoke of an artificial extension of childhood through institutionalized education, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. In this narrative, substantiated by political documents, the situation of labor markets made it d ­ esirable to keep children in educational institutions as long as possible. In addition, historical statistics impressively demonstrate an enormous growth of enrollment in institutions of higher education in the decades after World War II. The impact of this form of institutionalization of young adults on the constructed difference between childhood and ­ adulthood—for example, in terms of economic ­ independence—can hardly be overestimated. However, the case for the narrative of an extended childhood could both be statistically substantiated and made plausible on the basis of anecdotal evidence of the kind Gatto collected

about very young, self-subsistent, and responsible individuals throughout history. Then again, there are popular descriptions of the opposite. Educator and cultural critic Neil Postman famously argued for the current erosion of the division between childhood and adulthood, a narrative that is largely compatible with that of age compression. This confusion is further enhanced by the fact that the warning of an acceleration or compression of development coincides with a huge educational effort to accelerate and optimize the development of children. What is “too fast” or “too early” in terms of age compression seems to essentially come down to contingent normative positions as opposed to reliable knowledge about development and socialization. Franz Kasper Krönig See also Children as Consumers; Development; Developmental Psychology; Developmentality; Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP); Pedagogy

Further Readings Gatto, J. T. (2003). The underground history of American education: A school teacher’s intimate investigation into the problem of modern schooling. New York, NY: Oxford Village Press. Lassonde, S. (2012). Ten is the new fourteen: Age compression and “real” childhood. In P. S. Fass & M. Grossberg (Eds.), Reinventing childhood after World War II (pp. 51–67). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Postman, N. (1994). The disappearance of childhood. New York, NY: Random House. (Original work published 1982) Schor, J. B. (2004). Born to buy. The commercialized child and the new consumer culture. New York, NY: Scribner. Snyder, T. D. (1993). 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

Age

of

Consent

The concept age of consent may be used in many contexts, but when the age of consent is referred to, it is widely understood that at issue is sexual behavior and what is a lawful minimum age for sexual acts. Academic research has revealed the

Age of Consent

complex and contested history of how the notion of an age of consent has been understood in different times and places and the variety of minimum ages applied to different sexual acts—often varying according to the sex of participants. This entry first examines the history of the concept, then turns to comparative research across societies. This enables consideration of how and why the age of consent is subject to increasing levels of policing and social anxiety. For a long time, the age of consent was hardly covered in academic research beyond obscure legal texts on sex offences. As the women’s movement developed in the 1970s, feminist researchers such as Deborah Gorham began conceptualising age of consent laws systematically in relation to history and social power relations. However, the first academic book to take age of consent laws as its central theme was The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship in 2005, which considered the issue from various disciplinary perspectives, drawing on history, sociology, law, criminology, and politics. This work looked at the history of debates in the United Kingdom alongside an international review, drawing on new perspectives from gender and sexuality studies and the new sociology of childhood. Such an approach shifted analysis from an exclusive emphasis on the inherent vulnerability of children to a conceptualisation of children as social actors with agency, while simultaneously located in social structures that produce structural vulnerabilities.

History of Age of Consent Laws Historically, minimum-age laws for sexual behavior in Europe originally applied to girls, not boys, and were often integral to laws forbidding rape. A 1275 statute in England prohibited acts to ‘ravish . . . any Maiden within age,’ apparently implying the age of 12 for marriage. This reflected a social and legal approach to children and women as the property of fathers and husbands within patriarchal family structures. Such laws also reflected a preoccupation with pregnancy; they contained childbirth within marriage and in that way maintained male domination through patrilineal kinship. Hence, violation of the female body or personhood was not the primary concern. However, in most other European societies, minimum-age laws appeared centuries later. In different

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cultures, such as in the Islamic traditions of many Arab societies, minimum-age laws were also closely related to patriarchal property relations, with sexual activity thus similarly legal from a young age when within marriage. European states engaged in imperialism tended to export their minimum-age laws to the colonies with other criminal laws, especially from the 19th century. For example, the British Empire’s legacy of the Indian Penal Code in India replicated a minimum age of 16 for a female, but allowing 15 within marriage. However, these colonial laws were often intended primarily to regulate the colonising populations. Sometimes customary laws were allowed to continue for indigenous populations, and policing selectively overlooked colonisers’ illegal behaviour. Thus, generally across various societies, minimum-age laws were conceived to control ­ females under a particular age without indicating entitlement to consent over that age, making later popularization of the concept ‘age of consent’ during the 20th century a significant change in representation. Relatedly, the process of age of consent laws becoming related to citizenship and human rights also demands attention. It was the emergence of social purity movements from Protestant northern Europe in the late 19th century that inspired moves to raise the minimum age for sexual intercourse with a female. Middle-class male moralists allied with maternalist feminist women in calls for protection of girls and their virginity. In the United Kingdom, this led to an increase in that minimum age from 12 to 13 in 1875, then from 13 to 16 via the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. This occurred in the context of a remarkable controversy that led to a reported 250,000 people protesting in London’s Hyde Park. Anxieties were promoted by the emergent popular press, with Pall Mall Gazette editor W. T. Stead writing incendiary articles titled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’ claiming to have purchased a girl. Feminist social historian Judith Walkowitz has explored how specific concerns about child prostitution and white slavery became conflated with the wider minimum-age issue. The central insight to emerge from studying these social purity reforms, echoed in many Western societies, is that new laws were conceived more in terms of an age of protection rather than an age

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Age of Consent

of consent. They embodied a move to define an expanded realm of girlhood as presexual innocence, yet they did not embody a positive right to consent for females over that age. This was particularly apparent from narrow definitions of rape and its legality within marriage. Moreover, the focus was strongly on male–female, penis–vagina sexual intercourse, whereas anal sex remained illegal as ‘buggery.’ Other sexual acts such as oral sex or masturbation of another person were prohibited in England only where covered by ‘indecent assault,’ with delimited definition. This situation continued until the (partial) decriminalization of same-sex acts began. Among Commonwealth states, this first occurred in England and Wales in 1967, creating a minimum age of 21 for a ‘homosexual act’ in strict privacy. Only feminist-inspired shifts in the law from the 1970s began to reform laws on sexual violence and extend their scope. Gradually, second-wave feminism and gay liberationism influenced moves to regulate sexual acts beyond intercourse.

International Contestations of Age of Consent Laws From the 1990s, gay and lesbian movements increasingly made equalization of age of consent laws a prominent demand and initiated related human rights claims in legal cases. Rulings by the European Court of Human Rights held that there should be an equal age for same-sex behaviour with that for male–female behaviour, in light of the right to privacy—when interpreted together with the right to nondiscrimination concerning human rights for any relevant status group (here defined by ‘sexual orientation’). This encouraged changes in many states of the Council of Europe. Arguments have sometimes also invoked the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Over the past two decades, cross-national comparative research on minimum-age laws has emerged. Lawyer Helmut Graupner published a major comparative study in German in 1997, later synthesized for peer-reviewed publication in English, identifying various forms of law. One particularly important formulation highlighted is ‘age span provisions,’ which imply a changing minimum age depending on a partner’s age. Such provisions have been advocated by Matthew

Waites, senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, in the United Kingdom, to decriminalize behaviour between young people aged 14 to 15. But Sarah Beresford from the Lancaster University Law School has recently criticized such arguments from a feminist perspective, associating them with a queer politics overly influenced by male perspectives, opposed to regulation. She argues that critical debates have given insufficient attention to effects of a lower age on girls, although her emphasis on pregnancy seems to underemphasize scope for nonpenetrative sex, safer sex, and contraception. Other examples of legal formulations include ‘seduction’ provisions, dependent on the approach by the older party or the requirement of complaint from the younger party or someone responsible for them—for example, in the Netherlands until 2002. The recent tendency has been to move away from these provisions. However, higher ages are increasing for sex work or making pornography or behaviour with anyone with institutional power such as a teacher. Meanwhile, in the United States, Carolyn Cocca, professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and Law at the State University or New York, Old Westbury, has used quantitative and qualitative comparisons between federal states to illuminate the forces shaping what are known as ‘statutory rape laws.’ Her work in political science shows how research can discern contestation processes. Cocca shows how lobbying from the National Organization of Women was the driving factor in reform from the 1970s. Guangxing Zhu and Suzan van der Aa published, in 2017, one of the most extensive comparative analyses, examining 59 jurisdictions in Europe. They examine changes between 2004 and 2016 and identify three trends. The first is to raise the general age of consent and abolish very low ages of consent (under 14), although in Germany, for example, the basic age remains 14. The second trend is the equalization of age of consent laws related to same-sex and male–female behaviours, now completed in all 59 jurisdictions. The third trend is towards creating a higher age limit for relationships of authority or dependence. Research on non-Western societies, however, reveals important differences. In India for example, Hindu religion and culture historically

Age of Consent

allowed child marriage and nonpenetrative– reproductive sexual acts not seen as sinful, unlike in Christianity. As in much of the world, the legal framework of sexual offences was then shaped by colonialism. The Indian Penal Code created by the British empire in 1861 defined a minimum age of 16 for vaginal intercourse that replicated the law in the United Kingdom, yet allowed a lower age of 15 to apply within marriage, illustrating an adjustment to contextual social norms. Only in 1978 was the minimum age for a girl to marry raised from 15 to 18.

Intellectual and Political Perspectives Major philosophers and social theorists have also increasingly commented on age of consent laws. Philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault, with Guy Hocquenghem and Jean Danet, made comments advocating abolition of the minimum age in France in 1978. David Archard is another philosopher who has discussed sexual consent issues, and gender theorist Judith Butler addressed the issue in her keynote address for the 2010 Judith Butler Symposium at Columbia Law School. However, the arguments of Archard and Butler tend to focus on the relationship of the psychology or subjectivity of persons to an act or process of consent. These approaches may re-centre the individual’s psychology in analyses of consent, whereas a more sociological analysis (as suggested in The Age of Consent) tends to greater problematization of relationships of minimum-age laws to the competence and feelings of subjects. The big picture in contemporary public debates internationally is a move towards increased prohibitions. Extensive revelations of the scale of historical sexual abuse, in institutions from care homes to churches and children’s television, have led to a profound shift in official and public discourse—more pronounced in Western societies, although varying by ­context— in which expressions of desire involving children are increasingly unacceptable. Although there are ongoing questions about how to define abuse, generally, action against abusive behaviours is overdue. Yet the tendency is to conflate prohibitions of adult–child acts with erasure of sexual behavior between children or young

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people, and legal distinctions between adults and children can ignore the complexities of adolescence. From a critical perspective, however, consensual sexual behaviours that do not overlap with abuse need to be considered in a different way. Sociological analyses can provide an understanding that many social anxieties about the consensual sexual activity of young people are not generated by a realistic understanding of experiences. Rather, projects of moral renewal, including in the authoritarian politics seen from India and the United States to Brazil, fixate on excluding various groups seen as ‘others’ in society, whether migrants, witches, paedophiles, or further indefinable and queer peoples who seem unknowable and hence become objects of fear and loathing. Sociological analyses such as by Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity help explain how ‘strangers’ become targets, especially in times of uncertainty. Hence, moves to tighten up age of consent laws often say more about political mobilizations of moralism that shape the perceptions of parents than about the lives of children and young people themselves. Moreover, with researchers of paedophilia having been attacked for studying the issues and neoliberal universities running scared of controversy, the space for relevant academic research needs defending. It is also important to not allow adult preoccupations with adult–child sex to re-centre adults in discussions in ways that ignore the issue of sex between young people and the complexity of young people’s experiences as they move between childhood and adulthood. Here, crude legal divisions between adulthood and childhood seem unhelpful. Age span provisions, mentioned earlier, used in the law of some states, provide an important policy response that can allow sexual behavior between young people who are close in age. This can reduce criminalization and more realistically address the everyday social experiences of young people. Matthew Waites See also Age; Consent, Sexual; Sexual Citizenship; Sexual Exploitation of Children; Sexual Orientation; Sexuality and Childhood

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Ageism

Further Readings Archard, D. (1998). Sexual consent. Oxford, United Kingdom: Westview Press. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press. Beresford, S. (2014). The age of consent and the ending of queer theory. Laws, 3, 759–779. https://dx.doi .org/10.3390/laws3040759 Butler, J. (2011). Sexual consent: Some thoughts on psychoanalysis and law. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 21(2), 405–429. Cocca, C. (2004). Jailbait: The politics of statutory rape laws in the United States. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foucault, M., Hocquenghem, G., & Danet, J. (1978). Sexual morality and the law. In L. D. Kritzman (Ed.), Michel Foucault: Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977–1984 (pp. 271–285). London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Goswami, R. (2010, March 23). Child marriage in India: Mapping the trajectory of legal reforms. Sanhati, 23. Retrieved from http://sanhati.com/excerpted/2207/ Graupner, H. (2000). Sexual consent: The criminal law in Europe and overseas. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 29(5), 415–461. https://dx.doi.org/10.1023/ A:1001986103125 Waites, M. (2005). The age of consent: Young people, sexuality and citizenship. Houndmills, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Waites, M. (2010). Human rights, sexual orientation and the generation of childhoods: Analyzing the partial decriminalization of “unnatural offences” in India. International Journal of Human Rights, 14(6), 971–993. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2010.512142 Walkowitz, J. (1992). City of dreadful delight: Narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London. London, United Kingdom: Virago. Zhu, G., & van der Aa, S. (2017). Trends of age of consent legislation in Europe: A comparative study of 59 jurisdictions on the European continent. New Journal of European Criminal Law, 8(1), 14–42. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2032284417699293

Ageism Ageism refers to discrimination based on a person’s age. The term was coined in the late 1960s by the American psychiatrist Robert Butler, who created it to refer to discrimination against the

elderly. Although a preponderance of research naming ageism as a concept remains focused on the elderly, the term has since expanded to encompass any form of age-based discrimination, including age-based discrimination targeting children and youth. This entry describes how ageism takes shape as a socially constructed discourse and as a material practice affecting young people. In keeping with the tendency of much contemporary research focused on discrimination, this entry also locates ageism intersectionally or in relation to how ageism against young people operates in conjunction with other forms of discrimination, before considering the unique challenges that characterize attempts at combatting ageism. The entry first offers a definition of ageism.

Defining Ageism Ageism is a contested term. Researchers of elderly persons usually evoke ageism solely in context of its original usage, so that writing about young people in relation to ageism often appears only in connection to issues such as young people’s negative perceptions of aging or how it is that young people perpetuate discrimination against the elderly. Scholarship focused on children and youth often cedes ageism’s definitional grounds to its original usage as well, an occurrence that has helped spur the proliferation of many analogous, competing terminologies for talking about or qualifying ageism aimed at young people, terminologies such as adultism (discrimination in favor of adults), childism (a range of anti-child practices), and juvenile ageism. Ageism targeting young people can be defined as the range of perceptions and behaviors that operate at any given time to discriminate against children and youth on the basis of their age as well as to the intersecting network of individual, social, cultural, institutional, and legal discourses that uphold this discrimination and help to perpetuate it. It is important to note that ageism against young people long precedes its naming as a term. This is to say that across historical periods and contemporary geographies where ageism or comparable terms do not exist, it is still commonplace for young people to occupy marginal social positions, and for societies to adopt a normalized set of social relations toward them in which their particular developmental

Ageism

characteristics—­biological, cognitive, experiential— are put into practice as culturally constructed deficits and assumed as a pretext for disadvantaging them.

Ageism Targeting Children and Adolescents Although all human life exists within a continuum of development, contemporary discourses of ageism support perceptions of young people as developmentally incomplete, inferior, dependent, and deficient because they have not yet reached chronological adulthood, a legally defined and socially constructed position of power that confers upon its members a number of rights and privileges not granted to those who fall outside of its definitional boundaries. For young people who are often precluded from full participation in the legal, institutional, economic, social, and cultural life of their societies—in which the dictates of age determine the extent to which they can exercise control over such things as their right to learn, to work, to dwell, to play, to vote, and otherwise—the consequence is that their exclusion from these domains, even if enacted by adults in their presumable best interests, cast them as not fully functional and productive members of society, to the extent that they are often constructed pejoratively as a result. In youth and adolescence, these pejoratives find form in commonplace age-based discourses that suggest they are naturally self-absorbed, erratic, disengaged, irresponsible, coming-of-age, and/or hormonally imbalanced, as well as prone to depression, peer pressure, and crises of identity. In younger children, corresponding discourses find form in talk of innocence, vulnerability, helplessness, and immaturity. An ageist subtext here predominates, one which suggests that young people, not fully formed, must be watched, regulated, and discriminated against, sometimes for their own good, to guard against their presumed deficiencies.

Childhood and Adolescents as Socially Constructed It is important to note that childhood and adolescence are also socially constructed notions. Modern adolescence is not a universal or historically stable category. Those in age ranges considered adolescent in many parts of the world today

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would have been considered adults a little over a century ago, and the characteristics commonly attached to adolescence would not have been ascribed to them. The same can be said of notions of childhood, whose meanings and definitions can be sourced slightly further back in history, to domains such as literature, education, and legislation. While chronological age is real, the meanings, definitions, and discriminations people attach to age are variable and therefore constructed. Just as age-based definitions of childhood and adolescence are not ahistorical, nor are they acontextual. An important aspect of understanding and addressing ageism against young people is to consider how it takes shape in context of other forms of discrimination such as those based on race, gender, or class. In this regard, a young person from a traditionally marginalized group often encounters and experiences ageism in more pronounced and damaging ways than would be the case otherwise, based on the ways in which the multiple prejudices levied against them intersect and compound. For example, young African American males often experience a form of ageism that operates to criminalize them, which is a function of the way in which ageism and racism intersect. In schools, young females are likewise at times passively discouraged from seriously pursuing academic disciplines like math, science, or technology studies, in this case, a function of the way ageism and gender discrimination intersect. Young people therefore experience ageism unevenly based on how ageism intersects with other forms of discrimination.

Combatting Ageism One of the unique challenges of addressing and combatting ageism is that whereas other forms of discrimination can be understood as unequivocally bad, age-based discrimination can oftentimes be necessary for the protection of young people. For example, most would accept that it is wise for a young child not to have complete agency over their right to travel publicly of their own accord, eat whatever foods they like, or make acquaintances with all manner of strangers. An important issue in conscientiously addressing ageism therefore involves attending to the tension between supporting young people’s rights and imposing

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Agency

discriminatory protections deemed necessary for their safety. Joel Feinberg helps to resolve this tension by suggesting that while all humans share some common rights—such as the right to be treated with respect, or to not be assaulted—­ children also have a set of distinct rights. They have the right not to have the future rights they might enjoy as adults foreclosed to them (which can happen through abuse or neglect), as well as the right to an open future of autonomous thinking and being, in which case support of children’s rights does involve the imposition of a series of protections—at times seemingly discriminatory— provided by adults. Properly addressing ageism therefore involves understandings of young people that balance between their right to autonomy and their protection. It likewise involves holding to the idea that while chronological age is stable, predictable, and quantifiable, fostering respectful, anti-ageist relations with young people necessitates seeking to encounter in them the qualitative fullness that comprises any human life, of which chronological age is just one variant among many. Roger Saul See also Adolescence; Adultism; Age; Childism; Sociology of Childhood

Further Readings Feinberg, J. (2007). The child’s right to an open future. In R. Curren (Ed.), Philosophy of education: An anthology (pp. 112–123). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Lesko, N. (2012). Act your age!: A cultural construction of adolescence (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Westman, J. C. (1991). Juvenile ageism: Unrecognized prejudice and discrimination against the young. Child Psychiatry and Human Development, 21(4), 237–256. doi:10.1007/bf00705929

Agency Childhood studies has been critical of dominant models that construct children as a facet of social structure, as passive with regard to the processes of socialisation but also as locked into a linear structure of development (physiological, cognitive, social, or emotional) from infancy to adulthood.

In contrast to these models, childhood studies has championed research and thinking about children as social actors and as agents of social order, reproduction, and change. This entry considers how children might be conceptualised as having agency and the import of such conceptualisation.

Dominant Models in the Social Sciences The dominant models of children and childhood are reflected in the writings of social scientists over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Sociologist Émile Durkheim talked about childhood as a problem of growth. He argued that childhood is to be understood in terms of children’s lack of social individuation; namely, children are typified by their lack of physical and moral individuality. Children don’t properly exist as individuals; rather, they are defined in terms of their growth toward a state of full development found in adulthood. Until that point in adulthood, children are in a state of disequilibrium, a state of instability and transformation. In time, children’s bodies and minds are regularised and ordered, transformed from a state of nature to a state of society. In adulthood, individuals find their place or their role with regard to beliefs and behaviours of the collective social body. They are defined in terms of their role within social institutions. Durkheim talked about children in this sense as “becomings,” always in a state of growth. The sociologist Talcott Parsons writes in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s of the functional nature of social systems and how children are socialised into social roles. Children whose growth is not positively aligned with normative social functions are thereby understood as dysfunctional. For example, in a mainstream heterosexual patriarchal European society of the 1950s, a boy constantly wearing a dress to school might be identified as a problem, his family labelled as dysfunctional, and interventions applied to treat and rectify the perceived problem. In a similar, but also different, fashion, the psychologist Jean Piaget writing from the 1920s to the 1960s defined children in terms of their cognitive development. Childhood is defined as an intense process of development in which the cognitive capacities of the individual child progress

Agency

through processes of assimilation and accommodation and through various stages from infancy to maturity (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages). For Piaget, although the rate of development and the progression through the different stages may vary, there is nevertheless a normal line and rate of development against which variations or abnormalities are measured. Even though Piaget’s ideas of the child are such that the child is able to actively interpret and cognitively understand the world, there is still a sense that rationality and cognitive maturity are understood in terms of where the child ends up and in terms of what he or she would normally become. In the field of childhood studies, these ideas about socialisation and development are criticised inasmuch as they present an understanding of children not only in terms of their difference from adults but also of their being less than adults. They present an idea of children as always in a state of becoming adult and, as such, seen always in a state of deficit. It is a deficit model of childhood. Moreover, socialisation and development are understood always from the perspective of adults and adulthood. The deficit within, and of, the child is understood by adults from their vantage point and with regard to their adult values and interests. For childhood studies, these ideas of children and childhood as less than adults are linked with how children are treated. The deficit model of childhood supports a fundamental power imbalance between adults and children. Children are seen as less, but they also count for less. The childhood studies critique of the deficit model is thus also a critique of the social and historical power relationship between adults and children. The emergence and growth of the field of childhood studies has been predicated on a series of theoretical ideas and methodological tools for the study of children in addition to a politics of childhood concerning the need to offer the means of revaluing children and childhood. A central pivot has been the idea that children have social agency—namely, that they have the capabilities and capacities to make and reproduce society. To understand how society is made or how society is ordered, one should look not only to how adults order society and understand the social world

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from adult eyes but also to how children make social order. To think about socialisation in terms of children’s agency means not to consider children as passive recipients, persuaded and enforced into an adult-defined social order but, rather, to think about children as active coproducers of social relationships. Without ignoring the fundamental power relationships that may exist within ­families—across gender and age, for example—it is important to consider how children are key social actors in the making of “family.” Sociologist Carol Smart’s research in the United Kingdom in the 1990s on how children construct stories about themselves and their families after divorce is significant. Notwithstanding the often huge impact of parental separation on children, Smart explores how children coproduce complex narrative accounts of themselves in different subject positions in relation to their parents, new partners, and new relationships. These narrative accounts demonstrate a sense of children, not as victims of social structural change, but as active constructors of their and others’ social worlds.

The Social and Political Context for Understanding Children’s Agency The political dimension to the reconceptualisation of children, not as facets of social, physiological, or psychological structure, but as social agents, is important. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, writing on children’s rights presented ideas about children as equals to adults and with rights to access the same social spaces and resources as adults. Advocates for children’s rights argued that children should be free to work, to have sex, to choose their own form of care, and to roam and travel; namely, the central question was whether, and to what extent, children should and could have control over their own lives. Much of this writing, and the political activism that supported it, was critical of existing state, legal, and social structures. It was framed within the terms of a social, political and economic libertarianism. Children’s rights activists railed against the surveillance of the state, legal interference in people’s everyday lives, and the conservatism of the family and schooling.

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At this time, there was a critique of not only the family but more broadly of forms of social care, welfare, and protections that were seen as ideological foils covering implicit intentions and means for social control. Rights activists talked of social institutions as prisons and of the need to liberate children. Underlying these criticisms was an idea of children as autonomous individual beings, whose fundamental rights lay in their autonomy and their freedom to choose how they live their lives. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 (UNCRC) radically transformed the meaning and practice of children’s rights both in the tone of its political discourse and in the relationship between understandings of children’s rights and the supportive role of social institutions and social structures concerning those rights. While maintaining a deep concern with children’s rights to autonomy and their rights to political and social participation, the UNCRC also stressed the rights of children to supportive structures of family and education and to care, protection, and welfare. Moreover, it did so on an international, not simply national, scale. There was significant excitement for the UNCRC across civil society actors, childcare professionals, and academics alike.

The Development of a Strong Programme for Children’s Agency In this transformed political and social context, children’s agency could not simply be presented as a question of children’s autonomy against social structure. In this context, the theoretical idea that children’s agency and social structure constituted a duality rather than simply a conflict really came to the fore. To investigate children both as having agency in the making and ordering of society at the same time as being structured in relations of power and authority, childhood studies embraced an understanding of agency and structure as two sides of the same coin, as a dialectic. This theoretical model—which was largely derived from the writing of the sociologist and social theorist (but who didn’t write explicitly on children and childhood) Anthony Giddens— enabled childhood studies to consider adult power and social structure at the same time as children’s capabilities and capacities to make a difference. In Giddens’s writing, the idea of the duality of

structure and agency comes, in part, from a social theoretical engagement with cybernetic systems theory. Social structure and social agency are, for Giddens, abstractions from the recursive patterning of social organisation. Human agents are always situated in systems of social interaction. Human agents develop knowledge of themselves and their surroundings, but such knowledge is partial and changes the dynamics of the system. Human agency, in this sense, is thus also reflexive. Human agents don’t simply know and act on an external world but are themselves constructed and reconstructed through their knowledge and interaction at the same time as the social world is changed as a consequence of those interactions. Social systems are defined through an understanding of the interdependencies of actions, such that structure and agency are abstractions of those interdependencies. In this analysis, social structure does not preexist the interactions and interdependencies of agents; rather, social structures—family or work, for example—are made and remade, constructed and reconstructed each time anew through the interactions of social agents. Some writers within childhood studies, notably professor of childhood studies Berry Mayall, have been critical of the apparent lack of a historical dimension to social structure in Giddens’s analysis inasmuch as social structure is seen not to have an enduring preexistence over and above its construction through the interactions of social agents. As a criticism of Giddens, Mayall argues that although human agents certainly make social structures, such that society has no ontological depth beyond the actions and interactions of human beings, human agents do not simply make society and social structures anew, moment by moment. In that sense, she argues that children’s agency, as with human agency more generally, should be understood in terms of its transformational capacity rather of than its creational capacity. Giddens understands the reflexivity of human agency as a cognitive process. Human agents know about their world and about how their world is reproduced (i.e., inasmuch as it is not enough to make the world once, but it must be made and remade again and again). For Giddens, this cognitive standpoint is understood developmentally. Rational adults, not children defined by

Agency

their infancy, have the capabilities for autonomous action. Yet notwithstanding this fundamental problem with Giddens’s ideas for a theory of children’s agency, childhood studies read the theory against the grain. For childhood studies, contra Giddens, a theory of children’s agency allows one to understand children as active in the production and reproduction of society. The Norwegian sociologist Jens Qvortrup, in the mid-1980s, developed a theoretical model for thinking about children as central to the reproduction of society. In his writing, he considers how children have agency not only in terms of how they interact with others and how they shape the world through those interactions but also how children are productive subjects. Children’s productivity is significant because they, along with adults, both make the world in which we live and are part of the social reproduction of the world in which we live. In this sense, Qvortrup draws on the classic Marxist argument that labour is productive not only of the world now (at time T1) but of the world in the future (at time T2). It is not enough to make the world once; it is necessary to reproduce the world in the future, again and again. Qvortrup considers children in terms of their relation to the dominant mode of production in European industrial capitalism, and he considers their structural location within schools. Mass schooling is centrally important for industrial and postindustrial capitalist society. Qvortrup sees schools not simply as places of learning or as instrumental and dehumanising or simply as sites for the reproduction of class relations (i.e., as reflected in the training and distribution of children in terms of manual as opposed to intellectual labour, which also reflect class relations in industrial society) but also as sites in which children labour (and hence produce value through their labour). For Qvortrup, children’s schoolwork is, properly speaking, work; it is labour that has economic and social value. The work that children do at school is largely symbolic work (i.e., the manipulation of symbolic resources). Qvortrup understands the value of children’s schoolwork in terms of their contribution to society once they have grown up. Schools, for Qvortrup, are important social and economic institutions not only because they reproduce the

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divisions of labour (i.e., class relations) between those who sell their labour (i.e., the proletariat) and those who own the means of production (i.e., the bourgeoisie) but because they reproduce a “diachronic division of labour.” Children’s schoolwork is important because through that labour, children contribute to the making of society and economic value in the future when they are adults. Qvortrup’s writing is significant for childhood studies and for thinking about children’s agency because he argues that children are central to the production and reproduction of society, that they are productive of economic value (even if they do not always or frequently see the rewards from their labour), and that their agency (their productivity) has an effect not only now (T1) but in the future (T2). Also important, Qvortrup’s argument rests on a fundamental understanding of children’s agency in terms of their constituting a social class. Children are productive of economic value only inasmuch as their labour is collective labour. It makes little sense to consider children as individual social agents (i.e., as having capacity only because they contain and embody that capacity as individuals). Moreover, children constitute a social class, not because of their physiological or psychological characteristics (i.e., as defined by their emotional, physical, or cognitive immaturity), but only by virtue of the social institutions within which they find themselves (i.e., families and schools). Qvortrup’s understanding of children in the context of industrial and postindustrial modes of production is important because these modes of production provide the conditions for constituting children as a social class; their fortunes and futures are managed not by individual families (under the authority of a pater familias) but by the state. For childhood studies, understanding the social world as shaped by the dynamics of generational difference has also supported a commitment to understanding that social world from the perspective of children—namely, that to offset the deficit model of childhood, childhood studies has often sought to analytically describe the world from the position of the child. Writers, such as childhood researcher Leena Alanen and Mayall, have adopted this critical standpoint analysis as a way of supplementing social theories that have historically ignored the positionality of children and as a

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critique of social theory and social science that has failed to acknowledge the power relations (including those of adult–child) within which any form of knowledge sits. Moreover, childhood studies has often talked not only of children’s agency but also of recognising their voice. In part, this recognition and taking account of children’s voices concerns a methodological commitment to thinking about knowledge production as coproduction (namely, including the voices of those researched as an active facet of epistemological labour). In addition, such recognition has concerned a broader commitment to a politics of and for children. The social investigation of children’s agency has been aligned with a demand to make visible the experiences of children from their perspectives and a politics of childhood to facilitate children’s voices being heard. To be a social agent is more than being a social actor in the strong paradigm. Whereas a social actor is defined in terms of participating in social interactions, social agency is understood in terms of the capacity to make a difference to an existent state of affairs. For some writers, this capacity to make a difference is understood to be the capacity to change social structure, not simply to participate in social structure. The distinction between social actor and social agent also implies a distinction between social interaction on the one hand and the capacity for political change on the other. For example, doing work at school is a form of social participation. It is not simply the passive reception of social structure but also the positive and active interaction with social structure. Schoolwork takes on particular meaning and value by virtue of the different social actors (e.g., children) who do this work. In contrast, children who mobilise and take action to change the structure of learning at school (e.g., determine the curriculum through democratic assembly including adults and children) could be said to properly have social agency; namely, children have the capacity to make a difference, for bringing about structural change.

Recent Trends in Thinking About Children’s Agency Much of the early debate about children’s agency, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, was locked into a scalar model that placed structure–agency

and adult–child not only as polar opposites but as locked into a binary scalar understanding of social relations in terms of macrosocial relations and microsocial relations. In recent years, there has been significant criticism of this and of what might be seen as the heroic individual model of children’s social agency. Out of this criticism has come the development of more attenuated and nuanced interpretations of how children interact with and make a difference in the world in which they live. Recent leading research and thinking about children’s agency has three broad aspects: First, there is a concerted deflation of any heroic narrative of children’s agency, which sees agency in binary terms in opposition to ideas of victimhood, vulnerability, or suffering. Second, there has been an opening up to the complex and multiple materialities, relationalities, and dimensions of children’s agency. Finally, there has been a curiosity and air of experimentation about the methods and methodologies for disclosing and revealing children’s agency. These more recent novelties with regard to research and thinking about children’s agency have not foregone or ditched an understanding of children in the context of power relations and the historical and geographical accumulation and uneven distribution of resources and capital. Rather, they are more broadly contextualised, whether implicitly or explicitly, within a comprehensive understanding of the hegemonic order in which children find themselves, negotiate their relation with others, and live out their lives. That said, there has often been a hesitation about what constitutes the fixed and hard contours of that hegemonic order. The three broad trends in research on children’s agency can be outlined as follows. First, a range of empirically and theoretically focussed research has made the case that children’s agency is not constructed, or should not be seen to be constructed, in opposition to ideas about weakness or vulnerability. A range of researchers, in different ways, have made the case that children’s agency is not simply modelled in terms of active against passive. For example, Professor Alcinda Honwana in her research on young combatants in Mozambique talks about the “tactical agency” of the young people. Her ideas draw on the thinking of the French anthropologist, Michel de Certeau,

Agency

who talks about the way in which the tactics of the weak (which are fleeting, mobile, gathering resources where they are found rather than stockpiling weapons, guerrilla methods) are able to defeat the more rigid accumulated and strategic powers of the strong. The young soldiers of Mozambique, caught in civil conflict, supported by interfering international interests, are both victims and perpetrators of atrocities. Ethnographer Jessica Taft, in her research on young girls’ political activism in the Americas, both north and south, argues that the girls in their protests, demonstrations, union work, and organisation do not simply model a liberal or neoliberal idea of self-empowerment and active change. Professor of mental health and law Ofra Koffman and British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist Rosalind Gill, in their research on the figuring by international charities and others of young girls as agents of social change in non-Western countries and regions, are similarly critical of a model of empowerment and agency that aligns the activities of young people with global vested interests and corporate power. And professor of sociology Anita Harris and feminist researcher Amy Shields Dobson are critical of ideas of children’s and young people’s agency, in that agency is too closely aligned with choice, empowerment, and voice. They argue that agency should not be posed against an idea of victimhood but must be thought alongside ideas of injury and suffering. These ideas tally with sociologists Phil Mizen’s and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi’s research with young people in Accra, Ghana, on agency as vulnerability. Underlying much of this research is an understanding that vulnerability is a condition for social solidarity and collective struggle. These ideas suggest a sense of agency that is very different from the model of the heroic individual child. They also suggest that simple binaries between structure and agency, adult and child, do not capture the complexity and subtleties of the actual and situated performances of children’s agency. Second, a major argument for the strong programme for children’s agency was that children are not fixed by or locked into their biology, that despite being physiologically immature, the interpretation, construction, and reconstruction of that immaturity is open. Children’s agency is seen to

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depend on their being social beings, not on any biological essence. This strong argument also prioritised qualitative social research methods (such as discourse analysis and ethnography) in the investigation of children’s construction and reconstruction of their social worlds. Much recent research has criticised this binary thinking that divides the social from the biological and has, instead, put forward ideas about the heterogeneous materialities of and for children’s agency. Alongside the critique of the dualism of the social and the biological is an argument that agency never simply or solely resides in a single individual but rather that agency is always distributed. If agency is taken in its most rudimentary sense as the capacity to make a difference, then such capacity depends on a range of actors (both social and biological, human and technological). For example, the simple act of organising a birthday party may involve a parent sending out invitations on e-mail, the birthday child making choices about which friends should attend and negotiating with them and avoiding upset from those not attending, parents booking entertainers, planning and preparing food and drink, and various other actions. For the party to happen, children and parents need to be fit and well, they need to avoid allergic reactions to food, balloons need to be inflated, entertainers need to arrive on time, and so on. Instead of a single human figure making things happen, different actors work alongside each other, with different tolerances and reactions. Certainly in the context of contemporary communication technologies and systems such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat; with the popularisation of virtual and augmented reality technologies; and with newer biotechnologies on the horizon, the simple act of organising an event and the different forms and levels of intervention, interpretation, and feedback make the event, the interdependences between actors, and the dimensionality of the event more complex. A children’s party recorded and distributed via social media is no longer contained within conditions of copresence—for example, in the locality of a single set of rooms in a fixed geographical location. The event distributed by social media takes on different form, connects with different people, and becomes charged with different emotions and affects.

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AIDS Orphans

Finally, more recent research on children’s agency has branched out from the methodological focus on, for example, interviews, the recording of discursive encounters, or intense ethnographic observation. An explosion of innovative methods has brought to the fore the complex materiality of social life, ranging from real-time transactional data to new forms of visual mapping to emotional and affective data. Two big drivers of this innovation have been the growth in “big data” and the growth in different types of recording devices. Through these new methods, children’s agency can be disclosed in ways not seen before. Such methodological innovation raises significant questions about where children’s experiences might be situated and through what media and mediums might children’s voices be located. David Oswell See also Beings and Becomings, Children as; Childhood

Further Readings Alanen, L. (1994). Gender and generation: Feminism and the “child question.” In J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood matters: Social theory, practice and politics (pp. 27–42). Aldershot, United Kingdom: Avebury. Harris, A., & Shields Dobson, A. (2015). Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(2), 145–156. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022955 Holt, J. (1975). Escape from childhood: The needs and rights of children. Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin. Honwana, A. (2005). Innocent and guilty: Child-soldiers as interstitial and tactical agents. In A. Honwana & F. De Boeck (Eds.), Makers and breakers: Children and youth in postcolonial Africa (pp. 31–52). Oxford, United Kingdom: James Currey. James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London, United Kingdom: Falmer Press. Koffman, O., & Gill, R. (2013). “The revolution will be led by a 12-year-old girl”: Girl power and global biopolitics. Feminist Review, 105(1), 83–102. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.16 Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology for childhood: Thinking from children’s lives. Milton Keynes, United Kingdom: Open University Press.

Mizen, P., & Ofusu-Kusi, Y. (2013). Agency as vulnerability: Accounting for children’s movement to the streets of Accra. Sociological Review, 61(2), 363­– 382. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038026118771279 Oswell, D. (2013). The agency of children: From family to global human rights. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Oswell, D. (2016). Re-aligning children’s agency and re-socialising children in childhood studies. In F. Esser, M. Baader, T. Betz, & B. Hungerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising agency and childhood: New perspectives in childhood studies (pp. 19–33). London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood. London, United Kingdom: RoutledgeFalmer. Qvortrup, J. (2001). School-work, paid work and the changing obligation of childhood. In P. Mizen, C. Pole, & A. Bolton (Eds.), Hidden hands: International perspectives on children’s work and labour (pp. 91–107). London, United Kingdom: Routledge Falmer. Qvortrup, J., Bardy, M., Sgrita, G., & Wintersberger, H. (1994). Childhood matters: Social theory, practice and politics. London, United Kingdom: Avebury Press. Smart, C., Neale, B., & Wade, A. (2001). The changing experience of childhood: Families and divorce. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press. Taft, J. (2011). Rebel girls: Youth activism and social change across the Americas. New York, NY: New York University Press.

AIDS Orphans The term AIDS orphans came into general use in the late 1980s to refer to children who have become parentless due to the AIDS epidemic. This entry first explores the spatial distribution of AIDS orphans in relation to the geography of AIDS epidemic. Second, it discusses ideological discourses that inform the social construction of AIDS orphanhood. Third, the entry will identify and discuss common strategies of care for AIDS orphans, namely extended family care and community-based care. Fourth, it presents the ­ caregiving work of AIDS orphans in the context of poverty. After exploring the tensions regarding the politics of intervention in supporting AIDS orphans, the entry finally provides suggestions on new directions for research on the topic.

AIDS Orphans

Geographical Overview The AIDS epidemic is one of the key public health and human development challenges of the 21st century. According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, since its onset, nearly 32 million people had died worldwide. Africa accounts for two-thirds total of infected people and 70% of total deaths due to AIDS. Southern Africa is the most affected region. The average rate of infection among adults in Africa in 2018 is 6%, compared with 1.2% worldwide. Within Africa, there are rural–urban and regional disparities in infection with HIV as well as AIDS deaths. According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, the African continent is home for 15 million AIDS orphans—defined as children below 15 years of age who have lost their mother, father, or both parents due to AIDS. Although contemporary orphanhood could be held up as a mirror to the AIDS epidemic, the geography of AIDS orphans reflects more than epidemiology. AIDS has deep roots in poverty and global social and economic inequalities. Sub-Saharan Africa— the world’s poorest region and the one most affected by the ravages of the pandemic—is home to only 10% of the world’s population but accounts for more than 90% of global AIDS orphans. On the other hand, in South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, where the epidemic began later, there are an estimated 1 million AIDS orphans, making up 8% of the total AIDS orphans. In the remainder of the developed world, which is home to 2% of global AIDS orphans, the small size of the epidemic combined with the immense resources available for its prevention and treatment have contained the disease, resulting in no perceivable impacts on children.

Social Construction of AIDS Orphanhood The lives of AIDS orphans are often constructed in media and the aid industry in problematic terms. They are viewed as burdens whose existence epitomize crisis childhoods. Notions of the vulnerable child whose childhood has been lost, stolen, or simply nonexistent characterize media portrayal of AIDS orphans. This is perhaps unsurprising because in postmodernity orphans are necessary to

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the social construction of the nation-state, which is based on the image of family units. By living outside the family, orphans challenge the necessities of patriarchy, threatening the consensus that family is necessary. The term AIDS orphan not only contradicts the globalized notion of childhood, but it also produces powerful emotional overtones. It imbues the ambivalent position of the child who is capable of a life without a parent, combined with profound notions of vulnerability. The specter of the AIDS orphan has also linked the idea of parental death to various kinds of social pathology. In extreme cases, it is assumed that AIDS orphans grow up without adult guidance, do not receive proper care, and are rendered homeless; that they are in danger of not being socialized appropriately, and, therefore, of demonstrating criminal, antisocial behavior. This donor–media complex generates the perception of orphanhood encapsulated by helplessness and hopelessness: a ticking time bomb, silent crises, lost generation, robbed childhood, and childhood in the sun (i.e., without protection from the home). It not only amplifies AIDS orphans’ vulnerability but also perpetuates the rhetoric of disability (in the social sense). With journalists insisting upon extreme forms of vulnerability, AIDS orphans are emptied of the knowledge, resilience, and abilities they may have. The ways in which they are often embedded in and draw on larger networks of social relationships are overlooked.

Care for AIDS Orphans AIDS orphans are not only economically dependent on the wider society for their safe passage through childhood, but their care and protection also present a major childcare policy challenge. Over the past decades, finding the necessary resources to protect AIDS orphans has become a priority for the international aid community. Common approaches to support them emphasize strategies that increase the role of families and communities. Extended Family Care

A careful reading of the literature on the capacity and sustainability of extended families points to two polarized theories of care. The first theory

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is captured by the “social rupture thesis,” in which the extended family system is seen as being either overstretched or as having collapsed. Here, the absorptive capacity of the traditional family structure is no longer able to cope with the burden of caring for orphans. This perspective is typified mainly by international organizations, which argue that the AIDS epidemic has outstripped the capacity of African societies to offer any form of alternative care, leaving growing numbers of children to fend for themselves. Conversely, the second theory is grounded in perspectives of social resilience, which points out that orphans are well looked after by extended families and communities and that even in the context of poverty the existence of support networks has an enormous positive impact on AIDS orphans’ well-being. This rather optimistic approach provides insights into the complex ways in which families pull resources together and continue to ensure the safety and social security of orphans as well as providing care for those affected by the disease indirectly. It advocates that the capacities and strengths of the traditional childcare system, if supported by appropriate intervention, can still support a larger number of AIDS orphans. Each of these perspectives has its own implications for policy. Whereas the theory of social resilience focuses on empowering families, the social rupture thesis calls for, among other things, external interventions of care in children’s homes and institutions. Yet implementing external programs without examining the capacities and potentials of extended families can waste crucial resources while simultaneously supplanting existing structures of care, at the risk of making them socially unsustainable. Likewise, romanticizing the extended family system without a critical assessment of its constraints may result in the placement of orphans in unprepared families, to the detriment of the children’s physical and social wellbeing. In addition, both theories of care are based on economic models in which orphans are not only perceived as sheer burdens but also as mere recipients of care. AIDS orphanhood is associated with varying forms of vulnerability, and children receive different levels of treatment and degrees of exclusion and inclusion in extended families. The quality of the care that orphans receive is, for example,

shaped by, whether the deceased parents have left resources for them, spiritual influences, the orphans’ previous social proximity to their caregiving families, the emotional satisfaction of caregivers, and the economic conditions of caregiving households. In addition, although some extended families that look after orphans, especially grandparents, are economically poor, they are often the best providers of love and emotional care for children. Age and gender, kin category and the economic conditions of carers, the process leading to households being asked to care for groups of orphans, and geographical factors all influence the potential for the care and vulnerability of orphans. Rather than kinship per se, mixes of interdependent factors, such as the sense of obligation to family, household needs for resources, the capacities of the children themselves and the children’s own preferences, also influence the reciprocal relationships between orphans and their caregiving families. Community-Based Care

United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund advocates that to provide the best possible care for AIDS orphans, much greater efforts by governments are needed to establish and promote community-based care options. These are underpinned by a shift toward the development of responsible citizenship and good governance at the local level, which ironically forces vulnerable communities to assume greater responsibilities than they have the will or capacity to fulfill. Community-based care refers to local care arrangements carried out with different levels or degrees of community ownership and participation. They draw on strengths of community members in mobilizing resources and take on the responsibility of administering them. The approach is driven by the principle that care should be endogenous, participatory, and needs oriented, and that it should fulfill the basic needs of families and households. In 2000s, community-based care was seen as both a viable approach to taking care of orphans and a response to the wider social and economic impacts of the AIDS epidemic. There are three variants of community-based care: (1) care within the community (not in institutions); (2) care organized at the community level,

AIDS Orphans

where service provision (e.g., food, education, health care) is coordinated through the use of already existing traditional community institutions, and religious-based and village-based committees; and (3) care by the community, where resources (time, labor, and money) are mobilized from community members in order to support orphans. However, although most policies and programs for AIDS orphans emphasize the role of communities, the responsibility for and care of orphans ­ultimately falls on extended families. Often, c­ ommunity-based care function with the premise that the extended family structure has already collapsed. Yet, in Africa, the vast majority of AIDS orphans live in extended family households. Recently, communitybased care for orphans is increasingly questioned. This is not the least because just at the point at which this nongovernmental organization-driven model was itself being recognized as being timely, the AIDS orphan crisis made most childcare models redundant through the sheer weight of numbers. In the face of dependency ratios that are socially and economically nonviable, millions of AIDS orphans to date continue to seek care within the traditional kinship system of support. Moreover, community-based care does not tend to benefit many orphans, who must be highly mobile in order to join extended family households that themselves are spatially dispersed. Many AIDS orphans experience multiple migrations in response to maltreatment in their host families or to seek better opportunities elsewhere. By taking  communities as stable and homogeneous, ­community-based care fail to consider the fact that many orphans are newcomers and are least recognized in the places in which they reside. Since community-based care providers lack funds, it also tends to be donor-driven, seldom considering the perspectives of beneficiary orphans and families, who, from programming points of view, may have quite different expectations on the ground. Care Work by AIDS Orphans

AIDS orphans are not mere burdens to be coped with. They work for survival and fulfill social and economic obligations within their families and communities. They are also vital contributors of life-sustaining resources and, as such, have been recognized as being central to family livelihoods.

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AIDS orphans are actively involved in productive and reproductive labor. They view themselves and are viewed by their families as resources. The contribution of AIDS orphans includes periodic, regular, and substantial caregiving work. Young caregiving in the context of AIDS encompasses domestic chores (e.g., cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, laundry, shopping, fetching water, tending livestock, cultivating crops and vegetables), health care (e.g., reminding parent/relative to take their medication, caring for parent/relative in hospital, assisting with mobility, preparing special nutritional food), personal care (e.g., washing/bathing parent/relative; assisting to eat, dress, and use the toilet), childcare (e.g., bathing siblings, supervising and accompanying them to/from school), income generation activities (begging, casual farm work, selling produce, domestic work, working in markets, etc.), and emotional care (e.g., talking and comforting parent/relative, helping to remember appointment). Such intensified labor and intimate care distinguishes the role of AIDS orphans as young carers from the usual work children do within families and communities.

Politics of Intervention The global definition of AIDS orphans based on biological age and parental status is problematic for many reasons. First, in many patriarchal societies, where women have a low social and economic status, a child who has lost its father suffers almost all the social and economic disadvantages of a child who has lost both its parents. Second, orphanhood is not simply linked to parental loss but refers to children who are no longer living under the protection of their family and have fallen outside the traditional social safety net. In fact, absence of a carer, acute poverty, and economic marginality are central in many local, cultural definitions of orphanhood. Third, becoming orphan due to AIDS is experienced more as a gradual process rather than a single event. This is because children become disadvantaged long before their parents die, as the time lag between infection with HIV and death due to AIDS reduces the capacity of ailing parents to be productive and provide care for their children. Fourth, as research on AIDS orphans is highly cross-sectional, seldom comparing findings with historical evidence on how families and

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communities coped with large-scale orphanhood; intervention strategies are not supported by enough experiences on what types of strategies work and what types of strategies do not work. Identifying AIDS orphans in communities where there are common problems of social and biological orphanhood (due to poverty, war, famine, malaria, etc.) is stigmatizing. AIDS orphans may not have a medical certificate or know the cause of their parents’ deaths, and some orphans may not wish to say so due to the secrecy and stigma attached to the disease. A narrow focus on the vulnerabilities of AIDS orphans obscures the ways in which they share similar circumstances with other poor children, as well as the strengths they bring to bear on their circumstances. As previously noted, material support for AIDS orphans provided by nongovernmental organizations operate with predetermined definitions. Yet local conceptions of orphanhood among African people do not focus solely in their understandings on the loss of biological parents. Rather, it embraces existential dimensions and has more to do with destitution, alienation, and a lack of belongingness. The idea of being orphaned may resonate to a person who still has parents but who has experienced profound displacement, for example, through war. Moreover, nearly 70% of Africa’s AIDS orphans have at least one parent alive. Yet the global preoccupation on the category of AIDS orphans focuses analytical attention on the absence of parents and loses sight of their presence. Many of the poverty-related hurdles that AIDS orphans face such as lack of access to food, education, medical care, and sanitation facilities are shared with children who might be called social orphans—children who have been abandoned primarily due to poverty. Thus, to assist AIDS orphans selectively with material provisions in impoverished communities not only singles them out but also creates jealousies, tensions, and inequalities. Similarly, social assistance that uses the criteria of mere parental loss raises ethical questions by excluding other children, including non-AIDS orphans, who may be equally vulnerable. It contributes to a one-dimensional view of the multiple impacts of AIDS on children, mistargeting crucial resources. AIDS and HIV in a family or community results in a host of vulnerabilities often linked to the direct as well as indirect effects

of the disease, such as poverty, separation, economic decline, stigma, social isolation, and community impact. Interventions based on narrow and questionable assumptions about children’s circumstances are therefore not cost-efficient ways of adequately supporting the largest possible number of poor children, including AIDS orphans.

New Directions for Research AIDS orphans are not mere objects of pity and charity appeals. Nor are they passive victims of their circumstances. There is a need within academia and in international policymaking to move beyond the orphan burden to draw analytical attention into the ways in which care for AIDS orphans involves children’s capacity to reciprocate resources of care (economic, emotional, and psychosocial) with their families and communities. Care for and by AIDS orphans is not a one-­ dimensional process, whereby they are simply placed in the receiving end of the care continuum. Moreover, as orphans neither form a homogenous group of people nor have uniform trajectories of care, it is advantageous from the policy point of view to explore the differentiated nature of familial, cultural, and socioeconomic factors that make substantial difference to their lives. New areas for future research include, first, comparative studies revealing disparities in life outcomes between AIDS orphans, non-orphans, and orphans due to other causes using statistically representative samples. Comparative research should also focus on rigorous studies that include analysis to control for other possible intervening factors that affects AIDS orphans’ lives to isolate more effectively the orphan effect. Second, there is a critical gap for knowledge to understand the difference between single parental death and double parental death because there are considerable variations in the life circumstances of children who grow up motherless, fatherless, or lacking both parents. Third, research need to generate insights into children’s own perspectives, documenting how their experiences of orphanhood resonates with/contradicts other’s conceptualizations of what it means to be an orphan. Fourth, one needs to explore how the knowledge and skills of orphans can help us to understand wider processes of social and cultural reproduction in

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society. Fifth, what are children’s accounts of reorphaning, that is, children experiencing being orphaned for the second time when grandparents who look after them die due to old age? Finally, longitudinal studies on the outcomes of AIDS orphanhood in adult life are necessary. Such studies should also examine on the experiences of orphans aging out of institutions, children born with HIV, or the long-term gendered pathways of orphans and orphan-headed households. Tatek Abebe See also Children Living With HIV in Africa; Global Politics of Orphanhood; Orphan Care; Orphans; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Abebe, T., & Aase, A. (2007). Children, AIDS and the politics of orphan care in Ethiopia: The extended family revisited. Social Science and Medicine, 64(10), 2058–2069. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.02.004 Ansell, N., & Young, L. (2004). Enabling households to support successful migration of AIDS orphans in Southern Africa. AIDS Care, 16(1), 3–10. doi:10.108 0/09540120310001633921 Cheney, K. (2017). African orphanhood in the age of HIV and AIDS: Crying for our elders. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/ chicago/9780226437682.001.0001 Ennew, J. (2005). Prisoners of childhood: Orphans and economic dependency. In J. Qvortrup (Ed.), Studies of modern childhood: Society, agency and culture (pp. 128–146). London, UK: Palgrave. doi:10.1057/ 9780230504929_8 Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. (2018). Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. Retrieved from www.unaids.org Kalipeni, E., Craddock, S., Oppong, J., & Ghosh, J. (Eds.). (2004). HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. doi:10.1080/ 00291950510020501 Meintjes, H., & Giese, S. (2006). Spinning the epidemic: The making of mythologies of orphanhood in the context of AIDS. Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 13(3): 407–430. doi:10.1177/ 0907568206066359 Norman, A. (2016) Childhood in “Crisis” in the era of AIDS: Risk, orphanhood, and policy in Southern Africa. In N. Ansell, N. Klocker, & T. Skelton (Eds.),

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Geographies of global issues: Change and threat. Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 8). Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981 -4585-54-5_33 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. (2006). Africa’s orphaned and vulnerable generations: Children affected by AIDS. New York: UNICEF, UNAIDS, and PEPFAR. Retrieved from http://www.unicef.org

Andersen, Hans Christian Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805, and died in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1875. In his 70 years, this Danish writer accomplished much in the way of publications, although he is primarily remembered as an author of children’s literature. He wrote in a wide variety of forms: plays, novels, essays, travel books, poetry, autobiographies, and most famously, fairy tales, which are some of the most popularly translated works of children’s literature in the world. As a result, his legacy is tied to modern children’s literature as it is known today. The world’s most prestigious prize in children’s and adolescent literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, carries his name, and International Children’s Book Day is celebrated on his birthday, April 2. Andersen came from an impoverished family in a small town in Denmark. As such, he was always dreaming of moving onward and upward. His primary goal in life, even as a child, was to become famous. His early attempts at gaining fame led him to audition as an actor and dancer, but to no avail. After some formal education, he later had some success at playwriting, which kept him close to the theatre world he loved. Andersen spent a lot of time traveling and living as a guest, both abroad and in Denmark; he never actually had a home of his own. In addition, he never married and, based on all accounts, remained celibate his entire life. Andersen’s name is usually mentioned in conjunction with the Grimm Brothers for the fame that the men gained as writers of folk and fairy stories. However, Andersen’s stories are quite different from the others’ tales. His do not mainly come

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from an earlier oral narrative tradition, as did the Grimm’s; Andersen’s are almost all purely literary and original, even if they sound colloquial. That was one of Andersen’s talents—creating literary fairy tales that sounded natural and were meant to be read aloud. Some of the enduring appeal of his fairy tales are that they often blended strangeness and familiarity, beauty and ugliness, cruelty and kindness; they never guaranteed the presentation of a clear moral lesson or a happy ending. His most famous tales are “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “The Little Match Girl.” Disney adapted two of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories into major feature-length ­ animated films. “The Little Mermaid” was given a happier ending in the 1989 Disney film of the same name, The Little Mermaid. ­Andersen’s story “The Snow Queen” was loosely adapted, also with a happier ending, in the 2013 Disney film Frozen. On one hand, Disney Films’ rewrites and addition of musical features sustained the popularity of Andersen’s fairy tales into the 21st century. On the other, the ­Disneyfication of his work has also been viewed as a lessened and watered-down version of ­Andersen’s originals, detracting from his original, intended messages. Josianne Campbell See also Children’s Literature; Disney; Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition

Further Readings Andersen, H. C. (2008). The annotated Hans Christian Andersen (M. Tatar, Ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Andersen, H. C. (2013). My fairy-tale life (W. G. Jones, Trans.). Sawtry, United Kingdom: Dedalus. Wullschlager, J. (2002). Hans Christian Andersen: The life of a storyteller. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zipes, J. (2005). Hans Christian Andersen: The misunderstood storyteller. New York, NY: Routledge.

Websites H. C. Andersen Center: http://andersen.sdu.dk

Anorexia Nervosa Anorexia means not eating. Anorexia nervosa is a form of self-starvation recorded in children for 600 years. Since the 19th century, it has been regarded as a form of protest, a response to childhood pressures, and a psychiatric illness or eating disorder. Mystics and gurus have refused food on a search for enlightenment for centuries. Some claim not to eat at all. Political prisoners also refuse to eat. The medieval practice of self-­ starvation by young women in the name of religious piety and purity (anorexia mirabilis) was common. Many future Christian saints engaged in self-starvation, including Saint Hedwig of Andechs in the 13th century and Catherine of Siena in the 14th century. The poor physical health of Mary, Queen of Scots, between the ages of 5 and 15 years robbed her of appetite. Nonetheless, she is now regarded as suffering from an illness termed anorexia nervosa. This entry examines how anorexia is defined, its causes, and its treatments.

Inscribing Anorexia The general categorization of anorexia changes according to the source. Wikipedia defines the construct as an eating disorder, the UK’s National Health Service website claims it is a serious mental health condition, the U.S.-based Eating Disorder Hope organization uses the expression anorexia nervosa and suggests it is life-threatening, and the UK-based Beat Eating Disorders group say it is a serious mental illness. Charles Lasègue, a French pediatrician, called self-starvation as l’anorexie histérique and contrasted it to the behavior of people forced into starvation during the great famine in Paris. He then described the downward spiral of the anorexic, characterized by indifference, disgust, aversion, and eventually starvation, ill health, and possible death. Lasègue focuses on psychological factors and examination of the role of parental influences and family interactions. In the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952, anorexia nervosa is described as a psychosocial reaction, a neurotic

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illness. The next edition, DSM II, places it under special symptoms—feeding disturbances, which included pica and rumination. DSM 5 removes amenorrhea as a diagnostic requirement for anorexia on the grounds that the previous definition excluded males. Ignoring self-starvation carried out for political and familial protest, anorexia is more likely to be diagnosed in girls rather than boys, a phenomenon reflected in the presence of pro-self-starvation Facebook and other social media groups. YouTube is a popular avenue for those wishing to find efficient ways to self-starve.

Causes Some psychiatric researchers suggest that the foundations of anorexia nervosa lie in existing perfectionist and obsessional traits. In 1868, ­William Gull, a London-based physician, described his observations of an emaciated condition in young women in an address to the British Medical Association in Oxford. He observed that the causes of the condition were unknown, but that the subjects affected were mostly female between the ages of 16 and 23 years. He had occasionally seen it in males of the same age. Anna Freud (who retrospectively diagnosed herself as anorexic) regarded as critical the relationship with the principal caregiver, most frequently the mother among her middle-class clientele. Food avoidance could thus be a folie à deux, where the mother maintained the child’s conduct for her own reasons. By using a food = mother equation, rejection of food could be interpreted (and experienced as) as a rejection of the mother seen through the lens of a disturbance in the natural development from breast-feeding to healthy eating. Such hypotheses reinforce the mother blaming culture of early childguidance clinics; women (mothers) are controlled by guilt. The work of Hilda Bruch, another Germanborn psychoanalyst, can be read as maintaining a blame perspective. Bruch describes case histories where affluent, frequently stereotypically attractive American girls are brought up in homes dedicated to striving and academic achievement (golden cages). Suggested causes are typically multifactorial; a combination of biological, psychological, and/or environmental abnormalities are all cited though abnormalities are undefined. The Institute for the

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Psychology of Eating suggests five facets to the causal nexus. Stress in a complex world leads to disordered eating as a symbolic way of coping with an overwhelming environment. The family of origin is causal via parental attitudes to eating and body image. A history of abuse is claimed for up to two thirds of girls seeking help for disordered eating. The latter is described as a way of seeking bodily control or self-punishment for lingering feelings of guilt. A fourth suggested cause is the cultural space filled with media and other images of physical perfection leading to constant selfmonitoring. The Institute regards an eating disorder as a “call for growth and transformation.”

Treatment From a critical perspective, conduct inscribed as anorexia should not be treated. As a linguistic phenomenon the definition could instead be simply changed. As medically defined conduct that is distressing to others, however, treatment is inevitable. Electroshock has been performed on some young women inscribed with anorexia. In-patient psychiatric units specializing in eating disorders have attempted different group and talking therapies, of which cognitive behavior therapy is commonly the prime treatment modality after a return to normal weight—sometimes via forced feeding regimes—has been achieved. In common with many similar facilities, improvements are not sustained after discharge. Refusal of food is a feature of religious and spiritual life. Not eating can be a form of political protest and a way of responding to familial pressures, particularly amongst girls aged 7–17 years. Not eating is alarming to family members and may be inscribed as anorexia nervosa. No successful treatments have been found. Craig Newnes See also Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia; Digital Childhoods; Freud, Anna

Further Readings Beating Eating Disorders. (2017, October 30). Anorexia (or anorexia nervosa) is a serious mental illness. Retrieved from https://www.beateatingdisorders.org .uk/types/anorexia

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Eating Disorder Hope. (2017, October 30). Anorexia Nervosa is a psychological and possibly lifethreatening eating disorder defined by an extremely low body weight relative to stature. Retrieved from https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/information/ anorexia Institute for the Psychology of Eating. (2017, October 30). Retrieved from http://psychologyofeating.com/ causes-of-eating-disorders/ Lee, S. (1995). Self-starvation in context: Towards a culturally sensitive understanding of anorexia nervosa. Social Science & Medicine, 41(1), 25–36. doi:10.1016/0277-9536(94)00305-d NHS Choices. (2017, October). Anorexia nervosa is a serious mental health condition. Retrieved October 30, 2017, from https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ anorexia/

Anticipatory Socialization Sociologist Robert Merton’s notion of anticipatory socialization, based on the case of the American soldier, offers a useful tool for analyzing transitions between childhood and youth. Many soldiers experienced a “change of social class” after returning from their war effort, particularly when receiving provisions such as affordable housing and education schemes available to veterans. The soldier anticipated the change by adopting and acting according to the values, symbols, and lifestyle of the group to which he aspired. To make the social mobility credible, it was crucial to change in a convincing manner, acquire knowledge of the values of the new reference group, and not least, be able to alienate oneself from the group or a class from which one originated. The term anticipatory socialization may emphasize the past (childhood) to explain the present (youth) social status, as Merton did when explaining the social mobility of returning soldiers. For childhood and children, the term and its related terminologies are more commonly applied to the strategies children employ to prepare for the inevitable transition to youth and curbing these into individual trajectories. An age identity trajectory from child to youth implies a growing awareness and knowledge about the world of symbolic communication. Children use this growing awareness to different degrees and

more or less consciously when anticipating their new age identities. To understand children’s transition to youth, one can apply three elements of the concept anticipatory socialization: (a) personal ability and capacities, (b) knowledge of the norms and values of the group to which membership is aspired, and (c) alienation from present reference group. It is also useful to consider the strength of a future orientation when trying to interpret individual transitions and trajectories. A child’s ability and capacities may point to individual abilities and qualifications, but also to the capacity to make use of any resources present in the child’s world. Thus, these abilities may not be interchanged with intelligence or knowing how to play the piano or being a star athlete. Rather, it is a matter of making the most of the available opportunities and resources. Eventually, the success of such anticipatory strategies often depends on the depth of knowledge a child has about the new reference group. Knowledge of the norms and values of the reference group are important elements of symbolic and social capital that both initiate and curb the future orientation of a child. The sources for this knowledge and information could be anything from live role models (siblings, friends, peers) to adults, popular culture, music, or media messages. All these sources carry cultural images of youth and its symbols. When they are involved in an activity or have a core interest that has no specific age boundaries or when lifestyle and symbolic expressions of youth are generic, children may experience less need to alienate themselves from the present reference group. ­Activity-based and generic anticipatory socialization strategies are less likely to have an impact on social status mobility. A child choosing, however, to emulate the behavior, style of clothing, taste in music, mannerisms, or subcultural expressions of older role models may also need to distance himself or herself from an identity as a child and from groups performing “childlike” activities to be successful in using this strategy for social mobility. Studies of children and consumer culture explore such strategies involving material and symbolic expressions of subcultures. The term anticipatory socialization may also be applied to understand how underprivileged children aspire to a higher status and standard than their family or community of

Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children

origin. Personal capabilities and the willingness to acquire strong knowledge of the group one aspires to, combined with the willingness to alienate oneself from one’s present reference group and a strong future orientation, characterize a strong explorative anticipation strategy. As a prelude to youth and young adulthood, anticipatory socialization allows for testing out, negotiating, and developing the social identities necessary for acceptance by the new reference group. Randi Wærdahl See also Consumer Socialization; Socialization; Socialization Paradigm

Further Readings Gentry, J., Baker, S. M., & Kraft, F. B. (1995). The role of possessions in creating, maintaining, and preserving one’s identity: Variations over the life course. Advances in Consumer Research, 22, 413–419. Levine, K., & Hoffner, C. (2006). Adolescents’ conceptions of work: What is learned from different sources during anticipatory socialization. Journal of Adolescent Research, 21, 647–669. Merton, R. K. (1957). Social theory and social structure. London, United Kingdom: Collier-Macmillan. Wærdahl, R. (2005). ‘May be I’ll need a pair of Levi’s before junior high?’ Child to youth trajectories and anticipatory socialization. Childhood, 12, 201–219. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0907568205051904

Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children Anti-colonialism denotes the centuries of struggle of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa to move towards independence and liberation from various colonising powers. Together with strategic military concerns and geopolitical interests, the main motive for the colonisers was economic, facilitated by the establishment of ‘free’ labour in the form of slavery, which was abolished in all the colonies in the 19th century and replaced largely by indentured labour. This entry traces the reason the role of children, like that of women, has been mainly invisible, downplayed, and underresearched, and that is internalised patriarchal

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colonial subjectivity. Like the ‘native,’ children are colonised, in need of development, and without political agency, hence in the context of childhood, the terms coloniser and colonised take on a double meaning.

Patriarchy and the Invisibility of Women and Children War played an important role in ending ­colonisation—breakup of the Spanish empire in the 19th century and of the German, AustroHungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires following World War I. World War II was important in ending European colonialism by Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands as well as Japan—mainly because of economic exhaustion from dealing with nationalist movements, the mixing of races in armed forces, and the economic interests of the United States in opening up new markets. It was ended partly through nonviolent means (e.g., diplomacy, mass migration, constitutional methods, indigenous foreign-based newspapers) but also through armed resistance, especially when settlers were reluctant to give up the land on which they had ‘settled,’ not by adapting to their environment but seizing it and settling on it permanently. Although political independence has been achieved in the former colonies, the developing world continues to experience famine, poverty, and disease entangled with the political powerlessness—a result of the financial policies of the developed world and the IMF, the World Bank, and the power of the industrialised countries belonging to the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States). As in most history writing, the role of women and children in anti-colonial struggles is mainly invisible, usually mentioned in the literature only as victims of colonial violence that has cost millions of mainly non-White lives. The extent and nature of the role that children played as, for example, spies, war soldiers, leaders, or freedom fighters is underresearched. The role of children in anti-colonial movements tends to be either the result of adults’ co-opting children’s agency for their own political ends or children working alongside adults.

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In both cases, the aim was to overthrow colonial power. Children under the age of 18 years tend not to be political agents in peace initiatives. To establish the reasons for this, internalised colonial subjectivity and differing conceptions of childhood need to be examined, bringing together political science, childhood studies, posthuman philosophy, and postcolonial and feminist theory. In South Africa, the Soweto uprising in 1976 was a political action organised by thousands of black school students, resulting in the death of 176 children, including Hector Pietersen, eternalised in Sam Nzima’s famous photo of Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying the dying 13-year-old. This anti-colonial event caused a global outcry and significantly influenced the legal ending of apartheid in 1994. The children had been objecting to the government’s sudden compulsory switch from one colonial language (English) to another (Afrikaans), although this was the mere surface issue of deeper concerns about inequity and a segregated educational system. The invention of schools as such, colonial institutions, and places of ‘disciplinary power,’ as Michel Foucault argued, was not questioned at the time. Linking power with knowledge, his influential notion of ‘discourses’ highlights the way in which sociocultural practices limit what can be thought and said and how internalised power relations both produce and constrain subjects and are involved in what counts as knowledge. In South African schools, children were, and still are, inducted into Western forms of knowledge and subjugated to colonial mechanisms of power. Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues that identities ­ were created in the context of European colonisation and ‘coloniality,’ which remain after colonial administrations have left and continue to determine long-standing everyday hierarchical patterns of power within which the superiority of one person over the other is premised on the degree of humanity attributed to the identities in question. Anti-colonial struggles are patriarchal in that they are intricately connected with nationalism. This is because nationalist discourses tend to play on the subordination of women and children to the ‘fathers’ of the revolution. For example, Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement was the political tool that inspired the Soweto uprising and Nelson Mandela to save the ‘motherland’

against the ‘fatherland’ (the West). Advocating women’s rights is associated with Western-influenced ideologies and anti-nationalism rather than the nationalism involved in the anti-colonial struggle. This is because nationalist ideologies position women as caregivers and nurturers—as (m)others—mirroring the traditional structure of the normative idea of the family and conceptions of childhood.

Childhood and the Double Meaning of Coloniser and Colonized In African societies, the extended family is a microcosm of the wider society, characterised by communal interdependence. Hierarchies are written into the nature of the universe, with children lowest in the hierarchy—subservient (obedient and respectful) to adults and ancestors. A child’s place is to serve this extended family, with obedience as a prerequisite and reinforced through physical punishment. Girls have even less status and authority than boys and are expected to be more domesticated and more compliant, including sexually. There is an important difference, however, from (deficit) Western notions of childhood. Children are capable of important responsibilities and, like adults, need to contribute to the subsistence of their extended families and wider communities. Depending on gender, even young children, for example, are supposed to look after infants or herd cattle. Childhood is not seen as a phase in a human life but is instead associated with the physical activity of performing adult tasks, gaining economic independence, and getting married. The hierarchy is less related to age and more to children’s obligations to support the family in times of need and old age. So in that sense, children always remain children (of their parents). It is not something they grow out of. The kind of hierarchy implied is different from the Western conception of childhood assumed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The UNCRC protects eight domains of children’s development, but psychosocially the ‘right’ is understood as being the child’s right to become an adult—the ‘human becomings’ conception of childhood. This now hegemonic child subjectivity is constructed within a web of knowledge claims, drawn mostly from Western versions of histories,

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institutions, economies, politics, and practices. It is saturated with distinctions, neoliberal norms and yardsticks by which children’s progress and development (like ‘developing’ nations) is measured and found wanting. It is significant that colonialism and cognitive theories of child development emerged at the same time in Europe. There is an intricate connection between imperialism and the institutionalisation of childhood. One view is that enlightenment notions of progress and reason have colonised children as positioning them in need of recapitulating the development of the species (childhood as a colonised life stage). Like indigenous peoples, children are seen as simple, nonabstract, immature thinkers who need age-appropriate interventions to mature into autonomous fully human rational beings; therefore, they cannot be granted political agency. It is in that sense that developmental theories also position a child as the property of the adult, like the ‘native’ who is the property of the coloniser and needs ‘developing’; therefore, the terms colonizer and colonised take on a double meaning in the context of childhood. This tends to have been missed in the postcolonial literature. Karin Murris See also Child Soldiers; Children in Postcolonial Literature; Global Politics of Childhood; Political Rights of Children; Postcolonial Childhoods; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Burman, E. (2016). Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(3), 265–285. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0 3626784.2016.1168263 Cannella, G. S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization: Power, education, and contemporary practice. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. Chadya, J. M. (2003). Mother politics: Anti-colonial nationalism and the woman. Journal of Women’s History, 15(3), 153–157. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ jowh.2003.0064 Foucault, M. (1997). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Transl.). New York, NY: Random House. (Original work published 1977)

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Kohan, W. (2015). The inventive schoolmaster. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2), 240–270. Rivas, A. (2010). Modern research discourses constructing the postcolonial subjectivity of (Mexican) American children. In G. S. Cannella & L. D. Soto (Eds.), Childhoods: A handbook (pp. 245– 265). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Rollo, T. (2016). Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies, 8(1), 60–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/22014 73X.2016.1199826 Twum-Danso, A. (2005). The political child. In A. McIntyre (Ed.), Invisible stakeholders: Children and war in Africa (pp. 7–30). Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies.

Antislavery Movement, Role of Children During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, society came to believe that childhood should be valued as a social tool. Children were not only a blank slate that could be molded at will, but many increasingly believed that children held the promise of a new, better future—should they be molded along the right lines, that is. At the same time, the image of the innocent child in need of protection from society’s ills also became a persuasive tool, and at times a weapon, used in multiple ways to invoke support and endorsement of any cause celebre. As such, children both White and Black became powerful symbols of hope for reformers during this period, and many incorporated children into their agendas as a means of progressing their causes. This entry examines why abolitionists were interested in children, children as agents of change in the antislavery movement, accounts of childhood slavery, and the specific role children played in literary accounts of slavery.

Abolitionists and Children By the mid-18th century, children sat at the forefront of their moral platforms. Images of enslaved children packed an emotional punch, and abolitionists

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progressively utilized them in an effort to compel society to acknowledge and accept the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later the institution of slavery itself. By increasingly focusing their efforts on children as a symbol of purity and innocence, an innocence that many felt held the very salvation of society within their hands, abolitionists hoped to achieve success in achieving their goals. Furthermore, if abolitionists were not successful in persuading members of their own generation to condemn the practice of slavery, perhaps they could socialize future generations to pick up the mantle after they were gone. Therefore, many abolitionists prioritized children within their platforms, using them as a tool for moral progress.

Children as Agents of Change Children’s roles as agents of abolition are most obviously seen through the evocation of the image of the suffering enslaved child that featured so prevalently in abolitionist literature, lithographs, and speeches. Famed conductor of the Underground Railroad Harriet Tubman described her enslaved childhood as one where she grew up like a neglected weed, ignorant of happiness and living in conditions that were a stark contrast against the period’s ideals of what constituted an idyllic childhood. As proslavery advocates argued for paternalism and what would eventually become known as “The White Man’s Burden,” abolitionists countered with the image of the suffering enslaved child in order to illustrate that slavery was a sin against God. Abolitionists detailed the horrific conditions aboard slave ships, imploring listeners to imagine children crossing the Atlantic in dank, cramped quarters. Travel accounts described thin, malnourished children who ate like pigs at the trough during meager meal times. Pamphlets and poetry frequently noted the practice of selling children away from their parents for no reason other than to make a profit. British abolitionist Hannah More’s poem Slavery (1788), written to coincide with William Wilberforce’s parliamentary campaign for British abolition of the slave trade, vividly described a shrieking child being ripped from its mother’s arms in order to convey what little power enslaved mothers had over their own children. Harriet Tubman showed audiences the scars around her neck that were left

from the whip that was used to beat her at just 5 years old when she was unable to keep a newborn quiet during the night. Songs such as American abolitionist Eliza Lee Cabot Follen’s “To Mothers in Free States” (1855) implored women to imagine their own children enslaved and hungry and yearning to be free. Knowing that accounts, images, and characterizations like these would be difficult to ignore, abolitionists unquestionably and increasingly weaponized the image of the suffering enslaved child in order to illicit sympathy and disgust from an otherwise ambivalent public. While these images brought a harsh reality to those who tried to turn away from an inconvenient truth, abolitionists also encouraged survivors of the slave trade and slavery to commit their stories to paper. Subsequently, these narratives almost always included a section on childhood. Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery (1787) and Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography published in 1789 described the authors’ experiences as free children in Africa before they were kidnapped as adolescents and sold to European traders on the coast. These narratives also gave detailed descriptions of the children’s experiences aboard ship as they traveled the Middle Passage. Both men became noted abolitionists in their adulthood, with Equiano even speaking before Parliament during the abolition debates of the 1780s. Venture Smith’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa: But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America (1798) gave an incredibly detailed account of his violent capture at the age of 6 years by a slave raiding party and his 2-year journey through the interior of Africa in a slave coffle before finally being sold to American traders on the coast. Accounts like these not only enabled abolitionists to challenge the common belief that only adults traveled the Middle Passage, but firsthand survivor accounts detailing childhood memories of freedom in Africa only helped to humanize their stories even more.

Narratives of Childhood Slavery Later 19th-century narratives, like those written by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Jacobs, described childhoods born into ­ slavery. Accounts like theirs described lives that

Antislavery Movement, Role of Children

were devoid of childhoods, yet filled with suffering and oppression. Narratives like Douglass’s highlighted the fact that many children were alone in their enslavement, growing up with only the faintest memories of parents who were living their lives on other estates and plantations. Truth described the cruelty that she faced after being sold away from her family at auction at the age of 9 years upon the death of her owner. Jacobs’s narrative added even more to the collective horrors described in these accounts, as hers documented the unwanted sexual advances that many enslaved girls endured as they leaped from childhood to adulthood long before it was time. Their narratives, and others like them, described turbulent childhoods filled with grief, violence, and loss, adding vital evidentiary support to the abolitionist message that this was a practice that must end immediately. Narratives like these and other abolitionist tracts were meant to inspire action on the part of the reader, and they often were successful. The daughters of slave owners, young Angelina and Sarah Grimké, implored their family to abandon slavery and emancipate their slaves to no avail. At the young age of 12 years, Frederick Douglass learned to read The Columbian Orator (1797) and found inspiration from the story of an enslaved man who presented several arguments for emancipation. And then, there were the children of the abolitionists themselves, who grew up seeing the movement firsthand and served as apprentices to the cause. American abolitionist and Quaker Ann Preston not only grew up in an abolitionist household, but one that aided enslaved men, women, and children in their escape from slavery through the Underground Railroad. Preston herself helped one woman escape by disguising her as Preston’s elderly Quaker grandmother, as Preston drove her past patrollers herself. The children of American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison grew up influenced not only by their parents’ politics but of the politics held by the notable abolitionists who comprised their parents’ social circle. As such, the Garrison children grew up in a social environment that nurtured their commitment to social justice by ensuring that they would become activists and reformers in their adulthood; and while most American abolitionists disappeared at the end of the Civil War, Garrison’s children continued to work toward

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bringing equality to African Americans in the post-­Reconstruction Era.

Children and Slavery in Literature Therefore, it should be no surprise that children’s literature became the final tool in the abolitionist arsenal, whereby publications written specifically for children acted as a moral corrective meant to mold young readers into secret revolutionaries. Societies like the American Sunday School Union and the American Anti-Slavery Society, as well as mainstream publishers throughout the United States, offered space in their publications for tracts against the institution of slavery. Whereas abolitionist literature was easy to ignore when published for adults, it was able to hide in plain sight when published for children. During the mid-1830s, American abolitionist Lydia Marie Child’s magazine Juvenile Miscellany frequently published stories promoting the equality of all God’s children, Black and White. Eliza Lee Cabot Follen’s magazine The Child’s Friend & Family (1843–1850) featured poetry that taught sympathy for the innocent children who suffered for no other reason than they were enslaved. Other more directly aimed publications like the short-lived monthly magazine The Slave’s Friend (1838– 1838) sought to ally children to the cause by awakening children’s political consciousness through stories of familial separation, contrasted lives, and victimized enslaved children their age. Publications like The Anti-Slavery Alphabet (1847) taught children their letters through examples like K is for the kidnapper who stole the innocent child, or S is for the slave-harvested sugar that makes your candy sweet. Follen’s “Letter to a Young Friend” (1847) attempted to inspire activism through the story of a young girl who organized an abolitionist fair in her community. Alongside these, more obscure publications for children sat pieces written for adults that featured child protagonists, the most famous being Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). First published as a serial in the abolitionist periodical The National Era, Stowe’s book became one of the best selling novels of the 19th century. While Stowe’s story contained many of the themes so prevalent in abolitionist literature, including the

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separation of families and the long-suffering child, it is through the 6-year-old character of Evangeline St. Clare that Stowe was able to convey her message to society, and its youth, regarding the abolition of slavery. We first meet our young heroine when our titular character Tom saves her from drowning. Eva becomes his champion, imploring the reader to see him as a man who deserves respect and sympathy rather than faceless chattel. Terminally ill, Eva’s deathbed monologue not only advocates for Tom’s freedom but describes a heaven where all are equal in the eyes of God. While written for the adult reader, the novel did use a child to spread its main message that love and Christian charity can overcome a practice as evil as the enslavement of innocent men, women, and children. The book’s impact was monumental in its reach and influence, even prompting the likely apocryphal declaration from Abraham Lincoln, who upon meeting Stowe, exclaimed that she was the little lady responsible for the American Civil War. While the traditional players of the 18th- and 19th-century abolitionist movement stand next to the likes of William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, children throughout the Atlantic World played a multifaceted role in the abolitionist movement as both an instrument and symbol of freedom. Basing their platforms on the belief that it was a child’s social role to condemn the institution of slavery, abolitionist reformers and pundits alike tapped children’s power as agents of change in order to sway public support for their cause. For that reason, abolitionists used the image of the suffering enslaved child in order to directly challenge the paternalism of proslavery advocates, while abolitionist children’s literature worked to enlighten society’s youth to the horrors of slavery by issuing a direct call to arms hidden among the pages of an ordinary child’s magazine. To abolitionists, children—both White and Black, enslaved and free—represented a means to an end, and, as such, they held a prominent role within the movement. Colleen A. Vasconcellos See also Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children; Slavery, United States

Further Readings Alonso, H. H. (2002). Growing up abolitionist: The story of the Garrison children. Amherst: University of Massachusetts. doi:10.1086/ahr/109.1.191 Bubíková, Š. (2014). We were but property—Not a mother, and the children god had given her: The figure of a child in abolitionist literature. American and British Studies Annual, 7, 38–47. DeRosa, D. C. (2003). Domestic abolition and juvenile literature, 1830–1865. Albany: State University of New York. Geist, C. D. (1999). The Slave’s friend: An abolitionist magazine for children. American Periodicals, 9, 27–35. Russo, R. (2009). ‘When children are not glad:’ Sympathy, performance, and power in abolitionist children’s literature. The AnaChronisT, 14, 67–87.

Apprenticeship Apprenticeship is an educational institution that regulates entry into manual professions requiring special training in the trades, crafts, or arts. It is upheld as an alternative educational pathway to public higher schooling, which typically grants access to liberal professions. Apprenticeship implies a legal and social contract, whereby a young novice (the apprentice) provides labor to a skilled and experienced worker (the master) in exchange for knowledge and training required for the practice of a given trade, craft, or art. This entry provides an overview of the history of apprenticeship in Europe, spanning from preindustrial Europe to the 21st century.

Defining Apprenticeship The rules that regulate apprenticeship vary considerably depending on the historical period and geographical location. Nevertheless, a number of core characteristics associated with apprenticeship appear to be constant throughout time and space: (a) Apprenticeship is a form of education that combines aspects of technical training and general education; (b) it can be carried out in either workplace or classroom settings or both; (c) it typically involves some form of remuneration for the apprentice; (d) over the course of the apprenticeship, the

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apprentice enters into a subservient hierarchal relationship with the master; (e) the end of apprenticeship typically follows an examination and certification of professional competency. Throughout history, apprenticeship has been designed, overseen, and funded by a number of nonstate and state actors, including private individuals, craft guilds, private business, trade unions, and government. Several actors may work together, forming private–public partnerships to implement apprenticeship systems. The knowledge and skills acquired through apprenticeship systems are valued and soughtafter commodities that can influence individual social and economic trajectories. In addition to being considered central to the development of an individual’s human capital, apprenticeship is an educational institution that plays an essential role in the framework of national strategies for economic development and social stability. The individual and collective stakes linked to apprenticeship systems have rendered it a field of multidisciplinary enquiry populated by educationalists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists.

Apprenticeship in Preindustrial Europe In preindustrial Europe, the majority of everyday goods were produced within a domestic manufacture. Craftsmen and artisans worked in the home environment and produced items for sale in relatively small, local markets. In this context, the knowledge and skills required for the exercise of a given profession were typically transmitted by fathers to sons. A limited number of remunerative activities, including weaving, were carried out by women and are thought to have been transmitted from mothers to daughters. In addition to learning a profession, the apprentice was expected to acquire the norms, values, and behaviours that regimented everyday life on the shop floor. With the progressive growth of urban centres came an increased demand for goods. Cottage industries were born, wherein independent craftsmen increased output by forming a chain of production. The development of cottage industries altered the traditional apprenticeship model: The scope of knowledge and skill transmitted during apprenticeship decreased, and training increasingly took place outside the family sphere.

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In 13th-century Europe, the growing populations of skilled workers in urban centres gave rise to the formation of craft guilds. These institutions regulated and oversaw a professional group’s economic activity while protecting the interests of the group. Craft guilds regulated the admission of apprentices into crafts, trades, and arts by introducing the use of apprenticeship contracts. The contract bound an apprentice to a master and stipulated the rights and responsibilities of both parties. Apprenticeship outside the family sphere was thus normalized. Nevertheless, a quasi-familial relationship was established between the apprentice and the master, who exercised parental control over the apprentice’s spiritual, social, intellectual, and professional educational and training. Throughout the history of preindustrial Europe, imitation remained the key method of knowledge transfer. Upon the fulfilment of the terms of the contract, the apprentice was introduced into the craft guild and secured the rights and privileges associated to membership. Although craft guilds are thought to have accrued the agency of craftsmen by allowing them to engage in collective bargaining tactics, they are also said to have inhibited the possibility of technological innovation and social mobility, both of which would have otherwise been encouraged in a free market. The historical events related to the Industrial Revolution occurring throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries had deeply transformative effects on apprenticeship systems. Manual work began to be carried out on the premises of newly erected factories where the labor force was required to adopt new working methods. Mechanized production allowed producing more goods at higher speed. Factory workers carried out the specialized, simple, and repetitive tasks related to machine operation. The system of apprenticeship came to be perceived as outdated: Factory owners balked at the idea of providing a costly and time-consuming apprenticeship to a youth, since factory work required only very limited skills. Following the Industrial Revolution, trade unions advocated for the reform and continuation of apprenticeship systems to prevent the disempowerment of the working class. The advent of the factory brought with it the creation of a managerial class. Voluntary study schemes were instituted to allow laborers to access managerial positions, thereby

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introducing the idea of lifelong learning as a ­follow-up component to apprenticeship.

Later Evolution of Apprenticeship Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, private business owners, state actors, and trade unions fought over the control of apprenticeship systems. Following World War I, apprenticeship generally designated the education and training of skilled workers, and the term learnership was increasingly used to describe various programs suppling unskilled workers with on-the-job training aimed at increasing their professional prospects. The aftermath of World War II witnessed the development of various ­country-specific apprenticeship systems, prompting considerable academic enquiry and debate on the variety of skill formation systems. Current international scholarship aims to understand why different countries educate and train workers in different ways and the means through which apprenticeship systems in different countries can be optimized. In the beginning of the 21st century, apprenticeship as a pathway for professional education is widely regarded as a means to guarantee social harmony and economic growth. The design, implementation, and provision of apprenticeship systems is widely viewed as an effective means toward the achievement of poverty alleviation, gender equality, and inequality reduction and has garnered the support of national and regional governing bodies. Apprenticeship is equally prominently featured in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2015–2030. Although apprenticeship systems may be celebrated as the guarantors of social stability and economic growth, scholarly research has established that the institution’s history is in fact a deeply controversial one. Early apprenticeship systems exhibited a total absence or weakness of monitoring bodies, which left apprenticed youths vulnerable to countless forms of abuse over the course of their formative years. In addition, the historical record attests to the ways in which administrators of apprenticeship systems, be they craft guilds, trade unions, firms, or states, perpetrated discriminatory policies that effectively excluded entire groups of youths from gaining the skills required to later access remunerative and empowering skilled work. Such policies targeted

poor youth, youth from ethnic minorities, and girls, with ruinous consequences. Among those youths who did access apprenticeship systems, narratives of exploitative practices tell of the neglectful manner in which authorities dealt with apprenticeship, which serves to further perpetuate the notion that manual training is a remedial educational pathway, second best to general public education. Finally, apprenticeship can be said to constitute a form of juvenile labor, which is rendered socially acceptable in that it is carried out under the guise of education and training. On this topic, the histories of apprenticeship systems and juvenile labor are intrinsically linked and offer a vantage point from which scholars of childhood and youth may question the boundaries between the categories of work, training, and schooling. Diana Sakurako Volonakis See also Children’s Work; Education; Human Capital, Child as; Transitions; Vocational Education; Youth Work

Further Readings Acemoglu, D., & Pischke, J. S. (1998). Why do firms train? Theory and evidence. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113(1), 79–119. https://dx.doi.org/ 10.1162/003355398555531 De Munck, B., Kaplan, S. L., & Soly, H. (Eds.). (2007). Learning on the shop floor: Historical perspectives on apprenticeship. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Elbaum, B., & Singh, N. (1995). The economic rationale of apprenticeship training: Some lessons from British and US experience. Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 34(4), 593–622. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1468-232X.1995.tb00390.x Honeyman, K. (2016). Child workers in England, 1780– 1820: Parish apprentices and the making of the early industrial labour force. New York, NY: Routledge. Humphries, J. (2010). Childhood and child labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Apps (Mobile Applications) Apps (or mobile applications) have become a ubiquitous feature of computing since the arrival of modern touch screen devices in the early 2000s.

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At the most basic level, an app is a self-contained piece of software that is downloaded onto a touch screen device, such as a smartphone or tablet. The key design difference between apps and software found on other computing devices (such as laptops or personal computers) is their ability to be finger operated via touch screen controls—such as by pressing, swiping, or pinching. On a tablet, for example, apps appear on menus as icons that need to be pressed to launch the software. Once opened, an app is controlled using the touch screen interface. In book and magazine applications, for example, pages can often be ‘turned’ by swiping from right to left on the screen. In this respect, apps seek to encourage more intuitive forms of interaction with computing interfaces that eschew the need for a mouse and keyboard. As with most software, apps primarily started as work-oriented productivity tools (e.g., for e-mail, calendar management, etc.). Most touch screen devices come preloaded with applications as standard. However, the types of app available have rapidly increased over the last decade to include a wider range of applications designed for entertainment and leisure purposes, such as gaming and media playing. For many contemporary children, apps and touch screens have become the first introduction to computing interfaces. This has led some commentators to describe the generation born in the 2000s to 2010s the ‘App Generation.’ Since the early 2000s, touch screen devices have increasingly become a regular feature of both Western homes and schools. Research by the U.K. media regulator Ofcom in 2016 suggested that 55% of 3- to 4-yearolds regularly use a tablet computer, with this percentage continually increasing as children get older. At the same time, the number of children regularly using a laptop or computer has decreased.

The Walled Garden One of the earliest metaphors used to describe apps was ‘walled gardens.’ Within apps, access to the Internet is limited to an online interface set up by the software creator. It is possible to access only portions of the Internet that the designer makes accessible. For example, a children’s nursery rhyme app provides access to only the media content incorporated into the app’s design. One of

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the reasons cited for this contained approach to online content has been safety. Apps provide a means of controlling what online content is accessible (with the exception being web browser and search engine apps) and can also prevent unwanted intrusions by computer viruses and malware. The metaphor of the walled garden has also frequently been used in discussions of children’s media. Children’s broadcasters, such as Children’s BBC (in the United Kingdom) and PBS Kids (in the United States), are often described as walled gardens of media content. Their content is restricted to what they regard as age appropriate for their audiences. It is therefore no surprise that children’s media creators, such as the BBC and PBS, have been successful publishers of apps aimed at children. Taking advantage of the walled-garden environment, their apps provide self-contained media experiences, such as games, videos, and other activities. Some of the most popular apps marketed to children have focused on games or educational content or a combination of both. Unlike other children’s media content (such as television or movies), there is little regulation of the children’s app market. Although some come with arbitrary recommended age ratings, regulation is largely carried out either by the companies who own and manage app stores (e.g., Apple or Google)—­ making judgments of what they deem appropriate to be sold to children or to parents overseeing what apps their children download.

Microtransactions and Advertising One of the main public concerns to arise from children’s use of apps has been their funding models. Apps are sold on ‘app stores,’ where they are generally categorised as either paid for or free. Paid-for apps tend to require only one-off payments to download and access the full app. Free apps, however, can vary in terms of how they are financed. Although an app may be free to download initially, a significant number of apps also include in-app ‘microtransactions’ that encourage the purchase of new content inside the app. One type of app that most commonly uses this microtransaction system are ‘free-to-play’ (FTP) games. FTP games allow users to play a very basic version of the game for free, whilst also

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providing access to a range of additional content through purchase. In the once-popular ‘Farmville’ game, this included the purchase of new farming equipment, seeds, and animals. Microtransactions in free-to-play apps have become a focus of public and parental concern in relation to children. Since the arrival of FTP games, there have been numerous media reports of children amassing large bills on their parents’ accounts through in-game transactions. This led to a change in the design of many app stores, with new rules set on the quantity of microtransactions and extra verification steps for purchases. Another popular funding model for apps has been the use of advertising. This can include adverts that appear as banners at the sides of screens or whole screen adverts that need to be ‘clicked away’ to continue using the app. Many FTP games for children include advertising. Such adverts often involve interactive banners that, when clicked, take a user out of the app and to a commercial sales website. Consequently, many free apps with advertising do not subscribe to the walled-garden approach taken by other children’s app providers. Although not strictly a form of advertising, many apps form part of wider franchises—using well-known children’s icons as the brand to sell apps—particularly FTP games. For example, cartoon franchises such as The Simpsons and Peanuts have featured as FTP games. Liam Berriman See also Digital Childhoods; Digital Literacy; Digital Media

Further Readings Chung, G., & Grimes, S. M. (2006). Data mining the kids: Surveillance and market research strategies in children’s online games. Canadian Journal of Communication, 30(4), 527–548. Gardner, H., & Davis, K. (2013). The App Generation: How today’s youth navigate identity, intimacy and imagination in a digital world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Isomursu, P., Hinman, R., Isomursu, M., & Spasojevic, M. (2007). Metaphors for the mobile media internet. Journal of Knowledge, Technology and Policy, 20(4), 259–268.

Marsh, J., Plowman, L., Yamada-Rice, D., Bishop, J. C., Lahmar, J., Scott, F., . . . Winter, P. (2015). Exploring play and creativity in pre-schoolers’ use of apps: Final project report. Retrieved from http://www .techandplay.org/reports/TAP_Final_Report.pdf

Ariès, Philippe When Philippe Ariès (1914–1984) published his L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime in 1960, the work was generally ignored by French academics. But when the English translation became available 2 years later, with the title Centuries of Childhood, its reputation began to soar. Scholars in the United States and Britain were among the first to appreciate the ambition and originality of the book, and it eventually came to transform the history of childhood and the family. This entry discusses the life and works of Philippe Ariès, his description of childhood in medieval history, and his assessment of childhood in early modern history. Besides historians, specialists in a number of other disciplines readily cited it, including sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. Not surprisingly, Ariès stood out as the most influential historian on the thinking behind the “new social studies of childhood” that emerged during the late 20th century. His ideas also appealed to a wider public, and it was frequently asserted in the press and elsewhere that during the medieval period children were treated as “miniature adults” or that childhood was an invention of modern society. The Introduction to a new edition of Centuries in 1996 might plausibly describe it as “the book” in the history of childhood. Yet it was always a controversial work among historians, inspiring some with its daring questions, provoking others with its sweeping generalizations. During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a growing feeling that the agenda set by Ariès had run its course, with most of its key arguments refuted by further research and that it was time to explore new avenues in the history of children and childhood. The remarkably long trajectory achieved by Centuries in the historical literature finally went into its declining phase during the early 21st century.

Ariès, Philippe

The Life and Works of Philippe Ariès To understand Ariès the historian, it is instructive to consider his formative years in France. In the first place, he was born into a fervently Catholic and Royalist family and remained committed to its values throughout his life. He was even a political militant during his student days for the Action Française, an avowedly nationalist, antidemocratic, and antiparliamentarian movement. This extreme right-wing orientation set him apart from most of his fellow historians, who were wedded to the post-1789 republican tradition, and it may help explain his willingness to challenge some of their orthodoxies. In the second place, there was his position as an historien du dimanche, an amateur historian. Having twice failed his agrégation, the examination for the recruitment of teachers and faculty, he spent most of his working life employed by an agricultural institute. Again, this may help explain his adventurousness as a researcher: As Lawrence Stone observed, Centuries was the kind of pioneering work that no traditional historian could have written. Towards the end of his life, at the age of 64, he was finally admitted to the academic fold in France with election to a research post at the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales—that is, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. The right-wing influence was clear during the 1940s in his early publications, concerned with the land and landscapes of French regions. He also became interested in demography, publishing an article in the journal Population on attitudes towards life and death during the 18th and 19th centuries. This gave a hint of some later ideas on childhood and the family. With the success of Centuries during the 1960s and 1970s, he achieved intellectual respectability, consolidating it with a well-received study of past attitudes towards mourning and death, translated into English as The Hour of Our Death (1991). No less important, he was a driving force behind a five-volume history of private life, although he did not live to see published.

Ariès on Medieval History The original inspiration for Ariès’s research for Centuries was his perception that early medieval art made no attempt to portray childhood, depicting instead a series of “little men.” This led him to assert that “there was no place for childhood in

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the medieval world” (p. 31). He granted that there were signs of change during the 13th century, but he saw no decisive break from the “anonymity” of children in portraiture until the 16th and 17th centuries. Only then, his famous “discovery of childhood” was reflected in the world of art. He deployed further evidence in Part 1 of Centuries to support his argument that during the Middle Ages children were barely distinguishable from adults, dressing like them, playing the same games, and joining in with the crude sexual humour of the period. His conclusion was that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (p. 125). Historians and social scientists alike were quick to seize on the implication that childhood could have a history: That is to say, it was not some “natural” and universal condition but one that could vary according to period and place. The way was open for a massive research effort to investigate conceptions of childhood down the ages and in different regions across the globe. Paradoxically, however, this first part of the book was at the same time as Ariès’s major contribution to childhood studies and the source of much of the criticism of his scholarship. What he envisioned was infants in medieval society moving straight from a position of dependence on mothers and other female caregivers into the world of adults, without the transitionary stages now known as childhood and adolescence. In his own words, “As soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his [sic] mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society” (p. 125). The underlying explanation, according to Ariès, was that medieval civilization had no idea of education. Instead of attending school, the young learned all they needed to know from those around them in the family and the local community, as the “natural companion of the adult.” Medievalists were for the most part unconvinced by this interpretation. They drew attention to Ariès’s limited trawl among medieval records and his naive handling of visual evidence, suggesting that he treated paintings as a direct window on reality. With many more “texts, images and objects” at their disposal than was possible for a single researcher, medievalists have made a convincing case that people during their period did have an awareness of the particular nature of childhood.

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For example, there is the evidence of children being represented in scenes of everyday life in numerous illustrations on the margins of illuminated manuscripts or on carvings in churches. Early law codes and medical treatises paid some attention to children. A study of debates on baptism during the 12th and 13th centuries revealed extensive discussion of the spiritual and moral characteristics of the child. Also, it now seems doubtful to assert that medieval society had forgotten the meaning of education. Hence, there is something of a consensus among historians that people during the Middle Ages came up with a diversity of ideas on the nature of childhood.

Ariès on Early Modern History Part 2 of Centuries analysed the long-run evolution of the school system, investigating hitherto neglected areas such as the age of the pupils, the forms of discipline imposed on them, and the shift in favour of boarding schools. The underlying argument was that during the late 16th and 17th centuries, a small group of reformers grasped the essential “innocence and weakness” of childhood and established the college as a way “to safeguard the former and strengthen the latter” (p. 316). In this way, the school reimposed the long-lost intermediary stage between infancy and adulthood. Ariès also asserted that with the imposition of a strict disciplinary system, the school that emerged at this period was completely transformed. For Ariès, the “special treatment” of children that began during the early modern period was a mixed blessing for them, the product of an “obsessive love” that would come to dominate during the 18th century. Ariès was convincing in linking the revival of interest in education with the separation of children from the world of adults—a fundamental part of a modern childhood. However, historians were quick to point out other periods with a claim to the “discovery of childhood.” These included the early Middle Ages and the monks in its monastic schools, the 12th century and its “Renaissance,” and the 18th century and its Enlightenment thinkers—all taking seriously the challenge of producing rational human beings and good Christians or loyal citizens.

It follows that the whole idea of the “discovery” of childhood at one particular period looks dubious. It suggests some timeless category waiting for recognition. The alternative, adopted by most historians and social scientists, is to consider childhood as a social construction so that the innocent and weak child perceived by Ariès might be set against the evil or competent child also embraced in the past. In Part 3 of Centuries, Ariès claimed that the 17th century brought a new conception of the family, running parallel with the new conception of the child. He claimed that the return of children to their families was the “great event” of the period, as those from the middle classes stayed at home to attend school rather than leave for an apprenticeship. He contrasted the medieval lignage (line), when the children were left largely to fend for themselves and the modern child-centred family. He was explicit in talking in terms of the “indifference” and “callousness” towards children in the former, on the assumption that it was not worth investing emotion on a child that was likely to die young. Centuries undoubtedly reinvigorated the history of the family; during the 1970s, influential authors such as English historian Lawrence Stone and French historian Jean-Louis Flandrin highlighted a dramatic change in parent–child relations during the early modern period. Since then, however, historians have tended to play down any such discontinuity. The general response from medievalists and early modernists has been to show that parents did love their children in their own way, launching a long debate that has now settled in their favour. English historian Linda Pollock was influential during the 1980s in undermining the authority of Ariès by demonstrating from a large sample of diaries and autobiographies that parental care in Britain and North America changed little between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Ariès’s Impact on Childhood Studies Centuries was a truly seminal work, inspiring or provoking historians and social scientists with its grand narrative and numerous insights. They more or less generously acknowledged their debt to him as they used his hypotheses to frame their own arguments. With hindsight, the powerful

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influence of the Ariès thesis, allegedly treated as Holy Writ by many scholars, eventually became something of an obstacle to original thinking in the field. By the millennium, they were beginning to break out from the emphasis on family and school to look further afield. That said, Ariès remains a towering figure in the field of childhood studies, and Centuries can still be read as a modern classic. Colin Heywood See also Family; History of Childhood; Parenting Children; Schooling

Further Readings Alexandre-Bidon, D., & Lett, D. (1999). Children in the Middle Ages: Fifth–fifteenth century. Notre-Dame, IN: University of Notre-Dame Press. Ariès, P. (1996). Centuries of childhood. London, United Kingdom: Pimlico. Ariès, P., Duby, G., & Chartier, R. (Eds.). (1989). A history of private life: Vol. 3. Passions of the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Classen, A. (Ed.). (2005). Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The results of a paradigm shift in the history of mentality. New York, NY: de Gruyter. Heywood, C. (2018). A history of childhood: Children and childhood in the West from medieval to modern Times (2nd ed.). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity. Hutton, P. H. (2004). Philippe Ariès and the politics of French cultural history. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Orme, N. (2001). Medieval children. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ozment, S. E. (1983). When fathers ruled: Family life in Reformation England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pollock, L. (1983). Forgotten children: Parent–child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Artificial Insemination The term artificial insemination has been replaced with intrauterine insemination in medical terminology; however, artificial insemination continues

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to be used as a common term in both legal and religious contexts. The procedure involves an injection of semen, received via donor, into a vagina. For decades, the use of artificial insemination has challenged biological family ties and social constructions of childhood, situated as secretive and shameful for much of its history. This entry examines artificial insemination’s development, concerns about the procedure at different points in history, and why some religious groups continue to object to the practice.

Development of Artificial Insemination Artificial insemination is one option within assisted reproduction technologies. It does not have as high a success rate as in vitro fertilization, but it can be more cost-effective than in vitro fertilization. Reasons for choosing artificial insemination vary, from partner infertility (male or female) to same-sex households to single-parent households. Artificial insemination is one of the oldest known methods of assisted reproduction. The first report of successful artificial insemination, resulting in live birth, was published in 1909 (United States) of an 1884 procedure. It is difficult to know how many births are the result of insemination for a number of reasons, including (a) social shame; (b) familial, medical, and social secrecy; (c) lack of medical recording; and (d) lack of research. Countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia now record and track artificial insemination procedures and indicate that anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 live births from artificial insemination take place per annum. However, these numbers are considered underestimated, as they rely on doctors to report and record procedures, which may be difficult given the perpetuation of secrecy and shame that surrounds artificial insemination, as well as an inability to account for artificial insemination activity outside of medical practice. As the 20th century progressed, so too did interest in artificial insemination. The 1940s claimed artificial insemination as a fraud for both child and society. The inability to determine paternity challenged the biological and social legacies of families and society. By the 1960s, researchers began to shed the social counterfeit narrative, focusing instead on the best interests

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Artificial Insemination

of the child. Artificial insemination was deemed an unfit method of conception out of concerns for the child’s welfare and well-being, yet few studies were conducted to determine the effects of artificial insemination. The following 20 years were dedicated to making public the secrets of artificial insemination. Researchers in the 1970s and 1980s called for open conversations in families, society, and medicine regarding artificial insemination. Children’s rights also entered the conversation, as nations around the world began putting policies in place to protect those born of artificial insemination. For example, Sweden (1983), Germany (1985), and the United K ­ ingdom (1985) granted those persons born via artificial insemination access to donor information. While different states permit access to different amounts and types of donor information, all situate the person born of artificial insemination as an important actor within the network of conception, with rights the state is thus obligated to recognize and protect.

Concerns About Artificial Insemination The 1990s saw a shift from the rights of the child to the concern of disease and contamination. In particular, the 1990s were consumed by a c­ ultural– medical phenomenon: HIV/AIDS. Concerns over the health and well-being of child and mother took primacy in artificial insemination discussions. The importance of clean semen shaped the way women were treated medically and socially, as the medical clinics were the only way to assure disease-free semen. However, the process of cleaning and freezing semen, which is the best way to ascertain fitness, also reduces the success rate of the procedure. The 1990s also recalibrated the conversation to focus on the child, making it difficult for the person born of artificial insemination to achieve recognition as an adult. As such, the child of artificial insemination receives the primary care and attention of medical professionals, overtaking the needs of the mother. The latter of which is seen in the way the procedure is framed as if a child is always present, even though every insemination does not result in a live birth. Yet, the presence (or birth) of a child remains the official mark of a successful artificial insemination.

As artificial insemination shed some of the secrecy and shame of its past, the 1990s also saw an interest in data collection. Studies followed the children born of artificial insemination to learn the procedure effects. The interest in families choosing artificial insemination would follow later; however, the greater concern of the time was investigating the normalcy of the children born of artificial insemination.

Religious Perspectives on Artificial Insemination Religion is often a key player in discussions of artificial insemination. Some religions approve homologous insemination (i.e., involving a male partner in a heterosexual marriage) but not heterologous insemination (i.e., the use of an anonymous donor or insemination that takes place outside of a heterosexual marriage). Posthumous insemination is also not approved by many religious traditions. However, each faith group has specific justifications and limitations for assisted reproduction. Research into the social constructions of artificial insemination point to the ways that the procedure produces and reproduces themes of secrecy and shame. Artificial insemination for heterosexual couples is typically sought due to male infertility or to avoid passing on inheritable conditions. Constructions of manhood thus make open conversations difficult for men struggling with fertility limitations as well as the women in the partnership. Secrecy for many families using artificial insemination also avoids difficult conversations, such as infertility, biological family making, and reproduction education. This construction simultaneously reinforces the trope of children as innocent and in need of protection from these sexual and embarrassing conversations. For lesbian and single-mother families, however, the secrecy of insemination is less important due to the nature of reproduction itself. A discussion of how semen was located, gotten, and inseminated is seemingly inevitable. Furthermore, the shame of male infertility is no longer part of the equation, although other social constructions of shame remain, including family structures and sexual identification. Jessica Schriver See also history of; In Vitro Fertilization (IVF); Surrogacy

Assent, Children’s, in Research

Further Readings Haimes, E. (1998). The making of ‘the DI child’: Changing representations of people conceived through donor insemination. In K. Daniels & E. Haimes (Eds.), Donor insemination international social science perspectives (pp. 53–75). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Snowden, R., & Mitchell, G. D. (1981). The artificial family. London, UK: George Allen & Unwin. Venturatos Lorio, K. (2009). Ethical, legal and religious considerations of artificial insemination. In R. P. Dickey, P. R. Brinsden, & R. Pyrzak (Eds.), Manual of intrauterine insemination and ovulation induction (pp. 165–179). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Assent, Children’s,

in

Research

In 1947, the Nuremburg Code stated that the consent of human subjects is essential in research. This code was a response to international outrage over the treatment of individuals in the Nazi concentration camps just before and during World War II. Much subsequent work on consent has its basis in this code, yet children were excluded in what was the first international guidance on ethics in research. Children were not considered to be of sufficient age or maturity to give full consent to research. This assumption is explored and problematized in this entry, which teases out the difference between the terms assent and consent, often used synonymously, highlighting some problems with the issue of assent. Despite the often interchangeable use of the two terms in research, there is a legal distinction. Assent does not have the same legal validity as consent, and the consent of parents or legal guardians is generally required in all research involving children, who, as minors, may assent to research but are not considered to be of an age or maturity to enter into a legally binding contract. Parents or legal guardians can give or refuse consent to children’s participation in research on behalf of their children, but the assent of children is additional to this and is usually negotiated after permissions have been granted by adult gatekeepers—parents or legal guardians. If research is undertaken in an institution such as a school,

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however, additional layers of consent must be negotiated with adults such as head teachers or principals and then with teachers and support staff. This is because professionals working with children in such contexts are often charged with acting in loco parentis (in the place of a parent) and like parents and legal guardians are deemed to act in their children’s best interests. The corollary of this is that a child’s assent seems to be viewed as of secondary importance to the consent of the parents, guardians, or other gatekeepers who are adults—a position emblematic of children’s “lesser status” as human beings. At worst, there is potential that parents’ or guardians’ consent can ride roughshod over their children’s wishes, who are deemed capable of assenting only. Indeed, assent may mean little more than a child’s nonrefusal to participate in research. Medicine is an area in which such debates are particularly evident, notably in relation to consent to medical procedures deemed to be in the child’s best interest. Ethical guidelines generally insist that the child’s assent to research is actively sought, particularly in research based on the notion of children’s participation. Here, there is respect for the child as a person in his or her own right, but this does not remove the protection of the parent or legal guardian. However, here too, the notion of assent is fraught with difficulties; some commentators and ethical bodies internationally have sought to assign an age at which assent should be negotiated. In the United States, for instance, ethical guidance states that assent to research should be sought from children from the age of 7 years. What this highlights is a link between age and competence. The entanglement of age with competence is a hotly contested topic. Adults’ “competence” in research, both as participants and as authorisers of consent to research with children (e.g., as a parent or legal guardian), is presumed a priori to research being conducted, whereas with children there has been a tendency to assume incompetence. Underpinning this supposition is a construction of the child as incapable, powerless, dependent, and inherently less developed and unsteady in his or her thinking compared with an adult. Childhood, unlike other social categories such as race or gender, is interesting here in that this

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“incompetence” is deemed to be temporary because the child is regarded as undergoing linear developmental shifts over time towards greater competence. Crucial to this understanding has been the normalising of ideas about children’s “progress” derived from developmental psychology in particular. This is key when considering issues relating to assent. In an attempt to recognise the capabilities of children to assent to research, there have been attempts to assign an age at which a child is considered competent enough to assent, but this too is a vexed area. Very young children are often disregarded as autonomous, capable persons in their own right with decision-making capacities about their participation in research. Similarly, if “competence” is the benchmark of who is regarded as able to assent to research, disabled children who may not fit developmental norms or who have profound and multiple disabilities could be positioned as less competent than their able-bodied peers. Adults, by virtue of their adult status alone, rarely have to prove such competence in terms of research. Increasingly, this is changing. Shifts in thinking about children and childhood have unsettled the idea that age should be a defining factor in assigning competence and have prompted researchers to consider the ways in which children can assent to research. Such thinking is positioned within conceptualisations of children as capable commentators on their own lives, and it should be noted that the term consent is often employed by researchers who advocate such a perspective. A plethora of writing now unpacks knotty difficulties relating to ethical issues such as assent in research, and this writing often encourages researchers to seek the active participation of children in research rather than rely on passive nonrefusal. The issue of assent continues to be hotly debated, but this is indicative of changing ideas about children and childhood. The shift towards viewing the child as a capable social actor has not diminished the importance of parents’ and guardians’ consent in the research process: It is characteristic of understanding children as needing protection at the same time as recognising their capabilities. Deborah Albon See also Children as Competent Social Actors; Consent, Children’s, in Research; Developmental Psychology; Ethics; Power Relations in Research

Further Readings Alderson, P., & Morrow, V. (2004). Ethics, social research and consulting with children and young people. Barkingside, United Kingdom: Barnado’s. Cocks, A. J. (2006). The ethical maze: Finding an inclusive path towards gaining children’s agreement to research participation. Childhood, 2, 247–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568206062942 Dockett, S., & Perry, B. (2011). Research with young children: Seeking assent. Child Indicators Research, 2, 231–247. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/ s12187-010-9084-0

Asylum, Children

as

Seekers

of

Broadly speaking, an asylum seeker can be defined or described as a person who has left his or her country of origin and formally applied for asylum in another country, which has not yet been granted. Historically, children’s involvement in seeking asylum has been subsumed under family or kin migration. Consequently, children were largely treated as objects travelling with adults, or their experiences were conflated with those of women and mothers. However, the last 20 years has seen a gradual shift away from this perspective to understanding children’s role in migration as people with both feelings and agency in their own right, separate from the adults around them. By considering some of the legal, procedural, psychological, and personal challenges they may face, this entry engages the reader in a discussion about children who travel across foreign borders to seek asylum in a different nation-state. In turn, significant attention is now paid to children who seek asylum alone. In some situations, children may hope or expect to join kin who are already settled in the destination country. Perhaps rarer are children sent ahead of adults who later hope to join them once asylum is achieved. In some asylum situations, children born in the country their family migrated to face the prospect of having to stay behind whilst their parents are deported. Children seeking asylum alone are defined in most European contexts as a person under 18 years of age who is applying for asylum in his or

Asylum, Children as Seekers of

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her own right and who is not being cared for by an adult. In reality, the picture surrounding children seeking asylum is a complex one, which does not fit easily into categorisation. Even when seeking asylum alone, adults have a significant bearing on children’s migration and asylum experiences. It should also be noted that this group is different from economic migrants who move to other countries for work or money. Nor are their experiences akin to that of third culture kids, who usually travel under the auspices of elite migration and occupy multiple cultures in privileged positions. Research overwhelmingly shows that asylum-seeking children are predominantly motivated to move to another country due to fear of persecution and war. Whilst children’s reasons for moving are usually very similar to adults, their status as children has an impact on their preflight experience, their journey, and their experiences once they arrive at a new destination.

prohibiting and penalising traffickers rather than preventing exploitation. The second approach focuses on regulation and establishes parameters for legal migration. From this perspective, child migrants are usually treated as a family dependent rather than an autonomous agent. Therefore, children migrating alone must have proof of family ties to qualify for reunification, and in some states, for children over 12 years old, additional requirements are made. The third approach to children’s asylum is protective and involves international law that focuses on protecting human rights of specific groups. This body of work has focused on children’s distinctive vulnerability, the requirement to give children a ‘voice’ in the process and, in turn, a focus on child migrants as agents and decision makers in their own lives. However, individual states are able to interpret protection rights in ways that do not always help children.

The Legal Approach to Children Seeking Asylum

Why Children Seek Asylum

From a legal standpoint, children seeking asylum occupy a complex position when they migrate across foreign borders and are particularly vulnerable to the different treatments and definitions of their legal status. On the one hand, in countries that sign on to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), refugee and child migrants are afforded the same rights and protections as children born and raised in their domestic country. The UNCRC (Article 2) speaks to children being respected without discrimination, that a child’s best interests should be a primary consideration (Article 3), and that children should have the right to express their views in all matters, including judicial and administrative proceedings (Article 12). However, different nation-states have often applied further clauses to the legal framework, which has had the effect of watering down the legislation; also, internal policies may vary significantly. The literature points to three broad approaches to international child migration within international and domestic law. One approach is punitive and criminalising with a particular focus on trafficking. Although this treats children seeking asylum as victims of trafficking, the focus is on

Children who travel alone across international borders may do so for a variety of reasons. The literature reports on children travelling in search of educational or employment opportunities, particularly in situations of deep inequality or deprivation. Children may also travel to join documented or undocumented family members who have already migrated. In some situations, children’s decisions to leave their country are made by some other significant adult. In these cases, children often travel in the context of exploitation, and usually, an intermediary agent is paid a fee to transport the child. Children may also be trafficked, meaning that there is an ongoing expectation that once they reach their new destination, they will pay for their travel through labour or sexual exploitation. Predominantly, however, and crossing over all these categories, is that children travel to escape persecution or war, family abuse, and dire poverty. Children are said to be particularly vulnerable in the wake of conflicts and political oppression. Examples include escaping from torturers because of their parents’ political activities, religious or ethnic persecution, family abuse, and high levels of societal violence. Policy and political attention in this area have largely focused on reducing asylum numbers

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rather than seeking to understand why asylum is sought. Some argue that politicians, policy makers, media, and indeed large swathes of the general public assume that reasons for seeking asylum are usually economic. Attached to this perception is the belief that asylum seekers are knowledgeable about the country of their destination and their associated asylum processes. These perspectives downplay the role of persecution and war in children’s ‘choice’ to travel to a new place. The evidence, however, shows that most asylum seekers, particularly children, have little understanding of the process involved in applying. In situations where agents or intermediaries are paid to move them across borders, children often have no knowledge of what their destination country will be until they arrive.

The Asylum Process for Children Once the asylum-seeking child has reached his or her destination, support from professionals is said to be highly variable, both across international borders and within national states. Research has shown that the roles of professionals in these situations can be contradictory. On the one hand, professionals, such as social workers, have an ethnical duty of care to act as a befriender, guide, and mentor. On the other hand, they have responsibilities more akin to the control, surveillance, and policing of young people. Research has found that many professionals including immigration officials, legal representatives, and social workers sometimes come with a sense of judgment about who is more deserving of care, thereby creating a group that is deemed underserving of care. In most countries, asylum claims processes are lengthy, and the levels of uncertainty and fear attached to the process have been clearly documented. In the United Kingdom, for example, children are protected only until the age of 17.5 when there is a high risk of deportation. A large number of asylum claims are turned down the first time, and children do not always know that they can appeal. Often, their claims are treated with mistrust or not recognised as legitimate reasons for seeking asylum. In some countries, children spend much time in detention centres rather than in foster care or bedand-breakfast accommodation, and although both

have challenges, prolonged stays in detention centres have shown to have considerable deleterious effects on psychological well-being. Children and young people who are granted asylum often lose the support and contacts they had as children as they are transferred to adult services. In the United States, children who are not Mexican or Canadian are rapidly transferred from Customs and Border Protection to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and then placed with an adult sponsor. Evidence suggests that many of these placements are not assessed for safety, and little is known about the children’s progress of resettlement and integration. The asylum application depends heavily on the testimonies given by children about their reasons for seeking asylum. Part of this involves ‘proving’ that their fears of persecution are grounded. This is problematic because children may find it difficult to talk about their experiences, which are likely to have been extremely negative, yet these testimonies are crucial for their asylum application status. Research has also found that children often have to repeatedly divulge their distressing stories to a range of adults over time. There are well-founded fears held by children about the collection of information about their family background and how they became asylum seekers. Many fear what the consequences may be for discussing their cases, partly in fear of the reactions of others. This reticence to talk acts to further implicate them as seeking to deceive or trick their way into claiming asylum status.

Children’s Experiences of Seeking Asylum A growing body of work has focused on children’s own perspectives on claiming asylum. Many researchers adopt a range of participatory methods to enable ethically sensitive explorations of preflight experiences, the journey, and experiences of the asylum destination. Data collected about preflight experience suggest that the things children disliked about their preflight country are war, poverty, bad governments, poor living and health conditions, and poor personal treatment such as rape, sexual exploitation, and early marriage. On the other hand, children the food and weather, their language, cultural traditions, and their street. The journey to the destination and the subsequent experience of asylum are often intertwined.

Asylum, Children as Seekers of

Both present the child with precarious, difficult, and uncertain situations. For example, in one study, children brought into the United Kingdom told researchers that traffickers used the private foster care system as a mechanism for bringing them into the country. In other cases, the children were left to fend for themselves on arrival or the traffickers would masquerade as official carers. Through this mechanism, children can end up working in domestic servitude and sex work. In one study, those who had been through these situations wished they had been asked by border control more questions about their situation to avoid being released to adults who went on to exploit them. However, many young people avoid answering official questions out of fear. Sometimes their exploiters used Article 20 of the UNCRC, which is the right of substitute care that is protective and nurturing, as a means of taking these children from authorities.

Psychological, Emotional, and Mental Health A substantial body of work in this area has focused on the psychological impact and mental health concerns for children. One line of enquiry has looked at trauma, trauma-inducing events, and the subsequent emotional and psychological impact of those events. A tightly held and often problematic assumption within the trauma model is that trauma is universally tied to children’s vulnerability due to their age. This approach has been highly criticised because trauma-inducing events do not necessarily lead to trauma, and how the event is experienced may be strongly tied to a host of environmental and contextual factors. One response to the trauma model was to turn instead to the concept of resilience, which looks at the way children are able to withstand some of the mental, emotional, and physical demands of being in potentially trauma-inducing situations. Rather than seeing children as inevitably traumatised, resilience sees children as active agents in negotiating the conditions of their existence. Sometimes, however, this has given the impression that children have ‘choices’ about whether to leave a situation or to stay. Many activists and academics working in this area who argue that asylum-seeking children overwhelmingly head to destinations to escape

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persecution and war, would conclude that ‘choice’ is erroneous and could have a negative impact on how they are viewed in asylum claims. Although children’s rights legislation for the protection of asylum-seeking children does exist, it is widely recognised that there are some considerable gaps between the law and the delivery of social care. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on care, through human rights legislation, policy, and practice. On the other hand, there is a competing demand to reduce children’s asylum claims and to treat children travelling alone with suspicion. Research has overwhelmingly found that children seeking asylum elsewhere do so to avoid persecution and war, tend to have little knowledge of the asylum process, and experience significant psychological impact. Overall, they remain in a very vulnerable position. Sarah Crafter See also Age Assessment, in Migration; Immigrant Children; Political Rights of Children; Unaccompanied Minors, Migration; Undocumented Children; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Allsopp, J., & Chase, E. (2019). Best interests, durable solutions and belonging: Policy discourses shaping the futures of unaccompanied migrant and refugee minors coming of age in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(2), 293–311. https://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/1369183X.2017.1404265 Bhabha, J. (2008). Independent children, inconsistent adults: International child migration and the legal framework (Innocenti Discussion Paper No. IDP 2008-02). Florence, Italy: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. Chase, E. (2010). Agency and silence: Young people seeking asylum alone in the UK. British Journal of Social Work, 40, 2050–2068. https://dx.doi.org/10 .1093/bjsw/bcp103 Connolly, H. (2014). ‘For a while out of orbit’: Listening to what unaccompanied asylum-seeking/refugee children in the UK say about their rights and experiences in private foster care. Adoption & Fostering, 38(4), 331–345. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 0308575914553360 Crawley, H. (2010). ‘No one gives you a chance to say what you are thinking’: Finding space for children’s agency in the UK asylum system. Area, 42(2), 162–169. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00917.x

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Attachment Theory

Hart, J. (2015). Children and forced migration. In E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, G. Loescher, K. Long, & N. Sigona (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of refugee and forced migration studies (pp. 383–394). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Kohli, R., & Mather, R. (2003). Promoting psychosocial well-being in unaccompanied asylum seeking young people in the United Kingdom. Child and Family Social Work, 8(3), 201–212. https://dx.doi .org/10.1046/j.1365-2206.2003.00282.x Menjívar, C., & Perreira, K. M. (2019). Undocumented and unaccompanied: Children of migration in the European Union and the United States. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45, 197–217. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1404255

Attachment Theory Attachment theory has been used as a framework for investigating maternal–child relationships across a wide variety of contexts. The theory, credited to psychoanalyst John Bowlby, suggests that mother–child relationships create a relatively stable working model for all relationships that stays intact throughout a person’s life and that infants are engaged in soliciting the attention of adults, playing a role in developing a connection with a caregiver in order to ensure that the caregiver attends to them. Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiment, which was designed to measure and categorize attachment, made the theory one that has been easy to investigate among a wide variety of caregivers, including children of different ages and caregivers of varying types (mothers and fathers, nonparental caregivers, childcare providers in institutional settings like schools and day care centers, and caregivers in geographies beyond the United States). This theory has been employed across a number of contexts to emphasize the importance of children’s need to create a secure connection with caregivers in order to feel comfortable exploring unfamiliar situations.

History of Attachment Theory Bowlby (1907–1990) became interested in ­maternal–child relationships through his training as a psychoanalyst. Bowlby’s early work included

investigating juvenile delinquents to understand patterns in their relationship with their mothers and work (through his student James Robertson) on children who were patients at a hospital on the effects of parental separation on their emotional well-being. His specific work on attachment was inspired by ethologist Harry Harlow’s groundbreaking 1958 study in which he discovered that a rhesus monkey was more likely to bond with an inanimate surrogate mother when the monkey experienced contact comfort than when the maternal object satisfied physical hunger or thirst. Harlow’s work inspired a new generation of researchers to reexamine the mother–child relationship, including Bowlby. But the contribution of one student, Ainsworth (1913–1999), was most significant, as she developed a way to observe and classify attachment, which has allowed attachment theory to be validated in a consistent way. Ainsworth’s experiment, the Strange Situation, emerged from her 1963 interviews with babies and their mothers in ­Kampala, Uganda. It was in this research that she first saw infants actively seeking connection with their mothers, validating what Bowlby had seen in his clinical work and suggesting a connection with Harlow’s work. In the Strange Situation, researchers observe an infant engaged in exploratory play, with their mother close by, in a laboratory setting. While the child plays, a stranger enters the room. After a few minutes, the mother leaves the room and then returns. After a few more minutes, both the stranger and the mother leave the room, leaving the child by themselves. The mother then returns and the experiment concludes. While researchers watch the mother and child during the entirety of the experiment, the separation and reunions receive the most attention and scrutiny. Based on the child’s reactions, during these transitional moments, the child–mother dyad is classified as follows: •• Secure attachment occurs when children feel they can rely on their caregivers to attend to their emotional needs. It is considered to be the most advantageous attachment style. •• Anxious–ambivalent attachment occurs when the infant experiences separation anxiety when separated from the caregiver and does not feel

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

reassured when the caregiver returns to the infant. •• Anxious–avoidant attachment occurs when the infant avoids their caregiver when they return.

Expanding Attachment Theory The field of research on attachment theory now includes work on attachment with other caregivers, including fathers and childcare providers. Attachment theory’s validity has been explored in a range of contexts globally, with an eye toward whether different parenting styles and cultures surrounding the parent–child relationship have the same impact on a child’s working model of relationships. In addition, researchers have explored how factors like a child’s disposition/ personality might play a role in the way they engage (or do not engage) with caregivers. Over the 70 years since Bowlby and Ainsworth first began the work related to attachment theory, a number of methods have been developed to optimize or complement the Strange Situation, including surveys and scales that can be applied to children older than 18 months and interpretive methods that have helped researchers focus on older toddlers, children, and teens.

Critiques of Attachment Theory The assumption that a lab-based experiment like the Strange Situation can capture the complexity of child-rearing and parental–child attachment has led many to critique the usefulness of attachment theory. Researchers have questioned whether or not separations and reunions affect all children in the same way, and whether or not child temperament might relate more to the development of a secure attachment than a mother’s responsiveness toward her child. Many have suggested that because the Strange Situation was built to assess the maternal– child relationship and that relationship may have different characteristics than other caregiving relationships, it serves as a problematic starting point for attachment with fathers, for example. Attachment theory has been questioned for its relevance in cultures where specific notions of maternal–child attachment would most certainly affect the relevance of attachment theory in that culture. And many have simply questioned whether the working

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model of relationships truly does hold throughout life. A number of longitudinal studies are being conducted to assess and explore those results. Amy Henry See also Autonomy; Bowlby, John; Child Attachment Interviews; Infancy; Parenting; Parenting Children; Parenting Styles, History of

Further Readings Ainsworth, M. (1967). Infancy in Uganda: Infant care and the growth of love. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Attachment. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Separation. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Loss, sadness and depression. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) ADHD is a way of describing unwanted and asocial conduct including inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. This conduct is frequently observed when a child starts school and may previously have been understood simply as naughtiness. The conduct is typically diagnosed as ADHD between the ages of 6 and 12 years. The most frequent response is medication. Conduct typical of ADHD may be considered normal in boys under age 7 years; hence, boys are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed as girls. This entry examines the history of ADHD, its prevalence and treatment, and critiques of the ADHD diagnosis.

History In the case of ADHD, a retrospective reading of material concerning children’s conduct through the lens of diagnosis requires an acknowledgement that expectations of children in regard to education, health, and productivity/employment have changed

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considerably in the last two centuries, particularly in the industrialised Global North and West where school attendance is compulsory. Sir Alexander Crighton first described a case of ‘the fidgets’ in 1798. In 1902, Sir George Frederic Still, Professor of Paediatrics at King’s College Hospital in London, gave examples of the behaviours of 43 children as typical of deficiency in moral control. He regarded the defect as a psychical condition. Conduct (described as ‘symptoms’) included passionateness, spitefulness, jealousy, and immodesty all driven by self-gratification. ‘Passionateness’ can be seen as similar to ­impulsiveness—a key feature of a modern ADHD diagnosis. In 1932, Franz Kramer and Hans Pollnow reported on a ‘hyperkinetic disease’ of infancy where children had a marked motor restlessness observable only during the day and thus not attributable to brain dysfunction. The children could be disruptive in class, disobedient, and may have difficulty playing with other children. Claims have been made that these features of boys’ conduct meet a modern criterion of ADHD, impairment in social and academic functioning, matched by the modern criteria of conduct being noted before the age of 7 years. The American Psychiatric Association did not include ADHD in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952. The second edition of the DSM (1968) included hyperkinetic impulse disorder. DSM-III (1980) changed the name to attention deficit disorder and created two ‘subtypes’: (1) attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and (2) attention deficit disorder without hyperactivity. A revised version of the DSM-III (1987) removed the hyperactivity distinction and changed the name to ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ (ADHD). Inattentiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity were combined into a single type. No subtypes were suggested. The fourth edition of the DSM (2000) established three subtypes still in use: (1) combined type ADHD, (2) predominantly inattentive type ADHD, and (3) predominantly hyperactive–impulsive type ADHD.

Prevalence Prevalence estimates vary due to different cultural expectations of children and the use of different official forms of classification: The DSM-5 and

the International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders’ 10th revision have different diagnostic criteria. The United Kingdom and United States are regarded as easier sites for prevalence estimation due to relative cultural and economic consistency within national borders. As reported in Craig Newnes’s 2018 study, in the United Kingdom, surveys of children between the ages of 5 and 15 years found that 3.62% of boys and 0.85% of girls are inscribed with ADHD. For Europe, as a whole the overall estimate is 5%. For the United States, the current estimate of prevalence is 7%. Globally, estimates range from 2.5% in the Middle East to 12% in South America. South Africa has an ADHD support group offering on-line and local support for families of those diagnosed. Inconsistency of diagnostic procedures and variation in availability of, for example, medication or professionals tasked with assessment renders cross-cultural comparison of prevalence hazardous. There is no ‘natural rate’ of ADHD in any given population—only a variable rate of diagnosis, suggesting that it is a socially constructed rather than biological phenomenon.

Treatment ADHD treatments include pharmaceutical interventions and non-pharmaceutical interventions, though the former tend to be more common. Pharmaceutical Treatment

In 1936, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug amphetamine, a stimulant marketed under the trade name Benzedrine (as a decongestant inhaler in 1936). In 1937, Charles Bradley, in East Providence, Rhode Island, reported a positive effect (calming; effectively an overdose of speed) of amphetamine in children’s behaviour. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the psychostimulant methylphenidate, marketed under the trade name Ritalin, in 1955. It was first used to allay barbiturate-induced coma, narcolepsy, and depression. Since the 1960s, it has been prescribed to children inscribed with ADHD. Both amphetamine and methylphenidate are predominantly dopaminergic drugs. Dopamine is one of many neurotransmitters in the

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

brain, seen as responsible for mood and corresponding energy levels and is normally reabsorbed (or reuptaken). Methylphenidate acts as a norepinephrine–dopamine reuptake inhibitor and amphetamine as both a releasing agent and ­reuptake inhibitor of dopamine and norepinephrine. The brain is thus kept artificially saturated with norepinephrine and dopamine. Adverse effects include loss of appetite and weight loss (hence its popularity as a slimming pill), dry mouth, nervousness and agitation, nausea, ­insomnia, and lethargy. Prescribed as a means of ­preventing restlessness and irritability, methylphenidate causes both. Adderall (a drug consisting of a combination of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine) was released in 1996. Adverse effects are similar to those of methylphenidate, with an increased chance of addiction. Despite no change in the criteria of ADHD, in the United Kingdom, as Craig Newnes reports in his 2014 book, the number of children so diagnosed rose from 20,000 to 300,000 in the lifetime of DSM-III-R (1987–2000). Between 2000 and 2011, spending on drugs to treat ADHD by the tax-funded UK National Health Service rose by 938%; a total cost of almost £50 million in 2011. Non-Pharmaceutical Treatments

In common with all approaches to psychiatric disorders and psychological/behavioural problems, practitioners tend to emphasise the benefits of their own particular approach. In Western societies, family therapy, different types of psychotherapy, mindfulness, social skills groups, dietary supplements, and behavioural management/parental advice are all offered to children diagnosed with ADHD. Pharmaceutical company sponsorship of Web-based advice sites ensures a low profile for non-pharmaceutical approaches.

Critique of ADHD ADHD is a social construct that reflects society’s views about children, schooling, and masculinities rather than a biological ‘disease’ or psychological disorder. The feminist psychologist Erica Burman has demonstrated the ways in which conceptions of childhood and the establishment of norms for children’s development are historically and contextually

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variable rather than universal. ADHD ‘symptoms’ in children may be considered ‘normal’ rather than psychologically problematic, depending on the sociohistorical context. Like many other psychiatric disorders, ADHD is a collective noun for a number of unrelated aspects of conduct. Diagnosis is unreliable, inconsistent, and based on subjective judgement. In physical illness, testing of blood and other body fluids or metabolites will confirm a diagnosis. No similar testing exists for psychiatric diagnoses. Definitions of ADHD thus include untestable allusions to biological factors and terms such as neurobehavioural or neuropsychiatric, terms designed to give the appearance of science. ADHD is, however, first diagnosed through observation and subjective judgement before confirmation is sought from a psychometric assessment. Psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and other professionals then infer a neurological problem. Inscription of ADHD has increased. Between 1996 and 2003, the percentage of boys in American schools diagnosed as ADHD and prescribed stimulants rose from 6% to 17% (Newnes, 2016). The critical psychiatrist Sami Timimi has linked the increase in conduct likely to be described as ADHD to ‘heteronormative masculinity’—­conduct that may actually be observed at any teenage soccer game. Aggression and distraction are not, however, valued in the disciplinary space represented by classrooms. Factors include increased pressure on general practitioners to diagnose and prescribe; an increase in the numbers of professionals including teachers, nurses, and psychologists tasked with diagnosing children; financial and other benefits including, in the United Kingdom, Personal Independence Payments for ­ diagnosed children and families; and the valued subsequent calming effects on disruptive children in classrooms with poor teacher–pupil ratios. Boredom and accompanying inattentiveness will be renamed ADHD by teachers and parents. According to psychologist Dorothy Rowe, signs likely to lead to a diagnosis of ADHD—for example, difficulty in paying attention, difficulty in concentration, difficulty in keeping things in order, being easily distracted, restlessness—are better read as signs of fear of assault, authority, competition with peers, and so on. Drug company marketing, however, uses medical rather than

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common-sense language; consequently, the diagnosis of ADHD has risen 100-fold in the United Kingdom in the last 20 years. Over 10% of U.S. children aged 4–17 years have received a diagnosis of the disorder (Newnes, 2018). The majority are put on medications such as methylphenidate (sold under trade names Ritalin, Concerta, Methylin) or amphetamine salt combo (trade name Adderall). Only the amphetamine salt combo is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for children below 6 years old. More than 10,000 American 2- and 3-year-olds are, however, being medicated for ADHD outside established paediatric guidelines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to being put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ standard practice guidelines for ADHD do not address the diagnosis in children of three and younger, nor the use of stimulant medications. Studies of neuroimaging in children with an ADHD diagnosis conclude that differences observed in the neuroimages of brains of children with the diagnosis and ‘normal’ children may be caused by medication. Drugs such as methylphenidate become access drugs for similar (illegal) stimulants like speed (amphetamine) and cocaine, and the existence of a first diagnosis can lead to a future ‘career’ in human services for the growing child. Methylphenidate is increasingly used as a ‘study drug’ due to its effect of increasing focus and attention. It is also prescribed to members of the military, for example, drone pilots, required to focus on computer screens for long periods. There is, however, no evidence that methylphenidate improves study or concentration levels.

Concluding Thoughts ADHD is a prototypical example of the medicalisation of normal behaviour. Almost 90 years ago, Kramer and Pollnow suggested onset at age 3 and 4 years with a decline in severity by age 7 years and complete recovery later. A critical reading of their conclusions would be that schoolboys learn to behave according to adult demands. The diagnosis is an inscription used by teachers, parents, and mental health professionals of conduct in children disruptive to school or family

life. As Foucault notes, schools prefer ‘docile subjects’ or obedient, disciplined children. The majority of diagnosed individuals are boys. Conduct includes class disruption, a lack of attention and concentration and unwillingness to complete tasks such as homework assignments. The typical response is medication. In the last 30 years, ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions of stimulant drugs such as methylphenidate have multiplied 100-fold (Whitely, 2012). The sociological term inscription is preferred over the medical term diagnosis to reflect the fact that psychiatric interviews and procedures are social rituals rather than medical or scientific investigations. Like inscriptions on a tombstone, psychiatric labels also last many years. Advantages of inscription and prescription include financial rewards for researchers and medical professionals, state benefits, a naming ritual that removes blame from parents, less disruption in classes, and the possibility of selling the medication as a black market slimming pill. Disadvantages include introducing children to a career in psychiatric services, ostracism, and bullying from classmates contingent on a stigmatising label and a high probability that methylphenidate and similar medications act as gateway drugs to cocaine and other illegal stimulants. Hypotheses concerning the rapid increase in inscription of ADHD include demands placed on children to succeed academically, a reduction in physical activities in primary schools and changes in teacher–pupil ratios leading to classes being harder to control. Critical analyses include a lessening in parental tolerance of naughtiness as parents are more pressured to succeed and the promotional efforts of pharmaceutical companies and psychometric test companies who have vested financial interests in promulgating the idea that ADHD is a valid, testable, and curable disorder. Craig Newnes See also Medicalization of Childhood

Further Readings ADHD Support Group South Africa. (2019). Retrieved from www.adhasa.co.za Burman, E. (2008). Deconstructing developmental psychology (2nd ed.). East Sussex, UK: Routledge.

Autism, Child Development, and Theory Newnes, C. (2014). Clinical Psychology: A critical examination. Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books. Newnes, C. (Ed.). (2015). Children in society: Politics, policies and interventions. Monmouth, UK: PCCS Books. Newnes, C. (2016). Inscription, diagnosis and deception in the mental health industry: How Psy governs us all. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Newnes, C. (2018). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Analysing an illusion. The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 18(3), 174–181. Rowe, D. (2005). ADHD: Adults’ fear of frightened children. In C. Newnes & N. Radcliffe (Eds.), Making and breaking children’s lives. Ross-on-Wye, UK: PCCS Books. Stein, D. (2012). The psychology industry under the microscope! Plymouth, UK: University Press of America. Timimi, S. (2005). Naughty boys: Anti-social behaviour, ADHD and the role of culture. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Whitely, M. (2012). Will the backlash against DSM-5 be the downward tipping point for international ADHD prescribing rates? Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 12(1), 26–36.

Autism, Child Development, and Theory Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by a deficit in social communication and presence of stereotypical patterns of behavior and interests according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (5th ed.; DSM5). ASD is one of the fastest growing developmental disabilities with a prevalence rate of 1 in 59 among 8-year-old children in the United States according to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in 2018. This rise in prevalence is not unique to the United States. In ­Canada, for example, the prevalence rates of ASD grew 4.7 times higher from 1998 to 2007.

Overview: Prevalence, Trends, and the Cause In the last 15 years, research shows a tremendous increase in the early identification of ASD. The issue of whether the incidence of ASD is actually

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increasing is hotly debated among experts. It is difficult to determine whether the incidence is actually increasing due to a number of confounding factors such as increased public awareness, improved surveillance in early childhood, improved identification procedures, and changes in the diagnostic criteria. The cause of ASD is unknown. Researchers have documented differences between the brain structure of the individuals with and without ASD, suggesting a possible neurobiological basis. Although a single cause has not been determined, researchers have identified potential factors that increase the risk of having ASD, most notably genetics. A report from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development indicates that genes might be a leading cause; more than 100 genes have been identified as associated with ASD at different levels. In addition, children who have a sibling or twin with ASD are more likely to also have ASD due to shared genetics. On the other hand, it is known that parenting style and upbringing do not cause autism. Also, contrary to assumptions related to vaccines, researchers have found no association between vaccines and ASD.

Early Indicators of ASD and Diagnosis Many signs of ASD can be observed in early childhood. In a 2014 study, Katarzyna Chawarska and colleagues from the Yale Child Study Center found that approximately 80% to 90% of the participant parents were able to identify their children’s abnormal behavior before the age of 2 years. For example, 20% had concerns in the first 10 months about nonverbal social communication, 40% reported their concerns related to first words and joint attention between 11 to 17 months, and another 40% reported concerning the social communication and symbolic skills after 18 months. It is not surprising that parental ability to identify atypical behaviors was mostly based on social behaviors and language delay, both of which are associated with ASD symptoms. Children who demonstrate these behaviors should be screened by a pediatrician, family doctor, or any licensed physician in the hospital or child center and, if needed, undergo a full clinical

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evaluation. It is important to clarify that a c­ linical– medical diagnosis of ASD does not guarantee access to special education services provided by the public schools in the United States. This evaluation should be done through the school system based on the IDEA 2004 legislation. If the child meets the eligibility criteria, the school should provide proper intervention and services for the student, including the least restrictive environment and individualized education program (IEP). Regarding the diagnosis process, the main changes in ASD that came with the DSM-5 are these: (1) ASD is categorized as a neurodevelopmental disorder. (2) Previously separate disorders (autistic disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, Asperger syndrome, Rett’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder) are now considered a single condition with different levels of symptom severity. (3) Social deficits and communication difficulties are combined. (4) Both social–communication difficulties and restricted, repetitive behaviors (RRBs) are required for a diagnose of ASD. A new identification—social communication disorder—was created for individuals who do not demonstrate RRBs.

impairment of eye contact might be a significant symptom for infants, but it might also be caused by hearing problems, lack of attention, hunger, or other issues. Second, it is possible to observe some social communication or social–emotional behaviors in children with ASD. More important, consistency in social behavior makes a difference in the diagnosis of autism. Last, there is no particular pattern or milestone established for social behaviors as there is for motor and language development. Cultural differences in social behavior might make identifying ASD symptoms more difficult. A number of professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Neurology support early and consistent screening for young children. Pediatricians are supposed to conduct screenings for all children at 18 and 24 months old in regular clinic checkups. If they have concerns related to any symptoms, they should refer the child for an autism evaluation. The 2012 survey by Wirongrong Arunyanart and colleagues from the Yale School of Medicine showed that 58% of pediatricians engage with regular autism screening at 18 months and 52% at 24 months.

Theories

Several cognitive explanations have been posited to explain behavioral symptoms that are characteristic of ASD. These include cognitive theories such as weak central coherence (WCC) theory, the executive dysfunction theory (EDF), and theory of mind (ToM) deficits, all of which suggest alternaEven though the symptoms of ASD can be relitive explanations for the challenges children with ably observed in the first 2 years of life, they were ASD experience. not diagnosed until later years in general. Research The first model, WCC, developed by Francesca emphasized that earlier diagnosis plays a crucial Happe and Uta Frith from the Institute of Psychiarole in giving children opportunities for early intertry at King’s College in London, suggests that vention activities and determining the efficacy of these activities. Social–emotional and social–­ individuals with ASD tend to focus on details instead of the big picture. In other words, indicommunication impairments are significant conviduals with ASD have a propensity for detail but cerns that can be observed in children with ASD struggle to integrate details to understand the preschool age and older. These significant concerns main idea. Numerous studies have shown that might include social interaction (eye contact, smilstudents with ASD are more likely to give attening, and response to peers and adults; initiation of tion mostly to small details rather than broader communication, joint attention, and so on). Recogglobal perspectives. In this sense, a child with ASD nizing the symptoms in young children might be a may draw his or her attention to useless informachallenging process for several reasons. tion or emphasize the details, which can prevent First, it might be challenging to identify the lack text comprehension. of behavior in young children. For instance,

Autism, Child Development, and Theory

The second theory, EDF, developed by Bruce Pennington from the University of Denver, refers to the difficulty individuals with ASD have with executive functioning skills, including cognitive flexibility, working memory, and self-monitoring behavior. Executive dysfunction theory posits that cognitive functions rely on the ability to organize, plan, make decisions, multitask, and self-monitor performance. Therefore, individuals with ASD may have trouble cleaning, working, or cooking because they cannot focus their attention or integrate new information. Students with ASD need to be given a plan and purpose for the task to give it the attention it requires. The third theory, ToM, developed by Simon Baron-Cohen from the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University, has to do with the ability to infer others’ perspectives, predict behaviors, and interpret feelings. Since autism is associated mostly with deficits in social communication social interaction with other people, ToM is one of the most prominent theories behind autism. Numerous studies have shown that individuals with ASD have difficulties understanding other people’s feelings and thoughts. Sally Ozonoff, Bruce Pennington, and Sally ­Rogers found significant group differences between students with high-functioning autism and matched control groups (without autism spectrum disorder) regarding emotion perception, theory of mind, and executive function. In this study, students with high-functioning ASD showed deficits in executive function, theory of mind, and verbal memory; however, their performance was similar to IQ measures in students in the control group. Overall, ASD is one of the fastest growing neurodevelopmental disabilities that shows a deficit in social communication, language, and repetitive behaviors. Because of increased research on the early identification and intervention, doctors are able to diagnose children earlier. Therefore, students with ASD can benefit from the appropriate practices for emotional and behavioral disorders to increase daily and academic skills.

Education and Intervention Increased prevalence and awareness of ASD called attention to the need to seek more ways to provide appropriate education and intervention for this population. Researchers and professionals are

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exploring ways to train individuals with ASD. The demand for sufficient practices and effective interventions increases with time. Fortunately, evidence-based practices (EBP) can be used based on the scientific method and research. These practices have been empirically tested and are built on sufficient empirical positive outcomes for individuals with ASD. The review of the EBP is regularly conducted by different agencies, such as National Professional Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorder (NPDC), National Standards Project (NSP), and What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) to identify strategies and practices for education of students with ASD. Numerous social and academic skills can be improved by qualified empirical interventions, including social, communication, joint attention, play, motor, cognitive, vocational, adaptive (self-help), mental health, and pre-­ academic–school readiness skills. Connie Wong and colleagues reviewed the studies that met with the eligibility criteria. On the basis of their findings, they described evidence-based practices and classified them based on outcomes and age groups that can benefit from effective interventions. Despite these foundational characteristics, autism is a spectrum disorder, and individuals with ASD make up a large heterogeneous group. Individuals with ASD share common, predictable problems such as lack of socialization and communication, but individual personalities, abilities, and interests differ. Although all children with ASD experience difficulties with social interaction, these challenges may vary from person to person. Seyma Intepe-Tingir Further Readings Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46. https://dx.doi. org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8 Happé, F., & Frith, U. (2006). The weak coherence account: Detail-focused cognitive style in autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(1), 5–25. https://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s10803-005-0039-0 Janzen, J. E., & Zenko, C. B. (2003). Understanding the nature of autism: A guide to the autism spectrum disorders. San Antonio, TX: PsychCorp.

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Ingersoll, B., & Wainer, A. (2014). The broader autism phenotype. In F. R. Volkmar, S. J. Rogers, R. Paul, & K. A. Pelphrey (Eds.), Handbook of autism and pervasive developmental disorders (4th ed., pp. 28–57). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Pennington, B. F. (1997). Dimensions of executive functions in normal and abnormal development. In N. A. Krasnegor, G. R. Lyon, & P. S. Goldman-Rakic (Eds.), Development of the prefrontal cortex: Evolution, neurobiology, and behavior (pp. 265–281). Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes. Ozonoff, S., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (1991). Executive function deficits in high-functioning autistic individuals: Relationship to theory of mind. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 32(7), 1081– 1105. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1991 .tb00351.x Taylor, L. E., Swerdfeger, A. L., & Eslick, G. D. (2014). Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidencebased meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies. Vaccine, 32(29), 3623–3629. https://dx.doi .org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2014.04.085 Wong, C., Odom, S. L., Hume, K. A., Cox, A. W., Fettig, A., Kucharczyk, S., . . . Schultz, T. R. (2015). Evidence-based practices for children, youth, and young adults with autism spectrum disorder: A comprehensive review. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 45(7), 1951–1966. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2351-z

Autism

and

Neurodiversity

The neurodiversity perspective can be described as a movement that sees neurocognitive variation as a difference rather than a deficit. Although the neurodiversity movement is frequently associated with autism, it is also supported by advocates with other disabilities such as dyslexia, epilepsy, hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, developmental dyspraxia, and Tourette’s syndrome. Autistic individuals who embrace the neurodiversity movement emphasize the importance of self-advocacy and of seeing autism as a culture with unique characteristics and many positive aspects. Autism can be defined as a developmental disorder that results in communication and social impairments or, alternatively, as a natural variation in cognition associated with high intelligence, enhanced memory capabilities, and strong pattern

processing. Autism and the neurodiversity movement, which has grown exponentially since the 1990s, continue to inform contemporary debates about childhood, disability, education, and therapy. This entry explores how autism and neurodiversity have each been understood, identifies various organizations associated with autism and neurodiversity, and presents some common critiques of the neurodiversity movement.

Autism In addition to impairments in social and communication capabilities, autism is frequently associated with difficulties in sensory processing, imaginative capabilities, or intellectual disabilities. Autism was referenced in 1943 by psychiatrist Leo Kanner, who described it as an insistence on sameness (i.e., obsession with routine), difficulties with communication, and preferences for being alone. Around the same time, pediatrician Johann “Hans” Asperger differentiated “Asperger’s syndrome” from autism as a separate condition that did not involve intellectual or language impediments. Asperger adopted the term autism from a German lecture about child psychology, borrowing from Eugen Bleuler’s term autistic psychopaths; however, recognition of a spectrum of autism (or of Asperger’s syndrome as a separate diagnosis) did not receive widespread appeal until closer to the 1980s. Much of the research related to autism and Asperger’s syndrome throughout the 1940s promoted the idea that such conditions were caused by “refrigerator mothers” who were emotionally distant from their children. Such theories continued through the 1960s, with intellectuals such as Bruno Bettlelheim expanding them to blame absent or weak fathers as well. Such theories have been widely discredited. In 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) differentiated autism from child schizophrenia. Moreover, autism and Asperger’s were presented as conditions on a spectrum (autism spectrum disorder, or ASD) by psychiatrist Lorna Wing in the early 1990s. In addition to Asperger’s syndrome, autism has sometimes been placed on a spectrum with, or associated with, Rhett syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental

Autism and Neurodiversity

disorder (PDD) not otherwise specified. Autistic self-advocacy grew exponentially in the 1990s, due to the expansion of the Internet, which allowed autistic people the chance to work remotely and develop more extensive support networks with each other. In recent years, more attention has been given to how gender and race can affect either the expression or experience of ASD. Considerable time and energy have been spent on determining the “causes” of autism, a topic that remains controversial. Some say autism is a predominately genetic condition, and research into the hereditary aspects of autism continues to be a hot topic, particularly twin studies or sibling studies, although it is unclear which genes may or may not be linked to autism. Environmental influences such as diet, exposure to heavy metals or toxins, or chemicals in plastics have all been addressed in debates about the causes of ASD. Immunizations have also been critiqued for leading to increased rates of autism, although in recent years critics have debunked this claim, referring to research that shows no association between vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella and autism. Autism can also be viewed as a “culture.” Autistic self-advocates often argue that autistic individuals have their own unique styles of body language, communication, and eye contact. In this way, they argue, autistic communities can be viewed as cultures in much the same way that deafness is a culture (in that Deaf communities have particular social beliefs, behaviors, historical traditions, and values). One focus of autistic advocates has been critiquing nonprofits and other organizations centered on autism but led by neurotypical individuals who do not take the voices of autistic individuals into consideration when developing marketing campaigns, interventions, or policies. For example, self-advocates have critiqued Autism Speaks, a U.S. advocacy organization, for being too focused on “cures.” This organization, critics say, emphasizes that autism is a burden or tragedy to be eliminated and erroneously promotes the idea that autism is linked to immunization. Finally, critics point out that Autism Speaks has few autistic individuals in leadership positions and unethically allocates a large portion of its funding to compensate senior leadership rather than allocating that money toward providing supports and resources for autistic individuals.

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In contrast, other organizations have been praised for adopting more progressive approaches toward autism advocacy. The Autistic Self-­ Advocacy Network, for instance, is run by autistic individuals and emphasizes community organizing. It also works at changing society’s attitudes toward autism and related conditions such as Asperger’s Syndrome. Rather than emphasizing finding a cure for autism, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network focuses on employment initiatives and public policy reforms for autistic youth and adults. It also promotes the idea that stimming (self-stimulatory behaviors such as rocking or hand flapping) and differences in sensory processing preferences are variations on a spectrum of normal human responses and behaviors.

Neurodiversity The term neurodiversity is often said to have been coined by Judy Singer, a sociologist. Reference to the term first appeared in The Atlantic in an article written by journalist Harvey Blume in 1998. Blume predicted that the Internet would help popularize the term, which it did, with numerous blogs making reference to the term throughout the 1990s (such as Autistics.org, Neurodiversity.com, Left Brain/Right Brain, the Autism Acceptance Project, and the Joy of Autism). The term gained traction within journalism as well, appearing in Amy Harmon’s 2004 New York Times article “Neurodiversity Forever: The Disability Movement Turns to Brains,” and Andrew Solomon’s 2008 article “The Autism Rights Movement” in New York Magazine. Individuals who identify with the label “neurodiverse” often distinguish themselves from those who are “neurotypical.” Neurodiverse activists often prefer “identity-first” language, such as “autistic person” rather than “person with autism”. Such an emphasis draws attention to the belief that neurodiversity is a central aspect of one’s identity to be celebrated rather than a condition that one has. The neurodiversity movement often adopts a “minority” group identity model and stresses the importance of self-advocacy. Wellbeing is given great importance and is privileged over the ability to function in a “typical” manner. The neurodiversity movement is also often opposed to interventions and practices that attempt to make neurodiverse individuals seem

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Autonomy

more “normal.” For instance, applied behavior analysis has been critiqued by those within autistic communities for using forceful strategies with goals of making autistic children behave in a way that is more palatable for nonautistic adults. Such activists point out that autistic behavior labeled as “inappropriate” can be seen as normal coping behaviors (i.e., stimming, avoiding eye contact, performing repetitive body movements, etc.). The neurodiversity movement often adopts a social model approach to disability rather than a medical model approach. The medical model sees disabilities as a deficit to be corrected in the ­individual or adopts a charity–pity approach to disability. Rather than focusing on removing ­barriers to disabled individuals in society, it asks the disabled individuals to change or adapt to able-­bodied or neurotypical norms. In this view, disability is often seen as a burden or a tragedy. In the social model, disabilities are seen as being caused by the way society is organized rather than by something that is inherently flawed in the individual. Rather than focusing interventions on changing disabled or neurodiverse individuals, the emphasis is on revising social stigmas, architectural designs, and institutional systems. In the social model, impairments or limitations in abilities can exist, but they are not necessarily viewed as disabling in and of themselves (since disabilities are seen as added disadvantages created by societies in which impairments are thought to be abnormal). Eva Lupold See also Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); Autism, Child Development, and Theory; Disabilities; Disability Studies in Education; Education, Inclusive; Special Education

Further Readings Baker, D. L. (2011). The politics of neurodiversity: Why public policy matters. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Cascio, M. A. (2015). Cross-cultural autism studies, neurodiversity, and conceptualizations of autism. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 39, 207–212. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11013-015-9450-y Doja, A., & Roberts, W. (2006). Immunizations and autism: A review of the literature. Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, 33(4), 341–346. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/S031716710000528X

Fenton, A., & Krahn, T. (2007). Autism, neurodiversity, and equality beyond the “normal.” Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, 2(2), 1–6. Kapp, S. K., Gillespie-Lynch, K., Sherman, L. E., & Hutman, T. (2013). Deficit, difference, or both? Autism and neurodiversity. Developmental psychology, 49(1), 59–71. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ a0028353 Savarese, E. T., & Savarese, R. J. (2010). Autism and the concept of neurodiversity. Disability Studies Quarterly, 30(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq .v30i1 Silberman, S. (2015). Neurotribes: The legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity. New York, NY: Penguin.

Autonomy Autonomy refers to a state of independence, selfgovernance, or self-determination. The extent to which children experience autonomy is influenced by both the internalization of social rules norms and values and intrinsic motivation. Autonomy in childhood is best understood in terms of the child’s self-determination within the bounds of what is considered to be contextually appropriate behavior. This entry provides an overview of autonomy as conceptualized by various interdisciplinary perspectives that inform childhood studies.

Dominant and Critical Perspectives In fields such as education, childhood tends to be viewed as a preparatory state. In this perspective, acquiring the proper knowledge and skills allows the child to gradually and consistently progress toward becoming an adult, whereas self-directed, self-interested autonomy is reserved for adulthood. The view that childhood is rife with deficiencies influences policies and practices and organizes numerous aspects of children’s social lives, from familial and peer relations to participation in public institutions such as schooling and the justice system. Critics of the preparatory or deficiency paradigms of childhood, including child’s rights advocates and scholars situated within the field of childhood studies, understand children as beings

Autonomy

already worthy of rights, agency, and autonomy. Critics of developmentally appropriate pedagogy applied in global contexts underscore issues that arise when constructs of autonomy based on contextually specific behavior codes or expectations for early child development become codified into curriculum, subjecting children to universal standards independent of cultural context.

Normative and Legal Aspects In academic fields such as moral and political philosophy, normative principles and characteristics of autonomy are subject to rigorous debate and analysis, especially where constraints on autonomy are in tension with extant notions of freedom, liberty, and individual choice. In a legal sense, autonomy is a condition for being held accountable for one’s actions. Autonomy implies choosing freely among a range of available actions, with full understanding of the consequences of those actions. Applied to children, a contextually defined legal responsibility for behavior is directly tied to universal understandings of cognitive, social, and emotional development. Autonomy in childhood is of interest to advocacy groups such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children working internationally on issues involving children’s rights as well as in more localized contexts in professional fields concerned with children’s health, growth, and development such as education, psychology, social work, and medicine.

Shifts in Historical and Ideological Perspectives on Childhood Autonomy The meaning of child autonomy depends on how childhood is understood within particular historical and cultural contexts. For example, before compulsory schooling laws existed in the United States, children labored alongside adults. When deemed no longer useful due to mass immigration and industrialization, childhood was reenvisioned as a special state of purity that required protection from the corrupting influences of modern society, with public education training and assimilating children for the workforce and societal roles. This shift provides but one illustration of contextual understandings of childhood and autonomy.

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Gathering young people en masse into the school system encouraged generational isolation, which led to confusion over whether youths should be considered a protected class or a feared other. Even in progressive circles of advocates for children’s rights, tensions exist between the desire to protect children from harm and the desire to encourage levels of autonomy viewed as contextually appropriate behavior.

Behavioral Elements of Autonomy Curriculum and policy provide top-down approaches to developing children’s autonomy. Some early childhood developmentalists integrate elements of autonomy into social–emotional developmental stages. Indicators of autonomy are understood as related to the child’s executive function, drawing on working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory (impulse) control. School curricula further codify autonomy into dispositional behaviors and learning goals. As early as prekindergarten, children are expected to demonstrate self-directed learning through self-regulation, selfmotivation, and the ability to set and monitor their own goals. Goals for autonomy include making appropriate choices, identifying and controlling feelings, and demonstrating self-confidence. Child autonomy is a concept central to organizing the policies and practices of schooling, where learning to perform behaviors associated with autonomy are institutionalized, sanctioned, and tied to learning outcomes of the official curriculum. Curriculum guides on developing child autonomy provide teachers with strategies for teaching responsibilities and holding children accountable for classroom-based jobs such as taking attendance and monitoring classroom litter. Children are expected to be independent but also to behave in a manner that adheres to expectations of a classroom community.

Cultural Contexts: School and Home The extent to which children can be self-­determining in the home and at school is controlled by adults. Parents and caregivers act as socializing agents in a child’s home and family life, and teachers later socialize children in school. A parent or teacher socializes a child to make autonomous decisions

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that are constructed as good or right in the cultural context. Child developmentalists suggest that children learn to make good choices when adults allow them to take controlled risks within set boundaries. Adults develop children’s autonomy by presenting them with appropriate choices; children demonstrate their autonomy by choosing from the selection of appropriate choices. Research suggests that when home expectations for autonomy are similar to those at school, children are likely to be more academically successful. However, the ways in which parents and teachers socialize children to specific behaviors can differ greatly, and home-based values and behavioral norms can conflict with school behavioral expectations. At home, a caregiver may give a direct command to a child to indicate inappropriate behavior, such as “Jack, sit down now,” whereas at school, a teacher may use indirect language to achieve the same goal: “Jack, would you like to take a seat?” Likewise, at home, cooperating (or interdependence) to complete a project may be greatly valued, whereas at school, independence in test taking or project completion is expected.

Child-Centered Approach to School-Based Autonomy The centering of autonomy as an educational directive of early schooling can in large part be viewed as a development of a more general worry about the nature of freedom and its relationship to education. That autonomy should not simply be a product of schooling but part of the process of schooling is a position shared by theorists in the humanist and progressive educational traditions such as John Dewey. Dewey and other theorists hold that autonomy requires that schooling not only be child centered but that children will be able to understand the relevance of the curriculum to their own lives. Autonomy should be not only the product of schooling but part of the process. Autonomy is

viewed as a necessary condition for human excellence, a notion of personhood that requires that schooling be child-centered, and the learner’s way of thinking respected. Policies and curricula that recognize and bridge home-based and school-based concepts of autonomy could provide structures and supports that allow children to develop school-valued autonomy in culturally sustaining ways. Leslee J. Grey See also Agency; Children’s Rights; Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP); Dewey, John; Early Childhood Education; Schooling

Further Readings Castle, K. (2004). The meaning of autonomy in early childhood teacher education. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 25(1), 3–10. doi:10.1080/1090102040250103 Cote-Lecaldare, M., Joussemet, M., & Dufour, S. (2016). How to support toddlers’ autonomy: A qualitative study with child care educators. Early Education and Development, 27, 822–840. doi:10.1080/10409289.2 016.1148482 Dewey, J. (1959). The child and the curriculum (No. 5). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fröbel, F. (1904). Pedagogics of the kindergarten: Or his ideas concerning the play and playthings of the child (J. Jarvis, Trans. Vol. 30). New York, NY: D. Appleton. Hammersley, M. (2017). Childhood studies: A sustainable paradigm? Childhood, 24(1), 113–127. doi:10.1177/0907568216631399 Lubeck, S. (1998). Is DAP for everyone? Childhood Education, 74, 283–292. doi:10.1080/00094056.1998 .10521954 New York City Department of Education. (2017). Tools of autonomy in a Pre-K for all classroom. Retrieved from https://infohub.nyced.org/docs/default-source/ default-document-library/tools-of-autonomy-pre-k .pdf?sfvrsn=7c330056_2

B Babies’ Rights The idea of babies having rights is seen by many as unnecessary or worrying. Babies, it is thought, need care but not rights, which belong to rational, moral persons. Rights are too formal. They could set babies into harmful opposition with their ­caretakers, such as if social workers cite “babies’ rights” as an excuse to remove babies from their loving parents. This entry discusses two important reasons for taking babies’ rights seriously—­ practical and theoretical.

Practical Considerations One practical purpose of rights is to defend the vulnerable, and babies are the most vulnerable of all people. Many babies live in great danger: refugee families escaping from war, floods, or famine; migrants parched with thirst and burned by sun in small boats on the Mediterranean leaking engine fuel; babies born to young girls who live on the streets or who serve in rebel armies. Babies are overrepresented among the poorest families everywhere: those who lack enough healthy food and who live in damp, cold housing or in baking slums without clean water or rubbish collections. Of all the age groups, babies are at the highest risk. Their small, fragile bodies are most easily damaged, deformed, or destroyed. For example, it is estimated that each year up to half a million young children become permanently blind for lack of Vitamin A. Babies have least resistance to 91

infections, which they can pick up from vermin and when they suck dirty objects or crawl on the ground. Although the global death rate of children under 5 years of age was halved between 1990 to 2015, an estimated 2.9 million neonatal deaths still occur each year (from birth to 1-month-old), and another 2.6 million babies are stillborn. Most of these deaths could be prevented by better health care, but care is not enough. Babies also need rights, as powerful practical remedies for wrongs. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) not only clearly states children’s rights but also sets a global system of governments ratifying the UNCRC. They thereby undertake to implement the rights, to report regularly to the UN on their progress, and to receive praising or critical reports from the UN. All countries except the United States have ratified the UNCRC, and many have active NGOs and other agencies that pressure their governments to honour children’s rights. This is a slow, rather weak political process, but it is better than nothing. Great changes have been achieved, and awareness is gradually being raised. The rights enshrined in the UNCRC involve babies. Babies’ rights to life, a name, and a nationality enable their governments to recognise them as citizens with rights to state services and supports. Babies have provision rights to basic care necessary for their well-being, to health care, clean drinking water, nutritious food, and an “adequate standard of living.” Babies share all the protection rights, including protection from abuse and neglect; torture, “cruel,

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inhuman, or degrading treatment”; and invasion into their family life and their privacy. Privacy rights should, for example, stop governments from searching records about babies, held by charities and health services, to find immigrants and deport them. All children have equal rights against discrimination and exploitation, sexual abuse, and the sale or traffic of children. Yet do babies have the so-called participation or civil rights? Some argue that as soon as babies take part in cultural life and the arts—for instance, by being wrapped in a shawl or hearing a ­lullaby—and when they begin to take part in their religion by being welcomed into their church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, they are participating in social–civil life. To belong to those or other welcoming communities, the whole family needs to enjoy freedoms of expression and information; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of association and peaceful assembly; and freedom from discrimination, with respect for the child’s cultural background. When rights are seriously denied, the whole family needs the civil right to due legal process. UNCRC Article 12 states, The child who is capable of forming his or her own views [has] the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Here, premature babies are developed and “mature” enough to form and express views about when they are hungry, tired, contented, or afraid. Adults can care well for them only when they listen to babies’ views, clearly expressed through their cries and body language. Babies are healthier when their parents have rights to education and information and when the state respects and supports the family in practical ways explained through the UNCRC, reflecting the complex range of babies’ basic needs.

Theoretical Considerations The second important reason for taking babies’ rights seriously is theoretical. John Tobin contends that the UNCRC is undertheorised, so thinking about the profound questions that babies’ rights

raise can help bring clarity. Can newborn babies count as human beings with human rights? The UNCRC Preamble states that “recognition of the  inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” which raises the question: How can babies take part in this morality? Rights are partly justified in their ancient religious and spiritual origins that respect the sanctity or dignity of human beings. Two main modern ways to justify human rights are in how they respect (a) the person’s human interests or needs (babies can be included) and (b) the dignity and worth of the moral person, extended by philosophers to mean individuals who respect others and make rational choices. Some philosophers exclude all children, although many adults are disrespectful and irrational and many children are respectful and rational. And if rights apply only from 12, 16, or 18 years onwards, can they really be “human rights”? Yet do babies have the “inherent [inborn] dignity and worth of the human person”? Babies appear to have inherent moral dignity or awareness long before they can be taught about it verbally. When babies from 3-months-old watched puppetlike shapes, some being helpful and others unhelpful, they showed attention and surprise that seemed to judge the goodness or badness of the puppets’ actions. By 6 to 10 months old, Paul Bloom found, they showed a rudimentary sense of justice; babies reached for the helper puppet more often than the hinderer puppet. From birth, they seem to be highly aware of the quality of human relationships. Emese Nagy found that if researchers looked at babies aged only 2 hours old with a rigid passive face, the babies became distressed, averted their gaze, and eventually started crying, though they calmed down when the researcher started smiling. If this happened a second time, babies gazed at the researcher and tried to make contact for longer before getting upset. The babies recovered more quickly when the researcher smiled again, as if they had learned from the first time and were trying to have more control over the contact. Christian Smith identified 30 human characteristics, including consciousness, deep feelings, volition or will, forming interests, attending to others subjectively and

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intensely, making and communicating meanings, and love. Babies seem to begin to engage with these in their early weeks. Priscilla Alderson, in her article “International Human Rights, Citizenship Education, and Critical Realism,” notes that lawyer Conor Gearty believes human rights are ever more important as “the ethical architecture necessary to decent everyday life” and “the only contemporary idea with true universal and progressive appeal” in the present “post-religious haze of market supremacy” when profit rules. Rights respect everyone’s dignity through structures of accountability, equity, an independent rule of law, and a framework for working towards greater justice between rich and poor individuals and states. (p. 6)

So respecting babies’ rights and helping them learn to honour everyone’s equal rights are vital ways of promoting peace and justice in the world. Priscilla Alderson See also Baby, Social Construction of; Infantalization; Moral Development, Cultural–Developmental Perspective; Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC

Further Readings Alderson, P. (2008). Young children’s rights. London, United Kingdom: Jessica Kingsley/ Save the Children. Alderson, P. (2013). Childhoods real and imagined. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Alderson, P. (2016). International human rights, citizenship education, and critical realism. London Review of Education, 14(3), 1–12. https://dx. doi .org/10.18546/LRE.14.3.01 Alderson, P., Killen, M., & Hawthorne, J. (2005). The participation rights of premature babies. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 13, 31–50. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/1571818054545231 Bloom, P. (2014). Just babies: The origins of good and evil. New York, NY: Broadway Books. Nagy, E. (2017, August 4). Newborn baby development has been vastly underestimated, our study shows. The Conversation. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com/ newborn-baby-development-has-been-vastlyunderestimated-our-study-shows-81972

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Smith, C. (2011). What is a person. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tobin, J. (2013). Justifying children’s rights. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 21(3), 395–441. https:// doi.org/10.1163/15718182-02103004 United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. Treaty Series, 1577, 3. Retrieved from http://www .ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx

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Childhood studies have greatly increased our understanding of childhood by showing how it is not simply a biological stage. Childhood is also socially constructed as sets of beliefs and behaviours about what children and child–adult relations are or ought to be like, with many complex varieties of constructed childhoods in different times and places. This entry examines babies’ status as social beings, psychoanalytic and psychological perspectives on babies’ social status, and babies’ active role as social constructors.

Babies as Social Beings The social construction of the baby might not seem possible if babies are simply biological, presocial beings, perhaps the same anywhere and in any culture? Social constructions involving hermeneutics (interpretations) include adults and children constructing, reinforcing, or resisting their roles in dyads, such as provider adult and needy child, rescuing adult and victim child, punitive adult and naughty child, or respectful adult and resourceful child. The roles can take on their own momentum and become self-fulfilling prophecies and norms that are hard to evade. Ways in which babies are socially constructed, their active part in the processes, and some limitations of social construction theory will be considered. Vast social constructions and expectations are projected before birth onto babies as heirs to their cultural, financial, and genetic inheritance. Former ideas of parents’ more or less resigned unconditional acceptance of God-given children are being replaced by the morality of active cost-effective parental choice, with dreams of designer babies,

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and abortion of substandard foetuses. In India, China, and elsewhere, not only are very many fewer girls than boys being born following m ­ illions of elective foeticides, but girls are also far more likely to die or be abandoned during infancy than their brothers. Boys are seen as more able to increase a family’s wealth or reduce its poverty and to support the parents in future. In vitro fertilisation and surrogate pregnancy programmes are just two examples across the world of wealthier parents’ efforts to have a child who is their own genetic heir. An adopted child would seem not to fulfil their social construct of the dream baby, which is so largely shaped today by advertising and commercial pressures. Since the 4th century CE, paintings of the Infant Christ have suggested how babyhood has been idealised as a time of innocence and hope. Christina Hardyment analysed advice in childcare manuals over 5 centuries, showing that baby care is influenced in one direction by loving, trusting, mutually rewarding adult–baby relationships, and in another by adults’ mistrustful need to control the volatile baby with strict to cruel routines. Over the centuries, wild swings in fashionable advice exhorting either harsh or indulgent parenting reveal how normative beliefs about baby–adult relationships are far from fixed or inevitable, though much expert advice is propaganda rather than description of actual average baby care.

Psychoanalytic and Psychology Perspectives Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, theorised a split three-tiered concept of being human, with the ego constantly constructing an identity influenced by nature in the impulsive, narcissistic, baby-like id, and by culture and civilisation in the adult-like superego. Freud also set the conscious rational self apart from the little-known powerful subconscious, and his psychoanalytic talking therapy concentrated on verbalising subconscious fantasies linked to adults’ concepts of their babyhood. Freud’s concern with his patients’ deep fantasies, rather than with any reality about what might actually have happened to them as babies, inspired constructionist/interpretivist social theory developed by the Frankfurt School, as Anthony Elliott

has analysed. Frankfurt School members explored how the divided, alienated self, living through the turbulent 20th century, is constructed through language, and they stressed personal narratives, accounts, and interpretations. Anna Freud and Melanie Klein adapted ­Freudian analysis to treat disturbed young children, and they emphasised the mother–baby ­relationship as central to the child’s mental health, though they too concentrated on children’s unconscious fantasies. John Bowlby, however, wanted to offer more practical policy-related evidence of ways to support children, based on their real experiences and needs, not their fantasies. His research with very disturbed children identified a major cause of their distress as maternal deprivation: They could not form a secure attachment to their mother or they had lost contact with their mother over long periods during their first 5 years. In the mid-20th century, most professionals belonged to social classes that saw little of their own children and relied on servants to care for them, and they ­dismissed the idea that young children have any conscious awareness. Bowlby searched for scientific evidence to support his theory, including experiments with monkeys to demonstrate primate babies’ innate predisposition to interact intensely with their mothers. Gradually, his view of sensitive interacting babies became more accepted by the professions. Ben Bradley’s Visions of Infancy examined how leading researchers of human babies, from Darwin onwards, relied on animal studies to give scientific credibility to their work. Bradley showed how the researchers’ theories, methods, and personal biographies wove elaborate social constructions ­ about the babies they believed they were studying objectively. Bradley thought they were working less on the natural science of babyhood and more on interpretive social theories and policies. Erica Burman has also analysed how the supposed ­ ­scientific discipline of developmental psychology is complicated by social constructionism. Since around the 1970s, psychologists have moved on from constructing babyhood as a time of helpless unreason and overwhelming passion and babies as empty slates waiting to be inscribed by adults. Research studies of newborn and older babies have been aided by analysis, by the microsecond, of videos of babies’ gaze, their attention

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and surprise during interactions, in order to analyse their complex thinking. Alison Gopnik summarised today’s respectful social construction of babies who, from the start, ‘think like scientists’ using much innate knowledge and advanced learning skills. Well before anyone can explain these ideas to them in words, babies independently make sense of the world (including time, space, myself and others, moral beginnings of care and justice, that words have meaning and are not just noises). Babies may be cleverer, more thoughtful, and more consciously aware than adults are, Gopnik concluded.

Babies’ Influence on Parents and Families Babies are also active social constructors. They turn a couple into a family with a long-term future, and they transform their relatives into parents, siblings, cousins, and grandparents. The social study of babies relates to profound questions about human nature. For example, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman pondering the evil of the Holocaust questioned whether human morality is wholly taught, acquired, and socially constructed. A dominant theory is that people are born pre-moral or amoral, and often with great difficulty and goaded by incentives and punishments, people become moral agents by learning the rules that define what is ‘wrong’. Bauman and others questioned the origins of such a morality, asking how and why it was invented if it seems so synthetic, so hard to learn, and so counter to human nature. They favoured a view of moral awareness of justice and care as an authentic part of (adult) human nature, which is physical, social, and moral, when individuals’ conscience determines what is wrong and a brave minority protest and break unjust rules, for example, against the Nazi regime. Recent research on babies’ seemingly innate moral awareness appears to confirm Bauman’s view. The philosopher Mary Midgley traced the gradual loss of belief that each separate embodied self actually exists, back to Plato’s view that reality exists in abstract forms but not in the material natural world. Through the millennia, Plato’s abstractions were developed towards current ideas advanced by some social constructionists that the human self is wholly socially constructed,

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assembled, and performed. It is too transient, diffuse, malleable, and changeable to have a lasting identity. Midgley refutes these theories by saying they are incompatible with the everyday realities people rely on when they have to assume that each embodied human individual has a unique lifelong identity. This may change over time but nevertheless, it also endures as a distinct self. Disbelief in a lifelong self is supported by theories that babies have not yet acquired or co-constructed an individual self. However, new social scientific understanding of the newborn baby as a complex unique personality (which many of their carers probably always knew) supports Midgley’s view. Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014), a British philosopher, also aimed to resolve illogical contradictions between abstract theories and the everyday realities that theorists have to rely on. (For instance, though claiming that all knowledge can only be understood in its local context, they write books and emails for international readers.) Bhaskar criticised social constructionism that recognises reality only at the ‘empirical level’ of our perceptions and interpretations. This is a crucial level, but reality also exists at the ‘actual level’ of the things, events, relations, and structures people’s experiences. Most vitality, the third ‘real level’ of unseen causal mechanisms includes driving human desires for love, justice, and knowledge, which babies share. Priscilla Alderson See also Babies’ Rights; Freud, Anna; Freud, Sigmund; In Vitro Fertilization (IVF); Klein, Melanie; Moral Development, Cultural-Developmental Perspective; Participation, Protection and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Alderson, P. (2013). Childhoods real and imagined. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (2003). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Bhaskar, R. (1998). The possibility of naturalism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Bradley, B. (1992). Visions of infancy. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Elliott, A. (2013). Concepts of the self. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Gopnik, A. (2010). The philosophical baby: What children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. London, UK: Picador. Hardyment, C. (2007). Dream babies: Childcare from Locke to Spock. London, UK: Frances Lincoln. Midgley, M. (2014). Are you an illusion? Durham, UK: Acumen.

Baby Farms Baby farms designate both private homes that accepted informally boarded out infants for a fee—a practice that proliferated in many industrialized cities around 1900—and the criminal practice of murdering infants for profit. Typically, children in the care of baby farmers, criminal or not, were born out of wedlock, and their unmarried mothers faced the dual dilemma of earning a living while simultaneously finding childcare for their infants and escaping the shame of illegitimacy. The baby farmers themselves were usually poor working-class foster mothers or midwives running private laying-in establishments where unmarried mothers could deliver in secrecy. Ultimately, baby farms raise many issues including concerns about the stigmatization associated with illegitimacy, high mortality rates among illegitimate infants, lack of childcare facilities, and women’s work. These are all matters that have a profound impact on children’s lives and shape notions of children and childhood. This entry first examines international concerns about infant mortality. It further discusses how baby farms are represented in the media, legal controversies over baby farms, and their decline.

International Concern Over High Infant Mortality The exact origin of the term is unknown, but baby farming was simultaneously problematized during the last decades of the 19th century in countries such as Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. In Sweden, the phenomenon was

labeled by the foster care industry, indicating a widespread and profitable practice of private boarding out, which similarly to the concept of a baby farm had connotations of economic activities that were at odds with the romantic ideal of women’s vocation to nurture and care for ­children—the baby farmers did it for money. In Melbourne, Australia, private lying-in establishments were clustered around hospitals, but many illegitimate children died in foster homes in those areas, indicating a chain of baby farming in which newborn infants were transferred from the lyingin institutions to foster homes. In several countries, concerns about baby farms were addressed by male medical doctors. In ­England, the term baby farming first appeared in an 1867 issue of the British Medical Journal as an explanation for infant mortality rates being twice as high among illegitimate children. In Sweden, a medical doctor chaired an investigation demonstrating in 1894 that boarded out infants, predominantly illegitimate, had a mortality rate 3 times higher than that of other infants. In cities, 44% of boarded out infants died before reaching the age of 1 year. While plausible explanations for these alarming figures could be found in the difficulty of affording high-quality pasteurized milk as a substitute for breast milk, and poor and overcrowded housing where diseases could spread, the male experts accused female carers of willful neglect, incapacity, and in extreme cases, of murdering babies for profit. Consequently, the distinction between infanticide and infant mortality caused by structural factors became blurred in the pejorative term baby farmer.

Baby Farming and the Media Even though cases of criminal baby farming were not numerous, they were highlighted in the media and fueled the political debate about baby farming. In 1870, Margaret Waters—a London widow—was convicted for the murder of one infant but was suspected of murdering an additional 4–18 unwanted babies she had adopted for a fee by advertising in newspapers. Cheap advertising facilitated the exchange of children between strangers, and both foster carers and mothers who were seeking someone to take in their children advertised in newspapers. Waters was said to have

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neglected the infants so badly that they died in her care. She was the first woman in England to be hanged for crimes related to baby farming. Across the world, newspapers depicted the female foster mother or midwife as monstrous. However, in several criminal cases, men were also involved in baby farming. Taking in other people’s unwanted babies was a quick way to raise cash for poor people who could not get a bank loan.

Legal Consequences In the wake of the Waters trial, social reformers mobilized and, subsequently, The Infant Life Protection Act was passed in the United Kingdom in 1872. This act required any paid foster carer of more than one infant to register with the local authorities for regular inspection. Similar acts were introduced in many jurisdictions, including France in 1874; Pennsylvania, United States, in 1885; Denmark in 1888; Victoria, Australia, in 1890; and Sweden in 1902. These acts have been described as the first legislation by which states protected their infant citizens—a backdrop to the child rights charters to come. But it was also a means for the state to control female informal work. As Johanna Sköld and colleagues observe in their 2014 study, in Stockholm, nearly 14,000 foster carers were registered between 1902 and 1925. The majority provided their services without any comment from the authorities, but 9% received a remark, and some were forbidden to have foster children. These early laws have been described as quite unsuccessful in reducing illegitimate infant mortality because they did not target the core problem: the stigmatization of illegitimacy that minimized any public or philanthropic support for unmarried mothers.

The Decline The moral panic around baby farming gradually declined after the First World War. This decline has been associated with increased regulation and supervision, making large-scale foster care difficult to operate, changing work opportunities for women rendering foster care a less attractive source of income, and an increased willingness from the wealthier classes to adopt illegitimate children. Moreover, welfare reforms securing

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single mothers’ financial stability alongside the expansion of childcare facilities have proved important for illegitimate children’s chances to reside with their birth family instead of being farmed out to other people. Johanna Sköld See also Adoption, History of; Childcare; Foster Care, U.S.

Further Readings Broder, S. (1988). Child care or child neglect? Baby farming in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Gender & Society, 2, 128–148. doi:10.1177/089124388002002002 Grey, D. (2009). ‘More ignorant and stupid than wilfully cruel’: Homicide trials and ‘baby-farming’ in England and Wales in the wake of the Children Act 1908. Crimes and Misdemeanours, 3, 60–77. Homrighaus, R. E. (2010). Baby farming: The care of illegitimate children in England 1860–1943 (Rev. ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Sköld, J. (2006). Fosterbarnsindustri eller människokärlek [Foster care industry or humanistic compassion]. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University. Sköld, J., Söderlind, I., & Bergman, A.-S. (2014). Fosterbarn i tid och rum: lokal och regional variation i svensk fosterbarnsvård ca 1850–2000 [Foster children in time and space: Geographical variation within Swedish foster care 1850–2000]. Stockholm, Sweden: Carlsson. Swain, S. (2005). Towards a cultural geography of baby farming. History of the Family, 10, 151–159.

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This entry discusses the rise and decline of babysitting—providing temporary childcare for pay, typically while the parents are away from home—as a source of income for American girls and a source of convenience and irritation for the parents who hire them. For more than a century, the job that has been the gateway to employment for young people, especially girls, has been shaped by broad historical forces, from shifting demographics and economics to changing child-rearing ideals and competing notions of girlhood. Babysitting has

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been long characterized by much fluctuation and mutual frustration, and the trope of the White, middle-class babysitter has served as a lightning rod for cultural anxieties about the threat that gender and generational changes pose to the social order.

The Rise of Babysitting and Girls’ Culture Although the term babysitting had yet to be coined, the origins of babysitting as the primary form of part-time employment for adolescent girls dates to the 1920s, when increasing prosperity, leisure, and suburbanization gave rise to parents’ need for someone to take charge of the children while they went out for the night. Whereas household servants had taken care of the children while also maintaining the household, improving employment opportunities for working-class and African American women had diminished their availability generally and especially so in the new suburban communities. The so-called servant problem led middle-class parents (principally mothers) to turn to an expanding population of high school girls to “mind the children,” as it was often referred to at the time. Colliding with the new child-centered principles of parents with rising expectations of caregivers were pleasure-seeking teenage girls challenging traditional gender ideals. The Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 weakened the demand for babysitters among parents who cut back on ­entertaining and put off having children. At the same time, the sharp economic downturn increased the need for money among teenagers who ­experienced the highest levels of unemployment at a time when a flourishing youth culture spread in American high schools that institutionalized adolescence. Toward the end of the 1930s, the ­ modest economic recovery led more parents to hire babysitters. Although the term babysitters was new, old complaints about girls’ teen culture persisted, in contrast to boy babysitters who were extolled for their sincerity, diligence, and responsibility. Depression-era babysitting manuals sought to convey the concerns of parents who employed babysitters to care for their children. Babysitting guides and instruction addressed girls’ desire for

greater autonomy while affirming the importance of femininity, domesticity, and maternity. Babysitters, overworked and underpaid during the Great Depression, increasingly turned their backs on parents, especially mothers, more desperate than ever for childcare during World War II. The wartime economic expansion that generated new employment opportunities for mothers also affected teenage girls, who preferred to make more money working behind a store counter than caring for kids on the home front. Adults’ fears about the challenging social, sexual, cultural, and economic independence of fun-loving female adolescents led experts to represent babysitting as patriotic service to the nation. Rather than attracting adolescent girls back to babysitting, however, an army of eager elementary school girls flooded the ranks and lowered the age of typical babysitters. Depressed birth rates during the 1930s diminished the supply of teenage babysitters after the war—just as parents brought forth the baby boom. Midcentury prosperity and child-centered family ideals drove parents (especially housewives) to seek out recreational and entertainment opportunities when they could, but the age homogenization in the postwar suburbs inadvertently generated a scarcity of potential babysitters among older Americans: grandparents and even the middle aged. Many suburban parents formed babysitting coops or exchanges in which they minded each other’s children. They also turned to newly founded companies providing babysitters and hired boys praised for their masculine tenderness, strength, and protection. During the 1950s, the expansion of youth culture generally and girls’ culture specifically relentlessly fostered beliefs and behaviors at odds with parents’ expectations of babysitters. Fears that irrepressible and irresponsible girls threw wild parties and necked with boyfriends while babysitting found expression in popular magazines, pulp fiction, and movies. To encourage girls to be less independent and more dependable, after-school and weekend babysitting courses trained reinforced conventional gendered ideals among those expected to marry their high school steady. Some babysitters who felt exploited by the poor working conditions formed a handful of short-lived babysitter unions.

Babysitting, U.S. History of

Boisterous Babysitters and the Redefinition of Girlhood As the swelling population of teenagers in the 1960s brought about profound social transformations, the needs and desires of parents for compliant babysitters collided with the inexorable redefinition of girlhood by baby boomers coming of age. Although new fictional babysitters in the popular culture created by adults both reflected girls’ rebellion and cautioned against it, the consumer market motivated girls to supplement their allowance with babysitting jobs, still their main source of employment. As more women entered the workforce, delaying or sidestepping marriage and motherhood altogether, vixen babysitters representing sexual desire in pulp fiction, pornographic films, and the popular adult imagination expressed anxieties. Increasing urbanization, violence, and alienation fueling fears about the dangers of strangers to children and teenagers spread in the popular culture and by way of urban legends. Although addressed in instructional guides and babysitter courses that continued to increase during the 1970s as the birth rate declined (baby bust), sexually and socially independent teenage babysitters often became victims of murderous villains in slasher and horror movies, such as the 1979 film When a Stranger Calls, based on the urban legend cautionary tale circulating among young people since the early 1960s. During the 1980s, the vilification of teenage girls in popular movies occurred in tandem with the valorization of preadolescent super sitters. Another demographic dip in the adolescent population meant that babysitting jobs once again trickled down to preadolescent girls who were more eager than ever to make money. The development of malls that spread from coast to coast meant many real job opportunities for teenage girls, whereas preadolescents had far fewer sources of income. The emergent emphasis on the empowerment of young girls that soared by the end of the century shifted the notion of the youthful babysitter to more of an entrepreneur than an employee in babysitting instructional guides, courses, and book series The Baby-Sitters’ Club and the 1995 film by the same title. Nevertheless, although the highly

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successful book series that sold more than 176 copies by 2,000 inspired preadolescent readers to follow the lead of Kristy, the fictional founder and president of the BSC, young girls often felt disappointed by the realities of babysitting, dashing their expectations of being a super sitter.

Quitter Sitters and the Decline of Babysitting Although Black, Hispanic, and Irish-American girls in low-income families as well as those in rural Appalachia babysat for younger siblings, cousins, and kin, sometimes missing school to do so, middle-class teenage girls and their preadolescent sisters able to invest in their futures did so in after-school extracurricular activities. Subsequently, parents at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century scrambled to monopolize sitters’ free time and devise alternatives, including employing au pairs and hiring boys, often paid more than girls. Even though Latino boys provided far less childcare for siblings than did their Latina sisters, the male Rottweiler in the Good Dog, Carl, book series, along with other potentially ferocious male creatures in many children’s books of the era, was praised for its outstanding babysitting abilities. Despite century-long portraits of boys as babysitters par excellence, especially in comparison to irresponsible adolescent girls whose sensational crimes of child abuse had long made headline news, academic studies and FBI statistics increasingly demonstrated that boys and men who babysat posed a far greater danger. In the New Millennium, powerful social forces from girl power to the Great Recession continued to disrupt parents’ plans for a trouble-free night out, especially so in the age of helicopter parenting. Pay rates have climbed from the 15 cents per hour in the 1950s to over US $15 per hour on the East and West Coasts, whereas childcare employees received far less. In low-income Hispanic, Black, West Indian, and Hmong immigrant families, daughters’ care of siblings has been regarded as a nonmonetary obligation to the family economy by parents unable to afford a sitter. Hospitals, schools, and organizations such as the Red Cross and YWCA have continued to revise the babysitting basics curriculum to include

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CPR certification for babysitters in training in the digital age. Although the availability of reliable teenage babysitters remained in flux, erotic babysitters, all too eager to please their employers, became still more abundant in copious pornographic fantasies. As for babysitting, it too remains a dynamic vocation and a contested cultural site. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Caregivers, Children as; Care-Work; Child Domestic Work; Childcare; Day Care; Domestic Workers, Children as

Further Readings Dodson, L., & Dickert, J. (2004). Girls’ family labor in low-income households: A decade of qualitative research. Journal of Marriage and Family, 66, 318–332. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2004.00023.x Forman-Brunell, M. (2009). Babysitter: An American history. New York: New York University Press. Margolin, L. (1990). Child abuse by adolescent caregivers. Child Abuse & Neglect, 14, 365–373. doi:10.1016/0145-2134(90)90008-H

Baptism Baptism is the sacrament by which a human being becomes a Christian, usually received in childhood. Its name comes from the Greek ‘βαπτισμα’, and this in turn from the verb ‘βαπτιζειν’, which can be translated, amongst other meanings, as ‘to immerse’, ‘to dip’, ‘to plunge’, or ‘to put into a yielding substance’. It was administered to primitive Christians by the apostles. Adults were typically baptised by immersion in a river or a place full of water. As Christianity spread, baptism was performed on infants and total immersion was no longer required, as the Western Church introduced baptism by affusion (pouring water over the head) or aspersion (sprinkling water) as early as the 12th century. In the Eastern Church, baptism by immersion continued and is practiced today, with children submerged in a baptismal font. Most Christian denominations agree that baptism was instituted by Christ when cited in the bible’s Book of Matthew, Christ is said to have

commanded: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (Mt 28:19). Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans affirm its necessity for salvation, as Christ told Nicodemus, a Pharisee, that man needs to be born anew to enter the Kingdom of God. As cited in the Book of John, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God’ (Jn 3:5). Anabaptists and Evangelicals consider it, on the contrary, a sign of interior repentance rather than a sacrament with salvific power. This entry examines the effects of baptism, its status as a rite, and infant baptisms.

Effects of Baptism For Anglicans, Lutherans, Orthodox, and Catholics, baptism has the effect of washing away the original sin and forgiving all sins committed. It also confers the grace to become an ‘adoptive son’ of God, no longer a creature, but a son with all privileges. In the Catholic Church, baptism makes the receiver a member of the Church, a status that gives the right to receive the sacraments, the preaching of the word of God, and all the spiritual aids of the Church. For Catholics, baptism imprints a grace that remains, even if later the baptised changes religion or even rejects religion entirely. This implies that baptism can only be performed once in life. When faced with the dilemma of whether a former baptism was effected or not (as in the case of foundries), or whether a former baptism was or not valid, conditional baptism may be administered with the words ‘If you are not yet baptised, I baptise you in the name . . . ’ Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and other Protestant churches accept nowadays baptisms within them as valid. Also, Catholics recognise baptisms performed in Orthodox Churches. On the contrary, Baptists and most Evangelical churches practice rebaptism when a Christian of a different denomination enters their congregation.

The Rite of Baptism The two visible elements of baptism are water and the words pronounced by the celebrant. Water appears in the baptism performed by John the

Baptism

Baptist in the Jordan River, which was received by Jesus himself. However, John’s baptism was a symbol of purification and did not have the same elements of Christian baptism. Many Christian churches agree that, for a baptism to be valid, water must be present, either fresh water, salty water, water from a font, pond, or obtained from ice, snow, or hail. The Catholic Church does not admit liquids that cannot be considered water, such as oil, wine, milk, or blood. A curious document from Pope Gregory IX to the bishop of Trondheim, where beer had been used in a baptism, declares this kind of baptism as invalid. The reason why Jesus chose water as the element of baptism is, according to Tertullian, that it is present everywhere, and so that salvation can as well be available to everyone. Water is also, in the narrative of the creation of the world in Genesis (and according to modern biology), the substance from where life came to existence, so it seems logical that spiritual life, as well as biological life, should come from water. Water was indeed present in many passages of the Old Testament, which Christians consider as a prefiguration of baptism. Some include the story of Noah’s ark, when water put an end to sin and a new mankind emerged; the Passover, when the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea and water washed away the enemies of Israel; and the crossing of the Jordan River when the Jewish people entered the Promised Land. The other element of baptism is the form. Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and other Protestant denominations agree that baptism should be given in the name of the three divine persons, as Christ mentioned in the gospels. The Catholic and Anglican formula states, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’. In the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Churches, the formula changes to, ‘The servant of God (name) is baptised in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit’. While these words are pronounced, water is poured 3 times over the infant (in the Catholic rite), or it is submerged 3 times in water (in the Orthodox rite). Baptism is usually performed by an ordained minister, or by a bishop or priest, although in the Catholic Church deacons can also baptise. But in case of necessity, any person (even a non-Christian) can baptise, if he

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intends to do so, that is, to perform what the Church does when baptising. This ‘emergency baptism’ is administered to infants, children, or even adults in danger of death, so as not to prevent them from entering Heaven. The Roman ritual prescribes that baptism can also be performed on foetuses, even before extraction from the womb, provided that water can effectively touch a part of the foetus’s body. For Catholics, in exceptional cases, baptism can also be administered by desire (‘baptismus flaminis’), when a person who wanted to become a Christian, dies before receiving the sacrament, and by blood (‘baptismus sanguinis’), when a person dies of martyrdom for his belief in Christ.

Infant Baptism Circumcision practiced on Jewish infants at the 8th day after birth is the direct antecedent of baptism. Circumcision was a seal of the covenant between God and his people and signalled the admission of the child as a son of Abraham. Jesus himself was circumcised, according to the gospels. More like baptism, at least in form, was proselyte baptism, or purification by water performed, in addition to circumcision, to non-Jew adults ­accepting the Jewish faith. Although written testimonies of proselyte baptism go back to the second half of the 1st century, there are reasons to infer that it was effective since pre-Christian times, especially to Gentile women, who could not be circumcised. Today, the similarity between circumcision and infant baptism makes it easy to believe that early Christians baptised their children as most Christian churches do today. However, infant ­ baptism has been an object of controversy, as there is no ­ specific mention of it in the New ­Testament. Waldensians and Cathars before the Reformation as well as Anabaptists and Baptists after ­Reformation rejected infant baptism. These latter denominations only baptise believing adults, who can repent and express faith. For this reason, believers accepted into their congregations are rebaptised, usually through immersion. Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and other Protestant denominations continue to baptise their children. The practice is justified with reference to passages from the Book of

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Matthew—for example, ‘Let the children come to me’ (Mt 19:14)—and others in the New Testament that imply that infant baptism, although not specifically named, was common in the early Church. Amongst these passages are 1 Cor 1:16 (‘I did baptise also the household of Stephanas’), Acts 16:33 (‘and he was baptised at once, with all his family’), and Acts 18:8 (‘Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with all his household; and many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptised’). Children’s baptisms are well-documented. Hippolytus relates how families accepted in the Roman Church, as early as the beginning of the 2nd century, were baptised in Easter, including children and infants who could not speak. Irenaeus of Lyon around 180 mentions infants and children amongst those reborn in God (‘infantes et parvulos’). Tertullian in ‘De Baptismo’ is the first writer to report that godparents (‘sponsors’) took part in the ceremony, promising to be responsible for the Christian formation of the infants. Indeed, Tertullian recommended to delay baptism until an age in which the promises could be made by children themselves, which Joachim Jeremias cites as a proof that baptism was commonly administered to very young children. A synod held in Carthage around 251–253 opposed the opinion that baptism should be delayed until the 8th day after birth, like Jewish circumcision, and concluded that children should be baptised directly after birth. Some tombs from the 3rd century in Rome mention the child’s age at the time of baptism, such as the tomb of Tyche (1 year and 10 months), Irene (11 months old), or Apronianus (21 months). However, these three children were baptised shortly before death. If these were only emergency baptisms, little could be inferred about the tradition of infant baptism. But other tombs exist: A Greek inscription on the tomb of Zosimus, died 2 years and 1 month old, calls him a ‘believer from believers’, an indication that he was a christened son of Christian parents. Eutichiano, a 1-year-old, is called ‘slave of God’, a predicate that also appears in the tomb of Kyriakos, a ‘holy infant’. By the 4th century, shortly after Constantin granted freedom to Christianity in the Roman Empire, the custom spread of delaying baptism until adulthood, or even until the proximity of

death. Prominent Christians born to Christian families, such as Basil the Great, Ambrose, or John Chrysostom, were baptised as adults. This practice aroused from the desire to enjoy life’s and profit from the forgiveness of sin granted by baptism and coincided with a large number of Pagans entering the Church, but it was over by the end of the century. The recognition that baptised Christians could, and would, in fact, continue sinning, led forgiveness of sins to evolve in the Catholic Church into the sacrament of confession. Baptism is, in many Christian churches, complemented with other ceremonies such as communion and confirmation. In the Catholic Church, these three are considered sacraments of initiation, which lead a child into the fundamentals of a Christian life. In many Orthodox churches, the three sacraments are administered to infants almost simultaneously. In the Anglican and Lutheran churches, Confirmation takes place at an age when youngsters have reason enough to confirm the promises received at baptism. In the Catholic Church nowadays, communion (receiving the body of Christ, also called ‘Eucharist’) is usually done for the first time at 7 or 8 years old, and Confirmation at ‘age of discretion’, which can be as early as 7 years old, but is usually 15 or 16 years old. Juan Francisco Dávila See also Christianity; Religion and Children; Rites of passage

Further Readings Fanning, W. H. (1907). Baptism. In C. G. Herbermann & E. A. Pace (Eds.), Catholic Encyclopedia. New York, NY: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02258b.htm The Holy See. (1993). Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City, Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Jeremias, J. (2004a). Infant baptism in the first four centuries. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Jeremias, J. (2004b). The origins of infant baptism. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Pusey, K. (1984). Jewish proselyte baptism. The Expository Times, 95(5), 141–145. doi:10.1177/ 001452468409500505 Ratzinger, J. (2004). Introduction to Christianity. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press.

Barbie Doll Schnabel, E. (2011). The meaning of “baptizein” in Greek, Jewish, and Patristic literature. Filología Neotestamentaria, 24(44), 3–40. Tertullian. (2015). On baptism. Retrieved from https:// www.amazon.com/Baptism-Tertullian-ebook/dp/ B00980Y85Q

Barbie Doll Barbie, a 29-cm-tall plastic doll with the figure of an adult woman, was introduced in 1959 by Mattel Inc. The American businesswoman Ruth Handler is credited with the creation of Barbie, which became the figurehead of a brand of Mattel dolls and accessories, including other family members and collectible dolls. Since its introduction, Barbie has been an important part of toy fashion. A subject of numerous controversies, the doll has become an international phenomenon and one of the best-selling toys all around the world. This entry examines the history of Barbie dolls and other Barbie products and how Mattel has refashioned Barbie over time to assume different career roles and serve evolving educational mandates. This entry also examines some of the critiques that have been leveled against Barbie and Barbie-related products since the doll first appeared in the late 1950s.

The History of Barbie Previous to 1959, the popular toys of the 20th century were commonly built upon the models of animals, babies, and toddlers. The fashion dolls Dollikin, Little Miss Ginger, Sindy, Miss Revlon, and others had changeable adult outfits, while their bodies were childlike and prepubescent. Meanwhile, Handler surmised that the girls of her contemporary society preferred grown-up women dolls. Therefore, she envisioned a miniature woman made from molded plastic and dressed her up with realistic clothes and furnished her according to the ideal makeup tenets of the time. Handler thus initiated a more sophisticated version of the doll, perceptibly a more lifelike woman than any other available, naming it after her own daughter, Barbara.

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When the Barbie doll gloriously won interests, Mattel further provided the admirers with Barbie family members and friends, each of them equipped with the requisite accessories. The first of Barbie’s companions was Ken, whose success in the market and winning the consumers’ favor led Mattel to generate subsequent products like Midge, Miss Barbie, Skipper, Tutti and Todd, and Francie. In addition to these companions, Barbie appeared in the contour of numerous occupations. This gave rise to applause as well as criticism. In response to consumer demand that asked for Barbie to have a male counterpart, the first Ken dolls—named for Handler’s son—hit the market in 1961. Ken was straight-legged and skinny in red swim trunks and featured flocked brunette or blond hair. By 1963, the Barbie doll universe was expanding. She was joined by a growing group of friends: her friend Midge and Ken’s friend Allan. The fresh-faced Midge was a wide-eyed, freckled counterpart to Barbie’s glamor image of the day. Barbie’s first family member, little sister Skipper, arrived in 1964. Wearing a red-and-white sailor swimsuit, she was 9 inches tall, a little shorter than her sister, but packed with personality. The doll also appeared as a character in several Random House novels and Marvel Comics. A fictional biography was developed for her from these, as well as from the backs of the boxes that held the dolls. Soon ­Barbie’s siblings Tutti and Todd followed in 1965. They were tiny, wide-eyed twins, cherubic, and a little odd with unflinching, steely gazes. For 9 years, Barbie had been mute but the late 1960s had spawned a new technology that Mattel was currently using in other toys—a talking ­mechanism— and the talking Barbie appeared in 1968.

Barbie at Work Exploring new careers that were not necessarily considered appropriately feminine was the most outstanding feature of the doll in the early 1960s. For instance, Miss Astronaut (1964) came at a peak time in the U.S. space program. The fact is that Mattel was deeply in tune with the spirit of the times whenever they created a new identity or opportunity for the Barbie doll. Critics also credited Barbie with providing an alternative to restrictive 1950s gender roles. Barbie was indeed exploring all the roles from which women had

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traditionally been excluded. Unlike baby dolls, Barbie did not teach nurturing. The doll was not defined by relationships of responsibility to men or family. When in the early 1960s consumers clamored for a Barbie-scale baby, Mattel did not make Barbie a mother but issued a Barbie BabySits playset. The Barbie résumé includes occupations like an airline pilot, astronaut, doctor, Olympic athlete, and U.S. presidential candidate. Fashions and accessories were quickly becoming essential to the toy’s triumph. In 1963, Fashion Queen Barbie appeared, signaling a new emphasis on hairstyling. Miss Barbie, introduced in 1964, was another innovative doll to be considered the first Barbie to have sleep eyes that opened and closed. In its all compelling styles, Barbie takes feminine appearances and demeanor to unsustainable extremes. Nothing about the doll ever looks masculine, even when she is in the police force. Police officer Barbie comes with a glittering evening dress and a nightstick but no gun and no handcuffs. Barbie’s pink packing, soft and billowing fabrics, ­ form-fitting fashions, and shapely figure are extremely feminine. Essentially, in the case of Barbie, femininity entails not only an appropriate appearance but also a proper demeanor centered on being nice, soft-spoken, polite, helpful, and sensitive.

Barbie’s Educational Function The doll and franchise have at times been promoted as an educational product. Among other things, the doll has been promoted as a way for children to supposedly learn good manners and social relationships alongside feminine preoccupations (e.g., with color coordination, fashion design, good grooming, and hairstyling). As many onlookers have noted, Barbie was intended to signify and exemplify the fixed gender roles, heterosexual norms, and consumerist values to which women are expected to strive. Specifically, Barbie has been viewed as a means to teach girls the codes of femininity through standards of dress, bodily ideas, and modes of behavior. Handler’s doll is rigid and slender, ever-smiling and immaculately groomed and attired, mostly in pink. Therefore, in playing with Barbie, girls learn that in order to be successful and popular women, just like Barbie, they must look exemplary. Success follows and depends upon appearance.

Handler was well aware of the fact that playing and pretending about the future was an important part of a child’s—that is, girl’s—becoming. She deemed that with Barbie, girls would have a richer fantasy life. Indeed, Barbie aimed to touch girls’ psyches and desire for independence. The toy gradually became a vessel in which many little girls channeled their emotions, thoughts, and speech. Toys for children that take an adult form, including Barbie, can be considered a microcosm of the adult world. After all, they have all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public, the child must be supplied with the objects of her own size—objects that literally prefigure the adult world. Barbie and all its varieties are not invented forms. They do not appeal to the spirit of do-it-yourself. And, all its accessories reveal the list of all the things that the imagined adult finds to be typical. In entering Barbie’s universe, the child is only invited to identify herself as owner, as user, never as creator—even though, as Erica Rand and Elizabeth Chin have researched, children often do made use of the doll in multiple ways that reflect their own gender, racial, and social worlds. To encourage fantasy and play, Mattel withholds the biographical information, while simultaneously producing an overflow of diverse fantasy representations. But in Barbie’s work, race and ethnicity are marketed as accessories to the original (e.g., Mattel now also offers Black and Asian versions of the Barbie doll). While problematic on some levels, these products may offer the potential for identity to be viewed as mutable and unfixed.

Influence and Controversies Given the potential openness of interpretation and use of Barbie, the meaning of the doll and character often is narrowed down into a bipolar opposition, with many questionings whether this toy helps children practice positive or negative gender roles. Despite its pervasive presence, Barbie cannot readily become a part of ordinary lives in any fullblown sense because its femininity is fantastic. Therefore, the doll can be regarded as an excellent vehicle for girls to weave all kinds of fantasies in play therapy. Its sexual identity, moreover, is not clear-cut. Similarly, its class situation is ambiguous. Such attempt implies that the designer–producer

Barbie Doll

scheduled an intact and full-amount model, regardless of sexual, gender, ethnical, and discursive distinctive dispositions. The interpretations agree that, with its enormous range of lifestyle accessories, Barbie exists to consume. Her body is the perfect metaphor of modern times: plastic, standardized, and oozing fake sincerity. What is most substantial about ­Barbie is the outward show, the facade and the material manifestation as represented in the value-laden adjectives that prevail Mattel’s ­ ­advertisement for it: “adorable, billowy, charming, chic, dazzling, delicate, fashionable, elegant, regal, shimmering, lovely, graceful, romantic, . . .” The producers claimed that Barbie endorses multiethnic diversities. Having been criticized for materialism since the 1970s (amassing cars, houses, and clothes) and unrealistic body proportions, the doll would go on to embrace the global audience. Francie, Barbie’s cousin, was introduced as an adult doll with a slimmer and less voluptuous body. It was Mattel’s first African American doll to be significant because it added a multicultural element to the line. A decade later, Black Barbie would be introduced. As Mattel persisted with Barbie’s 21st-century image as progressive, feminist and multicultural, the critics estimated that so long as there was one Barbie to which all other Barbies must refer, such attempts would continue to gloss over issues of whiteness as a non-race, and, in turn, sustain White as the norm. Further, as Mattel continued to manufacture ­ethnic-looking dolls alongside the original White Barbie, additional questions emerged about racial authenticity. These forms often took shape in the primitive styles. As such, dolls such as the Shani Barbie exemplify what Mattel envisions Black dolls to be—complete with African print ­clothing—and limit Black bodies in mass culture to the atavistic. In the 1980s, Barbie still kept current as an aerobics instructor, a briefcase-carrying power executive, and a couture-inspired sophisticate reflecting the popularity of nighttime soap operas. In this era, ethnic walls would crumble with the introduction of the international series of the doll, which placed Barbie in the spotlight. In the late 1990s, Barbie stepped into the world of women’s sports as a member of the Women’s National Basketball Association and as a

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NASCAR racer. The international series and the later Happy Holidays line ushered in the 1990s, which would be Barbie’s coming of age as a collectible. Finally, as the millennium turned, Barbie ran for president and soared as a superhero. In this case, the doll stood in for all the consumerist principles then paving way into the social and cultural lives. Mattel had deconstructed Barbie’s intangible career barriers. But physical challenges had never been addressed until Barbie’s friend Smile Becky was offered in a wheelchair in 1997. Becky was a laudable addition to the Barbie universe since physically challenged children would have a doll which more closely reflected their situations. She was actually a deviation from the original Barbie with her idealized body. Unfortunately, Becky was discontinued since her wheelchair was incompatible with other Barbie accessories, including the Barbie house. Over time, Barbie has inspired works of art, including a 1986 Andy Warhol portrait and photographs by William Wegman and David Levinthal. Novelists, including Amy M. Homes and Barbara Kingsolver, have also used Barbie as a character in their fiction. But more than an icon, Barbie has been the subject of numerous controversies. Indeed, over the course of its existence, the Barbie doll has come to epitomize consumer capitalism. But projecting one’s interests, dreams, and personality into a doll was one of the principles that Handler followed in creating the Barbie doll. Mattel faced a specific dilemma from the onset. To make a doll that was marketable, it had to embrace certain stereotypes and static representations. These, in turn, worked to negatively heighten and reinforce the difference in one sense, while decontextualizing it in another. Thus, Mattel’s efforts to, for instance, transform the doll into an ethnic body may be doing multiple disservices to the children for whom it has been a play and fantasy object. Globalism undoubtedly brought uniformity to visual culture and it gave rise to the anxiety that idealized White femininity may have a universalizing effect on global identities. Mattel attempted to present an authentic racial accuracy and do not take account of shifting definitions of identities in culture. Instead, they worked to uphold a culturally

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specific, single moment in such identities. The approach prevented the possibility of the fluidity of difference, and the difference was often fabricated in the interests of social control as well as of commodity innovation. Despite all fervent applause, Barbie’s supremacy has also been challenged by other profitmaking doll franchises like Bratz. The opponent doll featured almond-shaped eyes adorned with eye shadow and lush, glossy lips and reached great success. In the 2000s, Bratz provoked controversies to Barbie in several areas. From the dolls’ stylized proportions to fashion-forward clothing, Bratz always followed pop culture trends closely. People were also very concerned that Bratz was setting unrealistic beauty standards for young girls. While Barbie’s style was concerned with timelessness, Bratz dolls acknowledged pop culture, fashion, and music trends that children of the age had also been hyper-aware of. In spite of such challenges, Barbie still maintained its esteem and reputation. It can be claimed that Barbie has performed as a cultural icon in its being almost universally appreciated by the users, enmeshed in people’s everyday lives and social relations. Barbie has been called an evergreen property, an adjective infrequently applied in the toy industry. Mahsa Manavi See also Dolls, U.S. History of; Gender; Toys

Further Readings Chin, E. (1999). Ethnically correct dolls: Toying with the race industry. American Anthropologist, 101, 305– 321. doi:10.1525/aa.1999.101.2.305 Eames, S. S. (1995). Barbie doll fashion (Vol. 1). Paducah, KY: Collector Books. Gerber, R. (2009). Barbie and Ruth. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Korbeck, S. (2001). The best of Barbie four decades of America’s favorite doll. Iola, WI: Krause Publication. Orbach, S. (2009). Bodies: Big ideas. London, UK: Profile Books. Rand, E. (1995). Barbie’s queer accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rogers, M. F. (1998). Barbie culture. London, UK: Sage. Toffoletti, K. (2007). Cyborg and Barbie dolls, feminism, popular culture and the post human body. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris.

Bechstein, Ludwig See Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm)

Beings and Becomings, Children as In socialization and child development theories, the child is seen as in the process of becoming, as passive and constantly changing on the path toward stable adulthood, and as being. The view that children grow physically, psychologically, and socially into adults enabled socialization theory and many of its applications to give shape to children in relation to the future society and desired adulthood. This entry discusses the implications of seeing children as in a state of being or in a state becoming compared with adults. Besides having long been a central question in philosophy, the being and becoming of children has been a key issue in childhood studies since the 1990s. The conceptualization of the child as becoming was challenged from the 1970s on, as marginalized groups struggled for recognition and equality. It became hard to see the child as simply a human becoming. Today in childhood studies, children are seen as beings who receive respect and recognition in their own right alongside adults, and both adults and children are seen as becomings, existing in a continuous process of change and with unknown possibilities. Nick Lee, lecturer in sociology at the University of Keele, gives a historical account of the emergence of the being–becoming distinction that is intertwined with the ideas of completeness and dependence. Originating in the Fordist era (postwar economic growth and the political and social order of advanced capitalism), completeness refers to the knowable destination of adulthood with stable employment and working conditions. Viewed through the binary contrasts of completeness and incompleteness, childhood was defined as whatever adulthood was not, as incomplete. Children were thought to be unstable and incomplete by nature and the passive recipients of adult actions, socialization, and development.

Beings and Becomings, Children as

By the late 20th century, rapid change and flexibility in work and intimate life and general uncertainty about adult lives, the contrast between adults and children slowly started to blur. Entwined in the distinction between being and becoming, and completeness, childhood is also identified with dependency. According to Lee, this idea originated in the industrial revolution when European nation-states grew stronger (with the help of colonization) and reached its peak during Fordism. Developing states sought to mold children to fit state purposes and ambitions. Children were future investments that states were keen to control. Children were protected from any contamination threatening the state’s investments. Thus, they were put under tight control, separated from society, and seen as intrinsically dependent on this protection and control. This view that only children are dependent masks the reality that adults also have dependencies and move in and out of dependent periods. Children’s dependencies, however, are portrayed as permanent. This status quo provided the template for relationships between children and adults and between children and the authorities. The incomplete and dependent state of children provided adults with power and the right and obligation to protect them and mediate on their behalf. Lee suggests that both children and adults should be viewed as becomings, in the plural, a view that acknowledges the multiple and shifting ways in which individuals continuously emerge as children and as adults. Hence, both adults and children are incomplete. They depend on their powers and abilities being extended and added to, thus they are always indebted to someone or something, which opens up life to continuous change. For example, in the criminal justice system, the extension of video recording has elevated the power of children as witnesses. This power is a given for adults but only because they are beings. Thus, the idea of being serves as an extension, giving adults power in a situation; power comes with being. Childhood studies have been pervaded by the view that children are beings in the present, which acknowledges that their lives and actions have meanings in and a relevance to present societies. By contrast, in conceptualizations in which the child is becoming, the child progresses from a state of vulnerability to one of sophistication, on the path toward acquiring adult competencies.

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In this mirror view of being and becoming, the child is intentionally portrayed by childhood studies as a being to lend power to children. Critics point out that one-sidedly emphasizing children as beings maintains the separation between being and becoming, adding that the sole emphasis on the child as being does little more than reinforce and sustain the hierarchical adult–child dualism. They suggest considering both adults and children through multiple ways of becoming that are always incomplete. The view of the child as being has produced much important research in childhood studies that recognizes children as beings alongside adults and considers children’s perspectives important; some even recognize that children are knowledge producers in the research. Numerous studies today rely on children as researchers who define their research priorities and interpret their own experiences, establishing a child’s standpoint to researching children’s lives. Others stress the importance of thinking about the otherness of children and childhood within the frame that both adults and children are becomings. They claim that children differ from adults and that their becomings cannot be fully known by adults. For a start, in addition to the commonalities between adults and children, children’s becomings include the processes of growth and development; at the same time, the nature of otherness also varies among children and is linked to how the embodied, the genetic, and the cultural are enfolded in their lives. The nature of these differences between adults and children is a question that guides and informs some of the current theorizing and methodological work. Still others problematize the linearity of growing up as encapsulated in the notion of becoming. Growing up is referred to as going on, as a continual process. It is not the competencies or independence that grow within it. Instead, the focus is on what matters to children for them to be able to cope, to make the best of things in different situations, to go on, and here it is explorations of the everyday and banal things that go on that really matter. Zsuzsa Millei See also Childhood Studies; Children as Competent Social Actors; Children’s Perspectives

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Further Readings Honig, M-S. (2009). How is the child constituted in childhood studies? In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M-S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 62–77). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in the age of uncertainty. Maidenhead, United Kingdom: Open University Press. Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 1–14. https://doi .org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.1.4 Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as “being and becomings”: Children, childhood and temporality. Childhood & Society, 22(4), 303–313. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.xo

Benjamin, Walter The world of the child and the nature of childhood are amongst the most persistent subjects in the work of German writer and critic Walter ­Benjamin (1892–1940), known primarily for his essays on aesthetic theory as well as his philosophy of history. Although Benjamin never formulated a coherent theory, his constant reflection on these subjects is manifested in a diverse array of heterogeneous texts. After his having abandoned the Youth Movement (Jugendbewegung) and turned away from his teacher Gustav Wyneken, the first indications of Benjamin’s interest in childhood emerged as early as the mid-1910s with sketches on the aesthetics of the imagination and colours. (Upon becoming a father in 1918, Benjamin began to keep a notebook, documenting— until 1932—with evident fascination how his son Stefan acquired and used language throughout childhood. Concurrently, he collected children’s books, some 200 of which have been preserved.) From the mid-1920s, this dedication to the subject found its expression in an imposing number of reviews and short treatises, which tangibly reveal just how pivotal the various facets of this topic were to Benjamin. The thematic range is vast: children’s books and contemporary reading primers, through to the cultural history of toys (and proletarian children’s theatre and pedagogy in general).

In One-Way Street from 1928, there are altogether six Denkbilder (‘thought-figures’) on the motif of the child, three of which had already been previously published under the title of ‘Children’ in 1926 in an issue of the journal Die literarische Welt dedicated to children’s literature. At the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, Benjamin then wrote several radio stories for children, which were produced and broadcast by the FunkStunde AG in Berlin and the Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk. Another text discussing a new medium looks at the cartoon Mickey Mouse. After his detailed study of the work of the novelist Marcel Proust, in the 1930s, Benjamin’s interest eventually focuses on the ongoing project of childhood memories, meanwhile famous from his largely autobiographical works A Berlin Chronicle (and Berlin Childhood around 1900). He worked on these texts until his death without ever being able to bring them into a form suitable for a completed book. It is in this context that Benjamin, in the Doctrine of the Similar/On the Mimetic Faculty, also develops a theory of language, the heart of which is an anthropological perspective on how children play. When searching for a stringent conception of childhood underpinning and connecting these varied writings, at least two premises emerging from Benjamin’s critical examination of the Youth Movement should be emphasised. First, Benjamin distances himself from the movement’s reformist education programme, disputing its anthropological optimism. He emphatically continues the modern practice of demystifying the bourgeois myth of an idealised childhood, tacitly referring to the writings of Sigmund Freud when he underlines the cruel and grim side in a child’s life, and he contrasts this with the naivety of those educators who still cling to the ideas of the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The latter assume that humans are innately good, and thus contend that it must be possible to bring up a child, the creature of nature ‘par excellence’, to be an extraordinarily pious, decent, and sociable person. Benjamin, however, casting an eye towards writers like Joachim Ringelnatz and painters like Paul Klee, points out the despotic element in children. Contrary to the claims of some commentators, Benjamin refuses to join his contemporary progressive reformist educators in espousing a romanticised idealisation. Instead of glorifying the

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child as an innocent angel or a superior human being, he uses the term ‘dehumanised’ to express the view that children have even yet to enter the domain of humanness because they inherently lack a moral consciousness and thus forthrightly articulates a clear criticism of the humanist foundations of the reform movement. A second premise is that Benjamin reproaches modern pedagogics for its infatuation with psychology. As he sees it, any psychological insight into the internal life of the child is geared to serve an entertainment industry that has lost its ethical yardstick and whose products foster a misguided idea of childhood. The purpose behind this scathing criticism is to realign the trajectory of interest in the child, to reorientate it not psychologically but soberly, in accordance with facts. In a pivotal passage in One Way Street, he observes that children are irresistibly drawn by any kind of detritus; they combine these materials and figure out their intuitive relationship, producing their own small world within the greater one. What Benjamin emphasises here is the capacity of the child to turn to and delve in the underbelly of the instrumentally rationalised adult world. Children do not accept the given meaning of things; by virtue of an unprejudiced sensual-haptic approach, they experience objects while playing in a way that liberates new potential meanings. The source from which the revolutionary force of a candid cognition springs, Benjamin understands to be a nursery of profane epiphany and a utopian figure. At the same time, the child’s ‘small world’ emerges as a phenomenon on the margins of ­society, and thus has the potential to proffer the cultural analyst key insights into social relations and conditions. Concerning the project of individual remembrance, Benjamin is fully aware of the core problematic of the genre of autobiography. In literary modernism, writing on childhood has to face up to the challenge that a simple reconstruction of childhood memories is deemed impossible, first and most obviously because of historical distance, and second because of the transposition of experiences into language. Accordingly, in Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin approaches (his) childhood from the perspective of a historian, setting himself a goal: to apprehend all those images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated

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in a child of the middle class. Instead of a personalised and presumably ‘authentic’ account of his early years, Berlin Childhood is a literary text that considers and incorporates both the historicity and specific milieu setting of childhood experiences as well as the subjectivity and sheer conceptual endlessness inherent to any striving to remember. After intensively reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Benjamin realises that any delving into the ‘microcosm’ of childhood exerts an irresistible gravitational pull, whereby remembrance progresses from small to smaller details. Berlin Childhood, which remained a fragment of which there are, moreover, several versions, consists of 45 prose miniatures. In the form of thought-figures, these miniatures present to the reader all those factors that, in the bustling and bewildering metropolis, influenced the socialisation of a child from the educated upper-middle class. As many of the titles suggest, Benjamin focuses above all on the material conditions forming the child psyche. Attractions (‘Tiergarten’, ‘Imperial Panorama’, ‘Victory Column’, ‘The ­Carousel’, and ‘Two Brass Bands’), traditional buildings and streets (‘At the Corner of Steglitzer and Genthiner’, ‘Market Hall’, and ‘Crooked Street’), and formalities determined by the season and appointed dates (‘Winter Morning’, ‘The Moon’, and ‘Tardy Arrival’)—all these shape the thought and feeling of children as much as the paraphernalia of school (‘The Reading Box’, ‘Boys’ Books’, ‘Colors’, ‘School Library’, and ‘The Desk’), technology (‘The Telephone’), illness (‘The Fever’), animals (‘Butterfly Hunt’ and ‘The Otter’), ­furniture and everyday objects (‘Cabinets’ and ‘The Sewing Box’), rumours (‘Misfortunes and Crimes’), figures of the imagination (‘A Ghost’ and ‘A ­ Christmas Angel’), or word creations (‘The M ­ ummerehlen’), with which children, while growing up, begin to appropriate their environment, enabling them to deal with it in their own language. Unlike studies on childhood from around 1900, Benjamin refrains from formulating a conclusive definition of ‘childhood’ and thus claiming to know how it should be approached and understood; instead, he traces and profiles the discontinuity and incommensurability of the phenomenon of childhood. Davide Giuriato and Philipp Hubmann See also Childhood in Western Philosophy; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

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Further Readings Benjamin, W. (1892–1940). Selected writings (19992003) (M. W. Jennings, M. Bullock, H. Eiland, & G. Smith, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, W. (1972–1989). Gesammelte Schriften. Unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem, herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser [Collected writings. With the participation of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser]. Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, W. (1995–1999). Gesammelte Briefe. Herausgegeben von Christoph Goedde und Henri Lonitz [Collected letters. Edited by Christoph Goedde and Henri Lonitz]. Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, W. (2006). Berlin childhood around 1900 (E. Howard, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buck-Morss, S. (1989). The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the arcade project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Geulen, E. (2005). Legislating education: Kant, Hegel, and Benjamin on pedagogical violence. Cardozo Law Review, 26(3), 943–956. Martens, L. (2011). The promise of memory: Childhood recollections and its objects in literary modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mehlmann, J. (1993). Walter Benjamin for children: An essay on his radio years. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bernstein, Basil Basil Bernstein (1924–2000) held the Karl Mannheim Chair Emeritus of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, and was one of the most eminent sociologists of his time. Over the course of four decades, his career contributed to significant advances in the areas of sociolinguistics, political economy, families and children, and schooling and education. Bernstein’s early sociolinguistic work was highly controversial, positing social class differences in the  communication codes of working-class and

middle-class children, differences that related to class and power relations. On his account, the restricted codes of the former are context dependent and particularistic, while the elaborated codes of the latter are context independent and universalistic. This research raised crucial questions around how relationships among the social division of labor, the family, and the school contributed to differences in learning among the social classes. Bernstein’s work was labeled a deficit theory by critics who alleged that it represented working-class language as deficient. These interpretations were consistently refuted by Bernstein, who stressed instead the Durkheimian position that such code differences were functionally related to and grounded in the social division of labor. Just as the middle class’s access to elaborated codes grew out of what Bernstein theorized as their new position in reproduction rather than production, it was not that restricted codes were deficient, but that contextdependent language was necessary in the context of production. And because schools require elaborated codes for academic success, for him this meant that children of working-class families are often beset with an early disadvantage. This focus on the internal workings of schools, their knowledge, and transmission mechanisms as well as their wider class reproduction functions went on to occupy much of Bernstein’s later work. Joining other sociologists of the curriculum in viewing educational knowledge as a crucial means of socialization, the distinguishing feature of ­Bernstein’s approach is that for him the message communicated is to be found within the principles upon which such knowledge is structured rather than in the contents of any specific curriculum experience. A large portion of Bernstein’s ­theoretical expositions thus revolved around the questions of how the curriculum and its subjects have been put together the rules of its construction, c­irculation, transmission, and acquisition. For him, it is precisely this focus on the form of the curriculum—rather than its ideological content— that would allow critical scholarship to understand how individuals’ cognitive orientations, dispositions, and identities are differentially ­positioned, and how and why social location intervenes in constraining what is learnt and by whom. To provide a more vivid illustration of his ideas, Bernstein introduced the notion of educational

Best Interests Principle

codes. Central to these are the analytic concepts of classification and frame. Classification refers to the construction and maintenance of boundaries between categories of school knowledge, while the frame, on the other hand, identifies the boundary strength between what may or may not be transmitted in a given context. For Bernstein, ­ boundaries—or relations of relevance—in the ­ structuring and presentation of curricular knowledge are emblematic of particular visions of social order, particular practices that are acceptable (or not) to dominant social relations and particular agents who work (both intentionally and otherwise) at maintaining all this. One major significance of Bernstein’s work on educational codes for sociological theory and research was its ability to translate between macro- and micro-sociological concepts: Educational codes depict, at the societal level, the extant set of power relations and ideologies and index, at the level of the acquirer, the array of legitimate competencies and identities. One area of Bernstein’s work that holds particular value for research on children and childhood studies and which has in recent years received increasing attention concerns his analysis of the social class assumptions and consequences of conservative/traditional versus progressive/child­ centered forms of pedagogy. For Bernstein, the principles and assumptions of child-centered approaches to educational transmission are fundamentally rooted in middle-class patterns of child socialization and interaction. Calling them invisible pedagogies—as against conservative/traditional approaches that emphasize visible, explicit criteria, and manners of transmission—Bernstein warned that these typically presuppose, among other things, students’ familiarity and facility with particular middle-class communication codes, a long educational life, as well as the presence of middle-class mothers as crucial agents of cultural transmission. Drawing examples from such notions as play and readiness—commonplace at the preschool and early elementary grades—Bernstein argued that the theories and principles that underpin and render sensible these pedagogies may not be known or understood by most working-class parents who themselves have not enjoyed high levels of education and can illafford time off from making ends meet. To be sure, invisible pedagogies contain a different theory of transmission that views the parents’ own informal

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teaching, where it occurs, or their pedagogical values, as irrelevant if not antithetical. Despite claims to the contrary, Bernstein concludes, the adoption of such pedagogical approaches (and their variants) in schools could add to the advantages already afforded to advantaged groups in society. Through this concerted focus on the inner workings of educational institutions and systems, their practices and assumptions, Bernstein’s intellectual oeuvre contributed to a greater understanding of how schools inevitably reproduce what they are ideologically committed to eradicating—social class advantages in schooling and society. Leonel Lim See also Cultural Capital; Cultural Politics of Childhood; Language, Social, and Cultural Aspects; Pedagogy; Schooling; Socialization

Further Readings Bernstein, B. (1977). Class, codes and control: Towards a theory of educational transmissions (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, codes and control: The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London, UK: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (2nd ed.). Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. Singh, P. (2010). Toolkits, translation devices and conceptual accounts: Essays on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Best Interests Principle The “best interests of the child” principle is about children’s rights; it is an innovative concept introduced in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. In Article 3 of the UNCRC, the principle is divided into three parts: (1) In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.

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(2) States parties undertake to ensure the child such protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-being, taking into account the rights and duties of his or her parents, legal guardians, or other individuals legally responsible for him or her, and, to this end, shall take all appropriate legislative and administrative measures. (3) States parties shall ensure that the institutions, services and facilities responsible for the care or protection of children shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision.

In addition to being specifically stated in Article 3, this principle serves as one of the four guiding principles of the UNCRC. The purpose of this entry is to provide a summary of the best interests of the child principle: the concept, its strengths, and its challenges.

The Concept The UNCRC is a legally binding international agreement that outlines the cultural, social, civil, political, and economic rights of every child— regardless of age, race, religion, or abilities. This agreement, adopted in 1989 by the United Nations, has since been accepted by 195 countries globally, making it the most widely ratified international human rights treaty. Consisting of 54 articles that set out specific rights of the child (eight of which specifically make reference to the “best interests of the child”), the UNCRC is far more than a treaty outlining specific legal rights. More precisely, it has contributed to a new status for children, that of competent individuals deserving of dignity, respect, autonomy, and a full range of human rights. Fundamental to this understanding of children as active subjects rather than passive objects is the best interests principle. It is one of the most important provisions within the UNCRC and is explained further in what follows.

Its Strengths Jean Zermatten, Chairman of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, explained the best

interests principle as consisting of three elements. First, he explained it as being a rule of procedure: In that whenever decision is to be made that will affect a group of children or an individual child, all possible impacts (positive and negative) on the child(ren) must be considered and given their due weight when determining an outcome or solution to a problem. Second, the best interest principle is a foundation for a substantive right: The best interests principle has established a guarantee that a child’s best interest must be considered when decisions are made on matters that affect him or her. Third, the best interests principle is a legal principle: It was developed to limit the unrestrained power that adults (parents, professionals who work with children, judges, police officers, medical doctors, teachers, etc.) have over a child or group of children. It should be noted, however, that the state cannot dictate what the specific best interests of the child are, or the final outcome of a decision; this must be considered on a case-by-case basis. Rather, the UNCRC can provide a procedural framework for state officials to abide by to determine the best outcome of a decision. These three elements prove the importance, breadth, and scope of the best interests principle—yet its ­implementation is complicated and contentious—­ making the best interests principle the most controversial charter in the UNCRC.

Its Challenges Most criticisms of the best interest criterion fall under two categories relating to the vagueness in which it is written. The first is the highly subjective nature of the criterion: Specifically, who has the authority to determine what best means—the child(ren), the parents, the state officials? Another issue, as Zermatten further states, is the existence of three levels of personal subjectivity: the subjectivity of the child(ren), the subjectivity of the parent or caregiver, and the subjectivity of the state officials or decision makers. At each level, there is a risk that the interpretation of what is “best” may in turn be counterproductive and have adverse effects on the life or lives it is intended to serve. Second, how can it be ensured that the best interest principle is universally operationalized while at the same time it is relative and that is reflects time and place?

Bettelheim, Bruno

The best interest principle is a highly subjective principle and must take into account myriad other factors, perspectives, and potentially conflicting human rights interests. Although Article 3 (para. 1) states that in all actions concerning children, their best interests must be a primary consideration, it does not state that it shall be the only consideration. The lives of children do not exist in a bubble, and as such any decision made on their behalf must recognize their rich and complex lives and the innumerable factors affecting them. The difficulty of defining what is best, however, is not limited to those in control of the decision but is also relative to time and place. Specific to time, the short-term, medium-term, and long-term impacts of such a decision on the child(ren) must be considered before an outcome can be selected. In addition, decisions must depend on the superiority of scientific knowledge at any given time. This is to say, that what is known today about child development and the well-being of children is different from what was known 10 years ago and from what will be learned by 10 years from today. In this way, decision makers are limited to responding with the tools provided to them in the present, which are always subject to change. Similarly, decisions must be relative to the place in which they are made. What might be a correct decision in one part of the world may be a poor decision in another. This cannot mean, however, that the principle is interpreted in an overly culturally relativist way (i.e., denying other rights stated in the UNCRC, such as the right to protection against harmful traditional practices or corporal punishment) but that flexibility must be built into the approach. Despite the challenges of implementation, the best interests principle remains a groundbreaking and fundamental principle in children’s rights. It has the advantage of being adaptable to best match the specific needs of an individual child or group of children while being a universally accepted concept with the potential to be applied everywhere. It serves as both a theoretical framework and a practical tool and has been instrumental in changing the global status of children. Caitlin Wood

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See also Children and Social Policy; Children as Citizens; Children as Competent Social Actors; Children’s Perspectives

Further Readings Freeman, M. (2007). A commentary on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child– Article 3: The best interests of the child. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Nijhoff. U.N. General Assembly. (1989). Convention on the rights of child. U.N. Treaty Series, Vol. 1577, No. 27531. New York, NY: Author. Retrieved from https://treaties .un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_ no=IV-11&chapter=4&lang=en U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. (2008, May). UNHCR guidelines on determining the best interests of the child. Retrieved from http://www.refworld.org/ docid/48480c342.html Zermatten, J. (2010). The best interests of the child principle: Literal analysis and function. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 18(4), 483–499. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/157181810X537391

Bettelheim, Bruno Bruno Bettelheim’s (1903–1990) notable life is very much an American story, even if he claimed primary validation for his views from the Viennese culture of his birth and upbringing. He arrived in the United States in 1939 after release from internment in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps following the triumphant Nazi arrival in Austria, 1938. In due course, he secured temporary positions at the University of Chicago, leading to his appointment in 1944 as director of the university’s Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, which offered residential care and treatment to disturbed children. His much-reported professional activities and his expert opinions about the problem child earned him considerable fame, but, following his death in 1990 (by suicide), his reputation was seriously damaged by accusations of lies and misrepresentation and questions raised about his working practice. To revisit some of these conflicts and, in consequence, to reconsider aspects of what appeared to be an extraordinarily effective career is to sketch a slightly unnerving, late 20th-century history but

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also to bring into focus two important issues in modern childhood studies. Bettelheim reframed the operations of the Orthogenic School, reformed its practices, and invigorated its staff. He also actively promoted his therapeutic program in scholarly books and articles and in discussion pieces for more popular forms of publication, including magazines and film, gaining thereby a significant presence in American mass culture. In 1956, he sought and gained a major grant from the Ford Foundation, in order to carry out research on autism and its treatment at the school. Bettelheim argued that autism should respond to the intense, sustained milieu therapy that he had developed for treatment of disturbed children. His results proved relatively promising but did not reach the level of success he claimed in reports and publications, most notably his major study The Empty Fortress. His claims expanded his cultural presence but also exposed him to controversy. Also controversial were the parallels he drew between the experiences of the autistic child and Jewish internees in Nazi concentration camps, and especially his tendentious argument that autism represented the catastrophic collapse of the critically important relationship of mutuality between infant and parent, especially the mother. Bettelheim did much to clarify that the latter conclusion did not mean the mother was at fault, yet he became closely associated with the damning notion of the refrigerator mother. On the other hand, since his claim was bound to a certain optimism, derived from belief that dispositions could be remedied and mutuality restored, it actually increased his authority as a voice for the American family, paradoxically enlarging his scope as a public intellectual qualified to speak on a ramifying set of childhood issues. In 1973, he retired from the Orthogenic School, after 29 years as its director, moving with his wife, Trude, to San Francisco, where he took up a research fellowship at Stanford. More significantly, he also entered upon a period of writing, completing his trilogy of works on the Orthogenic School and, in particular, The Uses of Enchantment, which extended his reflections on the lives of American children into an exploration of the force of the fairy tales they might well read. The primary business of this review of Bettelheim’s engagement with American childhood,

then, is to explore his concern with autism and, secondly, the value he set on literature for children, especially his concern with the virtues of the fairy tale. The different fields and moments of Bettelheim’s career were bound together by an adherence to Freudianism that was deep, but orthodox, in spite of his innovations. So, Freud’s familiar triad—id, ego, superego—was mapped over the Orthogenic School’s tripartite community, in order to articulate the energies that circulated in Bettelheim’s dynamic supervision. However cautious the psychoanalytic establishment might have been in approving this variety of Freud-in-action, appreciation of Bettelheim’s maverick genius was widely shared. Shortly after his death, several biographies were in train, and a team of specialists participated in a memorial volume in Psychoanalytic Review (1994) in which his contribution to applied psychoanalytic thought was widely noted—but also the “feelings of enchantment and disenchantment” that his activities and opinions stimulated. The memorial proves equivocal, in its response to an outpouring of accusations by former students, at the time of Bettelheim’s death, concerning his role and actions in the Orthogenic School, mostly detailing his violence—often physical (sometimes sexual), but mostly verbal and generally inducing terror. Generally, his behavior has been cast by colleagues as intermittent symbolic and disciplinary action, arguably falling within the limits of his therapeutic regime. Nevertheless, the scandal created by these accusations has tended to stick and, unquestionably, has contributed to his extraordinarily diminished standing in specific fields. Most interesting, in this regard, is the afterlife of Bettelheim’s involvement with autism.

Autismal Feelings Bettelheim came to his engagement with the treatment of autism comparatively late in his career, with the project funded by the Ford Foundation. In due course, in The Empty Fortress (1967), he detailed particular successes, with improvements claimed for 85% of the project’s child subjects. Later, however, he admitted to student therapists at Stanford that the Orthogenic School had been largely unable to improve

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significantly the condition of the autistic children whom it treated. The school’s limited success indicates a more profound conceptual failure, since it called into question Bettelheim’s contention that autism is a psychogenetic condition, rather than biogenetic or neurological. For ­ Bettelheim, it was associated with specific social triggers and, therefore, limited to specific forms—typically the lack of any capacity to ­ communicate—rather than ranging across a ­ spectrum of behaviors, some much less disabling than others. Nevertheless, the intense, continued, therapeutic involvement of the school’s counselors does seem to have produced material improvements in the well-being of its autistic children; later treatment programs have tended to be no more successful, although they have also not been troubled by challenges arising from fraudulent claims B ­ ettelheim made. Nina Sutton, his major biographer, has pointed out that these claims both s­ upported parents in false hopes that their child might achieve something like normalcy and turned attention away from the school’s real achievements with autistic children. Importantly, other programs have not been burdened with the hostility directed at a central aspect of Bettelheim’s therapy, the argument that the roots of autism are to found in psychic collapse precipitated by parental attitudes. This parental failure—dubbed toxic by some of Bettelheim’s critics—indicated that the autistic child’s state might be seen as response to absolute emotional isolation, likewise seen in internees’ reactions witnessed by Bettelheim in the Nazi concentration camps. The child suffering from autism becomes utterly convinced that the external world threatens total destruction, creating the subjective feeling that they live in an extreme situation. According to Bettelheim—contrary to the position taken by followers of the behaviorist school that originated with Bernard Ritland—the autistic child is ill rather than simply deficient—or damaged by poisons to which he or she is exposed. Bettelheim’s aim, therefore, was to switch a comforting social environment for one that was hostile or unpredictable. His constant emphasis was laid on the potential for rehabilitation offered in a benevolent milieu, a structured, therapeutic community, rather than by means of individual therapy.

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Physical origins for autism, seriously pursued by pharmacological researchers from Leo Kanner to Ritland and beyond, have not yet been proved. Bettelheim’s milieu therapy seems quite close in detail to effective modern programs, as Chloe Silverman, a critical historian of autism, has ­ observed, but the association of his partial success with his apparent attribution of the onset of the condition to the mother (who is most certainly not good enough) completely demolished any possibility that his work would be taken seriously in itself. The future of autism seems most uncertain, 25 years after Bettelheim’s death; maybe, for some, it will come to be construed more clearly in the 21st century as a mode of neurodiversity. In the meantime, The Empty Fortress dwells on the child in ways that make it a remarkable read.

Using Enchantment Bettelheim’s late work on the enchantments of literature—a bestseller and award winner, on ­publication—still figures in both popular and academic reading lists, not least, perhaps, because of an authoritative voice that, in other areas of ­Bettelheim’s writing life, finally provoked hostility. In arguing for the fairy tale’s intimate relationship with the unconscious, The Uses of Enchantment served—once upon a time—as a kind of guidebook for a general reading public that appreciated its investment in a favored American tradition, ego psychology. It demonstrates the role the fairy tale might play in directing the child’s route to maturity—commonly scored by the oedipal ­complex—stimulating interest in its argument by sensational, summary descriptions of plots and scenes. At the same time, it drew on another field of child studies—education, specifically literacy. How could American readers not respond to a book that voiced a demand that the child’s text serve important ends, but should never be dull? Specialist academic readers were not so kind. As with other works by Bettelheim, this one found itself trapped in controversy soon after publication. In this case, as Alan Dundas demonstrated, Bettelheim had been casual with his scholarly debts, close to the point of plagiarism. More significantly, perhaps, Jack Zipes wrote a lengthy essay aimed at exposing the fundamental errors in Bettelheim’s adoption of Freudian

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theory to support his work and the consequent mystification that compromised his presentation of the fairy tale’s qualities. Zipes’s analysis has been seconded by numerous literary scholars such as Maria Tatar, Ruth Bottigheimer, and Kenneth Kidd, who have enlarged the range of critical doubts about Bettelheim’s work and, furthermore, homed in on the moralizing support it seems to give to the dream of ego-integration. Nevertheless, Bettelheim’s discussion still occupies a defining position in fairy tale scholarship, if mostly as the kind of targeted, scholarly reference that serves to establish the good sense of the scholar’s own position. As a work of art, Bettelheim claimed, the fairy tale is unique in being fully comprehensible to children, not only offering the delight of the fantasy that plays out across its surface but also a typical capacity “to state an existential dilemma briefly and pointedly.” It offers a variety of rewards, from stimulation of the imagination to an encounter with experiences aligned with “anxieties and aspirations”: If there is triumph over odds, there are also monsters to overcome, conveying knowledge of evil, which is quite as important as belief in the good. At its surface, ­ however, the fairy tale’s very distance from the real world consistently guarantees its value—­inherently ­therapeutic—in directing the child reader towards inner processes. Now distinguished from myth by its relative ordinariness, it still speaks in the “language of symbols representing unconscious content”; whereas myth is organized around “the super human hero who projects an ideal p ­ ersonality acting in line with superego demands,” fairy tales depict ego-integration—which allows happily for “satisfaction of id desires.” Fairy tale, moreover, most strikingly delivers the child to scenarios that, by virtue of the tale’s endless retellings over centuries, prove to be neither accidental nor merely personal but represent a crucial understanding of the psychic structure of humankind. In every regard, for Bettelheim, the fairy tale’s nature essentially lies in its therapeutic instrumentality. That same instrumentality lies at the heart of academic objections that accept the tales are symbolic stories, possessing overt and covert meanings, but insist these meanings are not structured along the lines of Freud’s manifest and latent content, let alone distributed, as Bettelheim

insists, across sites, events, and characters that correlate with Freud’s id, ego, and superego. Interpretation becomes, as Vanessa Joosen argues, acrobatic. Driven by a narrow Freudianism, it is also dominated by a narrow definition of the tale, determined in effect by limiting the exemplary text to the Brothers Grimms’ 1857 collection, ignoring earlier editions, but also, more seriously, the complex exchanges between oral and written tales that is characteristic of the European fairy and folk tale corpus. Critics of Bettelheim’s position, then, have questioned not only his detailed readings of exemplary tales, but also his account of the structures and mechanisms of the tale, not least because its aesthetic power necessarily gets lost in the function it performs. A more radical challenge to Bettelheim’s readings comes from critics who question the importance of the unconscious, when the history of tale-telling (moving between cultures, but also between oral and written, in both directions) seems more clearly to support recognition of a primary reference to social and cultural experience—not least by reclaiming for the fairy tale an original audience that is adult, even where the child may have been present. Arguably, indeed, the agential dimension of the fairy tale is not so much psychoanalytic as ideological and its purpose found in its enforcement of social conformity within specific communities. Joosen points up a further, disconcerting, postmodern paradox: The most striking presentation of Bettelheim’s central, Freudian argument for the fairy tale has been conducted in areas that he purposefully excluded, the illustrated text and the reversioned tale. Both demand a reader whose participation Bettelheim sought to foreclose, if the tale were to prove truly comprehensible: the actively engaged adult as well as the child. Claudia Michaela Marquis See also Autism and Neurodiversity; Autism, Child Development, and Theory; Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition; Psychoanalysis, the Child in

Further Readings Bettelheim, B. (1967). The empty fortress. New York, NY: Macmillan. Bettelheim, B. (1977). The uses of enchantment. New York, NY: Knopf.

Better Baby Contests Fisher, D. (2008). Bettelheim: Living and dying. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi. Goldsmith, J. M., & Sanders, J. S. (1993). Milieu therapy: Significant issues and innovative applications. Philadelphia, PA: Haworth Press. Joosen, V. (2011). Critical and creative perspectives on fairy tales: An intertextual dialogue between fairy-tale scholarship and postmodern retellings. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Paul, M., & Rosenberg, A. (1994). Special issue: Bruno Bettelheim’s contribution to psychoanalytic research. The Psychoanalytic Review, 31, 3. Pollak, R. (1998). The creation of doctor B: A biography of Bruno Bettelheim. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Silverman, C. (2012). Understanding autism: Parents, doctors, and the history of a disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sutton, N. (1996). Bettelheim: A life and a legacy. New York, NY: Basic Books. Tatar, M. (1992). Off with their heads!: Fairy tales and the culture of childhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zipes, J. (1979). Breaking the magic spell: Radical theories of folk and fairy tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Better Baby Contests Better baby contests were a feature of the baby saving campaign of the early 20th century, mainly in the United States and Britain, that attempted to combat high infant mortality rates with the promotion of public health, often paired with the eugenics goal of race betterment. During the period before pediatric visits became common, baby contests at state and county fairs and civic gatherings introduced parents to the notion of routine health assessments for young children. These contests were part of what ­historians have termed scientific motherhood—a movement favoring the growing authority of medical professionals in child-rearing. The U.S. Children’s Bureau, founded in 1912, and organizations such as the National Congress of Mothers promoted this scientific approach through the development of milk stations, fresh-air camps, and other child welfare initiatives. Babies had competed before. Baby shows, baby beauty contests, and baby parades had been

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popular sensations since the mid-19th century; the impresario P. T. Barnum organized a National Baby Show in 1854 with 143 contestants and 61,000 viewers. These baby shows judged contestants in a variety of categories including cutest waddle, prettiest baby, and brightest eyes. But some child welfare activists wondered why the evaluation of young children couldn’t be as rigorous as the evaluation of crops and livestock at state and county fairs, instead of focusing on dimples and smiles. Organizers at the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport planned a scientific baby show along with their customary baby beauty contest in 1908. Former schoolteacher Mary DeGarmo, later a leader of the National Congress of Mothers, worked with pediatrician Jacob Bodenheimer to devise the first scorecard. Three years later, Mary T. Watts, also a member of the National Congress of Mothers, created a better baby contest at the Iowa State Fair, based on principles similar to the judging of prize livestock. Other state fairs quickly followed suit; by 1914, better baby contests were being held at some 40 state fairs, and at hundreds of other venues. At these events, babies and toddlers would have their appearance and health carefully measured, with participants receiving certificates, ribbons, scorecards, and other memorabilia that were often preserved in their baby books. Winners earned cash awards of US$25–$100, trophies, or medals. Judges evaluated infants and young children, divided into age-groups, by physical and psychological attributes, including height, weight, symmetry, length of head, and shape and size of ears, lips, forehead, and nose. They also examined disposition, energy, expression, tractability, attention, and sometimes such developmental landmarks as vocabulary and play (Figure 1). The scorecards at first used metrics established by Luther Emmett Holt, a founder of the American Pediatrics Society, who had collected data on 100 infants. In 1916, statistician Fredrick Crum revised the standards to propose ideal weight, height, chest size, and head circumference for boys and girls in each age category. In 1920, new evaluation standards were developed by Charles Davenport, a eugenicist and member of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality.

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Figure 1  Better baby contest scorecard, 1920 Source: Collection of Wendy McClure. Used with permission.

In January of 1913, the Women’s Home Companion sent editor Anna Steese Richardson to Denver, CO, to report on a better baby contest at the National Western Livestock Exposition. The magazine then created the Better Babies Bureau, headed by Richardson, to cosponsor the contests and supply prizes, scorecards, and awards. The Women’s Home Companion broadened the competitions to include urban as well as rural communities. Baby contests were held in such factory towns as Fall River, MA, and Spartanburg, SC. In 1914, the magazine claimed that contests were held in almost every American state. By 1915, some 200,000 babies had competed in the contests and tens of thousands of childcare pamphlets were distributed to parents. In many states, contest champions were showcased in newspapers, on radio, and in newsreels. Perfect babies were also featured in advertisements for condensed milk, clothing, and other products.

In 1920, the Fitter Families movement was initiated at the Kansas State Fair, extending the better baby contest to the whole family and promoting the role of heredity in human development. Strongly emphasizing eugenics, this movement encouraged those who were deemed fit to have larger families. Family fitness was assessed by social and medical history, intelligence testing, and physical attributes. Not surprisingly, winners were usually White with western and northern European roots. To many people, race betterment meant the betterment of White Protestants. Contests were sometimes segregated and featured All-American stock; in Indiana, for example, African American babies were excluded from participation at the state fair better baby contest. But these contests, sponsored by civic and religious organizations and settlement houses, still reached diverse populations. Some contests included ethnic baby competitors of all races. The

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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized baby contests for the Black community’s elite talented tenth to raise funds and promote an alternative version of eugenics for African Americans. And in 1913, the Mother’s Club of the Jewish Alliance of St. Louis arranged a better baby contest and circulated childcare leaflets in English and Yiddish. For poor families and immigrants, the contests were less about eugenics and more about the promotion of infant and child well-being. Better baby contests disappeared by the mid20th century as parents increasingly took children to pediatricians and as the popular embrace of eugenics faded. The last better baby contest at the Iowa State Fair was held in 1952. Lynn Y. Weiner See also Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History; Developmentality; Eugenics; Pediatrics

Further Readings Dorey, A. V. (1999). Better baby contests: The scientific quest for perfect childhood health in the early twentieth century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Dorr, G. M., & Logan, A. (2011). ‘Quality, not mere quantity, counts’: Black Eugenics and the NAACP baby contests. In P. Lombardo (Ed.), A century of eugenics in America: From the Indiana experiment to the human Genome Era (pp. 68–92). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pernick, M. (2002). Taking better baby contests seriously. American Journal of Public Health, 5, 707–708. Stern, A. M. (2002). Making better babies: Public health and race betterment in Indiana, 1920–1935. American Journal of Public Health, 5, 742–752.

Bilingualism

and

Multilingualism

The modern study of bilingualism dates back to the early 1900s, as linguists began to take interest in the language development of bilingual children. Despite considerable research effort ever since, there is no unified definition of bilingualism. Indeed, it has been proposed that bilingualism raises a fundamental challenge for linguistics as an

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academic discipline. The most basic reason for this is that research on bilingualism has been persistently informed by a monolingual perspective, where theoretical conceptualisations and analytical interpretations begin with the idea that humans are born with a hard-wired mental device for acquiring a first language. Accordingly, the production of speech and other forms of language use by bilingual individuals is unquestionably compared with, and assessed against, the language production of an idealised native, monolingual speaker. Such a monolingual approach can be observed in most attempts at defining bilingualism (and multilingualism), which stresses the individual’s nativelike competence in the two (or, in the case of multilingualism, several) languages alongside the condition that the mental linguistic representations and their cognitive processing do not interfere with one another in the production and understanding of language. In short, the ideal bilingual person is typically thought of as two monolinguals sharing one brain. This entry examines cognitive and discourse perspectives on bilingualism and multilingualism and further explores how recent theoretical advances are changing understandings of both bilingualism and multilingualism.

Cognitivist Perspectives Several attempts have been made to model the organisation of the languages within the bilingual or multilingual mind as well as to describe different paths of children’s bi/multilingual development. Generally, a child who is exposed to and begins to acquire several languages during the first 3 years of life is following a process of simultaneous development, whereas a child who develops monolingually at first and begins to acquire a second (and third) language after the age of 3 years is subject to a successive bi/multilingual development. The chief difference between the two trajectories is that in the case of simultaneous development, the child is acquiring two linguistic systems at once, without being able to discriminate between the languages at first, whereas in the case of successive development, first language acquisition has already taken hold with the result that the new language is added to, and accommodated with, the already existing language competence.

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A popular distinction has been made between coordinate bilingualism, which means that the child is developing dual conceptual systems, one in each language, and compound bilingualism, where two lexical systems correspond to a unitary conceptual system. In the first case, the word ‘car’ and its Swedish equivalent ‘bil’ each carry a distinct meaning, whereas in compound bilingualism the child would match the two words against a fused mental representation of the concept. In addition, the notion of subordinate bilingualism was introduced to account for those cases in which one of the languages becomes dominant (stronger), the consequence of which is that using the weaker language may involve a mental process of translation into the dominant system. There is little consensus as to how the two developmental trajectories relate to the different mental organisations of the linguistic systems because there seem to be too many contextual factors at play, but there is some agreement that the outcome in terms of language performance need not be affected by the differences in developmental paths. Thus, the idea that premature bilingual development may lead to semilingualism (a state of not reaching sufficient proficiency in either language) does not hold up in current research. It does, however, continue to cause some worry for parents whose children grow up in multilingual environments. Central to this issue is a phenomenon known as ‘code-switching’—the use of more than one linguistic code within a spate of talk. Before research on code-switching took shape around the late 1970s, such ‘mixed’ forms of language use were generally treated with much scepticism, chiefly because they were at odds with the normative, monolingually infused conception of the ideal bilingual person. In the case of bilingual children, code-switching was even seen as evidence of insufficient bilingual competence, a strategy to overcome the inability to find the right words in the language currently spoken.

Discourse Perspectives The deficit view of bilingual talk, which includes code-switching and other forms of language ­alternation, became increasingly challenged with the rise of discourse-oriented approaches to

bilingualism, most notably interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis. Rejecting the reductionist conceptualisation of bilingualism as, above all, a mental faculty, scholars began to record and analyse actual, naturally occurring samples of talk where more than one language were being used. It was soon found that far from being a disorderly result of insufficient linguistic competence amongst the speakers, bilingual conversations were minutely ordered and instances of code-switching often proved highly functional for the participants. For instance, code-switching could be used for negotiating what language to speak, to mark changes in the constellation of participants or type of activity, to shift from formal business to an informal mode of talk, to name just some of the communicative functions that have been documented in different parts of the world. In fact, attempts at constructing comprehensive taxonomies of code-switching functions have largely failed, as the exact meaning of any instance of language alternation is subject to participants’ situated inferences. The current literature offers a number of empirical accounts of how bilingual children put their language abilities into practice. For instance, in migrant families where the adults may be lacking sufficient skills in the majority language, bilingual children have been found to engage in language ‘brokering’. In this capacity, children often serve as translators of incoming posts or as interpreters in more formal situations such as medical consultations or even calls to the emergency services. Further, the social life of bilingual children has been the subject of sociological studies of the peer group processes, where language alternation along with other communicative means has proved a powerful resource for peer inclusion or exclusion as well as in children’s conflict management. A substantial, and increasing, amount of research has also been carried out in school settings where several languages are available to teachers and students alike. Here, various topics have been addressed in analyses of language alternation, including teachers’ explicating curricular content to their students or managing the student cohort during whole-class instruction, which often involves multiple ‘addressivities’ as several students may be bidding simultaneously for the

Binet, Alfred

teacher’s attention. Students’ use of several languages during school work has been investigated in a number of countries and there is some evidence that, given the right circumstances, language alternation may enhance task performance for instance in project work. Finally, as local school authorities, or individual schools, may or may not sanction bilingual interaction in the classroom, language alternation practices have been examined by researchers with an interest in language policy. Since the beginning of the 21st century, studies of bilingual classrooms have increasingly come to involve video data, often recorded with multiple cameras and microphones, providing for close-up analyses of not just the multilingual but also multimodal features of interaction, showing how participants’ gestures, eye contact, bodily orientation, and use of material artefacts are minutely coordinated with multilingual resources.

Theoretical Advances Besides the sheer amount of studies and variety in topics, the general upsurge in studies of bilingual communication has also given rise to conceptual and theoretical development. Terms such as ‘languaging’, ‘polylanguaging’, and ‘translanguaging’ have been proposed as labels for communicative practices that involve distinct linguistic and other semiotic systems, where perhaps the latter one in particular promises to offer a practical—rather than structural—theory of language. To conclude, since the late 20th century, attitudes towards bilingual and multilingual forms of talk have changed and language alternation is now increasingly seen as unproblematic—an additional communicative resource for people who command several languages. Having said this, research on children growing up in multilingual environments is still dominated by psycholinguistic and developmental perspectives that often adopt a deficit-oriented stance towards the nature and consequences of such development, focusing on linguistic interference, compensatory communicative strategies, nonnative linguistic forms, and other instances of trouble presumably resulting from inadequate or insufficient cognitive processing. Today, however, the research field has greatly widened, allowing for other, radically social approaches to bi/multilingualism which seek to

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understand and describe what young speakers do, in real-life everyday contexts, with the competencies that they do possess, as well as any affordances that lay at hand. Herein lies the challenge for the future with great scope for discoveries that may one day allow us to let go of the bedrock assumption that monolingualism is the natural state of human social life. Jakob Cromdal See also Language, Social and Cultural Aspects; Language Learning/Acquisition; Literacy/Literacies

Further Readings Grosjean, F. (1982). Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39, 9–30. Li, W., & Moyer, M. (2008). The Blackwell guide to research methods in bilingualism and multilingualism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444301120 .ch22 Musk, N., & Cromdal, J. (2018). Analysing bilingual talk. Conversation analysis and language alternation. In A. Filippi & N. Markee (Eds.), Capturing transitions in the second language classroom: A focus on language alternation practices. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/ pbns.295.02mus Orellan, M. (2011). Translating childhoods. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Romaine, S. (1989). Bilingualism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Binet, Alfred Alfred Binet (1857–1911) was a French scientist, best known today for his contributions to intelligence testing. Binet was awarded a law degree in 1878 and then began to study science at the Sorbonne in Paris. While doing this, he read psychology texts at the National Library in Paris and works by John Stuart Mill which influenced his views on intelligence, seeing links between Mill’s laws of associationism and intelligence. Binet never formally studied psychology, received a

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qualification in psychology, or held a post in an academic institution; perhaps because of this, he had difficulty in gaining recognition for his projects. This entry examines Binet’s career development and legacy with a specific focus on his contributions to intelligence testing with the Binet–Simon Scale.

Career Development In 1883, Binet began to collaborate with JeanMartin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Charcot was experimenting with hypnotism, and Binet was involved in his studies of hysteria and hypnosis. Interest in Charcot’s work was widespread, and Sigmund Freud came to Paris in 1885 to observe Charcot’s work, which influenced Freud’s later ideas. However, Binet came to doubt the reliability and objectivity of information acquired from patients under hypnosis and later publicly retracted support for Charcot’s findings. He left the Salpêtrière in the early 1890s. Binet is less well known today for his work on memory, which he began at the Sorbonne with Charcot. He designed experimental research with experts such as chess players and with schoolchildren. He pioneered the use of meaningful texts for studying memory, particularly with children, rather than the nonsense syllables approach developed by Ebbinghaus. Binet published the earliest studies of eyewitness testimony. He also carried out research on suggestibility, making a link between his work on hypnosis with Charcot and eyewitness testimony research. He also observed and researched group behaviour in children, finding that in a group, a division of roles arises implicitly with the first child to answer becoming the leader. He also identified an increase in suggestibility when grouped with other children, with a tendency to imitate peers in the group. This was later named the ‘group conformity effect’. Following the birth of his daughters, Madeleine (1885) and Alice (1887), Binet became interested in child development, particularly in the differences between their personalities. He began to develop his ideas about intelligence and attention span at this time. This was a period when many people were studying and closely observing their own or other children, beginning to describe how children develop in different areas. Binet’s work in

this area anticipates and may have influenced Jean Piaget, who later studied with Théodore Simon, Binet’s research assistant on intelligence testing. Binet published more than 200 articles and books over the next 20 years. In 1891, he began working at the Sorbonne’s Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, founded by Henry Beaunis, a physiologist, in 1889. He was appointed as the Director in 1894 and cofounded a major experimental psychology journal, L’Année Psychologique, where much of his work was published. During the 1890s, Binet studied individual differences with Victor Henri. He argued that psychology ought to study higher processes and complex operations via memory, imagination, judgement, attention, and reason, not sensation or perception. These experiments led to a book, The Experimental Study of Intelligence, published in 1903. This included his analysis of observations on his two daughters. The differences he observed were later termed ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ personality traits.

Legacy Today, Binet is best known for his work on intelligence testing. In England, Francis Galton was also interested in measuring intelligence at the same period, but Galton’s focus was on social policy and eugenics, whereas Binet, whose work has been more important to intelligence testing overall, was interested in practical utility and took a pragmatic approach. Binet was a member of La Société Libre pour l’Etude Psychologique de l’Enfant. The French government asked the society in 1904 to appoint a commission on the education of slower learning children, to identify which children would benefit from education and which ones would need alternative provision. This led to the development of the Binet–Simon Scale, which still underpins current intelligence testing. Théodore Simon, a young medical student, worked as Binet’s research assistant in testing and developing the scale. The scale was tested on a sample of 50 children, 10 in each of 5 age groups. Children were selected by their teachers as being ‘average’ for their age. The purpose was to compare children’s mental abilities to their ‘normal’ peers. This was

Binge-Watching

the first attempt to quantitatively measure intelligence. The scale contains 30 tasks, increasing in complexity and difficulty. Tasks included naming objects, counting, comparing the lengths of lines, and defining abstract words. The score on the scale was used to assess children’s mental age, comparing age-matched tasks to chronological age. Mental age could then be used to determine educational placement. Binet recognised the limitations of the scale which he revised twice. In 1908, he introduced age norms. The 1911 version became the definitive Binet–Simon Test. For Binet, intelligence was practical sense and adaptation to the world. He emphasised the diversity of intelligence and the fact that intellectual development occurs at variable rates and that environment matters. He argued against comparing children from different backgrounds. For Binet, intelligence was not generalisable. He aimed to test children for academic ability which should not predict every outcome. He also believed that intelligence was malleable: Education and environment could affect outcomes. It is unlikely that Binet would have approved of the way his scale was later developed and used, particularly in the United States. While Binet never argued against this, he did argue against intelligence as a single, unitary construct. His final work, ‘Modern Ideas of Childhood’, was published in 1909. Here, he summarised all that he saw as wrong with the education system as highlighted by his experimental research and argued for the introduction of scientific research into pedagogy. Susan J. Atkinson See also Intelligence Quotient (IQ); Intelligence Testing

Further Readings Nicolas, S., & Levine, Z. (2012). Beyond intelligence testing: remembering Alfred Binet after a century. European Psychologist, 17(4), 320–325. doi:10.1027/1016-9040/a000117 Siegler, R. S. (1992). The other Alfred Binet. Developmental Psychology, 28, 179–190. doi:10.1037//0012-1649.28.2.179 Wolf, T. H. (1973). Alfred Binet. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Binge-Watching Binge-watching consists of watching a whole season of a television series or a large number of episodes during a single viewing session. It may also refer to the intense viewing of multiple movies or television programs. The term was coined from the expression binge drinking, meaning an excessive consumption of alcohol throughout a very short period of time. As a new phenomenon, bingewatching can be linked to the evolution of both the television networks’ offer and the consumers’ habits. If this phenomenon can be observed in the general population, it concerns particularly preteens, teenagers, and young adults who have more free time at their disposal than the active population. Moreover, the phenomenon draws legal, social, and health issues. This entry examines new patterns in programming, the impact on audience behavior, and the broader social impacts of this shift.

New Patterns in Television Programming The change in the media consumption has to be linked to the evolving television offer. The contemporary audience may choose, in order of arrival, from traditional broadcast channels, cable television, or streaming services available to paying subscribers. In this competitive landscape, networks have had to develop marketing strategies to differentiate their offer. Thus, pushed by their digital competitors, broadcast channels have begun using their website to make their program available in replay. The changes brought by digitalization allow thus a stronger autonomy of the viewers who may choose a tailor-made program as an alternative to the broadcast or channel television companies’ schedules. Digitalization also brings out the new ubiquity offered by the medium. This characteristic referred to as portability means that any viewer may watch a program at home from a television set or a computer, and also anywhere else from a laptop computer, a smartphone, or a connected watch. The streaming services companies have benefited from this trend on an international scale, their online diffusion enabling them to expand more easily outside of the limits of a national territory. On February 1, 2013, the streaming media and producing company Netflix was the first to broadcast

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simultaneously a whole season of a television series: the first 13 episodes of House of Cards. Its success has started a rapidly growing trend among its competitors. For instance, Amazon Prime Video, a digital distribution service and video on demand launched by the online retailer in 2006 as well as Hulu offering similar services since 2007 under the direction of its parent companies (including The Walt Disney Company, 21st-Century Fox, and AT&T), mimicked the binge diffusion in order to attract the young and versatile audience. Indeed, the simultaneous diffusion of all the episodes of a TV series meets the need of binge viewers. However, it also strongly amplifies the need for new programs whose visibility is becoming more difficult to assert in an overloaded landscape.

A Turning Point in Audience Behavior The binge-watchers’ behavior is fueled by the expanding offer in television series and its immediate availability. However, the behavior preceded the 2013 coup made by Netflix. It began with the use of VCR and DVDs. And since the 1990s, peerto-peer websites have allowed Internet users to watch a uniquely large number of movies and television series while downloading them and/or watching them through streaming. If the illegality of downloading a patented work has been established, streaming on peer-to-peer websites remains in a legal gray area. This fuzziness around the way of consuming films and television series reinforce for the young viewers the sense of inclusion into the digital generation whose practices are very distinctive from their parents. Finding the streaming websites requires a digital awareness that gives them a sense of exclusivity in addition, for some teenagers, to the thrill added by the nonauthorized access. The younger consumers are also drawn to eagerly engage within a fictitious universe. The series lengthy-format allows characters’ development that stimulates the interest and attachment of the viewers. Preteens and teenagers, as well as young adults, tend to act as a fan base for the television series. The social networks and the Internet forums display their comments, various plots’ interpretations, and suggestions. This level of involvement is also drawn by the return of serialization, that is, a progression into the plot

throughout a season or a succession of seasons. The huge production of series fosters diversity: For instance, teen soap opera covers an unprecedented plurality of genres, from musical to vampire tale. Digital effects provide staggering science fiction and fantasy narratives. Eventually, the well-written scripts with cliffhangers and twists trigger the need to see without delay what is going to happen next.

A Social Issue Binge-watching has been described as an addiction in that it provides an immediate gratification susceptible to provoking a habit-forming tendency. An uncontrolled behavior may lead to daily late-night viewing. It numbs the feeling of loneliness and gives a sense of belonging to a digital community as well as to a fictitious universe. It is interesting to observe that binge-watching is mostly a solitary practice with delayed social interactions. Teenagers declare to prefer to watch their TV series alone curled up in their bed or in the living-room couch but choose the program in accordance with their real-life peers’ preferences and then discuss face-to-face or via the social networks about the TV series. In the media and academic world, the behavior is subject to moral and judgmental appreciation. Sleep deprivation, medical problems tight to the lack of physical activity, and loss of social interactions are the main concerns discussed. Eve Marie Lamendour See also Children’s Social Participation, Models of; Consumer Socialization; Media, Children and; Social Inclusion; Teenager Television Series

Further Readings Flayelle, M., Maurage, P., & Billieux, J. (2017). Toward a qualitative understanding of binge-watching behaviors: A focus group approach. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 6(4), 457–471. doi:10.1556/2006.6.2017.060 Hirschman, E. (1992). The consciousness of addiction: Toward a general theory of compulsive consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(2), 155–179. doi:10.1086/209294 Jenner, M. (2014). Is this TVIV? On Netflix, TVIII and binge-watching. New Media & Society, 18(2), 257–273. doi:10.1177/1461444814541523

Biopolitics of Childhood

Biopolitics

of

Childhood

The study of biopolitics can be traced largely to the collected works of French social theorist Michel Foucault and followers of his governmentality approach. Foucault argued that biopolitics was one pole of a form of power he called biopower. The other pole is anatomo-politics, which exploits human energies through efficient conditioning and disciplining of physical bodies, positioning them within institutional apparatuses (i.e., the bodily disciplines of factories and schools). In contrast, biopolitics aims to optimize the vitality of the population through knowledge, technology, and interventions aimed at promoting life expectancies, health, reproduction, and mental hygiene beginning in 18th-century Europe. Children were an important target of early biopolitics as their lives were represented and calculated in relation to economic productivity, thereby encouraging the institutionalization of foundling hospitals and dissemination of knowledge for treating childhood ailments. Children became subjects of visibility and administration when their lives achieved relevance to calculations of national security and prosperity.

Biopolitics Defined Biopolitics targets forms of life with the intent to command and control their vital operations. Foucault traces the origins of Western European biopolitics in significant part to new concerns about sex that began in the 17th century with the Protestant Reformation entailing (a) the social constitution and problematization of children as sexualized beings, (b) the hysterization of women, entailing medicalization of their bodies, (c) the development of the responsibilized Malthusian reproductive couple (discussed in the works of early demographer Thomas Robert Malthus [1766–1834]), and (d) the psychiatrization of perverse desires. Children’s bodies were sexualized following the Reformation in order to preserve their newfound purity and libidinal energies at a time when labor was replacing land as the ultimate measure of economic value. Masturbation, in particular, was seen as draining energies needed for future

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productive labor and for reproducing the Malthusian couple so vital for preserving racial purity and expanding the economic wealth of the nation within early liberalism. As illustrated by the example of masturbation, biopolitics explains forms of power that target life but are deployed in seemingly contradictory ways as vital energies are both elicited and targeted for strict governance and/or repression. According to Foucault, biopolitics is a form of power focused on fostering life or disallowing it to the point of death. Rather than exercise power through overt forms of violence (e.g., bloodshed), biopower seeks to control entire populations through various technologies of power, which include but are not limited to forms of measurement and ranking designed to ensure the adherence to established norms. Foucault emphasized that the normative and ­ capillary aspects of modern power result in antagonistic forces that can be leveraged ­strategically. As the primary site for the operation of power, individuals are both objectified and ­subjectified by biopolitical forces. Accordingly, biopolitical strategies elicit and channel children’s energies, shaping their social identi­ ties, self-understandings, intentions, routines, and habits in historically specific circumstances. Although some governing strategies, such as modern regimes of child hygiene, may persist for decades, others are more ephemeral—such as changing infant sleep regimes and dietary guidelines—thus reflecting changing expectations and interpretations of childhood.

Biopolitics and Childhood Biopolitical analysis of childhood more particularly addresses the cultivation and administration of the vital energies of people designated as children by strategies and technologies of power, such as laws that define and regulate children’s bodies; fields of knowledge and regimes of authority over children, such as pediatrics and developmental psychology; and practices of intervention, such as pedagogical strategies deployed in homes, schools, clinics, and so on. The symbol systems used to represent and interpret children both reflect and challenge the governing strategies used to manage their bodies, habits, and deployments of vital

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energies. Children in Western cultures have been represented as demonlike and aligned with satanic influences; as a miniature adult; as fragile creatures of God; as future delinquents; as vulnerable, at-risk beings; as nascent knowledge workers; and as future terrorists, among other western formulations. Each of these representations arose within particular apparatuses of power, as illustrated by the constitution of children as potential delinquents in need of salvation by Progressive rhetoric, law, and schooling around the turn of the 20th century and as potential future terrorists by the apparatuses of the War on Terror waged globally in the early 21st century. Each of these distinct representations of childhood was coded as dangerous and/or risky by laws, institutional rules, and expert authorities, thereby demanding careful surveillance and enhanced, often disciplinary, government. Biopolitical analysis offers a multidimensional approach to studying how children are represented and governed within particular apparatuses of power. This intense analytical focus on power relations might seem to deny the importance of experience and agency. However, the biopolitical analysis focuses equally on forms of (a) objectification and subjectification and (b) agency and resistance that arise within particular historical circumstances. Take, for example, the rise of expert scientific and clinical authority over childhood during the early part of the 20th century. Although pediatricians, developmental psychologists, and social workers strove to assert their authority over children’s lives with new diagnostic categories and expert practices (such as scientific motherhood), the success of their efforts was ultimately contingent upon the willingness of parents to adopt protocols and the tractability of those beings defined as children. Resistance was high; for example, women challenged expert formulations in their various political countermovements against masculine authority over women’s bodies and mothering. Biopolitical analysis focuses not only on power but also on resistance as social actors align with, or reject, specific forms of knowledge and habits of behavior developed to harness and administer their life forces and discipline their bodies and thoughts.

Research on Biopolitics and Childhood Research on the biopolitics of childhood is interdisciplinary and can be found published in books and journals representing a diverse array of academic disciplines and fields of study, including biotechnology and reproduction, child development and psychology, child policy studies, education, disability studies, policing, law, and international relations, among others. Although scattered across academic domains, those studying the biopolitics of childhood seek to produce untold histories, or genealogies, of childhood governing apparatuses and representational practices, replete with descriptions of specific institutional forms, technologies, authorities, disciplines, knowledges, and points of resistance in hopes that such disclosures reveal the most onerous and liberating forms of power, with the latter representing forms of power that promote vital energies equitably and in ways that are experienced as empowering individual children and their communities. Majia H. Nadesan See also and Childhood Governmentality

Further Readings Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood (R. Baldick, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Bloch, M., Holmlund, K., Moqvist, I., & Popkewitz, T. (Eds.). (2003). Governing children, families and education: Restructuring the welfare state. New York, NY: Palgrave. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-08023-3 Donzelot, J. (1977). The policing of families (R. Hurley, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Lee, N., & Motzkau, J. (2011). Navigating the biopolitics of childhood. Childhood, 18(1), 7–19. doi:10.1177/0907568210371526 Marshall, J. D. (1996). Michel Foucault: Personal autonomy and education. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer. Nadesan, M. (2010). Governing childhood into the 21st century: Biopolitical technologies of childhood management and education. New York, NY: Palgrave. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul (2nd ed.). London, UK: Free Association Books.

Birth

Birth From the beginnings of our species, birth was exclusively the work of women as they labored to push their babies from the private inner world of their wombs into the larger world of society and culture. Yet today, increasing numbers of women around the world have their babies pulled through the birth canal with forceps or vacuum extractors or cut from their wombs via cesarean section. The medical definition of birth is the emergence of a fetus from a womb—a definition that ignores all issues of women’s involvement and agency. This entry describes the cultural overlays that are common to birth practices everywhere.

Birth, Culture, and Women’s Status Although childbirth is a universal fact of human physiology, the social nature of birth and its importance for survival ensure that this biological and intensely personal process will carry a heavy cultural overlay, resulting in wide variation in childbirth practices: Where, how, with whom, and even when a woman gives birth are increasingly culturally determined. In 1908, Arnold van Gennep noted that cultures ritualize important life transitions into what he called rites of passage—of which birth is a prime example. Like all rites of passage, birth practices reflect and reveal the core values and beliefs of the culture, telling the observer a great deal about the way that culture views the world and women’s place in it. Where women’s status is high, a rich set of nurturant traditions tends to develop around birth; where it is low, the opposite may occur. For example, in the patriarchal Islamic society of Bangladesh, in which the status of women is low, childbirth (like menstruation) has traditionally been regarded as highly polluting. It was believed that women should give birth on dirty linens, with the baby set aside on a pile of rags until the placenta was delivered, as that was considered the moment of greatest danger; thus, rates of neonatal mortality and puerperal infections have long been high. In contrast, in matrilineal societies such as those of Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea and of Micronesia, where the status of women is high,

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pregnant women are pampered and nurtured. Skilled midwives administer frequent full-body massages during pregnancy and have a rich repertoire of techniques for assisting women during labor and birth.

The Effects of Place of Birth Brigitte Jordan’s comparative study of birthing systems in Holland, Sweden, the United States, and Mexico’s Yucatán, originally published in 1978, was the first to comprehensively document the wide cultural variations in birth. Her biocultural approach used the cultural definition of birth, the place of birth, birth attendants, artifacts employed to facilitate or control birth, and differences in knowledge systems about birth as foci for cross-cultural comparison. Among these, place of birth and the beliefs and ideologies of the practitioners who attend births have emerged as the most salient for how birth happens. In-home settings across cultures, from huts to houses, childbirth flows according to the natural rhythms of labor and women’s social routines. In early labor, women move about at will, stopping their activities during the 45 seconds or so per contraction, and then continuing to be active (which may include doing chores, cooking, chatting, walking, eating, singing, and dancing). Such activities subside as they begin to concentrate more on the work of birthing, often aided by massage and emotional support from their labor companions, who are usually midwives and relatives. Many cultures have rich traditions about who should be present (sometimes the father, sometimes only women, sometimes the whole family and/or friends), how labor support should be provided, what rituals should be performed to invoke the help of God and/or ancestor spirits, and what herbs and hand maneuvers may be helpful to assist a birth or stop a postpartum hemorrhage. When birth is imminent, women at home usually take upright positions, squatting, sitting, standing, or on hands and knees, often pulling on a rope or pole or on the necks or arms of their companions, and work hard to give birth, rewarded by the baby in their arms. Postpartum practices vary widely: Some cultures encourage early breastfeeding, whereas some code colostrum as harmful and feed the baby other

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fluids until the breastmilk comes in (a dangerous practice; many babies die from contaminated water). Most especially in low-resource countries, long-term breastfeeding is essential for infant survival. Steam and herbal baths and periods of postpartum confinement are often culturally prescribed, varying in length from a few to 40 days. Where freestanding birth centers exist, whether staffed by traditional or professional midwives, the experience of birth is resonant with the experience of birthing at home—a free flow. There are usually no absolute rules for how long birth should take. As long as the mother’s vital signs are good and the baby’s heartbeat is relatively stable, trained attendants allow labor to proceed at its own pace, keeping their focus on the needs of the mother for emotional and physical support. Skilled midwives recognize the difference between the latent phase of labor (up to 6 centimeters of cervical dilation), which can safely and normally take many hours or even days as the uterus tones and prepares for its work of delivery, and the active phase (from 6 centimeters on), which is usually much more rapid. Birth in the hospital and or in a medical clinic is an entirely different experience. Busy technomedically trained practitioners who either don’t recognize the normality of the latent phase (during which, if possible, women should not be admitted to the hospital) or lack both the time and the patience to nurture the mother through a lengthy latent phase tend to assume that birth should follow a certain pattern, including cervical dilation of 1 centimeter per hour—an arbitrary rule unsupported by science but consistent with industrial patterns of production. Ensuring the mechanical consistency of labor requires frequent manual checking of cervical dilation, which, if determined to be proceeding too slowly, will be augmented by breaking the amniotic sac (which introduces the possibility of fetal infection) and intravenous administration of the synthetic hormone oxytocin (Pitocin, Syntocinon) to speed labor. Women are often not allowed to eat or drink and thus are routinely hydrated through intravenous lines, which also facilitate the administration of oxytocin to speed labor and other drugs. Electronic fetal monitoring to record the strength of the mother’s contractions and the baby’s heartbeat is pervasive in Western-style hospitals, in spite of the fact that

its routine use does not improve most birth outcomes but does significantly raise the cesarean rate—because it shows every fetal heart deceleration (most of which are normal during labor), causing practitioners to assume that the baby is in distress when it is not. Intermittent auscultation of the fetal heart rate has been proven to be more effective than electronic fetal monitoring at detecting fetal distress. Yet the monitor is highly symbolic of the supervaluation of high technologies in technocratic societies (or those striving to modernize) around the world; its constant use provides an ongoing flow of information, reflecting the high cultural value technocratic societies place on information that comes from high-tech machines such as electronic fetal monitoring and ultrasound, which is increasingly used to determine fetal size and position instead of the handson uterine palpation midwives are trained in but doctors, increasingly, are not. Episiotomies to widen the vaginal outlet at the moment of birth are also common, although scientifically demonstrated to be unnecessary in 90% of births. Because of the preponderance of evidence against routine episiotomy, United States and European obstetricians have drastically reduced its use to around 10%, while in many low-resource countries the episiotomy rate for vaginal birth is 100% because obstetricians in these countries are taught that the baby will not come out without the cut and/or, as many have noted, that the perineum will explode. Such routine obstetric procedures have at times been ­interpreted as rituals that symbolically enact and display the core values of the technocracy, which center around an ethos of progress through the development and application of ever-higher technologies to every aspect of human life, ­ ­including reproduction. Their routine overuse is described by Suellen Miller and colleagues with an ­acronym—TMTS (“too much, too soon”).

Impact of the Western Technocratic Model of Birth in Low-Resource, Developing Countries Miller et al. contrast TMTS interventions with “too little, too late” failures of care, in which a strong push on the part of development agencies and national ministries of health to move birthing

Birth

people into medical facilities combines with inadequate staff, training, infrastructure, supplies, and medications. The all-too-common result is care that is poor in quality, withheld, or simply unavailable until it is too late. The growing worldwide supervaluation of advanced Western technologies has induced many developing countries to destroy formerly viable indigenous birthing systems and import the Western model even when it is illsuited to the local situation. Hospital staff members often have little understanding of or respect for local birth traditions and values, with the result that local women often avoid such hospitals whenever possible. From Northern India to Papua New Guinea to Croatia to Mexico, indigenous women echo each other’s concerns about biomedical hospitals and clinics in both rural and urban areas: “they expose you,” “they shave you,” “they cut you,” “they leave you alone and ignore you, but won’t let your family come in to support you and feed you,” “they give you nothing to eat or drink,” and “they yell at you and sometimes slap you if you do not do what they say.” Such treatment reflects the importation of the culturally insensitive technocratic model and demonstrates why more and more birth activists around the world are using the terms obstetric violence, disrespect, and abuse to characterize such practices and are insisting that these forms of violence, whether subtle or overt, constitute violations of women’s human rights. The transglobal imposition of this technocratic model on childbirth, sold to governments as modern health care and to women as managing risk and increasing safety in birth, has resulted in an explosion of TMTS technological interventions in birth (including cesarean sections) unprecedented in human history. Despite the World Health Organization’s demonstration that, although a national cesarean rates below 10% means that women are getting inadequate care often resulting in maternal and/or fetal death, when the rate is higher than 15%, it generally means that many cesareans are neither necessary nor life-saving. In many countries, cesarean rates are above 40%. For example, in most Latin American countries, it is normal for private hospitals to have cesarean section rates of 80% or higher, with rates of 30–40% in public hospitals. Greece has possibly the highest national cesarean section rate in the world, at around

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65–70%. Cesarean section rates in India and China vary widely, from 100% in some private urban hospitals to dangerously low in rural areas. The cesarean section rate in the United States stopped rising around 2011 and currently still stands at 32%, and those for the United Kingdom and New Zealand at around 25%. Physician convenience and economic gain, combined with deeply ingrained medical beliefs that birth is a pathological process that works best when technologically controlled, are significant factors in this cesarean epidemic, along with the de-skilling of obstetric residents, who are no longer taught how to use hand maneuvers to deliver babies in problematic positions nor how to turn them in the womb before labor begins. The World Health Organization standard is nearly met in the Netherlands, with its cesarean rate of 16%, and is reinforced by the excellence of birth outcomes in that country. This success is entirely cultural: The definition of birth as a normal physiologic process in the Netherlands, in combination with Dutch cultural values on family, midwifery care, and careful attention to scientific evidence, has led to minimal interventions in hospital birth and a higher homebirth rate (13%). In most of the developed world, homebirth rates hover around 1%, despite the demonstrated efficacy and safety of planned, midwife-attended home births.

Contesting Biomedical Hegemony The global hegemony of this technocratic model is heavily contested. In addition to the thousands of local birthing systems, three primary paradigms for contemporary childbirth exist throughout the world: (1) the technocratic, (2) the humanistic, and (3) the holistic models. The highly patriarchal technocratic model of biomedicine metaphorizes women’s birthing bodies as dysfunctional machines and encourages aggressive intervention in the mechanistic process of birth. The reform effort located in the humanistic model stresses that the birthing body is an organism influenced by stress and emotion and calls for relationship-centered care, respect for women’s needs and desires, and a physiologic, evidence-based approach to birth. This humanistic approach can incorporate epidurals (pain-relieving analgesia that numbs the woman from the chest

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Birth

down), which many women want and is unlikely to cause harm if administered after active labor has kicked in. (Giving an epidural too early in labor, as often occurs in the technocratic approach, can slow labor down, thus necessitating the administration of Pitocin to speed it back up, in what is known as the TMTS cascade of interventions in which one leads to more, often resulting in an emergency cesarean section due to the stress to the baby from the more powerful oxytocin-induced contractions, duly registered on the monitors.) In many low-resource countries, epidurals are simply not available. In the United States, they are used in around 60% of births, whereas in the highresource country of Japan, the epidural rate is only around 6%, as women tend to expect pain in labor and consider it to be an important part of the process of transformation into motherhood. The more radical holistic model defines the body as an energy system, stresses spiritual and intuitive approaches to birth, and places a high value on the feminine—without essentializing women as “slaves to their biology.” Rather, in both the humanistic and holistic paradigms, women are the protagonists and the choices are theirs to make, whereas in the technocratic paradigm, women are passive recipients of whatever kind of care their practitioners choose to provide. In dozens of countries, humanistic and holistic practitioners and consumer members of growing birth activist movements are using scientific evidence and anthropological research to challenge the dominant technocratic model of birth. They seek to combine the best of indigenous and professional knowledge systems to create healthier, safer, and more widely cost-effective systems of birth care. Yet, from a cross-cultural point of view, all three paradigms are limited by their focus on the care of the individual. For example, mortality resulting from parturition (pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period) is widely recognized as a massive global problem, costing over 300,000 lives per year. Technomedicine identifies conditions such as hemorrhage and toxemia as major causes of maternal death; advises investment in doctors, hospitals, and rural clinics to provide prenatal care to prevent toxemia; and recommends active intervention immediately after birth (administration of oxytocin, and cord traction for rapid removal of the placenta—an extremely dangerous intervention) to

prevent hemorrhage. This technomedical approach makes it appear that problems inhere in individuals and should be treated on an individual basis, patient by patient, hospital by hospital. In contrast, social science research in countries with the highest maternal mortality rates (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa) highlights the general poor health of women, who in many patriarchal societies suffer from overwork, exhaustion, anemia, malnutrition, and a variety of diseases resulting from polluted water, showing that the most important interventions required for improving women’s health and for increasing safety in birth are clean water, adequate nutrition, and improved educational and economic opportunities for women.

Back to the Future: Science and Midwifery Care Deep in the evolutionary past, our ancestors came to understand the benefits of women helping other  women to give birth. Today, the most successful birthing systems combine midwifery— and, increasingly, doula care—with solid scientific research on the physiology of birth, resulting in what Melissa Cheyney and Robbie Davis-Floyd have termed the RART approach or “the right amount at the right time.” Contemporary midwives and doulas (supportive labor companions) work in all settings, from hospital to home, and support women to avoid unnecessary interventions, and to move around a lot during labor, as frequent movement is the essence of a healthy labor, as is eating and drinking at will to give women the strength they need. Such practitioners encourage women to give birth in upright or sidelying positions (never on their backs, as this lithotomy position compresses the pelvic outlet, making pushing more difficult) and to enjoy uninterrupted contact with their babies after birth, which facilitates breastfeeding. In the United States, obstetricians solidified their control over birth during the first half of the 20th century and had nearly eliminated midwifery by the 1950s. Since then the demands of many women for the more one-on-one, time-intensive, and humanistic care midwives provide have g­ enerated a small midwifery renaissance. U.S.-based research, such as Eugene Declerq’s 2015 study, reports that by 2012, certified nurse-midwives had reached

Birth

attendance at 11.3% of total U.S. births, while “other” midwives, mostly certified professional midwives, attended around 1.36%—a significant rise from the 2% midwives cumulatively attended in 1979. A major midwifery renaissance has also taken place in New Zealand. As Eugenia Georges and Rea Dallenbach report, professional midwives were nearly nonexistent in New Zealand by the 1980s, yet today they are present at 100% of births—even at scheduled cesareans performed by obstetricians; they also are chosen to serve as primary caregivers by 92% of pregnant women. And the long-standing midwifery systems of the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent the United Kingdom continue to achieve excellent results. The World Health Organization, the International Confederation of Midwives, and other international development organizations have issued a call for 350,000 more professional midwives to be trained in the very near future to meet the demand for skilled care and evidence-based birth practices, most especially in low-resource countries. Traditional midwives, formerly the major care providers for the majority of women in these countries, are being intentionally phased out of practice in most of them because development agencies and Ministries of Health have come to perceive them as generally untrainable in best practices and thus unable to lower the still unacceptably high maternal and perinatal mortality rates in those nations. Much anthropological research addresses the faulty nature of these perceptions and stresses the lamentable fact that traditional midwives are almost never trained in the lifesaving and easy-to-learn proper administration of oxytocin injections, or of Cytotec/misoprostol, to stop postpartum hemorrhages on the ground rather than having to try to transport the bleeding mother to a faraway—and often unreachable— medical facility where too little, too late care may prevail. Yet such perceptions of untrainability persist to the extent that it seems clear, sadly, that traditional midwives will not accompany us into the future, in spite of their invaluable services in the present and the past. When their training and practice are overly biomedical and their work conditions are stressful due to overwork and lack of essential supplies, professional midwives and nurses themselves can

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be the source of the problem of obstetric violence, sometimes to the same extent as doctors. In contrast, midwives and nurses trained in what is internationally known as “the midwifery model of care”—which focuses on keeping birth normal in most cases while identifying and addressing pathology where it truly exists—are often the solution. It has repeatedly been demonstrated that practitioners of the RART midwifery model perform fewer interventions, generate less iatrogenic damage to mothers and babies, improve outcomes (both psychological and physical), and massively lower costs. It is to be hoped that in short order the world will pass through the current phase of high technology interventions in what should and could be normal birth and come full spiral, uniting evolutionary understandings with contemporary science through midwives’ skilled, nurturant, and woman-centered care. Robbie Davis-Floyd See also Baby, Social Construction of; Mothers/ Motherhood; Pregnancy; Reproductive Choice

Further Readings Cheyney, M., Bovbjerg, M., Everson, C., Gordon, W., Hannibal, D., & Vedam, S. (2014). Outcomes of care for 16,924 planned home births in the United States: The midwives alliance of North America statistics project, 2004 to 2009. Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health, 59(1), 17–27. doi:10.1111/ jmwh.12172 Davis-Floyd, R. (2003). Birth as an American rite of passage (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1922) Davis-Floyd, R. (2018). The technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models of birth. In T. Merrill (Ed.), Ways of knowing about birth: Mothers, midwives, medicine, and birth activism (pp. 3–44). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. (Original work published 2001) Davis-Floyd, R., Barclay, L., Daviss, B. A., & Tritten, J. (2009). Birth models that work. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis-Floyd, R., & Cheyney, M. (Eds.). (2019). Birth in eight cultures. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. de Jonge, A., van der Goes, B. Y., Ravelli, A. C., AmelinkVerburg, M. P., Mol, B. W., Nijhuis, J. G., . . . Buitendijk, S. E. (2009). Perinatal mortality and morbidity in a nationwide cohort of 529,688 low-risk planned home and hospital births. BJOG: An

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International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 116(9), 1177–1184. doi:10.1111/j.1471-0528 .2009.02175.x Declerq, E. (2015). Midwife-attended births in the US, 1990–2012: Results from revised birth certificate data. Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health, 60(1), 10–15. Georges, E., & Dallenbach, R. (2019). Divergent meanings and practices of childbirth in Greece and New Zealand. In R. Davis-Floyd & M. Cheyney (Eds.), Birth in eight cultures (pp. 89–128). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Jordan, B. (1993). Birth in four cultures: A cross-cultural investigation of childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States (4th ed; revised and updated by E. Davis-Floyd). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. doi:10.1525/maq.1996.10.1.02a 00110 (Original work published 1978) Miller, S., Abalos, E., Chamillard, M., Ciapponi, A., Colaci, D., Comandé, D., . . . Althabe, F. (2016). Beyond too little, too late and too much, too soon: A pathway towards evidence-based, respectful maternity care worldwide. The Lancet, 388(10056), 2176–2192. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(16)31472-6 Trevathan, W. (1987). Human birth: An evolutionary perspective. New York, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Birth Control Birth control generally refers to the practice of preventing conception. It can also signify terminating a pregnancy. It has been a feature of people lives (those of reproductive age) across history and geographical spaces. Heterosexual men and women have employed many techniques to avoid conception and childbearing, including abstinence, a range of barrier methods, scheduling sex at particular times of the menstrual cycle, coitus interruptus (withdrawal prior to ejaculation), menstrual regulation (using abortifacients to induce bleeding), sterilization, modern contraceptive methods (including oral hormonal pills), long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) such as intrauterine devices, long-acting hormonal injections and implants, and abortion. This entry examines birth control as a social and public health issue, contraception, and other birth control methods, and how and why young people are often denied access to birth control. This entry

also examines attempts to educate young people on available birth control methods and explores how young people are implicated in ongoing debates about abortion.

Birth Control as a Social and Public Health Issue While birth control involves a set of decisions and actions at an individual or couple level, it is also intensely social. It is intricately interlinked with governments’ population policies, in which governments seek to regulate population growth according to the perceived needs of a country, in particular, economic needs. Population policies vary from attempting to reduce the population of a country (antinatalism) to encouraging couples to have children (pronatalism). Very often these policies are interweaved with the power relations in a country. For example, it is often marginalized groups (poor women, Black women, disabled women, drug-using women, sex workers, migrant women, and young women) who are the target of birth control messages and techniques. These may include such measures as forced sterilization and the administration of LARCs without informed consent. And very often it is the dominant groups (e.g., White people during Apartheid in South Africa) who are encouraged to have more children (including through such incentives as tax breaks). Unintended pregnancies account for about half the pregnancies throughout the world, meaning that planning for pregnancy is only one factor in conception. How children are viewed within a particular country is another factor in how heterosexual couples act on birth control. In spaces where children are viewed as economic resources, fertility may be high. In others, where they are valued simply for their emotional worth and where they represent a net drain on family resources, fertility may be lower. It is within these contexts that birth control for minors is either opposed or advocated for. The notion of minors accessing birth control brings with it a host of questions which are linked to cultural understandings of what childhood entails. Discussing birth control among minors requires acknowledging that young people do and will engage in sex. This sits, for some, uncomfortable with the notion of childhood innocence. Questions

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of competence to negotiate sex and birth control all form part of the debate. Nevertheless, in light of concerns that are expressed in many countries regarding unwanted pregnancy and childbearing among teenagers (in particular marginalized young people), significant public health effort has been put into encour­aging contraceptive usage among sexually active­ teenagers as well as understanding the barriers to usage. There have been differing levels of success in this regard, with reports of rates of usage varying across countries. For example, sexually active young people in countries in the Global South report significantly lower rates of usage than their counterparts in resourced Global North countries. Minors are not only children but form part of the complex power relations around which population and birth control within a country play themselves out. As the literature by critical researchers on teenage pregnancy shows, it is not teenagers per se who are viewed as creating individual calamities and social problems through childbearing, but rather teenagers who occupy marginalized positions within particular societies (generally poor, Black teenagers).

Contraception An important concept in contraceptive use is the notion of unmet need. This refers to sexually active women who are able to conceive and who do not want a child (or another child) in the next 2 years or at all and are not, for a variety of reasons, using contraception. Women in the Global South, poorer women within countries, and young women are more likely to experience unmet needs than their wealthier and older counterparts. Public health research on teenagers and contraception has focused on four broad issues: (1) the most suitable form of contraception to reduce sexual and reproductive health problems, (2) barriers to young people using contraception, (3) young people’s knowledge, attitudes, and practices in relation to contraception, and (4) providing youth-friendly contraceptive services. Each of these will be discussed in the following sections.

The Most Suitable Birth Control Methods Research shows that young women experience more contraceptive failure and are more likely to

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discontinue contraception a year after starting than older women in similar situations. Given this, public health specialists pose the question of the most suitable method of birth control for young women. Some have argued that young women have difficulty remembering to take the daily dose of oral contraception. Therefore, LARC, such as intrauterine devices and long-acting injections and implants, are mooted as a better option. When young women know about intrauterine devices, they generally express positive attitudes toward their use. Among those who do use them, there is evidence of continued usage and low rates of unwanted pregnancy. Long-acting injectable and implant contraception is, however, somewhat more controversial for two reasons. Firstly, there are health effects, such as reducing skeletal health. Secondly, a number of critical researchers have pointed out that long-acting injections and implants tend to be prescribed for women in marginalized or disadvantaged situations. Concerns have been raised about their being used in coercive ways that reduce women’s reproductive rights and choice and possibly endangering their health. Some researchers argue that emergency contraception should be widely discussed with young people to assist them through gaps when they change contraception, method failure, and lack of use of other contraception. It has been argued that this is an area, in addition to condom usage, in which young men should be well informed so that they can become actively involved in contraception decisions. Much emphasis has been placed in countries with high HIV infection rates on the use of condoms, particularly among young people who have high new infection rates. Increasingly, however, public health experts are advocating for dual method use (condom plus another method) in order to prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

Barriers to Young People Using Contraception Barriers to young people using contraception include lack of knowledge, obstacles to accessing information and services, and concern over side effects, especially fear of infertility. Researchers have pointed out that minors may not be well

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informed about sex and contraception, particularly in spaces in which abstinence-only is emphasized. Barriers to accessing services include inconvenient clinic opening times (e.g., during school hours), long distances to clinics, rude staff who scold the girls (or boys), and a lack of confidentiality (community members attaining knowledge of the visit to the clinic). Research shows that contraceptive usage and negotiation is deeply gendered. For example, young women may fear infertility and other effects such as weight gain when using oral contraception and LARCs. This points to particular culturally embedded notions of successful femininity which includes childbearing as the ultimate goal of womanhood and the slim body as the attractive female body. The fear of infertility is so entrenched in some areas that young women (e.g., in post-Soviet countries) may prefer to terminate a pregnancy rather than using oral contraception or LARCs. Condom use may be associated by young people with disease and promiscuity. Despite significant messaging concerning the prevention of HIV through condom use, young people may suspect that their sexual partner wishes to use a condom because she/he is already infected. They may also believe that it an indication of infidelity on the part of their partner. In addition, young women may find negotiating condom use with a male partner difficult, with men frequently preferring to have sex without a condom on the basis of increased pleasure. The notion of romantic love (we are in this together) can make negotiating contraceptive usage difficult. A major barrier to the use of contraception is what has been termed the feminization of contraception: the assumption that the responsibility for contraception lies with women. In many societies, gendered understandings of the role of women includes the management of sexual encounters and fertility. Where these management strategies are not successful, women are frequently stigmatized for having pregnancies that are unintended, unwanted, or mistimed. Researchers have pointed out that this feminization occurs in multiple spaces including health-care services, where service providers are not equipped to speak both to young women and young men.

Various government campaigns emphasize the need to improve parent–child communication about sex and sexuality. However, as pointed out by some researchers, these often stress parents encouraging the delay of sexual debut, rather than discussions of contraception. In addition, the manner in which communication is enacted is important. This includes the content of the communication (e.g., moralizing content has less impact), the style of communication (e.g., authoritarian versus dialogical), the frequency of the communication, and where and when the communication takes place (e.g., in spaces where young people feel safe and able to talk about sensitive issues). Where this kind of communication is lacking, a barrier to contraceptive usage among sexually active young people may be fear of their parents discovering their contraception. As contraception is a clear sign of sexual activity, or the plan to engage in sexual activity, parents who disapprove of sex between young people may react negatively and even punitively. Research and health-care practice concerning contraception, for the most part, assume that the participants of research and patients in clinics are cisgender young men and women who are, or potentially are, engaged in heterosexual relationships. Information and training on how to work with intersex, transgender, nongendered, gay, bisexual, and lesbian youth is in short supply.

Interventions: Youth-Friendly Services and Media Messaging Interventions to improve access and use of contraception have included the provision of sexuality education, extending contraceptive services to young people, and building community support for the provision of contraception to children. It is argued that comprehensive sexuality education that provides information on a range of birth control methods (including, but not limited to, abstinence) should be provided both within and outside of the school setting. Proponents of comprehensive sexuality education point out that information on sex and contraception does not encourage early sexual debut or increased sexual activity but rather serves to protect young people from unwanted early

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reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases when they do decide to engage in sex. A key question in relation to sexuality education outside of the classroom is using the media that young people generally use and which they find attractive. New digital media (such as the Internet, text messaging, mobile phones and social networking sites) have become increasingly popular as means of reaching young people. These interventions show some promise in increasing contraceptive usage and in promoting positive attitudes toward contraception. Increasing access to and use of health services by young people has been a major initiative over the last few decades. Providing contraception through a variety of outlets, including schools, has been advocated for, as well as integrating contraceptive services into other services. The creation of what is termed youth or adolescent-friendly services has attracted significant attention. Youth or adolescent-friendly service initiatives, in which services are rendered in a way that is acceptable to young people and that encourages them to use the services, have been set up in a number of countries. These initiatives have met with some success. These services have also been critiqued, however, for continuing to treat adolescence as an underdeveloped stage, for idealizing traditional family forms, and for viewing sexuality as negative and dangerous for girls, and pregnancy as wholly deleterious. Researchers have highlighted some of the issues that should be considered when health service providers counsel young women about their contraceptive options. These include assessing the maturity of the young woman, her finances, and her ability to access health care; the assurance of confidentiality; a clear outline of the medical risks and benefits of each method; contraindications for the use of certain methods; and addressing concerns such as infertility, weight gain, and acne. The topics of menstrual suppression with hormonal methods, contraception taken in the context of complex medical conditions, and birth control for adolescents with physical and development disabilities are also reviewed. There is a gendered aspect to these recommendations, as it is seldom suggested that service providers spend as much time providing

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information and counseling young men about reproductive issues and contraception.

Abortion A method of birth control that has been practiced down the ages is abortion. The legal status of abortion varies considerably across the world, with some countries having very liberal legislation (e.g., allowing the woman to request a termination of pregnancy within a certain period, such as the first trimester of gestation) and others having very restrictive legislation (e.g., not allowing abortion even when the woman’s life is in danger). In contexts of restrictive laws, unsafe abortion, which is defined as a termination of pregnancy performed in unsafe medical conditions or by an unregistered practitioner or both, is common. It is a major factor in the occurrence of maternal mortality in these situations. Unsafe abortion also occurs, however, in situations where there is liberal legislation but a lack of political will to implement the laws (such as in South Africa). Pregnant teenagers with unwanted or unsupportable pregnancies tend to face significant complications in accessing termination of pregnancy services. In some countries where abortion is legalized on particular grounds, a minor needs parental consent in order to receive the service. In places where judicial bypass (where the minor approaches a court to provide permission) is permitted, this process may delay the procedure until the pregnancy is past the cutoff date for legal terminations of pregnancy. Even in countries where parental permission is not required, parents and extended family may feel that they have a right to decide on the outcome of the pregnancy, putting pressure on the young woman in one direction or the other. The sexual partners of the young women may also feel that they are entitled to impose their own views or alternatively may provide her with little support in her decision. A key difficulty with young women is early detection of the pregnancy. This results not only to late access to antenatal clinics where the decision is to take the pregnancy to term but also to late access of termination of pregnancy clinics where abortion is decided upon. Second trimester (3–6 months of a pregnancy) abortions are more complicated medically. Even in countries where women are allowed

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to request an abortion, a termination of pregnancy after 12 weeks of gestation usually requires the recommendation of health service providers. A further factor in minors accessing abortions is the attitudes of referral staff and the termination of pregnancy clinic staff. Referral staff may feel negatively about minors being pregnant in the first place and may have objections to abortion. They may on the basis of this refuse to provide information on services of alternatively provide misinformation. Termination of pregnancy clinic staff can, in many instances, act as gatekeepers, even when ostensibly all requests should be provided for. In circumstances where there is a great demand for services, staff is forced to prioritize. In the case of minors, this may have contradictory effects. In some cases, clinic staff may fast track requests by young women on the basis that childbirth in such circumstances is clearly unacceptable; in others, they may feel negatively about youth sex and reproduction and therefore construct a number of subtle barriers. Catriona Ida Macleod See also Adolescence Pregnancy Child Pregnancy; Pregnancy; Reproductive Choice

Further Readings Chandra-Mouli, V., McCarraher, D. R., Phillips, S. J., Williamson, N. E., & Hainsworth, G. (2014). Contraception for adolescents in low and middle income countries: needs, barriers, and access. Reproductive Health, 11(1), 1. doi:10.1186/ 1742-4755-11-1 Guse, K., Levine, D., Martins, S., Lira, A., Gaarde, J., Westmorland, W., & Gilliam, M. (2012). Interventions using new digital media to improve adolescent sexual health: A systematic review. Journal of Adolescent Health, 51(6), 535–543. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth .2012.03.014 Kossler, K., Kuroki, L. M., Allsworth, J. E., Secura, G. M., Roehl, K. A., & Peipert, J. F. (2011). Perceived racial, socioeconomic and gender discrimination and its impact on contraceptive choice. Contraception, 84, 273–279. doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2011.01.004 Wittaker, A., & Gillam, M. (Eds.). (2014). Contraception for adolescents and young adult women. New York, NY: Springer.

Birth Order The order in which children are born into the nuclear family has significance in religious, monarchical, legal, financial, and other social systems. These distal forces may result in internal conflict concerning hierarchy, succession, and inheritance. Consequently, the topic has been the subject of historical, sociological, and psychological research. This entry begins with a historical overview of the significance of birth order, including the law of primogeniture. It continues with a discussion of theories about the effect of birth order on personality and intelligence and ends with a brief section about sibling rivalry.

Historical Overview Traditionally, for poorer families, the order of birth of children has been less important than the number and survival of children. Egyptian Royal households and Chinese dynastic rulers required slaves and a working populace. Good survival rates of children born to slave and peasants thus maintained the workforce although not their nuclear families. This reading of history bears comparison with modern familial societies at risk of war, flood, and famine and consequent disease and starvation. Such societies may privilege firstborn children—often boys—but their primary concern is survival. Historically, families with greater financial and cultural capital have been bound by cultural, traditional, and religious contexts that determine the importance of birth order. Primogeniture is the right, by law or custom, of the paternally acknowledged, firstborn son to inherit his parent’s entire or main estate, in ­preference to daughters, elder illegitimate sons, younger sons, and collateral relatives. The son of a deceased elder brother inherits before a living younger brother by right of substitution for the deceased heir. Among siblings, sons inherit before daughters. Egyptian civilization was ruled by primogeniture. The firstborn had absolute power within the family unit. Pharaoh was the firstborn of the firstborn of the firstborn. It was from this birthright that he exercised power. In the 10th plague recorded

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in the book of Exodus, the slaughter of firstborns can be seen as an attack against Egypt’s entire culture at that time. Rabbinic tradition dictates that the slaughter is commemorated annually. During the Roman Empire, laws pertaining to inheritance made no distinction between the oldest or youngest, male or female, if the decedent left no will. Roman aristocracy was based on competition; a Roman family could not maintain its position in the ordines merely by hereditary succession or title to land. The eldest son was expected to construct his own career based on competence as an administrator or general. A combination of the laws of primogeniture, sibling rivalry, interfamilial intrigue, and murder in a period over 700 years resulted in exclusively male rulers of England from Egbert in 827 CE until the succession of Mary in 1553 CE. The same combination in 1483 CE led to the imprisonment and presumed (though unproven) murder of the princes in the tower—Edward V (aged 12 years) and Richard, Duke of York (aged 9 years)—at the hands of their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

Personality and Intelligence Constructs of personality are not stable across time and, despite the common use of personality tests and media statements by experts, any constructions about personal attributes are the only opinion. The personality industry is maintained by such experts who test presumed qualities such as leadership or attributes characteristic of personality disorder. Psychological theories mirror and maintain lay conceptions of personality and myths concerning the influence of birth order. These myths are embedded in religious and other laws noted earlier. Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler (1870–1937) proposed that younger and only children are more likely to be pampered; such indulgence is supposed to have an impact on personality development. The psychologist Frank Sulloway suggested that birth order had powerful effects on the supposed traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. He argued that firstborns were much more conscientious and socially dominant, less agreeable, and less open to new ideas compared with later borns. As with all psychological constructs relying on language, the key confounding factor in Sulloway’s hypothesis is

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that there can be wide variation in definitions of, for example, openness. Further confounding variables include family size and socioeconomic status. Larger families are associated with poorer people; a third-born child in an impoverished household creates greater challenges than a new sibling in a wealthy household and needs to develop a different range of survival responses, which may then be seen as personality characteristics. Children in adoptive and extended families with several different parents act differently than do those in the archetypal Western family of two siblings of a married couple. As Michel Foucault has noted, abnormality defines desirability by default. Thus, siblings in a non-archetypal family (actually, the majority in most countries) must develop strategies for defending against accusations of being odd and different from the norm. Large independent multicohort studies in the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany, such as those reviewed by Julia Rohrer, Boris Egloff, and Stefan Schmukle, have revealed no conclusive effect of birth order on personality. Children’s adjustment to social and material factors in a growing family may eliminate or change any initial effects ascribed to birth order. In a review of all research published between 1946 and 1980, Cecile Ernst and Jules Angst found no substantial effects of birth order and concluded that birth order research was a waste of time. Firstborns, only children, and children with one sibling all score higher on tests of verbal ability than do later borns and children with multiple siblings. This supports the hypothesis that parents who have smaller families also have children with higher IQs. Satoshi Kanazawa’s analysis of the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom found no association between birth order and intelligence. Similarly, claims that birth order affects sexual orientation have been questioned.

Sibling Rivalry The sibling bond is often complicated and is influenced by factors such as parental treatment, birth order, and people and experiences outside the family. Such rivalry can be assumed among siblings without evidence, for example, by psychoanalysts who propose that denial of rivalry

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indicates unconscious hostility toward siblings. Birth order is central to the myth of rivalry embodied in numerous fictional works. King Lear, for example, provokes rivalry among his three daughters by asking them to describe their love for him; in the same play, Edmund contrives to force his half-brother Edgar into exile. In John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden, the brothers Cal and Aron Trask are counterparts to Cain and Abel of the Bible story. The folk character Cinderella, brother-like Mufassa and Scar in the 1994 animated film The Lion King, the brothers in the 1972 and 1974 films The Godfather (Parts I and II), and the sisters and stepsister in the 2005 film In Her Shoes, all offer stereotypical aspects of sibling rivalry. In the contemporary music world musicians Liam and Noel Gallagher, who formed the band Oasis, are often portrayed as having a turbulent relationship, similar to that of Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks.

Validity of Theoretical Conclusions Psychological theories concerning the importance of birth order reflect and reify cultural and religious factors such as primogeniture and literary myths. These myths include the conflict between siblings and the presumed importance of the firstborn. A critical perspective concludes that the varied interpretations of words used to describe aspects of personality, the generalization of the term family and socioeconomic and related factors render invalid psychological theories focusing on birth order. Craig Newnes See also Children in Romantic Literature and Thought; Family; Judaism; Sibling Rivalry

Further Readings Ernst, C., & Angst, J. (1983). Birth order: Its influence on personality. New York, NY: Springer. Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do. New York, NY: Free Press. Kanazawa, S. (2012). Intelligence, birth order, and family size. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1157–1164. doi:10.1177/0146167212445911 Lamb, M. E., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1982). Sibling relationships: Their nature and significance of the lifespan. London, UK: Psychology Press.

Rodgers, J. L., Cleveland, H. H., Van Den Oord, E., & Rowe, D. C. (2000). Resolving the debate over birth order, family size, and intelligence. American Psychologist, 55(6), 599–612. doi:10.1037/ 0003-066X.55.6.599 Rohrer, J. M., Egloff, B., & Schmukle, S. C. (2015). Examining the effects of birth order on personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(46), 14224–14229. doi:10.1073/pnas.1506451112

Blank Slate, Children

as

See Tabula Rasa

Boarding Schools The boarding school is an educational institution that provides its pupils with meals and accommodation. Although often identified with elite and reactionary provision, the boarding school has served as a site for the regulation of marginalised groups and as a centre for countercultural experimentation. This entry begins with a history of the English public school, a template for elite education in many countries. It then turns to the role of boarding schools in state education, focusing on pedagogy in China, before addressing the destructive use of such institutions in the education of indigenous people. Theoretical approaches to the boarding school are introduced here, and the entry concludes with a discussion of contemporary debates concerning the benefits of boarding school education.

The British Boarding School Model One of the most globally recognised models of boarding school education was developed in England in the 19th century. What are known in Britain as ‘public schools’ (private fee-paying institutions, as opposed to schools supported by public funds) began as endowed charitable organisations, allowing a small number of non-elite male students to study at grammar schools. By the 18th century, they had become centres of privilege but were widely criticised for poor

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quality teaching, unsanitary conditions, and a lack of discipline. From the 1830s, through the influence of Evangelical reformers such as Thomas Arnold at Rugby, the schools were transformed once more. The school day became regulated, games were granted greater significance, peer monitoring was encouraged, and an ideology of self-control was promoted. Although the English boarding system always maintains a unique curriculum, subjects studied were gradually expanded. The new focus on character rather than lineage, the broader curriculum, and the promotion of self-control resulted in an influx of upper-middle-class pupils. The schools remained popular with the aristocracy, however, with pupils from this class receiving instruction in social responsibility. The Clarendon Commission (1861–1864) examined the quality of provision at the nine ‘Great Schools.’ The report concluded that they should be free to exercise independent judgment in educational matters but that entry should be gained through examination. This led to the rise in unregulated, fee-paying preparatory schools. The introduction of access through examination is indicative of the transformations in pedagogical structure that Pierre Bourdieu observes in his study of the very different education in France: Because elites could no longer rely wholly on inheritance to maintain their dominant position, class reproduction took on more indirect, institutional forms. The 1860s introduced a tension in elite education that persists to this day: Privileged groups are caught between the need to justify their status through the idea of universal access to enabling educational structures and the need for the unhindered replication of existing structures. The result is often a normalisation of privilege. The schools investigated by the commission were for educating boys only, but English boarding schools for girls were also developed during this period. Elite education for girls had been centred on the home and was generally wide-ranging but superficial. The development of the boarding school introduced a more rigorous programme of study. As in earlier provisions, the justification rested on the requirement to offer intellectual companionship in married life, but this was accompanied by a recognition of the increasing need to prepare for

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professional employment. The boarding school enabled young women to experience female community within a patriarchal society, but it also expected its pupils to both adhere to strict rules of feminine behaviour and follow masculine structures of established educational practices. By the end of the century, the boarding schools were increasingly tasked with creating a public service elite and in the process shifted their outlook from the evangelical to the colonial. One aspect of the expansion of empire was the exporting of the model of the boarding school; elite education in Ghana and India take from the English system. Boarding schools in America, Scotland, and Australia can also be traced back to this model, but in every instance, there are significant differences. Thus, for example, American pupils begin their study after their English counterparts, and Scottish institutions are urban rather than rural. Despite the challenge to aristocratic power arising from the end of the World War I and the increased dominance of day schooling in the private sector, English boarding schools remain centres for the cultural replication of elites and have contributed to a globalised system for shoring up the interests of the powerful. They also are increasingly globalised institutions themselves, with a third of British boarding school pupils coming from overseas.

Chinese Boarding Schools It is estimated that 33 million children attend boarding schools in China, a significant minority of these at elite institutions. Boarding can also be the only option for economically disadvantaged members of society. In 2000, the falling birth rate led to the closure of many schools that serviced rural communities in western China, with the government pooling resources in larger institutions. The declared intention was to enable children from poor backgrounds to have a greater chance of achieving educational capital: At boarding schools they should receive regular meals and will not be required to engage in manual labour. In reality, the institutions are designed to reduce expenditure in their every aspect, funded so poorly that pupils are often malnourished and receive scant medical treatment; in addition, widespread failures to protect basic human rights have been reported.

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There has also been an increase in neoliberal thinking in more successful rural schools, with an individualist ideology placing constraints on pupils while also offering the conditions for resistance.

Native American Boarding Schools The stated aim of certain boarding schools is to inculcate pupils within a prevailing culture. Among the most notorious of these are the Native American boarding schools created in 19th-century America. These institutions worked to eliminate Native American identity, this understood to be more efficient than, and therefore preferable to, military means. Beginning in 1869, the government ordered Christian administration of reservations, leading to the establishment of 150 schools on these reservations. Pupils suffered abuse and harsh discipline, received inadequate food and medical care, and were instructed to speak only English. At an additional 25 schools later established outside reservations, pupils were further isolated from family and community. This is not an isolated programme; comparable institutions in Australia, Russia, and Canada were designed to eliminate indigenous people. Despite sharing a commitment to indoctrination with the majority of Soviet-era boarding schools, as well as madrassas in Pakistan and all elite boarding schools, they differ in many respects, not least in their strict focus on marginalised groups. It can be argued that a connection can be made, however, insofar as all could be classed as ‘total institutions’.

Theories of Institutionalisation Erving Goffman includes the boarding school in his list of those total institutions that reject the separation of work, sleep, and play and promote mandatory, scheduled, and collectively experienced activities. There is an imbalance in the numbers of ‘inmates’ and staff, and surveillance aids governance. Those entering the institution at a low level are subject to a mortification process. Breaking the complex set of rules is inevitable, leading to a constant sense of anxiety. Such institutions are figured by Goffman as experiments in what can be done to the self. Total institution subjects tend not to rebel for any sustained period,

but they do not side wholly with those in power, choosing instead the path of least resistance. For Michel Foucault, institutional surveillance can be placed within a wider context of Enlightenment praxis. The disciplinary structures within the total institution contribute to the production of the modern subject rather than simply placing limits on an essentially free and preformed individual. The boarding school pupil, in this understanding, is an exemplar of the managed subject, exposed to constant scrutiny and, ultimately, self-regulating. Foucault figures the boarding school as a “crisis heterotopia,” a transitional yet disciplinary space, removed from the gaze of wider society.

Theories of Psychological Impact There has been a recent growth in literature claiming that boarding schools negatively affect attachment patterns in early childhood. Ideally, children and caregivers come to terms with the necessity of mutual adaptation. Boarding school pupils must, instead, adapt to the demands of the institution while dealing with the loss of the familiarity and support of home. This, combined with what is taken to be a prevalence of abusive relationships within total institutions, leads to difficulties in later life, with ex-boarders unable to sustain complex relationships.

Radical Boarding Schools Some boarding schools move against the intolerance and coercion often found within total institutions. In radical schools such as Summerhill in the United Kingdom, pupils have the right to organise their own time, attend whatever lessons they choose, and vote on all school matters. They are free to do what they will, as long as this does not negatively affect fellow students. Unlike other boarding schools, where questions of sexuality turn on a choice between disavowal and regulated control, Summerhill encourages its exploration and expression. Such schools are controversial, and Summerhill, in its original incarnation, was criticised both for poor teaching and toleration of sexual relationships between staff and pupils. It can be argued that schools such as Summerhill remain uncanny doubles of their reactionary opposites: They, too, are experiments in what can be done to the self,

Borders, National

complete with their own—arguably ­liberatory— forms of surveillance and mortification.

Resurgence of Elite Education Elite schools in many countries, aware that their financial security at least partially depends on state sponsorship, have increasingly attempted to justify such largesse through outreach, with methods and resources exported to state schools. Although an arrangement favoured by reactionary politicians, the notion that the boarding structure has liberatory potential is shared by committed social reformers such as Lisa Bass, whose study of working-class black students at boarding schools in the United States suggests that the system is unique in the access it grants to enabling capitals. The 24-hour care such institutions provide enables vulnerable students to experience economic and social stability. Education capital is maximised through small-group tuition; culture capital, through extracurricular activities.

Equality and Success There is equally strong evidence that boarding school education in the elite mode will always serve established power, and that, even where efforts are made to engage outreach, they are divisive. Aline Courtois’ 2017 study of private schools in Ireland demonstrates that success of such institutions arises from their difference from other forms of education. Although independence enables a dismissal of many of the target-driven structures that define state education, it also works to the advantage of pupils aiming to qualify for powerful positions within the competitive market such targets serve. Certainly, within the United Kingdom, former boarding school pupils dominate government and media: 7% of the population went to private school, yet in 2015 half of the members of the cabinet in David Cameron’s government were educated in private boarding schools. A further problem with arguments that see in the structure of boarding schools the possibility of enabling democratic access is that boarding schools do not offer the best long-term education. On average, privately educated students in the United Kingdom receive lower degree classifications than those in state education.

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The disproportionate number of top jobs taken up by privileged students is thus attributable to other factors. If personal confidence and cultural capital could be increased in working-class students through boarding school provision, a range of other advantages will never be so widely enjoyed. It is, for example, the ability to work as an unpaid intern and networks of family connections that lead to elite employment opportunities. Neil Cocks See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Bullying in Schools; Classroom Discipline; Education; School Story, The

Further Readings Adams, D. W. (1996). Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience. Lawrence: University of Kansas. Bass, L. (2014). Boarding schools and capital benefits. Journal of Educational Research, 107(1), 16–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2012.753855 Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. A class apart: China’s grim boarding schools. (2017, April 12). The Economist. http://www.economist.com/news/ china/21720603-millions-children-countryside-attendwretched-schools-far-home-chinas-grim-rural Courtois, A. (2017). Elite schooling and social inequality: Privilege and power in Ireland’s top private schools. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave. Foucault, M. (1984, October). Des espace autres [Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias] (J. Miskowiec, Trans). Architecture: Mouvement, Continuité, No. 5, 46–49 Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. New York, NY: Anchor. Hansen, M. H. (2016). Educating the Chinese individual. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Maxwell, C., & Aggleton, P. (Eds.). (2016). Elite education: International perspectives. Abingdon, Oxon, United Kingdom: Routledge. Schaverian, J. (2016). Boarding school syndrome. Hove, United Kingdom: Routledge.

Borders, National Borders are geographic boundaries that demarcate the territory of a political entity, usually a nationstate. Borders are not fixed entities; rather, they are connected to the historical creation of

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nation-states, and they have always maintained fluidity because of wars and political conflicts as well as other forms of geopolitical restructuring (e.g., fall of the Iron Curtain, the creation and expansion of the European Union). Although the forces of globalization have eased and accelerated the movement of people, goods, and information across borders, national borders remain relevant because debates about identity, citizenship, and security continue. The bourgeoning, interdisciplinary field of border studies has gained momentum since the 1990s and is evidence of the centrality of borders in social sciences. The purpose of this entry is to provide an overview of the major debates surrounding national borders and to illustrate how children and childhood are implicated in these debates. The literature on border studies begins with a basic observation—that the number of international borders is larger than ever despite the widespread belief that the world is borderless. Although it is true that Internet technology has created the possibility for cross-border communication, the fact that more borderlines are being drawn between populations cannot be ignored. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the division of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the 1990s played a large role in increasing the number of international borders, and other demands for independence, partition, or secession maintain the possibility for the creation of new countries. Although the fall of the Berlin Wall is a prominent example of national reunification, the overall state of affairs points to a trend for division and the creation of more boundaries.

Border Studies: Three Major Themes Border Conflict and Contestation

Three major themes run through the field of border studies. First is the question of border conflict and contestation, which means that the positioning of the national border is not agreed on by both sides. There is a long list of territorial disputes where military hostilities occasionally erupt (e.g., Israel and Palestine, China and Tibet, Sudan and South Sudan, Russia and Crimea) and where the conflict can be traced back decades or even centuries ago.

In other cases, such as the Balkans, national borders are not officially disputed, but given drastic redrawing of boundaries in the 20th century, there are still debates about populations that find themselves on the wrong side of the border. These disputes reveal that questions of belongingness and territory are not settled in many areas around the world and that these conflicts challenge stagnant notions of national identity. Children who live in war zones or conflict zones are directly affected by border disputes. Some research on this topic focuses on psychological and mental health issues that may arise from children’s exposure to violence, especially posttraumatic stress disorder; however, the research is limited and not necessarily grounded in culturally sensitive approaches. One of the most prominent case studies is the Green Line between Israel and Palestine where children in the West Bank and Gaza face, on a daily basis, an elaborate matrix of blockages and boundaries, in addition to the heavily militarized checkpoints. In cases in which border disagreements are protracted but generally nonviolent, social science research shows that children may inherit narratives of pain and suffering from parents and grandparents or even stories of previous peaceful coexistence (e.g., Northern Ireland, Cyprus). Thus, living along a disputed border provides for a complex process in national identity formation that involves family stories, the educational system, and the media. Border Porosity

The second most prominent issue in border studies is the question of the porosity of the ­border—that is, the question of who can cross a border and under what circumstances. Migration laws in each country dictate who can legally go across a border and for what purpose; also, international human rights laws specify the responsibility of nation-states to grant asylum. According to the International Organization for Migration, there has been a continuous increase in the total number of international migrants (this includes economic migrants and internal migrants as well as refugees and asylum seekers), although their overall percentage has been kept fairly constant in the past few decades. Historically,

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populations have crossed borders because of armed conflicts, forced deportations, or even to move from former colonies to the metropolis (notable destinations are the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands). The movement of populations across the globe highlights hierarchies between groups enclosed in national borders or designated with specific nationalities. Border studies scholars recognize the authority of borders to classify and categorize populations, thus emphasizing the idea that one’s passport is not a neutral document but a symbol of power. The unification of several European countries and the elimination of border controls through the Schengen Agreement is an example of increased border permeability designed to facilitate the movement of European Union (EU) citizens while at the same time the outer borders of the EU became more impenetrable. The creation of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX) in 2005 underlined the idea that the freedom of movement within the EU should be safeguarded through the control of the outer-border porosity. Security

These processes point to the third concept in the field: security. Border studies scholars argue that national border security is complex because national borders have been deterritorialized. Borders can be either natural (rivers, coastlines) or artificial barriers (walls, fences, barbed wire), but they can also exist in locations such as airports and train stations. This means that border control entails not only strategically located military outposts but also the use of increasingly sophisticated bureaucracy of documents (passport, visa, travel permits), biometric measures, and Internet-based databases, which often raise questions about government surveillance and privacy rights. Thus, national border security is less about military invasions and more about protecting the nation from “unwanted” populations such as refugees, migrants, or those deemed as potential terrorists. Part of the focus of border studies is how permeable national borders threaten a sense of national purity and arouse social panics. There are also examples of border areas where control

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eludes law enforcement and the borderland functions under different rules. For example, the area in Southeast Asia known as Zomia where the borderlands of several countries intersect (Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, China) in a rugged terrain is a case of multiethnic populations defying the boundaries of the nation-state and maintaining their own subsistence economy and culture. Also, the border city of Tijuana at the U.S.–Mexico border is another example of a hyperactive border that features gang violence, drug wars, and trafficking.

The Impact of Border Debates on Children Children’s lives are directly implicated in these debates on national borders, although it was not until recently that research focused on children’s own perspectives about the legitimacy of borders or their border crossing experience. Children as migrants became the focus of research only in the 1990s when there was increased interest in understanding their lives—from how they adjust to how they maintain a sense of ethnic identity. Studies on migrant children in the United States present a particularly rich tradition, focusing on whether migrant children are upwardly mobile, how they learn to become “American,” and how they negotiate hybrid identities. Often, children play a role in borderland spaces by defying conventions of movement to find ways to protect themselves or even stay alive. There are examples of research showing how Palestinian children are able to slip through the roadblocks in order to peddle goods or how children in the Zomia borderland find ways to survive by engaging in illegal trade. Finally, some studies focus on the experiences of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, given that their numbers have increased dramatically in the past few years, especially in the United States and the European Union. This research highlights ethical issues in working with this population, the difficulties in “classifying” underage children (illegal migrants, refugees, minors, victims), and the contrast between a legal approach and a psychological approach to managing children who are potentially traumatized or have been victims of trafficking. The study of borders focuses on issues that exemplify the idea that borders are not static

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objects but historical and political products that can be negotiated, disputed, and adjusted. The lives of children unfold differently within different boundaries, and their movements across national borders complicate notions of security and legality. Understanding how children participate in these “bordering” processes reveals not only the cultural dimension of national borders but also the complexity of investigating children’s rights and children’s agency. Miranda Christou See also Children and Borders—Cyprus; Children and Borders—Palestine; Children’s Mobility; Immigrant Children; National Identity; Refugees; Transnational Childhoods

Further Readings Aitken, S., Bosco, F., Herman, T., & Swanson, K. (2011). Young people, border spaces and revolutionary imaginations. New York, NY: Routledge. Donnan, H., & Wilson, T. M. (1999). Borders: Frontiers of identity, Nation and state. New York, NY: Berg. Spyrou, S., & Christou, M. (Eds.). (2014). Children and borders. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Spyrou, S., & Christou, M. (2016). Children and youth at the border: Agency, identity and belonging. In K. Nairn et al. (Eds.), Space, place and environment: Vol. 3. Geographies of children and young people (pp. 521–540). Singapore: Springer. Wastl-Walter, D. (Ed.). (2012). The Ashgate research companion to border studies. Surrey, United Kingdom: Ashgate. Wilson, T. M., & Donnan, H. (Eds.). (2012). A companion to border studies. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Bourdieu, Pierre Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French sociologist who dedicated his life’s work to understanding inequality and the cultural reproduction of society. His concepts habitus, cultural reproduction, field, and symbolic violence serve as tools and have been widely applied in sociological

research. The purpose of this entry is to give a brief overview of Bourdieu’s motivation to develop his concepts as well as an overview of how his concepts help make sense of the role of education in social and cultural reproduction. Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in Béarn, France, to a working-class family and grew up in a small village. Despite his working-class roots, Bourdieu was a bright student and graduated at the top of his class from the prestigious institution École Normale Supérieure in Paris. However, he always felt like an outsider among other French intellectuals at the institute. After graduation, he went on to teach philosophy in a high school but was soon after called, very much to his annoyance, to serve in the French Army in Algeria. His rebellious actions during his military service meant that he was disciplined and sent to work in Algeria as punishment. This is when he took up his first position as a lecturer in 1958 in Algiers (capital of Algeria). During this time, Bourdieu got to experience the French–Algerian war (1952–1962), colonialism, and uprooting of the Algerian people, leading him to develop a sociological stance on the phenomenon that he was witnessing. In 1962, he returned to France to carry on his academic work. One of Bourdieu’s earliest works looked into the lives of the Kabyle peasants and the effects of the French–Algerian war on their agricultural practices, marital practices, and gender relations. He found, for example, that when the Algerians migrated to France and took up new positions in farming, for some, the traditional agricultural practices that had survived over generations in their own homelands diminished and were reduced to a form of labour only for the purpose of being exchanged for commodities. Many struggled to rise up in the ranks in the field of agriculture, and some even returned to their homeland. Inspired by his own uprooting and personal struggle, during this time, Bourdieu developed the notion of habitus (dispositions), capital (power or assets) and cultural capital (skills, knowledge, values, etc.), and field (the network of objective relationships between positions occupied by agents according to the capital they possess). For example, he argued that the Kabyle peasants had inculcated over generations their

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traditional agricultural practices, specifically keeping their honour system in tact through gender role divisions. Thus, the Kabyle peasants were inclined to act that way due to their habitus. Their agricultural skills (capital) did provide some peasants with opportunities outside their homelands in that these forms of capital were valued. However, when removed from the conditions that gave rise to those dispositions (by, for example, migrating to France), some peasants felt out of tune with their new surroundings; in other words, their habitus was mismatched with the new field. Bourdieu argued that, specifically, education played a significant role in societal and cultural reproduction of society in a way that the dominant groups remain dominant and vice versa. With his colleague Jean Claude Passeron, Bourdieu used cultural and social capital (alongside linguistic) and directly related the possession of these capitals to the degree of success of students in the French education system. They found that these students were differentially selected and positioned in schools, courses, and ability classes according to their possession of power or status, which then had an impact on their achievement outcome (as reflected in the patterns found through statistical analysis). It either limited or enhanced their access to further capital available in the field (field here can be seen as the school, and classrooms can be seen as fields within the school field). If this is applied to, for example, understanding engagement and disengagement with learning in classrooms, it may be suggested that the distribution of this “capital” can define the success of the student (e.g., higher attainment in a subject) within a classroom. Such a capital can be seen as having several forms— social, cultural, economic, linguistic, and so on. In childhood studies, specifically, Bourdieu’s sociological tools (field, habitus, cultural capital) have been used to understand children’s experiences of childhood as mediated by societal inequalities. For example, the focus has been on children’s positioning within the field acquired through their own cultural capital, the opportunities the field avails them based on their cultural capital, and the role of their parents in building that capital. The field of childhood studies has also looked at how

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children’s subjective understanding of their positioning within society develops over time. Bourdieu’s contribution to social theory gives a powerful insight into the role of power (capital) in local cultural practices, especially in education, with what consequences to learning. Finally, to date, Bourdieu remains the most cited social theorist in educational research. Sophina Choudry See also Childhood, Anthropology of; Cultural Capital; Habitus; Social Inclusion; Structural Violence

Further Readings Alanen, L., Brooker, E., & Mayall, B. (Eds.). (2015). Childhood with Bourdieu. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Devon, United Kingdom: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2007). Sketch for a self-analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wacquant, L. (2002). The sociological life of Pierre Bourdieu. International Sociology, 17(4), 549–556. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580902017004005

Bowlby, John John Bowlby (1907–1990) was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His theory of attachment is an account of the development of secure, intimate, meaningful, enduring, and trusting relationships. The forming of attachment begins in infancy with the child’s primary caregiver but has ramifications for the way they relate to others throughout life. Bowlby’s theory has had a profound influence on the understanding and treatment of children in every aspects of their lives. It is possibly the most influential 20th-century psychological theory of child development. Attachment theory is essentially a spatial theory. Its premise is that the closeness to a loved one feels good while separation causes anxiety. As Bowlby puts it “all of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organized as a

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series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

Early Experiences of Care Shape Their Expectations According to Bowlby, there are two key factors shaping the extent to which a child develops the capacity to form secure attachments. The first is whether a child has experienced a calamitous separation in which no alternative maternal figure is provided. This leads to the shutting down of interest in emotional connection with others. The second factor is the parental emotional attitude to their child. If the infant’s caregiver is reliable, sensitive, and available, the child will develop into a securely attached, trusting, optimistic adult, able to reflect on themselves and relate empathically to others. If the child’s caregiver is neglectful, abusive, unreliable, preoccupied, or insensitive, the child will develop an insecure (anxious or avoidant) attachment style. The need for closeness may be minimized or relationships may subject to anxious attempts to control the other person. The concept of the internal working model is key to Bowlby’s theory of attachment. Each individual develops a set of unconscious assumptions about themselves (e.g., how acceptable or lovable they are) and about the world and what they can expect from others, based on experiences with their attachment figures.

Evolution/Ethology Among primates, the human newborn baby is particularly helpless because its brain is comparatively underdeveloped. Forming an attachment with its caregivers is essential for survival and is universal across human societies. Babies are innately motivated to contribute actively to establish a bond with their caregivers. Bowlby saw the quality of a child’s relationship with caregivers as the key to understanding their mental health. This was a challenge to the narrow psychoanalytic view of Melanie Klein that prioritized the child’s unconscious fantasies over reallife events and the classical Freudian emphasis on life and death drives. Bowlby wanted to reformulate the psychoanalytic theory of instinct to explore the way humans have evolved to form

attachments. Attachment is not, as Freud would have it, a means to an end (it’s not cupboard love) but rather a motivational end in itself.

Bowlby’s Personal Life There were deeply personal reasons for Bowlby’s interest in human attachments and loss. Bowlby’s life was characterized by a series of major separations and losses which had a powerful impact on him. As a child, he saw his mother for only 1 hour a day (except in summer) and was brought up primarily by a much-loved nanny until the age of 4 years, when she left the family and was replaced by a cold and sarcastic nanny. It is widely believed that the loss of his first mother-figure fueled his interest in the centrality of attachment and loss in forging the psyche. Bowlby suffered further losses and dislocation later in his childhood. During the First World War, his father fought overseas and only returned home once or twice a year. At the age of 10 years, Bowlby, along with his older brother, were sent to boarding school.

The Impact of Maternal Deprivation One of the first pieces of research Bowlby undertook was with children evacuated to Cambridge during the Second World War. In 1944, he published Forty-four Juvenile Thieves. He found that a disproportionate number of young delinquents had experienced early and prolonged separation from their primary caregiver before the age of 5 years. These findings of the relationship of deprivation and delinquency brought international attention to the impact of a child’s early emotional environmental on their healthy development.

Influence and Legacy of Bowlby Bowlby’s legacy is immense. Attachment theory is taught across the human sciences and to caring professionals, such as social workers and professionals allied to medicine. Attachment-based research has also had a huge impact (although the attachment needs of the infant are far from adequately addressed) on the treatment of children in schools, hospitals, and the care system. For example, there is no longer routine separation of children from their parents while in hospital, a common practice prior to Bowlby’s work.

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Attachment theory has spawned a huge body of international research exploring and evidencing the impact of early attachments on human relationships across our life span. Colleagues such as Mary Ainsworth and later work by Mary Main, Howard Steele, and Peter Fonagy have developed and extended Bowlby’s theory to refine, develop, and clarify the impact of environmental stresses on cognitive–emotional development. Attachment-based neuroscience has provided further validation of Bowlby’s claims that the first 24 months of life form a crucial sensitive period in human development. The period of establishing an attachment exactly overlaps the period in which there is a massive growth spurt in the brain. Neuroscientists such as Allen Schore have shown that face to face, highly arousing dyadic interactions, usually between the mother and baby are crucial in ­influencing the wiring of the circuits in the brain that are the responsibility for the future socio-­ emotional development of the individual. Bowlby has been criticized by feminists and sociologists, who argue his theory essentializes and pathologizes mothers who are exhorted to become an enslaved carer. However, this view distorts Bowlby’s concern, which is less with women as carers per se than with the infant’s need for intimately engaged, sensitive, and deeply committed caregivers. He recognized that the carer needed support from the family and other social institutions. Just as Donald Winnicott recognized there is no such thing as a[n isolated] baby, Bowlby understood that the attachment couple cannot be seen in isolation from the wider context of the attachment system. The primary carer needs social support to undertake the demanding and important work of caring for an infant. Deborah Marks See also Attachment Theory; Developmental Psychology; Evolutionary Developmental Psychology; Klein, Melanie; Psychoanalysis, the Child in

Further Readings Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. London, UK: Hogarth Press. Duschinsky, R., Greco, M., & Solomon, J. (2015). The politics of attachment: Lines of flight with Bowlby,

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Deleuze and Guattari. Theory, Culture and Society, 32(7–8), 173–195. Holmes, J. (1993). John Bowlby and attachment theory. London, UK: Routledge. Schore, J. (2016). Modern attachment theory: The central role of affect regulation in development and treatment. In A. N. Schore (Ed.), The science of the art of psychotherapy (27–51). London, UK: W. W. Norton. Wright, K. (1991). Vision and separation: Between mother and baby. London, UK: Free Association Books.

Boyhood Boyhood has often been defined as the opposite of girlhood and has been differentiated from adult masculinity. This has led to different concerns about boys’ specific circumstances and to portray boys as either being in crisis or as causing social problems. This entry offers an overview of different conceptualizations of boyhood in popular and scientific discourses, focusing on gendered perspectives on boys. It also discusses boys’ shifting relations to gender and sexuality over time.

History of Boyhood In modern times, boys and girls have often lived in separate spheres and under somewhat distinct conditions. In the United States in the 19th century, for instance, boys were often freer than girls to roam and were allowed to play and carry out their chores without adult supervision. There were, however, also concerns that industrialization and urbanization affected boys negatively, in particular that they would be feminized. Commentators argued that boyhood was in crisis since coeducation forced boys to embrace girls’ cultures and, as families and schools were dominated by women, boys lacked proper male role models. In response to this, different forms of boy work emerged, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Scout movement that wanted to regain the manhood of the nation by having men and boys spend time together. Since then, the feminization of boys has been a recurring theme. Another common concern has been boys as a social problem. In the middle of the 20th century,

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the sociologist Talcott Parsons depicted the gendered division of labor in the nuclear family— where men and women have distinct sex roles—as an adequate adaptation to contemporary society. But fathers’ absence was yet again argued to create difficulties for boys. While girls identified with their mothers, boys had no natural male role models. Drawing on psychoanalytical perspectives, Parsons argued that the boy initially identifies with his mother but has to distance himself from her when realizing that women are inferior to men in society. Aggression and condemnation of weak and effeminate boys are seen as attempts to create distance from the mother and femininity in general. Parsons called this anxiety about the male sex role and the need to demonstrate manhood compulsive masculinity, which in the worst case could lead to antisocial and criminal behavior.

Boyhood and Delinquency Sex role theory was often used in discussions about juvenile delinquency. Boys’ comparatively higher crime rates were explained by differences in socialization, as boys were less supervised than girls, expected to be tough and allowed to question adult authority. In his subcultural theory, Albert Cohen emphasized class background to explain young men’s criminality. He saw working-class boys’ delinquency as a result of a combination of compulsive masculinity and status frustration, that is, feeling discontent with not being able to achieve the same economic and social position as the middle class. Working-class boys therefore joined gangs involved in crime that provided income and higher status in the local community. For middleclass boys, delinquency was seen as exclusively a matter of compulsive masculinity.

Boys in Subcultural Studies The youth cultural studies that developed in the United Kingdom in the 1960s–1970s were partly inspired by subcultural theory but focused primarily on esthetic and cultural expressions. ­ ­British cultural studies scholars were critical to moralizing discourses that portray boys as social problems and instead explored how young ­people—often involved in spectacular workingclass subcultures such as teddy boys, rockers,

skinheads, and motorbike gangs—resisted both parent and mainstream culture through music, clothes, and other symbolic means. In the groundbreaking book Learning to Labour, Paul Willis followed a group of White working-class boys, the lads, who were critical of their school’s middle-class norms and saw its meritocracy as ­ merely a means of social control. They instead idealized manual labor, which they associated with masculinity and toughness. Being a lad was also expressed through heterosexual identification, drinking, dismissing schoolwork, and joking at the expense of the conforming boys in school. Although Willis and others explored young men’s cultures, they did not discuss gender relations but had a rather idealized view of boys, which obscured girls’ cultures and romanticized young men’s resistance while minimizing their sexism, racism, and violence. As a response to this, scholars have increasingly taken a boy-centered approach by exploring boys’ experiences and opinions about the world and their lives while also problematizing masculinity. Inspired by feminist theories, masculinity is conceptualized as culturally and historically contingent, whereas the biological body is regarded as given. Masculinity is not only accomplished by boys’ distancing themselves from femininity but also through hierarchies between men. Raewyn Connell sees boy culture as hierarchies between different forms of masculinity, in which one group is able to maintain a hegemonic position vis-à-vis other masculinities and femininities. This approach diverges from sex role theory, which is considered inadequate to explain social and psychological processes in the development of gendered subjectivity as it presents a static and a historical polarization between boys and girls. It is also critical of patriarchy theories since it simplifies gender relations and obfuscates power differences between boys. At the same time, boy-centered researchers have continued to focus on boys as a social problem and identified how they dominate girls and, for example, harm their schooling experiences, but also that boys harm other boys physically and emotionally. A number of traits have been associated with young hegemonic masculinity, such as physical strength, aggression, and sexism. Specific attention has been given to boys’ anti-school ­culture and to their homophobia.

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Boys’ Anti-school Culture The boy crisis discourse that has grown strong in many Western countries since the 1990s is largely a result of reports of boys’ underachievement and a widespread anti-school culture. Reminiscent of the debates a hundred years earlier, boys are positioned as victims of women dominating boys’ lives in school and at home. The current debate is also related to the neoliberalization of education and its increased emphasis on competition, where schools unable to produce high-performing students are doomed as failing and where rankings in international tests create concerns about national academic performance. The boy crisis discourse should also be seen in the light of a backlash against feminism, where gender equality efforts carried out in the school environment are seen as having gone too far. On the one hand, boys are constructed as victims of feminization and the crisis of education. On the other, the tone of the public discussion is often tinged with nostalgia for a lost masculinity whose superiority is left unchallenged. Dominant explanations for the gender gap in school achievement have been that academic success and studying hard has low status among boys and that hegemonic masculinity is rather linked to rowdiness and indifference to schoolwork. Boys and girls are recurrently presented as homogenous groups, which obscures the importance of class background for educational achievement, boys that are study-oriented, as well as the experiences of underachieving girls. Some researchers have called for more nuanced analyses, suggesting that boys balance between idealized masculine positions. They distance themselves from studying and hard-working swats (a category associated with lack of talent), while they also value educational achievement without excessive effort. By not being too studious yet not failing, many boys can engage in schoolwork without having their masculine identity questioned.

Homophobia and Gender Normativity Another issue continually linked to boyhood as a problem is homophobia, which has been described as pivotal in regulating young masculinity. All behavior that can be interpreted as feminine including emotional and physical

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intimacy with other boys has been classified as gay, while homosexual and nonbinary youth have been marginalized in masculine hierarchies. In recent years, however, researchers have pointed out that the grip of homophobia on young masculinity is loosening, and, above all, that the meaning of homophobic language depends on context. While invectives such as fag, gay, or sissy are central to boys’ interaction, C. J. Pascoe argues that they are not always homophobic; they are rather resources to discipline each other through joking relationships. Fag is not necessarily linked to homosexual boys but is used when boys fail to enact ideal masculinity. Since everyone can temporarily be a fag, it is not to be seen as a fixed identity. Nevertheless, boys may still be afraid of being associated with the fag identity, especially if it becomes a permanent label. Recent studies among working- and middleclass boys and young men in the United Kingdom and the United States suggest that homophobia is declining since sexuality does not define popularity and that boys recurrently express gay friendliness. Mark McCormack argues that this is a consequence of broader cultural changes where attitudes toward homosexuals have been remarkably more positive and where an inclusive young masculinity is emerging as homohysteria is decreasing. These cultural changes affect boyhood culture, according to McCormack. Since the risk of being seen as gay is diminishing, heterosexual boys increasingly dare to express emotions, intimacy, and other behavior that had previously been condemned. While there is currently a transformation underway in how boys relate to gender and sexuality, it should also be noted that LGBTQ youth still are disproportionately exposed to violence and hate crimes and lack the same civil rights as heterosexuals in most societies. Further, normative masculinity can also be enacted by portraying other boys as homophobic or sexist. Working-class, racialized, and Muslim boys are often pointed out as embodying such values, and particularly the young immigrant man has become a deviant masculine stereotype in need of learning Western liberal norms of sexuality. Embracing gay friendliness and other inclusive values can thus be a form of homonationalism and a way of producing new hierarchies among young masculinities.

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Queering Boyhood Although boyhood scholars recurrently point out that masculinity is accomplished, they tend to tie it to what young men do. Queer theorists have therefore argued for separating masculinity from male bodies and seeing it rather as practices and discourses that children and young people can embody in different ways and to various degrees. Jack Halberstam has explored how masculinity is accomplished by girls, such as tomboys. Tomboysim is a form of female masculinity that adults perceive as relatively positive among young girls, since it is seen as an expression of agency and postponed sexualization. If boys exhibit the same cross-identification, they cause fears of possible homosexual or transidentity. Tomboyism also becomes troublesome in adolescence since it does not fit into traditional feminine gender norms. It is only accepted if it is seen as a precursor to an adult femininity but becomes problematic if it transitions or is in the risk of transitioning into an adult female masculinity such as butch identity. In a similar vein, Chris Haywood and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill have called for a postmasculinity approach where gendered identities are studied without being reduced to masculinity. Too strict a focus on masculinity reproduces a regulatory system based on sex/gender binaries, which they instead argue need to be destabilized since dichotomous categories such as masculinity and femininity restrict cross-gender attitudes and behaviors. Boyhood is then not defined as the opposite of girlhood or as a definite gender category but as a temporary fixation of discursive and material assemblages. Haywood and Mac an Ghaill also emphasize the need for an intersectional understanding of boyhood, where other positions, such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, can be more important to boys’ identity processes than gender. In particular, the position as a boy illuminates how gender interacts with age. The transitive character of childhood suggests that masculinity is always changing and unstable and that boyhood could always be imagined differently. Lucas Gottzén See also Boyhood Studies; Gender; Queer Studies; Sexualities and Childhood; Youth Culture

Further Readings Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haywood, C., & Mac an Ghaill, M. (2013). Education and masculinities: Social, cultural and global transformations. London, UK: Routledge. McCormack, M. (2013). The declining significance of homophobia: How teenage boys are redefining masculinity and heterosexuality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199778249.001.0001 Pascoe, C. J. (2011). Dude, you’re a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1353/sof.0.0041 Willis, P. E. (1977). Learning to labour: How working-class kids get working class jobs. Farnborough, UK: Saxon House. doi:10.4324/ 9781351218788

Boyhood Studies The interdisciplinary field of boyhood studies encompasses a range of practical and theoretical approaches to the study of boys and boyhood. Like childhood studies itself, which it clearly draws on and, in recent years, has developed from, contemporary boyhood studies bring together researchers from various academic disciplines, including—but not limited to—sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary studies. Boyhood studies initiate complex considerations of deceptively simple questions, such as what is a boy or how should boyhood be defined? In a broader sense, the work of boyhood studies extends beyond the academy to include a diverse array of stakeholders, such as parents, teachers, activists, and boys themselves, all of whom approach these questions differently, a recognition that contemporary boyhood studies takes as a starting point. Practitioners in the field cast a wide net in taking stock of these different approaches while attempting to establish a cogent framework to meaningfully contextualize key issues, questions, and developments in the field. This entry explores the history of boyhood studies and lays out some of the key trends and themes of this stillevolving area of study.

Boyhood Studies

The Development of Boyhood Studies The study of boyhood has a long if imprecise history in the Anglophone world. Still, a few visible landmarks help chart the field’s development. A strong body of scholarship devoted to boys and boyhood surfaced in the wake of the Western feminist movement of the 1960s–70s, and boyhood studies began establishing itself as a clearly recognizable field in the 1990s; this process was punctuated in 2007 by Thymos: A Journal of Boyhood Studies, the first academic journal devoted to the subject. As this long incubation period suggests, boyhood studies have experienced some difficulty establishing itself as a unified field, with leading theorists and critics debating how to best situate research on boys and boyhood within the broader rubric of gender studies and, especially in relation to similar but separate fields, such as women’s studies, men’s studies, and girlhood studies. Of course, the study of boys, and boyhood, has a long history predating these debates, and this history has also done much to shape the current iteration of boyhood studies.

Boyologists In the Anglophone world, one clear antecedent to boyhood studies involves the loosely organized boyologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term boyology was coined by American Henry Gibson, a self-styled boy expert in 1916 and resuscitated by a handful of contemporary scholars of boyhood nearly a 100 years later. In the second half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, boyology folded in a number of cultural and social movements designed to define the features and characteristics of boyhood, while addressing the proper or desired development of boys. These movements, typically instigated by members of the Anglo-Saxon elite, employed a cohesive set of strategies to protect boys from perceived threats, such as the feminizing influence of the home, the deleterious effects of modern urbanity, or the danger posed by sensational literature and other types of early American mass culture, while promoting activities that enabled a proper path to ideal manhood.

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Muscular Christianity stands out as one example of these kinds of character-building movements. The movement began in the United Kingdom and migrated to America in the second half of the 19th century. As popularized in Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, Muscular Christianity wedded Victorian notions of self-control and moral duty to a program of physical exercise and athletic activity. While Puritan orthodoxy framed the movement’s celebration of active play and physical exertion as sinful, prominent American ministers like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Henry Ward Beecher soon became proponents of Muscular Christianity, and the movement spread rapidly. Beecher advocated building gymnasiums inside YMCAs, and in the last four decades of the 20th century, churches began routinely promoting exercise as a way to cultivate the body and the soul. The growth of the YMCA coalesced with other character-building movements, including early scouting organizations, culminating with the foundation of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910, and valorization of organized team sports. These movements proliferated toward the century’s end, as contemporaneous anxieties about boyhood escalated, described by some pedagogues as a boy problem or boy crisis, powerful enough to instigate a degree of moral panic. Turn-of-the-century fears about juvenile delinquency provide one keen example of this kind of panic at work. The American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall represents a key touchstone for this cultural moment. Hall established the contours of modern adolescence, publishing the influential book Adolescence in 1904. He focused on youth as a time of great promise and peril and offered early models for developing young people into successful adults. Hall was mostly interested in the development of boys, describing the raw material of boyhood as a unique source for developing idealized visions of American manhood. Boys, Hall insisted, had access to a kind of primitive strength adult men lacked. Left to their own devices, however, boys’ primitive strength could develop pathologically. As such, Hall presented boyhood as a time that required increased dependence and guidance.

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Similar ideas predated Hall, and his theories can be read against broader developments at the time, specifically the growing influence of the middle class, the emerging prominence of the companionate family, and concerns about the future of American (read as Anglo-Saxon) manhood. All of these historical factors helped provide the context for various educational models and boy work organizations to prosper in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Interestingly, the questions and concerns that dogged Hall and other boy workers at the turn of the 19th century remained central to cultural reckonings of boyhood at the turn of the 20th century. This helps explain the second life of boyology in the early decades of the 21st century. Researchers described the term in its original historical context, while also using it to examine the return of popular rhetoric about a boy crisis, as evidenced in books published by mainstream authors like Michael Gurian and Christina Hoff Sommers. To some, the language of boyology seemed eerily similar to the language used by these 20th-century activists, and debates about boys and boyhood as at-risk became common in academic journals and mainstream news media outlets alike. Contemporary scholars of boyhood studies have expressed considerable interest in these parallel constructions of boys as victims and boyhood as a time of crisis, offering a range of opinions about the durability and viability of this rhetoric. In fact, the notion that boyhood demands and has demanded both too much and not enough attention remains a paradox central to boyhood studies work in the Anglophone world.

Feminist Perspectives Renewed concern of a boy crisis also existed within a broader critical response to western feminist ideology. Boy crisis proponents, Sommers, in particular, sought to push back against a dominant brand of feminism that they conceived of as marginalizing boyhood and threatening the well-being of American (particularly) boys. In this way, boyhood studies became sucked into the culture wars of this time period, and as a result, a bulk of scholarship in the field was devoted to questions of educational inequality, psychological development, and the contested relationship ­

between biology and gender. At the center of the culture wars, and this raft of scholarship, were data that suggested that, in the wake of the feminist revolution, girls were outperforming boys in various forms of school testing, high school graduation, and college enrollment. The related question of whether or not boys were falling behind dominated these cultural debates and, along with data suggested gendered differences in educational achievement, remains central to research in boyhood studies. The paradigm shift wrought by the feminist revolution affected the theoretical parameters of boyhood studies as well. Like masculinity studies, boyhood studies has defined itself largely in response to feminist theory, even as the relationship between boyhood studies and seemingly parallel fields, such as girlhood studies, remains murky. Clearly, all of these movements coexist within the broader rubric of gender studies, a field that has gained cultural credence rapidly in the 21st century. However, scholars of boyhood studies have ­struggled to situate themselves properly within these broader cultural conversations and realignments. At its heart, contemporary boyhood studies remain strongly influenced by the ideological repositioning of masculinity studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Prominent scholar Raewyn Connell injected the notion of hegemonic masculinity into this discourse, providing a radical realignment of scholarly conversations about both manhood and boyhood. Connell’s influential notion that social, historical, and cultural practices are constantly being reshaped to justify male dominance had a powerful effect on the development of scholarship of boyhood studies in the 1990s. For if patriarchal structures were constantly being adapted and refitted to justify masculinity’s primacy, much of that work would be expected to happen in institutions such as schools and families, places where boys learned to be men. While largely following Connell’s lead, scholars of boyhood studies began a rigorous investigation of hegemonic masculinity through questions about race, social class, and, of course, age.

Boyhood Studies and Childhood Studies At this same time, echoing childhood studies, scholarship of boyhood studies grew increasingly

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wary of developmental models that obscured the question of agency. Rather than defining boys through notions of futurity, though what they are developing into or who they might become, scholars became more interested in how individual boys perceived, responded to, and helped shape their social worlds. This shift encompassed a number of modified research methodologies, such as including boys as research participants, and theoretical adjustments, such as focusing on boys’ competency and capacity as meaning makers. At the end of the century, scholars of boyhood studies retained strong ties to masculinity and men’s studies, but practitioners in the field were generating new types of questions about the relationship between the different fields. Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity remained influential. However, scholars did not limit themselves to questions of how this idea structured the cultures of boyhood or framed the social worlds of boys themselves. In addition, scholars looked at issues more applicable to individual agency, such as how might boys resist or subvert hegemonic masculinity as it appeared in a specific social or cultural setting. This reorientation of the field helped instigate a more expansive global perspective for boyhood studies. From the early focus on boyology to postfeminist reappraisals of boys and gender, the field of boyhood studies retained a decidedly, and reductively, Anglophone focus. As scholars started paying growing attention to how race and social class could structure boyhood in various social and cultural contexts, exercising a powerful influence on the lives of individual boys, their focus began to shift to the existence of multiple boyhoods in different parts of the world. So, just as African American boyhood might be situated in a range of historical, sociological, or anthropological discourses, any consideration of Sudanese or South African boyhoods suggested a similar set of discourses combined with a plethora of distinct context-specific questions and considerations. During the first two decades of the 21st century, gender issues have been dynamic and hotly contested, demanding broad public interest and engagement in the Western world. Gender studies has flourished in these years, and the field of boyhood studies has been rejuvenated as well.

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Although Thymos ceased publication in 2013, Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal was launched 2 years later to fill the vacuum. As of this writing, the field encompasses a truly diverse set of research subjects, from child soldiers in Sierra Leone to homosexuality in American high schools. Like childhood studies, the field retains a self-reflexive stance that puts a premium on elemental questions about what boyhood is and how it should best be studied. Martin Woodside See also Childhood Studies; Girlhood Studies; Hall, Granville Stanley; Scouting, Boys

Further Readings Jannsen, D. (2015). After boyology, or, whence and whither boyhood studies? Boyhood Studies, 8(1), 1–14. doi:10.3167/bhs.2015.080101 Kidd, K. (2005). Making American boys: Boyology and the feral tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.1080/00926230590927204 Macleod, D. I. (1983). Building character: The boy scouts, YMCA, and their forerunners, 1870–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. doi:10.1086/ ahr/89.4.1169-a Ottenberg, S. (1989). Boyhood rituals in an African society. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sommers, C. H. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided policies are harming our boys. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Breastfeeding Breastfeeding is the practice of feeding infants and young children human milk from a lactating breast. Breastfeeding is a culturally situated process, meaning how it is practiced, by whom, for how long, and for what reasons vary across time and place. Throughout human history, breastfeeding—its presence or absence, its success or failure—has had a uniquely important impact on the lives of infants and young children. This entry examines how key historical changes in science, society, politics, and culture have shaped the practice and meaning of breastfeeding.

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Toward a Modern Conception of Breastfeeding Breastfeeding has long been a site upon which cultural and political debates have raged over the proper place of women in society. Similarly, the meanings and practices that surround breastfeeding illuminate important ideas about who ought to nurture and nourish infants and how. Between the beginning of the 18th century and the end of the 20th century, a complex mixture of factors emerged that continue to shape the meaning, practice, and experience of breastfeeding for mothers and infants today. Ancient Western beliefs about the connection between women’s bodies and the natural world formed a foundation upon which modern ideas about motherhood and breastfeeding grew. As modern scientific and medical perspectives developed and spread throughout the 1700s and 1800s, new ideas about race, women, and class mingled together to shape the ways that people in various positions in society understood and practiced breastfeeding. Throughout the 20th century, these interacted with important changes wrought by the rising cultural authority and reach of science to shape the ways that people thought about breastfeeding. Within this web of important factors that have impacted breastfeeding, a few points are key. First, wet nursing, or the reliance upon another woman to breastfeed one’s baby, was once widely practiced by women in wealthier classes in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in America. This practice, however, slowly gave way to more scientific and modern alternatives such as proprietary or medical infant formulas and the breast pump. Second, the construction of breastfeeding as a maternal obligation has shifted over time. The obligation to breastfeed, for example, diminished in importance during the early 18th century, rose again in the 19th century only to diminish once more throughout most of the 20th century, before experiencing a resurgence at the end of the 20th century. These changes in breastfeeding have impacted women differently depending on their relationship to the dominant ideals of motherhood in each era. Black mothers in America, for example, have traditionally experienced categorical exclusion from White, middle-class constructions of womanhood and motherhood. Similarly, throughout the 18th,

19th, and 20th centuries, Black infants in America were historically denied access to breast milk either because their mother’s milk was coopted to feed White infants or because the demands made of Black women’s labor made commercial alternatives more accessible. Indigenous and immigrant mothers and children similarly have historically faced problems with breastfeeding as a result of state policies and practices that undermined cultural traditions through the destruction of the maternal–child link. Today, the modern understanding and practice of breastfeeding for all mothers and infants bear the myriad scars and legacies of this c­ omplex past. Scientific Discourses on Breastfeeding

In 1758, the now well-known Swedish biologist and taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus identified the mammary gland and its abilities to produce milk as the most noteworthy characteristic of a class of creatures he designated mammals, meaning of the breast. His act of tying human taxonomy to a mother’s ability to breastfeed was highly symbolic. It foreshadowed the important role that scientific experts would play in debates about breastfeeding, infant care, and motherhood in the coming centuries. In keeping with Western traditions stretching back to the classification systems of Aristotle, Linnaeus’s view of breastfeeding stressed a unique link between women and lower orders of nature. Inherited from the Ancient Greeks, the idea of a Great Chain of Being suggested that the material world and all living things could be ordered from the lowest and simplest organisms to the highest and most complex of living beings, humans. It also placed women below men on this ladder of perfection. In Western philosophy and medicine, women’s bodies were understood to be inferior to that of the male, a perspective that was supported by natural philosophers’ beliefs about reproductive processes and lactation. Linnaeus’ taxonomy modernized this ancient view of the female body by placing the female ability to lactate at the center of humanity’s connection to other animals who could also produce milk. Doing so helped establish a modern way for understanding breastfeeding in which it continued to be seen not only as natural but also primitive.

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The Duty to Breastfeed and the Victorian Mother

As new ideas about political citizenship and human rights emerged in the 18th-century intellectual circles of the increasingly powerful bourgeoisie, well-educated women pushed for recognition of their abilities to reason and to contribute to public discourse. During this historical moment, wet nursing grew in popularity, expanding beyond the wealthiest classes of mothers in Europe to include mothers from the expanding bourgeoisie. In urban cultural hubs like Paris, as many as 90% of infants were being sent out to wet nurse at the height of this trend in the 1780s. High rates of infant mortality, however, also accompanied this practice. Opponents of wet nursing were quick to point out that wet nursing often resulted in infant death due to the poor conditions in which wet nurses sometimes lived and the lack of oversight of the profession. It was also not uncommon that wet nurses, desperate to carve out a meager living, might take in more infants than they could adequately nourish. By the turn of the 19th century, ideas about wet nursing and maternal breastfeeding began to shift as the era witnessed the emergence of new constructions of motherhood that placed a heightened emphasis on the supposedly innate moral and sentimental qualities of women. The idealized Victorian mother of this period was White and middle class and her image emerged in tandem with the growth of a sentimental and romantic view of childhood. These changes were facilitated by demographic trends toward romantic marriage and lower rates of pregnancy, which resulted in shrinking family sizes. This era also witnessed the early growth of the authority of the medical profession, which increasingly argued that home hygiene and childcare ought to be overseen by experts. Along with these changes came new racial and class dynamics created by the emancipation of Black Americans from slavery, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. An expanding middle-class during the 19th century prompted questions about the proper role of the growing numbers of women who were educated and yet were not expected to work outside the home. As a result, European and American societies came to place additional emphasis on the importance of the

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moral influence of maternal love and nurture on the rearing of children. These changes combined to create a social and political environment in which women approached childcare and homemaking with a heightened sense of purpose and zeal. Breastfeeding at the mother’s breast in the Victorian age came to symbolize this new idealized and class- and race-based construction of sentimental motherhood. At the same time, White middle-class anxieties about the risks of exposing infants to the bodies of the working-class and poor grew up alongside public health concerns that unfairly linked disease and contagion to the bodies of those who were poor, immigrant, or Black. By the 1890s, even as the duty for Victorian mothers to breastfeed grew, it became increasingly customary for mothers to wean their babies from breast milk after just 3 months, a dramatic shift from earlier and non-Western practices in which infants nursed for 1 to 2 years. This change was accompanied by a growing reliance on breast milk substitutes (usually cow’s milk) which women used to feed their babies, opting to forego breastfeeding altogether. At least in part because of the health issues caused by unsafe cow’s milk and proprietary infant formulas, physicians became an increasingly important part of the infant feeding experience during this time. Doctors helped screen wet nurses and provided advice on their management. They also helped design safer and more nutritious breast milk substitutes. Industry, Science, and the Move Away From the Breast

By the second half of the 19th century, chemical analyses of human and cow’s milk gave scientists and physicians reason to believe that cow’s milk could be sufficiently modified to mimic the composition of human milk. Thus, was born the infant food industry. The German chemist Justus von Liebig and the Swiss chemist and merchant Henri Nestlé both sought to address the era’s growing infant mortality problem, which had been linked to a combination of poverty, urbanization, and unsafe feeding practices. While public health advocates sought to reform the dairy industry to make cow’s milk bacteriologically safer, industrialists turned to the production of a sterile and easily distributed alternative. von Liebig’s and Nestlé’s foods, based primarily on a mixture of

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processed wheat, cow’s milk, and sugar, met with huge commercial success and helped spur a new era of chemistry-inspired infant foods. Mothers often used a combination of feeding methods, from patented infant foods to wet nurses, in order to find a situation that worked well for their baby. Throughout the early 20th century, the cultural authority of science expanded. The scientific management of infant feeding, under the direction of a medical expert, grew to become the new normal by the middle of the 20th century. During the first half of the 20th century, breastfeeding rates declined so dramatically that by the 1950s, fewer than one in five infants in the United States were breastfed.

The Effort to Increase Breastfeeding Rates in the Late 20th Century Even as scientific formula became the dominant infant feeding method, by the 1940s and 1950s, a small segment of middle-class women, many of them with college backgrounds, began to buck the century’s push toward bottle-feeding when they instead chose to breastfeed. If the earlier 20th century was dominated by sciences such as bacteriology, chemistry, and nutrition, by the 1930s, the human and behavioral sciences, including anthropology, psychology, and ethology, were on the rise. The scientific perspectives that these disciplines offered helped to inspire a renewed interest in breastfeeding among a small, but dedicated cohort of mid-century parents. The studies on infant development and ­maternal–infant attachment that emerged in these years placed a heavy emphasis on the mother– infant relationship and its impact on everything from childhood development to marital success later in life. Mothers who breastfed in this new era increasingly claimed that it offered developmental, emotional, and psychological benefits to their children that formula could not. Many also came to see breastfeeding during this time as a way to be a better, more fulfilled, and more natural mother. Women involved in this movement drew upon long-established narratives that linked women to the natural world and maternal identity to breastfeeding. This new approach to the importance and meaning of breastfeeding helped launch

a back to the breast movement in 1956, when the woman’s breastfeeding support organization, La Leche League, formed. Although it began with one group, the soon expanded well beyond La Leche League. By the 1980s and 1990s, national and international public health programs emerged to spread the gospel of breastfeeding ever further. Public Health and Modern Feminism

As more women expressed interest in breastfeeding, late 20th-century public health and medical organizations began to adopt efforts to actively promote and support breastfeeding as the optimal infant feeding method over all others. As interest in infant formula waned in places like Canada, Europe, and the United States, a new focus on breast pump technology emerged as mothers sought to participate in the turn toward breastfeeding while maintaining their participation in the workforce. The unscrupulous marketing of infant formulas in poor and developing nations during this same period, meanwhile, helped call global attention to the issue of breastfeeding as a fundamental public health issue and an issue of social justice. By the end of the 20th century, some women and experts began to raise questions about the costs of intense public health scrutiny around breastfeeding. Critics of breastfeeding promotion have since pointed out that in places where incomes are relatively high and water supplies are bacteriologically safe, formula feeding can offer families healthy choices and flexibility in infant feeding. Others argue that if breastfeeding is optimal, that governments ought to be doing more to support gender and racial equity for mothers by implementing policies that allow all women the time, supports, and resources necessary for successful breastfeeding. Still others have suggested that policies aimed at increasing breastfeeding rates at all costs have done so without consideration for the total health and well-being of mothers and babies. In the 21st century, breastfeeding continues to carry a complex set of meanings and implications for mothers and infants alike. Jessica Martucci See also La Leche League; Mothers/Motherhood; Pediatrics

Bronfenbrenner, Urie

Further Readings Apple, R. D. (1987). Mothers and medicine: A social history of infant feeding, 1890. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Blum, L. M. (2000). At the breast: Ideologies of breastfeeding and motherhood in the contemporary United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Fildes, V. A. (1987). Breasts, bottles and babies: A history of infant feeding. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.1177/089033448700300412 Golden, J. (1996). A social history of wet nursing in America: From breast to bottle. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Martucci, J. (2015). Back to the breast: Natural motherhood and breastfeeding in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schiebinger, L. (1993). Why mammals are called mammals: Gender politics in eighteenth-century natural history. The American Historical Review, 98, 382–411. doi:10.2307/2166840 Swanson, K. W. (2009). Human milk as technology and technologies of human milk: Medical imaginings in the early twentieth-century United States. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 37(1), 20–37. doi:10.1353/ wsq.0.0160 Wolf, J. (2001). Don’t kill your baby: Public health and the decline of breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th centuries. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Bronfenbrenner, Urie Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005) established a scholarly position from which the child’s participation in his or her complex and ever-changing world is seen as the crucial hub for human being and development. Bronfenbrenner was born in Moscow but emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 6 years. It was in the United States that he was educated as a psychologist and built an academic career. As a Russianspeaking American academic, he was able to translate, both literally and metaphorically, between scholarly traditions as they were developed in the two societies. In the United ­ States–Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Cold War era, these efforts of theoretical bridging were valuable for the development of contextualising psychologies in ‘the West’.

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Bronfenbrenner was an ambitious scholar; he wanted to ‘use’ his knowledge and insights in order to make children’s and parents’ lives better. He contributed to policymaking and to educational programmes in U.S. schools and kindergartens with the Head Start programme as the foremost example. The measures of Head Start not only reflected his view on the importance of child–environment interactions as fundamental for children’s learning and development; they also included the children’s families and advocated an understanding of the embeddedness of parent– child relationships in wider historical, social, economic, and cultural contexts. In his groundbreaking book published in 1979, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design, Bronfenbrenner argued that the understanding of ‘human’ development demands more than the direct observation of behaviour on the part of one or two persons in the same place; it requires examination of multiperson systems of interaction not limited to a single setting and must take into account aspects of the environment beyond the immediate situation containing the subject. Human ‘development’ has been for several decades a rather contested concept within the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. A cluster of developmental theories resting on joint ideas of universal, unidirectional, and stagebound moves throughout childhood has been strongly criticised for—among other things— depriving the child of agency and of the right to a worthy life ‘here and now’. From the standpoint of these critiques, the child should not be seen simply as becoming—that is, in a prestate of real humanness, but as ‘being’, a full-fledged subject and a social participant in his or her own right. Psychological traditions rooted in contextualising developmental paradigms transcend this dichotomisation of the being/becoming aspects of human existence by paying attention to both the present moment and the process of life. Examples here are James Mark Baldwin, George Herbert Mead, and Lev Vygotsky, followed by Urie Bronfenbrenner, Jerome Bruner, and Richard M. Lerner, to mention just a few in the northern hemisphere. Bronfenbrenner’s theory is based on the developing person’s involvement with five interacting

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Figure 1 Urie Bronfenbrenner sitting and talking, Cornell University Source: Urie Bronfenbrenner Papers, #23-15-954. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. © Cornell University. Reproduced by permission.

systems; the (1) micro-, (2) meso-, (3) exo-, (4) macro-, and (5) chronosystems. The first four are seen as mutually interdependent systems continually formed and reformed along the axis of time, the chronosystem. In Bronfenbrenner’s work with Morris in 1998, the authors stress the ‘biopsychosocial characteristics’ of the developing person as a reminder of his/her central part in the developmental process. The five systems should be considered analytical concepts. They provide us with an optic through which to look at and analyze children’s participation in their social worlds and the embeddedness of these worlds in wider societal structures. Trying to map the systems of a certain child, we can at best depict a snapshot of a segment of his/her ongoing interactions, but even the snapshot may provide relevant information as far as we remember to take its interim character into consideration. A ‘microsystem’ includes the developing person as one amongst two or more participants in direct interaction. The definition does not specify who the participants may be but leaves this question to empirical investigations. Microsystems thus have to be studied, not taken for granted. The developing person’s ‘experience’ of the situation, that is, his or her subjectivity, as well as the physical/ material characteristics of the setting are to be included in the study of microsystems. Relations,

roles, and activities constitute the building blocks of a microsystem and Bronfenbrenner directed particularly his interest towards what he called ‘molar activities’; that is activities with a momentum of their own and which the participants experienced as meaningful. The concept of ‘mesosystems’ directs our attention towards the connections between the microsystems in which the developing person participates. It is the interrelations amongst two or more settings in which the developing person actively participates that constitutes mesosystems. An ‘exosystem’ refers to one or more settings that do not involve the developing person as an active participant, but it comprises events that affect, or are affected by, what happens in settings including the developing person. Pay attention to the formulation ‘affect, or are affected by’ which points to an interdependence between the developing person’s micro- and exosystems. The parents’ workplace, the local sports club, the municipal council, or a legal regulation may be analysed as exosystems. The macrosystem refers to more overarching cultural ideas, ideologies, or belief systems that underlie consistencies in the form and content in the three lower-order systems. Thus, the macrosystem should not be depicted as the most distal system seen from the developing person’s position. The macrosystem is more to be seen as the shared ideas that underpin the organisation of everyday life as well as the institutions, regulations, and materiality in which this life unfolds. At the same time, everyday lives as lived by developing subjects will continually contribute to changing the macrosystem. The ‘chronosystem’ is constituted by the axis of time, both the personal and the historical time axis. The idea of psychological development needs a concept of time to be able to comprise processes of change. While many developmental theories limit their focus to the individual’s personal life course, Bronfenbrenner underlines the necessity of placing the developing person into his/her historical context. The flow of time plays a fundamental part in process-based thinking. The meaning of time is also highlighted in Bronfenbrenner’s concept of ‘proximal processes’, which he sees as enduring and progressively more complex reciprocal interaction between an active, developing person and the persons, objects, and

Brownies’ Book

symbols in his or her environment. In his later works, Bronfenbrenner points to proximal processes as the impetus of development. Liv Mette Gulbrandsen See also Beings and Becomings, Children as; Development; Vygotsky, Lev

Further Readings Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bronfenbrenner, U. (Ed.). (2005). Making human beings human: Bioecological perspectives on human development. London, UK: Sage. Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (1998). The ecology of developmental process. In W. Damon (Series Ed.) & R. M. Lerner (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 1. Theoretical models of human development (5th ed., pp. 993–1028). New York, NY: Wiley.

Brownies’ Book The Brownies’ Book was a short-lived but influential early 20th-century African American children’s magazine and one of the first periodicals designed for young readers of color. An outgrowth of the annual “Children’s Number” of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Brownies’ Book appeared monthly from January 1920 through December 1921 under the editorial direction of W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fauset. This entry describes the magazine’s origins and aims, its format and recurring features, and its impact on African American children’s literature.

History of The Brownies’ Book Two years into his editorship of The Crisis, which he cofounded in 1910, Du Bois had begun publishing a popular children’s issue each October. Alongside regular coverage of social, political, and cultural matters affecting African Americans, these special issues highlighted positive images of Black childhood by publishing portrait-style photographs

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of middle-class Black children, while also providing stories, poems, and other materials for and about children. In 1919, in part out of his concern that child readers of The Crisis were being prematurely exposed to the increasingly traumatic episodes of racial violence discussed within its pages, Du Bois announced his intent to launch a new magazine for young readers. Without aiming simply to shield children from these realities—Du Bois’s own monthly columns in The Brownies’ Book would include extensive reporting on global race ­relations—he felt that a separate magazine directed to young people could offer powerful representations of racial identity without cultivating racial hatred. From its first issue, which included a mix of stories, sketches, poems, images, letters, and advertisements, The Brownies’ Book afforded young readers a different view of blackness than typically found in contemporary Anglo-American children’s periodicals. Most children’s magazines of the era either ignored persons of color or trafficked in racial stereotypes. Non-White readers would have found few invitations to imagine themselves as part of the world these periodicals presented. By contrast, The Brownies’ Book not only welcomed readers of color into its pages, including as contributors, it also sought to counter racist stereotypes of Anglo-American children’s culture by appropriating and inverting them.

Visual Imagery Visual imagery was crucial to this strategy. The cover of the first issue of The Brownies’ Book shows a young African American girl in a fairy costume, reaching her arms high into the air, fingers outstretched. The girl’s posture suggests both an active commandeering of the European fairy tradition and, in the grasping gesture of her hands, a powerful sense that there is more to be taken hold of. Inside the inaugural issue were many other affirmative images, including photographs of Black children (similar to those popularized in the Children’s Numbers of The Crisis) as well as pictures of children in groups, including a scout troop from Philadelphia, a girls’ school in Abyssinia, and the YWCA in New York City. Taken together, these images represent blackness as a source of local, national, and international achievement, pride, and connection.

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Narratives Strategies of inversion and appropriation are also evident in the stories and tales that appear in each issue. Fairy stories, for example, which appeared frequently, were often recast to feature Black or Brown protagonists instead of White ones. Folk tales from multiple sources, including African, West Indian, Native American, and African American stories, gave young readers access to a rich array of non-European cultural traditions. Although not always free from stereotypes of racial primitivism, these stories and tales provided a deliberately broad, international, and multiracial perspective unavailable in mainstream children’s periodicals. Other features, such as biographical essays, conveyed a powerful sense of African American history and achievement. The Brownies’ Book further reimagined the genre of the children’s periodical by making the social sciences a crucial partner with literature and the arts in the shaping of childhood subjectivity. Although other children’s magazines sometimes incorporated references to history and politics, The Brownies’ Book made the study of human behavior a crucial component of the magazine. This featured prominently in two of its most distinctive departments, Fauset’s “The Judge” and Du Bois’s “As the Crow Flies.” In “The Judge,” Fauset conducted semi-Socratic dialogues with imaginary children of color representing a range of ages and concerns. Together they discuss such matters as the nature of happiness, the sources of prejudice, the value of labor, and the contributions of Africa. The Judge’s role is not only to pass judgment but also, crucially, to obtain the children’s perspectives. At their core, these columns are reflections on, and instructions in, how societies function, how they might change, and what role children might play in their evolution. Du Bois’s “As the Crow Flies” columns present an even more overt social scientific perspective. The conceit of each installment is that it reports, in the persona of a beautiful, black crow, what Du Bois sees as he swoops around the world, cataloging and commenting on the accomplish­ ments and hardships of peoples and nations, with special emphasis on their impact on people of color. The crow’s observations mix history, p ­ olitics, and ­ economics with psychology, sociology, and

anthropology, training children in new ways of seeing, interpreting, and ultimately inhabiting the world.

Legacy Despite its short run, the impact of The Brownies’ Book was substantial. It helped legitimize the genre of African American children’s literature, which in turn helped reshape conceptions of Black childhood. It also helped launch the careers of several prominent Harlem Renaissance writers, poets, and illustrators of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Effie Lee Newsome, who would produce substantial work for children. William Gleason See also Children’s Literature; Folklore, Children’s; Moveable Books; Picture Books; Race and Childhood in U.S. Context; Racial Formations

Further Readings Harris, V. J. (1989). Race consciousness, refinement, and radicalism: Socialization in The Brownies’ Book. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 14(4), 192–196. doi:10.1353/chq.0.0857 Phillips, M. H. (2013). The children of double consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies’ Book. PMLA, 128(3), 590–607. doi:10.1632/pmla.2013.128.3.590 Schäffer, C. (2012). “The Brownies’ Book”: Inspiring racial pride in African American children. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. doi:10.3726/ 978-3-653-01901-8 Smith, K. C. (n.d.). The Brownies’ Book and the Roots of African American Children’s Literature. The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature, 1880-1939. Retrieved from http://childlit.unl.edu/topics/edi.harlem.html

Buddhism Buddhism is all too often represented as an aloof, ascetic tradition disengaged from society. However, in historical and contemporary societies across Asia, and increasingly around the world

Buddhism

where Buddhism is found, Buddhist practitioners and institutions are deeply intertwined with broader cultural, political, and economic forces. These include the forces that influence conceptions of childhood and the position of children. Since Buddhism began in South Asia 2,500 years ago, children have always been important members of lay and monastic communities. This is because, as Rita Gross has written, children and the state of childhood have no special status in Buddhist societies. All children come to their current birth with accumulated karma, resulting from their thoughts and actions in previous lives, and therefore, they have the same spiritual potential, and the same obstacles to realizing that potential, as older members of society. In historical narratives, children are considered to hold spiritual agency and potential, and therefore, a variety of institutions and ritual traditions have developed to help them realize it. This entry examines the ideal Buddhist childhood, how Buddhist seek to protect children’s spiritual potential, and children as sustainers of Buddhist traditions.

The Ideal Buddhist Childhood This potential is epitomized in narratives about the life of Siddhartha Gautama, who was born as a prince and grew up to become the Buddha and spread his teachings throughout northern India, establishing a blueprint that has inspired Buddhists ever since. In his early life, Siddhartha was surrounded by a life of wealth and distraction, as his father Suddhodana had been warned by a religious teacher before Siddhartha’s birth that he would either be a great king or a great sage. Hoping to keep his son focused on his royal inheritance, Suddhodana lavished his son with the best tutors and material goods. However, Siddhartha established himself as unique early on, excelling in his studies, princely arts and sports, and falling into natural states of contemplation. This precociousness set him apart from other children and is mirrored in biographical traditions elsewhere in the Buddhist world. Influential and respected Buddhist teachers are often represented as special in some way: wise beyond their years, able to memorize scriptures at an unusually fast rate, or given to religious play, imitating rituals with their playmates.

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The presence of unique or unusual behavior during childhood due to karmic propensities is interpreted as especially salient in Tibetan and Himalayan Vajrayana Buddhism, where enlightened masters known as tulku (Tibetan: sprul sku) are held to be able to control the direction of their rebirth and be reborn to continue their compassionate mission as bodhisattvas, practitioners who take a vow not to become enlightened until all sentient beings are free from the cycle of rebirth. Tulku is recognized in childhood by signs and dreams interpreted by the close students of their previous incarnations, who are often left instructions by their teachers on how to identify their next rebirth. Students of previous incarnations then travel to locate parents and places who appear to connect with these instructions. They then carry out tests on the children, such as asking them to identify possessions from their past lives. If the children pass these tests, they are then recognized and enthroned as tulku, and then placed in a monastic training environment that is designed to help them realize their spiritual potential and take up their spiritual and practical responsibilities from their previous birth.

Technologies to Cultivate and Protect Children’s Spiritual Potential Part of the reason why the recognition of tulku in childhood is considered to be so important is that the child is believed to be in spiritual peril if they are not appropriately raised and educated. This concern about spiritual dangers around children is not confined to the tulku tradition and demonstrates Buddhism’s attribution of agency and potential to children. Throughout the Buddhist world, there are a variety of ritual and textual traditions around children that have developed to protect them from malevolent forces. In the Himalayan world, newborn babies are often given informal personal names with bad associations (including words associated with human waste) in order to distract spirits from interfering with them. Special amulets are also made for children to wear on their bodies as a type of spiritual armor. In Thai Theravada Buddhism, when infants reach 1 month and 1-dayold, the Fire-Hair ceremony takes place. In this ceremony, infants have the hair they were born

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with cut for the first time, and white thread amulets tied around their ankles and wrists. This represents the transition of infants into full members of the family, as before they were especially susceptible to spiritual influence. Not only corporeal children are of concern, though. In Thailand, child spirits (Thai: wintan dek) are also seen as holding special forms of power and as worthy of propitiation.

Children as Sustainers of Tradition The spiritual potential of children is powerfully manifested in childhood ordination ceremonies for male children found throughout Buddhist cultures. While monastics cannot be fully ordained until the age of 20 (which obligates them to undertake the full discipline of the vinaya, monastic law), many Buddhists cultures contain injunctions or expectations that boys will take lower ordination in the Buddhist monastic community at some point in their early lives. In some cultures, such as Thailand and among the Newar community in Nepal, this can be a temporary ordination; elsewhere in Sri Lanka and Tibetan cultural areas of the Himalayas, taking ordination is considered to be a heavy responsibility. Ordination brings great merit to the parents of the ordained as well as to the monastic, but also has a practical function, as children who join monasteries are educated, housed, and fed by lay sponsors. Historically, monasteries were the centers for education in many Buddhist societies and continue to be bastions of significant social, and in some cases, political and economic influence, providing opportunities for social mobility. The relationship between the monastic community and laity in Buddhist societies is complex. Even after monastics take ordination, they still have worldly obligations and connections. In Sri Lanka, for example, parents will play an important role in the ordination ceremony and act as ongoing sponsors and sources of emotional support for their children. Monastic teachers also take up some of these responsibilities, and in Sri Lanka as elsewhere in the Buddhist world, affective family relationships are common in monastic settings. Girls are not ordained as often but are also seen as instrumental to the continuity of tradition either as lay sponsors or ritual specialists charged with their own set of responsibilities.

In these contexts, across diverse Buddhist cultures, the spiritual potential of children is vividly demonstrated, as they literally continue the Buddhist tradition through upholding monastic lineages and, in the case of tulku, embody the wisdom of their previous incarnations. As integral figures in the continuation of Buddhist traditions, ordained children and tulkus also subvert usual child–adult relations as the holders of great spiritual authority and knowledge. These complex hierarchies are socially sanctioned, as they provide laity with continued opportunities to practice Buddhism, accumulating merit, and in doing so, move toward enlightenment along with these children. Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa See also Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; Religion and Children

Further Readings Gross, R. (1996). Child and family in Buddhism. In H. Coward & P. Cook (Eds.), Religious dimensions of child and family life: Reflections on the UN convention of the rights of the child (pp. 79–98). Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Nakagawa, Y. (2006). The child as compassionate bodhisattva and as human sufferer/spiritual seeker: Intertwined Buddhist images. In K. Yust, A. Johnson, S. E. Sasso, & E. Roehlkepartain (Eds.), Nurturing child and adolescent spirituality: Perspectives from the world’s religious traditions (pp. 33–42). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Sasson, V. (Ed.). (2013). Little Buddhas: Children and childhood in Buddhist texts and traditions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Sinnott, M. (2014). Baby Ghosts: Child spirits and contemporary conceptions of childhood in Thailand. TRaNS: Trans-Regional and – National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2(2), 293–317. doi:10.1017/trn.2014.8

Bullying Bullying is a widespread problem among children. This entry examines its prevalence and offers an overview of some of the definitions developed and discussed by researchers working within childhood studies. It takes into account the perspectives of

Bullying

practitioners trying to implement researchers’ understandings of bullying in their work in schools and other institutions for children and explores both bystander behavior and some known interventions.

The Prevalence of Bullying Approximately 12% of boys and 10% of girls, aged 11 years old, surveyed in the World Health Organization’s 2016 Health Behaviour in SchoolAged Children study, reported being bullied at school at least two or three times a month in the months leading up to the study. The study also found that incidences of bullying generally decreased as age increased, peaking for boys at 11 years and dropping to the lowest levels at 15 years. Among girls, incidences of bullying remained constant at ages 11 and 13 years and dropped at 15 years. Almost 220,000 young people across 42 countries and regions were involved in the survey at the center of the 2016 report. As the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children figures show, bullying is a common problem among schoolchildren, often with severe consequences for not only those directly targeted but also their peers. In a 2014 Danish study, Helle Hansen, Inge Henningsen, and Jette Kofoed found that bullying is often associated with a general lack of well-being in the classroom and a negative classroom culture.

Defining Bullying A bullied child knows all too well what it is like to be bullied. He or she feels hurt, lost, powerless, and alone. It is often hard to see any way out of the situation; in extreme cases, the targeted children and young people lose the will to live. Researchers, on the other hand, disagree on how to define what bullying is or why it occurs. They discuss whether bullying should be seen as a form of individual aggression, as a form of social violence, or as a result of dysfunctional group dynamics. Researchers and practitioners develop various forms of the intervention program and compile guidelines for how school professionals should act in cases of bullying; however, such programs and guidelines vary considerably depending on whether they are rooted in individualistic or social approaches to and definitions of bullying.

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The Swedish physician Peter-Paul Heinemann first introduced the term mobbing in 1969. Bullying behavior among children had been described in fiction long before Heinemann wrote about mobbing in a Swedish journal, but he was probably the first to draw serious attention to the phenomenon and to try to develop a theory exploring the dynamics of bullying. Heinemann was inspired by research on mob behavior among animals attacking members of their own group. He attempted to use such observations to understand similarly destructive everyday behavior among humans. His definition focused on the importance of social groups and described mobbing as a group’s violent and aggressive behavior toward a particular child. A few years later, another Swedish scholar, psychologist Dan Olweus, developed a different definition. For Olweus, a student is bullied and victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of someone with more power than himself or herself. He also emphasized the willful aspect of the action and the intention to hurt and inflict harm. Thereby, Olweus set aside the social group aspect and instead characterized bullying as a result of particular personality traits of individual perpetrators and victims. In his view, bullies were aggressive and impulsive individuals with a need to dominate. They lacked empathy with their victims and had a positive attitude toward violence. Victims, meanwhile, are described as submissive, insecure, passive, and weak. Olweus explained such personality traits by the child’s family upbringing, particularly stressing the child–mother relationship. Bullies had cold, uninvolved, and permissive mothers, whereas victims had overprotective mothers, he assumed. Other researchers developed different perspectives on the phenomenon. The psychologist Ken Rigby warned against too inflexible definitions and offered a tentative description of what constitutes bullying in his book New Perspectives on Bullying from 2002. Maintaining Olweus’s focus on the individual, Rigby described bullying as comprising a desire to hurt, hurtful actions, a power imbalance and, most often, a pattern of repetition. Bullying, he contended, also involves an unjust use of power and evident enjoyment on the part of the aggressor. Bearing in mind the

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differences and variations between cases of bullying, Rigby stressed that interventions must be designed to appropriately respond to each specific instance of bullying. In very serious cases, where perpetrators repeatedly refuse to change their behavior despite adult intervention, he advised the use of direct sanctions. In cases of low-level harassment, meanwhile, he advised schools to focus on strengthening the victim. And in cases of bullying by groups, where perpetrators expressed willingness to change their behavior, he advised school professionals to try to work with methods of shared concern and awareness.

Bystander Behavior and Strategic Interventions In Finland, researchers developed new understandings of bullying behavior by studying the role of bystanders. Although inspired by Olweus, the researchers in Finland shifted the focus toward group dynamics in their attempts to understand what produces bullying behavior. Christina Salmivalli and her colleagues, for example, drew attention to the impact of the behavior of all the other children in the network surrounding the bully and the victim. In their article, “Targeting the Group as a Whole,” which was published in 2004, they describe six different categories of participants in bullying activities: (1) the bullies, who are active and take the initiative in bullying situations; (2) the victims, who are systematically attacked; (3) the assistants, who join in with bullies; (4) the reinforcers, who provide positive feedback to bullies by laughing, making encouraging gestures or serving as an audience; (5) the outsiders, who withdraw and refrain from taking sides; and (6) the defenders, who may comfort the victim or try to make others stop bullying. Bystanders can find themselves trapped in a social dilemma, aware that what they are witnessing is wrong but in order to protect their own status, nevertheless rewarding bullies, for example, by laughing, accepting, or even joining in. Whether active or passive bystanders thereby contribute to the continuation of bullying behavior. Salmivalli and her colleagues conclude that if only fewer children rewarded and reinforced the bully, and if only the reward structure of the classroom could be changed, bullying behavior would

diminish. The intervention strategy that Salmivalli and her colleagues suggest is therefore directed at bystanders and their participation in classroom reward patterns. A Danish research team has taken a further step toward a perspective on bullying sensitive to the complex social aspects at play. They claim that the enactment of bullying practices comprises ongoing interactivity and mutually formative processes among multiple phenomena and forces. Rather than focusing exclusively on individuals, they highlight the role played by cultural, material, discursive, and technological forces in the occurrence of bullying. In 2007, the research team called eXbus: Exploring Bullying in School set out in to try to understand the dynamics involved in the emergence, reiteration, and dissolving of bullying practices. Their basic assumption pointed to the ways in which the more comprehensive apparatus that produces bullying would imply many and complexly interacting participants and phenomena. First of all, these would include the norms and the patterns of social relating among the children but also the effects of the children’s individual histories and their past and current positionings in the classroom. The conditions for social and individual becoming facilitated by the teachers and the ways in which the teachers relate to the children would also entangle the apparatus that produce bullying and extreme exclusion among the children, as would the premises set by school principals for the practice of teachers and other school participants. The norms and climate nursed by the principal would interact in these complex processes, as would the participation, no matter how passive or active, of the parents. In addition, the rapid development of technologies and their mediation of children’s social and subjective becoming via digital communication, be it verbal or visual as in pictures and videos, would entangle the apparatus that produces bullying behavior. All of these components would interact and entangle in the processes through which bullying patterns and practices of exclusion and marginalization would emerge. Dorte Marie Søndergaard from the eXbus-team developed a further set of specifications as to how this apparatus might work in cases of bullying enactment. She introduced the concept of social exclusion anxiety, which emerges in relation to communities of belonging. In her 2014 article, “Social Exclusion

Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept

Anxiety: Bullying and the Forces That Contribute to Bullying Amongst Children at School,” Søndergaard explains that social exclusion anxiety is an affect that circulates among members of a group. It smolders beneath the surface when people interact in groups they expect or are expected to belong to. Social exclusion anxiety is linked to the risk of being judged unworthy of belonging, and it may increase if the comprehensive apparatus, for whatever reason, works in ways that enact pressure within the group and insecurity among its members. If the distributed social exclusion anxiety grows, it can move toward social panic. In such situations, members of the group may seek a form of relief; by producing contempt for someone or something, they soothe their own fear of exclusion. This someone or something then functions as the abject: the excluded and ultimately detested. Abjection enacts clear boundaries around the group, enabling in- and exclusion. Such a process also cuts off empathy toward those that are positioned, for a shorter or longer period, as the abject. Søndergaard urges all participants in such apparatuses, and in particular teachers, school principals, and parents, to be attentive to processes of contempt production and dignity production. Working with an understanding of bullying that emphasizes the dysfunctional group dynamics in the ways previously outlined implies moving away from intervention designs that focus exclusively on individuals and the modification of individuals’ behavior. Intervention and prevention practices embedded in a social group approach concentrate instead on activities that aim to reconfigure the culture in the classroom and the general patterns of intra-action involved in the comprehensive apparatus that enacts school life. Dorte Marie Søndergaard See also Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept; Bullying and Parents; Bullying and Teachers; Bullying in Schools; Cyberbullying; Social Exclusion and Bullying

Further Readings Hansen, H. R., Henningsen, I., & Kofoed, J. (2014). When classroom culture tips into bullying. In R. M. Schott & D. M. Søndergaard (Eds.), School bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139226707.015

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Horton, P. (2011). School bullying and social and moral orders. Children & Society, 25, 268–277. doi:10.1111/j.1099–0860.2011.00377.x Inchley, J., Currie, D., Young, T., Samdal, O., Torsheim, T., Auguston, L., . . . Barnekow, V. (2016). Growing up unequal: Gender and socioeconomic differences in young people’s health and well-being. Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Study: International report from the 2013/2014 Survey. København, Denmark: WHO Regional Office for Europe. Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Rigby, K. (2002). New perspectives on bullying. London, UK: Jessica Kingsley. Salmivalli, C., Huttunen, A., & Lagerspetz, K. M. J. (1997). Peer networks and bullying in schools. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 38(4), 305–312. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511584466.014 Salmivalli, C., Kaukiainen, A. O., Voeten, R., & Sinisammal, M. (2004). Targeting the group as a whole: The Finnish anti-bullying intervention. In P. K. Smith, D. Pepler, & K. Rigby (Eds.), Bullying in schools: How successful can interventions be? (pp. 251–273). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schott, R. M., & Søndergaard, D. M. (Eds.). (2014). School bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, P. K., Cowie, H., Olafsson, R. F., Liefooghe, A. P., Almeida, A, Araki, H., . . . Wenxin, Z. (2002). Definitions of bullying: A comparison of terms used, and age and gender differences, in a fourteen-country international comparison. Child Development, 73(4), 1119–1133. doi:10.1111/1467–8624.00461 Søndergaard, D. M. (2014). Social exclusion anxiety: Bullying and the forces that contribute to bullying amongst children at school. In R. M. Scott & D. M. Søndergaard (Eds.), School bullying: New theories in context (pp 47–80). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9781139226707.005

Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept Bullying is a serious problem among children in schools and institutions. However, it is only relatively recent that bullying has emerged as a field of

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research, although the phenomenon itself has likely existed in various forms among children for as long as humankind has walked the earth. The genealogy of bullying as a concept has taken the understanding of bullying in different directions with a varying emphasis on either the roles played by individuals (victims and perpetrators) or the social and relational aspects. This entry examines the origins of the concept of bullying and its expanded definition and usage since the 1990s.

Origins Inspired by the pioneering ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s work on mob behavior among animals, Peter-Paul Heinemann (1931–2003) introduced the term mobbing almost 50 years ago, linking it to everyday, human examples of harassment and social exclusion among children. For Heinemann, the concept described a particular form of aggression in which one person is singled out and aggressively targeted by a larger group. His notion emphasized group violence against individuals who, in some way or another, were considered deviant by their peers. This initial use of the word mobbing is linked to the English word mob which, as Robin May Schott points out in her article, “The social concept of bullying,” refers to a loosely organized group that is accidentally formed and relatively short-lived. However, the social aspects of the phenomenon were quickly downplayed and replaced by a focus on the role of individuals as the research of Dan Olweus, a Swedish psychologist, developed. In 1973, Olweus published Forskning om skolmobbning, translated into English in 1978 under the title, Aggression in Schools: Bullies and Whipping Boys. Olweus’s approach to mobbing, which is the term used in Scandinavian contexts, relied on a notion of fixed personality traits forming stable dispositions that lead individuals to respond to certain stimuli and situations in a relatively consistent manner. In this way, he developed a model of individual aggression based on personality traits in his conceptualization of mobbing. Heinemann’s understanding of bullying as a social phenomenon arising within loosely organized and constantly mutating groups was sidelined by Olweus’s individualized approach, identifying certain individuals as having an innate predisposition for aggressive behavior and hence a propensity for bullying.

Olweus formulated what for a number of years became a prevailing standard definition of bullying: A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over an extended period of time, to attempts to inflict injury or discomfort by one or more individuals. A number of variations of this definition can be found in Olweus’s later work and in the contributions of others inspired by Olweus’ ideas. However, the main points remained highly influential, inspiring researchers and intervention programs across the world.

Expanded Definitions of Bullying in the 1990s Gradually, new definitions emerged expanding the focus and concept of bullying. In the 1990s, more indirect forms of harassment, humiliation, and exclusion, such as the spreading of defamatory rumors, began to be included in definitions of bullying. Particularly among U.S.-based researchers, increasing attention was paid to gendered bullying and the links between bullying and sexual harassment. The Finish researcher Christina Salmivalli’s work introduced a shift from focusing entirely on the perpetrator and the victim to also considering the other participant roles in bullying. She hereby reintroduced the concept of school bullying as a group phenomenon by focusing on the importance of peer bystanders in acts of bullying and by arguing that the motivation for bullying is grounded in the perpetrator’s social standing within his or her peer group and desire to increase his or her prestige and popularity. An appreciative audience, as indicated by laughter, cheering, or just watching and accepting, supports bullying behavior. With the spread of social media and digital communication among children and young people, the conceptualization of bullying has also had to take these new forms of social relating into account. The catchall term cyberbullying is used to denote various forms of bullying via shifting social media platforms which enable written as well as visual persecution, harassment, and humiliation. The focus on the social mechanisms involved in bullying has gained impetus in recent years. Researchers have started to question the feasibility of working with a single universal definition and stressed the need to examine a range of behavior

Bullying and Parents

that causes relational harm or to understand bullying and relational aggression as a continuum and as an emergent and complex social phenomenon. While the dominance of the notion of bullying as dependent on individual personality traits seems increasingly challenged by definitions and approaches which stress socially situated and enacted relational patterns and complex social mechanisms, researchers have also drawn attention to other shortcomings of a generalized definition of bullying. Drawing on the work of Peter Smith and his colleagues, Robin May Schott points to the variations across different cultures and countries. The Japanese term ijime, for example, emphasizes social manipulation and refers to mental and physical suffering taking place in a group-interaction process, whereas the Italian term prepotenza implies violent physical actions. In Spanish, there does not even seem to be a word corresponding to the English bullying. Similarly, research primarily based on qualitative methodologies and analytics, a tradition within which the eXbus-team in Denmark is rooted, shows that variations also emerge in local and situated contexts. Bullying may take many different forms, positionings among the children and young people involved may not be stable, and bullying practices may remain part of the culture in a given classroom even if those directly involved are removed. As such, there is a need to open up the definitional practices and routines and for research within the field to develop approaches sensitive to the complex nature of bullying. Dorte Marie Søndergaard See also Bullying; Bullying and Teachers; Bullying in Schools; Cyberbullying

Further Readings Agevall, O. (2008). The career of bullying: Emergence, transformation, and utilisation of a new concept (pp. 1–71, Rapport No. 29). Växjö, Sweden: School of Social Sciences, Växjö University. Salmivalli, C., Kirsti, L., Kaj, L., Karin, O., & Ari, K. (1996). Bullying as a group process: Participant roles and their relations to social status within the group. Aggressive Behavior: Official Journal of the International Society for Research on Aggression, 22(1), 1–15. doi:10.1111/j.1099-0860.2011.00374.x

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Schott, R. M. (2014). The social concept of bullying: philosophical reflections on definitions. In R. M. Schott & D. M. Søndergaard (Eds.), School bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9781139226707.004 Schott, R. M., & Søndergaard, D. M. (Eds.). (2014). School bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, P. K., Cowie, H., Olafsson, R. F., Liefooghe, A. P., Almeida, A., Araki, H., . . . Wenxin, Z. (2002). Definitions of bullying: A comparison of terms used, and age and gender differences, in a fourteen-country international comparison. Child Development, 73(4), 1119–1133. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00461

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and

Parents

Bullying is an extreme form of social exclusion that affects a significant number of children in schools and other childhood institutions. The number of 11-year-olds stating that they were bullied was approximately 10% for girls and 12% for boys according to the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study conducted in 42 countries in 2013– 2014 and published in 2016. The definition of bullying is a matter of debate among researchers. Some researchers emphasize aggressive contra vulnerable individual personality traits as a basic premise for the emergence of bullying behavior. Others conceptualize bullying as an effect of dysfunctional social mechanisms in groups. In line with such diverse understandings of how to define and understand bullying, researchers also discuss the part played by parents in children’s bullying practices. Researchers who understand bullying as an effect of deficits in individual children tend to explain such deficits as a consequence of inadequate upbringing. Researchers who explain bullying behavior as an effect of dysfunctional social patterns in groups of children (and adults), meanwhile, tend to focus on the ways in which parents interact with each other and with school professionals as one of a number of aspects involved in the processes and outcomes of the school environment as a whole. This entry examines parents’ complex role in bullying with a focus on their potential liability and differing perspectives.

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Bullying and Parents

Parents’ Potential Liability in Bullying Cases

Parents’ Perspectives on Bullying

Among the first group of researchers, parents are held responsible for their children’s ­involvement in bullying—whether as bullies or victims—by pointing to problems with how they bring up their children. Within this tradition, quantitative approaches, such as surveys, prevail in attempts to determine the relational patterns, and emotional attachment between parents and their children who are involved in bullying, thereby placing the causes of bullying outside school. Peter Smith and Rowan Myron-Wilson conclude an overview of research on parental influence by suggesting that children involved in bullying are more likely to have problems with poorly functioning families and to endure insecure attachment to their parents. Bullies are likely to live in home environments characterized by strict discipline; the father is likely to have been a bully himself, and the family is more likely to be distant and disengaged in structure, they summarize. Among victims, meanwhile, they find overprotective mothers and families that are overly closed to the outside world and enmeshed. In a review by Amanda B. Nickerson, Danielle Merle, and Kristina M. Osborne-Oliver, the same focus on parents’ role in their children’s involvement in bullying is identified. Bullies are considered more likely to have avoidant attachment styles; they also have distant and less supportive relationships with their parents, who usually lack warmth and empathy. Victims, on the other hand, are found to suffer from insecure attachment styles, they summarize. Such approaches, and the explanations they produce, are closely linked to an individualizing understanding of bullying, seeing bullies and victims as either aggressive or vulnerable, and to an idea that factors outside school, in this case, children’s families, comprise the formative i­mpetus in relation to such individual characteristics. The practical implications suggested by this kind of thinking are most often that school authorities, teachers, and principals are encouraged to ensure that parents understand their own role and change their ways of relating to and bringing up their children.

Within the past two decades, new research using qualitative methods has focused on the experiences and perspectives of parents whose children have been involved in bullying, as well as on the interrelated processes that move across school and home as the primary arenas of children’s everyday lives. Nina Hein, for example, describes in her research how intense encounters between teachers and principals on one side and parents and children on the other can become entangled in conflict and mutual frustration. This occurs as a result of school-initiated attempts to define the children’s reality in school and the truth about what has happened, determining guilt and whether or not it was a case of real bullying, and finally, to decide what the parents have done wrong since their children behave as they do. Individualized definitions of bullying in particular seem to cause trouble in such encounters between school and parents because complex bullying practices often do not match that kind of defining practice. As a result, a more pervasively dysfunctional classroom culture comprising complex social relations, where certain children are the targets of more severe forms of exclusion and persecution, tends to be dismissed as not recognized as a site of real bullying by school professionals. Instead, such cases may be sidelined as mere teasing, boys being boys, or girls’ scheming. In such encounters, the school often places guilt and the responsibility for change with the children and their parents, whereas parents expect the school to acknowledge the problem and take action. The practical implications of approaches to bullying which focus on the comprehensive, interacting social forces and phenomena involved in cases of bullying will often instead point to wholeschool approaches, conducted parallel to helping the individual students involved. This is done in an effort to solve bullying-related problems among children as an effect of a dysfunctional school culture and intolerance in the child community. In whole-school approaches, several interacting aspects of and actors in school life are involved and brought together in an effort to develop more tolerant and inclusive school cultures. Dorte Marie Søndergaard

Bullying and Teachers See also Bullying; Bullying and Teachers; Bullying in Schools; Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept; Social Exclusion and Bullying

Further Readings Harcourt, S., Jasperse, M., & Green, V. A. (2014). “We were sad and we were angry”: A systematic review of parents’ perspectives on bullying. Child Youth Care Forum, 43, 373–391. doi:10.1007/s10566-014-9243-4 Hein, N. (2016). New perspectives on the positioning of parents in children’s bullying at school. British Journal of Sociology of Education. doi:10.1080/0142 5692.2016.1251305 Inchley, J. C., Currie, D. B., Young, T., Samdal, O., Torsheim, T., Augustson, L., . . . Barnekow, V. (Eds.). (2016). Growing up unequal: Gender and socioeconomic differences in young people’s health and well-being: Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study: International report from the 2013/2014 Survey. Copenhagen, Denmark: WHO Regional Office for Europe. Nickerson, A. B., Merle, D., & Osborne-Oliver, K. M. (2010). Parent-child relationships and bullying. In S. R. Jimerson, S. M. Swearer, & D. Espelage (Eds.), Handbook of bullying in schools: An international perspective (pp. 187–197). New York, NY: Routledge. Smith, P. K., & Myron-Wilson, R. (1998). Parenting and school bullying. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 3(3), 405–417. doi:10.1177/1359104598033006

Bullying

and

Teachers

Bullying is a widespread problem among children in schools and other childhood institutions. In the 2016 Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study, which includes data from 42 countries, approximately 10–12% of 11-year-olds reported having been bullied at school on a number of occasions during the preceding months. This entry examines explanations for bullying behavior, how teachers sometimes contribute to bullying, and intervention strategies.

Explanations for Bullying Behavior Researchers offer different explanations for bullying behavior. Some consider it an effect of individual personality traits and behavioral characteristics;

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others point to social group dynamics and the institutional setting of the school as well as to the socioculturally and historically formed structures of inequality among children. Approaching the relevance of teachers and their role in children’s bullying practices depends on the definition of bullying implied. If bullying is understood as an effect of individual traits and behavior, teachers are most often considered to be in a position to determine whether or not the reported or observed events can be defined as real cases of bullying. In cases deemed as bullying, they are considered responsible for taking further action in relation to the individual children involved. If bullying is understood as an effect of a dysfunctional culture in the school and in the classroom, and enacted by the social structures in schools and other childhood institutions, it is instead seen as the teacher’s responsibility to analyze and seek to transform the climate and norms among the children. In those contexts, the teachers are to transform the complex social processes in which bullying practices are entangled, while simultaneously helping the individual children caught up in the bullying practices.

Teachers’ Contributions to Bullying Sometimes teachers are themselves part of the bullying patterns that may emerge among children, contributing to destructive social patterns of mutual contempt production, oppressive norms, and extreme practices of social exclusion. Many studies emphasize the role of the teacher in setting the norms and culture of a school class. In a 2010 article, Kathleen Allen, for instance, underlined that changing a culture of bullying among a group of children or young people requires changing how adults respond to students. These studies show that teachers exert great influence on the social dynamics of child communities and that the ways in which teachers facilitate students’ communities are of essential importance to these communities’ character and the norms that regulate them. Teachers’ pedagogical and didactical practices may likewise support or prevent the production of bullying practice. If students are bored, if they do not understand the purpose of what they are being taught, if they find the classroom norms and the teacher’s expectations of them as students unclear

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or unrealistic, or if they experience social exclusion anxiety, students may seek meaning and social inclusion through other, potentially more destructive, forms of community building. According to a review of studies on bullying interventions from 2015, conducted by Kristine Kousholt and Tine Basse Fisker, teachers do not always intervene in bullying practices, a passivity that students may interpret as a form of tacit approval. Several researchers have also pointed out that the definition of bullying in itself can function as an obstacle when working with bullying as a teacher. With a fixed and individualizing definition of bullying, teachers are often blind to the varied and complex patterns of bullying behavior that children experience, severely damaging their social development and participation, as well as their ability to learn and to build academic school competences. Lacking understanding of bullying, teachers tend to blame the individual child, and often also their parents, for any problems spawning from a classroom bullying culture. They may consider some children too aggressive and others too vulnerable, or they may attribute problems to the child’s situation at home, to bad upbringing or to other phenomena outside the school or other childhood institution. In their study of teachers’ behavior in relation to bullying practices among students, Petrie Van der Zanden and colleagues found lower levels of bullying in school contexts where teachers are less likely to use strict disciplinary measures. Meanwhile, high levels of bullying behavior were found in classrooms where teachers were more prone to use discipline. Students who perceived the teacher as helpful, who saw the teacher as less insecure and more satisfied, tended to engage less in bullying.

Intervention Programs Some intervention programs take a so-called whole-school approach to bullying prevention, trying to focus a range of different aspects in the case. They involve the children involved in bullying, the teachers, and principals. They focus the classroom curriculum, offer individual counseling, enhance the communication between parents and school, and work with conflict resolution. Some expand such approaches to the so-called multicontextual approaches and further include the

local communities and more comprehensive peer groups of the children and adults involved. However, the importance of teachers, the norms and culture they work to establish, and how they engage with and relate to the children and their communities, all of these aspects of teacher involvement play a major role in the development of destructive patterns of relating among children and thereby also in relation to bullying behavior in groups of children. Dorte Marie Søndergaard See also Bullying and Parents; Cyberbullying; Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept; Social Exclusion and Bullying

Further Readings Allen, K. P. (2010). A bullying intervention system: Reducing risk and creating support for aggressive students. Preventing School Failure, 54, 199–209. doi:10.1080/10459880903496289 Inchley, J., Currie, D., Young, T., Samdal, O., Torsheim, T., Augustson, L., . . . Barnekow, V. (2016). Growing up unequal: gender and socioeconomic differences in young people’s health and well-being. Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Study: International report from the 2013/2014 Survey. WHO Regional Office for Europe. Kousholt, K., & Fisker, T. B. (2015). Approaches to reduce bullying in schools—A critical analysis from the viewpoint of first- and second-order perspectives on bullying. Children & Society, 29, 593–603. doi:10.1111/chso.12094 Van der Zanden, P. J., Denessen, E. J., & Scholte, R. H. (2015). The effects of general interpersonal and bullying-specific teacher behaviors on pupils’ bullying behaviors at school. School Psychology International, 36(5), 467–481. doi:10.1177/0143034315592754 Vreeman, R. C., & Carroll, A. E. (2007). A systematic review of school-based interventions to prevent bullying. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 161, 78–88. doi:10.1001/archpedi.161.1.78

Bullying

in

Schools

Most definitions of school bullying agree that it involves a more powerful individual or group repeatedly seeking to hurt or intimidate someone

Bullying in Schools

who is unable to defend himself or herself. Definitions vary, however, when it comes to more detailed descriptions of what this entails and, not least, of why bullying occurs. Some definitions emphasize the individual’s personality and upbringing to explain the cause of bullying behavior. More recent definitions point to dysfunctional relational patterns in social groups characterized by low tolerance, leading to the upholding of norms that allow an ongoing production of contempt and social exclusion. This entry examines the prevalence of bullying in schools, factors that promote bullying in schools, and intervention strategies.

Prevalence of Bullying in Schools In 2016, in the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study, conducted in 42 countries, approximately 10–12% of 11-year-old children reported that they had been bullied at school on a regular basis in the months immediately prior to the survey. It is also well established that being a victim to bullying at school affects children’s mental and physical health, resulting in symptoms such as headaches, stomach aches, depression, bad temper, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. Longterm effects may include some of the same symptoms as well as various forms of dysfunctional behavior. However, other studies show that longterm effects may vary considerably; many adults who were bullied as children integrate such experiences in productive ways.

Factors That Promote Bullying in Schools The social climate and norms of schools are important factors in the production of bullying behavior among children. School principals play a central role in establishing norms of tolerance and inclusion among schoolteachers. Teachers bring such norms into their work with the children in the classroom communities. Together, teachers and students establish differing norms and patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the school community. These patterns are further developed in children’s social interactions, including those outside adult supervisions, such as interactions online, during recess or which simply escape adult attention despite being entangled in classroom activities.

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When the norms and climate among principals, teachers, and students move in negative and socially destructive directions, processes of marginalization and persecution targeting one or more children may intensify and result in bullying. Teachers and principals do not always recognize such interactions as exclusionary and destructive; sometimes, they may accept or develop explanations that the bullying is just a bit of fun or the victim’s own fault. They may even take part in the production of targeted contempt. In other cases, teachers and principals may recognize bullying behavior but consider children’s behavior and their social interactions in school the responsibility of parents. Many schools, however, do recognize the supervision of social relations among children and preventing and intervening in cases of bullying as a key part of their responsibility.

Intervention Strategies A number of intervention strategies are employed in schools, for example, direct sanctions, restorative practices, or mediation. Direct sanctions are based on the idea of individual responsibility and do not regard dysfunctional social group patterns as the source of bullying. This kind of strategy seeks to identify a single individual or a specific group of individuals as bullies without trying to understand why bullying practices became meaningful activities to engage in for these children. Sanctions may in some countries include physical punishment, but mostly they involve verbal reprimands and contacting parents, who are asked to discipline their child. Sanctions may also encompass the withdrawal of privileges, short-term exclusion from lessons, placement in a special room away from classmates, or even permanent exclusion from the school. Research suggests that direct sanctions are less likely to effect more permanent changes to the social climate in a class blighted by bullying since they do not lead to a transformation of norms or relational patterns in the child community. Restorative strategies may involve meetings between offenders and victims, facilitating dialogue intended to raise the bully or bullies’ awareness of the effects of their behavior. Sometimes witnesses or parents are also invited to participate in such meetings. The aim is to encourage the

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remorse of offenders and to support them joining a process aimed at forming ideas about how to move on in ways that prevent further bullying. However, there is a strong risk that, even if ­offenders react positively as a result of the pressure of the meeting situation, if they return to unchanged norms and the same classroom climate, any such awareness and remorse will be fleeting and will not result in lasting changes to behavioral patterns. Mediation involves a dialogue between the offender and victim facilitated by a peer or a teacher. The mediator stages a symmetrical relation between offender and victim, asking them to take turns in telling their version of events while the other listens without interruption. At the end of each story, the other party repeats what he or she has just heard. The next step is for each party to contribute to a list suggesting ways to move on. The parties then try to agree upon elements of this list. Mediation was originally developed as a conflict-solving tool and its relevance in cases of bullying can be discussed, as it does not take into account that the sheltered space of mediated dialogue differs radically from the shared community of the classroom, with its norms and positionings unchallenged by the mediated conversation. Many studies have shown that a whole-school intervention can effect positive change in cases of  bullying and prevent bullying. This form of ­intervention involves students, teachers, parents, and principals and has the objective of changing the school climate. However, the teachers’ role in whole-school intervention strategies is particularly

important. Research indicates that the ways in which teachers respond to students and form students’ capacity and possibilities for community building have a major impact on classroom culture. Addressing this responsibility alongside the many other aspects of school life seems to have positive effects. Dorte Marie Søndergaard See also Bullying; Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept; Cyberbullying; Social Exclusion and Bullying

Further Readings Espelage, D. L., & Swearer, S. M. (2004). Bullying in American schools: A social-ecological perspective on prevention and intervention. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. doi:10.4324/9781410609700 Mathiassen, C. (2014). Traces of being bullied: ‘dynamic effectuality’. In R. M. Schott & D. M. Søndergaard (Eds.), School bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139226707.018 Rigby, K. (2014). How teachers address cases of bullying in schools: A comparison of five reactive approaches. Educational Psychology in Practice, 30(4), 409–419. doi:10.1080/02667363.2014.949629 Salmivalli, C., Huttunen, A., & Huttunen, K. M. J. (1997). Peer networks and bullying in schools. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 38(4), 305–312. Thornberg, R. (2011). “She’s weird!”—The social construction of bullying in school: A review of qualitative research. Children & Society, 25, 258–267. doi:10.1111/j.1099-0860.2011.00374.x

C Capitalism

and

with its focus on cheap, mass production impacted greatly on working class children who were used as labor to enable the cheap production of goods. For contemporary childhoods, neoliberalism—a form of liberalism that is guided by the free market—is also important. According to Iris Duhn, childhood is not often addressed in economic literature, with capitalist production generally considered the business of the adults who govern and participate in the market. Children have traditionally been seen more as a domestic concern, future participants in capitalism, and removed from market systems. As a notionally adult concern, capitalism can sometimes be positioned as a threat to children’s presumed innocence. However, children have increasingly been involved in capitalism in various ways throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Childhood

Broadly defined, capitalism is a social system that is organized around the production of goods for sale and the generation of profit. It is a dominant and pervasive global influence on many aspects of people’s lives, including those of children. Capitalism can influence how children are educated, government policies, the jobs their parents do, the jobs they will do as adults, their access to resources, and how they are conceptualized. Capitalism is not universal and is practiced in multiple forms. Consequently, its effects are multiple and can differ across locations, time periods, classes, and cultures. This entry investigates current research debates with respect to capitalism and its relevance to studies of childhood. Specific attention is paid to children’s status as consumers, neoliberalism’s influence on children’s educations, and children’s status in a global capitalist context.

Children as Consumers Arguably the most obvious involvement children have in capitalist societies is through the consumption of goods. Children have increasingly become active consumers with financial capital to purchase goods. A study by James U. McNeal estimated that as of 2005, children aged 4–12 years in the United States purchased goods with their own money valued at approximately US$ 42 billion. During the 20th century, marketers and pro­ ducers began to recognize the value of children’s participation in the market and increasingly advertised directly to children. In addition to being

Capitalism in Context Capitalism has had many incarnations that are deeply interconnected with history, geography, technological change, and shifting balances in the roles of business and the state. Each has implications for children and childhood, although some have been more influential than others. The global expansion of trade in the 19th and 20th centuries facilitated the reach of capitalism and its influence. Industrial capitalism during the 19th century 173

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present-day consumers, children are also valued by marketers as future adult consumers. Children also have the capacity to influence the purchasing decisions of others from a young age, in particular older family members. Marketers advertise to children in the expectation that they will influence the purchasing decisions of adults and peers. Children can influence the purchase of goods including food, clothing, books, media, and larger purchases such as cars, holidays, and electronics. In his 2004 book, Daniel Thomas Cook details how in the United States after the World War I, children’s clothing emerged as an important means by which children could act as independent consumers and influence parental purchasing. In his 2007 study, McNeal estimated that in 2005, children aged 2–12 years in the United States influenced approximately US$ 700 trillion worth of purchases. The ways in which children participate as consumers and influencers is a function of class. Given the profit-making imperative underpinning capitalist systems, the financial capital available to a child determines the ways that they are able to participate and the sorts of products they are able to purchase. In established consumer cultures, children of low socioeconomic status are limited in their capacity to participate. In her 2009 study, Allison J. Pugh argues that this has implications not just for what children and their families buy but also their sense of dignity and belonging. One interesting consequence of children’s participation in capitalism is the emergence of new, socially practiced categories of childhood different to traditional developmental categories. An example of this is the tween, a category of child identified and pursued by marketers. Cook says tweens are broadly defined as mostly female, preadolescent children who aspire to be seen as adolescents. Marketers value tweens because of their access to financial capital and capacity to purchase goods. Children’s growing participation in consumer activities has changed how they are conceptualized. Cook describes how in the first half of the 20th century, mothers were more likely to make purchasing decisions. Cook says children are now conceptualized as independent consumers who can determine their own purchases and also as somebody entitled to be consulted about family purchasing decisions. These shifting views of

childhood afford children more agency in economic activities. Capitalist philosophies are also a growing influence over children’s educational and care institutions. Some contemporary researchers are interested in neoliberalism, one of the most dominant modes of capitalism of recent decades and its effects on education settings. Neoliberalism privileges the idea that completely free markets are the best means of providing products and services, including schools and early childhood education and care (ECEC). In countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada where governments have extended neoliberal principles to ECEC, there has been a shift from community and government provision to for-profit provision. In their 2007 book, Alan R. Pence, Gunilla Dahlberg, and Peter Moss describe how in these locations, the language of capitalism has crept into ECEC. Settings are referred to as services that must either make a profit or be self-sustaining. Parents are called customers with the power to choose their preferred service. This marks a shift in how ECEC is conceptualized and practiced.

Neoliberalism and Education There is also interest in whether neoliberalism is an influence on educational curriculums. If one of the purposes of education is to prepare children for participation in society, then it follows that education in neoliberal societies will produce subjects who can function in that environment. Duhn proposes that the neoliberalization of curriculum encourages children to be competitive, autonomous, and self-governing. While these seem to be desirable qualities, there is concern that they are individualistic and do not take sufficient account of social connections to others and the environment. Neoliberalism is believed to have a narrowing effect on curriculum. Activities that are deemed productive and measurable are privileged, whereas non-productive activities like the arts are valued less. Neoliberal capitalism may also have implications for children’s social equity, especially the poor, given its widespread adoption in the majority world. One of the premises of neoliberalism is that it encourages competition and rewards hard work, making it easier for children to transcend

Capitalism and Childhood

class and disadvantage. However, there is evidence that inequality and child poverty are growing under neoliberal governance. In his 2005 book, Alan Prout asserts that there has been an erosion of welfare and social supports. Prout believes increasing inequality has implications for a range of factors associated with disadvantage including health outcomes, neglect, abuse, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, smoking, suicide, mental illness, and educational outcomes. Other forms of capitalism, such as Nordic social democracy, where government takes greater responsibility for social welfare seem more effective in improving social equity.

Globalization Another phenomenon that has accompanied the rise of neoliberal capitalism is that of globalization. Global trade has a long history but has increased dramatically since the 1990s with improvements in transportation, communication, and information sharing. One concern about global capitalism has been the consequences for children. Practices like child labor, colonization, and slave trading are deeply connected to current and past models of global trade and have had adverse effects on children that are immediate and generational. These include detrimental effects on health, development, education, poverty, and family and community structures. Global capitalism privileges cheap modes of production and therefore cheap labor. This is increasingly provided by the emerging economies of the Global South. In some economies, this involves the use of children for inexpensive labor. The effects of globalization on child labor are complex. While it is widely accepted that children’s forced labor is a social wrong, the ethics of children’s work is difficult to define. In a 2013 publication, Tatek Abebe describes how in many communities in the South, children’s work is considered normal and a social good, particularly when it contributes to the well-being of family and community. Much of this work has historically taken the form of domestic tasks or participation in subsistence farming. However, neoliberal capitalism privileges the production of goods for trade. Abebe describes how in some communities, this has resulted in children being redirected from

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family and domestic tasks to commercial production. This can have complex effects for traditional family hierarchies and structures and complicates distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of children’s work. Global capitalism is also believed to influence how children are conceptualized in the South. In a 2013 study, Olga Nieuwenhuys suggests the productive role assigned to children in the South differs from the North where children are less productive and afforded the luxury of just being children. Global capitalism, operating alongside discourses of children as rights holders, is credited with spreading this Northern concept of childhood and imposing it on Southern cultures. This conceptualization of children as nonproductive creatures of play renders children’s work problematic, which can have detrimental social effects in communities it is traditionally valued. This entry has covered a number of different aspects of the relationship between childhood and capitalism. It raises the possibility that capitalism goes beyond the mere exchange of goods and has implications for children in areas like education, work, marketing, and how they are conceptualized. Bruce Hurst See also Children as Consumers; Children as Workers; Global North Childhoods; Material Culture, Children’s

Further Readings Aitken, S., Lund, R., & Kjorholt, A. T. (Eds.). (2013). Global childhoods: Globalization, development and young people. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Cook, D. T. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. R. (2007). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care: Languages of evaluation (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Duhn, I. (2010). Mapping globalization and childhood: Possibilities for curriculum and pedagogy. In G. S. Cannella & L. D. Soto (Eds.), Childhoods: A handbook (pp. 309–318). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. McNeal, J. U. (2007). On becoming a consumer: The development of consumer behavior patterns in childhood. Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heineman.

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Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood: Towards the interdisciplinary study of children. London, UK: Routledge Falmer. Pugh, A. J. (2009). Longing and belonging: Parents, children, and consumer culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1177/0907568210017004 1002

Care, Feminist Ethic

of

The ‘feminist ethic of care’ (FEC), or ‘care-based ethics’, is an ethical theory that places interpersonal relationships and care as a central virtue to moral action. This contrasts with the ‘rationalist’ theory of action that underpins much conventional social and ethical theory, in particular utilitarian and Kantian ethical theories. The ideas developed in the late 20th century by feminists concerned that ‘feminised’ virtues of caring have been underplayed and systematically devalued. This entry outlines a brief set of historical ‘waves’ to identify how the FEC has developed over time. The entry also notes that children’s own processes of caring have suffered similar processes of devaluation and silencing, as caregivers, as well as care receivers. Specifically, this entry maintains that children do have moral virtues as active participants in caregiving and receiving. FEC provides an important approach to fully understand children’s real and substantial participation in this aspect of social life.

First Wave The first ‘wave’ of the FEC arguably begins with the publication in 1982 of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice; the book provided an important contribution to moral theory and feminism in general. In the book, Gilligan engaged a critique of the previous conventional moral theory associated with developmental psychology. By way of contrast to early versions of child development where reasoning ‘develops’ at specific ‘stages’, Gilligan drew on gendered object relations theory to suggest that girls adopt a different set of moral reasoning to boys. Object relations theory argued that mothers experience their daughters as less separate from themselves, and girls, unlike boys,

are not pushed away from their mothers and thereby compelled to repress their intimacy, tenderness, and capacity of care. Drawing on this, Gilligan argues that girls develop a capacity for empathy and sensitivity, whereas boys define themselves in terms of independence and autonomy. According to Gilligan, ‘masculine’ moral reasoning utilises mathematical calculations and the adoption of hierarchical rules; in contrast, girls look to more concrete, relational issues to adjudicate moral dilemmas. Gilligan draws on a class experiment whereby children were set a dilemma: Should a man steal from a chemist (druggist) a potion he cannot afford to save his sick wife? The boys thought that it was justified because the harm to the wife was worse than the harm to the chemist. Girls did not provide such a ‘mathematical’ solution and said that husband and wife needed to ‘talk about it’ and what would happen if the wife needed the treatment a second time around? A more relational and long-term resolution of the dilemma was presented. Childhood studies critiqued developmental psychology as devaluing the reasoning of children in a similar way to how Gilligan argues that women’s reasoning is marginalised. Developmental psychology’s traditional moral reasoning that values hierarchies of expert knowledge, the rewarding of an accumulation of mathematical and technical knowledge would always place children as ‘other’. The parallels to childhood studies are marked. There were difficulties, however, with Gilligan’s early approach. There were suggestions that her sampling was selective and small. We can add that Gilligan’s deployment of ‘women’s moral reasoning’ does not suitably deconstruct the category ‘woman’ and can be accused of essentialism and biological determinism, rather than emphasising women’s shared history, culture, and experience of oppression. The assumption of female moral superiority is also questionable: The work of American anthropologist Carol Stack demonstrates there are more ways in which the process of care and marginalisation are as much racialized as gendered. Furthermore, within sociology there was a shift away from associating care with oppression and exploitation to viewing care through the framework of social obligations and normative structures, where caring activities are analysed in a

Care, Feminist Ethic of

more nuanced way and an eschewal of unidirectional top-down exploitation. Thus, an ethic of care demands more rigourous and multidimensional attention. Feminist ethicists have quite rightly highlighted women’s special role in caring relationships. After all, women’s continued primary role as default carers remains obdurate. According to Carers UK, of the 6.5 million unpaid carers in the United Kingdom in 2017, 58% or 3.34 million are women. However, this unhelpfully marginalises the role of men as carers and the increasingly recognised caring undertaken by children. For instance, as of 2013, the UK’s Office of National Statistics reported that there were 149,000 young carers aged between 15 and 19 years in the United Kingdom and approximately 70,000 in the 10–14 years age range at that time. Girls are more likely to be carers (about 5% of girls are carers and about 4% of boys). Statistics so far collected in the United Kingdom are measurements of children caring for adults only and do not count the largest proportion of caring by children, that is directed at their siblings, of which there are no reliable figures. Although one can assume that this is also gendered, as girls are drawn into this caring role more than boys, although not exclusively so.

Second Wave Indeed, most feminist writers now avoid such essentialist thinking and instead focus on the processes whereby activities of caring and the gendering of these processes become marginalised. Gilligan’s work, although influential, was built upon by other moral theorists. In this ‘second wave’ of the FEC, definitions of care are placed within broader social and political concerns rather than essentialised individual gendered psychology. In Moral Boundaries, Joan B. Tronto developed the ethic of care to include a total worldview that involved a more complicated perspective where ethical frameworks take the position of the others’ needs into account. She shows of the power differentials where caring about and taking care of people are often the duties of the powerful. However, the concrete giving and receiving of care are left to the least powerful in society. Tronto identifies four ethical elements of care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and

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responsiveness. ‘Attentiveness’ refers to the recognition for the need to care; ‘responsibility’ denotes taking responsibility of care; ‘competence’ concerns the daily tasks of tending and ensuring that all care needs are met; and ‘responsiveness’ applies to the interaction between the caregiver and receiver. Thus, caring is a continuous social process that places caring for the self and others as the central ethical question that our human society can pose. In terms of a moral theory and the development of a moral framework, Tronto identifies three ‘moral boundaries’ that it is helpful to reflect upon. Firstly, traditional moral theory separates public and private life. Children and adults tend to be cared for in ‘private’ spaces and are thus absent, excluded or ‘protected’ from public life. Whilst issues of privacy are of course fundamental to us all, feminists have shown that private spaces are often sites of loneliness, violence, and abuse experienced by women and children. The challenge to the public/private distinction by feminists leads to the second ‘moral boundary’ that confronts the separation of morality from politics. Politicians face deep moral questions, such as the nature of education, the feelings of the sick, the care of children, and so on; yet politicians focus on social questions only in so far as economic and political efficiency. Due to feminist and other challenges to political life, moral issues, such as child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and children’s rights, have entered the political realm and led to important reforms. The final ‘moral boundary’ concerns challenges to abstract accounts of morality and builds upon Gilligan’s critique of technical and expert-led solutions to questions of society. This is an important point, as measurements and outputs of children are placed within quantitative frameworks that are separated and parted from the lifeworlds of children. One can think of outcomes, such as levels of qualifications, health indicators, the transition from schooling to paid employment, and so on; where such outcomes take very little account of the complex, emotional, and relational lifeworlds in which children live. Yet, Tronto continues to emphasise the connection between the naturalness of care that is ascribed to gendered roles, where care is assumed to fall to women. Whilst developing the theory of social and cultural constructions, Tronto moves away from the psychological essentialism of

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Gilligan; however, the entire focus on gendering weakens the place of the FEC to take a more central role in moral theory and allow other intersections, such as race, class, (dis)ability, and indeed those of children, to utilise the theory fully.

Third Wave The new moral theory associated with the FEC offers a new way of thinking about politics and society. Recent usages of the FEC, such as those of Selma Sevenhuijsen, have developed what may be called a ‘third wave’ that has applied the philosophy to particular contexts in the real world in a more nuanced and less essentialised way. They note caring for others does not always involve women. Second, there is a recognition of the sometimes oppressive nature of caring; the relationships require a balancing of the needs and interests of the two parties. Third, an ethic of care and traditional moral theory must not be placed as polar opposites. Instead, principles according to justice, economics, materialism, and ‘science’ do have important contributions to childhood studies. Access to adequate care could be perceived as a human right. What is of overwhelming importance is to place all of these moral theories into some sense of dialogue and debates must be placed within the context of pluralism and democratic citizenship. The FEC offers a vital added value to moral approaches, as the approach demands that ethical and policy dilemmas cannot be divorced from the immediate realities of caring relationships and the emotional complexities of people’s lives. The principle of ‘protecting children from harm’ must be applied to the specific context of a confused or vulnerable child (or a child with clearly thought-out view of things [i.e., the opposite of confused or vulnerable] that can be lost amidst policy and legal ‘procedures’). The ethic of care highlights, by way of contrast, principles of equity and inclusion and sees ‘emotional detachment’ as irrelevant or even an anathema to good quality caring. Caring involves differential elements of responsibilities and need and often includes conflicting agendas. Thus, a caring ethical framework must be deliberative and involve situated social practices that are open and dialogic. The FEC approach is not just concerned with challenging the imposition of top-down

knowledge but also analytic attention is to be paid to those within the concrete contexts of caring for and being cared for. Within social policy, care is placed within the discourses of individualism and inserted into frameworks around ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’. The operation of ‘rights’ assumes a choice about what one does and the corresponding duties or responsibilities. Yet this offers little space for reflections upon how people actually experience or ‘do’ responsibilities, or for the moral considerations they employ. Assumptions about rights persist in the view that people are primarily calculating, rational beings who weigh up economic benefits and costs to their actions. Those who offer care have a variety of motives beyond the economic, such as love, affection, and loyalty but also control. Furthermore, reducing care to a ‘cost’ or ‘duty’ places those in dependency, such as children, in a devalued position. Instead, it is necessary to move beyond a technical delivery of services towards a reformulation of caring ethics that seeks to work with diversity, complexity, and uncertainty. Within policy and academic disciplines, including some usages in childhood studies, ‘care’ remains a distinct policy that is separated artificially from education, health, criminal justice, and so on. Instead, there is need of an ethic that places processes of caring attentiveness, responsibilities, competences, and responsiveness as a habit of mind across all academic disciplines and service agencies. Those advocating an FEC have identified a public sphere that moves away from closed and steering frameworks towards one emphasising conversation and dialogue. There is reason for optimism in seeking to encourage this more dialogical governance, in that wider social changes around care are taking place in society. This is possibly due to the movement of women into public organisations where they can introduce caring into these spaces. Thus, ‘caring professions’ such as health are moving from mere ‘acute’ services to palliative and preventive services that allows for consideration of the nature and type of care to be taken seriously. Relatedly, ‘user groups’, including the voices of children, are increasingly being brought into the planning and delivery of services. Men are also increasing their caring in both formal and informal settings. Whilst there is still a good deal of ground to make up, the mould has

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been broken and the traditional taboos around male carers are weakening. Finally, caring is moving out of the private sphere and is now located across the public, voluntary, and private sectors. Debates around caring and the inclusion of ethical deliberations have never been as timely. We are confronted with the necessity of using a moral orientation of care in our public services, and within our homes, to act together and form a sustainable and dignified existence for everyone, including children.

Feminism and Childhood Studies Those interested in childhood studies should consider the ideas put forward by feminist ethicists. The conflict in interests between women and children only applies to the fact that mothers are pressured to be paid workers and carrying the ‘single’ responsibility for childcare. There is a requirement for space for ethical consideration. Here, children are not the ‘question’ for women but the contemporary labour market, men’s participation in caring, and the operation of the welfare state. Thus, feminism and childhood studies can be symbiotic allies in creating a better world for women, children, and men. Children’s vulnerability is socially constructed through masculine ordered social environments that can be challenged. Sociologist Berry Mayall cites the example of Finland, where mothers work in partnership with the state to facilitate children to live competent and independent lives. This has the consequence of children and mothers living more independently and the state has the benefit of developing competent and empowered young citizens. An understanding of how caring happens within specific settings and an ethical framework to consider care processes allows for children’s and women’s ‘hidden work’ to be recognised and can facilitate a mutually fulfilling dialogue. This can only benefit women, children, and men too as ‘vulnerabilities’ and ‘dependency’ are reformulated through attention to processes of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness; to allow greater and more fulfilling relationships for all. Tom Cockburn See also Care-Work; Caregivers, Children as; Childhood Studies; Ethics; Feminism

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Further Readings Cockburn, T. (2005). Children and the feminist ethic of care. Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 12(1), 71–89. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Larrabee, M. J. (2016). An ethic of care: Feminist and interdisciplinary perspectives. London, UK: Routledge. Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology for childhood. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Sevenhuijsen, S. (1998). Citizenship and the ethics of care: Feminist considerations on justice, morality and politics. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9780203169384 Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. London, UK: Routledge.

Care, Institutional ‘Children in care’, ‘looked-after child’, and ‘children in out-of-home care’ are amongst the terms that refer to children who are unable to live with their parents and are placed in state or public care. ‘State care’ is where a government or local authority takes responsibility for children whose family are unable to take care of them, with children usually living in foster care or residential/institutional care. This entry offers an overview of what being in care means and the different care arrangements available.

Care Systems Around the World Care systems vary across the world, with child welfare systems, approaches, and regulation differing with the social, cultural, and economic contexts that influence a child becoming cared for ever changing. State care where there are established child welfare systems is common in Europe, North America, and Australasia, whilst other economies are in the early stages of developing country-wide approaches to child protection and the care of children unable to live at home. China is one example of a large, global economy that has over recent years begun to pilot governmentled child protection. These wide-ranging approa­ ches to children in care makes cross-country

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comparisons problematic; however, it does add to the understanding, contextualisation, and conceptualisation of children living in care. Reasons for going into care can differ across the world. In countries with more established child welfare systems, a child can go into care often due to concerns of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, neglect, parent’s mental or physical health, substance abuse, or due to learning or physical disability. In African and Asian countries, health epidemics, conflict, and natural disasters, children ‘left behind’ due to economic migration, and children abandoned by their families can cause children to go into care. Examining the intersections and social inequality influencing children going into care is critical. There is an overrepresentation of ethnic minority children in the United States and children from indigenous communities in Australia being placed in care. Children ‘left behind’ in rural areas due to economic migration in China are seen as vulnerable to abuse and in need of care, and the disadvantage of care leavers in the United Kingdom highlight some of the prevalent issues facing children in care across the globe. Countries often have a number of arrangements in place for children taken into care. Foster care, which is the care of choice for many countries, refers to placing a child in family-based care, either with state-approved foster carers or those registered with private or voluntary sector organisations, kinship care (care with a relative), or private foster care (a private arrangement between the child’s family with a non-family member). However, whilst kinship care is the prominent option in some countries, such as the United States and New Zealand, foster care is the more frequently used option in others, for example, in the United Kingdom.

Reliance on Residential Care The use of residential care, children’s homes, or orphanages varies. In the United Kingdom, and many Western-type economies, large residential facilities or children’s homes, often provided by faith organisations, were popular until the mid20th century. Use of residential placements has decreased, with countries such as the United Kingdom preferring smaller, community-based ‘homes’, with evidence suggesting that family- and community-based care improve outcomes. ­

However, in some European countries, including Germany, Denmark, and Finland, larger residential units are still in use, where a model of social pedagogy forms the foundations of care and the focus is on upbringing as opposed to care and teaching. According to Frank Ainsworth and June Thoburn, Japan’s care system suggests that though a child is less likely to enter care, once in care 90% are cared for in residential institutions. Much is documented on the disadvantage experienced by children in care through disruption of education and lower levels of attainment, mental health needs, disrupted relationships due to lack of family contact and multiple professional input. Whilst, internationally, there are differences in the structural inequalities and the sociocultural and economic influences that impact on the lives of children in care, research highlights that children in and leaving care continue to be disadvantaged and are one of the most excluded groups in society.

Policies on Children’s Care In recent years, the introduction of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has placed significant attention on the rights of children and has seen a theoretical and policy shift in the understanding of children and their participation in decisions made about their lives. This has particular significance for children in care as it is now becoming common practice, for example, in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Finland, to ensure children are involved in their care planning, reviews, and placement choice. However, criticisms of the care system and child welfare highlight that there continues to be a strong emphasis on risk management and achieving outcomes, and a neglect of the importance of the relationship between the child and social worker as well as in understanding the experience of being in care. In addition, the sociology of childhood, as discussed by Annabel Goodyer, refocuses attention on understanding the lives of children in care and advocates a shifting of power dynamics in existing practice in an effort to conceptualise and challenge the micro- and macrolevel problems that exist within the care system. Laura J. Goodfellow See also Foster Care, U.S.; Street Children

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Further Readings Ainsworth, F., & Thoburn, J. (2013). An exploration of the differential usage of residential childcare across national boundaries. International Journal of Social Welfare, 23(1), 16–24. doi:10.1111/ijsw.12025 Augsberger, A., & McGowan, B. G. (2014). Children in foster care (Chapter 13). In A. Gitterman (Ed.), Handbook of social work practice with vulnerable and resilient populations (2nd ed.). Chichester, UK: Columbia University Press. doi:10.7312/ gitt11396-014 Cashmore, J. (2014). Children living away from home. In G. B. Melton, A. Ben-Arieh, J. Cashmore, G. S. Goodman, & N. K. Worley (Eds.), The Sage handbook of child research. London, UK: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781446294758 Higgins, M., Goodyer, A., & Whittaker, A. (2015). Can a Munro-inspired approach transform the lives of looked after children in England? The International Journal of Social Work Education, 34(3), 328–340. doi:10.1080/02615479.2014.999658 Mendes, P., & Snow, P. (Eds.). (2016). Young people transitioning from out-of-home care: International research, policy and practice. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-55639-4 Stein, M. (2006). Research review: Young people leaving care. Child & Family Social Work, 11(3), 273–279. Tilbury, C., & Thoburn, J. (2009). Using racial disproportionality and disparity indicators to measure child welfare concerns. Child and Youth Services Review, 31, 1101–1106. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth. 2009.07.004 Xiaoou, M., Barth, R. P., Li, Y., & Wang, Z. (2017). Exploring the new child protection system in Mainland China: How does it work? Child and Youth Services Review, 76, 196–202.

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In the Global North and Global South, children and adolescents commonly take on more or less extensive care tasks and responsibilities with regard to parents, siblings, and grandparents. The degree of involvement is determined by the circumstances, by the unavailability of relatives, or by the temporary or permanent incapacity of the latter to handle such tasks. The commitment may be occasional, when the mother is engaged in other priority activities (commercial activity, agricultural work, or

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social obligations). Children also intervene on an ongoing basis when one or both parents, the mother in particular, suffer from health problems (physical, mental), including HIV/AIDS, diabetes, or addiction. Through their daily support, they express their attachment, as well as putting themselves in a position to react immediately in the event that a new need or problem arises. The range of responsibilities and activities varies according to needs and circumstances. It may include bodily care and participation in therapeutic measures (distribution of medicines); it may take the form of procuring and preparing food and drink, household maintenance work, as well as caring for younger siblings (supervision, education, and feeding). This entry examines care versus labor and explores different forms of care offered by children.

Care Versus Labor The involvement of children in care is noted in various bodies of research, primarily in publications on child labor carried out on behalf of relatives. In her study focused on Zimbabwe, Pamela Reynolds, who examined children’s work within an agricultural subsistence economy, found that girls under the age of 10 years spent 56% of their time caring for infants and younger children. Drawing on her research in Kerala, within a smallscale fishermen economy, Olga Nieuwenhuys also underscores girls’ contribution in attending to younger siblings and doing household work, while boys are more readily entrusted with other tasks. Children’s contribution to caregiving is also highlighted in the work on child circulation, which has been mainly studied in the African context. These arrangements are favorable or disadvantageous to children in varying degrees. They may make it easier for some to attend school, whereas for others, they are not accompanied by advantageous counterpart benefits and represents cases of children being abusively put to work. The latter is the subject of research on child domesticity, which looks at the situation of children who are locally referred to as little nieces or little maids. Children’s ability to care for themselves and younger siblings is also singled out by studies on child-headed households (supervised by orphans). The extent of care provided by children is also demonstrated in a migration context by

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studies on their skills and role as language and cultural brokers in different institutional contexts, including therapeutic ones. The care provided by children is highlighted in publications on the care and management of young children, who are entrusted for part of the day to older children. In some contexts, these children are referred to by a specific label, notably that of small carriers. Through their contribution, children run counter to common Western images of the child as “useless but precious,” primarily a source of economic investment and emotional gratification; this contradicts the Western norm, crystallized in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which tends to represent the child as vulnerable and protective, school-centered, and lacking economic responsibility. It goes against the representation of childhood defined as a period of immaturity and irresponsibility.

Recognizing Different Forms of Care Care provided by children is often under-recognized for various reasons: Care is part of a division of reproductive labor that is shaped by asymmetric power relations between genders and generations. Moreover, it is often free or very modestly remunerated and in a deferred manner while also running counter to certain social norms, according to which children are obligated to their parents and not the other way around. Analysis of the care provided by children calls into question the assignment of individuals to an exclusive role, that of caretaker and caregiver. This finding with regard to children taking on multiple and differentiated care roles reinforces the observation made by Myra Bluebond-Langner about children caring for their parents even when gravely ill themselves. While children with cancer identified the seriousness of their situation and the chances they had of healing, they nonetheless concealed this knowledge so as to spare their parents, thereby showing a concern for their emotional state and well-being. The ethnographic approach to child labor, which takes into account both their viewpoint and that of adults, serves to renew the vision of care. It proves that children perceive their contribution in a specific and contextualized way; the same task may be seen as help, work, or an undue chore

depending on the degree of closeness, attachment, and reciprocity with the person for whom they are caring. The complexity and scope of the care work done by children tends to remain invisible; far from just carrying a young child, girls ensure his or her safety, teach him or her to walk as well as talk and interact with others and with the environment. They also facilitate the weaning process. The care provided by children mobilizes complex knowledge and social skills. Thus, as evidenced by the ethnography of care provided by children to parents suffering from tuberculosis, care includes a cognitive dimension: Children learn about the disease and its treatment; they also know how to adapt their discourse to social norms and institutional contexts. In this way, they reveal their knowledge of their parent’s disease in a very selective way, in order to protect the identity and social status of their parent, as well as their own. Their caregiving involves emotional work aimed at minimizing the negative impact of the disease and, through the adoption of appropriate behavior, at fostering a positive attitude in the parent and in the family as a whole. Their caregiving is accompanied by a deliberate management of social identities: through their domestic work, they enable their mothers to preserve—within their family network and in the neighborhood— an identity as good housewives and mothers. By supporting their parent’s social identity and therapeutic approach, they improve the future prospects of their mother, as well as their own, by providing support for this person who best defends their interests. The ethnography of care relationships in the family and institutional context highlights intergenerational interdependencies and speaks to promoting greater appreciation of children’s contributions, particularly by public authorities. Jeanne Veronique Pache See also Care-Work; Child Labor; Restavek; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Bluebond-Langner, M. (1980). The private worlds of dying children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Care-Work Gottlieb, A. (2004). The afterlife is where we come from: The culture of infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.3366/ afr.2006.0039 Hunleth, J. (2017). Children as caregivers: The global fight against tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. doi:10.26530/oapen_627650 Jacquemin, M. (2009). Petites nièces” et “petites bonnes” à Abidjan: Les mutations de la domesticité juvénile. Travail, Genre Et Sociétés, 2(22), 53–74. doi:10.3917/ tgs.022.0053 Lallemand, S. (2012). La garde des enfants par d’autres enfants: Quelques études de cas extra-européens. Paedagogica Historica, 46(6), 741–750. doi:10.1080/0 0309230.2010.526334 Orellana, M. (2009). Translating childhoods: Immigrant youth, language, and culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. doi:10.1080/15235882.2012 .704543 Nieuwenhuys, O. (1999). Children’s lifeworlds: Gender, welfare and labour in the developing world. New Delhi, India: Social Science Press. Razy, E. (2007). Naître et devenir: Anthropologie de la petite enfance en pays soninké (Mali). Paris, France: Société d’ethnologie. Reynolds, P. (1985). Children in Zimbabwe: Rights and power in relation to work. Anthropology Today, 1(3), 16–20. doi:10.2307/3033125

Care-Work Care is a notion that is used in various disciplines: social work, sociology, anthropology, educational and political sciences, as well as in gender studies and childhood studies, the latter being the focus of the following entry. According to the well-known definition provided by Joan Tronto, caring includes all that one does to “maintain, continue, and repair” one’s world which includes “our bodies, ourselves, and our environment.” As care fosters an ongoing process of maintenance and development of fellow humans, it tends to be looked at from the perspective of the cared for, while failing to focus on the time and effort devoted to it by care providers. As a matter of fact, care becomes particularly conspicuous when it is lacking and thus directly or indirectly jeopardizing the living conditions, health and well-being of regular or

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legitimate beneficiaries. This entry defines care, locates it in various contexts, explores the impact of transnationalism on care, and explores the importance of investigating care in relation to both work and kinship.

Defining Care Care includes an extreme variety of more or less complex activities and tasks, aiming at fulfilling the physiological, emotional, intellectual, and social needs of human beings, sometimes even including pets. Care can be delivered in institutional as well as private contexts. It may combine intimate and economic relations, as sociologist Viviana Zelizer notes, calling for a better understanding of the interrelation between economic transactions and intimate relations. Care-work can refer to professional and commoditized activities as well as to unpaid help/assistance, labeled as reproductive work, which is performed out of social obligation and emotional bonding. The value of this unpaid work, often performed by women, is to be taken into consideration within national economies. Aside from being defined by gender, care arrangements tend to be determined by intergenerational reciprocity and kinship debt. The division of care-work tends to rely on a naturalization of competencies, associating a fitness to care with specific ethnic/national origins, social classes, and gender. According to the ideology of intensive motherhood coined by Sharon Hays, mothers are supposed to be naturally more endowed with the qualities required for attending to children’s needs; as a consequence, their primary social responsibility is to take care of their children, at the cost of a lesser involvement in other social, economic, and political fields, in which fathers are more generally allowed to invest their time and energy.

Understanding Care in Context The nature and extent of caring services are molded by the evolving needs of the beneficiaries, who move from one to next stage of the life cycle, belong to various social categories, and live in changing political, social, and economic circumstances. Care is also determined by the resources available to the socially designated first-hand care

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providers, who may to varying extents delegate certain responsibilities and tasks to third parties. Historical studies focused on the delegation of childcare highlight the number of specialists (e.g., slaves, wet and dry nurses, nannies, governess, tutors) to whom children’s care and education were entrusted, the number and qualification of these specialists being determined by the parents’ status and wealth. Historical studies also demonstrate the links between domestic service, apprenticeship, education, and care. Care not only expresses and maintains existing kinship relations but contributes to creating relatedness between those giving and receiving care, for instance in the context of adoption. As a matter of fact, care is provided and received in various arrangements whose performers and beneficiaries may refer to a variety of ideologies and values, ranging from contracts, to exchange and to gift. The process of delegating care may be accompanied by a stratified transnational division of reproductive labor, linking employers residing in high-income countries to female employees from low-income countries, through the establishment of a “global care chain,” a concept coined by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild. In this kind of arrangement, female migrants supply paid care labor to employers, at the cost of having to delegate the care of their own dependent family members.

Translational Patterns of Care A large number of studies analyze transnational parenting, mostly focusing on practices and representation of transnational motherhood. According to available resources (e.g., salaries, legal status, and social capital), migrant domestic workers may leave their children behind in their country of origin and entrust them to relatives (especially to their own mother, sisters, elder daughters) or to domestic workers. They may also decide not to be separated from their children and organize the migration of close relatives (especially sisters or cousins), to whom the children are entrusted, in exchange for board and lodging or for a low salary. As noted by Kornia, these arrangements express and maintain asymmetric relations not only between citizens and migrants but also among migrants themselves.

Alongside prevalent studies on migrant domestic workers, a growing number of research projects examine how international division of care impacts the living conditions and prospects of children and youth. In her study on the Philippines, Rachel Salazar Parrenas insists on the difficulties raised by the incoherence between, on the one hand, the state’s policy of encouraging women’s emigration to foster remittance flows; and, on the other hand, its promotion of intensive motherhood, reinforcing the image of the mother as a homemaker and hands-on mum. Parrenas explains that the lack of political and social recognition of transnational families stigmatizes the experiences of children and parents and prevents acknowledgment of new ways of maintaining meaningful and valuable family ties, notably thanks to new information and communications technologies.

Care and Kinship Anthropological research, such the recent collection of articles edited by Erdmute Alber and Heike Drotbohm, underscores the necessity of understanding care not only in relation to work but also in relation to kinship and life course. The emphasis on care, kinship, and life course pursues earlier research, such that on fosterage undertaken by Suzanne Lallemand, who highlights the social and economic structural significance of the circulation of children who don’t grow up with their biological parents, but instead shift households and live in relatives’ households. In the Andes, as noted by Anna Kornia, child fostering encourages co-residence of younger and older generations, who are in different stages of the life cycle and thus have not only different needs with regard to receiving care but also varying capacities to provide care. This trend is motivated not only by specific ideologies of kinship and parenthood but also relates to definite representations of education and children. Accordingly, children are not only regarded as beneficiaries of care, but also represent competent and productive care providers for the members of the household to which they are attached. These capacities explain children’s involvement in domestic work performed for the benefit of nonrelated employers and underscore

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the need to understand care in relation to kinship as well as to larger social and political processes. Jeanne Veronique Pache See also Care, Feminist Ethic of; Caregivers, Children as; Child Domestic Work; Transnationalism Families

Further Readings Alber, E., & Drotbohm, H. (Eds.). (2015). Anthropological perspectives on care: Work, kinship, and the life-course. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1111/1469–8676.12404 Ehrenreich, B., & Hochschild, A. R. (Eds.). (2002). Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Hayes, S. (1996). The cultural contradiction of motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kornia, A. K. (2015). Negotiating the care of children and the elderly in the context of family migration: Transnational arrangements and entangled inequalities between Peru and Italy. In A. Erdmute & H. Drotbohm (Eds.), Anthropological perspectives on care: Work, kinship, and the life-course (pp. 43–67). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137513441_3 Lallemand, S. (2002). La circulation des enfants en société traditionnelle [The circulation of children in traditional society]. Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Pache Huber, V. (2012). Delegation of childcare as a cornerstone of children’s interethnic relations. In P. H. Véronique & S. Spyrou (Eds.), Children’s interethnic relations in everyday life: Beyond institutional contexts. London, UK: Sage. Special issue of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research, 19(3), 389–396. Pache Huber, V., & Dasen, V. (Eds.). (2010). Politics of child care in historical perspective: From the world of wet nurses to the networks of family child care providers. Paedagogica Historica, 46(6), 673–848. doi:10.1177/0907568212445934 Parrenas, R. S. (2008). Children of global migration: Transnational families and gendered woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sarti, R. (2005). Domestic service and European identity: Conclusion of the Servant project. Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/ 30955387/drs_servant_project_conclusion.pdf?AWSA ccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=

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1546528469&Signature=ngcOxgOW5m%2FHY8JPL ISLPjVlBXk%3D&response-content-disposition= inline%3B%20filename%3DFINAL_REPORT_ Conclusion_Domestic_service.pdf Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.1177/000169939503800414 Zelizer, V. (2005). The purchase of intimacy. Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1177/ 0891243208316866

Carroll, Lewis Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832– 1898) is best known as the author of Alice in Wonderland (1865), as well as its sequel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876). He adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll in 1856 when he first published a poem in The Train monthly magazine. Although some critics have argued that he kept his writing alias separate from his professional name, even going so far as to return letters addressed to Lewis Carroll at Christchurch, there is evidence to show that he continued to write to children from Oxford using this name until shortly before his death. In addition to his fame as a children’s author, he was one of the most prolific early British amateur photographers and a mathematics researcher at Oxford University. His personal life has also been the source of speculation, including the propriety of his relationships with the children he photographed. This entry situates Lewis Carroll’s most renowned work, Alice in Wonderland, in the context of his life story and activities as mathematician, photographer, and diarist, and also comments on some of the controversies surrounding his life and work.

Childhood Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Daresbury, Cheshire, UK in 1832; he was one of 11 children born to Charles Dodgson, a High Anglican vicar, and Frances Jane Lutwidge. Carroll was his parents’ third child and their first son. His siblings all survived into the 20th century,

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with Carroll the only exception. Some of Carroll’s juvenilia survives, largely consisting of poems, parodies, and illustrations composed for the magazine he produced for his family. He was educated at Richmond Grammar School and then, aged 14 years, as a boarder at Rugby School. There are mixed reports as to how successful his school years were. His letters home complain about the school and he had, at this time and as an adult, a stammer, which may have made his school life difficult. Conversely, there is anecdotal evidence that he took part in fights with his classmates, and his school reports suggest that he was an academically successful student.

Oxford University and Mathematics Carroll enrolled at Christ Church College, Oxford University, in 1850 to read mathematics. His mother died shortly after he began his undergraduate degree, but he continued his studies after returning to Oxford from Daresbury, gaining a Studentship (an Oxford fellowship) in his third year. Although his diaries record a resistance to applying himself to his work and some frustration at his own lack of motivation, he was awarded the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855. University rules at this time stipulated that lecturers take holy orders but Carroll petitioned for, and was granted, an exception for as-yet unknown reasons. Reports of Carroll’s teaching abilities tend to focus on his stutter and his self-confessed inability to apply himself to his studies. Nevertheless, the research he undertook at Oxford University continues to have a legacy in the fields of geometry, probability, algebra, and symbolic logic. His notable mathematical works include Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879), A Game of Logic (1887), and Symbolic Logic (1897 and 1977), and he is credited with the first published proof of the Kronecker–Capelli theorem (linear algebra). In addition, the Dodgson Condensation for computing square matrices’ determinants led to both the Alternating Sign Matrix theorem and the Desnanot–Jacobi identity (also called the ‘Lewis Carroll identity’). It was during the early years of his career at Oxford that he took up photography and began a relationship with the Liddell family, the father of

which, Henry, was appointed Dean of Christ Church the same year that Carroll took up his Lectureship. Carroll remained a Lecturer at the college until his death, although in his later years he spent increasing amounts of time in Eastbourne and in Guildford, where he had bought a house for his unmarried sisters.

Alice in Wonderland and Children’s Literature The origin of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the subject of some dispute. The most popular story is that Carroll told the tale to three young sisters—Ina, Alice, and Edith Liddell–on a sunny boat trip on the Thames at Oxford, with his friend the Reverend Robinson Duckworth on 4 July 1862. The story goes that Alice enjoyed it so much that she insisted he write it down, which he duly did (albeit with a 2-year delay), becoming the selfillustrated Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. This original, handwritten, and illustrated text is held at the British Library on restricted access. With the encouragement of his friend, the author George MacDonald, who read some of the story to his appreciative children, he showed an unfinished manuscript to the Macmillan publishing house, who agreed to publish it in an expanded version, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This version included the addition of some of the most well-known characters in the story, including the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, and the Cheshire Cat, and was accompanied by illustrations by the ‘Punch’ political cartoonist John Tenniel. This version of events solidifies Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a classic on the basis of its popularity with children and inspiration by them, as well as its legitimation by a publisher. This origin story becomes more complicated when disputed by weather reports for 4 July 1862 (which state that the weather was cloudy and cold), the fact that Carroll did not record the storytelling in his diary entry for that date (only going back later to insert it, suggesting the event did not initially hold noteworthy significance for him), and the fact that 2 years elapsed before Carroll completed Alice’s Adventures Under Ground for Liddell. Nevertheless, 4th July is celebrated as Alice Day in Oxford and around the world and

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the origin story is repeated without dispute in some biographies and introductions to the Alice books, including, partially, Carroll’s own poetic preface to the first edition. The initial print run of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was recalled due to the low quality of the pictures, but after this false start, the book quickly became successful, bringing Carroll literary fame. There are no accurate records as to how many copies the book has sold to date but there have been hundreds of print runs across 174 languages. It is credited with changing the field of children’s literature, by rejecting moral didacticism and focusing instead on fantasy and the child’s experience and imagination and increasing the popularity of nonsense literature. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has had myriad afterlives, through illustrations by new artists including ranging from Helen Oxenbury to Salvador Dalí, adaptations into different media, most famously by Disney into animated and live action films in 1951 and 2010, respectively, in the 2016 film, Alice Through the LookingGlass, and through various merchandise, including interior decoration, jewellery, clothing, and food. The ongoing adaptation of the book began during Carroll’s lifetime and with his endorsement: He rewrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into The Nursery Alice and oversaw the 1886 debut of the musical pantomime Alice in Wonderland. In 1871, Carroll published the less popular but still critically and commercially successful sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, whereas the poem The Hunting of the Snark was published in 1876. Carroll is also the author of Sylvie and Bruno, a duology illustrated by Harry Furniss, about a brother and sister’s adventures in fairyland, littered with baby talk and the kind of didacticism critics often cite Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as rejecting. These books, widely available online but now out of print with mainstream publishers, were met with bad reviews and have failed to gain popularity, despite their association with Carroll.

Photography There are almost 1,000 extant photographs and negatives attributed to Carroll; principal holdings

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are at the Parrish and Cotsen Collections at Princeton University, the Harry Ransome Library in Texas, the The Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, the National Gallery in London, and Christ Church College. Although his photographs of children are the most popular, his collection also contains a large number of adult portraits. His sitters included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Rossetti family, and the actress Ellen Terry, as well as many of his colleagues and Oxford notables. Carroll used a wet collodion camera, a process that required a large amount of light, a certain knowledge of the chemical processes involved, and patience both in the making of the photograph and its development. Most of his photographs,

Figure 1 Photograph of Lewis Carroll, taken on 2nd June, 1857. Considered an Autoportrait Source: Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries including the United States.

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especially his earlier ones, were taken outside, often using material backdrops and carpets to simulate interior spaces. In later years, he acquired permission to install skylights in his rooms at Oxford University, enabling him to move his photography indoors. Carroll’s most famous photographs are of three of the Liddell sisters, in particular, the portrait ‘Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid’, and four nude or semi-nude portraits of children. Diary evidence suggests that these photographs were made with the permission of the children’s parents, but the existence of these four portraits, as well as the recorded destruction of a number of others, has led some to suggest that Carroll had a paedophilic interest in young girls. Although much has been made of Carroll’s apparently sudden end to taking photographs, with some critic suggesting it was linked to a discovery of his paedophilic interest in children, it can also be attributed to the increasing popularity of a new photographic, using dry collodion, for which he expressed a distaste. Although he does not seem to have made any photographs after 1880, he remained a commissioner and purchaser of portraits until his death.

Diarist Carroll’s diaries, spanning 1855–1898, have been published in both a heavily abridged (1 volume, 1954) and full (10 volumes, 1993–2007) form. They detail his work, travels (all within the United Kingdom with the exception of a trip to Russia with the Reverend Henry Liddon in 1867), social engagements, and achievements. The original diary manuscripts are held at the British Library as a restricted holding. The diaries are perhaps most famous for what is not in them: It estimated that there are four missing volumes and at least seven torn-out pages, which some critics have speculated contained illegal and/or sexual content. In 1996, Karoline Leach made public a scrap of paper held in the Surrey history Centre archives that seems to detail one of these removals. Known as the ‘Cut Pages in Diary Document’, it purportedly summarises three missing entries from volume 8 and 11 (original numbering; these are volumes four and seven in the published diaries).

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The commentary from the ‘Cut Pages in Diary Document’ that has aroused the most speculation is from an entry that apparently states Carroll was accused of using the children’s friendship as a way of courting their governess and/or ‘Ina’. Most critics have taken the latter name to mean the eldest daughter of Dean of Christ Church College, but Leach argued that ‘Ina’ was the children’s mother, Lorina Liddell, and that the subsequent break in the family’s friendship with Carroll was due to his attraction to, and possible affair with, her. The most famous controversy surrounding Carroll is that he had a paedophilic interest in the young girls he photographed, with critics citing the fact he was unmarried and the four nude photographs, as well as diary entries discussing his nude photography as evidence for this. The first proponent of this was Florence Becker Lennon, in claims that predate the discovery of the nude photographs; she understood Carroll’s surviving sisters’ refusal to let her view Carroll’s diaries as evidence of his illegal behaviour and although the diaries have since been published, the missing volumes, torn page stubs and crossings-out have continued to fuel this speculation. The most sustained refutation of the accusations of his sexual and/or romantic interest, specifically in Alice Liddell, come from critics, including Cohen and Wakeling, who argue for the inherent innocence of the Victorian child, an idea that was so entrenched, they claim, that it would have been impossible for Carroll to view the girls as in any way sexual. Claims about Carroll’s paedophilia have gained more currency in the mass media than in academic circles (which have been more invested in maintaining the propriety of his work as a field of scholarly study), but they remain a contentious issue, and one that taps into the ability or inability of photography and of missing diary pages to act as evidence for illegal behaviour. Those critics who seek to defend his reputation fall into the same trap as those who work to accuse him: A missing page can as much be claimed to contain evidence of paedophilia as evidence against it. Although this is not a debate that can be resolved, it is an important one as it questions the availability of history, and specifically of child identities, through the apparently evidential medium of photography.

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Concluding Thoughts Carroll’s popularity as a historical figure is firmly rooted in the popularity of his debut novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and in this book’s subsequent adaptation into different media. It has had an enduring influence on children’s culture and on the way that critics view historical and theoretical children. Although Carroll’s legacy is centred on this book he also remains a subject of study for his photographs of children and adults, as well as for his mathematical research and the unresolved controversy surrounding his diaries. Jessica Medhurst See also Children’s Literature; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Further Readings Becker Lennon, F. (1962). The life of Lewis Carroll. New York, NY: Collier. Carroll, L. (2007). The complete works of Lewis Carroll. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble. Cohen, M. (1995). Lewis Carroll: A biography. New York, NY: Knopf. Gardner, M. (1998). The universe in a handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s mathematical recreations, games, puzzles and word-plays. Berlin, Germany: Springer. doi:10.5860/choice.34-2210 Leach, K. (1999). In the shadow of the dream child: The myth and reality of Lewis Carroll. London, UK: Peter Owen. Smith, L. (2016). Lewis Carroll: Photography on the move. London, UK: Reaktion Books. Wakeling, E. (2015). The photographs of Lewis Carroll: A Catalogue raisonée. Austin: University of Texas Press. Woolf, J., & Wakeling, E. (2011). The mystery of Lewis Carroll: Discovering the whimsical, thoughtful, and sometimes lonely man who created Alice in Wonderland. New York, NY: St Martin’s Griffin. doi:10.1353/chq.2010.0014

Child In many circumstances, actual children going about their lives are shadowed by a figure of ‘the child’. This figure has deep historical, cultural, and political roots. It is available for use wherever there is a need to come to an understanding of

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actual children. It is held by many adults, and its deployment is often a token of their caring for and their responsibility towards children. The figure of the child is a character who has many deficits of cognition and of wisdom when compared to adults, who is on a path towards repair of these deficits, but who, in light of these deficits, requires the protection of, intercession by, and a degree of control by adults. One major finding of social and cultural research into childhood over the last few decades is that this figure of the child, while influential in decision making about and planning for them, does not always accurately reflect the lives and experiences of actual children. Drawing on key research, this entry explores the complex relations between ‘the child’ and actual children across four domains. First, this entry considers the evidence that whether or not children have deficits, they also need to be understood as active participants in shaping their own lives and circumstances. Just like any adult ‘agent’, they are presented both with constraints and opportunities as they do so. Second, this entry compares the quite different places that are assigned to children within mid-20th century and contemporary versions of evolutionary theory. Third, this entry explores the view that the child, considered as family member and as school pupil, is a product not only of biology but also of strategies devised by states to make their populations governable and useful. Finally, this entry considers children as producers and consumers of culture.

The Figure of the Child The child is often conceived of as a human aged between birth and 18 years. This is also consistent with how the child is defined by the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children are central to many societal activities, plans, and concerns. Children often figure as a focus of hope for future potential and opportunity and as a focus of fear and concern about current and emerging threats. Children, then, are a resource in the imaginative and practical work of making and sustaining value and meaning, both within individual lives and within collectivities like families and nation states. There are reasons to think that this tendency to rest value on children is intensifying in some societal sectors.

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Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim has argued that as societies become more individualised, relationships with their children become the only lasting emotional investment for some parents. In the education sector, the influential Programme for International Student Assessment established by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development asks how much value different education systems add to children in terms both of their school achievement and their future value as global citizens and present data to encourage governments to improve their offering within these terms. Often understood as a bridge between past, present, and future, children stand ready to be gifted or, indeed, burdened with the purposes and plans of the adults around them. As the cliché has it, ‘children are our future’. This bridging and value bearing ‘child’, however is, in some respects, an imaginary figure. Consider how the term ‘child’ is used to draw such diverse people as infants and 17-year-olds together into a common frame of reference. Arguably, nothing compels us to overlook the obvious differences between these ages apart from a sense that they are all vulnerable or useful in ways that adults are not, a shared sense of them being, as yet, in formation, that they are not simply human beings, but also human becomings. Yet the figure of the child is no simple illusion. It has real consequences, both good and ill, for actual children. This figure of the child, rooted, as it is, in concerns with building future societies, does not take account of the full spectrum of children’s lives and experiences. The ‘futurity’ of the child and its connection with present day value, meaning desire and control are so often taken for granted that they are rarely examined in popular culture and public debate. There are some notable exceptions to this. Two works of dystopian science fiction that take up the theme of mass infertility, implicitly asking the question of what could happen if there were not ‘enough’ children on which to build societal value and meaning, or, indeed, if there were none at all. In Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, environmental pollution is suppressing many women’s fertility and the United States has become a theocratic dictatorship. In consequence, the few remaining fertile women are enslaved and forced to bear children for ruling

class men. Here, with a reduced supply of children, anything goes in the name of birthing, raising, and possessing them. P.D. James imagines the complete absence of children from society in her novel Children of Men. She presents a world in which mass infertility has taken hold across the globe and no children have been born for more than 20 years. In the United Kingdom, democracy collapses, christening ceremonies are held for infant animals, and men and women are subject to obligatory fertility testing. Here, no children means no human future and without a future, familiar social values are thrown into disarray. These books, of course, are fictions, but they depend on readers’ familiarity with and implicit acknowledgement of the connections between children, value, meaning, and futurity that has already been considered. These connections also inform an international consensus view of what the adult world owes to children that has been expressed in the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Adopted by the United Nations in 1989, and, since then, ratified by nearly all the world’s countries, this is a set of promises made by nation states to provide for children, to protect them and to foster their participation in society. If these promises were met in full, no child would go hungry, lack education or medical care; none would be exploited in modern slavery or pressed into military service; there would be a good deal more evidence of policy makers and professionals seeking out and acting on the basis of children’s opinions and perspectives. Roger Hart and Priscilla Alderson’s work on children’s voice and participation has shown how readily this can be done. In fact, many countries cannot or will not make good on the promises they have made. Inequalities of resource between countries, circumstances of peace and conflict, and uneven levels of local political will mean that the global picture of childhood remains highly varied. Consider, for example, the case of global provision of primary education. Educating young children is an activity that draws together the interest of nation states in having a literate and numerate future population, with a view of children as having a right to develop their minds and capabilities. Education is one aspect of statecraft that is consistent with children’s rights and wellbeing. In practice, however, access to universal primary education

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continues significantly to be shaped by children’s gender and by global region. Girls’ access to education remains contested, and thus limited, in some parts of the world and there is a considerable disparity between North American and subSaharan African rates of primary school enrolment. It needs to be recognised, therefore, that not all of today’s children experience the benefits of protection, provision, and participation that can accompany their positioning as fragments of the future. There are other factors that put strain on the credibility of the ‘figure’ of the child. These are to do with the harmful potential of mismatches between the figure of the child and actual children. Consider some of the costs of being a child, of bearing the weight of adult plans, concerns, and desires. Many, if not all, human societies distribute power and influence by age and generation. Being young can limit your chances to speak and to be heard. It can limit your ability to shape your own life circumstances, or, effectively to resist the uses that adults find for you. To the extent that children appear to be protected from the present and prepared for the future, consistent with the figure of the child, these costs would appear to be legitimate. There are many cases, however, in which services and institutions intended to protect and provide for children have gone on to enable their abuse. For example, in recent years some global religious organisations have had to acknowledge the degree to which they have provided, within their children’s services, opportunities for persistent and systematic physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of children and that, once this abuse has come to light, have tended to guard their own reputations and those of abusive adults, and actively to betray children’s interests. There are also instances of secular organisations such as social and police services failing to listen and respond to children’s complaints about abuse. There are reasons to believe that in such cases, the figure of the child has played a considerable role in silencing actual children. It is comforting for adults to suppose that those charged with children’s protection and support are diligent, competent, and well-intentioned. The emotional costs and practical implications of recognising and responding to what children have to say about adults who abuse them, or who simply let them down, have outweighed children’s interests in the past.

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The Agentic Child Today, then, contrasts between the figure of the child and actual children’s experience are becoming clearer. Not all of these contrasts speak simply to children’s victimisation. The focus on the child as becomings and as fragments of the future also tends to conceal children’s active social, economic, and political participation in the present. The term ‘children’s agency’ captures this sense in which children in fact actively shape their own and others’ circumstances and often understand themselves as doing so. Berry Mayall offers empirical studies of this drawing on family relations. Further, a recent collection edited by Afua Twum Danso-Imoh and colleagues provides evidence that many children of the global South play important roles in securing their family’s income through paid employment and take on considerable caring responsibilities. Children’s direct participation in political debate and action is, arguably, becoming more effective and is certainly receiving increasing attention following the attempted assassination in 2012 of the then 15-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai by Taliban forces in Pakistan. She survived to continue her campaigning for girls’ education and human rights. Consider, also, the case of Greta Thunberg. At the age of 15 years, seeing that climate change was likely radically to alter the future expected and planned for by her native country Sweden, and following a summer of Arctic heat waves and wildfires, she decided temporarily to withdraw from schooling and devote her time to protest. Since her first school strike for climate in August 2018, tens of thousands of students across 270 cities worldwide have taken similar action. Sevasti Melissa-Nolas has explored connections between children’s private lives and their public political participation in detail.

The Biological Child The child is often understood as a human who is passing through a process of maturation. This process has been modelled as a more or less natural one by child researchers in the past, as something that, given the right conditions, would unfold in much the same way in any social context. There was a marked tendency, for example,

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for the early 20th century founders of child psychology, figures like the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, to present the child as if it were a ‘primitive’ human being. The development of the individual child, on this view, was comparable to the evolution of the modern human species ‘homo sapiens’. This idea of a parallel between the maturation of individual animals and species’ evolutionary history was credible at the time. It was often supposed that ‘ontogeny’ (the maturation of the individual) could recapitulate ‘phylogeny’ (the evolutionary history of the species). This gave a clear rationale for conducting research into childhood development. By studying children, a researcher stood a good chance of, as it were, unlocking secrets of human nature. Here, the figure of the child stood in for us all. So, there were scientific reasons for wanting to establish a universal account of what is natural in childhood and what should be considered normal in the way of maturation. A side effect of this research orientation was that statements about children that were grounded in assertions about the universal nature of childhood could gain a hearing even in the face of clear diversity of experiences of childhood. Thus, set against an assumed singular and ‘normal’ path of development, many children who were simply developing differently could be cast as ‘retarded’, deviant, or ill. The childhood historian André Turmel offers critical accounts of the detailed administrative processes that have helped to normalise childhood for the 19th century onwards. In the context of a universalised and naturalised childhood, the figure of the child that previously discussed also gained some detailed features and some scientific credibility. If children were held in relatively powerless social positions, the reasoning ran, this was only for the good, since as undeveloped, primitive humans, they could not be expected fully to participate in shaping their circumstances and societies. By this point, the parallels between this figure of the child and the way that divisions of power based on gender and on ethnicity have operated are likely already evident. Prejudice against women and against any persons not marked out as ‘White’, ‘European’, or ‘Caucasian’ has often been supported by assertions of natural, biologically

grounded difference. If 20th-century developmental research offered similar opportunities for prejudice against children to present itself as natural and appropriate, then, perhaps the real concern should be associating the child with human evolution and guarding against the presentation of the child as a natural phenomenon. Amongst many others, Allison James and Alan Prout have made the case that childhood needs to be seen as a ‘social construction’—something that has real effects and consequences that has been created by human meaning making and social organisation— rather than solely as a natural phenomenon. On this view childhoods, in the plural, are a highly diverse set of phenomena which are the dynamic result of interactions between biological maturation, social life, and economic and political power. This social constructionist view of childhood was conceived and developed in small part as an intellectual antidote to prejudice against children grounded in and enabled by questionable assertions about childhood and nature. However, evolutionary thinking about the child has also moved on a great deal since the early 20th century. It is now clear that childhood is not a uniquely human phase of life. Jean-Jacques Hublin, for example, has analysed fossil remains of young Neanderthals so as to compare rates of maturation between them and the young of our species. It turns out that Neanderthal children matured more rapidly than ours and he argues that relatively slow human maturation lent us an evolutionary advantage. More time growing and learning means more opportunities for the transmission of culture and skills between generations. To understand human evolution means accepting that biological and cultural forms of adaptation and change are fundamentally linked with one another. If childhoods vary between species, it is short step, within contemporary evolutionary science, to suppose that they also vary within species. Contemporary work on the evolution of childhood marks a clear contrast with the idea that if childhood is partly biological it must possible to produce a universal account of what is natural and what is best for all children. When Darwin accounted for the evolution of species he proposed that processes of natural selection go to work on populations that have varied characteristics.

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Likewise, Melvyn Konner asks us to think about childhood in terms of ranges of behaviour and capability and of maturation as the expression of alternative adaptive strategies. On this view, though children have much in common with each other, there is no single universal child with an identical set of fixed characteristics. Children and childhoods differ because humans have an evolved capacity to adapt themselves, within limits, to different sets of challenge and opportunity. Furthermore, within this frame it makes little sense to characterise childhood, or any other aspect of human life, as ‘primitive’. A connection between ontogeny and phylogeny is a poor guide to thinking about childhood. Neither our ancestral populations nor children are best understood as sitting behind modern humans or full-grown adults on a line charting growing progress and sophistication. Instead, what is seen are different outcomes of variation coupled with natural selection and taking place hand in hand with cultural processes of learning and exchange. This way of thinking suggests that childhoods need to be understood in connection with maturation towards adulthood, but also in their own right as phenomena that are at once biological and cultural.

The Governed Child The child needs to be understood not only as a biological figure but also as a socially constructed one. The scale, range, and intimacy of processes of the construction of the child can be appreciated by adopting the view that the figure of the child is a product of modern forms of government that arose, primarily, in European nations from the 18th century onwards. The historian Michel Foucault makes the case that, in this period, national government began to consider their national human populations as a kind of resource, standing alongside, and in relation to, other resources like land, water, livestock, crops, coal, and iron ore. Just like these resources, populations came to be seen as open to and requiring constant management if they were to act as a relay in projecting national wealth and power into the future. The ‘bio-politics’ that emerged from this focus on human populations was no simple matter of authoritarian command. One feature of human populations was that they had

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their own, often diverse, interests and that, if given appropriate structures of opportunity, they would pursue these with vigour. The goal of government was not only to command the behaviour of populations—though force always remained an option—but to generate opportunities for people to align themselves with the interests of their nation. Building on these ideas, Jacques Donzelot has made the case that these processes of governance shaped family life in France in such a way that ‘the family’ became an instrument of governance. The family, ideally bounded by the walls of a shared dwelling, united by blood and pursuing common interests, was to be the site where children could be protected from commercial exploitation, disease and sexuality, and made subject to parental authority that was in turn made open to official scrutiny in the name of child welfare. This argument has resonances wherever national governments engage with what is known as ‘social policy’—that mixture of housing issues, conditional welfare payments, and matters of public and domestic order. On this view, the figure of the child—a bundle of vulnerabilities and potential utilities—is a construct that was created in the course of the bio-political management of populations. The government of the child is supposed to take place in part through the instrument of the family. When this all goes well, the child is cocooned by loving adults who vigorously pursue their interests in the child’s present and future wellbeing. When it fails, children have little to protect themselves from the adults around them but state-sanctioned child welfare agencies. Raising and evidencing an accusation of criminal conduct, such as sexual, physical or emotional abuse, against a family member remains a serious challenge for many children. The family is not the only instrument devised for the governance of the child. Mass compulsory education arose and became consolidated in the industrialising, modernising states of the Global North in the course of the last two centuries. Like the family it can also be understood as bio-political in nature. Across many diverse applications of policy, it consistently targets one section of the population—the young—for different treatment that the rest. This imposes an obligation on them to give up their time and effort without sight of

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monetary compensation. Mass compulsory education was designed to generate literate, numerate, and docile future citizens who would be capable of contributing through taxation to national wealth and of taking care of, and responsibility for, their own lives and those of their dependents. One of the many challenges that teachers face within this arrangement is of ensuring that children accept the curtailment of their agency which this often involves and that they are willing to frame it in terms of their own future advantage. As a pupil, one is expected to defer gratification, as the phrase has it, for a decade or more in the hope that schooling will bring personal benefit in the long run. They are, in effect, asked to see themselves as reflections of our figure of the child—a human becoming who is being safely sheltered against threat and encouraged to grow till such a point as they are strong enough to become fully independent. Where this fails, teachers find themselves obliged to devise and to implement strategies of coercion and sanction that might bring a child back into line. Teachers’ tasks would be easier were the opportunities available to children at the end of their education distributed fairly. Social injustices of ethnicity, gender, dis/ability, and sexuality continually threaten the everyday credibility and viability of this bio-political arrangement. It is clear that mass compulsory education does have advantages for those actual children who are able to recognise themselves in the figure of the child such that they can see a relatively clear path to a positive adulthood in which they are free to be themselves. However, many children have to balance this vision of themselves with their contradictory experiences of social inequalities of wealth, esteem, and respect.

The Cultural Child David Buckingham has established that children are an important influence on household purchases of food, clothing, and media. Care-givers make choices on their behalf, attempting to address their preferences and needs. The pejorative term ‘pester power’ signals that children are also active in expressing and enacting their own preferences. Further, specific experiences, music, and books are created in the hope of attracting

children’s interest. It is clear that children, as consumers, play an important role in shaping cultural production. The commercial and institutional contexts of this vary widely as do the mixtures of care giving and relative autonomy and of adult and child agency in forming tastes and making decisions. In response Anna Sparrman has proposed a frame for understanding the cultural child. Within what she calls a ‘child culture multiple’, as different relations between children and culture are enacted, new experiences of and new figures of childhood may emerge. To understand these properly, it is important to set aside the standard figure of the child. This idea of the emergence of new forms and experiences of childhood is useful when thinking about children as producers and consumers of digital culture especially. Public debate tends to focus on instances where children participate in digital culture with harmful outcomes. Think of social media in relation to children’s mental health in the context of peer-topeer encouragement of self-harm and eating disorders and bullying. Looking through the lens of the standard figure of the child as becoming tends to activate adult anxiety and a desire to protect. The work of both Sonia Livingstone and Buckingham has been careful to acknowledge these new risks and vulnerabilities, while also making the case that children’s participation in digital culture means that childhood is also changing in ways that children may enjoy and benefit from. Nick Lee See also Child as Method; Childhood as Figuration; Childhood in Western Philosophy; Childhood Studies; Children’s Cultures; Critical Theory, the Child in; Freud, Sigmund; Piaget, Jean

Further Readings Alderson, P., & John, M. (2008). Young children’s rights: exploring beliefs, principles and practices (2nd ed.). London, UK: Jessica Kingsley. doi:10.1017/ s1035077200010579 Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population (G. Burchell, Trans.). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203362600

Child Actors in Film and Television Konner, M. (2011). The evolution of childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Livingstone, S. (2009). Kids Online: Opportunities and risks for children. Cambridge, UK: Policy Press. Nolas, S. M., Varvantakis, C., & Aruldoss, V. (Eds.). (2018). Political activism across the lifecourse. London, UK: Routledge. Twum Danso-Imoh, A., Bourdillon, M., & Meichsner, S. (Eds.). (2018). Global childhoods beyond the northsouth divide. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978–3-319–95543–8

Child Abuse See Abuse and Child Abuse

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‘Child actors in film and television’ (TV) need to be considered in the context of the media children’s film and children’s TV, which in many countries is strongly ideologically and pedagogically based. Two major aspects of this issue are discussed in this entry: (1) children as moral agents and correctives—stars, gangs, and collectives in children’s film and (2) as co-actors with care function in animal relationships and as animated figures in TV. The entry addresses mainly U.S. actors and productions because of their early dominance in the expansion of film as mass entertainment and their great influence on the cultural imaginary in Europe (although Charlie Chaplin was British).

Children as Moral Agents and Correctives: Stars, Gangs, and Collectives in Children’s Film The silent film and tragicomedy The Kid (1921) by Charlie Chaplin features child actor Jackie Coogan as his adopted son and sidekick. This film made Coogan, then a vaudeville performer, the first major children’s star in film history. The film shows Chaplin in his established tramp costume

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as a glazier looking for work and his adopted son, who was abandoned by his mother as a child, with oversized trousers held by suspenders and a hat worn sideways, a costume that is still consistently used. The child smashes windows for his (substitute) father, thus acting as a typical street child trying to create jobs. In the movie, both adult and child are presented as equally suspended to the brutal capitalist system. They face and survive it with wit, cleverness, and an all-defeating family empathy that leads the story to a happy end. By contrast, in the almost simultaneously released first sound film The Jazz Singer (1927), a moralised oedipal narrative, the child actor Bobby Gordon performs as young Jakie Rabinowitz, a Jewish cantor’s son in Chicago. Although wearing a costume similar to Coogan’s in The Kid, his part in the film, performed on a ragtime stage, was small but essential for the film plot. Because of his extraordinary voice, it was assumed that Jakie would carry on the family tradition and also become cantor, but instead he fell in love with the jazz he was exposed to in his environment. Until then, this music genre was reserved for African Americans. If it was performed by White singers, as in the movie, they used make up to create a blackface. If White singers wanted to sing with a black voice, they had to be masked as someone else. With his performance as childish White ragtime artist without blackface masking, Bobby Gordon as Jakie Rabinowitz decisively shaped the new medium of sound film. Political scientist Rogin points out that even when Young Jakie Rabinowitz never appears in Blackface, he gets the first individual voice in feature films by singing as someone else ‘in the most darkest manner’, as the shooting scripts puts it. As Jakie onto the stage, an Orthodox neighbour, Moisha Yudelson, reports to Cantor Rabinowitz in an intertitle that Jakie is singing ‘raggy time’ songs; the original shooting script called them ‘nigger songs.’ Jakie finds his voice through black music and as an adult jazz singer (played by Al Jolson) goes on to succeed as a Blackface singer. Perhaps the most famous child actress of the subsequent era, even of the 20th century (which lastingly coined the term child star), was Shirley Temple. She started her film acting career at the age of 3 years, with small roles for the film

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distribution company Educational Pictures (1931– 1934). During the time of her contract with Fox Pictures (later 20th Century Fox), she made 21 movies between 1934 and 1937, known as an always perfectly prepared, professional singing and dancing actress. As Daniel Cook has mentioned, her on-screen persona was distinct and complex, but her role characters were morally shaped. She spoke with adults on their level, even if in the simple words of a child and was often depicted as being smarter and wiser than they in the ways of the world. Her characters seemingly were able to look past surface qualities such as race, physical disability, and social class to offer moral lessons to adults by her acceptance of those different from her and them. Her appearance as a short child with curly hair, pronounced dimples, and wide eyes became the role model for associated merchandising such as Shirley Temple dolls and clothing as well. The child actors in the film version of Harper Lee’s southern states drama To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) have a similarly important role in regards to the moral exposure of racism. In the movie, as well as in the literary model, the plot is consistently told from the children’s perspective. The stylistic method of guiding the camera at knee level to capture the children’s perspective reminds one a bit of the movies of Japanese filmmaker Jazuiro Ozu as demonstrated in the documentary about Ozu, Tokyo Ga (1985). Hal Roach, the creator of the legendary comedian duo Laurel and Hardy, proceeded quite differently in his highly successful silent film series Our Gang (1921–1933). He did not show children as moral correctives of adult actors but took up Chaplin’s adapted subject of the street child in a ‘gang’ format close to the child’s reality. Roach was tired of the dressed-up child stars of the silent film era; he describes being sick of them looking like Sarah Bernhardt, wearing heavy lipstick and false eyelashes. Instead, he observes children playing in front of the studio window arguing about lumber sticks. This scene amused him so much in its authenticity of kids just being that Roach casted the seven children who acted in Our Gang as he found them around the studio; some had already played in other productions or were children of members of the film set. He showed them as they were tall,

small, younger, older, Black, White, big, skinny, and wearing too-big or too-small clothes. He strongly believed that a careful observation of the childish behaviour and their point of view on everyday life was important for the success of a film comedy. According to his credo, the visual comedians were real actors who imitate children. In this idea, Roach saw the key to all visual comedy. The Our Gang kids disassembled the adults’ reality and reassembled it with objects they find on the streets—always without parents. They built highly fragile and shaky fire engines, in which all of them have space; they recreated battlefields and invent, as did the management of motion picture studies, labour-saving machines for infant and toddler care with remote controls. All these things existed for only a short time before they collapse and break up into their components, but for that short period, the objects served their intended purposes. The gang motif established by Roach is often used in the adventure film genre. As an often diversely composed collective or swarm intelligence, children get the power of the seemingly helpless, which can fight adults’ intrigues and injustice, to uncover infringements and to sanction it. One example for this theme is Emil and the Detectives (screenplay by Billy Wilder): A gang of children avenges the theft of an envelope with money that the destitute boy Emil was supposed to deliver to his grandmother in the city. Completely different productions of childish collectives and their sometimes even self-destructive power are presented by Peter Brook in Lord of the Flies and The Wave.

Children as Co-Actors With a Care Function in Animal Relationships and as Animated Figures in TV A totally different idea of child actors can be found on TV, succeeding the big children’s movies after World War II. In the early years of the medium ‘home cinema’, films starring children in interaction with animals were particularly popular. These films quickly became series such as Lassie, My Friend Flicka, Fury, and Flipper. Children were either presented in need of care and as always guarded by these loyal and intelligent animals—which lack only the logos of the human language in their

Child Actors in Theater

overwhelming set of communicative skills—or due to special circumstances, the children themselves were caretakers for beautiful but shy or abused and therefore aggressive animals in need, misunderstood and forbidden by the adult world. Hence, child and animal actors in these TV series act in favour of each other and the surrounding nature mutually taking responsibility and care—once again symbolising the ideological corrective of the adult world. The German educational scientist Benedikt Sturzenhecker states that the TV dog Lassie might be the actual educational role model of a care pedagogy, although she wasn’t able to lead the adolescents she takes care of to democratic participation. In a whole different way, animated figures are presented in interaction with child actors. The media scientist Mark Poster sees the omnipresent TV, which unlike the cinema is not explicitly visited but in the 21st century is already part of families’ living rooms and bedrooms, structuring domestic life as a learning tool. According to him, children get into contact with the world through these machines as well as through people. As an example for this world explained by machines, Poster mentions the TV format Teletubbies, created in 1997 by the BBC for 1-year-old children. Here, the childish protagonists are four friendly characters with the names Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po. They are presented as furry and colourful, equipped with the voices of young children. Their natural habitat is called ‘Teletubbieland’—a serene and happy place where the Teletubbies laugh and play and enjoy one another. The outside world is included in this world without obstacles. Real children appear in the show, demonstrate finger painting, and say hello to the Teletubbies. Poster states that this concept of doubling of the screen leads to a fantasy world of TV within TV. For him, this layering of human beings and TVs can be understood as assemblage. Throughout the 21st century, it will be interesting to observe how and if child actors behave in regards to this TV assemblage—if they evade it or ambitiously refine it. Birgit Althans See also Child Actors in Theater; Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising; Children’s Television, U.S. History; Temple, Shirley

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Further Readings Cook, D. (2004). The commodification of children. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Poster, M. (2006). Information please! Culture and politics in the age of digital machines! Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rogin, M. (1998). Blackface—White noise: Jewish immigrants in the Hollywood melting pot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sterneborg, A. (1992). Das wohlorganisierte durcheinander: Our gang [The well-organized mess: Our gang]. In H. Roach Hommage zum 100 42. Internationale fimfestspiele Berlin: Retrospektive [Hal Roach, A tribute to his 100th birthday: 42nd Berlin International Film Festival. Retrospective] (pp. 27–36). Berlin, Germany: Stitung Deutsche Kinemathek. Sturzenhecker, B. (2012). Lassie als pädagogische figur: Was kinder- und jugendarbeit von dem fernsehhund lernen kann—und was nicht [Lassie as a pedagogical figure: What children and youth work can learn from the TV dog—and what not]. In J. R. Buchner-Fuhs & L. Tose (Eds.), Tierische sozialarbeit: Ein lesebuch für die profession zum leben und arbeiten mit tieren [Animal social work: A reading book for the profession of living and working with animals] (pp. 99–114). Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer. Sievernich, C. (Producer), & Wenders, W. (Director). (1985). Tokyo ga [Documentary]. Paris, TX: Chris Sievernich Filmproduktion.

Child Actors

in

Theater

Traditionally, children’s theatre produced by adults for children, or in another variant, children act in school plays in front of schoolmates and parents putting on plays written by adults or conceived by teachers. Seen in this way, children’s theatre in school is traditionally an opportunity for education, reception, and reproduction of texts belonging to the classical educational canon but at the same time constituting a space that creates the opportunity to establish collective experiences and make them transferable. In the past 15 years, a number of groups have adopted an unusual third approach by developing a play professionally ‘with’ children ‘as’ children ‘for’ adults. This entry discusses works belonging to the latter, participative forms of contemporary

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children’s theatre, in which children perform as actors in plays for adults (and children) but also become involved in the plays’ content-related development with their own perspective of the surrounding world (e.g., the Theatre Campo and its predecessor Victoria in Ghent, Belgium, which work in cooperation with free theatre groups and children).

Participative Forms of Contemporary Children’s Theatre It should be noted that even the ‘traditional’ theatre for children differs in its interactive practices and fundamental participative orientation from classical theatre for adults in including the audience, thus making them co-actors of the happenings onstage. The traditional Christmas pantomime as well as the Punch and Judy puppet shows address the child audience directly, asking, ‘Are you here?’ and expecting the collective yell ‘YES!’ in answer; consequently, the ‘fourth wall’—the imaginary wall between actors and audience—is torn down. Nevertheless, the phenomenon that especially children react strongly to the opening and closing curtain’s magic—separating the performance onstage from everyday reality—is repeatedly described in literature. The central German education novel of the 19th century deals with children’s experiences in the puppet theatre and its magical curtains being the decisive impulse for Goethe’s protagonist Wilhelm Meister to leave home as an adolescent to become part of a travelling theatre. In a similar way, in Theodor Storm’s Pole Poppenspieler, puppet theatre constitutes the first occasion of encounter, experience, and interaction with the strange within the provincial familiar space. For Berthold Brecht’s methods of theatre, this experience of unfamiliarity is essential. According to him, the familiar should be exposed to the process of alienation to transform the place of illusions into a place of experience and to create new possibilities of perception. For this purpose, Brecht wrote the ‘learning plays’ in the first place to address children and adolescents: The Lindberghflug (1930; renamed Ozeanflug in 1950) had a subtitle explicitly addressing children. The Jasager, declared to be a school opera, premiered

in 1930 with pupils and in the same year was performed at several Berlin schools. The theatre scholar Patrick Primavesi points out that Brecht—who preferred the translation ‘learning play’ instead of ‘teaching play’ for his ‘Lehrstücke’—established a theatre practice including children and adolescent participants as nonspecialists. With its productive combination of play and reflection, this practice goes far beyond the clichés of authoritarian instructional theatre still conveyed in school lessons today.

Content-Related Development From Children’s Perspectives Walter Benjamin, who in 1928 in collaboration with the Latvian actress and director Asja Lacis set up a children’s theatre in Orel after the October Revolution, conceived of the programme of a proletarian children’s theatre; he saw children’s theatre as the opposite of education and the revolutionary potential of children’s theatre. The theatre scholar Elise von Bernstorff sees this as a surprisingly timely approach to contemporary, artistically explorative theatre with children: Instead of an education that teaches obedience to children, he developed the idea of ‘education in’ that grants children the experience of their childhood. That is, education should take place in children’s theatre, because here life is framed and appears as a territory in the theatre. As von Bernstorff notes, according to Benjamin, it is important that the theatre director has no direct influence on the children: With the help of tasks, materials, and events, children should be influenced only indirectly. Thereby it is essential for the theatre to allow things to happen without any intervention, intentionality, or instrumentality on the part of the educator. So much for the theory. The practice can transform this approach, as Peter Brook’s memories of working with children at the film set of Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1963) show. Despite this supposed freedom in dealing with Golding’s childoriented material, Brooks’ memories clearly reveal the power relations between the children actors and the directors. A big advantage of working with children is that they are too young to know anything about acting theories. Because of that, children are able to act more openly than an adult,

Child Actors in Theater

having theoretical preload, ever could. These asymmetrical power relations in children’s theatre are not only more and more made a subject of discussion by the theatre; they are also brought to the stage and performed. The theatre director Milo Rau and his ‘institute of political murders’ addressed this issue in the production of Art Campo Ghent/BE Five Easy Pieces (2016). The title takes up the ‘learning play’ format by referring to the Études composed by Igor Stravinsky to teach his children how to play the piano. As a re-enactment staged with seven children between the age of 8 and 13 years old and one adult actor in the role of a director, the play deals with the life of the Belgian child murderer and sex offender Marc Dutroux—Belgium’s national trauma of the 1990s—as an example to address violence against children. Child actors perform adult characters—Marc Dutroux’s parents and the parents of the kidnapped and later murdered children—as well as the kidnapped children. And they also play themselves during the casting, which is also put on stage. Tools of the postdramatic theatre are widely used in this theatre production: The children act on the front of the stage whilst the director stays in the staged background filming the situations. The emerging live videos are presented on a background screen, which is also used for prerecorded material, subtitles, and animations. According to education scholar Kristin Westphal, this format can be considered as a way of dissociation: Medially inflated, a situation is staged that shows the bodily power of an adult, represented by the filming director, over children. He is spatially located above the children via the video screen, and because of his real position in the back end of the stage where the child actors can’t see him, he seemingly controls the situation like a puppet master. Westphal points out that this optical and spatial order not only relates the media to the stage space but also spatialises the relation of children and adults. In Germany, the play evoked strong reactions and its performances were partly censored because the adult audience had to face the character of an adult voyeur as well as the childish bodies presented in an objectionable way. Again and again the question came up if the child actors were able to cope with the performance.

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Westphal also analysed the postdramatic collective Gob Squad (Berlin/Nottingham) and their performance of Before Your Very Eyes (2011), which addresses the issue of the classic relationship between generations and its reversal. According to Westphal, in this case, it is not about adults writing theatre pieces for children; on the contrary, the children are expressing their worldview as children in front of an audience made up of adults. The piece was created with Gob Squad’s core of seven members together with a group of children between the ages of 6 and 14 years old from Ghent, Belgium. Over 2 years of rehearsals, the play is created in a process that mirrors the children themselves growing up. The actual provocation lies in the play’s stage design: The children are hidden in a container, and therefore, the audience can only see the video recordings they create. According to Westphal, the audience as well as the actors themselves experience both—the lifetime on stage and the vision of a possible future— and the difference between the two. Producers and recipients are exposed to a play with present, past, and future. Gob Squad member Sarah Thom uses the video, a medium most children are familiar with, as a new format of the fourth wall. They often create a screen as an instrument to keep a distance between themselves and the audience. In this way, they form a fourth wall to hide behind. The result is a very comfortable situation in which the actors feel both safe and liberated. In this perspective, a camera can be a tool that gives them a voice and allows them to speak. Gob Squad also utilises media devices that are already established in postdramatic children’s theatre to broach the issue of the adult audience’s gaze as well as the children’s and adolescents’ gaze on themselves—and on the adults. In this way, Benjamin’s hope for the revolutionary potential lying in this kind of theatre seems to be fulfilled: As looked-at-actors, the children now look back— just like the objects in Benjamin’s ‘Bucklicht Männlein’ in his Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood Around 1900). Birgit Althans See also Child Actors in Film and Television; Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising; Children’s Voices; Education, Child-Centered; Young Lives Study

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Further Readings Benjamin, W. (1977). Programm eines proletarischen kindertheaters (1929) [Program of a proletarian children’s theatre (1929)]. In W. Benjamin (Ed.), Collected papers (pp. 763–769). Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bernstorff, E. V. (2014). Das undisziplinierte im transdisziplinären: Das pädagogische verhältnis in der künstlerischen forschung mit kindern [The educational relationship in artistic research with children]. In S. Peters (Ed.), Das forschen aller: Artistic Research als Wissensproduktion zwischen Kunst, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft [The research of all. Artistic research as knowledge production between art, science and society] (pp. 95–120). Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. Brook, P. (1988). The shifting point: Forty years of theatrical exploration, 1946–1987. London, UK: Methuen. Goethe, J. W. (2004). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm Meisters apprentice]. Munich, Germany: DTV. (Original work published 1795–1796) Primavesi, P. (2015). Stop teaching! Theater als Laboratorium (a)sozialer Phantasie) [Stop teaching! Theatre as a laboratory of (a)social imagination]. In P. Primavesi & J. Deck (Eds.), Stop teaching! Neue Theaterformen mit Kindern und Jugendlichen [Stop teaching! New forms of theatre with children and young people] (pp. 15–45). Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript. Westphal, K. (2015). Theatre as a place of selfempowerment: The example of Gob Squad: Before your very eyes. Scenario: Journal for Drama and Theatre in Foreign and Second Language Teaching, 9(1), 131–143. Retrieved from http://research.ucc.ie/ scenario/2015/01/Westphal/08/en Westphal, K. (2019). Kids on stage: About the exhibited body in the theatre with children. In M. Brinkmann & S. Rödel (Eds.), Body–corporeality–embodiment: Vol. 8. Phenomenological educational science (pp. 279–299). Wiesbaden, Germany: VS-Verlag.

Child

and

Youth Activism

Children’s activism is defined here as engagement in collective action for social change. Children’s social movements—that is, groups organized to respond to shared concerns, usually injustices and inequalities—are treated as an overlapping notion.

Children and youth constitute anywhere from a quarter to nearly half of the world population, depending on focal age range. Whereas the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (UNCRC) defines children as people age 18 and younger, global demographics break population statistics into groups of people under age 15 (26% of global population) and those ages 0 to 24 (40%). Regardless of age, young people are social beings who live in relationships, communities, and societies. Children and youth witness what happens in their worlds—violence, war, and suffering as well as creativity and joy—and observe effects of events on people surrounding them and on their own lives. How they respond to what they see is the focus of this entry. Children and youths have advocated for themselves and on behalf of others throughout human history and across the globe. Young people’s activism and social movements are underdocumented, however, due in large part to power structures that privilege adults. In other words, educational, religious, governmental, and other social arrangements represent adults’ viewpoints and marginalize perspectives of children and youths. Adult dominance makes children’s and youth’s voices less likely to be acknowledged than those of caregivers, educators, community officials, and scholars. Children’s activism and social movements depend on adult-managed media, curriculum, and public policy for time and attention. People who are not children engaged in activism and youth social movements, even those with the best of intentions, are inclined to draw on partial understandings of children’s activism and are therefore predisposed to underestimate its existence and its potential as a social force. What follows is a discussion of five categories of children’s activism and social, highlighting conceptual frameworks that scholars have employed to understand the activism of children and youth. In the process of reviewing examples of children’s activism, it is important to recognize that “childhood” is a concept that varies across time, geography, and cultural borders. Similarly, the position of children and youths varies with social and historical context in ways that frame opportunities and barriers to activism. In the examples that follow, activism and events come from Africa, the

Child and Youth Activism

Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, with an emphasis on events that have occurred since 1960, a period that witnessed a groundswell of activism on many fronts worldwide.

Conceptualizing Children’s and Youth Activism Explaining children’s activism and social movements is complicated by contextual variations across location, time, and culture, as is the application of concepts and theories. For example, communities and societies where child-initiated grassroots and nongovernmental efforts to improve social conditions are visible tend to recognize young people’s social, political, and economic contributions; often these are societies where children’s labor is a necessity for family survival. In social contexts where children are viewed as needing protection—that is, where young people are viewed as not yet capable of contributing—their agency is more likely patronized, ignored, or dismissed. Writers who explore children’s activism and social movements come to the topic with an array of disciplinary concepts, different levels of analysis and explanation, and proposals for policy and practice. Published scholarship has emerged from anthropology, child development, education, geography, history, political philosophy, political science, economics, cultural studies, psychology, and sociology. As a result, understandings of children’s activism have been conceptualized on multiple analytic levels, from individual-focused to microsocial and macrosocial perspectives; some children’s activism scholarship integrates concepts across levels. Concepts anchored in the study of individuals include cognitive and social development, gender identity development, and development of political consciousness, capability, and competence. Analyses of individual development support arguments about children’s potential for moving beyond a dependent state to independent action and about children as objects or subjects. Conceptual frameworks targeting individuals, even studies of socialization, address knowledge and behaviors linked to children developing into citizens and social actors—for example, two Fijian children who spoke at the UN climate change

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conference and the girls educating others about child marriage through Girls Not Brides, both discussed later. One might probe the cognitive development or political consciousness of these young people or seek evidence of their levels of social and identity development. Microsocial approaches that contextualize children’s actions in relationships, institutions, and other social spaces take a somewhat wider view. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have approached children’s social relationships in generational terms (children compared with adults; shared experience of groups of age-mates), power hierarchies (children’s rights vs. adult rights), forms of participation (children as contributors in decision-making processes led by adults), and children’s protagonism (the notion that children do or could, either spontaneously or in organized forms, play important roles in their communities). Frameworks that contextualize child and youth activism in relational terms acknowledge that agency can be constrained or supported by social arrangements. Organizations of working children, anti-violence organizing of Florida high school students, and anti-apartheid student activists in Soweto exemplify children’s protagonism. At a broader level, the macrosocial, are approaches that adopt cultural, historical, economic, or demographic lenses and focus on questions such as how a given culture defines childhood, the meanings attached to children (for instance, children as innocent and apolitical), and how those meanings change over time. Contributing scholars come from history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, and economics; scholarship includes rich descriptive work on child activism in one society as well as comparative work on children and youth activism across cultures. Macrosocial approaches contextualize understandings generated in individual-focused investigations and are interconnected with microsocial perspectives. The connections are visible; for example, in her account of civil war in Syria (see later in this entry), Bana Alabed articulates the impact of war on her life, her family, and their neighborhood. Those self-expressions are facilitated by her mother. Bana’s tweets embody the experience of one 7-year-old and offer a picture of mass destruction in one part of Aleppo.

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Child and Youth Activism

Children’s activism and social movements aim for change in many venues, among them adult– child interactions (parenting, teaching), conditions in learning and living environments (access to health care, equitable schooling), societal attitudes toward and treatment of children (children’s/ human rights), corporate greed (land, water, and mineral appropriation) and governmental policies that affect children (climate change, violence, and war). Children’s activism takes almost as many forms as adult activism does, the exception being voting in elections. Formal public speaking, filing lawsuits, organizing mass protests, marching and rallying in the streets, and educating others about specific issues through press releases and social media are all strategies employed by child and youth activists discussed next.

Examples of Children’s Activism and Social Movements Environmental Activism

Speakers at the 2017 United Nations Climate Change conference included two Fijian students, Timoci Naulusala, age 12 years, and Shalvi Shakshi, age 10 years. Their messages informed conference participants about impacts of climate change on their island homes, including devastation from cyclones and rising sea levels, and called on member nations to act immediately. Rising sea levels and other environmental concerns are shared by non-island youths. Twenty-one young people (ages 10 to 21 years) filed a lawsuit in 2015, Juliana v. the United States, claiming that the government is violating their constitutional rights by supporting the use of the fossil fuels. These litigants live in many parts of the United States, not just the coasts. Since August 2015, indigenous youths in South Dakota (United States) have been involved in direct action against the Dakota Access Pipeline designed to transport oil from North Dakota through indigenous sacred sites and water sources. Teenagers from one reservation who had already worked together in response to widespread youth suicide in their community were among the first to respond to the pipeline conflict when it began in November 2015. A few months later, their small prayer camp took root on the edge of Standing Rock Sioux

Reservation, a place where eventually several thousand people, both Native American and nonindigenous citizens, lived in tents in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux whose culturally important sites were in the oil company’s path. Similar protests by indigenous people in Ecuador (South America) continue to be staged against corporate interests in oil and mineral resources. Movements for Economic and Political Change

Thousands of university students expressed desire for government reforms through hunger strikes and protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Martial law was declared and protestors were forcibly cleared from the streets. Young people in other regions of China, far beyond the Square, also spoke out for democratic reforms and economic opportunity. Across North Africa in 2010, young people made up large segments of their countries’ populations; unemployment and housing insecurity were among their central concerns. When a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire to draw government attention to humiliating conditions, the Arab Spring of 2011 (or Arab Awakening) spread to Egypt, Yemen, and Libya. In Egypt, Cairo schools closed during 18 days of massive protests against the nation’s head of state and his government. Thousands gathered in Tahrir Square, including children who accompanied their parents. Adults improvised an on-site learning space for the youngest children and school children of all ages were present in the square. Student-led Otpor! (“Resistance” in the Serbian language) formed in 1998 to protest repressive laws introduced that year by authoritarian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Otpor! organized a successful nonviolent campaign to oust Milosevic that inspired other Eastern European youth movements in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Albania. In the United States, in Mississippi, Brenda Travis witnessed racism and abuse of African Americans throughout her childhood. These experiences precipitated her act of civil disobedience in 1961, a bus station sit-in, and arrest at age 15. After serving a month in jail, she was expelled from high school and sentenced to a year in reform school. A few years later in Birmingham, Alabama, many

Child and Youth Activism

hundreds of children as young as 6 years of age left their school classrooms and marched to protest racism in that city. More than 2,000 children were incarcerated during the Children’s March in 1963. Anti-War and Anti-Violence Activism

Living in Aleppo during a recent civil war— subject to military airstrikes, widespread destruction, and hunger—Bana Alabed urgently wanted the world to know how precarious life is in Syria. With the help of her English-speaking mother, 7-year-old Bana began describing her experiences on Twitter. After she and her family escaped to Turkey, Bana authored an account of the refugee crisis that was published in 2017. In 2018, March for Our Lives grew out of a school shooting in Florida (United States) and called for tighter gun control with the tagline “Never Again.” High school survivors held an event in Washington, D.C., that drew thousands of marchers, mostly adults. Testimonies about the impact of gun violence on young people’s lives were presented in parallel events staged in 800 other locations around the world. Movements for Educational Access and Equity

South Africa’s Soweto Uprising in 1976 was led by high school students objecting to the apartheid government’s education policy that mandated Afrikaans as the language of instruction. The number and persistence of young activists have been cited as a force in the eventual collapse of apartheid. Students in Arizona (United States) chained themselves to chairs in a Tucson school board meeting to rally against a 2010 law banning the teaching of ethnic studies in the state’s public K–12 schools. Arizona’s educational leader supported the law that targeted Mexican American Studies in a state bordering Mexico, one with relatively high proportions of Latino students; that law was overturned in 2017. In Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai was targeted by the Taliban for insisting on the importance of education for girls. She survived an assassination attempt in 2012 while on her way home from school. Malala continued her advocacy and at the

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age of 17 became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Human Rights and Respect

Organizations of Latin American working children emerged in the 1980s in Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico (as well as movements in West African and South Asian cities). Those involved are mostly preteens and teenagers (ages 12–16) whose work—selling newspapers or bottled water, carrying loads or delivering messages, shining shoes—is informal and happens in the streets. The focus of their advocacy and activism includes being treated with dignity and respect, decent working conditions, and access to schooling and health care. Although adults are sometimes involved through human rights organizations, these groups of working children are generally self-organized—that is, they operate by their own design and decision making. In the 1990s, Pakistani child Iqbal Masih advocated for schooling instead of forced child labor. Sold by his parents to a carpet weaving company at 4 years of age, he and other children who worked there were kept chained to prevent escape. Iqbal fled at age 10 after the nation’s highest court outlawed child labor. He was captured by police and returned to his employer. More than a year later, after Iqbal’s second escape, he began studying and hoping to do legal work for children’s rights. During this time he traveled internationally, educating others about child labor. Iqbal Masih fought against child labor until he was assassinated in 1995, at age 12. Girls in Bangladesh, Thailand, and Indonesia, as members of a global partnership—Girls Not Brides—inform communities about and advocate against child marriage. Similarly, child marriage in Afghanistan disturbed Sonita Alizdeh who avoided marriage twice, once as a 10-year-old and again at age 16. Sonita risked her own and her family’s safety in creating a rap video titled “Brides for Sale” that drew worldwide attention. She completed high school in the United States and continues to perform, educate audiences, and protest child marriage. Among the many children and youths who advocate for gender equity is Gavin Grimm, a transgender youth whose request to use the boys’

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bathroom in his high school in Virginia led to 4 years of legal battles. As a 15-year-old, Grimm used public facilities for males. However, the local school board created a policy requiring students use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex at birth. In 2018, this policy was found to violate U.S. federal law against sex discrimination in education. Colleen S. Bell See also Antislavery Movement, Role of Children; Autonomy; Children as Competent Social Actors; Political Rights of Children; Yousafzai, Malala

Further Readings Alabed, B. (2017). Dear world: A Syrian girl’s story of war and a plea for peace. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Bartos, A. E. (2016). Children and young people’s political participation: A critical analysis. In K. P. Kallio, S. Mills, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Politics, citizenship and rights (pp. 113–131). New York, NY: Springer. Conner, J., & Rosen, S. M. (Eds.). (2016). Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. deSchweinitz, R. (2009). If we could change the world: Young people and America’s long struggle for racial equality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kennelly, J. (2011). Citizen youth: Culture, activism and agency in a neoliberal era. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Liebel, M., Hanson, K., Saadi, I., & Vandenhole, W. (2012). Children’s rights from below: Cross-cultural perspectives. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Philo, C., & Smith, F. (2013). The child-body-politic: Afterword on “Children and young people’s politics in everyday life.” Space and Polity, 17(1), 137–144. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780718 Spyrou, S., Rosen, R., & Cook, D. T. (Eds.). (2019). Reimagining childhood studies. London, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury. Stoecklin, D., & Fattore, T. (2018) Children’s multidimensional agency: Insights into the structuration of choice. Childhood, 25(1), 47–62. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0907568217743557 Tisdall, E. K. M., Gadda, A. M., & Butler, U. M. (2014). Children and young people’s participation and its transformative potential: Learning across countries. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Travis, B., & Obee, J. (2018). Mississippi’s exiled daughter: How my civil rights baptism under fire shaped my life. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books. Wells, K. (2009). Childhood in a global perspective. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Child

as

Method

‘Child as method’ is an analytical approach that addresses sociopolitical practices focusing on the positioning accorded the child/children. It formulates a set of problems and agendas for but also beyond childhood studies. It counters the abstraction of concern about (and for) children from other cultural–political contexts and dynamics, to attend to the ways these contexts and dynamics produce and interact with meanings and practices of childhood. Focused on children and childhoods, this approach is oriented to situating both in relation to wider sociopolitical relations. The multiple indexing of ‘the child/childhood/children’ highlights how constructions of childhood produce and constrain the forms of childhood that children actually live and practice. Far from disallowing children’s agentic activity, this particular, critically focused attention to modes of childhood available within specific cultural–political contexts addresses how children navigate and negotiate, and acknowledges their necessary engagement with, these contexts. The agenda is to invite deeper sociocultural analysis of how modes of childhood (including those as practiced by children) reflect and inform wider sociopolitical dynamics, rather than attempting to resolve or adjudicate on debates about the ontological status of children. This entry examines the origins of the child as method, questions its status as a method, and considers its application and influence.

Origins ‘Child as method’ is a creative transformation of Kuan-Hsing Chen’s influential 2010 text Asia as Method, which set out an agenda for decoupling cultural studies from orientalist and colonial imaginaries and practices. Tracing intellectual and political contributions (from Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, and others),

Child as Method

Chen argued for a geo-materialist analysis comprising three aspects: (1) decolonisation (as a political moment or event); (2) de-imperialisation (affective investment and desires on the part of both the coloniser and the colonised); and (3) deCold War (as a key global dynamic that has configured and continues to configure, local and regional transnational relations). Chen’s analysis resonates with key debates about how conceptions of childhood, and also children themselves, relate in complicated ways to the history of colonialism and to the ways children and childhood are enlisted into (neocolonial) development projects both at the national and transnational levels. Questions of subjectivity as well as structural positioning and specific geopolitical relations also come to the fore. Such analysis makes equation of childhood and colonisation problematic, notwithstanding some alignment of position of colonised peoples with children through common practices of disempowerment and minority status. Chen moves from critique to advocate specific interventions, including ‘inter-referencing’, or re-orienting focus away from traditional sources of power/ knowledge (originating from Europe or North America) to attend to local and regional relations, and noticing to new ‘syncretic’ practices combining the old and new, or traditional/indigenous and modern/‘Western’. A second, related, source for ‘child as method’ is Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s 2013 book, Border as Method, an intervention from geography and development studies focused on migration and labour (that also explicitly references Asia as Method). Their key claim is that borders include as well as exclude and so demand study of the specific and active forms of inclusion/exclusion they produce, the relations between these two processes, and for whom. By focusing on the figure of the migrant, the authors claim to deepen Marxist analysis of current forms of dispossession and exploitation beyond ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’. Their attention to the various forms of ‘differential’ or relative inclusion produced through borders (seen as not only national, and indeed not only physical but also cultural and affective) is clearly relevant to considerations of childhood. Retracing the ‘spatial turn’ in social theory, their call to consider temporal as well as spatial features as necessary to understanding the complex and

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shifting subjectivities at play speaks to the transitional and complex embodied-historical dis/continuities inhabited by children (as also adults who were once children), whilst attending to (what they call) ‘borderscapes’ as well as border crossings as multiply encountered (including as ‘subjects in transit’) may deepen analysis of children’s lives.

Can the Child Be a ‘Method’? Like ‘Asia as method’, and ‘Border as method’, ‘child as method’ is informed by post-structuralist, specifically Foucauldian frameworks, feminist debates on intersectionality, and social psychoanalytic perspectives. As with these, the notion of ‘method’ is not a question of technical procedure but rather an ‘epistemic angle’ or ‘narrative imaginary.’ This conceptual intervention enables the posing of more interesting and engaged questions to better tackle the cultural–political complexities and fluidities of children’s positions and lives. Nevertheless, as would be expected from a specific epistemological stance, some methodological frameworks follow. Chen’s ‘inter-referencing’ could be applied to decouple forms of childhood away from the normalising teleology of (rich, northern, advanced capitalist) development, to focus instead on the local relations (crossovers, frictions) between various (spatially or temporally distinct) competing and consecutive practices of childhood. It is less a ‘method’, then, than a set of epistemological commitments, or even a manifesto, to generate new research agendas. ‘Child as method’ therefore takes ‘child’ as a nodal point in a set of practices, social relationships, and institutional arrangements as a way of reading cultural–political practices, including academic practices. Whilst these questions may already have been posed by childhood researchers, the overall project to highlight the necessary intersections between the political economy of childhood with geopolitical dynamics, alongside their local and global relations, must figure as part of postcolonial, anticapitalist initiatives, in which children figure as more than policy or theory tropes. ‘Child as method’ is thus compatible with current moves in educational studies towards ‘southern theory’. Notwithstanding the almost total absence of children and childhood in both ‘Asia as method’ and ‘Border as method’ (the latter especially striking

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considering its focus on labour), ‘child as method’ mobilises these critical frameworks not simply in the service of cross-disciplinary conversation (with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, or migration studies), nor as direct equivalent of those, but rather as a syncretic emergence from common problems and resources that aims for mutual engagement, rather than mere application.

Influence and Applications There is now a considerable literature from educational and early childhood studies exploring the implications of Asia as method, although often reading it as merely the study of education/childhood practices within Asian contexts, or in intercultural educational encounters that include Asian (origin, migrant, or heritage) teachers or children. Such readings risk insufficiently analysing the wider political transnational dynamics at play. Currently, there appear to be no explicit applications of ‘Border as method’ to childhood studies, although much current work on child migrants and borders could be read in this way. Erica Burman has so far elaborated ‘child as method’ through a set of critical readings of the writings of Fanon, and juxtaposing it with sociocultural theory, whilst other researchers have used it as an analytical frame for ethnographic (including autobiographical) memories of (post)socialist childhoods. Erica Burman See also Child; Childhood as Figuration; Childhood in Western Philosophy; Childhood Studies; Critical Theory, the Child in

Further Readings Burman, E. (2016a). Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation. Curriculum Inquiry, 46(3), 265–285. doi:10.1080/03626784.2016 .1168263 Burman, E. (2016b). Fanon’s other children: Psychopolitical and pedagogical implications. Race, Ethnicity & Education, 20(1), 42–56. doi:10.1080/13 613324.2016.1150832 Burman, E. (2016c). Fanon, Foucault, Feminisms: Psychoeducation, theoretical psychology and political change. Theory & Psychology, 26(6), 706–730. doi:10.1177/0959354316653484

Burman, E. (2018). Child as method: Anticolonial perspectives for educational research. International Studies in the Sociology of Education. doi:10.1080/09 620214.2017.1412266 Burman, E. (2018). Fanon, education, action: Child as method. Abingdon, UK: Brunner-Routledge. Cannella, G. S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as Method: towards deimperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connell, R. (2014). Using southern theory: Decolonizing social thought in theory, research and application. Planning Theory, 13(2), 210–223. doi:10.1177/ 1473095213499216 Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Park, J. (2016). Asian education and Asia as method. In C. M. Lam & J. Park (Eds.), Sociological and philosophical perspectives on education in the AsiaPacific region (pp. 205–225). Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-287-940-0_14 Silova, I., Millei, Z., Aydarova, A., & Piattoeva, N. (2016). Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of (post)socialist childhood and schooling. doi:10.1080/10564934.2016.1223977 Stoler, A. L. (2002). Carnal knowledge and imperial power. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Child

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Other/Stranger

The idea of the child is often posed as the obverse of the autonomous, rational, adult subject, or citizen, what is sometimes conceptualized as an Other. The term Other refers to an aspect of the world, usually another human being, that is external to the Self but also essential to the formation of one’s self-awareness and personal identity. As the concept is developed in philosophy, psychology, and sociology, an individual’s reflective consciousness is constructed through communication or confrontation with an Other who is often posited as a fundamentally oppositional stranger or enemy. The Other represents that which is outside the Self, an exteriority that determines the boundaries separating Self from the world. In presenting a conception of what the Self is not, the Other also functions to define what the Self is, what constitutes the interior identity of the Self. Viewed through an oppositional lens, this

Child as Other/Stranger

constitutive Other is met with fear, excluded and treated as a threat to the safety and security of the Self. At the same time, the Other must be preserved so that the Self has something to define itself over and against. This means that the loss of the constitutive Other and its antagonism, far from alleviating alienation and insecurity, can produce a crisis of identity. By contrast, viewed through a non-oppositional lens, the appearance of the Other is immediately experienced as an ethical demand, as a stranger who may be in need. In this sense, one’s identity is immediately experienced as someone who has a duty to others. Western conceptualizations of the adult Self posed in contradistinction to a child Other admit of both oppositional and non-oppositional frameworks and find expression within the classic array of philosophical areas of inquiry: epistemic, metaphysical, ethical, political, and aesthetic. In each of these intellectual domains, the acquisition of language and reason plays the central discerning function in constructing the child as a constitutive Other of the adult. In the psychoanalytic and developmental psychology traditions, for instance, the child is often positioned as a solipsistic being devoid of the self/other distinction until the advent of language draws the child into selfconsciousness. Language is understood to create a genuinely human form of consciousness where none had existed, marking out the transition from child to fully human adult. This transformation results in an irreversible epistemological divide as the adult can no longer remember or understand what it was like to experience the world or relate to others prior to linguistic and reflexive consciousness. This metamorphosis is usually viewed in terms of natural biological progress but sometimes in terms of the fulfillment of a metaphysical telos of development into a human being that must be motivated through discipline and education. While the process of transformation is typically celebrated, it is also viewed in some corners of aesthetics as a tragic rupture, specifically in the Romantic tradition, where the consciousness of the child is idealized as a lost paradise of communion with nature that language and rationality permanently and necessarily sever. The child is, therefore, an aesthetic Other—the muse and object of painting, sculpture, and poetry. The same Romantic tradition is related to a non-oppositional ethical view

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of the child Other as an archetype of the stranger in need, one who in their state of radical dependence imposes an burden of care on the adult. Together, these oppositional constructions of the child Other have served to inform a political conception. Otherness in the domain of politics is related to issues of nonconformity, disenfranchisement, and alienation whereby individuals and groups are disqualified as political agents. The figure of the child serves a political function in at least three ways. First, the child stands as a perennial Other of adult rationality, order, and lawfulness. The dependence of the child is taken to affirm the importance of adult capacities for speech and reason, capacities that confer the dignity and privilege of a fully human and properly political mode of agency. Second, the lawlessness of the child, often associated with carelessness and irrational violence, presents an imminent threat to the order and security of the adult world. Historically, this has resulted in the criminalization of vagrant youth. Third, the constitutive Other of politics is sometimes viewed as a dangerous outsider, stranger, or foreigner in opposition to which a parochial national, ethnic, or racial self-identity is upheld. The foreigner is often a racialized Other who is presented as a threat racial order and purity. The child Other serves historically as a model for the categorization of racialized peoples as children, which carries with it the connotation of irrationality and criminality. Problems related to Othering are addressed by challenging the solipsistic view of the self along with any chasm alleged to separate the self from others. Such a challenge reveals that human beings are not cut off from the experiences of others and that personal identities can be constructed with others rather than against them or in reaction to them. Indeed, it has become apparent that the alleged schism between child and adult, as in most Self–Other models, is a pseudo-philosophical problem. To assert an unbridgeable chasm between the understandings of self and other presumes an understanding of the differences that are alleged to be unknowable. In the case of the Othering of children, then, the distinction between child and adult can be challenged. This appears to require a recognition that although human beings privilege different modalities of relating to the world and others during different phases of life, the modality

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of language does not erase or displace the way of being we possess as children. Toby Rollo See also Development; Developmentality; Minority Group, Children as; Psychoanalysis, the Child in

Further Readings Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. Kennedy, D. (2006). The well of being: Childhood subjectivity and education. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Wall, J. (2010). Ethics in light of childhood. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Child Attachment Interviews The very first instruments for assessment of child attachment were mostly observational, including the classical Strange Situation by Mary Ainsworth, and were designed to measure attachment security for children of 5 years old and younger. Further growth of attachment tools included development of the Cassidy and Marvin system, story stems and drawings, categorical forced-choice descriptions, doll play, and different self-report measures intended to be completed by caregivers (for review of infancy and early childhood attachment tools, see research by Peter Fonagy). This entry describes a number of interview instruments and tools for assessing attachment in children. Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Development of exclusively interview-based attachment tools started with Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), considered the “gold standard” measure. Interviews as tools for measuring attachment in children can be subdivided into three subcategories: The first is interviews designed to identify attachment figures and the hierarchy among them; the second includes various semiprojective measures with use of pictures, dolls, and attachment-activating plots; and the last category is made up of modified and adapted versions of the AAI with a focus on internal representations of self and relationships with parents. Important People Interview (IPI). Roger Kobak and colleagues designed the Important People

Interview (shorter version) to assess children and adolescents’ attachment hierarchies. It has two parts; in the first part, children are asked to nominate four of the most important people in their lives, and adolescents are asked to name four of their most important peers. In the second part, participants rank their nominees (plus a “nobody” option for adolescents) with whom they would want to be first, second, and so forth in different attachment-related situations (emergency, everyday comfort, companionship in games, separation). Attachment Figure Interview. In the Attachment Figure Interview, as opposed to IPI, children are first offered different attachment-invoking life events and then asked to name up to two people with whom they would like to be in a given situation. Scoring is based on whether it is an adult or a child’s peer. Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST). A number of semiprojective measures that use narrative story stem techniques, dolls, pictures, photos, or different combinations of these are available in the literature. Most of those protocols evolved from Inge Bretherton, Doreen Ridgeway, and Jude Cassidy’s the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), which was originally developed to assess attachment security of 4-year-olds. The Manchester Child Attachment Story Task (MCAST) is a protocol developed, clinically tested, and evaluated for middle childhood that uses a combination of representational doll play and conversation to access a child’s inner representations of attachment. The Doll Story Completion Task (DSCT). This is another modified and adapted version of the ASCT. It is a story stem technique in which an interviewer initiates and the child completes five attachmentrelevant stories using dolls and props from the investigator. The themes covered in those stories are accidents, fear, pain, separation, and reunion. The interview is coded based on a child’s emotional openness, conflict resolution, parental availability, and general coherence of the produced narrative. Attachment Doll Play Assessment (ADPA). This assessment also follows the tradition of the ASCT and employs the same attachment-activating plots and story stems: “Hurt Knee” “Monster in the Bedroom,” “Separation,” and “Reunion.” The

Child Attachment Interviews

classification scheme is the main procedure that differentiates the ADPA from the original ASCT. MacArthur Story Stem Battery. Published in 2003, the MacArthur Story Stem Battery was initially developed by Inge Bretherton and colleagues as part of the MarArthur Narrative Work Group in 1990. This battery of story stems was designed to elicit children’s narratives (verbal and enacted) about specific themes (e.g., moral, attachment, peer, sibling, and parent conflict).

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9-point scales meant to capture quality of attachment relationships; as a result, participants are assigned to one of four categories: secure, insecure–dismissing, insecure–preoccupied, and insecure–unresolved.

Child Attachment and Play Assessment. This is one more assessment of attachment of children, using both storytelling and doll play. It was validated to be used from toddlerhood to mid-childhood (3.5 to 12 years old).

Child Attachment Interview (CAI). The CAI is another modified version (with considerable adjustments of instructions and probes) of AAI for 8- to 14-year-olds, designed to bring out relevant attachment information and concepts of self and important others in current interpersonal relationships. Children are interviewed about their general view of their relationship with parents; common experiences with parents in which the attachment system is presumed to be activated (upset, injury, illness, separation); experiences of loss; and finally, the self-perception that children derive from those experiences. The transcripts are coded according to a multifaceted scoring system that is meant to capture both the content of what a child says (e.g., that the mother is caring, harsh, or neglectful) and unintended qualities of the person’s narration, such as incoherence, inconsistency, and emotional disorganization. Scoring is based primarily on a child’s ability to give an integrated, believable account of his or her experiences supported by elaborate and relevant examples.

Separation Anxiety Test (SAT). The SAT is a semiprojective measure in which children are asked to talk about pictures illustrating various attachment-tapping caregiver–child interactions. The tool was developed for adolescents, later adapted for 6- to 7-year-olds, and further modified for 10- to 14-year-old children.

Friends and Family Interview (FFI). The FFI is an increasingly used semi-structured interview. A child is asked not only about his or her primary caregivers (parents) but also about his or her siblings and friends. Similar to AAI, AICA, and CAI, coding is based on both verbalized story and nonverbal qualities of narration.

Family Drawings. This is an attachment measure in which a child is invited to draw his or her family. A coding scheme includes two types of categories: dimensional (the size of self and other figures, distances between them, etc.), and categorical (relations between self and family members).

Manasi Kumar and Anastasia Polkonikova-Wamoto

The Story Stem Assessment Profile. This assessment asks children to respond to a set of narrative story stems in which they are given the beginning of a story highlighting everyday scenarios with an inbuilt attachment-related dilemma. It is used to examine a child’s relationships with his or her siblings as well as with significant adults. The probing is done in accordance to the protocol guideline to obtain the necessary information for further coding and classification of child’s responses.

Attachment Interview for Childhood and Adolescence (AICA). The AICA is a semi-structured interview largely based on the AAI. Adaptations were made for language simplification and to drop a few questions inappropriate for late childhood and early-adolescent age groups. Obtained narratives are coded similarly to the AAI on twelve

See also Child Study; Children and Art; Interviews; Life Mode Interview

Further Readings Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation: Anxiety and anger. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Fonagy, P. (2004). Attachment theory and psychoanalysis. London, United Kingdom: Karnac.

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Fury, G., Carlson, E. A., & Sroufe, L. A. (1997). Children’s representations of attachment relationships in family drawings. Child Development, 68(6), 1154–1164. Kobak, R., Rosenthal, N., & Serwik, A. (2005). The attachment hierarchy in middle childhood: Conceptual and methodological issues. In K. Kerns & R. Richardson (Eds.), Attachment in middle childhood (pp. 71–88). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Steele, H., & Steele, M. (20050. Understanding and resolving emotional conflict: The view from 12 years of attachment research across generations and across childhood. In K. E. Grossmann, K. Grossmann, & E. Waters (Eds.), Attachment from infancy to adulthood: The major longitudinal studies (pp. 137– 164). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Target, M., Fonagy, P., & Shmueli-Goetz, Y. (2003). Attachment representations in school-age children: The development of the child attachment interview (CAI). Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 29, 171–186.

Child Beauty Pageants Child beauty pageants, introduced into U.S. popular culture in the 1920s, had developed by the 1960s into high-stakes competitions based on notions of glamor. The ostensible purpose of beauty contests is to provide an opportunity for children to showcase their performing talents and abilities. The downside of the pageant industry, however, is that it focuses less on the talents of the children than on cultivation of a glamorous physical appearance, leading many young girls to develop perfectionistic tendencies and to give performances that exhibit a hypersexualized personality. The purpose of this entry is to give an overview of the research on child beauty pageants, highlighting findings on both the positive and negative side of young children participating in these events. Television shows such as Toddlers and Tiaras, launched in 2009, have given the child beauty pageant industry tremendous exposure in promoting mostly young girls to wear costumes that ultimately lead to the exploitation of children’s innocence. As a number of observers and critics have noted, behind the popularity of shows such as Toddlers and Tiaras are the interests, motivation, and purposes of the participants; for parents and families, having their child participate in beauty pageants entails the

prospect of rewards. Although this is perhaps not always the case, Elisabeth Blumer Thompson’s dissertation on child beauty pageants, girlhood, and power suggests that many middle-class families willingly spend a considerable sum of money on lessons and planned activities with the goal of satisfying the hope for fame and new opportunities for the child and family. For some middle-class American households, beauty pageants offer a means to raise their social standing, which is why parents may put pressure on their children as pageant participants so they can ultimately achieve success and stardom. This may include encouraging girls to undergo bodily transformations in order to look perfect; it also places a financial burden on parents because participation in beauty pageants represents a substantial investment for many families. Some research suggests that young children themselves do in fact have a desire and interest in taking part in beauty pageants. According to Hilary Levey Friedman’s book Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, pageants are not just pursued for the purpose of the child’s interest and extracurricular activity. Rather, competitive activities such as pageants help the child to develop their level of ambition and become more goal-oriented. Pageant advocates argue that the pageant lifestyle prepares children for the adult world at a very young age, thus helping children to be flexible and versatile. Ultimately, children who compete in beauty pageants tend to develop a sense of strength and/or internal resilience. This skill set in turn supports them through various challenges they may experience during their transition from adolescence to adulthood. In contrast, child beauty pageants have fueled controversy over the perpetuation of traditional gender roles, given the focus on curating young girls’ femininity and the stereotypical performance of normative gender. According to some researchers, many of the benefits parents receive is, to some extent, at the price of their child’s exploitation. Often, girls as young as age 4 years are required to look like fashion models, wear clothing that is revealing of body parts, and accentuate facial features with cosmetics to make them appear conventionally beautiful. This form of objectification teaches young girls that their appearance matters more than their intrinsic self. Some observers would argue, however, that pageants teach children to

Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective

become more focused, disciplined, and goal-oriented. In severe cases, parents become severely judgmental of their child’s performance, insisting on the fulfillment of high expectations that can be difficult for the child to meet. Owing to the strong influence of parents, children are subject to the imperative to compete successfully and win all the time. The obedient child does so at the expense of her own emotional, physical, and social self. In addition, critics of beauty pageants argue that such competitions serve as another way for parents (especially mothers) to fulfill vicariously their own dreams of being part of the pageant lifestyle. Over the years, researchers on gender and identity have suggested that some beauty pageants do not just emphasize the principle of beauty but also the notion that the participant should demonstrate confidence and elegance in her performance. The child’s outward appearance must be such as to convey to the audience that her personality exudes femininity. It should be noted, however, that instilling this behavior of femininity in young girls holds them hostage to stereotypical feminine attitudes. This further propagates the notion of young girls being hyper-gendered in a consumer-oriented society that already subscribes to the notion of women as objects. Thus, one of the principal aims of current research is to examine the positive and negative effects of enrolling children in beauty pageants as well as the loss of innocence that can occur when children become pageant participants. Charnjot Kaur Ghuman See also Gender; Girlhood; Girling; Girls

Further Readings Anastasia, L. (2013, November 25). Toss the Tiara? Should the U.S. ban child beauty pageants? Junior Scholastic/Current Events, 116(7), 15. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.ryerson.ca/apps/ doc/A352039603/CPI?u=rpu_main&sid=CPI&xid= 00c377a0 Banet-Weiser, S., & Portwood-Stacer, L. (2006). I just want to be me again!: Beauty pageants, reality television and post-feminism. Feminist Theory, 7(2), 255–272. doi:10.1177/1464700106064423 Cartwright, M. M. (2012). Princess by proxy: What child beauty pageants teach girls about self-worth and what we can do about it. Journal of the American Academy

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of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 51(11), 1105– 1107. doi:10.1016/j.jaac.2012.08.011 Crawford, M., Kerwin, G., Gurung, A., Khati, D., Jha, P., & Regmi, A. C. (2008). Globalizing beauty: Attitudes toward beauty pageants among Nepali women. Feminism & Psychology, 18(1), 61–86. doi:10.1177/ 0959353507084953 Hodel, C. (2014). Performing the ultimate grand supreme: Approval, gender and identity in toddlers & tiaras. Girlhood Studies, 7(2), 113. doi:10.3167/ ghs.2014.070208 Kelly, J. M., & Garmon, L. C. (2016). Perceptions of child beauty pageants and their impacts: What really lies behind the tiara? Atlantic Journal of Communication, 24(4), 201–215. doi:10.1080/15456 870.2016.1208528 Thompson, E. B. (2007). Trailer park royalty: Southern child beauty pageants, girlhood and power. Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 471. Retrieved from https:// digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/47

Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective Within the context of a fast-evolving marketplace where children have become key actors of promotional strategies deployed by global brands on social networks, it is necessary to question the various factors that shape children’s capacity to deal with consumer culture to become not only consumers but also powerful influencers on social platforms such as YouTube or Tik Tok. Immersed in the contemporary mass consumption culture that characterizes Western and fast-growing economies, children gradually learn to talk and think of each other and of themselves as apprenticeconsumers, legitimate consumers, and as relevant influencers in the marketplace. Children are present in the marketplace through a variety of activities such as understanding advertisements, choosing a proper gift for a classmate’s birthday, earning and saving pocket money, buying personal items, influencing friends, and negotiating with adults to obtain highly desired fashion objects. All these activities are everyday sociocultural practices in which children are involved and through which they learn to decipher the consumption culture that surrounds them, make sense of objects, and differentiate social relationships.

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Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective

This entry examines how Russian psychologist Lev Vygotskij accounts for children’s consumption practices in his sociocultural development theory, types of children’s joint consumption practices, and the broader impacts of children’s consumption practices.

Sociocultural Developmental Theory and Consumption The sociocultural developmental theory elaborated by Vygotskij in the 1930s maintains that cultural significance emerges from social interactions and discussions with other participants when performing a cultural activity. Children are in constant interaction with a social body from which they receive help and reassurance to dare to participate in social life. To understand how children learn and develop through participation in sociocultural activities, it is necessary to accept that learning is more than the mere detection of changes in individual reasoning. Learning only occurs when a child interacts with an adult or a more experienced partner to achieve a task or solve a problem. The Vygotskian perspective lays emphasis on the structured guidance role played by the other— an adult or a more experienced child—who introduces some cultural tools to the child with the aim of helping him or her achieve the task or of finding a socially acceptable solution to the problem. Applying this conceptual framework to the realm of child consumption leads us to underline that the relevant unit of analysis is not an isolated child confronted with a problem but rather the joint activity developed within a “child–adult” or “child–more experienced child” interaction. The Vygotskian perspective applied to child consumption aims at describing and explaining the transformation of children’s participation in different kinds of joint consumption activities. In this perspective, child’s learning and development emerge through the transformation of his or her level of participation in various sociocultural activities related to consumption. Indeed, as apprentice-consumers children need to understand and activate the relevant sociocultural rules to adjust their level of participation in different situated joint consumption activities. But which combination of cultural elements modifies children’s participation from a restricted peripheral

participation (e.g., users of a product bought by their parents or an older sibling) into a real central participation (e.g., legitimate decision makers for some categories of products, as recognized experts of specific products, and successful influencers on social networks)? From a theoretical standpoint, to account for the relationship between the individual and the external world, the Vygotskian perspective introduces the notion of psychological or semiotic tools. Cultural tools embrace the language, the normative requirements or social standards referred to, the rhetoric called upon, and the material design of the products themselves. All these elements are cultural signs that the apprenticeconsumer needs to decipher in order to differentiate the social meaning of various consumption practices.

Children’s Joint Consumption Practices By engaging in a joint activity with a more experienced partner, the child discovers and explores the cultural meaning of objects displayed in the marketplace and the social significance of consumption practices. To investigate how children understand consumption realms in their own perspective and how they account for their consumption practices in their own words, it is necessary to explore the psychological tools or systems of signs children use to negotiate their participation in joint consumption activities. As the child’s narrative capacities increase, researchers can analyze the evolution of children’s accounts of their consumption practices. For instance, to obtain what they wish children must learn to tell the appropriate story and correctly enact their actions and objectives to make them legitimate within specific social groups: family circles or peer groups. This transformation of children’s participation in joint consumption practices takes place within a complex cultural system that consists of three interwoven components. Firstly, children’s participation in consumption practices is as mediation agents. After all, children never enter alone or directly the realm of consumption. Others—an adult caregiver, an older sibling or a more experienced peer—always guide them to question the practices of consumption and to construct socially

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shared meanings. Through the interaction with another partner, children’s attention will focus on specific cultural objects, such as toys, snacks and food, comic books, videos, TV shows, and other products offered in the marketplace. Secondly, children’s participation consumption practices takes place as “a historically situated activity.” In other words, it takes place in the design of manufactured products or industrial services includes an array of social, historical, technical, and institutional backgrounds that strongly direct their potential uses. In Vygotskian terms, a cultural object includes the material and physical characteristics of the object as well as its symbolic and semiotic dimensions whose meanings evolve constantly depending on brand content innovations promoted by marketing techniques such as advertisements, design, packaging, retailing, e-commerce, and retargeting. Thirdly, children’s participation in consumption practices takes place with “a zone of proximal development,” or in the intersubjective space opened by the interaction with an adult or a more experienced peer, the child is encouraged to engage in an intense semiotic inquiry to elaborate emerging and transitory meanings about the consumption situation under joint scrutiny. Within the zone of proximal development, the child might try out new ways of using the cultural tools available to him or her to make sense of consumption activities. This perspective allows differentiating the actual development of the child—the purchases he has already made and understood—from consumption situations whose meaning remains unstable and unclear for the apprentice-consumer while they offer an opportunity for potential development under structured guidance. The dynamics of intersubjectivity that take place within a joint consumption activity generate new meanings, new symbols, and produce innovative reinterpretations that provoke a transformation of the meaning of the situated consumption activity itself. Agentive children actively modify words and objects belonging to adulthood and collectively create their own social rules about consumption practices. Through their active participation in joint consumption activities, children perform a permanent recreation, an ongoing invention that renews cultural assets—such as

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products, toys, and so on—by transforming them, adapting them to particular circumstances, recombining them according to newly perceived issues, and inventing meanings that remain temporary as they depend on marketing-driven technological and media advances.

The Broader Impact of Children’s Consumption Activities Children are real players, real consumers, real influencers, but they do recognize their dependence on others to make sense of their role as consumers and of the various situated consumption activities in which they participate. The Vygotskian perspective also highlights that through joint consumption activities, children learn much more than mere buying or influencing behaviors in the marketplace. The mundanity— and sometimes liminality—of consumption practices in which children are involved highlights their utmost importance from and ethical and moral perspective. By taking part—directly or indirectly—in different consumer activities, child learning exceeds the realm of consumption practices. By learning to link a consumption choice with a specific social context—within the family, among the peer group, within a relationship of authority with a teacher among other contexts— the child not only discovers institutions, social rules, and standards but also understands the influence of judgmental biases, situations of social exclusion. Through their progressive participation in joint consumption activities, children discover and decipher contemporary society and the diverse social rules that prevail according to different social situations. Valérie-Inés de La Ville See also Children as Consumers; Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

Further Readings Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. De La Ville, V. I., & Tartas, V. (2010). Developing as consumers. In D. Marshall (Ed.), Understanding children as consumers (pp. 23–40). London, UK: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781446251539.n2

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Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning, legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9780511815355.003 Rogoff, B., Baker-Sennett, J., Lacasa, P., & Goldsmith, D. (1995). Development through participation in socio cultural activity. In J. J. Goddnow, P. J. Miller, & F. Kessels (Eds.), Cultural practices as contexts for development, 67 (pp. 45–65). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. doi:10.1002/cd.23219956707 Rogoff, B., Moore, L., Najafi, B., Dexter, A., CorreChavez, M., & Solis, J. (2007). Children’s development of cultural repertoires through participation in everyday routines and practices. In J. E. Grusec & P. D. Hastings (Eds.), Handbook of socialization: Theory and research (pp. 490–515). New York, NY: Guilford. Wertsch, J. (1984). The zone of proximal development: Some conceptual issues. In B. Rogoff & J. Wertsch (Eds.), Children’s learning in the zone of proximal development (pp. 7–18). San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass. doi:10.1002/cd.23219842303 Vygotskij, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. In M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman (Eds.), Handbook of research on integrating digital technology with literacy pedagogies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctvjf9vz4

Child Depravity Child depravity refers to the concept of children (i.e., those 17 years and younger) being in a state of total immorality—that is, evil, corrupt, or perverted. It is relevant to this volume because it raises important questions about what qualities are essential to being a child and what it means when a child is no longer categorized as such. This entry explores the history of the concept in both fictional and nonfictional texts and discusses the implications of mobilizing the concept when children engage in acts considered to be depraved. Throughout Anglo-American history, there has been a persistent thread in Christian discourse that pertains to the notion of “child depravity.” The idea that people are born of original sin can be found in the early theological writings of Augustine of Hippo (354–430), and these ideas were later developed in religious doctrines by the

Protestant reformers Martin Luther (1530) and John Calvin (1559). In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Puritans endorsed the idea that children’s inherent evil must go through a civilizing process in childhood. This was often used as a justification for corporal punishment, and the Old Testament was interpreted as an endorsement of “the rod” as a means of saving the child’s soul and cleansing away evil. Throughout modern history, the notion of child depravity also carried significant cultural currency, emerging in literature, nursery rhymes, and poetry from the 17th century onwards (e.g., see Wordsworth’s sonnet on Baptism [1822], which describes the child “Whose virtue changes to a christian Flower, A Growth from sinful Nature’s bed of weeds”). At the beginning of the 20th century, such ideas were reworked in Freud’s influential psychoanalytic theory of sexuality and his concept of the id. In Freudian theory, the id represents a morass of instinctual amoral wants and needs that is present from birth and that is unrestrained until its containment by the civilizing force of the superego. In contrast, modern constructions of childhood rely on the absence of depravity; children are innocent and incapable of evil, corruption, and perversion. Such ideas can be traced back to John Locke’s conception of the newborn child as a tabula rasa (blank slate), free from corruption because of lack of social experience. Subsequently, the Romantic movement (1800–1850) encouraged the idea of an inherent innocence and special moral nature in children. Furthermore, JeanJacques Rousseau endorsed the natural goodness of children, who are born with an innate sense of morality. This assumption is written into legal practice around the world; most jurisdictions identify a minimum age of criminal responsibility in recognition of the assumed lack of criminal intent in children. Nevertheless, the depraved child is a common trope in contemporary Anglo-American popular culture. Depraved children are represented in comic books (e.g., Ashley Guthrie in Hack/Slash), computer games (e.g., Betty in Fallout 3), popular music (e.g., Nick Cave’s “The Curse of Millhaven”), and television (e.g., Joshua Austin in Outcast). Furthermore, their representation in mainstream literature and film has burned

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particular protagonists into the Anglo-American cultural memory. Examples include the murderous 8-year-old Rhoda in The Bad Seed (March, 1954; dir. LeRoy, 1956), son-of-Satan newborn Adrian in Rosemary’s Baby (Levin, 1967; dir. Polanski, 1968), and 5-year-old anti-Christ Damien in The Omen (Seltzer, 1976; dir. Donner, 1976). However, to some extent the depraved child is a transcultural phenomenon, with examples including the evil child–ghost Mitsuko Kawai in Honogurai Mizu no soko kara (trans. Dark Water) (Suzuki, 1996; dir. Nakata, 2002), demonic Rohan in Vaastu Shastra (dir. Narang, 2004), and the eponymous “little gangster” in Tsotsi, who terrorises his local community (dir. Hood, 2005). The alleged causes of these children’s depravity tend to be fairly limited to (a) demonic possession, (b) psychological damage by dysfunctional or neglectful families, and (c) broader structural and institutional failures. Quite often, depraved children are constructed as the product of all these things, to a greater or lesser extent (e.g., children may be possessed because their family’s shortcomings have made them vulnerable, a situation that society has both contributed to and failed to intervene in). It could be argued that such cultural narratives of child depravity—and the complexities imbued within them—perform an important social function in exploring the boundaries of responsibility, redemption, and childhood itself. However, the notion of child depravity also retains currency in nonfictional cultural texts. This is particularly exemplified during high-profile criminal cases that involve children engaging in extremely serious offences, such as torture and murder. In newspaper reports of such cases, the concept of child depravity is sometimes mobilised to explain the crimes. One way this is achieved is through the use of evocative national newspaper headlines that serve to classify the child perpetrator as depraved: Examples include “Freaks of Nature,” “Devil Child,” and “The Monsters Next Door” (these are from three infamous cases from the United Kingdom and the United States that involved children who murdered). In each of these cases, the idea that the children were inherently “evil” was frequently reinforced by the administrators of justice; judges and police officers were reported to have come to similar

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conclusions about the nature of the perpetrators in their charge. Furthermore, limited research that has explored public perceptions of children who have engaged in grave offences has found that, on the whole, the public shares these sentiments, using evil as both explanation for the child’s behaviour and as a rationale to support retributive and punitive sentences as an appropriate response. Innocence is essential to the category of child; once children are no longer considered innocent and are imbued with the construction of depraved, they are cast out of the category of “child” altogether. This process has been termed by sociologists as “conceptual eviction.” The examples highlighted here show how such children are not only constructed as nonchildren; they are also nonhuman. Such practices allow normative constructions of the child to remain intact (and, indeed, to be reinforced) and for society to be absolved from blame for failing in its duty as a civilising force. Amanda Holt See also Children Who Murder; Corporal Punishment; Freud, Sigmund; Tabula Rasa; Wordsworth, William; Young Offenders

Further Readings D’Cruze, S., Walklate, S. L., & Pegg, S. (2013). Murderous children. In Murder (pp. 69–102). London, United Kingdom: Routledge. James, A., & Jenks, C. (1996). Public perceptions of childhood criminality. British Journal of Sociology, 47(2), 315–331. https://dx.doi.org/10.2307/591729 Renner, K. J. (Ed.). (2013). The “evil child” in literature, film and popular culture. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.

Child Domestic Work Child domestic workers are children under the age of 18 who work in other people’s households doing domestic chores, caring for children, and running errands. Paid in cash or in-kind, they typically live in their employers’ homes. Most child domestic workers are female. Indeed, child

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domestic work (CDW) is often referred to as the most common occupation for teenage girls in the Global South (generally, Third-World countries). This entry is divided into four parts. The first section provides an overview of CDW, including its beneficial and harmful aspects. The two subsequent sections explain how understandings of CDW have been influenced by (a) feminist perspectives on care work and (b) broader research directions in childhood studies and children’s geographies. The final section discusses the disjuncture between contemporary scholarship on CDW and international policies promoting workfree childhoods.

Child Domestic Work: A Diverse Occupation The prevalence of CDW is difficult to ascertain with precision because of its hidden location in employers’ private homes. Relatively recent statistics from the International Labour Organisation’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (ILO-IPEC) suggest that around 17.2 million children are employed as child domestic workers worldwide. Children become involved in CDW for many reasons. Most commonly, they come from a familial context of poverty. Some child domestic workers are orphans, and others may be seeking escape from abusive or otherwise dysfunctional homes or early (forced) marriage. Still others are drawn from their rural villages to the “bright lights” of the city. CDW also presents an opportunity to save money and build a better future. For poor (often rural) households, the live-in nature of CDW means there is one less mouth to feed, with the added benefit that child domestic workers typically send remittances home. The pathways to CDW vary considerably, incorporating kinship linkages, peer pressure, and formal trafficking networks. Urban householders often recruit child domestic workers from their ancestral villages in a relatively informal manner, or parents themselves opt to send their children to live and work in the homes of comparatively wealthy urban kin. Children’s experiences of CDW are highly variable. Because it is not governed by formal regulations or an employment contract, each child’s circumstances are highly contingent on the nature

of his or her employer. Work undertaken by child domestic workers typically includes cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and linen, and childcare. In many areas of the Global South where CDW is prevalent, these tasks often entail fetching and carrying water; washing clothes by hand; and collecting, carrying, and chopping firewood. Some child domestic workers also provide assistance in employers’ small businesses (e.g., shops or farms). Studies of CDW across diverse countries have revealed a complex occupation with varied implications for the children involved. On the positive side, CDW is a survival mechanism for children whose own impoverished families are unable to adequately shelter, clothe, or feed them. Some children report that the living conditions in their employers’ homes are superior to those in the familial home. Accordingly, CDW can have benefits for child nutrition and health. Those child domestic workers who are paid a wage can support their families’ immediate material needs or can fund their own (or their siblings’) education. This is a key driver and benefit of CDW in contexts where parents are unable to fund their own children’s education or bear the opportunity costs (i.e., giving up the wages their child might earn by working instead of going to school) of sending them to school. Some employers pay for their child domestic workers’ education or training (e.g., sewing classes) or provide their dowries. Moving to the city as a child domestic worker can also open opportunities to access types of education, such as evening and vocational classes, that may not be available in rural villages. Moreover, child domestic workers with reasonable employers report that they experience good working conditions, are not overworked, and feel cared for in their employers’ homes. In addition, girls who work in this sector regularly report that CDW provides them with skills important to their future lives as wives and mothers. As with other types of work, child domestic workers often take pride in their work and in their contribution to the well-being of their family unit. However, CDW is characterised by immense power differentials between children and employers, exacerbated by the live-in arrangement. Many employers prefer to hire children as domestic workers because they are considered docile and obedient and can be paid low wages (or no wages

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at all). With this in mind, it is unsurprising that many child domestic workers experience exploitative and even abusive employment scenarios. In the absence of an employment contract and clear job description, many child domestic workers report long working hours, seven days per week and often without an annual holiday. They are permanently on call—even when asleep. In some cases, the tasks required of child domestic workers are physically arduous and even dangerous for their age. Many are not paid because employers rationalise that the live-in arrangement equates to an in-kind payment. Those who do receive wages are amongst their societies’ lowest paid workers. Child domestic workers also report having their wages withheld and delayed or docked for the slightest infraction (e.g., breaking a cup), and their living conditions are often problematic. Many sleep on the floor, even in households where beds are available. Some are denied adequate or nutritious food and medical care. Child domestic workers also experience near constant surveillance and may even be locked into their employer’s home. This lack of freedom can create isolation and loneliness and hinder contact with their own families. CDW can have negative implications for children’s sense of self-worth, especially when they are emotionally mistreated by way of belittling and derogatory statements. Child domestic workers often report that they are not permitted to eat with their employer’s family, use the same crockery, watch television, or sit on the sofa. Given the hidden nature of CDW, physical and sexual violence occur with some ­ ­regularity—at the hands of the employers themselves or the employers’ children.

Intersections With Feminist Scholarship on Care Work Feminist literature exploring the traditional gendered division of labour (male: paid, public, and productive; female: unpaid, private, and reproductive) provides an important foundation from which to understand the predicament faced by many domestic workers, whether adult or child. Research by Bridget Anderson, Janet Momsen, and Geraldine Pratt, focusing on migrant (adult) domestic workers living in the Global North (generally, First-World countries), overlaps in

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important ways with the case of CDW in the Global South. There are also, however, key differences; most obviously, child domestic workers tend to migrate within their own country, rather than internationally, and so are less often exposed to the structural inequalities and racisms inherent in international migration and visa processes. Nonetheless, important parallels in how domestic work is valued (or, more accurately, devalued) remain. Domestic workers’ activities are diminished because they take place in the “female” sphere of the home—where women and girls have traditionally undertaken unpaid reproductive work outside the formal economy. Paid domestic work presents a challenge to the view of reproductive work as something that occurs outside the market. Domestic workers, then, are often positioned as quasi-family members. Their work is elided with tasks that female family members perform as a “labour of love.” It is common for employers throughout the world to refer to domestic workers as “one of the family.” Such discourses downplay domestic workers’ status as employees. When domestic work is not considered “real work,” it readily goes unregulated, creating scope for highly exploitative employment scenarios to ensue. The entanglement between domestic work and women’s and girls’ unpaid reproductive work in the home makes it difficult to place boundaries around domestic workers’ conditions and hours. This situation is further complicated in the context of CDW by the fact that some children want to be treated as members of their employers’ families rather than strictly as employees. It is perhaps unsurprising that children who are living away from their own families value expressions of love and care from their employers, even if their pay and conditions are far from ideal.

Insights From Childhood Studies and Children’s Geographies Research on children’s work, including CDW, must also be understood in the context of broader scholarly trajectories in the fields of childhood studies and children’s geographies over the past two to three decades. Research under the banner of the “new social studies of childhood” has challenged the notion of universal norms, arguing instead that childhood is a social and cultural

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construct and that the meanings and characteristics of childhood vary across time and space. From this perspective, international efforts to ban children’s work and proclamations that CDW is akin to slavery have come under critique for neglecting the plurality and contextual specificity of childhoods across the world. Scholars working in this field have demonstrated that in many contexts, the supposed ideal of a work-free childhood is actually far from perfect. In addition to challenging notions of a universally appropriate childhood, the new social studies of childhood and children’s geographies have foregrounded children’s participation. They have framed children (including child domestic workers) as competent actors capable of making decisions about their own lives rather than as inherently vulnerable victims. Children’s agency has been emphasised in such work, prompting changed research practices and the emergence of participatory research projects heavily influenced in their design and implementation by working children themselves. When applied to CDW, such research has shown that child domestic workers are often defensive of their right to work but wish to do so under more protected circumstances. Child domestic workers have a realistic understanding of their lives and local contexts and of the (often limited) alternatives available to them. They rarely express support for laws and policies that seek to prohibit their work entirely. More recently, children’s geographers have identified an overemphasis on children’s voices in some research projects. Although they concur that children’s participation in research is critical, this should not occur to the exclusion of other stakeholders’ perspectives, especially those of adult decision makers who have a profound influence over children’s lived experiences. Hence, some scholarship on CDW has incorporated insights from parents and employers alongside those of child domestic workers themselves. Far from abandoning children’s voices, the objective of this body of work has been to provide more nuanced insights into the complexity of CDW. The participation of employers, for instance, can (a) unsettle pervasive and one-dimensional stereotypes positioning them as innately ruthless and exploitative and (b) create space for productive dialogue.

A final research direction has seen somewhat of a pushback against the straightforward acceptance of children as active agents, able to make decisions in their own best interests. This work has acknowledged the highly constrained circumstances in which children often make decisions— and thus the importance of remaining attentive to the broader structural, economic, political, and cultural forces that affect children’s lives. The point here is not that child workers in general, and child domestic workers in particular, lack agency. Rather, it is that this agency is often heavily circumscribed by forces beyond children’s control (e.g., economic globalisation and neoliberal policy mechanisms). Work conducted in this vein also broadens the scale of focus. Although the specificity of children’s lived—local—experiences remains important, this needs to be paired with an understanding of broader forces. Tatek Abebe and Sharon Bessell have identified this as a political economy approach to children’s work. In relation to CDW, this prompts attentiveness to the local and microscale of children’s everyday lives (e.g., their familial contexts of poverty) as well as to the “bigger picture”—for instance, how economic and cultural shifts in the Global South have contributed to the feminisation of labour markets. As growing numbers of women enter the paid workforce, a reproductive labour gap is created in middle-class homes, and this is often filled by child domestic workers. At the same time, global chains of care see some impoverished women migrate to the Global North or to oil-producing countries in the Middle East to work as migrant domestic workers while hiring child domestic workers to look after their own children back home. In both of these examples, child domestic workers are enmeshed in broader structural processes and inequalities that are well beyond their individual control.

Policy and Scholarship on Child Domestic Work: A Disjuncture There is a large, and arguably growing, gap between scholarly accounts of CDW (and children’s work more generally) and the international instruments and domestic policies designed to “protect” working children. The ILO has raised

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concerns about CDW in relation to Article 3 of its 1999 Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which identifies (among other things) “all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour” as inherently problematic. Yet following the pathways described earlier, research on CDW has become increasingly nuanced. It has eschewed the simplistic caricature of CDW as version of slavery. To the contrary, the ILO continues to position work-free childhoods as an ideal global standard, despite substantial empirical evidence of the potential benefits of children’s work and the harm engendered by outright bans and minimum age standards. Research has shown that banning CDW can undermine the survival of impoverished children and families, push children into potentially more hazardous sectors (such as prostitution), and leave them with little alternative but to stay in abusive family homes. Prohibition is also a risky strategy because prohibited work, by its very nature, cannot be regulated. Much recent scholarship on CDW has concluded that the most beneficial course of action for children employed in this sector is regulation—for instance, through the existence of employment contracts between child domestic workers and their employers that stipulate certain minimum requirements relating to pay and conditions, as well as avenues for seeking recourse. Given the diverse experiences of CDW recounted in existing studies, this is not a straightforward task. Nonetheless, it is an approach that many child domestic workers themselves have identified as their preferred course of action, and so it warrants concerted attention. Natascha Klocker See also Child Labor; Children’s Geographies; Children’s Voices; Children’s Work; Global South Childhoods; Participation Rights, UNCRC; Working Children’s Movement

Further Readings Abebe, T., & Bessell, S. (2011). Dominant discourses, debates and silences on child labour in Africa and Asia. Third World Quarterly, 32, 765–786.

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Aitken, S. (2001). Geographies of young people: The morally contested spaces of identity. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Anderson, B. (2000). Doing the dirty work? The global politics of domestic labour. London, United Kingdom: Zed Books. Bourdillon, M. (2017). Labour as education. In T. Abebe, J. Waters, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Laboring and learning: Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 10, pp. 91–110). Singapore: Springer Reference. Gamlin, J., Camacho, A., Ong, M., & Hesketh, T. (2015). Is domestic work a worst form of child labour? The findings of a six-country study of the psychosocial effects of child domestic work. Children’s Geographies, 13, 212–225. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 14733285.2013.829660 International Labour Organisation, International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour. (1999). C182–worst forms of child labor convention, 1999 (No. 182). Retrieved from https://www.ilo.org/ dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO:: P12100_ILO_CODE:C182 International Labour Organisation, International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour. (2013, October 4). Child domestic work: Global estimates 2012. Retrieved from http://www.ilo.org/ ipec/Informationresources/WCMS_IPEC_PUB_23235/ lang--en/index.htm Jacquemin, M. (2004). Children’s domestic work in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire: The petites bonnes have the floor. Childhood, 11, 383–397. https://doi .org/10.1177/0907568204044889 Jensen, K. (2017). Learning skills, building social capital, and getting an education: Actual and potential advantages of child domestic work in Bangladesh. In T. Abebe, J. Waters, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Laboring and learning: Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 10, pp. 305–325). Singapore: Springer Reference. Klocker, N. (2012). Conducting sensitive research in the past and present tense. Recounting the stories of current and former child domestic workers. Geoforum, 43, 894–904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.05.012 Klocker, N. (2014). Struggling with child domestic work: What can a postcolonial perspective offer? Children’s Geographies, 12, 464–478. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 14733285.2013.827870 Momsen, J. (Ed.). (1999). Gender, migration and domestic service. New York, NY: Routledge. Nieuwenhuys, O. (1994). Children’s life worlds: Gender, welfare and labour in the developing world. London, United Kingdom: Routledge.

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Nieuwenhuys, O. (2007). Embedding the global womb: Global child labour and the new policy agenda. Children’s Geographies, 5, 149–163. http://dx.doi .org/10.1080/14733280601108312 Pratt, G. (1997). Stereotypes and ambivalence: The social construction of domestic workers in Vancouver, BC. Gender, Place and Culture, 4, 159–177. http://dx.doi .org/10.1080/09663699725413 Woodhead, M. (1999). Combatting child labour: Listen to what the children say. Childhood, 6, 27–49. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0907568299006001003

Child Labor While work is a fundamental human activity and work of some kind is central to the lives of very many children worldwide, inappropriate work can be harmful to them and hinder their development. This entry is primarily about such work that impinges on the well-being of children, and which is commonly categorized as child labor. After commenting on the term child labor, the entry presents criteria for assessing when and how work can be harmful to children. It goes on to consider why children undertake harmful work and points to a variety of strategies to protect children from harm in work. Finally, this entry examines debates surrounding current international policy on child labor and its definitions.

Child Labor as Harmful Work There is no universally accepted definition of the term child labor. Its meaning varies with user, culture, disciplinary or organizational context, or situation, and it does not translate well between languages. In particular contexts, such as within given academic disciplines, bureaucratic organizations, or legal references, precise definitions may be available, but these need to be recognized as specific to that usage. Because of the confusion it can engender, careful authors often avoid child labor as a descriptive term, using it sparingly such as in quotes to denote historical or social ideas called by that name. In most common parlance, however, child labor is understood as pejorative, connoting work that is somehow inappropriate for children, by exploiting them, harming them, or

obstructing their development. This is the meaning of the term adopted in this article; when other meanings are referred to, the term is in quotation marks. The term would not generally apply to work that is reasonably acceptable, safe, and developmental for children of any age. In most of the world, providing children with appropriate, safe work experience under proper supervision is considered an important part of responsible childrearing. Children need to acquire life skills and social respect that move them toward competent adulthood, and all over the world parents use work, inside or outside the home, for that educative purpose. In some cases, especially where poverty is an issue, children’s work also contributes to maintaining the family’s and the child’s basic sustenance and quality of life at a decent level. Some writers distinguish child labor, defined as work that is in some way harmful, from child work that is benign; such a distinction has questionable usefulness since much work contains a mixture of both potential benefit and potential harm.

Criteria for Diagnosing Harm in Children’s Work Children should not do work that harms them— which is the substantive way of saying they should not be involved in child labor. That includes work that is inherently dangerous (as in underground mining or carrying heavy loads on the head), in a toxic environment (as where the air is polluted or pesticides are present, which can even be in the home), through the use of dangerous instruments (designed for use by adults rather than children, or used without adequate safeguards and training), and where safety standards for all workers are inadequate. Work can be psychologically or socially damaging when children are treated without respect and physically and verbally abused, or when work disrupts social interactions necessary for growing up. And work can be damaging when it takes up so much time and energy that it inhibits or prevents other important activities, like learning, play, and rest. Children’s right not to perform work that harms them has been formally articulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 32 stipulates that children have

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the right “to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development.” This list of categories demands that the impact of work be assessed broadly across domains of child well-being and development. These categories include: •• economic exploitation, usually interpreted to mean being mistreated and not properly compensated in the workplace; •• hazardous work, denoting work and working conditions that are unsafe in either the short or long term; •• interference with schooling, including both absence from school and lack of achievement within it owing to work responsibilities; and •• harmful to: ° health, referring to both current physical and mental soundness, freedom from disease and trauma, and long-term effects; ° physical development, understood as growth and bodily functions considered normal for the age of the child in good health; ° mental development, encompassing both cognitive and emotional development, measured against some standard of normalcy for the age; ° spiritual development, which has long evaded sharp definition, but current child development research suggests it includes feelings of respect for the transcendent and charitable behavior that is understanding and compassionate; ° moral development, usually understood to relate to the ability of the child to discern fairness and justice and to act accordingly; and ° social development, the ability of the child to fit into society successfully by gaining social skills and other resources that enable them to make friends, to earn the respect and confidence of others, and eventually to become responsible parents and economically competent, selfsustaining, and contributing citizens.

Work can be damaging in any of these categories because of dangers in the work itself or in the environment in which it is undertaken because

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children are treated harshly in the workplace or because it contains debilitating hours of monotonous activity. Often harm comes from situations surrounding children’s work more than from the work itself. For example, some jobs, such as domestic service, demand that children live away from the protection of their families and support networks, leaving them particularly vulnerable to abuse. In some places, traveling to and from work can be hazardous, particularly for girls. Working children are in some contexts socially discriminated against, including in school, in ways that obstruct their emotional and social development and may even traumatize them. How children’s work intersects with their education looms especially significant in deciding what constitutes child labor. Today, most parents around the world are avid for their children to be educated, and consequently the vast majority of school-age working children also attend school. Children’s work that does not impede schooling is often considered by their parents and communities to be not only appropriate but also developmental. However, some social advocates primarily from Western countries believe that school and work are incompatible, and insist that all work by young children and burdensome work by older children be prohibited as child labor. In certain given situations, work does indeed interfere with schooling, but attempts to generalize about workschool relationships from large-scale statistical data generally encounter too much variation to definitively guide policy. Although available evidence does not support the claim that children’s work and schooling inherently conflict, there are enough cases in which they do conflict that parents, employers, and others supervising children’s work need to ensure that the work does not degenerate into child labor. Some children are more at risk than others. Children living in poverty are likely to work more, and because they are frequently disadvantaged with respect to home background and access to quality schooling they are likely to have poor results at school irrespective of work: Poverty rather than work may be the prime cause of poor school attendance and performance. School attendance is of little value if children fail to learn in poor quality schools and if there is no appropriate employment available at the end of it. In such

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situations, work might justifiably appear to be the better preparation for future livelihood; school system failures sometimes push children into work as the better option. That is a factor in determining whether children’s work is more threat or more opportunity. Most decisions about whether children work and what work they do are made inside families, usually in conversation between adults and children. That is because most children’s work is family related and unpaid. Since work can increase children’s wellbeing and development as well as undermine it, both parents and children need to understand the nature of the work, the conditions, and social relations under which it is undertaken, and the characteristics of the children involved so that they are able to recognize both developmental work and harmful work, and well-intended work remains appropriate. Sometimes outsiders such as agencies for public health or child advocacy have reason to review and assess in a given place or situation the impact of children’s work on their well-being and development, identifying work that should be discouraged as child labor. To be competent, this sort of analysis requires insight from a variety of disciplines ranging from medicine to child developmental psychology to sociology and economics. Experiments have taken place in including work in children’s education as part of a recognition of the value of experiences out of school; in this approach, monitoring and control are placed within the expertise of education and development.

Why Children Get Involved in Harmful Work Throughout the world many children become involved in work that is in some way harmful or hazardous to them. There are no reliable statistics on the number of children so involved worldwide. Figures published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) are frequently cited; but their numbers in child labor, however, include any work that does not meet the international standards for a minimum age of employment, not all of which is harmful to children, and ILO estimates on hazardous work are based on the sectors children work in, rather than on the tasks they undertake or the conditions of work, which may or may not be hazardous. Nevertheless, there is clear

evidence that many children become engaged in exploitative and harmful work. Children usually engage in such work because somebody (the employer) wants it done and recruits children to do it. That employer is most likely to be a parent or other family member; only a minority of children work for outsiders. Conventional wisdom, with some empirical justification, considers family employers less likely than outside employers to expose their working children to danger or abuse. However, some work in the home can be harmful, and there are many cases in which adults themselves work in demanding and inherently hazardous businesses and bring their children into inappropriate working conditions. One cannot simply assume that work inside the family is better for children than is outside work. Employers recruit child workers for a variety of reasons. Particularly where processes of production are labor intensive, employers recruit any hands available as cheaply as possible to keep costs down. But reasons may be as much social as economic. As helpers in family businesses and farms, for instance, children often provide flexible unpaid labor necessary to make the family livelihood economically viable. Family helping out is a prevalent form of children’s work, and it is frequently valued as a means of learning and community socialization as much as for its economic contribution. Some outside employers hire children through social connections having important non-economic aspects; it is not uncommon for employers to feel a communal obligation to hire economically unnecessary children at the behest of an adult acquaintance from a poor household needing to expand the family income through children’s work. Socially enmeshed and tempered work relationships can generate cases of harmful work, but this is not the norm. The epithet child labor is best reserved for situations in which the employer knowingly recruits children because they are cheaper or more docile than adults, disregards their special needs as children, and consigns them to work or working conditions known to be dangerous. Just because the employer wants a job done does not necessarily oblige a child to do it. The question remains as to how and why children engage in work that can harm them. Research is clear that children’s work becomes particularly important when family income is inadequate to

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support all its needs. In such situations, there may be little choice of jobs, with no safe work available. In extreme poverty, or in emergencies such as when a household earner dies or becomes incapacitated, the situation may be so desperate that the welfare of children is sacrificed to the survival needs of the family. Structural inequality commonly perpetuates poverty situations in which all available work is poorly remunerated and often undertaken in hazardous conditions. Where there is little regard for conditions of work for adults, working children are also likely to suffer. Children sometimes pursue risky work because its rewards— economic, social, or even life-style and pleasure— are substantially higher than in safer work available to them. Sometimes cultural values may result in work so burdensome that children’s development suffers. Girls, for instance, are often expected to spend so much time in household and childcare chores that their schooling suffers. Status can also be a factor: Boys, especially, have been noted to emulate adult colleagues who refuse to adopt safety equipment or processes. When children migrate for work away from supportive networks, they often have little defense against exploitative situations.

Modes of Intervention When children are being harmed by the work they are doing, appropriate intervention is required. It needs to take account of the reasons behind their situation as well as the specific context of their work if it is reliably to improve their situation. If the harm can be removed from the work, the benefits of work can remain; if the harm cannot be removed, removal of the child from that work becomes necessary. Removing Harm From Work

Many cases of children in harmful work that might be classified as child labor can be remedied by fixing the work or working conditions to become safe. Effective solutions have been developed through discussions with the working children, their families, and their employers. When needed, additional local technical expertise can be brought to help identify problems and find solutions, including expertise to help employers

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improve productive processes and so eliminate the need for hazardous work by children. Interventions are most effective when they are iterative, confirming that changes have been effectively implemented and then identifying any remaining problems that need further attention. This is a task for local action. Typically, such intervention is carried out in a low-key manner by local government or community organizations familiar with the situation and actors. In some places, working children acting in their own best interest have (with adult support) organized themselves to ensure that they are not harmed or exploited through work and to advocate for solutions they find helpful. Child-led organizations have a long history of collaboration with local, national, and international agencies to improve the conditions of working children, and some observers suggest that they provide rich developmental experience for their young members. Recently, however, some of these organizations have come into conflict with national and international policies seeking to ban members below a specified legal minimum age from working. Removing Children From Work

Some work or its conditions are so toxic to children that there is no alternative to removing children from it. However, removal from work is no guarantee that they are better off, especially if they are deprived of livelihood and have inadequate other support. To ensure that children benefit from such removal, their physical, mental, and social needs must be met. To that purpose, sound interventions focus on helping children removed from hazardous or otherwise inappropriate work to find alternative safe forms of work. In many places, local organizations and communities have organized well-planned and supervised programs for safe child employment, often of an educative nature and linked to schooling. Business development programs that help improve business productivity and profitability sometimes have the side effect of eliminating specific forms of harmful work done by children. Such changes in business practices are more effective in improving the lives of children when accompanied by additional support programs with and for working children.

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Improving the Social and Economic Environment

Since poverty and lack of essential public services frequently drive children into inappropriate work, poverty alleviation programs—such as government income subsidies to the neediest families—have, along with improvements in transportation and education infrastructure, successfully raised school attendance and achievement rates and reduced the workload of children. Some of that reduced work was in harmful activities. In the growing movement to hold businesses accountable for the way their merchandize is produced, and in particular to ensure that children are not abused in the production chain, a common reaction is to prohibit goods when children have been involved in their production. However, such boycotts can prevent young children from participating and learning in family enterprises and can exclude children from better and safer jobs; some businesses have tried instead to be accountable for the state of children in producing communities in other ways, such as ensuring that their educational and other needs are met. This serves the interests of the children better but is more complex than simply prohibiting their participation in production. Focus on the Local

All around the world, the first line of prevention of child labor is the family, often with backup from the local community. Children’s work is so fraught with situation-specific factors that it demands local responsibility. Protection of working children has been observed to work best when overseen by those closest to the people and social contexts involved. The main challenge today relating to child labor is less to police the population in general, than to find and remedy remaining pockets of harmful child work, which requires mostly local knowledge and initiative.

Child Labor Policy: Critiques and Debates Although local communities are largely responsible for the effective protection and development of their children, most of today’s loud concern around child labor comes from the international community and is about what international policies should be implemented worldwide. This

began at the end of World War I in 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles included the creation of the ILO, tasked with bringing fair labor practices to the world. Among its mandates was the elimination of child labor, then aimed primarily at children who were working full time and seen as losing out on their education, at the same time creating competition that reduced adult employment and wages. The ILO continues to lead much public policy in this field. There are three principle areas of debate relating to current policy and intervention on child labor: first, on the relative importance of principles or norms rather than outcomes in children’s lives; second, on the extension of the concept of child labor to work that does not meet legal standards of age of employment; and third, on the relevance of the views of the children concerned in determining policy and intervention. Principles Versus Outcomes

There is perpetual discussion regarding when policies should be driven by values and should articulate principles and rules based on them, and when they should respond instead to factual evidence of need and be designed to produce tangible outcomes in meeting those needs. Policies based on values and their implementing principles are evaluated according to how well the principles (often in the form of laws) are disseminated and enforced. Evidence-based policies are evaluated according to outcomes, that is, how well they solve identified problems. Both these approaches are represented in national and international policy governing children’s work, having different origins and different results. The ILO, backed by some other national and international organizations, has established international norms and principles through a highly political process that brings governments, employers, and trade unions into an agreement based on its fundamental values. Policy implementation is evaluated according to how completely the principles (i.e., child labor laws) are being recognized, codified in law, and obeyed in practice. Their further impact on child or community well-being is not a major concern and is seldom investigated. Conversely, economic and social development organizations, local programs and projects, and academically based research and projects take a

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more pragmatic problem-solving approach, aimed at improving the well-being of children and others involved. This approach endorses rights and law as important means to foster human flourishing, rather than as ends in themselves: It is not enough to be out of work and in school if children learn little in school and gain little chance of appropriate employment afterwards. Those adopting a pragmatic approach tend to work primarily through development activities, and assess their success according to changes in the well-being of the children, families, and communities that they are intended to serve. These two approaches to children’s work produce very different results. At many points they conflict, and there is a fierce debate about which should prevail. Interpreted very broadly, growing research suggests that policies based on principles and promoting universalized rules through law, such as ILO conventions, may be of limited benefit to  working children, and in many cases may actually harm them. Pragmatic evidence-based policies remedying particular situations and promoting children’s well-being seem on the other hand to more reliably promote beneficial impact on the children, families, and communities involved. Policies promoting locally contextualized interventions hold important practical advantages over universalized national and international policies seeking general conformity. Many academics and children’s rights activist observe that principles-based policy systems often draw from western culture and often reflect lifestyles and values of the elites who decide on their implementation. They purport to be universal; but when imposed in diverse social and cultural contexts, they often exclude local values and bear little relation to realities of family life and growing up. They can end up harming those they were intended to serve. An example is to portray child labor as work “that takes away childhood,” legitimizing without scientific or other justification a minority view of appropriate childhood and denigrating far more common childhoods, known to be at least equally successful, in which young people participate in, and contribute to, their families and communities through part-time work from an early age. These academics and activists argue that such ethnocentrism ensconced in policy undermines children’s well-being and legitimate rights.

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Minimum Age for Employment

The debate concerning norms and outcomes is reflected in the debate about the ILO policy of a minimum age for employment. From the time of its creation in 1919, the ILO has followed a policy of legislation to remove children from labor markets, which arose to prominence in 18th-century England in response to the abuse of children in industry and accompanied a range of social and economic changes that improved the lives of children. The ILO followed the legal precedent with a series of international conventions setting minimum ages for entrance to work; the latest, The Minimum Age Convention (No. 138) of 1973, extends the prohibition to all work that is productive or economic, whether paid or unpaid, thus including unpaid help in family enterprises—which according to ILO estimates comprises two-thirds of child labor today. The set age is defined by countries, normally 15 years, and not less than 14 years or the age to which schooling is compulsory. Specific categories of light work (generally considered to be not more than 14 hours a week) may be permitted up to 2 years below the minimum age; but below the age of 12 years, as little as 1 hour a week of economic activity is classified as child labor. In 1999, the Organization added a convention on The Worst Forms of Child Labour (No. 182) specifically targeting children’s hazardous work; it retains, however, into the 21st century the Minimum Age Convention as the foundation of its program for eliminating child labor. Under the ILO, children’s work is treated in international policy primarily as a labor problem. The Organization’s primary concern is the legal structures it has developed globally toward just conditions of labor. Its interest in working children is subordinate to this overall objective and structure. Within its own program and publications, the ILO defines child labor to include all work that does not meet its minimum-age standard irrespective of whether or not the work is in any way harmful, and it promotes that definition for use by member countries in drafting their policies governing child work. While minimum age policy is widely accepted by governments and international organizations, its effects on children’s well-being have never been empirically evaluated, and it is now criticized by many child work experts, working children’s

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organizations, and many from the human and child rights communities on several grounds: •• The Minimum Age Convention fails to protect children: It does not cover harmful work in noneconomic activities, such as household chores (in current policy, ILO classifies household chores as child labor only when they reach over 28 hours a week, even for a young school-going child), and it pays inadequate attention to conditions of work for those young people above the minimum age. •• Since legal prohibitions on work do not address the reasons why children work, they have limited effect in reducing children’s work. Indeed, enforcement of such prohibitions sometimes drives children into more exploitative and hazardous work. •• The Convention prohibits much work that can be beneficial to children, economically, socially, and developmentally. Policies and programs based on the Convention conflate such prohibited work with harmful work: An underage child helping parents after school in a family business is placed in the same category of child laborer as a child involved in dangerous or exploitative work in a mine or brickyard. •• Minimum age standards ignore the specific situations of children, and interventions based on them can disrupt the lives of disadvantaged children and deny them important opportunities to improve their lives. •• The Convention focuses on a particular area of risk, namely work, and fails to consider the well-being of children considered holistically. •• The Convention has been surpassed. Since the Worst Forms Convention now prohibits all work that is in any way harmful to children of any age, the Minimum Age Convention only adds to the ban work that is not harmful.

Children’s Right to Participation

A further area of debate concerns the right of working children both individually and collectively to participate in the formulation of policies about child labor. Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, children should be heard in decisions that affect them and their views should be given due weight. Children

usually develop a good experiential knowledge of their working situations; they attempt to forge their own lives rather than simply following what is decided by adults. However, working children who wish to challenge current child labor policies—often claiming their right to appropriate and dignified work at any age— have been systematically prevented from taking part in the development and implementation of those policies, partly on grounds that in law children are not recognized as fully autonomous agents capable of deciding on their own best interests. The Regulation of Children’s Work

Historically, children’s work has been regulated as a labor issue, with policy determined and monitored by institutions—such as the ILO and ministries of labor—concerned primarily with labor market matters. Recent discussions in the child protection community have questioned the appropriateness of this institutional framework, suggesting that children’s work might better be overseen by public health, education, and social welfare agencies that have expertise related to children’s well-being and development. Michael Bourdillon, Richard Carothers, and William Myer See also Apprenticeship; Childhood Poverty; Children’s Rights; Children’s Work; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Aufseeser, D., Bourdillon, M., Carothers, R., & Lecoufle, O. (2018). Children’s work and children’s well-being: Implications for policy. Development Policy Review, 36(2), 241–261. doi:10.1111/dpr.12215 Bourdillon, M., Levison, D., Myers, W., & White, B. (2011). Rights and wrongs of children’s work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. doi:10.1086/ 664428 Bourdillon, M., Myers, W., & White, B. (2009). Reassessing working children and minimum-age standards. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 29(3/4), 106–117. Dammert, A. C., de Hoop, J, Mvukiyehe, E., & Rosati, F. C. (2017). Effects of public policy on child labor: Current

Child Labor in Europe, History of knowledge, gaps, and implications for program design (Policy Research Working Paper No. 7999). New York, NY: World Bank. doi:10.1596/1813-9450-7999 De Hoop, J., & Rosati, F. C. (2013). Cash transfers and child labour. Rome, Italy: Understanding Children’s Work Programme. Edmonds, E. V. (2008). Child labor. In T. P. Schultz & J. Strauss (Eds.), Handbook of development economics (pp. 3607–709). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Elsevier Science. Hanson, K., & Vandaele, A. (2003). Working children and international labour law: A critical analysis. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 11(1), 73–146. doi:10.1163/092755603322384038 International Labour Organization. (2017). Global estimates of child labour: Rights and trends 2012– 2016. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Lancy, D. F. (2018). Anthropological perspectives on children as helpers, workers, artisans, and laborers. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/ 978-1-137-53351-7_3 Levison, D., & Murray-Close, M. (2005). Challenges in determining how child work affects child health. Public Health Reports, 120, 1–12. doi:10.1177/ 003335490512000609 Liebel, M. (2004). A will of their own: Cross-cultural perspectives on working children. New York, NY: Zed Books. doi:10.1163/15718182-02303002 Liebel, M. (2015). Protecting the rights of working children instead of banning child labour: Bolivia tries a new legislative approach. International Journal of Children‘s Rights, 23, 529–547. Weston, B. H. (Ed.). (2005). Child labor and human rights. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner. Woodhead, M. (2004). Psychosocial impacts of child work: A framework for research, monitoring and intervention. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 12(4), 321–377. doi:10.1163/1571818043603607

Child Labor History of

in

Europe,

This entry provides an overview of child labor in Europe from the 16th to early 20th centuries. In this entry, the term child labor is used to describe forms of labor carried out by children under 15 years of age in contexts where they were treated as part of a labor force, whether the work is paid or unpaid. First, the controversial character of the

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issue is noted with a focus on differences between past and present forms of childhood labor. The specific forms of child labor discussed include rural child labor, child labor in poor-relief institutions, industrial child labor, and child labor in urban environment.

Child Labor’s History and Surprising Return In the 1950s, paid child labor in Europe was so marginal and primary school attendance so universal that child workers appeared to belong to the past, except for primary-school age children working on family farms. The International Labour Review of the International Labour Organization scanned the issue globally. At the time, nobody could have imagined that paid child labor would return in the West. Its return in the 1980s brought about new scholarship on child labor in Europe in the past and the revival of the controversy over its pros and cons. Childhood in the past often appears harsher than today. Due to higher mortality, many children lost one or both parents, while many children lost all contact with their parents in turmoil during wars and troubled times. Moreover, the hardships of life resulted in high numbers of abandoned children. Before school education became the rule, children learned the skills they would need primarily by trying to equal adults around. Many skills, always learned by doing, took years to master. Children’s nimble fingers, frequently referred to in the context of factory children, were not inborn but an outcome of routines to give children from tender age tasks that trained them in dexterousness. Hence people had good knowledge of children’s capacity for work and labor at different ages. The age of 7 years was recognized as a turning point by peasants from Spain and France to Scotland, Sweden, and Russia. Other commonly acknowledged ages included 12 years, after which also the division of labor by gender was applied, and 14 or 15 years that generally signified the end of childhood.

Rural Child Labor Before the 20th century, in Europe, the great majority of children lived in the countryside. Rural

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childhood changed along with the changing countryside. The development known as the commercialization of agriculture that commenced in the 18th century brought with it labor-intensive novelties that probably increased the use of and demand for child labor. Conversely, in outlying villages, from Greek mountains to northern forests, rural children may not have been burdened with all the labor connected with commercial agriculture. Children who grew up in the home farm were gradually introduced to the many tasks and skills needed in traditional agriculture, starting with fetching firewood and water, weeding, picking up stones, and digging potatoes. Children were entrusted with poultry and pigs close to the house, but it was risky to entrust them with goats, sheep, and cows grazing far from villages in the wild where wolves roamed. Only past the age of 13 years or so were children robust enough for work that required stamina, such as milking and plowing. Owing to the widespread poverty that characterized rural Europe, farmers could always get other children prepared for work and labor that their own children shunned. Children of cottagers and underlings were utilized as child minders, shepherds, herders, and helpers to their parents, with or without specific pay. Moreover, many pauper children were part of agricultural labor gangs. In the central Italian countryside, they consisted of men, women, and children; in the English countryside often of women and children. Two factors increased the demand for children for herding: the privatization of land and the expansion of animal husbandry. Initially in the 17th century during the Thirty Years’ War, and for the last time in 1914, children from the Austrian Alps, known as Schwabenkinder, walked long distances in the spring, all the way to German Upper Swabia where they were hired for herding, and then in the fall walked back home. In most of Europe, it was a general practice to farm out abandoned, orphaned, and deprived children to private households, preferably to the countryside. Children worked for their keep, but because growing children consumed more than they produced, receiving households were commonly paid ready money for taking them. This gave the system a mercenary character; as a consequence, farmed-out children may have been overworked. Such non-family children may have

had an opportunity to go to school only after effective implementation of compulsory primary education.

Child Labor in Poor-Relief Institutions In the 16th century, with the expanding beggary, medieval practices concerning the poor gave way to new measures that included the principle that destitute children should maintain themselves by working. The new policy spread in Catholic and Protestant Europe from country to country and reached Orthodox Russia in the 18th century. Orphanages and foundling homes adopted the practice of obligatory labor by children in their custody. Children might also be placed to work together with adults in workhouses and pauper hospices. Children were set to work with anything considered suitable for children of humble origin, such as spinning, spooling, pin making, card making, button making, tobacco spinning, and the like. Boys were set in weaving, shoemaker work, and garden work, while girls in sewing, embroidery, and knitting stockings. In the best case, at the age of 12 years or so, boys were apprenticed and girls were put out as servants. However, with large numbers of deprived children, pauper boys placed in workshops became just cheap child labor, workhouse boys may have been passed for the navy, as in England, and many children were offered as servants and labor force to anyone, including manufacturers. Contrary to expectations, closed institutions based on compulsory labor proved costly, mainly because of the low productivity of work and poor quality and salability of products. Moreover, due to poor hygiene conditions in such institutions, children’s mortality rates were high, which was another reason for why authorities preferred to farm out pauper children in private households. However, the idea of labor as morally beneficial to poor children persisted: charitable workshops for urban folk-school children who earned meals by working were established in late 19th-century Scandinavia.

Industrial Child Labor In the past, before machine-made products, all children learned to make useful articles with the

Child Labor in Europe, History of

help of relatively uncomplicated tools. Such traditional labor was transformed into industrial child labor, when children had to contribute to family subsistence. Children were engaged in commissioned rural cottage industries as early as in 16th-century Spain and Italy and eventually in many other countries. In early manufactories that applied division of labor, children worked in conditions that contemporaries paralleled with workhouses. Children also worked underground, in England and Belgium in coal mines, in mid-19th-century Spain in a mercury mine. Some boys aged 14 years died in accidents in French mines as late as the 1920s. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children, urban and rural, were engaged in poorly paid piecework at home, known as “outwork or putting-out work.” It involved long working hours and was often quite exhausting for children, but it was no concern for contemporaries, no more than child labor out of sight in brickyards, glassworks, and workshops. In the 19th century, a new phenomenon, factory children, emerged. The harmful working conditions of factory children shocked some contemporaries and were also in due course reported by factory inspectors. However, other contemporaries welcomed factories as an opportunity for needy children to make their living without resorting to poor relief. The champion of the so-called first industrial revolution was the British textile industry. It applied technology that required large numbers of child workers. The model of British textile mills was followed in many other countries; hence, in the late 19th-century textiles, alone or together with garment industries, were the largest employers of children in at least 10 European countries including Portugal, France, Germany, and Russia. Only a handful of other sectors, varying somewhat from country-to-country, employed notable numbers of children in the decades preceding 1914. Factory laws and the introduction of compulsory primary education have generally been credited for the decline of industrial child labor. However, industrial child labor declined also in countries with no noteworthy agitation against it and school attendance also increased in countries that had not introduced compulsory education.

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Another line of reasoning assumes that with more professional assessment of profitability, the demand for children declined due to their low productivity. Moreover, it should be emphasized that 19thcentury reformers strove for the regulation of industrial child labor, not its abolishment. In fact, established industrialists lobbied for stricter child labor laws than reformers, because they needed national laws and international conventions that would shield them from unfair competition. Contrary to received ideas, 19th-century laws were not enacted as first steps toward the abolition of industrial child labor. They began to appear as such only in hindsight.

Child Labor in Urban Environments Since the 18th century, Europe has witnessed repeated waves of young people leaving the countryside. Many boys signed up to work on ships, but many more left for cities to work in mills, construction sites, backstreet workshops, and as chimney sweeps. Girls left for textile mills, seamstress workshops, and domestic service positions. Most children migrated with parents, but there were also middlemen who supplied masters with children. They traveled around impoverished countryside and purchased children from credulous parents. In the 19th century, Italian children amusing passers-by earned money for their masters in distant St. Petersburg, but St. Petersburg also housed child workers purchased nearby in the Finnish countryside. The advantages of having school education were very evident in the urban life of the late 19th century. In most of Europe, working-class children as a rule went to school at least for several years. In cities, it was possible to combine school with work. Out of school hours, children delivered newspapers, milk or bread, ran errands, and sold printed matter, flowers, and haberdashery in the streets. Boys did shoe polishing and carried shopping baskets and travelers’ suitcases. Girls were engaged in retail-trade shops, in household services, and as maids-of-all-work. Children making money in the streets may have been truly deprived, but in most cases, they were ordinary working-class children who had homes and went to school. Authorities once viewed these

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children as a social problem. In the 21st century, they would more likely be viewed as enterprising since such qualities are highly valued in today’s service-oriented, commercial urban economy. Marjatta Rahikainen See also History of Childhood; Working Children

Further Readings Becchi, E., & Julia, D. (Eds.). (1998). Histoire de l’enfance en occident: 2. Du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours [A history of childhood in Western Europe: Vol. 2. From the 18th century to the present]. Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil. doi:10.1162/jinh.1999.30.2.296 De Coninck-Smith, N., Sandin, B., & Schrumpf, E. (Eds.). (1997). Industrious children: Work and childhood in the Nordic Countries 1850–1990. Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press. Cunningham, H., & Viazzo, P. P. (Eds.). (1996). Child labour in historical perspective: 1800–1985: Case studies from Europe, Japan, and Colombia. Florence, Italy: UNICEF: Istituto degli Innocenti. doi:10.1017/ s0020859000114403 Heywood, C. (2001). A history of childhood: Children and childhood in the west from medieval to modern times. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Hindman, H. D. (Ed.). (2009). The world of child labor: An historical and regional survey. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Lieten, K., & van Neederveen Meerkerk, E. (Eds.). (2011). Child labour’s global past, 1650–2000. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. doi:10.3726/978-30351-0218-5 Naumovic´, S., & Jovanovic´, M. (Eds.). (2004). Childhood in South East Europe: Historical perspectives on growing up in the 19th and 20th century. Münster, Germany: Lit Verelag. Rahikainen, M. (2017 [2004]). Centuries of child labour: European experiences from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. London, UK: Routledge [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate]. doi:10.4324/9781315260716-7

Child Marriage Child marriage is the formal union between two children or adolescents who have not reached the legal age of adulthood and are considered minors. It was a common practice among many different

ethnic groups to ensure the financial security of young girls, the well-being of the young couple, and the continuity of cultural practices of the group. A critical examination of long-term effects of child marriage through developmental and sociological lenses highlights both the positive, and most likely negative effects of child marriage especially on young girls. This entry reviews rationale for child marriage, how child marriage is defined internationally, and the effects of early marriage on young girls. First, this entry discusses how the legal age of majority is connected to marriage.

The Legal Age of Majority and Marriage Children transition into adulthood when they attain legal age of majority and are able to provide consent for marriage and other legally binding activities. Legal age of majority in most jurisdictions is 18 years with some countries having raised their age of maturity to 21 years. Children who are married are often considered emancipated and can make decisions that affect their own well-being. They are also free from the authority of their parents and can partake in many adult sanctioned sociocultural activities. Based on some cultural practices, child marriage for girls is considered when a girl reaches puberty or begins menstruating and can bear children. For adolescent males getting married can be either a rite of passage or a sanctioned path toward adulthood.

Child Marriage Practices Traditional child marriage practices existed as a way for families to secure resources or fulfill cultural obligations. Examples of current child marriage practices can be found in sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, South America, rural China, and other parts of SouthEast Asia. Child marriage existed and exists in some form even in developed countries that have policies against early marriage. Based on United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund’s 2017 Report on the State of the World’s Children, the countries with the highest rate of child marriage include Niger with approximately 76% of girls marrying before the age of 18 years,

Child Marriage

followed by the Central African Republic at 68% and closely by Chad at 67%. The prevalence of child marriage continues due to various reasons. Parents wanting to create familial alliances would arrange marriages between children even as young as babies. Betrothals or formal marriage contracts between two families would specify both the plan for future marriage and transfer of resources. Arranged child marriages were common among the aristocracy and practiced in many regions of the world. An arranged marriage is a type of marital union where the selection of bride and groom are done either by family members, parents, or in cases of royalty, selection of partners can be made by political bodies or other interest groups. Arranged marriages of children were practiced by royalty to secure alliances and political connections. That public view and acceptance of child marriage set a precedent for others within the community to view the practice in a positive light and to secure resources or strengthen familial alliances. In many arranged child marriages, the marriage contract could specify cash or property transfer, the bride price or dowry, which is a transfer of either resources, money, or property from the grooms to the bride’s family at the time of marriage, or any rights to the product of that union such as children or joint property acquired during the marriage. Familial agreements could dictate clan and familial affiliation, how children would be raised, and the family name that they would carry. In agricultural or agrarian societies that relied on farming or physical labor ensuring that there were individuals to work the fields and continuity of land ownership rights strengthened arranged marriages and alliances between different families. Families often had multiple children and each child was another resource and pair of hands to help with farming. Children as young as five partook in many home-based labor activities such as household chores and working in the field with their parents or caregivers. As societies moved from agricultural, preindustrial, and postindustrial development, the family unit also changed from communal or clan-based configurations to nuclear families. The shift from agriculture to industry and working in city centers forced families, including young adolescents and adults, to migrate in search for work and better economic

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opportunities. Adolescent males entering the workforce delayed child marriage for boys; this also had an impact on the availability of marriage partners for girls. Parents with means and resources to educate their daughters improved the health and mental health of those girls by delaying marriage until their primary or secondary education was complete. During the early industrial era, children’s participation in the labor market was common, that participation continued to decrease during the postindustrial and globalization era to regions with higher rates of poverty or lack of economic opportunities. The practice of child marriage continued through early industrial societies that relied heavily on physical labor and receded in societies that relied more skilled labor, which had an effect of delaying marriage until each partner had acquired both the schooling and skills required to support their own families.

Child Marriage and International Conventions The economic and cultural shifts that occurred in the early 18th and 19th centuries shaped the classification of both childhood and adulthood. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was a key document in changing notions on what constitutes childhood and rights accorded to children. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a human rights treaty that specifies civil, social, economic, political, health, and cultural rights of children. The convention was introduced in 1989 and came into force September 2, 1990. Childhood is considered the stage from birth until the child reaches puberty. The legal definition of childhood and legal age of majority was established by the CRC and defined a child as any human being below the age of 18 years old, or in cases where local jurisdictions specify another age of majority. CRC has international universal agreement and is the basis for laws and policies around child safety and child protection in many countries. This international treaty is ratified by 192-member countries, with 196 countries that are signatories apart from the United States. It stipulates basic human rights for children, and outlines civil, political, economic, health, and sociocultural rights of children. The guiding principles of the

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convention include the best interests of the child as its primary tenet. The convention stipulates developmental rights such as; access to adequate food, shelter, water, and education, including protection rights form child abuse and neglect, participation rights to express their emotions and opinions, and decision-making rights especially in cases of child marriage. Even though CRC stipulates that a child has inalienable rights and protections under this convention which includes protection against forced marriage, based on the United Nations Population Fund 2012 document, there are 146 countries which have customary laws that allow girls to get married with parental consent under the age of majority or 18 years. Out of those 105 countries allow boys to marry under the age of 18 years with parental consent.

Poverty, Inequality, and Child Marriage Inherent inequalities around marriage laws and protections especially for girls are major issues that remain unaddressed. Children, mostly girls, are forced to marry at young ages due to ingrained cultural traditions or economic pressures. Countries with the highest rates of child marriage have the lowest gross domestic product and greater rates of inequity. In 2014, the United Nations Children’s Funds reported that countries such as Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, and Bangladesh had child marriage rates close to 70%. Countries that have continuing high child marriage rates are concentrated in resource poor regions such as central Africa, South-East Asia, and some areas of central and South America. Poverty is a key driver in the perpetuation of child marriage. Girls living in poverty are less likely to refuse child marriage and parental consent around their betrothals. Poverty reinforces some of the cultural practices around child marriage. Cultural practices and rationale around child marriage dictate that when a girl reaches puberty she enters a new phase in development and can assume roles of caretaker and mother. Once a girl gets married she is often treated as a woman, even though she might not be developmentally ready to assume that role. For many girls around the world, cultural beliefs, practices, and traditions are drivers for the continued practice of child marriage.

Parents and caregivers see child marriage as a way to secure their daughter’s future, especially if they themselves are poor and do not have the means to provide for their health and education. Girls can be seen as a commodity or economic burden for most parents, especially in cultures where parents are required to provide dowries during marriage. Parents may opt to settle debts, or form alliances with other families through child marriages. They also might arrange for marriage of their daughters to families or grooms that provide higher bride prices or return of goods and services for a girl. The girls are placed in vulnerable positions; they may not be able to refuse a husband’s sexual advances. Girls who have not reached puberty and are not ready for sexual activity are at highest risk of spousal abuse and lack the agency to refuse any sexual advances. Girls’ vulnerability to early marriage increases during economic, political, and humanitarian crises. Parents are more apt to marry their daughters to secure their daughter’s safety or obtain critically needed resources for themselves. The rationale for child marriage is multifaceted and involves both economic, cultural, and individual reasons to engage in the practice.

Effect of Child Marriage on Child Development The impact of child marriage on children and child development is well documented. It includes increased risk of domestic violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and death due to pregnancy and childbirth complications. Children, especially girls who marry before the age of 18 years, are at greater risk of interpersonal violence, are more likely to remain uneducated, have fewer economic opportunities, and fall into the same poverty cycles as their parents. Young first-time mothers more likely experience health complications compared to older women. They are more likely to experience preeclampsia, anemia, and hypertension and are at increased risk for low birth weight or premature babies. Adolescent or first-time mothers might not have the right resources or support to care for a young or a needy infant, which can lead to increased rates of under-five mortality rates in many regions with high child marriages and adolescent pregnancies and births. Child brides are often married to older men who might have had

Child Mortality

multiple sexual partners, which places these girls at greater risk for both sexually transmitted diseases and HIV infection. Furthermore, exposure to HIV or other sexually diseases might not be treated on a timely manner, which adds to the continued inequity and disparity for child brides.

Interventions to Mitigate Child Marriage Sociological, anthropological, and psychological literature on marriage practices globally highlight the complex and nuanced issues of child marriage and how to address this issue appropriately. Interventions include education at the community level about the effects of child marriage, increased access to health and mental health services for young mothers, increased access to education, including subsidizing young girl’s education and other poverty reduction measures for their families and caregivers. Cash transfer programs have shown a positive effect in the reduction of child marriage among girls in Bangladesh and India. To change perceptions around child marriage social norms around the legitimation of this practice needs to be addressed at the international, country, and regional levels as an issue, and alternative patterns of caregiving practices introduced at the community and family levels. The Millennium Development Goals included ending child marriage as a priority development agenda. The Millennium Development Goals favored designing’s both programs and policies that support the reinforcement of legal minimum age for marriage to 18 years and delaying marriage for both girls and boys until they are ready to partake in their own decision making. The Sustainable Development Goals have also focused on ending child marriage by 2030 and 193 countries have pledged to implement measures to achieve this goal. Ending child marriage achieves at least eight Sustainable Development Goals, including gender equality, reduction of inequalities and poverty, increased social justice, economic growth, education, health, and well-being. United Nations bodies for protection and child welfare have prioritized education as a method to address child marriage especially for girls. Research shows that girls who complete their formal education are more likely to have better health and mental health, increased economic opportunities,

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and are often better mothers. The focus on having girls remain in school and complete their formal education delays early marriage, with the added benefit of increasing the gross domestic product for countries. The delay of child marriage reduces burdens for social and health-care services, increases overall productivity of its citizens, and improves overall population health. Reframing child marriage as a human rights violation that curtails a child’s health and social well-being should be on the developmental agenda as a priority for most developed and developing countries, it is the single most issue that has the greatest return for future generations. Manasi Kumar, Keng-Yen Huang, and Besa Bauta See also Childhood Poverty; Children’s Rights; Consent, Sexual Girlhood

Further Readings Dahl, G. B. (2010). Early teen marriage and future poverty. Demography (Pre-2011), 47(3), 689–718. doi:10.1353/dem.0.0120 United Nations Children’s Fund. (2005). Early marriage: A harmful traditional practice. Retrieved from https:// www.unicef.org/publications/index_26024.html United Nations Children’s Fund. (2014). Ending child marriage: Progress and prospects. New York, NY. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/media/files/ Child_Marriage_Report_7_17_LR.pdf United Nations Children’s Fund. (2018). Child protection from violence, exploitation and abuse: Child marriage. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/ protection/57929_58008.htmlb United Nations Population Fund. (2012). Marrying too young: End child marriage. New York, NY. doi:10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/e1716 Walker, J. (2012). Early marriage in Africa-trends, harmful effects and interventions. African Journal of Reproductive Health, 16(2), 23–140.

Child Mortality Child mortality, also known as child death, refers to the death of children under a particular age. Substantial reductions in child mortality have

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occurred in the last two centuries. However, according to the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, 5.6 million children younger than 5 years old still die every year, mostly from preventable diseases. In major Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation countries, the under-five mortality rate has declined from, in many cases, more than 300 to less than 10 per 1,000 live births in the last 200 years. This trend has accelerated in recent years. In the last half of the 20th century, many developing countries achieved this level of decline in a much shorter period. Such a dramatic decline in child mortality has provided profound benefits to our society through human capital accumulation, but some countries still lag behind and do not enjoy such benefits. This entry provides an overview of the measurement of child mortality and the analysis of child mortality, worldwide patterns and trends in child mortality, and recent challenges in reducing child mortality under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Measuring Child Mortality In everyday usage, childhood covers the period from birth to adolescence. However, the term is generally nonspecific in its time span. The typical age patterns of age-specific mortality start high at birth, and then decline to the minimum level around age 10 years, before increasing again for older age groups. To quantify the probability of death from birth to a particular age, several indicators have been proposed. Some of the widely used indicators are neonatal (less than 28 days) mortality rate, infant (less than 1 year old) mortality rate, and under-five (less than 5 years old) mortality rate. These widely used indicators focus on the survival or death of children before the age of attending primary school. In 2016, the probability of death among children aged 5–14 years was 7.5 deaths per 1,000 children. This is substantially lower than the probability of death among children under age 5 years (41 deaths per 1,000 live births). The under-five mortality rate is defined as the number of deaths of children under age 5 years per 1,000 live births in a given year. This measure is often called U5MR, or simply the child mortality rate. It is regarded as a critical indicator

to summarize child mortality and welfare in global development. The mortality status of children has traditionally been summarized by the infant mortality rate rather than the under-five mortality rate. The infant mortality rate refers to the number of deaths of children under age 1 year per 1,000 live births. The infant mortality rate has been historically used as an important measure of childhood mortality and well-being, although its popularity has waned in recent years. In many circumstances, the under-five and infant mortality rates are used similarly. However, there are several reasons why one should consider them as two separate indicators. First, a substantial proportion of deaths in childhood take place between the ages of 1 and 5 years, especially in high-mortality countries. In some countries like Niger and Chad, infant deaths account for less than 60% of under-five deaths, whereas in countries like Barbados and Montenegro, infant deaths account for more than 90% of under-five deaths. Second, different causes of deaths are important during the first month of life, the period of breast-feeding, and the period after breast-feeding. During the first month of life, the causes of death are more biological and less amenable to socioeconomic interventions. Meanwhile, the causes of death in the postnatal period are more related to standard of living factors. Third, the infant mortality rate is more easily obtainable than under-five mortality. In countries where civil registration is not available, the death of infants can be obtained by retrospective questions in a census or surveys. In the United States, the Mortality Statistics of the Census prior to 1900 included the question of the ages of those who died during the census year. Combining the number of deaths of individuals less than 1-yearold with the number of births in the same census year, one can indirectly calculate the infant mortality rate, even when there is no civil registration system. However, in order to calculate the underfive mortality rate, one needs to track the survival of infants for at least 5 years. This requires an effective civil registration system. The traditional use of infant mortality rate as an indicator of economic development acquires greater relevance if it is used together with the under-five mortality rate. For this reason, both

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under-five and infant mortality rates are used to track progress in reducing child mortality and to evaluate countries’ performance related to MDG 4 and SDG 3.

A Brief History of the Study of Child Mortality The study of child mortality requires both highquality birth and death data. Prior to the 16th century, there were no written records of child mortality. Some studies obtained the mortality rate in this period from the analysis of ages at death based on the excavation of burial grounds. However, such data are very sketchy and hardly represent the population. For this reason, most hypotheses about child mortality prior to the 16th century have been derived by using population backcasting to the past or on extrapolations from child mortality from uncivilized tribes in some parts of the world today. Beginning in approximately 1500, written records on child mortality were available in some parts of Western Europe and Japan, at least for some subpopulations. In the area of historical demography, estimates of child mortality for periods prior to the emergence of civil (vital) registration systems could have been obtained from parish registers, village registers such as the Japanese Shumon Artame-cho, family histories, or written records of sub-populations such as the English aristocracy. The statistical analysis of child mortality started in the 17th century at the latest. In 1662, John Graunt, a British haberdasher and part-time protodemographer, published his “Bills of Mortality,” the first known life table based on real data. This book was considered to be the first publication to estimate child mortality, but this has been rarely explored. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that the statistical analysis of child mortality emerged in its modern form. As a result of the Births and Deaths Act of 1874, birth and death registration was made compulsory starting in 1875. William Farr, a British epidemiologist, first used the current definition of infant mortality rate without explicitly using the term infant when he reported deaths in 1875. In 1906, Sir George Newman, a British physician, published his famous book titled “Infant Mortality: A Social Problem.” By 1910, the foundations of the early infant

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welfare movement had been laid, but its achievements did not occur until the following decades. The study of child mortality has become increasingly global in the 20th century. The first internationally agreed classification of death, currently known as the “International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems,” came into operation in 1900. This enabled researchers to make valid comparisons of the causes of child mortality patterns in different populations in different countries. Nine revisions have been released since then, and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems-10 is currently used to code death certificates worldwide. Today, nationally representative estimates of infant and under-five mortality can be obtained from several different sources, including vital registration, sample surveys, and census. Vital registration data are the preferred data source for child mortality estimation. However, these are not available for all countries due to the lack of wellfunctioning civil registration systems. In 1970, only 28% of global deaths were registered, but 45% of global deaths were registered in 2013. However, only 40 of 194 countries reported highquality cause-of-death data to the World Health Organization. In low and lower middle-income countries where high quality data are not available, household surveys, such as the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the Demographic and Health Surveys, have been used for the primary source of data on under-five mortality. These surveys are nationally representative household surveys that provide data for a wide range of topics in the areas of population. These surveys ask mothers about the survival of their children, and it is these reports that provide the basis of child mortality estimates. However, if these mothers had died before the surveys were conducted, the retrospective fertility surveys cannot track the birth records of their children. Therefore, these surveys tend to underestimate the under-five mortality rate, if not adjusted for maternal death.

Global Patterns and Historical Trends in Child Mortality The Scandinavian countries have detailed demographical data that predate other European

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countries. Sweden has been of particular interest, as it has high-quality civil registration data dating back to capture the initial decline of mortality in the last half of the 18th century. In Sweden, underfive mortality appears to have slowly declined with some fluctuations from approximately 300 in 1800 to 200 in 1860. It then declined steadily to a level of about 150 around 1900, fell more rapidly to around 40 in 1945, and then continued to decline slowly toward its current level, 3. The global estimate of child mortality documents that global child mortality fell from 182 in 1960 to 41 in 2016. This has been a substantial achievement, and showed that the decline of child mortality in the late 20th or early 21st century is faster than the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The proportion of under-five deaths that occur within the first month of life (the neonatal period) has increased from 37% in 1990 to 46% in 2016. The share of neonatal deaths among under-five deaths is still relatively low in sub-Saharan Africa (36%), which also remains the region with the highest under-five mortality rates. In the regions of Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Europe, where under-five mortality rates are low, more than half of all under-five deaths occur during the neonatal period. As the causes of mortality later in childhood are declining faster, there is a shift in the timing of child deaths closer and closer to the time of birth. In a 2015 study published in The Lancet, Li Liu and colleagues presented estimates on the changes of causes of deaths among children from 2000 and 2013. During this period, the smallest decline (0.2%) was achieved for pertussis or whooping cough, whereas the largest decline was achieved for measles (12.8%) for which a vaccination is widely available due to Goal 4 of the MDGs. The leading causes of death among children under age five include preterm birth complications (17%), pneumonia (15%), intrapartum-related complications (11%), diarrhea (9%), and malaria (7%). It is worth noting that a number of countries suffered a temporary slowdown or even reversal in under-five mortality rates during the 1980s and 1990s before accelerating once more during the 2000s. In sub-Saharan Africa, child mortality reversals were observed in a number of countries like Cameroon, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zambia in the 1980s and 1990s. Russia and

other former–Soviet Union countries experienced a reversal of child mortality due to economic turmoil in the early 1990s after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Political turmoil in Rwanda in the early 1990s also temporarily reversed the trend of child mortality rates. Several interventions have critically reduced the child mortality rate. Providing adequate nutrition, prenatal care, and the prevention of infectious diseases with vaccinations certainly decrease the child mortality rate. Babies delivered with a skilled birth attendant, which is included as an indicator for improving maternal health (Goal 5 of the MDGs), also have a greater chance of child survival.

Child Mortality in the Era of MDGs and SDGs Global concern of child mortality gained greater attention with the introduction of the MDGs in 2000 in which the reduction of child mortality is included under Goal 4. Goal 4 of the MDGs proposes to reduce the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. Fifteen years later, the under-five mortality rate dropped from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 43 in 2015 (or from 12.7 million in 1990 to almost 6 million in 2015). Globally, the annual rate of reduction in the under-five mortality rate has increased from 1.9% in 1990–2000 to 4.0% in 2000–2015. Despite these gains, progress remains insufficient to reach Goal 4 of the MDG, particularly in Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Southern Asia. Under-five deaths are now increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. As of 2013, approximately half of under-five deaths occur in only five countries: China, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. In 2015, the world began working toward a new global development agenda, called the SDGs, seeking to achieve its goal by 2030. The proposed SDG target for child mortality aims to end, by 2030, preventable deaths of newborns and children under 5 years of age; all countries are aiming to reduce neonatal mortality to as low as 12 deaths per 1,000 live births and under-five mortality to as low as 25 deaths per 1,000 live births. The establishment of a birth registration system is also included in target 16.9 of the SDGs, which

Child Neglect

have an explicit aim to ensure access to highquality civil registration systems. Indicator 17.19.2 is proposed to measure three separate countrylevel demographic and health data collection: the status of conducting at least one population and housing census in the past 10 years, having achieved 100% birth registration and 80% death registration. According to the United Nations Development Program, 138 of 246 countries had birth registration data that were at least 90% complete today. In sub-Saharan Africa, only eight of 53 countries reached that level of coverage. During the same period, 144 countries had death registration data that were at least 75% complete. In sub-Saharan Africa, only nine in 53 countries met this standard. As discussed in the previous sections, improved birth and death registration data will enable more accurate and timely monitoring of the under-five mortality rate. Little progress has been made in birth and death registration over the past 30–40 years. However, substantial progress in this area is expected with a further reduction in under-five mortality rate in the next decade under the SDGs. Hiroaki Matsuura See also Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS); Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Further Readings Hill, K. (1995). The decline of childhood mortality (Chapter 3). In L. S. Julian (Ed.), The state of humanity (pp. 37–50). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Infant Mortality Rate. (2017). Health, health care, millennial development goals (MDGs), sustainable development goals (SDGs). Liu, L., Oza, S., Hogan, D., Perin, J., Rudan, I., Lawn, J. E., . . . Black, R. E. (2015). Global, regional, and national causes of child mortality in 2000–2013, with projections to inform post-2015 priorities: An updated systematic analysis. The Lancet, 385(9966), 430–440. doi:10.1016/s0140–6736(14)61698-6 Roser, M. (2018). Child mortality. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality UNIGME. (2017). Levels and trends in child mortality: Report 2017. Retrieved from http://childmortality.org/ files_v21/download/IGME%20report%202017%20 child%20mortality%20final.pdf

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Child Neglect Child neglect is broadly understood as a form of maltreatment by omission, a failure of parents or carers to provide for the basic needs of a child. Usually, neglect has a chronic nature, and the resulting harm may be cumulative and not immediately evident. Whereas there is agreement on the broad understanding of neglect, the precise scope of such maltreatment is difficult to define. This entry defines child neglect, explores its prevalence (with a specific focus on the United Kingdom), and examines some of the medical, legal, and social issues raised by child neglect.

Defining Child Neglect In England (an example of jurisdiction providing a definition of neglect), the Department of Health has issued statutory guidance to agencies and professionals working with children, which defines neglect as the persistent failure, on the parts of parents or carers, to meet a child’s basic physical and/or psychological needs, likely to result in the serious impairment of the child’s health or development. The precise boundaries of what constitutes neglect remain here undefined, but neglect is said to involve parents or carers failing to provide adequate food, clothing, and shelter; appropriate supervision; medical care; or failing to protect the child from physical or emotional harm. Neglect is usually differentiated in physical and emotional/psychological. •• ‘Physical neglect’ involves nutritional and medical neglect, educational neglect, inadequate supervision, and inadequate shelter. •• ‘Emotional neglect’ involves unresponsiveness to the child’s emotional and psychological needs. Exposing children to domestic violence, silencing them, and giving them responsibilities that are not congruent with their developmental stage may all fall under the category of emotional neglect.

The notion of neglect poses important definitional challenges; it is not easy to identify a threshold that distinguishes failures that are not neglectful from failures that are neglectful. It is similarly unclear what the indicators of neglect are

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and what the threshold of legitimate intervention is. Some definitional and practical problems are outlined in the following sections.

Prevalence In England, over 24,000 children were identified as in need of protection from neglect in 2018, and the Department for Education has identified neglect as the underlying problem in nearly half of all initial referrals to social services. According to the Global Health Observatory, the lifetime prevalence of child neglect worldwide is 16.3% (2014). Global estimates are likely to be approximate, partly because the understanding of what constitutes a basic need of a child changes significantly across cultures and partly because child protection services are not equally accessible across the world. The burden of poverty, particularly in the Global South, the increase in migration, and the number of displaced children may be responsible for further and pervasive forms of child neglect globally. In these cases, however, child neglect should be understood as ‘societal’ neglect rather than parental.

Health Implications Child neglect has major public health implications. Neglect has hideous consequences for the victims: eating anomalies, increased susceptibility to infections, delayed development (late walking, problems toileting, and language delay), difficulties with concentration, problems with bonding, low self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. Neglect may result in social isolation/exclusion, behavioural difficulties, and poor attainment at school. In adulthood, neglect is associated with substance misuse, criminal activity, sexually exploitative relationships, selfharm, suicide attempts, and difficulties in forming relationships. Emotional abuse and emotional neglect also retain statistically significant relationships with adult personality psychology. Children exhibit significant variability in their response to neglect. Children who have alternative positive caregiving experiences are usually more resilient to neglect. Genetic factors may also moderate the outcome of various forms of maltreatment. Neglect nonetheless continues to remain the most frequent form of maltreatment (more frequent than physical or sexual abuse), and in the

United States, it is either the sole cause or the contributory cause of the majority of child deaths. Psychopathology symptoms appear to be independent of the country and cultural context.

Child Neglect in Law The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 expanded the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) to children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has had significant impact on the development of national child protection legislation and international law. Following the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Right of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography (A/RES/54/263), and the Optional Protocol to the CRC regarding the use of children in armed conflict (A/RES/54/263) entered into force, respectively, on January 18 and February 12, 2002. The Committee on the Right of the Child defines neglect as the failure to meet children’s physical or psychological needs, protect them from danger, or obtain medical, birth registration, or other services. In the United Kingdom, the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 made it a criminal offence for someone who is responsible for a child to fail to provide him/her with adequate ‘food, clothing, medical aid, and shelter’. The Serious Crime Act 2015 has amended the 1933 Act, and it now includes suffering of a psychological nature amongst the realm of culpable omissions (Part I ‘Cruelty to persons under 16 years’). Thus emotional/psychological neglect may also constitute, potentially, a criminal offence, under UK law. In some jurisdictions, parents are neglectful only if they possess the resources that a child needs but are unwilling to provide them. In the United States, for example, in Nevada, neglect is defined as a failure to provide ‘when able to do so’. In Wisconsin, parents are not neglectful if they fail to provide ‘because of poverty’.

Conceptual and Practical Issues Around Child Neglect Whereas extreme forms of child neglect may be easy to identify (e.g., children left to starve), the

Child Neglect

notion of neglect poses significant conceptual, practical challenges, as well as political challenges (see next section). •• ‘Nutrition’: Defining what constitutes an acceptable standard of nutritional care is highly problematic. A child who does not maintain a growth appropriate for his/her age may be neglected, but how about a child who is not encouraged, say, to eat vegetables? According to a 2014 report, around 70 children were taken into care in the United Kingdom in the previous 5 years because of morbid obesity. Obesity in childhood is associated with obesity in adulthood, morbidity, and premature mortality. Thus, whereas a child who does not achieve the expected physical development may be clearly neglected, it is not clear whether allowing children to become obese, or, just to give another example, to raise young children on a vegan diet, may constitute nutritional neglect. There are, thus, unanswered questions around what it is to fail to provide for the basic nutritional needs of a child. •• ‘Medical neglect’: What constitutes medical neglect presents other complex challenges. The parents’ and professionals’ opinions about what is proper medical care may conflict. The example of the Jehovah’s witnesses who may wish to refuse whole blood products on behalf of their children provides an illustration of this, but similar considerations may be made for other areas of health care (e.g., vaccination).

Other forms of neglect are highly contextdependent. For example, what is adequate shelter is likely to vary within various communities and is likely to depend on socioeconomical factors and cultural norms. This raises important challenges relating to when the State should intervene to protect children in multicultural pluralistic societies.

Child Neglect and Poverty: A Political Issue? Neglect is usually associated with conditions of indigence and socioeconomic disadvantage. Global injustice, migration, and children displacement may be responsible for significant and numerous cases of child neglect, which are difficult to

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estimate. But even within individual countries, structural factors (lack of resources and deeper and more complex poverty-related problems that may affect less advantaged families) may have a causal role in child neglect. From this perspective, child neglect is not just an issue between parents and children but is a social and political issue. A deeper understanding of the causes behind the overrepresentation of poorer children in national estimates of child neglect is currently absent. Neglect, however, can occur in all strata of population. Children may appear materially well provided for but may be suffering from less obvious forms of neglect, such as emotional neglect or inadequate supervision or inadequate nutrition. Disconnecting the notion of neglect from situation of socioeconomic disadvantage is important; firstly, it may counteract the anti-poor bias that in part may have led relevant agencies to seek (and find) neglect in the less advantaged families; secondly, it may potentially allow protection of a much wider number of children at (not immediately evident) risk. However, disconnecting child neglect from poverty raises further challenges: How can less obvious forms of neglect be identified? How much scrutiny in family life is ethically and legally justifiable? How should civil and criminal law interact in cases of less obvious forms of neglect (such as obesity, e.g., or emotional/psychological neglect)?

Neglect in a Gender Trap In nearly all cases of neglect reported in the literature, the perpetrator is a woman. The marginal role of men in neglect narratives, as well as in research around neglect, may reflect gendered ideas about parenting. Surveys conducted in the United Kingdom and in other countries on parenting roles suggest that society still values a child’s relationship with its mother more than that with its father. Interventions of reduction/prevention of child neglect generally focus on helping ‘mothers’ to improve maternal sensitivity and child responsiveness. Studies have also examined the intergenerational factors that may cause neglect; in these studies, it is again invariably mothers who are said to have an unresolved attachment status and who,

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in turn, are said to have difficulties in interpreting the children’s emotions. The attachment theory traditionally places the mother at the centre of attention, of expectations (and therefore at the centre of blame). Locating the problem of neglect, and its resolution, in the relationship between child and ‘dysfunctional mother’ reinforces gender stereotypes relating to parenting but also directs the attention away from the problems that may be experienced by these ‘perpetrators’. The circumstantial factors that may ‘shape’ the perpetrator move out of sight. In 2000, the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and Their Families recommended an ‘ecological approach’ to neglect, one that encompasses considerations relating to the social context (family, community, and culture) which hosts the child and one which would allow for a shared responsibility amongst various individuals and society at large. An ecological approach is one that is not limited to the understanding of family dynamics, or on parental responsibilities, but moves towards a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the child and the parents, as embedded in a social context. This approach considers multiple levels of environmental influences (including epigenetic influences): It asks how structures beyond the largely Western notion and of a nuclear family, or the dyadic relationship between carer and child, may impact upon a child’s welfare. An ecological approach would suggest that interventions should not be limited to individuals, or individual families, but should occur at a broader social level. Simona Giordano See also United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Bhabha, J. (2018). #Us too: Children on the move and belated public attention. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, 32(2), 250–257. doi:10.1093/ lawfam/eby003 Carr, A. (2016). The handbook of child and adolescent clinical psychology: A contextual approach (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Child Maltreatment Global Estimates. (2014). Retrieved from http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.main. VIOLENCECHILDMALTREATMENTv Committee on the Rights of the Child. General Comment No 13. (2011). The right of the child to freedom from all forms of violence. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu .2011.09.006 Department of Health and Department for Education and Employment. (2018). Working together to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. London, UK: The Stationery Office 2010. Amended February 2017. doi:10.4135/9781529706895 Dixon, L., Perkins, D., Hamilton-Giachritsis, C., & Craig, L. (Eds.). (2017). The Wiley handbook of what works in child maltreatment: An evidence-based approach to assessment and intervention in child protection. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118976111 Dubowitz, H. (1999). Neglected children: Research, practice, and policy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Evans, R. (Ed.). (2015). Abuse and violence towards young children: Perspectives on research and policy. New York, NY: Routledge. Korbin, J. (1991). Cross-cultural perspectives and research directions for the 21st century. Child Abuse & Neglect, 15, 67–77. doi:10.1016/ 0145–2134(91)90010-b Korbin, J. E., & Krugman, R. D. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of child maltreatment. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Mbagaya, C., Oburu, P., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (2013). Child physical abuse and neglect in Kenya, Zambia and the Netherlands: A cross-cultural comparison of prevalence, psychopathological sequelae and mediation by PTSS. International Journal of Psychology, 48(2), 95–107. doi:10.1080/00 207594.2012.691975 Munro, E. (2011). The Munro review of child protection: Final report, a child-centred system. Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Education by Command of Her Majesty in May 2011 [Online]. doi:10.1375/jcas.36.3.164 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children NSPCC. (1884). doi:10.1016 /0145–2134(94)90141-4 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2017). Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities 2016: Statistics and interventions. Retrieved February 12, 2019, from https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubpdfs/fatality.pdf World Health Organisation, Child Maltreatment. (2016). Retrieved February 12, 2019, from http://www.who .int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs150/en/

Child Pornography

Child Pornography Any form of image that involves a child or a young person in some sexually explicit manner may be considered pornography. More specifically, child pornography is the depiction of children, often as young as toddlers, engaged in “sexually explicit conduct.” This entry presents child pornography definitions and laws, discusses how it relates to the sexualization and the victimization of children, and examines virtual child pornography and children’s self-exploitation.

Definitions The definition of sexually explicit conduct includes children engaged in actual or simulated sexual intercourse, including genital–genital, oral–genital, anal–genital, or oral–anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex, bestiality, masturbation, sadistic, or masochistic abuse. It also includes lascivious exhibition of their genitals or pubic area. The child does not have to be engaged in a sexual act in the image, as it is the overall level of sexual suggestion that may lead a particular image to being deemed pornographic. Child, for purposes of child pornography legislation, is defined as anyone under the age of 18 years. The age of consent for sexual activity in any given jurisdiction is in fact irrelevant; any depiction of a minor under 18 years of age engaging in sexually explicit conduct is illegal. What varies between jurisdictions is the extent and gravity of the penalty imposed. Presently, there is a global disparity in the availability of mechanisms for tackling child sexual abuse imagery online. To address this unevenness, in a world where child sexual abuse imagery online is a crime that disregards international borders, it is worth highlighting that 35 countries still do not have legislation that deals specifically with child pornography. Of the countries that do have some legislation in place, 60 of them do not define child pornography specifically; 50 do not criminalize possession without regard to intent to distribute; 79 have data retention legislation in place to ensure access by law enforcement to user data needed to investigate and prosecute online criminal activity; and 26 do not deal with computer-based offenses.

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In 2016, Internet Watch Foundation, which assesses and removes online child abuse material, reported a shift in where the most child sexual abuse imagery is hosted. Prior to 2016, most hosting sites for child pornography were in North America; by 2016, Europe had emerged as the primary hosting region for child pornography. In 2017, the gap widened, and as of 2019, European countries are hosting an ever-increasing amount of child pornographic content.

Child Pornography Legislation Whatever the approach chosen, legislating to eradicate child pornography remains a key priority for most jurisdictions. First of all, it is imperative to define what child pornography is. Subsequently, legislation should criminalize computer-facilitated offenses and ban possession of child pornography, regardless of the intent to distribute. The law should require Internet service providers to report suspected child pornography to law enforcement or to some other agency and expect Internet service providers to develop and implement data retention and preservation provisions. Moreover, it is imperative that, with the advent of the Internet and new technology, mention be made of all the forms child pornography can take including, but not limited to: film, DVD, CD-ROM, diskette, CD-R, data files, data storage devices, software, information and communication technologies, and other electronic or digital media. Legislators should consider all the ways child pornography can be distributed, including via computer networks and the Internet; and all the ways in which child pornography can be possessed, including by simply knowingly viewing an image on the Internet or knowingly downloading an image to one’s computer. Child pornography law is the least contested area of jurisprudence in most jurisdictions. When it comes to drugs policies and drugs use or sex work, for instance, different jurisdictions have approaches which are either punitive or liberal. There is not an acceptable liberal position when it comes to the sexual victimization of children because there is nothing particularly controversial about laws that prohibit pictures of naked children and children forced into sex acts. Not even issues about civil rights and civil liberties, and

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censorship come to the fore here. Legal scholars often raise questions about the censorship imposed by child pornography laws. They argue that these laws, intended to protect children from sexual exploitation, threaten to reinforce the very problem they attack. A picture of a naked child always constitutes illegal child pornography if it is sufficiently sexually suggestive. More controversial is the matter concerning virtual child pornography, with legislators and legal scholars debating the actual harm that virtual pornography can cause to children. The 2000 Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography highlights how every child has the right to protection from all forms of exploitation. In particular, Article 2 defines child pornography as any representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes. The Optional Protocol criminalizes specific acts relating to the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography, including attempt and complicity. It lays down minimum standards for protecting child victims in criminal justice processes and recognizes the right of victims to seek compensation. It encourages strengthening of international cooperation and assistance and the adoption of extraterritorial legislation, but it does not provide for exemption from the dual criminality principle. Also, the Optional Protocol does not protect children from victimization in criminal processes once they have been recognized as having had their rights violated. It is worth noticing that from a legal perspective, the notion of the child as a full subject of rights is recent and has broken new ground. The child is no longer considered as a becoming adult, but as a person with his or her own rights. There is no ambiguity in this, and it represents a considerable step forward in history. Releasing children from their traditionally perceived status as minors and dependents is a decisive change in the perception of childhood.

Children’s Sexualization Whereas imaginary or real, the images of children are increasingly becoming objectified by a

pornographic gaze. Child pornography is linked to a long tradition of children and young people being represented as objects for erotic contemplation (and commodification) by adults. Such practice reflects a strange ambivalence about childhood sexuality: It is both denied (because children are deemed to be innocent) and yet seen as a potentially unstoppable force once it is released by external corrupting influences. Children’ sexualization and objectification are reinforced and normalized by a deliberately broad and inclusive categorization of goods available to children, which are currying potentially sexual meanings. Children are continually exposed to goods that seem to make reference to sexual practices through images, words, or humor (including the use of ambiguity or innuendo). There are also goods that appear to make reference to sexual contexts through images, words, colors, styles, or items. This is the case, for instance, where the familiarity with the item stems from culturally sexualized contexts—for example, stripping’s association with shiny gloves and stilettos, burlesque’s association with feather boas, or sexy lingerie’s associations with lace and the colors red, black, and purple. In other words, these are goods that emphasize body parts and shapes which might be culturally associated with adult sexuality (e.g., eyes, lips, breasts, cleavage, curves, legs, bottom, skin, and groin). Goods aimed at children often duplicate styles currently considered high fashion for adults. Also, goods are often marketed in a way that combines items from a potentially sexual adult context with images, words, or practices (e.g., play) associated with childhood, in such a way as to normalize them as children’s goods (e.g., Hello Kitty ‘Sexy Little Mints’, sweets that carry potential sexual connotations by virtue of their name and image). Often goods aimed at children contain a reference to gender stereotypes, for example by overemphasizing physical attractiveness, associating females with love and intimacy, or associating males with aggressiveness and dominance, through words, images, symbols, or activities. Although the goods fitting these descriptions might be identified (by some people in some contexts) as carrying sexual or gendered meanings, this might not in itself be sufficient to consider them as sexualized, thus making the link between sexualization of children and child

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pornography a very tenuous one, the point here is about a pornographic, that is indecent, improper, indelicate, gaze on children. If pornography is intended as the production and consumption of inequality, as maintained in some feminist discourses, there is a contention that child pornography in particular produces and reinforces inequalities between children and adults. Feminists have long criticized pornography not only because it produces inequality, and not only on the grounds that it might lead to actual sexual abuse. They have also condemned pornography on the grounds that it is the eroticization of inequality. More pointily, child pornography, actual or virtual, cannot depict children as equal participants in sexual activity with adults, nor can it establish a relation of equality between the adult viewer and the viewed child. Children are not equal on the basis that they own less power as Michael Foucault has pointed out. For that reason, sexualizing children for adult viewers is necessarily sexualizing inequality. In this view, child pornography is an extension of mainstream sexual relations, which are contingently unequal.

The Victimization of Children An image of child pornography is a permanent record of the sexual abuse of a child. In other words, the social harm to the depicted child can have immediate and long-term effects. The immediate effects on the child are apparent during the abuse in the forms of physical trauma and emotional symptoms including moodiness, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. Being used by an adult, often a trusted one, is harmful to juveniles not only during the abuse, but also, and often even more so, during their future development. The damage caused by child pornography uniquely affects victims far into the future. Experts on child pornography and youth health care practitioners have characterized one effect as psychological paralysis in which young victims have an inability to separate themselves from the sex exploitation in order to reestablish a positive life. Additionally, child pornography is a crime of perpetuity because every time an image is distributed the victim is revictimized. With regard to the experience of victimization, the effects also focus around the disclosure where the parties develop a

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silent conspiracy in which no one discusses the incident either before or after the disclosure. Finally, years later, victims of child pornography report that these effects are the most difficult to overcome and are described as a self-concept so eroded that the person cannot disclose, and this secrecy creates the paralysis. What should also be acknowledged a secondary form of victimization is the harm to children not used in the production of child pornography. Research has fully documented this harm which manifests itself in many ways: Child sexual abuse images are used by offenders for sexual gratification, to groom children to be sexually molested, to support the idea that adult–child sexually abusive relationships are acceptable, to decrease the inhibitions of potential victims, to demonstrate to victims how to sexually please a sexual offender, to entrap or control victims, for barter/exchange on the Internet, and for profit. It is argued in the scientific literature that viewing child pornography predisposes some males to sexually desire children, undermining males’ internal inhibitions and social boundaries with minors, and undermining children’s ability to avoid child sexual victimization. In fact, whenever new images are created, no matter the source, the market becomes more saturated. This is particularly true on the Internet where the combination of opportunity, ease, perceived anonymity, and the immediacy of personal rewards creates a situation where accessing child pornography is not simply common, it actually becomes the norm. Exposure to child pornography is a significant factor in child victimization, young girls being particularly vulnerable. The harm is not limited to future victims of child sexual abuse whose perpetrators use these images to facilitate abuse but also extends to the general exposure of youth to such images. In fact, children’s exposure to child pornography can undermine their capabilities to avoid, resist, or escape sexual victimization, thereby making them more vulnerable to sexual victimization.

Virtual Child Pornography Virtual child pornography is solely computergenerated; therefore, it could be argued that the images displayed do not depict actual children.

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Consequently, the children whose images are used in this manner are not harmed by virtual pornography because they are not identifiable. In other words, the images are of imaginary children, and imaginary children can suffer only imaginary harms. Many scholars, however, maintain that real children are harmed by virtual pornography and indeed they argue that virtual child pornography can be used to seduce and abuse actual children. The question whether pornography encourages or even causes rape has been debated for a long time, yet empirical evidence to support this claim is scarce and inconclusive. Some studies, on the other hand, maintain that pornography reduces the number of actual sexual assaults, by providing an acceptable outlet for dangerous sexual urges. Nonetheless, also in this instance, evidence is too ambiguous, to be afforded any scientific credibility. The claim that virtual pornography can be used to seduce actual children is put forward by Shirley O’Brien, an expert in child protection and abuse, who contends that pedophiles use pictures of children (apparently) engaged in sexual acts to lower their defenses. The children, consequently, come to believe that the activity must be acceptable, because other children have engaged in it. Following this reasoning, it could be plausible to state that virtual child pornography can be seen as a means to abuse actual children. Indeed, it may well be true that child pornography has been used in this way. However, it is implausible to think that it has ever made the crucial difference, in the absence of which a child would have escaped abuse. More probably, pornography is used sometimes by pedophiles to make children slightly more compliant; in its absence, there remain a number of other obvious means to the same end. Pedophiles can (and commonly do) use drugs or alcohol; bribe children with toys and money or use force. In the absence of much stronger evidence that child pornography makes a real difference to the ability of pedophiles to satisfy their desires, some scholars have suggested that there is little reason to ban virtual pornography on this basis. The notion that permitting virtual child pornography makes it extremely problematic to enforce the laws which prohibit actual child pornography has been the focus of a much-heated international legal debate. Scholars have argued that there is

every reason to consider that if virtual child pornography was legal, pornographers will abandon production of actual images of children in favor of it: The price of producing virtual pornography being indeed very low. In this way, monetary incentives can play a part in encouraging such shift. Furthermore, this will be reinforced by a more pragmatic approach whereby individuals can avoid being convicted for producing actual pornography when a simulacrum can be produced legally. Finally, from a mere legalistic perspective, the burden of proof can be simply reversed: Rather than the state having to prove that the images are of actual children in order to obtain a conviction, the defendant would have merely to show that the images are computer-generated, in order to be acquitted. Sometimes, legal scholars, law enforcement agents, and campaigners turn to the argument that permitting child pornography on the Internet allows isolated pedophiles and potential pedophiles to contact one another, thus mutually reinforcing each other’s pedophilic tendencies. This argument is a deviation on the contention that child pornography triggers child abuse: Possibly, simply viewing images or films of (apparent) children engaged in sexual activity does not cause child abuse, but talking to other people who are engaged in, or who are considering, child abuse, can normalize this deviant and criminal behavior. On the Internet, individuals interested in sexually explicit images of children gain access to a community that legitimizes their views. On the other hand, operating in the real world does require some organization, and it is much more testing than acting in virtual reality. A contrasting argument, equally valuable, supports the view that allowing virtual child pornography can reduce the amount of harm to actual children, by providing an acceptable outlet for dangerous desires, and by encouraging pornographers to seek alternatives to real children.

Self-Exploitation Some very disturbing social behaviors manifest as a result of this increased access and exposure to child pornography and the increased eroticization of children. One of these is the self-exploitation of children, with children believing it is acceptable to

Child Pregnancy

post pictures of themselves on the Internet. Initially, one might conclude that these instances are all the result of grooming by adult predators. Research suggests otherwise, as the request to create images is more likely to occur when youths are with friends because a lot of children are using the Internet in groups. This social phenomenon of self-exploitation by minors is both expanding and novel, and such behavior lacks a clear definition. As a general matter, this activity is the creation by a minor of visual depictions of that minor and/or other minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct, including the lascivious display of genitals, which would clearly constitute a criminal offense in most jurisdictions if the actor is an adult. While a myriad of scenarios exist, which can lead to selfproduced child pornography, the increase in production is well documented. These instances are best understood when placed in the context of how large the juvenile presence is on the Internet, and consequently how it can cascade in child pornography. Several international studies have now documented that juveniles are a significant portion of child pornography offenders.

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MacKinnon, C. (1987). Feminism unmodified: Discourses on life and law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. (2012, September). Child abuse cases: Deciding to prosecute. Retrieved from https://www .nspcc.org.uk/ Pereda, N., Guilera, G., Forns, N., & Gomez-Benito, J. (2009). The prevalence of child sexual abuse in community and student samples: A meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(4), 328–338. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2009.02.007 Richards, K. (September 2011). Misperceptions about child sex offenders. Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 429, 1–9. Stanko, B. (1990). Everyday violence. London, UK: Pandora. Wykes, M., & Welsh, K. (2009). Violence, gender and justice. London, UK: Sage.

Website Internet Watch Foundation. Retrieved from https://www .iwf.org.uk/

Nicoletta Policek See also Age of Consent; Violence

Further Readings Dines, G., Jensen, R., & Russo, A. (1998). Pornography: The production and consumption of inequality. New York, NY: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1984). The use of pleasure (H. Robert, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. Goode, S. (2013, January 7). How can we prevent child abuse if we don’t understand Paedophilia? The Independent. Retrieved from https://www .independent.co.uk/voices/comment/how-can-weprevent-child-abuse-if-we-dont-understandpaedophilia-8438660.html Itzin, C. (1992). Pornography and the social construction of sexual inequality. In I. Catherine (Ed.), Pornography: Women, violence, and civil liberties (pp. 57–75). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1177/144078339603200121 Langton, R., & West, C. (1999). Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 77(3), 303–319. doi:10.1080/ 00048409912349061

Child Pregnancy Pregnancy amongst women under the age of 20 years is generally referred to as ‘adolescent’ or ‘teenage pregnancy’. The World Health Organization differentiates between pregnancy that occurs between the ages of 15 and 19 years, and those occurring amongst 11- to 14-year-olds, as there are greater physical risks associated with the latter than the former category. The vast majority of early pregnancies worldwide occur amongst older teenagers. This entry examines research on child pregnancy and the ‘causes and consequences’ approach to understanding child pregnancy and further explores interventions and alternative perspectives on the subject.

Research Research on teen-aged pregnancy first appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Prior to this, social concerns centred on marriage and legitimacy rather than the age of the mother. This shift, from

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the marital status of the mother to her age, allowed for a ‘moral’ argument (reproduction should occur within the confines of marriage) to be replaced with a ‘scientific’ one (young pregnancy and childbirth can be shown to lead to negative outcomes). Indeed, the early research focused on teasing out the negative consequences of teen-aged pregnancy, for the infant, for the mother and her partner or family, and for society. Soon, it became an ‘established’ fact that child pregnancy was a personal calamity and social problem, and the term ‘children having children’ became commonplace. As a result, researchers attempted to tease out the factors leading to such pregnancies. Research on interventions that prevent early reproduction followed. Interventions providing appropriate health and educational support to pregnant young women are a recent phenomenon. ‘Revisionist’ arguments emerged in the 1980s. These authors expressed concern about the straightforward association of early reproduction with negative outcomes. They argued that the research showing such negative outcomes is often methodologically flawed. Social constructionist authors take a slightly different tack, unravelling the gender, race, class, and colonialist power relations underpinning understandings of, and approaches to, child pregnancy.

‘Causes and Consequences’ Approach Research on the consequences of child and teenaged pregnancy has concentrated on the disruption of schooling; the perpetuation of a cycle of disadvantage or poor socioeconomic circumstances; poor child outcomes in terms of health, emotional development, and learning; health risks associated with the pregnancy; welfare dependency; contribution to higher fertility rates in certain countries; and the association of teenage pregnancy and HIV. Major factors associated with early reproduction include reproductive ignorance, the earlier occurrence of menarche owing to increased nutrition, risk-taking behaviour, psychological problems, cognitive deficiencies, poor academic performance, peer influence, coercive sexual relations, dysfunctional family patterns, poor health services, poor socioeconomic status, and cultural factors.

Interventions Interventions involve primary prevention (the prevention of the occurrence of early reproduction), secondary prevention (early detection of a pregnancy to initiate care), and tertiary prevention (care during and after pregnancy to reduce negative effects). Primary prevention involves empowering young people with information and the interactional skills to negotiate sexual encounters and contraceptive usage. It also includes such things as creating better educational and employment opportunities for girls and good access to contraceptive services. Secondary prevention involves provision of good antenatal care services that are ‘youth friendly’. Tertiary prevention encompasses encouraging and supporting young mothers in their return to school, and accessible termination of pregnancy and postnatal care services. Only recently has there been a focus on the sexual partner of the young woman, emphasising his role in prevention at all three levels.

Alternative Arguments Revisionists argue that early childbearing represents a rational and adaptive choice for young women in particular circumstances. In situations of poverty, young mothers generally have better access to the familial caregiving nexus than they would if they delayed childbearing. In addition, they experience foreshortened healthy life expectancy. Having children early means, thus, more time with the children while the mother is healthy and able to care for them. Finally, opportunities for meaningful employment outside the home are limited in these circumstances, meaning that mothering offers an attractive pathway to adult status and function. Social constructionist scholars argue for the need to be critical of taken-for-granted assumptions concerning early pregnancy, and how these assumptions may serve the interests of dominant groups. For example, teen-aged pregnancy may be seen as problem not because of poor outcomes for infant and mother but because the young women are not conforming to the dominant life trajectory that includes increased female workforce participation (often in gendered and menial jobs). These scholars point out that health service providers, educators, and researchers position young pregnant or mothering women (in particular poor,

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Black, or minority women) as irresponsible, and as unable to mother properly, a positioning that is not borne out in research that compares young and older mothers of similar social circumstances and access to health care. Researchers are increasingly arguing for contextual nuance concerning child pregnancy. For example, in some countries (such as India) early pregnancy tends to occur within the context of marriage, while in others (such as South Africa) the trend towards late marriage means that teenaged pregnancy and mothering mostly takes place outside of marriage. In some contexts, there is a growing call for contraceptive services that are not only youth friendly but also acknowledge that heterosexual encounters may be sites of inequitable gender relations. Some researchers argue that programmes encouraging return to school need to also acknowledge that a drop out may have preceded pregnancy and to further acknowledge the right of young women to not return to school (or work) but rather to concentrate on childcare. Catriona Ida Macleod See also Adolesecent Pregnancy; Birth Control; Pregnancy

Further Readings Arai, L. (2009). Teenage pregnancy: The making and unmaking of a problem. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Cherrie, A., & Dillon, M. (2014). International handbook of global adolescent pregnancy: Medical, psychosocial, and public health responses. New York, NY: Springer. Farber, N. (2009). Adolescent pregnancy: Policy and prevention services (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Springer. Macleod, C. (2011). ‘Adolescence’, pregnancy and abortion: Constructing a threat of degeneration. London, UK: Routledge. World Health Organization. (2011). Preventing early pregnancy and poor reproductive outcomes among adolescents in developing countries. Geneva, Switzerland: Author.

Child Prodigy Although the semantic distinction between child prodigy and gifted child is not always clear, the term ‘child prodigy’ tends to be attributed to those

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children who display exceptional ability in just one or a couple of domains of expertise, with the added suggestion of high-level outputs or performance. The label of child prodigy predates that of gifted child. The former tends to appear more often today in popular culture and the media (where it sometimes competes with the term ‘child genius’), while the latter is preferred in scientific publications. This entry briefly examines the history and academic definition of child prodigies and further explores the cult status and popular fascination of child prodigies in contemporary art, culture, and media. This entry concludes with a review of academic debates on the topic.

Historical Perspectives on Child Prodigies Unlike giftedness, whose definition is closely tied to definitions of intelligence and its scientific measurement, ‘prodigy’ as an attribute for children has encapsulated, over its history, a wide variety of exceptional skills and achievements, including divine inspiration and magical powers. Another distinction is that child prodigies, who are sometimes called ‘exceptionally gifted children’ or ‘exceptionally high achievers’, do not tend to be theorised as a category; rather, they are more frequently studied individually, as case histories. The term ‘prodigy’, while not pejorative, has throughout history triggered suspicions of pathology or religious enchantment. From the 18th century onwards, the term became used increasingly positively, most often to refer to outstanding performance in artistic domains, in the scientific field (particularly mathematics and logic, including chess, an area especially likely to attract the label), and in foreign language learning. Several classical composers, such as G. F. Handel, W. A. Mozart, and Franz Liszt, and some visual artists, such as John Everett Millais and Pablo Picasso, have retrospectively been called ‘child prodigies’ insofar as they achieved productions of considerable quality at an extremely early age. J. S. Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre have also been given the label a posteriori, based on testimonies from their autobiographies. Famous child prodigies, forgotten today, who fascinated the general public in the 19th and early 20th centuries, include George Bidder, an exceptional mental calculator; the prodigious young scientist Norbert Wiener; William James Sidis,

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who went to Harvard at 13 years; Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr., who could speak five languages at the age of 5 years; and a spate of young poetesses in the 1920s, such as Marjorie Fleming, Hilda Conkling, and Nathalia Crane, whose works were widely published, reviewed, and discussed.

The Child Prodigy in the Popular Imagination The child prodigy’s strong hold on the popular imagination to this day is visible through the sheer recurrence of the figure in cultural and media productions. Some TV shows focus especially on the figure of child prodigies, such as the recent ‘Child Genius’ in the United Kingdom. Non-specialised shows such as the ‘Got Talent’ franchise also frequently foreground child performers. Fictional child prodigies in literature and film are sometimes given magical powers, such as Roald Dahl’s ‘Matilda’. It can be said that, today, the vocabulary used in talking about child prodigies still bears the mark of the early assimilation between prodigies and divine inspiration or mystical power. David Henry Feldman, one of the most prolific writers on the subject of child prodigies, does not shirk from evoking potentially paranormal forces at work behind their talent. Other scholars, such as Michael Howe, have attempted to demystify the construct of child prodigy by referring to scientific findings on expertise; the riddle of what one might call supernaturally early talent at music, for instance, might be simply solved by calculating the number of hours put into training by some children.

Research and Debates One central debate in the public and scientific interest for child prodigies concerns the degree to which their exceptional performances are ‘cultivated’ or ‘natural’. A climate of distrust has long surrounded the display and media coverage of such children. Accusations of being ‘one-trickponies’ or of having been hot-housed are frequent in history and all the way to contemporary times in relation to child prodigies. Frequent, too, are concerns for the mental and physical health of the young prodigy, with many case histories foregrounding episodes of depression or isolation in adulthood. In recent years, the mediatisation of

Amy Chua’s strenuous control of her daughters’ musical and educational development, and the declarations of world-renowned pianist Lang Lang on his father’s intensive training techniques and his ensuing trauma, have rekindled debate around the early cultivation of talent and performance in children. Some academics have attempted to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘contrived’ prodigies, the latter being perceived as victims of pushy parenting. However, there appears to be no convincing basis for a strict dichotomy between natural and cultivated talent. Several scholars have shown that there is a strong correlation between ‘genius’ in children and above-average parental involvement in the education of the child. It is also clear that many such children have parents who had a preexisting interest for the areas in which the children are found to excel and that they focused on their skills in those areas from an early age. Another debate, at the level of both aesthetics and childhood studies, concerns the theorisation and critique of the child prodigy’s outputs. Principally, it is discussed whether a child’s writing, composition or artwork can or indeed should be evaluated in relation to equivalent productions by other children, in relation to work by adults, or ‘on its own terms’, though that last option is not easy to define. The concept of a child creator or child’s creation remains somewhat of a theoretical blind spot in the philosophy of art and, to some degree, in childhood studies, where it is tied to neighbouring debates on agency and creativity. Some theorists in the field of literature have argued in favour of child-authored texts being analysed solely for their sociological or historical value. However, recent work has taken to analysing child-authored texts alongside adult-authored ones, arguing that critics should strive to explore their shared aesthetics despite the generational difference. A third important line of questioning for theorists of childhood surrounds the power of fascination that the young prodigy holds for the general public. Roland Barthes influentially hypothesised, taking French child poet Minou Drouet as a case study, that the child prodigy unifies the Romantic child ideal of innocence, purity, and numinous closeness to nature, with the neoliberal ideal of early and fast achievement with a concrete output. From that viewpoint, the child prodigy is a bourgeois object, explainable through sociological analysis.

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The extensive critical work surrounding the particular figure of child Mozart allows for a good illustration of these three debated aspects of the child prodigy in theory. There are many questions regarding the extent to which Leopold Mozart could be said to have contrived his children’s skills, as opposed to simply nurturing them. There have been many claims that Mozart was maladjusted as an adult and permanently unhappy as a result of this treatment (those claims are much contested). Regarding aesthetics, it is generally agreed that Mozart’s early productions, although impressive for his age, are not even close in quality or originality to his later work and that his piano-playing skills are today routinely exceeded by child musicians around the world; the question arises as to how they should be judged today. Finally, the seductiveness of the child Mozart figure, still palpable today, may contribute to explaining such commercial phenomena as the sales of ‘Mozart effect’-style music or parenting guides. While not intended to diminish the aura of this unquestionably exceptional composer, such debates highlight the symbolic importance of the child prodigy status in the creation of the Mozart myth, sometimes regardless of historical fact. The term ‘child prodigy’ is in constant evolution, and increasingly used to refer to children who excel at sports, at computer programming or similar types of activity, or at political or leadership roles. Since there is no fixed theorisation or definition of the construct, it is likely that the concept will continue to evolve. The phenomenon of extraordinarily high-achieving children is also being increasingly re-explored in the light of new findings in neurology and genetics, which highlight the comorbidity of some conditions, such as autism, epilepsy, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with certain specific dispositions, particularly to music and mathematics. However, research on the topic remains controversial, and so does research on the best ways of cultivating different types of artistic or scientific ability in young children. Still, parenting manuals claiming to turn children into prodigies continue to be produced in large quantities. Beauvais Clementine See also Agency; Gifted Children

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Further Readings Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies. Paris, France: Seuil. Feldman, D. H., & Goldsmith, L. T. (1986). Nature’s Gambit: Child prodigies and the development of human potential. New York, NY: Basic Books. Halverson, C. (1999). Reading little girls’ texts in the 1920s: Searching for the “Spirit of Childhood.” Children’s Literature in Education, 30(4), 235–248. Howe, M. J. A. (1999). Genius explained. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Child Prostitution, Sex Work Child prostitution and sex work (CPSW) encompasses the use of girls and boys under the age of 18 in commercial sexual activities remunerated in cash or in kind. The phrase CPSW contains in itself a bias, which is in stark opposition with the research to date on the exploitation of children in the sex trade. By using the rhetoric of work, CPSW suggests that the child has knowingly consented. CPSW has attracted much media and policy attention in recent decades. The child’s specific vulnerability and protection needs have fostered a consensus at the international level to condemn the involvement of children in the sex trade. CPSW can put children at risk of violence, be gravely detrimental to their physical and emotional health and well-being, and undermine their self-esteem and development. CPSW has chain effects. At a personal level, children subjected to CPSW are at heightened risk of experiencing complicated pregnancies and abortions, being unable to escape exploitation and violence, and perpetuating a cycle of abuse with their own children. This has subsequent effects on societies at large, by putting citizens in precarious situations over several generations, thereby not only adversely affecting their quality of life but also reducing the pool of skilled people necessary for a country’s long-term economic development. The harmful effects of CPSW on children and societies are well-documented, yet this does not preclude animated discussions of prostitution and sex work (PSW) in general, which directly affect measures pertaining to CPSW. The purpose of this entry is to shed light on CPSW, which is in the

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public eye yet not well understood, and explain the debates affecting its various stakeholders. First, the entry presents an overview of CPSW’s many guises, ranging from traditional forms of exploitation and abuse, from routine prostitution, to forced prostitution concealed as domestic work, to more contemporary forms such as computer-linked pornography or prostitution ­ tourism. Second, it analyses the construction of the discourse on children engaged in PSW, showing how representations of CPSW affect the reality of children involved. Third, it retraces the evolution of the rights of the child and the emergence of a global anti-CPSW norm. Fourth, this entry seeks to provide an insight into the debates rocking the conceptualization and implementation of policies on CPSW. Finally, this entry elaborates on the policy provisions identified as the most suitable avenues to protect children from commercial sexual exploitation.

The Socio-Anthropology of CPSW Children’s enslavement for prostitution in unstable contexts such as war, or their search for livelihood through CPSW, has been traced back to at least ancient Mesopotamia. In our own era, increasing globalization has contributed to accelerating and complicating the exploitation of children in what has grown into a global ­multibillion-dollar sex trade market with millions of children and young adolescents having sex for tangible compensation. New information and communication technologies have facilitated the consumption of child abuse material. Offenders are not only pedophiles and prostitution tourists; they are also business travelers, migrant workers, and local populations, most of whom are ­situational offenders with no marked preference for children. Offenders are presented with the evergrowing opportunity to exploit children, especially in environments with high levels of corruption, while impunity remains the rule. There is no typical profile of children subjected to CPSW. Boys and girls, adolescents and young children from all countries and backgrounds are affected, although physically attractive youths, young (virgin) children believed to be free of sexually transmitted diseases, and young boys are particularly sought after in certain settings and trigger

higher purchasing prices. Research has shown that specific vulnerability factors make children more prone to exploitation in CPSW. Risks can be categorized into family-related factors (poverty, social exclusion, absence of parental figures, low levels of education), child-specific factors (homelessness, peer pressure, absence of legal identity), socioeconomic factors (movements of people, high population density), and environment-related factors (existence of child labor or prostitution tourism, corruption and organized crime, proximity of armed conflict zone). When children experience several risk factors simultaneously, a phenomenon termed poverty plus by a joint consultation of International Labour Organization and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, they are at heightened risk of being drawn into CPSW. Likewise, through chain effects, children subjected to child labor are likely to dip in and out of CPSW—which often represents the best-paid option—and vice versa. Social, economic, and political structures shape environments that are more or less prone to the flourishing of CPSW. Government policies, the global economy, and male-centric traditions are among those structural effects. Government policies define whether CPSW is tackled seriously; neglected due to weak education structures, low salaries, impunity for offenders and traffickers, inadequate support for CPSW survivors; or even actively encouraged through the (unofficial) promotion of a lucrative sex industry protected by (corrupt) government officials, either for personal gain or for national financial interests. Journalist Thembu Mutch reported in 2007 that, according to nongovernmental organizations working in Cambodia and Thailand, prostitution, though illegal, is so lucrative that it is encouraged by the government. In the 1990s, the underground business of prostitution generated 0.8–2.5% of Indonesia’s and 15–18% of Thailand’s gross domestic product. Researchers have also pointed to the role-played by economic factors, in particular that of a globalized economy in the increase of demand for sexual services from children, of development policies (e.g., austerity, loans, debts) in the facilitation of exploitative practices and human trafficking, and of stark economic disparities, coupled with inadequate migration policies, in enabling a breeding ground for debt bondage practices.

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These societal structures are infused by an undercurrent of beliefs regarding the place of children, men, women, and sexuality. Male-centric assumptions about gender roles and sexuality as a male right are drivers of structurally discriminatory practices. This has been widely described as a driver in the mail-order-bride system, for instance. The socio-anthropological reality of CPSW is thus largely driven by gender stereotypes and representations of childhood.

The Construction of the Discourse on Children Engaged in PSW Historically, constructed representations of gender, children, sexuality, and sex work are embedded in the semantics defining CPSW. Discourses on PSW and CPSW are intrinsically linked. Conceptual representations of prostitution have changed greatly over time, demonstrating their dynamic evolution. Nineteenth-century morals have had a lasting influence worldwide on prohibitionist stances toward prostitution, insisting on the corrupting effect on female souls of losing oneself in the flesh. Medical writings later framed prostitution as a public health issue. Heidi Rimke and Alan Hunt (2002) show how these two dissimilar movements came together toward the end of the century in the moral hygiene movement promoting sexual purity, contributing to the legal provisions criminalizing prostitution. Prostitutes’ rights movements in the 1970s opposed a different vision to the up-to-then prevailing discourses, presenting their activity as a legitimate helping profession. Aside from confirmed cases of trafficking, this view currently dominates the industry of adult PSW. PSW is thus the locus of strong sociopolitical orientations. The point of contention resides in the limit between child and adult prostitution and therefore the limit between legitimate work and exploitation. In practice, they share similar personnel and clients/abusers and proceed from the same sociocultural norms; functionally, they are combated on the same terms, through the fight against poverty, for instance. Yet from a semiotic, philosophical, and moral point of view, they are assessed on distinct terms. CPSW is uncontroversially considered to be a grave abuse of vulnerable persons. Speaking of CPSW glosses over its exploitative dimension: By framing it in the context of labor

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terminology, it annihilates the child/adult distinction and accentuates the supposed free choice of the children involved. Chris Goddard and associates denounce the lexical redescription at stake in the use of CPSW and associated terminology. By using economics terminology (i.e., client, prostitute, brothels, pimps), the commercial and contractual nature of the transaction are emphasized, euphemizing the violence that sex offenders and exploiters exert on the child, who is indirectly framed as an actor and potential criminal rather than a victim. Less detrimental to the protection of the child, speaking of modern slavery insists solely on the human rights abuses experienced by the children, potentially applying a dichotomous filter (i.e., innocent versus evil, or victim versus offender) to complex situations. The language favored to describe CPSW carries with it historical constructions as well as epistemic and sociopolitical choices and has strong bearings on the content of norms addressing CPSW. Although the term child prostitution is used by a number of international legal instruments (e.g., the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography; the Lanzarote Convention; and the European Directive 2011/93/EU), its use has been called into question, as it is not considered to be legally universal. It is the author’s opinion that speaking of commercial sexual exploitation, in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, better encompasses the complexities of CPSW.

The Rights of the Child: Emergence of a Global Anti-CPSW Norm The status of the child in societies has changed greatly over time and space. In his influential book Centuries of Childhood, French historian Philippe Ariès argues that before the 17th century, children were portrayed as mini-adults; the concept of childhood is a modern notion much derived from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education. In turn, considered as a gift or a curse for the family, as an appendix of adults, a solution to economic constraints, or the property of their parents, the status of the child has markedly changed in the 19th and 20th centuries to increasingly be considered as an individual enjoying special rights and protection. The emergence and evolution of an

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international legislative and policy framework on CPSW retraces the codification of this recent historic construction of norms pertaining to children and sex work. PSW came into focus with the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children (first negotiated 1904, came into force in 1921), primarily concerned with the slave trade of women and children into prostitution. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 responded to the aspiration of setting universal norms to be met by all countries, which is particularly true in the realm of children’s rights. Concern over CPSW mounted during the 1990s. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child lay the bedrock for future legislation on CPSW, by establishing that “childhood is entitled to special care and attention” and by firmly putting obligations upon states to take comprehensive measures against the crime against humanity, slavery, and torture that are sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children (Article 34). In the wake of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the first World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children was held in 1996. The ensuing Stockholm Declaration called for the protection of children trapped in prostitution, defined the “commercial sexual exploitation of children” and enshrined the four general principles of non-discrimination, best interests of the child, right to survival and development, and importance of the views of the child. Subsequent important developments include International Labor Organization Convention 182 on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour and its Recommendation 190 (1999), closely followed by the adoption of an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography. The 2000s have seen further developments specific to CPSW through United Nations Resolution 1307 on Sexual exploitation of children: zero tolerance (2002), the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse  (2007), and United Nations Resolution 1579 (2007) on child prostitution. The provisions of these treaties have refined the norms of child protection against CPSW and guided governments on tools to reach that aim. In a nutshell,

the current human rights acquits on CPSW, thus stipulates that it is the State’s responsibility to ensure that all persons under the age of 18 should receive protection against commercial sexual exploitation, that the consent of children participating in commercial sexual activities cannot waive their right to protection, and that adults directly responsible for the exploitation should be proportionally sentenced by law. Besides the growing web of national legislation pertaining to CPSW, policy initiatives have flourished to address CPSW in specific sectors. The Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism is one of such multistakeholder initiatives.

CPSW in Contention: Debates on the Conceptualization and Implementation of Policies on PSW The morality of CPSW is straightforward and noncontroversial for most people and institutions. This does not preclude acrimonious debates about PSW in general, which, though not directly concerning children, have direct implications on CPSW. The main sources of those points of contention can be traced to three interwoven domains: diverging disciplinary perspectives, debates over the existence of universal norms, and the pragmatic implementation of laws and policies on PSW. Academic scholarship on the sex trade is broadbased. For instance, while the universality of the anti-CPSW norm is widely consensual in human rights’ scholarship, it is often debated in other epistemological circles. The very idea that individuals should have rights has been subject to controversy for centuries and thus transcends the commonly held notion that it springs from the current cultural differences between peoples. Political debates opposing proponents of cultural relativism and those of universalism started, in its contemporary form, with the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In short, the former disputed the validity of international legal norms by arguing that they are the product of Western values imposed on the rest of the world, while the latter defended the ideal of universal human rights to be applied to all human beings. To cite but a few of the many nuanced debates that have sprung from this coarser dichotomy: Philosopher Amartya

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Sen argues that humans are naturally inclined to eliminating injustice and that therefore rational discussion can lead people to plural grounding (i.e., a shared understanding of justice); Chandler is concerned with the political implications of what he argues is a shift, in international relations, away from the interests of states to prioritizing the human rights of individuals, while the cultural heritage upon which the notion of universal human rights is premised is interrogated in critiques of colonialism and gender studies. Where PSW is concerned, two opposite interpretations prevail of the consent of persons involved in PSW. One the one hand, neoregulationists view free PSW as legitimate labor that should be decriminalized and legalized—in contrast with trafficking seen as forced prostitution; neo-abolitionists, on the other hand, equate all forms of PSW with trafficking and “harmful traditional practices” as defined by the United Nations flowing from the “economic and patriarchal” oppression and human rights abuse of women worldwide. These positions translate into the legislative frameworks of states, with the prohibitionist stance amounting to criminalization of PSW (the Swedish model), whereas regulationist positions can be found in decriminalization policies differentiating between voluntary and forced PSW (e.g., New Zealand) and legalization policies, whereby PSW becomes regulated by the state (e.g., Austria). Although not directly concerning children in PSW, which is considered to be immoral and illegal in all of these frameworks, it nevertheless has a very direct impact on the environment of, and responses to, CPSW.

Protecting Children From Commercial Sexual Exploitation: Policy Measures and Ways Forward Policies are contained in-between the space of PSW frameworks and those of child protection measures, with the “best interest of the child” serving as guiding principle. The following discussion explores some of the pragmatic challenges currently faced by policymakers to successfully guarantee the best interest of the child within these complex environments. Owing to the international nature of supply and demand, CPSW can only be combatted

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efficiently by responses that cut across national boundaries, North/South and private/public sector divides. With the advent of regional and subregional child protection mechanisms, this level of cooperation has gathered increasing importance, in particular in regions such as Europe (e.g., Council of Europe, European Union) or SouthEast Asia (e.g., Greater Mekong Subregion, ASEAN). Legal provisions should ensure that the demand factor is addressed properly. This involves both efforts to reduce consumer demand, engaging of the business sector, and guarantees of nonrepetition. The latter challenge resides in the continued impunity of perpetrators, who, due to the widespread territoriality of law, escape legal proceedings simply by going back to their own country. The Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography encourages states to apply the principle of extraterritoriality to child prostitution tourism (see in particular Articles 4 and 6). Some jurisdictions abide by a general principle of extraterritoriality (e.g., Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland); countries have ascribed extraterritoriality to CPSW (e.g., France, Spain) under principles of active and passive personality, or aut dedere aut judicare, yet there is still some way to go for it to be subjected to the principle of universality under customary international law. Possibly the biggest challenge in protecting children from CPSW is operating conceptual shifts in sociocultural environments. Priorities for tackling CPSW were identified from the offset of global debates on child protection in the 1990s. Interlinkages between CPSW and migration control, unsafe working conditions for vulnerable laborers, patriarchal structures of domination over women and children, poverty and development dynamics, and many more sociocultural paradigms are increasingly well understood. CPSW does not occur, nor will it be solved, in a vacuum. As a number of observers have pointed out, what is needed is a coordinated effort to implement viable alternatives in a holistic framework of development and human rights promotion. Élisa Narminio-Gielen See also Child Labor; Child Pornography; Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia; Child Trafficking; Children’s Rights; Sexual Exploitation of Children

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Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History

Further Readings Barreto, J. M. (Ed.). (2014). Human rights from a third world perspective: Critique, history and international law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Brown, C. (1997). Universal human rights: A critique. The International Journal of Human Rights, 1(2), 41–65. Chandler, D. (2002). From Kosovo to Kabul: Human rights and international intervention (Vol. 23). London, UK: Pluto Press. Farr, K. (2005). Sex trafficking: The global market in women and children. New York, NY: Worth. Goddard, C., Bortoli, L. D., Saunders, B. J., & Tucci, J. (2005). The rapist’s camouflage: ‘Child prostitution’. Child Abuse Review: Journal of the British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, 14(4), 275–291. doi:10.1002/car.894 International Labour Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund. (2009). Enhancing cooperation for combating child labour in South Asia. Summary Report of the Joint ILO-UNICEF Consultation: 9 November, 2009. New Delhi, India. Jeffreys, S. (2000). Challenging the child/adult distinction in theory and practice on prostitution. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2(3), 359–379. Jeffreys, S. (2008). The industrial vagina: The political economy of the global sex trade. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.1080/14616740050201940 Lim, L. L. (Ed.). (1998). The sex sector: The economic and social bases of prostitution in Southeast Asia. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Organization. Montgomery, H. (2008). Buying Innocence: child-sex tourists in Thailand. Third World Quarterly, 29(5), 903–917. doi:10.1080/01436590802106023 Mullally, S. (2006). Gender, culture and human rights: Reclaiming universalism. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Muntarbhorn, V. (2007). A commentary on the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, Article 34: Sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Brill. doi:10.1163/ ej.9789004148840.i-44 Mutch, T. (2007, July 27). Undercover in South-East Asia’s brothels. BBC News. Retrieved from http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6915890.stm OHCRC. (2015). Report of the Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/ en/issues/children/pages/childrenindex.aspx Rafferty, Y. (2013). Child trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation: A review of promising prevention

policies and programs. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 83(4), 559–575. doi:10.1111/ ajop.12056 Rimke, H., & Hunt, A. (2002). From sinners to degenerates: The medicalization of morality in the 19th century. History of the Human Sciences, 15(1), 59–88. doi:10.1177/0952695102015001073 Ringdal, N. J. (2003). Love for sale: A world history of prostitution. New York, NY: Grove/Atlantic. Sen, A. (2008). The idea of justice. Journal of Human Development, 9(3), 331–342. Talleyrand, I. (2000). Military prostitution: How the authorities worldwide aid and abet international trafficking in women. Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce, 27(151), 151–176. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography. (2016). 25 Years of fighting the sale and sexual exploitation of children: Addressing new challenges. doi:10.1163/2210–7975_hrd-9846-0070

Child Psychology, Clinical See Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology

Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History The U.S. child-saving movement has its roots in the mid-19th century, when industrialization led to rapid urbanization. While industrialization increased material possessions, it also created urban communities with social problems. Social activists focused on prisons, asylums, and children. The child-saving movement resulted in laws passed to limit child labor and institute education in the second half of the 1800s. It influenced the development of the juvenile court in 1899. This entry examines the origins of child savers and the childsaving movement, the phenomena of orphan trains, child labor, and education reforms in the late 19th century, the eventual establishment of the first juvenile justice court, and women’s specific role in child saving and the child-saving movement.

Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History

The Need to Save Children During this time, manufacturing increased, resulting in rapid urbanization, which, unfortunately, damaged children. Urbanization was associated with children working long hours and performing dangerous tasks for little pay. Children often worked 6–7 days a week for 12–14 hours per day. Some of these child workers were even chained to the machines in the rooms where they worked. The work was grueling and it severely damaged the development of these children. Most children did not have an opportunity to receive any education. The children had little parental supervision, were malnourished, and were involved with illegal activities such as theft, substance abuse, and prostitution. Social reformers were also concerned about the vices that the children had developed. Given that they worked and received money, albeit a small amount, children were able to purchase alcohol, drugs, and the services of prostitutes. Social reformers, then, implemented plans to save children from the ills of urbanization. The child-saving movement, however, must not be seen as completely an altruistic mission; there were other motives involved. Child savers were also saving society from children since many children were involved in crime.

Orphan Trains Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890), a reformer and philanthropist, believed that if orphans could be moved away from the negative influence of urbanization, they would have a much better chance at living a moral and worthwhile life. He believed immigration and urbanization threatened the country, particularly if the next generation of adults were not properly socialized. He put orphaned children on trains and sent them to Midwest farmers to raise until 21 years old. Child savers saw farm life as more wholesome and would therefore result in a better upbringing for the children. From the middle of the 1800s until the 1920s, nearly 250,000 children aged 7–14 years were sent to live with adoptive parents on farms in the Midwest. Critics of the child savers movement such as Anthony Platt (1969) claim that the childsaving movement was not as altruistic as others

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have made it appear. Platt contends that childsaving reformers had other motives such as assimilating immigrant children into U.S. life and middle-class values. He also states, some children who rode the orphan trains were not truly orphans but that their parents were seen as having the wrong values. Sometimes orphan trains would bring children who had been special ordered, such as an 8-year-old girl with blonde hair and a sunny disposition. Those orphans who were not special ordered were forced to undergo physical tests after they disembarked. Reminiscent of a slave auction, prospective adoptive parents would have kids run and lift heavy objects to test their suitability for farm work. The farm people who adopted orphans treated these children as indentured servants. In fact, the children were legally bound to their adoptive parents until the children were 21 years old. The adoptive parents were required to feed and clothe the children. They were also to provide them with an education and a religious upbringing. While the adoptive parents were required to be kind to their adopted children, there were few people available to check on their welfare. Even if the new parents were abusive, there were few opportunities to place the children with other parents. From interviews of orphan train children later in their lives, it is known that many of these children were not treated the same as their adoptive parents’ other children. The orphan trains were more than an attempt to save children. Platt (1967) states that taking children from cities and to the country to work on farms was an attempt to also preserve nostalgic notions of farming and small-town life. The evidence for this was that the orphan train moved children to farms just as urbanization and jobs in urban areas were increasing. The orphans, therefore, were learning skills to survive in a work world that was shrinking.

Child Labor Reforms The progressives were able to change labor laws so children under the age of 16 years were restricted from working as many hours as adults. While there were limitations that kept children from working in 1840, the influx of immigrants in the second half of the 19th century provided many

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children to work in factories and mills. Factory employers wanted to hire children because they would work long hours for less pay than adults, and they were not a part of labor unions. One study in the 1880s revealed that one of every three boys, and one out of every eight girls aged 10–15 years, were in the workforce. Another study conducted just before 1920 revealed that children who were in the workforce provided nearly onequarter of the family income. Many of the changes would not be fully implemented until the Great Depression began in the late 1920s. Unions fought to create and enforce child labor laws to ensure that adults had enough jobs. Reformers such as Grace Abbot, Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, and Lewis Hine reported on the deplorable conditions in which children worked and encouraged laws to stop child labor. In 1916, the Keating Owens Act was passed and allowed the federal government to set limits on child labor as part of interstate commerce. However, in 1918, the Supreme Court nullified this Act as unconstitutional. There were problems with attempts to limit child labor. First, there was enforcement. Factory owners wanted to hire child labor and children, or at least their families, wanted to sell their (or their child’s) labor. The second was that there were exemptions for agriculture. The orphan trains took children from urban areas to rural areas. The idea was not that all children’s labor was unhealthy. Reformers, instead, were particularly upset about the children who worked in factories and mills. Moving those children to the countryside and having them work long hours on the farm was seen as desirable and healthy. Ultimately, child labor reforms left children with time to go to school. Many reformers not only wanted children to work less but to go to school more often.

Child Education Reform Prior to 1850, education for children had existed, but it was relatively unregulated, and many times excluded poor children. Poor children often worked for wages and had little opportunity to go to school. In New England states, the Puritans had worked to teach children to read so that they could read the Bible for themselves. In 1834, Pennsylvania had started taxing their citizens to

pay for education. For the most part in the United States, the wealthy used private tutors and academies, while poor children received little or no education. By 1900, 31 of the 45 states had compulsory education requirements. By 1918, all 48 states had compulsory education laws. Horace Mann, an education reformer, pushed for compulsory education for all children. In 1850, Mann’s efforts resulted in compulsory education for all children in Massachusetts. He had become the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837. Massachusetts compulsory education was only for a few hours a day, for 100 days (much less than today), and only for a few years. All grade levels were taught in one classroom. By 1838, Mann had started a journal to provide information for teachers and to increase the quality of education. Mann, like other education reformers, believed that middle-class Protestant values were what was needed to hold the United States together. Mann believed that hard work and self-improvement were necessary for the republic to survive. In short, Mann had six principles to his educational reform: (1) one cannot be free and be ignorant; (2) the public should pay for, control, and maintain schools; (3) public schools should be inclusive: No matter what the social class of the child, they needed to go to school; (4) public schools should be nonsectarian: There should be no political or religion focus; (5) education must be democratic; and (6) there should be well-trained professional educators. In most states, compulsory education required that those children aged 7–14 years old would have to attend school. Truancy officers were allowed to arrest children who were truant and the courts could decide what to do with the children. Mann wanted to make sure that everyone, including recent immigrants, were to adopt similar values. A standardized, compulsory education system would provide for the common socialization of all children.

First Juvenile Justice Court Created in 1899 Criminal justice reformers fought to carve out a juvenile justice court that would be separate from adult court. Reformers sought to correct children

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by saving them from their social environments caused by urbanization. They wanted the courts to recognize the special status of children (e.g., immature brains, dependency). The idea was that children could not appreciate their crimes in the same way that adults did. Reformers were able to help create the first juvenile court in Chicago (Cook County), IL, in 1899. The court recognized the special status of children. The juvenile court did not provide children with the same procedural protections as the adults had. The juvenile court, instead, focused on what the court considered to be in the best interest of the child. The juvenile court worked more on treating and rehabilitating children rather than punishing the child. During the next two decades, juvenile courts were developed in each state. In some cases, the juvenile court was beneficial for children, but in other cases it was not. Critics suggest that the juvenile court widened the sphere of its influence, reduced the procedural protections, and in its zeal to protect children ended up punishing more children than if there had been no juvenile court. An example, in the in re Gault case, took place during the 1960s. In this case, a teenager was accused of making obscene phone calls. He was arrested and taken to the police station without his mother’s knowledge. He was interviewed without the presence of a lawyer or his mother. The victim of his delinquent act (i.e., obscene phone call) did not show up in court. Gault was ultimately remanded to a juvenile training school (i.e., juvenile prison) for a period of 5 years. If the juvenile offender had been an adult, then he would have certainly received less severe punishment.

Women and Public Service The child-saving movement allowed upper-­middleclass women the opportunity to participate in social and political life. This was at a time when women did not yet have the vote. By focusing on children, female child savers were able to carve out an area of public life that was considered legitimate by the society at large. In the United States, women did not gain the right to vote in presidential elections until 1920. Reforming children gave these women a way to make an impact in the greater society. Part of the success of the

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child savers was that their efforts did not impact negatively on capitalism. Most of the child savers’ husbands were capitalists but they were capitalists who did not rely on child labor.

Concluding Thoughts The child savers were successful in their mission; they saved children from homelessness and from being worked to death. They moved children from the cities to the countryside. At the same time, the child savers made sure that the children were fed and received an education. These reformers wanted to see poor children and immigrant children develop middle-class norms and they wanted society to be protected from the ills caused by child workers. Ultimately, children were removed from cities to the country. Child labor laws were developed and enforced. Compulsory education developed. Finally, the juvenile justice system was created to deal with the special needs of children. Daniel W. Phillips, Ariel E. Carter, Wesley V. Carter, and Eric M. Carter See also Children and Youth in Prison; International Child Saving; Juvenile Courts; Juvenile Courts, U.S. History; Juvenile Delinquency

Further Readings Baker, D. B. (2002). Child saving and the emergence of vocational psychology. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 60(3), 374–381. doi:10.1006/jvbe. 2001.1837 Edwards, D. B., Jr., & DeMatthews, D. E. (2014). Historical trends in educational decentralization in the United States and developing countries: A periodization and comparison in the post-WWI context. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(40), 1–39. doi:10.14507/epaa.v22n40.2014 Lapsley, D. K., Enright, R. D., & Serlin, R. C. (1985). Toward a theoretical perspective on the legislation of adolescence. Journal of Early Adolescence, 5(4), 441–466. doi:10.1177/0272431685054004 Platt, A. (1969). The child savers: The invention of delinquency. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Platt, A. (1977). Child savers (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schuman, M. (2017, January). History of child labor in the United States—Part 1: Little children working,

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Monthly Labor Review. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. doi:10.21916/mlr.2017.1 Teeter, R. (1995). Pre-school responses to the 19th century youth crisis. Adolescence, 30(118), 291. Retrieved from http://0-search.ebscohost.com.library. acaweb.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pbh&AN=95 07210795&site=ehost-live Umbreit, M., & Armour, M. (2011). Restorative justice and dialogue: Impact, opportunities, and challenges in the global community (Vol. 36). St. Louis, MO: Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. Wilson, D. (2017). Illinois juvenile court act of 1899. doi:10.1002/9781118524275.ejdj0204

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and

Child sexual abuse negatively affects many adults and children around the world. Estimates suggest that about 20% of women and between 5% and 10% of men report being sexually abused as children. Exact figures are difficult to determine because child sexual abuse remains a taboo subject, and many sex crimes are not reported because of fear and stigma or may go unheard because of lack of understanding. Flawed criminal justice systems also mean most sex crimes do not result in prosecution. In addition, there is no worldwide consensus on what constitutes childhood, resulting in variable ages at which consent to sex is determined to be legal, a factor that often shapes whether child sexual abuse is recognised. This entry discusses the variety of defections of child sexual abuse, including the importance of language when it comes to defining and recognising abuse, focusing on the phenomena, understandings of it, and treatment for it within Global North contexts. In addition, it addresses the therapies and work done with children who are sexually abused and with children and adults who sexually abuse children—as these populations require distinct attention. Finally, a look at the problems of risk assessment concludes the discussion.

General Definitions In general terms, most current definitions of child sexual abuse cover the intersecting issues of sex, power, consent, and age. Child sexual abuse

therefore includes any sexual activity with a child, who by virtue of his or her age does not fully understand, is not developmentally ready for, or is unable to give informed consent to the activity and cases in which sexual activity with a child violates the laws and social rules of a society. Sexual abuse is understood to be perpetrated by adults and children who, because of their age or developmental stage, are in a position of power, trust, or responsibility over the victim—the aim of the activity being to gratify or satisfy the needs of the abuser. Definitions of sexual abuse include contact abuse (being physically present with or touching the child during abuse) and noncontact abuse, which covers all nontouching activities, such as grooming, online abuse, and sexually exploiting a child for money, power, or status. Most children who are victims of sexual violence are assaulted by someone they know, and many are repeatedly assaulted. Most child sexual abusers are male. As such, child sexual abuse is a highly gendered crime in which men predominate as offenders and, to a less extreme degree, girls predominate as victims. No compelling and clear evidence for the genetic basis for sexual offending has been found. It is more relevant to consider how men and women are socialised into unequal relationships with sex and power. Arguably, men overwhelmingly predominate as perpetrators because men’s privilege and entitlement to sex are deeply entrenched in many cultures. This is especially the case for children for cultures in which family honour overrides the need to safeguard children; where reporting sexual violence can lead to exclusion, violence, or even death; and where unequal gender power relations are socially, economically, and legally embedded.

Language Matters Language matters because it is a key mechanism through which sexually abused children are controlled or groomed to accommodate sexual abuse—as something deserved, inevitable, even desired. Grooming engenders the child’s trust, dependence, powerlessness, shame, and responsibility. This is why it is thought important to refer to abused children and adults as survivors and not just victims; this challenges the idea that victimhood is enduring and it provides a framework for

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opposing abuser-defined identities and life scripts. Unfortunately, marginalising language can also be used by professionals and the general public to describe survivors of child sexual abuse. This is evident over the recent history of responses to children who have been sexually abused for profit. They have variously been referred to as underage prostitutes, children abused through prostitution, and children making ‘poor choices’ and having ‘problematic lifestyles’. It is only recently that sexual ‘exploitation’ has reframed work with such young people, leading to a less punitive response for child survivors of sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and modern slavery. Yet there is still often professional disagreement about the actual meaning of these terms, which can result in inconsistent data collection, conflicting policy development, and poor application of protective measures. Language also matters when considering child sexual abusers. A paedophile is defined as someone who is sexually attracted to children. Controversy exists around the use of the term. Etymologically, paedophilia is a composite word from the Greek meaning child (pais) and friendship or affection (philia). The word ‘paedophilia’ therefore is not accurate in describing the unlawful exercise of sexual power that is central to child sexual abuse. The use of this term also obscures the ordinariness of sexual abuse. This enables ‘the paedophile’ to function as a social trope that separates abusers from the so-called normal population and, in so doing, absolves societal responsibility—abusers being outliers who are individually odd, mad, or evil. Use of the term ‘child sexual abuser’ has also been contested, particularly when it is applied to young people. The concern is that when young people are defined as ‘being’ abusers, this limits the opportunities for change and development in that this identity can feel fixed and all-encompassing. As such, a distinction is often made between children or young people and the behaviour they exhibit, such that children and young people are spoken about as ‘engaging in’ sexually inappropriate or harmful sexual behaviour rather than ‘being’ sexual offenders.

Child Sexual Abuse Effects Child sexual abuse has a negative impact because it reinforces division, hierarchy, and inequality,

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and it undermines the ability of individual survivors to reach their full social and economic potential. This is because child sexual abuse can lead to immediate and long-term physical, mental health, and social difficulties. The physical body has a great capacity for recovery, which means that in most cases, there is no conclusive physical evidence of sexual abuse. However, sometimes there may be life-changing injuries, other health impacts (including sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, forced terminations, and ongoing gynecological problems), and even death, particularly in the context of conflict or war situations. Physical ill health can also result from continually disrupted sleep and hypervigilance and anxiety; leaving abusive homes to live on the streets; declining or avoiding preventive health checks; self-injury, food problems, and misuse of alcohol and drugs— all of which may be used to mask difficult feelings associated with child sexual abuse. Because sex may be painful and or trigger stress responses such as dissociation this can negatively affect sexual desire and arousal. In addition, as a result of lowered self-worth, survivors may be more likely to engage in risky sex, may be at increased risk of further victimisation, or both. Sexual abuse does not automatically stop at 18 years. Survivors may continue to be targeted and groomed because of other ongoing vulnerabilities (e.g., in respect to learning disability and economic deprivation), and there may be additional family abuse and neglect which is ongoing and concurrent. If sexual abuse occurs when children are very young, it may also affect their sense of sex and gender identity. This is because, in early childhood, identity is experienced as inherently changeable. Early sexual abuse can therefore feel very much part of identity development. Conversely, talk about child sexual abuse can sometimes be used to invalidate survivors’ positive sexual and gender experiences, particularly when those experiences are associated with marginalised identities such as LGBTQ+. Intersecting identities, including those around sex and gender, are associated with contrasting pressures and difficulties about disclosing child sexual abuse. Girls may be particularly silenced in cultures where female virginity is highly prized. Boys may struggle to speak about sexual abuse by

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men in homophobic societies or because of how male victimhood generally challenges normative understandings about masculinity. This can sometimes lead to boys and men reasserting their masculinity by becoming more aggressive towards others or to engage in sexually controlling behaviour themselves. Although girls and women may do the same, it is more likely for girls and women to turn their hurt and anger inwards and self-harm. It should be noted that most survivors, of either gender, do not go on to become forever victims or the next generation of offenders. However, internalised expectations about these primary identifications (as victim or abuser) can add another layer of social difficulty and psychological distress. If survivors stay silenced, their difficult feelings, such as despair and anger, can increasingly feel unmanageable. Unresolved feelings may then come out explosively, when triggered by minor stresses and irritations, and this can lead to further psychosocial and relationship difficulties, particularly when those around them do not understand or fail to protect. All this can increase the risk of further trauma associated with the breakdown of intimate relationships. Extreme psychological and behavioural expressions of distress can increase the likelihood of family separation as a result of coming into care, psychiatric hospital, young offenders institution, or prison. Emotional trauma often persists longer than the physical effects of abuse. This is because the psychosocial mechanisms that are used to coerce and control abused children are internalised as enduring qualities of the child (as damaged, bad, unlovable, unwanted, etc.). Dissociation plays a major role in enabling survivors to avoid focusing on the physical and emotional terror they endure. Dissociative coping strategies can generalise over time; in extreme cases, where abuse has been severe, enduring, and ubiquitous, this can lead to different aspects of the child and the child’s memories being reconstructed as separate voices, visions, or different identities or parts within the same abused person. Dissociative coping strategies coupled with active attempts not to notice or think and talk about abuse can result in patchy and fragmented memories of abuse thereafter. Nevertheless, abuse survivors are often plagued by their traumatic

memories and this can result in posttraumatic stress effects. These include intrusive and reoccurring thoughts and flashbacks, night terrors, reduced concentration, high anxiety, phobias and panic attacks, hyperarousal and avoidance of trauma triggers, hypervigilance, and reduced trust in others. These effects can leave survivors feeling ashamed, depressed, angry, hopeless, and suicidal or, conversely, emotionally numb.

Therapies and Care for Children Who Are Sexually Abused Survivors are increasingly treated with compassion, yet many societies deny or minimise the extent of abuse. In the West, second-wave feminists in the 1970s and 1980s can be credited with forcing child sexual abuse back onto the political agenda. They argued that because most sex crime is perpetrated by men, there is a need to advocate for gender equality and a refusal of patriarchal power that otherwise, as noted, provides tacit permission for the control and exploitation of women and children. This gender-mainstreaming and rights-based approach has had an impact on the United Nation’s policies against violence against women and children. And public bodies increasingly accept that it is crucial to understand and address gender and other intersecting inequalities if all sexual abuse survivors are to feel able to access services and to be supported. There is also increasing recognition that survivors of sexual abuse are best helped when there is strategic oversight and clear care pathways in terms of both investigation and support at international, national, and local levels in the form of treaties, laws, policies, and frameworks for service delivery. This is important because retraumatisation may be engendered at the local level when support is not integrated and survivors must navigate multiple services, repeating their statement to each agency they encounter. As a result, various countries now provide integrated sexual assault referral services for children and adults. They usually include an independent sexual violence advisor who acts as an advocate and an independent supporter who is available when a survivor first discloses and helps that person navigate the criminal justice system and access

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appropriate and timely support. This model has been extended in some countries to include providing sexually abused children and their families with safe houses in which they can stay whilst accessing medical, investigative, and emotional support under the same roof. A range of therapeutic approaches can help children and adults cope with and overcome experiences of sexual abuse. Psychiatric drugs may be used to manage unwanted ‘symptoms’ of sexual abuse (e.g., depression, anxiety, psychosis). However, if clients are to be moved from victimhood, through survival and symptom management, and into recovery, it is generally accepted that talking therapies are more effective. With young children, it is common practice to work with the nonabusing caregivers (a) to help them understand the effects of sexual abuse on a child and how to support that child, (b) to reestablish their parental relationship with the child (sexual abuse undermines this), and (c) to address their own vicarious abuse trauma and sometimes reactivated trauma from their own childhoods (this can interfere with rebuilding their relationship). Sometimes, it is important for children to know that their caregivers are supported so that they can concentrate on their own recovery. There are different forms of trauma-focused talking therapies. Although some of this work is orientated towards managing emotional arousal associated with unresolved trauma, sexual abuse specific therapy aims to challenge the impact of grooming. Increased recognition of grooming has led some countries to extend their powers to deprive children of their liberties when they are judged, as a result of having been groomed, to lack the mental capacity to make informed choices about their behaviour. The aim of restricting liberty in secure and semi-secure placements is to provide the space in which survivors might be ‘deprogrammed’. Unhelpful messages associated with past abuse are carefully challenged and revised; current stresses and worries are addressed; clients are enabled to develop less harmful coping strategies and to plan for the future. However, in the absence of wider interventions with abusers and the families, intimate partners, and communities to which children and young people return, such specialist placements have limited effect.

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Working With Children and Adults Who Sexually Abuse Children The twin pillars of work with child sexual abusers have been punishment (in the form of detention) and rehabilitation (in the form of support and therapy services). However, because the Internet has increased opportunities for children to be sexually abused, either through abusers using social media to groom children or by abusers accessing, viewing, and distributing sexually abusive images of children, it is not possible to provide personalised services for all abusers. This is one reason preventive social interventions are crucial in this area and why increasing cooperation between police forces internationally is needed to address the operations of a globalised network of abusers. There has been considerable contestation about what constitutes the most effective form of intervention for individual sexual abusers. Alongside ongoing attempts to find a biological cause for sexual attraction to children and their abuse, attempts have been made to find a biological or chemical cure for so-called paedophilia. The use of chemical castration to reduce libido and sexual desire has had limited effect, perhaps because the sexual abuse of children is not just a matter of sexual desire but also of power and control. Child sexual abuse is also a largely gendered crime, with men predominating as abusers. To work with offenders, it is important to have an understanding the sex–power–gender nexus in individuals who sexually abuse others. The aim of psychotherapy with abusers is to stop abusive behaviour. Increasingly, it is now recognised that the most effect way to do this is to understand abusers in their whole life context. Clients are helped to understand and take responsibility for how they exert power through tracking the various ways in which they have groomed, manipulated, and coercively controlled their victims and those around them. They are enabled to reflect on the negative impact of their behaviours and the harm to their victims, wider family and, also importantly, themselves. They are invited to reassert a more positive use of power in terms of recognising the key events from the past implicated in their offending behaviour and the specific triggers that increase their

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risk of offending, the aim being to develop a greater understanding of themselves and a clear safety plan that can help them act safely and responsibly in the future. As such, an important aspect of this work is to revisit abusers’ own experiences of being victimised and the impact of this. This is not to provide an excuse but to help them make sense of their own unresolved issues and unmet needs that contextualise their harmful sexual behaviour. Issues of power are also addressed indirectly through providing and modelling how to have safe, supportive, and reliable relationships. Therapists who bully and derogate their clients reinforce existing interpersonal frameworks that undermine progress. Through supported selfreflection, abusers are invited to reevaluate their sense of self, how this has developed, and its impact on their gender identity and expectations. An important aspect of this work is to help clients recognise that they have multiple identities, strengths, and skills beyond that of being an abuser. When people feel more positive about themselves, they are more able to make positive choices and implement strategies to reduce and manage their risk, thereby helping them work towards more positive life aims and less harmful coping strategies. This work then unpins and informs direct work to address and enable healthier relationships and specially to improve sexual attitudes and behaviours. A number of additional factors inform work with children and young people. These include the age and developmental stage of the child, what children can understand about their actions, what they can reasonably be held accountable for, and how they should be helped to change their behaviour. Working with a 9-year-old is clearly very different from working with a 15-year-old or an adult. For young people, their own experiences of victimisation may be concurrent with their displays of harmful sexual behaviour. When children have experienced abuse and neglect within their family, they may be removed for their own safety. Being safe is the first condition for any therapeutic work. When children are prepubescent, it is inevitable that they will have suffered some form of traumatic sexualisation themselves, as they must have learnt how to sexualise power somewhere and this, by virtue of their

age, is inappropriate. All these issues need to be addressed. Sometimes with children, it is necessary to start with their victim experiences, before their own capacity to harm can be addressed. Sexually harmful behaviour occurs in secret. Once discovered, abusers may be imprisoned, ostracised, or may become necessarily socially withdrawn. It is important, therefore, to also work with those around abusers to strengthen their support networks (partners, families, and others), which are important in mitigating risk. Encouraging open communication with partners and within families increases their problem-solving skills together and helps reestablish and strengthen family relationships. There may be significant conflict and split loyalties where sexual harm has been caused to family members (e.g., son, daughter, siblings). Work with all family members needs careful coordination and must address their traumatic reactions to the abuse, as well as how to safely manage future family relationships and interactions. The safety of survivors is paramount here, and their needs and wishes for ongoing separation from the abuser, for example, must be respected and adhered to. Many young people who are sexually harmful do not repeat this behaviour, particularly following therapy. As such, it is crucial to help the young person and their families envisage life beyond the harmful sexual behaviour. Practical aspects of this work involve careful safety planning and supervision to enable children to re-enter the social world and participate in school and other social activities. This helps foster their sense of inclusion, helps rebuild self-esteem and enables the child to practice socially appropriate behaviour. Adult abusers may not have support systems around them and may struggle greatly when therapy ends. This is not least because ‘paedophiles are the most reviled and stigmatised group in society’. Such attitudes provoke fear and self-loathing and can lead to abusers isolating themselves further, which can increase mental distress, undermine attempts to rebuild their lives, and discourage help-seeking behaviour—all of which increases the risk of recidivism. In some countries, organised community support is a vital intervention used to prevent relapse. Suitable members of the public are identified to monitor and support the

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‘core member’ (the sex offender) in the community. The aim is to prevent further sexual abuse. These interventions recognise that inclusion rather than exclusion, respect rather than humiliation, minimise risk and enable individuals to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions—and that with support and challenge, people have the ability to grow, learn, and change their behaviour.

Risk Assessment Risk assessment is central to all interventions with child sexual abusers; it is used to inform management strategies in terms of levels and periods of imprisonment, community supervision, or both. Risk assessments are also used to determine therapy needs, settings, and methods and to give an estimate of how successful intervention has been. A number of actuarial risk assessments are designed specifically for children and adult sexual offenders, with most considering contact abuse, rather than online behaviours, although this latter issue is increasingly relevant. Most contemporary risk assessments consider both historical, relatively unchangeable factors referred to as ‘static’ risk factors (e.g., age at first offence) as well as current or ‘dynamic’ risk factors (e.g., cooperation with treatment). Such risk assessments are necessarily time limited: The context for offending changes according to life experiences and therapy, for example, and therefore so does risk. Risk assessments provide a general estimate of recidivism (low, medium, or high), rather than specific information about timing or the severity of future harmful behaviour. Recently, as with sex offender therapy, there has been increasing focus on more contextual understandings and assessment of risk—risk being one issue in a more holistic understanding of the individual. Deficits and psychopathology are no longer the sole focus; greater consideration is given to identifying assets and strengths. This type of risk analysis is wider in scope, less stigmatising, and hence more emotionally enabling for change and development. This type of assessment approach is termed ‘formulation’. Formulation contextualises risk by providing a functional analysis of what supports and prevents the presenting problem (sexual harm) in terms of

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predisposing factors (root causes), precipitating factors (current triggers), perpetuating factors (ongoing needs), and protective factors (that which helps the individual refrain from future abusive behaviour). This type of risk analysis therefore elaborates the key intersecting targets for intervention. Formulation also provides a meaningful account or narrative about the abuse that can help individuals, their families or partners (where relevant), and other professionals make sense of the behaviour. Shared understandings enable positive working relationships that further serve to mitigate risk. Samantha Warner See also Child Prostitution, Sex Work; Children at Risk; Consent, Sexual; Puberty; Sexual Exploitation of Children

Further Readings Baldwin, K. (2019). Sex offender risk assessment. In Sex offender management, assessment and planning initiative. Retrieved from https://smart.gov/SOMAPI/ sec1/ch6_risk.html Mews, A., Di Bella, L., & Purver, M. (2017). Impact evaluation of the prison-based Core Sex Offender Treatment Programme. Ministry of Justice Analytical Series. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/impact-evaluationof-the-prison-based-core-sex-offender-treatmentprogramme National Health Service England. (2015). Commissioning framework for adult and paediatric sexual assault referral centres (SARC) services. Retrieved from https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/ wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2013/05/SARCs-servicespec-contract-template-and-paed-framework.pdf National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2016, September). Harmful sexual behaviour among children and young people (NICE guideline [NG55]). Retrieved from https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ ng55 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. (2019, July 5). Protecting children from harmful sexual behaviour. Retrieved from https:// learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-abuse-and-neglect/ harmful-sexual-behaviour/#heading-top Spicer, D. (2018, March). Joint serious case review concerning sexual exploitation of children and adults with needs for care and support in Newcastle-upon-

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Tyne. Newcastle, UK: Newcastle Safeguarding Children Board. Retrieved from https://www .cvsnewcastle.org.uk/images/Final_Joint_Serious_ Case_Review_ppt.pdf Warner, S. (2020). Feminist perspectives on child sexual abuse. In J. Ussher, J. Chrisler, & J. Perz (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of women’s sexual and reproductive health (pp. 482–494). London,UK: Rouledge.

Websites Circles UK. Retrieved from https://www.circles-uk.org.uk

Child Soldiers The number of children associated with armed forces and groups has not been updated in many years. In fact, international organizations affirm that the number has been decreasing and that today there are fewer than 300,000 child soldiers in the world. Nevertheless, over the past two decades, images of boys (mostly) carrying weapons such as AK-47 rifles continue to inundate not only the academic debates but also the humanitarian reports, popular media, film, and fictional literature. Usually identified as victims of extreme adult abuse or extreme perpetrators of violence, very little is still discussed about the child behind the gun and how he (or she) became so threatening with a weapon. This entry engages the reader in the discussion about children who live their lives in shades of gray by considering the particularities, complexities, and ambiguities of their war experiences. As a consequence, spaces may be opened for thinking about child soldiers not in terms of children robbed of their childhood, but as moral subjects—as well as beneficiaries of international protection. The text is divided into three main sections: First, it outlines the “phenomenon of child soldiers” and reviews the definitions of this group of children as well as the main ideas and explanations concerning the participation of children in contemporary armed conflicts. Then, it focuses on the international response to the child soldier problem from a rights-based approach that aims

to prohibit the participation of children in war. The international practices developed to prevent the military recruitment of children and to guarantee their return to civilian lives are also analyzed. Finally, the last section touches on some critical issues about the participation of children in war, who have been marginalized by the prevailing humanitarian discourse on child soldiers.

Defining the Child Soldiers “Phenomenon”: Who, Where, and Why What initially comes to mind through the reports about child soldiers published by international humanitarian organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the world’s media is a relation between extremes: the extreme violence of the child soldiering phenomenon, the extreme brutality of the contemporary wars, and the extreme fragility of the states where children are militarily recruited by armed forces and groups. Despite the recognition that some children have been present in armies in the past, these are considered the exceptions to what the rule used to be—that is, that warfare was the domain of adults. In these narratives, African (mostly) children carrying weapons appear as a growing feature of the so-called new wars. In addition to that, expressions such as “children without childhood,” “children robbed of their childhood,” and “children out of place” strengthen the message that child soldiers are at serious risk. Once they have experienced episodes of violence and loss, these children are understood as essentially vulnerable and hapless victims whose process of human development has become antithetical to normality. To shed light on this narrative in which children engaged in war are regarded as a new social problem, a formal definition of child soldier according to international principles is offered; then it turns to the description of the three common assumptions that underlie this particular understanding of child soldiers: (a) Children are inherently vulnerable, irrational, and innocent; (b) the contemporary wars are especially brutal and “uncivilized”; and (b) weapons today are much smaller and lighter than the old ones. It is important to emphasize that this specific way of framing the child soldier phenomenon builds the limits that produce a bounded conception of who the

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child soldiers are, where they are found, and why they are militarily recruited. The 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions was the first legal systematic attempt to directly address the issue of child soldiers. In 2007, United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) published the Paris Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups. Looking at these documents, it is possible to identify a great expansion of what is meant by the social category that refers to children involved in warfare. On one hand, under the first international documents, the regulation of children’s participation in war and their protection were contingent on their role as combatants. On the other hand, the Paris Principles formally abandons the concept of child soldier in favor of the concept of a “child associated with armed group or armed force,” which has broadened the category to include any person under 18 years of age who has been recruited by any armed force or group in any capacity, such as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies, or for sexual purposes. In other words, the category does not refer only to a child who has taken a direct part in hostilities. At the same time that this broader concept makes possible the protection of an increasing number of children, it unites under one single category children who may have performed various roles that have very different meanings in the local context. This broader definition of the term child soldier is considered here. According to the anthropologist David Rosen, whose research on the involvement of children in wars has opened room for critically reflecting on the prevailing narratives about child soldiers, children have always been present on the battlefields. However, they have been depicted in many different ways. In the medieval era, for example, they were portrayed as war heroes or natural companions of adults during war, when the attitude towards children was generally one of indifference to age. What is so particular about the construction of the contemporary phenomenon of child soldiers is its framing as a deviation in relation to a supposedly universal conception of childhood. The next section explores the main assumptions that construct child soldiers as a new international emergency.

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Children and War: Explaining the Phenomenon of Child Soldiering In 1996, Graça Machel, an expert of the SecretaryGeneral and former Minister of Education of Mozambique, presented at the UN General Assembly her report Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. There, she suggested that more than 300,000 children under 18 years of age were fighting at that time in 31 conflicts around the world. The study prompted much international attention, advocacy, and programming on the phenomenon of child-soldiers and also led to the creation of the Child Soldiers International that included prominent humanitarian and human rights organizations. The report included a number of concrete recommendations for the protection of children in armed conflicts and was, according to Machel, an urgent call for ending the exploitation of children as soldiers. Within the report, it is possible to identify three assumptions mentioned earlier. From the first assumption—that they are inherently vulnerable, irrational, and innocent—children are depicted as programmed to function like robots or killing machines or are brainwashed to commit terrible abuses about which they have no appreciation and over which they have no control. In addition to children’s irrationality, the fact of being vulnerable is reproduced by the focus on violent abductions linked to specific acts of terror, such as compelling the new recruits to kill family members or co-villagers, and on the abusive exploitation of children who do not have real agency in their military participation. Even when the recruitment is reportedly voluntary by the children themselves, the diversity of reasons that can motivate this decision is downplayed by emphasizing that the armed forces and groups took advantage of poverty, idleness, or lack of adult care. As is the case in the Machel’s report, the term voluntary is usually placed within quotation marks, indicating that it should not be taken literally when addressing child enlistment. Although there are many situations in which children are brutally exploited while part of the armed group or forces, the risk of this particular narrative is that it silences the possibility to consider the experiences of military recruitment

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through a different grammar rather than the one of victimization of children. The second assumption affirms that the military recruitment of children is closely related to the development of the so-called new wars in the post–Cold War era, which are predominantly intrastate conflicts with a high percentage of civilian casualties, mostly between poor and lowerincome states. Simply put, these new wars can be contrasted with earlier wars in terms of the blurring of distinctions, which are characteristic of the institutionalization of both the modern state and the modern war, such as the principle that differentiates between combatants and civilians and the differentiation between war and peace. One of the characteristics of these armed conflicts is their long duration; within this context, child soldiers fulfill the continuous demand for combatants to maintain the conflict. Although the qualitative changes that would justify thinking in terms of a different form of war are questionable, child soldiers are presented as one of the greatest examples of incivility that emerges from this context of chaos and abandonment of all standards, especially on the African continent. From such a particular understanding of war, not only a particular conception of child soldier is at issue but also a specific idea of an entire social system, which makes this phenomenon possible, is articulated. As a consequence, states and families are constructed as fragile and unable to take care of their own children, making international interventions the only possible solution. Finally, the third assumption is that technological improvements make small arms lighter and easier to use so child soldiers can be effective participants in warfare. Besides that, through the black market, the military organizations, official or not, easily acquire the weapons very cheaply. Within this approach, at the same time that the easy access to deadly weapons is assumed to transform any local conflict into a bloody slaughter, the cost for turning children into soldiers is significantly lower. Although it is not possible to establish a direct link between the spread of small arms and the recruitment of children by armed groups and armed forces, what becomes clear is that together these three assumptions articulate and translate the participation of children in war as a “new”

phenomenon of child soldiering, populated by images and narratives of mostly poor children who are exploited by adults in “barbarous” contexts of armed conflict.

Preventing and Ending the Use of Child Soldiers Over the past 40 years, international law has developed to ban children from engaging in military activities and to better protect them in the war context. As mentioned earlier, in 1977 the Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions sought to prohibit the military recruitment and use of children under the age of 15, which is now recognized as a war crime under the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It applies to both government-controlled armed forces and nonstate armed groups. In relation to what the Paris Principles has established, that is still a too restrictive category, in which child soldier means any person under 15 years of age who takes part in hostilities. In addition to an increasing body of conventions, principles, and treaties promoting the rights of children in conflict situations, there are also numerous international initiatives undertaken by the United Nations together with the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) for young people to both improve their situation in conflict and post-conflict contexts and to prevent their military recruitment. This section first analyzes the response to the child soldier problem via the rights-based approach, which distinguishes what is allowed and what is forbidden in accordance to a specific code; the second part of the section focuses on the UN Release and Reintegration program. The two main pillars that support the ban on the involvement of children in armed conflict are the idea of “militarization”—that is, if the child takes part directly in hostilities or not—and the child’s age. Amid the international agreements that reproduce the 1977 Additional Protocols’ exact vocabulary, there is Article 38 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which also defined a child for the first time as any person under the age of 18. The Rome Statute, in turn, defines as a war crime the use of children to “participate actively in hostilities.”

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By excluding the word direct, the Rome Statute recognizes a broader definition of the involvement of children in armed conflict that may include activities not directly related to the battlefield. In 2000, the standard was raised again by the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, also known as OPAC. For the first time, an international treaty was wholly focused on ending the military recruitment of children. Still contradictory in terms of the age limit for participating in wars, since it varies according to state or nonstate recruitment of children, the OPAC appears as one of the main symbols of what has come to be known as the “straight-18 position,” which calls for an international legal standard banning recruitment into armed forces and use in combat of anyone under the age of 18. Other international laws have also helped strengthen the straight-18 position: the International Labour Organization’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 182 (1999) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1999). Outside the formal treaties, humanitarian and human rights organizations have sought restrictions that would set children and military activities completely apart. The Cape Town Principles (1997) and the Paris Principles are the two main examples. According to them, the notion of militarization must be as broad as possible to embrace all children who are involved with armed groups, state or otherwise, and the age limit must be 18. In terms of international policies, the UN Security Council has strongly condemned the targeting of children in situations of armed conflict, including the recruitment and use of children in wars. The first thematic resolution on children and armed conflict was adopted in 1999, and since then the UN body has adopted 13 resolutions specifically regarding the issue of child soldiers, the latest one being the UN Security Council Resolution 2225, which was passed in June 2015. By adopting these resolutions, the Security Council stated an important message: Children’s participation in situations of armed conflict affects, or at least has the potential to affect, international peace and security. About the practices established by these resolutions, it is worth highlighting the UN Release and

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Reintegration programs for child soldiers. There have been intense national and international efforts to demobilize child soldiers both during and after the war as way of promoting child soldiers’ return to civilian life, which is understood as an important strategy for breaking cycles of violence and securing international peace. After negotiating the release of children with armed forces and groups, child soldiers are, first, accommodated in “transitory centers” while their families are traced so their reunification can happen as soon as possible. To prepare these children to reintegrate into civilian life and to return to their families, psychosocial support activities begin immediately at this stage. Also, in the centers, children have access to catch-up classes to restimulate them in going back to school. The UN regards the reintegration of children as a complex, long-term process that requires major resources. According to the Paris Principles, this process must involve five components: (a) family reunification, (b) educational opportunities, (c) psychosocial support, (d) training in vocational skills, and (e) community mobilization to receive former child soldiers. During the reintegration process, the challenges children face are many and diverse: (a) difficulty of overcoming the war traumas, (b) lack of money or job opportunities in very poor and war-ravaged communities, (c) that families and communities may be unreceptive to children who have committed crimes during the war, and not surprisingly, (d) that some children may be unwilling to assume the role of a child as prescribed by UNICEF after having held positions of power while part of the armed forces and groups. For girls, in particular, participation in the military may carry great stigma that prevents them from entering accepted roles in society, especially if they were sexually abused or had children while associated with armed forces or groups. This section examined the international responses towards the child soldier phenomenon. The next (and last) section sheds light on some critical aspects about the involvement of children in war, which have been marginalized through these responses and by the prevailing discourse about child soldiers that states them as essentially vulnerable victims of adult abuse.

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When Children Participate in War: Critical Issues This last section aims to encourage a further element in the study of child soldiers: curiosity about children’s experiences while associated with armed forces and groups as well as about their processes of returning to civilian lives. Such curiosity through a child-centered lens, stimulated by the field of childhood studies, enables the analysis of the relationship between a conflict’s trajectory and children’s lives, recognizing that there is no single profile of a child soldier because different children experience conflict differently. By doing that, it becomes possible to consider some questions and ideas that have been marginalized by the dominant humanitarian discourse on child soldiers. First, room is opened to demonstrate that some children may have agency within conflict. In this sense, it not only seeks to understand the motivations for children engaging in war but also to explore how various children experience conflict and how they may participate in the process of post-conflict reconstruction. The question of participation further complicates the picture of victim and perpetrator and has the capacity to generate significant debate about the possibility of considering children responsible for the acts committed while part of the armed forces and groups. If so, would it be possible to conciliate practices of international child protection and child soldiers’ punishment? Furthermore, by bringing children’s lives into focus, such as the work developed by many anthropologists, questions related to gender and what should be prioritized in the reintegration process are unfolded and considered in their own specificities. Finally, these children, whose faces are part of what Erica Burman describes as the iconography of emergencies, may be thought as the emergency themselves whose acts and experiences challenge the idea of a universal ­ childhood. Jana Tabak See also Children as Victims; Children at Risk; Children’s Rights; Militarization; United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF); War and War-Affected Children

Further Readings Boyden, J., & de Berry, J. (2004). Children and youth on the front line: Ethnography, armed conflict and displacement. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Burman, E. (1994). Innocents abroad: Western fantasies of childhood and the iconography of emergencies. Disasters, 18(3), 238–253. Dallaire, R. (2010). They fight like soldiers, they die like children: The global quest to eradicate the use of child soldiers. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Random House. D’Costa, B., Huynh, K., & Lee-Koo, K. (2015). Children and global conflict. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Denov, M. (2010). Child soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Drumbl, M. A. (2012). Reimagining child soldiers in international law and policy. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Honwana, A. (2006). Child soldiers in Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Machel, G. (1996). Impact of armed conflict on children. Report of the expert of the Secretary General of the United Nations, New York, NY: United Nations. Marshall Beier, J. (Ed.). (2011). The militarization of childhood: Thinking beyond the Global South. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. McKay, S., & Mazurana, D. (2004). Where are the girls? Girls in the fighting forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique: Their lives during and after war. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development. Rosen, D. (2015). Child soldiers in the Western imagination: From patriots to victims. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shepler, S. (2014). Childhood deployed: Remaking child soldiers in Sierra Leone. New York: New York University Press. Singer, P. W. (2006). Children at war. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wessells, M. (2006). Child soldiers: From violence to protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Child Study At the turn of the 20th century in the United States, child study referred to a new disciplinary field dedicated to the scientific study of children.

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Child study was also an organized club movement among women, mainly mothers, in search of scientific knowledge about educating and rearing children. Interest in the scientific study of the child reflected a new child centeredness in American family life and the influence of 19th-century positivism with its quest for universal laws governing human behavior. This entry describes the two-pronged history of child study as an academic discipline and a lay movement promoting scientific motherhood. It examines the contributions of experimental psychologists such as Granville Stanley Hall who wanted to professionalize the study of the child and women organized in mothers’ clubs who believed their observations of children also served the interest of science. The child subjected to scientific scrutiny was a product of social and economic changes that supported an individualist philosophy of mobility and a domestic philosophy that assigned mothers primary responsibility for rearing children who had the self-discipline and moral traits needed for success. Child study was premised on four beliefs: (1) that children were not miniature adults, (2) that the differences extended beyond physical size and knowledge, (3) that these differences were scientifically discoverable, and (4) that scientific studies could be translated into guides for successful child nurture. As an academic discipline and experimental science, it was a precursor to specialized fields of developmental psychology and educational psychology. As a club movement child study was the precursor to 20th-century parent education programs. Both as a scientific field of study and as a parent movement, child study constructed a normal child with typical unexceptional developmental issues; this child is juxtaposed to the delinquent, disabled, or impoverished orphan child that concerned 19th-century social welfare agents.

Child Study as an Academic Discipline The 1890s was the heyday of child study when child study was synonymous with the work of Hall. Hall brought to his work with children a new approach to psychology rooted in laboratory research rather than introspection. With his students at Clark University, Hall studied children

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through direct observation. To address his questions about the mind of the child, Hall pioneered as a research methodology the use of questionnaires administered to children by teachers. His first study, The Contents of Children’s Minds (1883), quantified responses to assess the typical child knowledge on entering kindergarten. Hall’s students expanded the method, creating nearly 200 topical syllabi questionnaires to explore different research interests. Others, including Henry P. Bowditch at Harvard, added to the child study quantitative measures of norms for body size, motor skills, and other physical characteristics that might influence mental development. The two-volume study of Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904) was Hall’s last, but it was also his most important contribution to child study. Although much of this treatise was debunked later by developmentalists, Adolescence drew attention to the significance of the teen years. Early proponents created the trappings of child study professionalism during the 1890s. Programs developed at universities and normal schools across the country, although Clark University remained the flagship institution. The journal Pedagogical Seminary (established by Hall in 1891) provided an outlet for research publications. No national child study association emerged, but Hall encouraged the growth of state societies, with the Illinois Society for Child Study the first in 1894. Child study professionals found homes in the American Psychological Association and the National Education Association. Hall saw a natural synergy between child study and teaching. In turn, educational reformers looking for a scientifically grounded pedagogy were early and essential promoters of child study programs. Reform enthusiasts such as Earl Barnes at Stanford University were among the first to view questionnaires as the best method to produce universally applicable conclusions about children that could be translated into pedagogical practice and utilized in teacher training. Child study researchers worked closely with the National Education Association to build teacher awareness of the new, experimental psychology. In 1894, the National Education Association responded by creating the organization’s Child Study Department.

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Hall’s influence receded in the early 20th century along with the usefulness of child study as an organizing principle for academic research. Researchers began to look beyond Hall’s theoretical framework—recapitulation theory—to explain child development. Recapitulation theory described the 19th-century Darwinian view that child development replicated stages of evolutionary development. Largely discredited in the 20th century, recapitulation gave way to new theoretical frames drawn from John B. Watson’s behaviorism and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Experimentalists found the questionnaire format limiting and gravitated to research questions focused on deviation for norms, with measuring intelligence as a primary example. Child psychology emerged as a more specialized disciplinary title for the scientific study of children’s minds. Leaders in the field of education such as John Dewey, Edward Thorndike, and James Mark Baldwin, also challenged Hall’s theory and methodology to develop a separate field of educational psychology. By the 1920s, professionals had splintered child study into new disciplinary parts, but the third arm of the child study movement, women who self-identified as mothers, continued to designate parent interest as child study. In the 1880s and 1890s, they, too, organized to heed the call for a science of the child.

Mothers as Scientific Observers of Their Children Milicent Shinn—college-educated, member of the Association of College Alumnae (ACA), and with no academic affiliation—constructed a model of child study that blurred the research acumen credited to academics and amateurs. She made a detailed record of her niece from birth to age 7 years, presented her observations at scholarly conferences, published reports throughout the 1890s, and in 1900 shared her findings in a popular text, The Biography of a Baby. As director of the ACA’s department of child study, she involved a nationwide network of ACA mothers in recording detailed observations of their offspring by using Hall’s topical syllabi. Shinn believed these individual observations

would lead researchers to generalizations about child development. Her Notes on the Development of the Senses in the First Three Years of Childhood (1907) was a comprehensive compilation of at-home observations from ACA women. For Shinn, the book was visible evidence of the value of the maternal researchers. Shinn belonged to the generation of collegeeducated women who legitimized for parents the scientific study of the child, although most did so through discussion and not as Shinn had, by research in the nursery. Largely denied opportunities for careers outside the home, these women created organizations that turned domesticity into a science and motherhood into a public service career. Although the woman’s club movement addressed many civic betterment projects, women’s clubs often made the welfare of infants and children their special province. Their work with exceptional children—the impoverished and orphaned children of the working classes—fueled an interest in best practices for understanding their own normal offspring. In Worcester, Massachusetts, and in New York City, groups formed in the 1880s to study the most modern and scientifically approved ways of parenting; others soon followed as this shared interest drew middle-class and wealthy women into child study clubs. The clubs met regularly to evaluate through readings and discussion the latest information about the physical and mental development of ordinary children and the routine problems parents and teachers dealt with on a daily basis. Hall and other child study researchers fostered these organizations, serving as speakers for local clubs.

The Child Study Association of America In 1908, club members established the Child Study Association of America (CSAA) to coordinate the activities of the local clubs. The leader of CSAA, Sidonie Gruenburg, became the lay voice of child study. Her writings and CSAA-sponsored publications helped make child study and child development research publicly (and palatably) accessible for decades. The CSAA represented a shift from the balance of power between mothers and experts envisioned

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by Shinn. In the environment where male academics were carving out control over the science of the child, amateur at-home observers could be dismissed as too sentimental for objective accounts of development. New parameters for quality research in psychology and education set by the specialized professions made mothers’ observations unscientific. Instead, mothers performed child study as consumers of advice rather than creators of child study knowledge. Scientific motherhood described those who followed the advice of experts and confined their research to recording for posterity in commercially available baby books the milestones of a child’s life. Child study clubs were organized and led by university extension agents in the 1920s, they exemplified this shift to parent education by experts. CSAA served mothers as a resource center; it continued as a parent education organization until the 1970s as the new professional child study derivatives populated the universities. Kathleen W. Jones See also Developmental Psychology; Hall, Granville Stanley; Mothers/Motherhood; Parental Advice Literature

Further Readings Davidson, E. S., & Benjamin, L. T. Jr. (1987). A history of the child study movement in America. In J. A. Glover & R. R. Ronning (Eds.), Historical foundations of educational psychology (pp. 41–60) Boston, MA: Springer. Grant, J. (1994). Caught between common sense and science: The Cornell child study clubs, 1925–45. History of Education Quarterly, 34, 433–452. doi:10.2307/369266 Siegel, A. W., & White, S. H. (1982). The child study movement: Early growth and development of the symbolized child. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 17, 233–285. von Oertzen, C. (2013). Science in the cradle: Milicent Shinn and her home-based network of baby observers, 1890–1910. Centaurus, 55, 1175–1195. doi:10.1111/1600-0498.12016 Wollons, R. L. (1983). Educating motherhood: Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg and the child study association of America, 1881–1929 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

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Child Suicide Suicide is the intentional act of ending one’s own life. The nature of the intent is not necessarily straightforward, however, because ‘intentional’ assumes that the decision to end one’s life is a conscious and rational one. People experiencing mental health problems do not necessarily make conscious and rational decisions because distorted thinking is a common feature of many mental health problems. For example, ‘catastrophizing’ (believing situations are far worse than they actually are) is a cognitive distortion common in anxiety disorders, and ‘anhedonia’ (feeling no pleasure in everyday activities) is a feature of many depressive disorders. The term ‘commit suicide’ is no longer generally accepted in the mental health field because of its past association with criminality (when suicide was seen as a crime); instead, terms such as ‘died by suicide’ or ‘killed himself or herself’ are preferred. In research and clinical practice, suicide is often grouped with self-harm as a single entity, but the two are not synonymous. Most acts of selfharm (including those by children or young people) have little or no suicidal intent. There are, however, obvious relationships between suicide and self-harm: Suicide is an extreme act of selfharm and repeated self-harm is well known as a risk factor in the completion of suicide. Suicide in children under 14 years of age is relatively rare but rates rise sharply in the late teens. According to World Health Organization data published in 2015, suicide is the second leading cause of death globally amongst 15- to 29-yearolds after road injuries. Boys are more at risk of suicide than are girls in both younger and older children. Most child suicides occur in countries classified by the World Bank as a lower middle income. Most of these countries can be found in Africa and South East Asia (Pakistan, India, Nigeria, and Sudan being notable examples). Relatively few of these countries are in Europe or the Americas, Bolivia and Ukraine being notable exceptions. Suicide rates in lower-middle-income countries are similar for both sexes; in upper-middle and highincome countries (mostly Europe, China, and the

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Americas) and low-income countries (mainly Africa), male suicides far outweigh female suicides, with ratios as high as 3:1. Child suicide rarely has a single cause. Some of the main risk factors in child suicide include bereavement and loss, mental health problems such as mood disorder or borderline personality disorder, a history of previous attempts, drug and alcohol problems, issues with sexuality or sexual identity, domestic violence, child neglect or abuse (including sexual abuse), physical disability, bullying behaviour, and academic pressures. A particular risk factor is easy access to lethal means, not just obvious means such as firearms, pills, and poisons but also less obvious means such as high structures or railways. Restricting access to lethal means is thus a protective factor in suicide as are good problemsolving skills and strong family, peer, or community support. There is some evidence that Internet and social media use may be an additional risk factor for some children; on the other hand, Internet and social media use that provides positive peer support or encourages help-seeking behaviour may be a protective factor. Child suicide is almost always distressing for those close to the child—parents, siblings, and peers—but may be no more distressing than when an adult dies by suicide. A Lancet Psychiatry review from 2014 on bereavement by suicide found that parents bereaved by the suicide of an adult child were equally as distressed as parents of children under 19 years of age who died by suicide. Moreover, parents of children who died through ‘nonsuicidal’ violence (such as homicide or a road traffic accident) were found to have worse psychiatric outcomes. Death through suicide does, however, seems to elicit more stigma and shame amongst relatives and friends than death through nonsuicidal violence. Because suicide is a terminal act, the only logical interventions are those that focus on prevention, although those bereaved by suicide may benefit from supportive ‘postvention’. Suicide prevention interventions can be targeted at individuals particularly at risk, or they can be universal, population-level interventions. Some ­ ­population-level interventions simply involve hazard removal: Fencing off high structures and railways, limiting access to medicines or poisons (e.g.,

paracetamol/acetaminophen pack-size restrictions in the United Kingdom or hazardous pesticides restrictions in Sri Lanka), controlling firearms (although this can be highly political in some countries), or removing information about suicide methods from the Internet. Others involve training peers, teachers, health professionals, parents, or the general population about suicide risk factors in children or young people and taking some form of appropriate action. The action is taken and the target audience tend to be what discriminates between the many suicide prevention interventions that exist worldwide. The simplest interventions merely encourage people to ask if everything is OK if they suspect something is wrong with friends or peers, or they seek to reassure people that discussing suicidal thoughts will not increase the risks of suicide. In addition, more sophisticated interventions (targeted at, for example, teachers, family doctors, and school nurses) generally involve anti-stigma training, techniques to encourage help-seeking behaviour, and education about thresholds for referral to specialist or emergency services. There is some speculation that sensational media reporting of suicides may lead to ‘contagious’ or ‘cluster’ suicides, particularly amongst vulnerable young people, thus national suicide prevention strategies usually include specific guidelines for the responsible reporting of suicide by news and media organisations. Targeted interventions focus on those deemed to be at high risk of suicide—for example, children who repeatedly practice self-harm or those exposed to severely traumatic incidents. A very simple targeted intervention is posting telephone numbers of suicide crisis lines (e.g., the Samaritans) in specific areas (e.g., near cliffs) or on specific structures (e.g., bridges) that have seen frequent suicide attempts. A wide of variety of targeted interventions exist, some of which are specifically designed for high-risk groups—for example, dialectical behaviour therapy for borderline personality disorder or trauma-focused cognitive behaviour therapy for those exposed to trauma—whereas others use more general counselling or psychotherapeutic approaches. Unsurprisingly, given the wide variety of suicide prevention interventions, the evidence for these interventions is somewhat mixed. A Journal of the

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American Medical Association review suggests that the best evidence appears to be for the education of physicians and the restriction of lethal means. The U.S. National Suicide Prevention Resource Center suggests that to be effective, suicide prevention interventions should (a) lead to reductions in suicidal thoughts and behaviours or changes in suicide-related risk and protective factors and not just changes in knowledge, (b) be built around explicit theories of change, (c) engage those with lived experience of suicide-related behaviour (including those bereaved by suicide), and (d) be culturally competent. Steven Pryjmachuk See also Children Who Murder; Neurocognitive Development; Neuroscience; Well-Being, Children’s

Further Readings Gvion, Y., & Apter, A. (2016). Evidence-based prevention and treatment of suicidal behavior in children and adolescents. In R. C. O’Connor & J. Pirkis (Eds.), The international handbook of suicide prevention (2nd ed., pp. 303–322). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Hawton, K., Saunders, K. E. A., & O’Connor, R. C. (2012). Self-harm and suicide in adolescents. The Lancet, 379, 2373–2382. Mann, J. J., Apter, A., Bertolote, J., Beautrais, A., Currier, D., Haas, A., . . . Hendin, H. (2005). Suicide prevention strategies: A systematic review. JAMA, 294(16), 2064–2074. Pitman, A., Osborn, D., King, M., & Erlangsen, A. (2014, June 1). Effects of suicide bereavement on mental health and suicide risk. The Lancet Psychiatry, 1(1), 86–94.doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(14)70224-X

Websites Suicide Prevention Resource Center: www.sprc.org

Child Trafficking As a social problematic, child trafficking exploded onto the international scene in the late 1990s, a product of the union between the anti-childlabour and anti-trafficking movements. For the next 15 years, it became the defining child

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protection issue for a whole network of Northern donor agencies, Southern government departments, UN bodies, and a universe of nongovernmental organisations. It led to institutional interventions across the globe, carved multilateral channels through which billions of dollars flowed, and shaped (and in many cases seriously harmed) lives on every continent. Although now somewhat supplanted by the catchall problematic of ‘modern slavery’, the concept of ‘child trafficking’ still carries some weight and has been targeted for eradication, alongside child labour, by the 8th Sustainable Development Goal. This entry looks at how child trafficking has commonly been understood, at what policy makers have tended to do about it, and at the many scholarly critiques of their actions and understandings.

Background and Legal Definition Child trafficking came to the world’s attention in the 1990s as the result of a sharp increase in funding for, media attention to, and political discourse around the previous ‘it’ issues of (adult) sex trafficking, child labour, and child sexual abuse. These spiked in the wake of the 1989 adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and in 1992 led to the establishment of the International Labour Organisation International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour. International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour quickly became the centrepiece of a well-resourced and discursively powerful global movement to get children out of work and into school. In 1996, it helped launch the World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, and in 2000, it fought for the adoption of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. The ‘Palermo Protocol’, as this document became known, marked the official inauguration of human trafficking (and child trafficking as a subcategory thereof) as an international issue. The years following its adoption saw an explosion of anti-trafficking rhetoric, legal action, project money, and media stories. Organisations dedicated to the anti-trafficking fight mushroomed from a few to many thousand, anti-trafficking literature proliferated, national policy frameworks

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spread worldwide, and funding rose from the paltry to the billions. The international legal architecture defining child trafficking combined the Palermo Protocol with the International Labour Organisation’s 1973 Minimum Age Convention and 1999 Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. In doing so, it constructed child trafficking as comprising childhood (understood to be under 18 years old), movement, and exploitation. The following section outlines the components of the legal definition of the crime, according to International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour.

Definitional Elements of Child Trafficking •• A child—a person under the age of 18 years. •• ‘Acts’ of recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt, whether by force or not, by a third person or group. •• A third person or group who organises the recruitment and/or these other acts for exploitative purposes. •• Movement may not be a constituent element for trafficking in so far as law enforcement and prosecution is concerned. However, an element of movement within a country or across borders is needed—even if minimal—in order to distinguish trafficking from other forms of slavery and slave-like practises enumerated in Art 3 (a) of International Labour Organisation Convention No. 182 (C182) and to ensure that trafficking victims away from their families do get needed assistance. •• Exploitation is taken to include the following: (a) all forms of slavery or practises similar to slavery, debt bondage and serfdom, and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict (C182, Article 3(a)); (b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances (C182, Article 3(b)); (c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular, for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties (C182, Article 3(c));

(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children (C182, Article 3(d) and C138, Article 3); (e) work done by children below the minimum age for admission to employment (C138, Articles 2 and 7). •• Threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, abduction, fraud or deception, or the abuse of power or a position of vulnerability at any point of the recruitment and movement do not need to be present in case of children (other than with adults) but are nevertheless taken as strong indications of child trafficking.

Mainstream Discourse and Policy Using the preceding definition, child trafficking has commonly been understood by international child protection agencies as involving innocent and unsuspecting minors kidnapped, tricked, or trapped by criminal exploiters or sold by their desperately poor (or irresponsible) parents into work that is damaging for them. This view assumes that no well-intentioned, well-informed adult would willingly let a minor engage in labour or migration and that no minor would have the capacity to make a decision to engage in these things independently. As such, the existence and persistence of ‘regular’ child work and mobility has often been understood as inherently problematic and unwilled. Children’s work and mobility as unfortunate consequences of factors beyond what they assume to be the ‘normal’ state of affairs. Mainstream policy responses have correspondingly tended towards the draconian, paralleling efforts to end child labour by preemptively targeting the work equated with trafficking or the migration seen to lead to it. Although the specifics of each intervention vary by case and by context, there exist common trends the world over. These pull in two major directions: (1) the promotion of the components and institutions seen as contributing to the creation of the ‘safe and healthy’ (read: Western) childhoods representative of the norm that trafficking is understood to be a deviation from and (2) the preemptive discouragement of children’s labour and mobility.

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This involves initiatives such as school promotion for children as an alternative to work, anti-work and anti-movement sensitisation campaigns, the passing of anti-trafficking laws that illegalise independent child mobility, border strengthening, and police efforts to reduce child work and movement.

Problems With Mainstream Discourse and Policy The mainstream approach to addressing child trafficking has been widely critiqued by the scholarly community as reductive and at times counterproductive. Five principal issues have been identified. First is that institutional thinking around it has typically proved ethnocentric, assuming the archetypal Western, middle-class childhood to represent a morally ‘right’, universal childhood that all others should aspire to. This, in turn, has led to the pathologising mentioned earlier, whereby nonWestern and non-bourgeois childhoods, along with the socialisation practises they entail, including child work and mobility, are constructed as deviant, deficient, and anti-developmental. Second, in its ethnocentrism, mainstream institutional understandings of child trafficking have failed to account for the ‘social’ nature of meaning. That is, in any given context, practises such as child work or mobility may be experienced either as negative ‘or’ positive, with the difference between the two largely accounted for by the local meanings given to each practise. This relativity of meaning is missed amidst the assumption of a one-size-fits-all truth around childhood and maturation, with the consequence that children’s subjective understandings of their experiences often end up discounted within official child protection practise. Third, in their zeal to protect children by promoting the nonmobile, work-free childhood typical of middle-classes in the Global North, international anti-child-trafficking efforts have often failed to account for the socio-material imperatives underpinning children’s work and movement in the Global South. For many poor children in many poorer parts of the world, work is a necessary condition for survival and to contribute to their families’ well-being. For some, mobility is also necessary in order to access that work. As such, child trafficking narratives that

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demonise work or mobility gloss over the structural conditions making each necessary, whereas the policies that aim to prevent work and mobility fail to address the needs beneath them. Fourth, the preceding factors tend to manifest themselves in an approach to projects and policymaking that is typically top-down and at times heavy-handed. Critical scholars have long documented this tendency within the international development field, and anti-trafficking actors are no exception to the rule. Children and their families are rarely meaningfully consulted in analysing their circumstances or in generating ideas for how to improve them; projects are commonly conceived and managed in nonparticipatory fashion, and interventions tend to take place ‘on’ rather than ‘with’ affected communities, with the result that effectiveness is often limited. Finally, fifth, as a consequence of all this, research has shown that many anti-trafficking efforts fail to achieve their stated goals and can even make things worse, causing what has been termed ‘collateral damage’ for the very children and communities they are designed to protect. This trend has been documented on all continents, with children forcibly ‘rescued’ from work that would otherwise have provided them with a livelihood and repatriated against their wishes and best interests. Worse still, the overly simplistic rescue paradigm has diverted energy away from more robust initiatives towards socioeconomic redistribution, which could more directly address the structural underpinnings of all difficult work and mobility.

Explanations What explains this state of affairs? If one can reasonably assume that international child protection actors genuinely wish to contribute to the wellbeing of the world’s children, including those who they understand as trafficked, why do they appear to be getting it all so wrong? A number of explanations present themselves in the scholarly literature. First is simply the power of the ethnocentric received ideas discussed earlier about what childhood is and should be. International child protection actors are commonly taught to think in these terms and much less frequently taught about the multiplicity of childhoods or the social nature of

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meaning. As a result, they fail to develop the reflexivity necessary to interrogate often sensationalist discourses such as those surrounding child trafficking. Second, institutional practise is such that few have the chance to encounter alternative narratives that challenge their own received beliefs. Agencies in this field tend to cite reports written by each other, and field staff members in Global South country offices are rarely permitted (or able) to spend long periods of time with the target populations their interventions affect. As a result, meaningful feedback mechanisms are stifled, meaning that pathways for correcting interventional failures or institutional misunderstandings are lacking. Third is the power of ideology and the funding that attaches to it. Received normative ideas around childhood have been shown to be essential here but so too have those around statehood and the market. Ultimately, as critical development scholars have argued, (neo)liberal understandings of the way that states and markets should be managed govern the operations of all development actors, and those working on child trafficking are no different. This has major consequences for child protection practise. For instance, many anti-traffickers have admitted to being aware of the structuring power of borders and global capitalist inequalities in prompting child migration or (exploitative) work. Many are on record as wanting to do something about them. Yet none are permitted to openly discuss or directly address these issues in the projects they propose because doing so would result in a denial of funding. Ultimately, therefore, international development and the anti-traffickers that are part of it comprise a political system designed to eschew the political economy of lack and instead reproduce comforting stories about Southern cultural backwardness amidst the grinding pressure of poverty because that is what sells amongst the largely White, Western media audience and the donor agencies they fund.

Alternatives These criticisms notwithstanding, a substantial academic literature has developed over the past two decades (itself drawing on the related literature around child labour, which dates back

further) advocating alternatives to the mainstream documented here. These alternatives point in a number of directions. First is for international child protection actors to approach what they do in more reflexive fashion. This would require them to embrace the idea that many different kinds of childhood are possible and thus to avoid the unquestioning pathologisation of those that differ from what has been described as the ‘globalised’ norm of Western middle-class childhood. That, at least, would lead to an appreciation of the difference between child trafficking and child work or mobility. Second is for international child protection actors to acknowledge that children’s well-being can best be served in different ways at different times in different contexts. This would itself require putting the promotion of child well-being at the heart of international policymaking, which is organised around responding to specific issues, such as ‘trafficking’. To do this would require the arduous practical and intellectual work of collaboratively defining what well-being means in any given context and balancing competing visions of it. Third, advocates argue that policy and project work should be developed in participatory, bottom-up fashion. That is to say, rather than ­ beginning with an externally defined problematic (such as trafficking) and a preset way of dealing with it (such as the prevention of child movement), they should approach the communities they wish to assist and ask their members what they think ‘they’ need to improve their lives and the lives of their children. This shift has been characterised as one from charity to solidarity. Fourth, and in line with the third alternative just described, child protection practise would need to alter its accountability mechanisms. Accountability travels upwards towards donors rather than downwards towards beneficiaries. Reversing this direction of travel would constitute a considerable improvement on current practise and would require the establishment of feedback mechanisms within the international system that is lacking. Finally, anti-trafficking actors have been widely urged to ‘get political’ in what they do. This would involve directly naming and tackling the political and economic root causes of the phenomena they

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wish to address. For example, honestly identifying border controls as causal of migrant vulnerability by pushing migrants into ever more dangerous (and exploitative) hands and so instead advocating for more open borders. Or critiquing Western trade subsidies as fundamental to rural Southern immiseration and targeting global debt relief as a macropolitical response to the economic vulnerability that lies beneath children’s work and movement. Neil Howard Note. Portions of this entry have been re-published, by permission of the publisher, from the author’s monograph: Howard (2016). See also Best Interests Principle; Children’s Rights; Participation Rights, UNCRC; Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC; Sexual Exploitation of Children

Further Readings Bourdillon, M., Levison, D., Myers, W., & White, B. (2010). Rights and wrongs of children’s work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Boyden, J., & Howard, N. (2013). Why does child trafficking policy need to be reformed? The moral economy of children’s movement in Benin and Ethiopia. Children’s Geographies, 11(1), 354–368. doi :10.1080/14733285.2013.817661 Dottridge, M. (2007). Introduction. In M. Dottridge (Ed.), Collateral damage: The impact of antitrafficking measures on human rights around the world (pp. 1–27). Bangkok, Thailand: Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Hashim, I., & Thorsen, D. (2011). Child migrants in Africa. London, UK: Zed Books and the Nordic Africa Institute. Howard, N. (2016). Child trafficking, youth labour mobility and the politics of protection. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Howard, N. (2017, April 17). When NGOs save children who don’t want to be saved. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/ 2017/04/ngos-save-children-don-saved170425101830650.html Huijsmans, R., & Baker, S. (2012). Child trafficking: ‘Worst form’ of child labour, or worst approach to young migrants? Development and Change, 43, 919– 946. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01786.x

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International Labour Office. (1973). Convention concerning minimum age for admission to employment. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. International Labour Office. (1999). Convention concerning the prohibition and immediate action for the elimination of the worst forms of child labour. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Molland, S. (2012). The perfect business? Anti-trafficking and the sex trade along the Mekong. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. O’Connell Davidson, J. (2011). Moving children? Child trafficking, child migration, and child rights. Critical Social Policy, 31(3), 454–477. doi:10.1177/ 0261018311405014 O’Connell Davidson, J. (2015). Modern slavery: The margins of freedom. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Okyere, S. (2013). Are working children’s rights and child labour abolition complementary or opposing realms? International Social Work International Social Work, 56(1), 80–91. doi:10.1177/ 0020872812459069 Okyere, S., & Howard, N. (2013). Beyond trafficking and slavery short Course: (Vol. 7). Childhood and youth. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy .net/info/bts-short-course United Nations. (2000). Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children: Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime. New York, NY: UN General Assembly.

Child Welfare Child welfare is concerned with the social administration of children’s lives in organised welfare states. The aim of child welfare is to promote children’s development, safety, and well-being. Contemporary uses of the term ‘child welfare’ tend to refer to services related to adoption, the prevention of abuse and neglect, and living in state care. Social work is the profession most directly responsible for the delivery of child welfare policies in collaboration with teachers, health professionals, and parents. Child protection is the most recognisable service in which children’s welfare in enacted, although child welfare is much broader including the state’s responsibility for children’s economic prosperity. The entry provides an

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overview of the emergence of child welfare from an international perspective. It further examines different theoretical approaches that inform the practice and organisation of children’s welfare. Finally, it surveys research on children’s experiences of child welfare services.

The Emergence of Child Welfare Internationally Three movements have shaped child welfare historically. The first is ‘child saving’, the idea that children are relatively powerless to act for themselves and that adults in authority are responsible for their welfare. ‘Social investment’ ideas have also shaped child welfare, the idea that children are the future capital of a nation. Finally, from a rightsbased perspective, child welfare is considered to be an inalienable right, and children are social actors who can contribute to their own welfare. The emergence of organised child welfare is closely linked to industrialisation, modernisation, and the birth of the nation-state; yet, the roots of child welfare predate this period. For example, Foundling Hospitals were set up across Europe from the 13th century onwards. Until that point, orphans, children born outside of wedlock, and poor children were often abandoned. Foundling Hospitals existed to save children from abandonment, or even infanticide, to care for them in the absence of parental or extended family care and to ensure their education and transformation into productive citizens. Run by philanthropist and charitable missions, Foundling Hospitals represent pre-statist approaches to child welfare. World Wars I and II were instrumental in the shaping of contemporary child welfare in AngloAmerican contexts. As historian Hugh Cunningham notes, in the United Kingdom, specifically during war times, children have often been viewed as a source of hope. The need to invest in children’s health, education, sense of citizenship, and to focus on their best interests achieved a rare political consensus. As such, children in capitalist societies started to be understood as embodying the future, and an identification between childhood and the future of the nation was established. Since the late 1980s, and with the ratification of the United Nations Convention for the Rights of

the Child, children’s entitlement to welfare came to the fore. In the Convention, welfare cuts across rights of provision and protection in childhood, as, for example, in the case of state provision of the highest possible standard of health and treatment in the case of illness (Article 24) and/or state protection from violence, abuse, and neglect (Article 19). Children’s participation rights, which state that children’s views must be solicited, listened to, and respected in all matters affecting them, also play a role in their welfare. The children’s rights movement has recast our understanding of child welfare as both a national and international issue, as might be the case, for example, in transnational adoption and/or children’s work and labour movements. Critiques of children’s rights approaches to child welfare highlight the foregrounding of the individual child at the expense of thinking about welfare as an interdependent set of relationships between children, significant others, and institutions. Further critiques challenge the balance of children’s rights in practice arguing that protection rights often eclipse children’s rights to participation, in what could be described as a perpetuation of earlier child-saving approaches. In contemporary post-industrial economies, child welfare is currently undergoing drastic reorganisation. The emergence of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s saw the beginning of the marketization of public services throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and the outsourcing of state responsibilities, including in child welfare, to the charity and private sectors. Such trends were confounded with the 2008 Financial Crisis, which paved the way for over a decade of austerity policies. These socioeconomic and political developments have had detrimental consequences for state provision of child welfare in many countries. For example, in the United Kingdom, state funding to women’s shelters and the under-resourcing of prevention services for children leaves children (and their mothers) who have experienced domestic violence in extended precarious circumstances, unable to leave home and escape perpetrators. At the same time, the profession of social work, a key part of child welfare, is undergoing radical restructuring in terms of the education of future social workers as well as the organisation of services, as current socioeconomic trends implicate social work in privatisation.

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Models and practices of child welfare largely depend on the socioeconomic and political configuration in different countries and regions. The model of child welfare found in the United Kingdom has been described as an institutional model of child welfare. A comparative look at child welfare across the world can unsettle received wisdom of both childhood and welfare. In Europe, child protection legislation and policy varies considerably across different countries with not all countries claiming centralised frameworks. Children’s welfare in social democratic societies, such as those found in Scandinavian countries, suggests a more developmental approach to child welfare in which provision for children is embedded within extensive family social policy ranging from early state nursery provision to shared parental leave. In the United States, where there is no universal welfare and local provision varies considerably across federal governments, a residual model prevails which favours minimalist state intervention. The residual model necessitates social entrepreneurship and innovation in the design and delivery of children’s welfare. The Harlem Children’s Zone is an example of a community child welfare model describing itself as a ‘cradle to career’ intervention. Meanwhile, anthropological research sensitises us to more informal child protection and welfare practices as such alloparenting, child fosterage, clan fostering, and nurture kinship across the Global South. Multisited ethnographies of adoption also highlight the different meanings and practices of welfare, as anthropologist Rachael Stryker extensively documents in her ethnographies of transnational adoption experiences of Russian children by U.S. parents. Other examples include the indigenous, participatory interventions in Ethiopia for the prevention of, for example, female genital mutilation, where child welfare is linked to issues of civic education, women’s economic support, food security, environmental protection, and elder care.

Different Theoretical Approaches for the Practice of Child Welfare Child welfare is an interdisciplinary area of knowledge and social work, which underpins child welfare practice, has been influenced by

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behaviourism, psychoanalysis, intervention science, Marxism, feminism, and postcolonial studies alike. Approaches to child welfare can be categorised as being therapeutic, scientific, and/or societally focused. The dominance or combination of approaches tends to follow broader trends in the social construction of childhood, social problems, and proposed responses providing different conceptualisations to social issues, children, parents, social workers, and the state, and offering diverse avenues of action. Early models of child welfare were influenced by developments in child psychoanalysis. The work of Anna Freud on the one hand and John Bowlby on the other is of particular note, as is the synthesis of both traditions in the work of Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. Anna Freud and colleagues’ work in London during and following World War II ushered in a culture of listening to children. In contrast to her father’s approach to psychoanalysis which relied on cultivating a relationship to the past, Anna Freud argued that children’s cares and concerns related to their lived experience in the ‘here-and-now’. Accounts exist in the literature of the ways in which Freud and her co-workers tried to understand children’s seemingly idiosyncratic behaviours and musings. Instead of trying to persuade children of the moral rectitude, or otherwise, of such expressions, they tried to understand the ways in which such expressions provided a window into the child’s inner and outer worlds. Likewise, John Bowlby contended that children’s encounters with the outside world were often responsible for their psychological experiences and emotional disturbances. Bowlby was particularly interested in children’s relationship with their primary caregiver—typically their mother—and together with Mary Ainsworth pioneered research into relationship attachment in childhood. The pair, separately and together, posited children’s need for a secure base from which to explore the world. Through experimental research, understanding of different attachment styles and their consequences was developed, and more contemporary research, such as by Fonagy and Target, has continued in this tradition contributing to our understanding of child and adult ‘mentalisation’ processes—the imaginative activity of understanding another person’s mental

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states, an ability thought to be rooted in early secure caregiving relationships. This body of work continues to influence child welfare practices because of the compelling evidence in postindustrialised societies, where the concept of attachment has taken root, between the breakdown of mentalisation processes and patterns of abuse and neglect. Drawing on such approaches, children and their parents are conceptualised as thinking, feeling, and acting beings. In this model, social workers are trained to work intergenerationally, being mindful to relationship breakdown, and using themselves in the process of repair. The attachment approach has been criticised from feminist, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. Early critiques focused on the overemphasis on mothers in the attachment process and the implications this had for women who alone were held responsible for the child’s present and future well-being. More recent sociological critiques have also centred on the overdetermination of the relationship between attachment and brain development. This is a relationship that has caught policy makers’ imaginations and spurred the early intervention movement. However, it is still a relationship that is being investigated and is much less definite than its popularisation would suggest. These sociological critiques also stress how class, poverty, material life conditions, and structural inequalities fall out of sight when the individual and interpersonal psychological issues take centre stage. Anthropologists have also pointed out the cultural decontextualisation of much research on attachment which takes the nuclear family, and the mother–child relationship, as its basis and ignores the many different family formations and childcare arrangements that exist globally. The scientific method has also impacted on the practice of child welfare. Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work provides an early example of empirical research in child welfare. The intermingling of science and child welfare, however, predates them. The hygiene movement of the early 1900s emerged in response to high infant deaths, and mothers were the focus of philanthropic (friendly visitors) and later state interventions (social workers) to keep babies and houses clean and orderly. Health visitors existed in parallel to the emerging profession of social work and, backed

by science, intervened into poor and workingclass family homes. The discipline of psychology, following its own historical trajectory and efforts to become a legitimate natural science, soon joined scientific discourses of child welfare and the rise of expert advice in child-rearing started to emerge. Developments in public health and medicine have further contributed to contemporary trends in the practice of child welfare. The evidence-based medicine movement, with its ­ rejection of professional hierarchy and authority, turned to experimental design as a way of providing an answer to what worked in therapeutic interventions as well as to support decision making for the rationalisation of resources in the newly founded ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state. Scepticism over the outcomes of psychotherapeutic approaches to child social work practice and the organisation of child welfare at national levels sparked an appetite at a policy level for more evidence-based approaches to the practice of child welfare. Evidence-based child welfare practices are an approach to intervening into children’s lives which only uses evidence derived from experimentally designed research which has shown a practice to be effective in changing behaviours and improving outcomes for children. Today, a number of national and international evidence synthesis organisations, such as the Dartington Social Research Unit, are in existence working at the interfaces of psychology, criminology, and social work, to produce knowledge for state and philanthropic funders of ‘what works’ in addressing complex social problems and to guide investment strategies for children living in care, experiencing abuse and neglect, and offending. At the time of writing, the relationship between neuroscience and child welfare is also at a high, with a number of well-known child welfare charities, such as, for example, the now-closed Kids Company and the Early Intervention Foundation in the United Kingdom, drawing heavily on physicalist understandings of the child (e.g., a damaged brain) to shape fund-raising and legitimise intervention strategies. Such approaches to shaping child welfare remain controversial for privileging one research design, the randomised control trial, as the ‘gold standard’ of knowledge creation, and for excluding other ways of creating knowledge and learning about children’s lives, what effects

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them, and how children and their significant others create protective relationships and experiences. Many social problems that children face which compromise their welfare, as well as the various therapeutic and community approaches that have been developed to respond to those compromises, do not lend themselves well to experimental designs that ignore the major structural issues (e.g., poverty) that contribute to chronic social problems. Finally, the understanding of children’s views and experiences is increasingly implicated in the practice of child welfare. While the details of children and young people’s lives have to a greater or lesser extent fascinated social researchers as noteworthy experiences in their own right, the introduction of children’s rights discourses in the early 1990s as a result of the establishment of United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child in 1989 and its subsequent ratification globally (with the exception of the United States, South Sudan, and Somalia, though Somalia has since ratified the agreement), lead to burgeoning of societal approaches to understanding children’s welfare from the child’s perspective. Children’s rights have ushered in critical and radical approaches such as recognition theory and social justice perspectives both in child welfare research but also, and perhaps more importantly for children, in everyday child welfare practice. A child’s right to be consulted and involved in decisions that affect them has shaped thinking of children’s welfare over the last 30 years (however, problematic, at times partial, and other times incongruent with expert views of the child). Such an approach has seen the rise of children’s advisory groups at all levels of child welfare policy and practice, of monitoring and evaluation of service design and delivery, and of more child-focused curricula in the training of social workers. Where the involvement of children is successfully practised, children themselves become co-constructors of knowledge about their lives and co-designers of appropriate support systems for difficult times.

Children’s Experiences With Child-Welfare Services Engaging with children’s experiences of child welfare is another dimension to our understanding of

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the topic. A study by Elsbeth Neil, who looked at the experiences of children in the United Kingdom who were placed for adoption under the age of 4 years, suggests that children are active in making sense of their experiences; while some children had not yet started to think about their adoption, others found it unproblematic. At the same time, half of the children in the study associated their adoption with complicated emotions of loss, sadness, and rejection by birth families, and such tensions were exasperated when adoption broke down. The research shows children experiencing and navigating a pull to be with their birth families, especially mothers, even as they know the impossibility of such an outcome, and the push to find belonging with new families. Other research, by Julie Selwyn and colleagues, for the UK government explores what happens ‘beyond the adoption order’. The research shows that children and young people are often not involved in the decision-making processes in the run up to adoption and feel excluded. Such research also shows the ways in which being adopted might impact on other parts of a child’s life especially where the match has been precarious and disruption in the adoption has been experienced by the child. Research of children’s views of institutional care also provides a nuanced picture of the ways in which children experience care away from birth families. In one study by Evelyn Khoo and colleagues, children in one Mexican institution described the place as ‘almost home’ and ‘almost family’, at the same time as children highlighting their everyday temporalities (school, homework, sport, and extracurricular activities) which hardly differed to those of peers living with their birth parents. Children are also providers of care. In many parts of the world, and in sub-Saharan Africa in particular, relationships of care have been reversed on account of epidemics such as HIV/Aids, and many children and young people end up caring for their parents. Morten Skovdal’s extensive research in the region reveals children and young people’s various strategies for balancing growing up, family relationships, managing a household, nursing, and providing palliative care for chronically ill and dying parents as these experiences unfold in a particular moment in children’s lives as well as across time. Insights like these into children’s lives

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can help to provide services and organise social support that is more likely to resonate with children and young people. Paying attention to children’s experiences of their own welfare can challenge received wisdom and usher in new ways of thinking about child welfare. For example, programmes designed to support children and young people who have experienced domestic violence have long held that part of the psycho-educational message conveyed to children should be that they are not to blame for the violence typically experienced by their mothers. However, the most comprehensive study of children and young people’s perspectives of domestic violence carried out by Audrey Mullender and colleagues suggests that efforts around reducing self-blame are probably misplaced. The children and young people participating in that study were quite clear about where the blame should lie—with the perpetrator(s)—and demonstrated age-determined understandings of the power dynamics they had experienced in their family homes. Research on children’s economic and social capital contextualises the importance of wider social and cultural participation, as well as the role of friendships, family, and community, in children’s welfare. Tess Ridge’s research on children living in poverty describe themselves as ‘not having enough money’ and report that inadequate family income curtailed their participation in cultural life with their peers (e.g., through the consumption of goods and services), as well as being responsible for inadequate housing (e.g., overcrowding) and stress on family relationships. Ginny Morrow’s work, also in the United Kingdom, shows how children’s relationships, their family and friendship networks, as well as where they lived, mediate their well-being with close friendship groups and mothers key in providing emotional support. Moving home had the potential to disrupt supportive friendship networks but living across two homes (e.g., in the case of divorce) was not considered disruptive by the children who reflected on the multiplicity of relational and material resources that offered (e.g., two of everything). Nevertheless, and despite informal experiences of participation in family and community settings, as in other studies, children reported unsatisfactory experiences of

participation in institutional decision-making practices such as school councils, which were deemed by children a good idea poorly implemented and with little impact. Taken together children’s views and experiences suggest that both relationships and the contexts in which they are lived out, are important and shape their lives. For practice, such findings would support the further development of what Anna Gupta describes as ‘poverty aware practices’ within a more social model for social workers and social support. Sevasti-Melissa Nolas See also Adoption, History of; Children’s Rights; Mental Health, Child; Sexual Exploitation of Children

Further Readings Cunningham, H. (2006). The invention of childhood. London, UK: BBC Books. Duschinsky, R., Greco, M., & Solomon, J. (2015). The politics of attachment: Lines of flight with Bowlby, Deleuze and Guattari. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(7–8), 173–195. doi:10.1177/0263276415605577 Fundamental Rights Agency. (2015). Mapping of child protection systems. Retrieved from http://fra.europa .eu/en/publication/2015/mapping-childprotection-systems-eu Gupta, A., Featherstone, B., Morris, K., & White, S. (2018). Protecting children: A social model. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Hardiker, P., Exton, K., & Barker, M. (1991). The social policy contexts of prevention in child care. British Journal of Social Work, 12, 341–359. Hendrick, H. (2005). Child welfare and social policy. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Howell, S. (2009). Adoption of the unrelated child: Some challenges to the anthropological study of kinship. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38, 149–166. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407 .085115 Kassam, A., & Lalise, A. D. (2006). Community-based approaches to reforming female genital operations in Africa: A case study from the Oromia regional state of Ethiopia. Anthropology in Action, 13(3), 22–39. doi:10.3167/aia.2006.130304 Neil, E. (2012). Making sense of adoption: Integration and differentiation from the perspective of adopted children in middle childhood. Children and Youth Services Review, 34, 409–416. doi:10.1016/j .childyouth.2011.11.011

Childcare

Childcare Childcare is a broad term, which can be defined as care for children outside of compulsory schooling or for those younger than compulsory school age. This service is usually provided for children from infancy to age 12 years, can be through formal or informal services, and can be centre based or family based. A principal function of childcare is to enable parents to participate in employment, although it also seeks to help alleviate poverty and improve child development. This entry examines the historical emergence of childcare, the main features of childcare, and key issues relating to the subject.

The History of Childcare The single breadwinner model, which in the developed world was the dominant model until the 1960s, rarely required external childcare. An exception to this, however, emerged in some countries during the industrial revolution in the 19th century when families moved away from their extended support networks to industrial centres. An example of this is the mill towns of northern England which employed large numbers of workers, including women. As women began to enter the labour force, driven by poverty, the demand for childcare emerged. This was provided by informal, unregulated services in the homes of working-class women and remained unregulated until the 1960s. As female aspirations increased and the female labour market emerged, the need for childcare as an adjunct to employment arose. The Nordic countries were the first to meet this need in terms of policy, developing a comprehensive system of formal childcare during the 1960s. Other countries in the developed world followed, meeting the demand for childcare in diverse ways.

The Primary Function of Childcare The primary function of childcare can be seen as enabling female participation in the labour force. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has produced research into the area of family/work balance. They outline the benefits of female labour force participation as being 3-fold: alleviating child poverty, increasing parental

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well-being, and facilitating better social welfare systems. As more women work, they are better able to provide financially for their children, they are better off themselves, and they contribute to the economy, which enables investment in social welfare systems. Recently, research into the impact of quality early childhood education on child development has led to a further investment in childcare, which is now supporting the system. The kind of provision that is provided depends on the type of female employment. In some regions such as the Nordic countries, full-time female employment is most prevalent, whereas in other countries, such as the Netherlands, there is a greater uptake of part-time employment. This affects provision, as full-time care is not required by part-time workers. The cost of provision is also a key factor. In countries where funding for childcare is provided on a supply basis by the state, the cost to users is very low, leading to a high uptake. In countries where funding is low, the cost of childcare can deter parents from entering the labour force. This can be the case in the United Kingdom, where some parents find that it is not cost-effective to work.

The Structure and Effects of Childcare In addition to the link with employment, the provision of childcare is also linked to alleviating child poverty. Many countries offer state-funded childcare to children who are classed as suffering from deprivation and poverty or are in some way disadvantaged. Examples are the United Kingdom’s offer of free part-time childcare for disadvantaged 2-year-olds and, in the United States, the Head Start programme for disadvantaged preschoolers. These programmes attempt to alleviate poverty by supporting child development and facilitating parental employment. Childcare, in this sense, supports the economy as it develops human capital. If the state can positively intervene early in a child’s life, the need for later investment in the adult in terms of the costs of crime and poverty can perhaps be avoided. The types of childcare provision offered internationally are diverse. Formal childcare provision for children aged 3 years to compulsory school age has the highest uptake of all types of provision in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation

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and Development reports. This takes the form of centre- and family-based care. Centre-based care includes kindergarten, preschool, and nursery and tends to have a more educational focus. Many countries have a curriculum for preschool that outlines the learning which should take place. Centre-based provision is regulated by the state, with expected standards of education and care. In some countries, this care is full-time and may extend to the full working day. In other countries, centre-based care is part-time and may take the form of play groups and other, more care-based types of provision. In many countries, there is a different form of provision for the final year of early childhood education and care. This is seen as a preparatory year, where children develop skills that will be needed for their transition to compulsory schooling. The aim of this class is generally to develop school readiness and ensure a smooth transition. In some countries, this year is part of compulsory schooling itself. An alternative form of formal provision for children aged 0–school age is family-based day care. This is also a significant form of provision for children aged 0–3 years. Family day care usually takes the form of child minders and may happen in the child’s home or the provider’s home. It is defined as care which takes place in a home setting. It may be combined with centre-based care when child minders and other carers attend to provision at a centre. Formal provision for younger children aged 0–3 years can also be centre- or family-based but has a lower uptake than provision for older children. The uptake is linked to state parental leave benefits, with the more extensive provision being seen in countries which have more limited packages for parental leave. Centre-based provision includes a diverse range of full- and part-time care including full day care, part-time day care, play groups, and crèches. Alongside these formal forms of childcare, there also exists a range of informal, unregulated services provided by family and friends. This is understandably difficult to measure as it is an unregulated system. There is, however, a correlation between the level of formal and informal services provided, with the uptake of informal childcare much higher in countries that have a lower uptake of formal services. In the

Netherlands, for example, the majority of female employment is part-time, leading to a reduced demand for full-time childcare. This correlates with an increased use of informal services to support parents in part-time employment. Nordic countries, on the other hand, have a culture of full-time female employment and use of full-time, centre-based day care. The use of informal care in these countries is extremely low. In addition to childcare for children prior to the age of compulsory schooling, there is a demand for childcare outside school hours. This may be before or after school, or during the school holidays. In some countries, such as Sweden, schools must offer school-based care for working families. Other countries offer state-run and privately run care, which may take place on the school premises or in private settings such as preschools. The demands of employment mean that for many families, a mixture of informal and formal childcare is used at different times in the child’s life. They may make use of part-time centre-based provision as well as informal care from grandparents and other relatives. In many countries, the provision of out-of-school care remains an underdeveloped area. Mandy Pierlejewski See also Child-Centered Design; Childhood Poverty; Early Childhood Education; Education; Human Capital, Child as; School Readiness

Further Readings Jackson, S., & Forbes, R. (2015). People under three: Play, work and learning in a childcare setting. Oxon, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315815275 Jones, P., Moss, D., Tomlinson, P., & Welch, S. (2008). Childhood: Services and provision for children. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2006). Starting strong II: Early childhood education and care. Paris, France: Author. doi:10.1787/9789264032477-en Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2007). Babies and bosses—Reconciling work and family life. Paris, France: Author. Plantenga, J., & Remery, C. (2017). Out-of-school childcare: Exploring availability and quality in EU member states. Journal of European Social Policy, 27(1), 25–39. doi:10.1177/0958928716672174

Child-Centered/Child-Led Research

Child-Centered/Child-Led Research There is a growing agreement within childhood studies to involve children as participants. Researchers engaged in the social studies of childhood, early childhood, and primary school education; human geography; or social anthropology seek to establish research practices that are child centred or even child led. The methodology of child-centred and child-led research indicates a fundamental shift from treating children as objects to including them as important actors within the research itself. Traditional methods of developmental psychology, sociology, and education are admonished about reducing children to objects of interest who have little to say about themselves. Whereas the adult researcher remains the transcendental signifier, children are often seen as having deficits both substantively and methodologically. Against this critique, child-centred and child-led research practices are valued as alternatives to traditional child research where the inquiry is conducted ‘on’ children. Inspired by discourses on children’s rights and children’s agency, studies on children and childhood increasingly advocate children’s rights and competence to participate in research projects, childhood research as a relational process. This entry discusses reasons for including children in research about children, ways to include children in such research, and moving from participatory techniques for involving children in research to more relational methods.

Rationales for Doing Research With Children Methodologies and methods of doing research with children always rely on an implicit understanding of children and childhood. Child-centred or child-led research relies on an understanding of children as holders of rights and as agents of their own lives. Drawing on discourses on children’s rights and children’s agency, these researchers claim that child-centred or child-led research practices are more ethical and provide better knowledge than traditional child research.

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Children as Holders of Rights

Traditionally, the study of children relied on and reproduced an understanding of childhood as a trajectory to adulthood and the implicit construction of the child as irrational, incompetent, and powerless. Childhood was considered a phase of immaturity and dependency, during which children did not know their own best interests. In contrast, the adult researcher was considered to be mature and competent, someone who doubtlessly knew how to study children and how to interpret what they said and did. Such adult-led research agendas are criticised for being too little interested in children’s lives and experiences, paying too little attention to the relevance of the research for children’s lives, and neglecting to consider the impact children can make on the research. Against the backdrop of such critique, child-centred and child-led research practices seek to respect children as persons in their own right, people who have legitimate interests and noteworthy views about their own lives and are accordingly entitled to be heard. The claim to empower children to voice their interests and thoughts is strongly inspired by the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child. In the discourse on child-centred and childled research, the General Comment on Article 12 is referred to as an especially important framework for considering children as holders of rights in research. It emphasises children’s right to express their views as well as their right to participate. In light of the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child, giving voice to children and allowing them to influence decisions that affect them, holds the status of an ethical imperative for any research that seeks to work with and understand children. In its impetus as an ethical and moral obligation, the rationale of participation exhibits many ambiguities. In particular, there is a danger that children’s participation in research is misunderstood as an end in itself. Child-centred or child-led research practices by no means guarantee that participatory activities are relevant and meaningful to children. Constant scrutiny concerning the relevance and meaningfulness for children is necessary to ensure that participation holds emancipatory opportunities for children rather than

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serving only the adult researcher’s interest to promote children’s participation. Children as Competent Interpreters of Everyday Worlds

The acknowledgement of children’s rights interplays with the recognition of children as competent agents of their own lives. In recent decades, advocates of the so-called new sociology of childhood reinforced an understanding of children as competent meaning makers who are knowledgeable about their own lives. Although children have often been treated as an appendage of their parents in traditional sociological research, the new sociology of childhood emphasises that children have unique experiences and have authentic insights into their own lives. This advocacy translates into research practices that take children seriously as experts of their own experiences. The knowledge gained from children is considered as valuable authentic self-knowledge, which leads to a more nuanced understanding of children’s lives. Giving voice to children is appreciated as an emancipatory alternative to marginalising or silencing children. However, an understanding of children as experts about their own lives implies normative expectations. Children are expected not only to know themselves but to be competent in articulating this knowledge as well as willing to share it. Authors who uncover the implicit normativity of the rationale of children’s self-knowledge claim that doing research with children cannot be reduced to offering children participatory techniques. Child-centred and child-led research also require childhood researchers to reflect their understanding of childhood, of knowledge production, and its relation to the representation of reality. Most important, trusting that the knowledge children produce about themselves is more valid must be constantly reflected in relation to the empirical data generated by children.

Practices and Methods of Doing Research With Children The participation of children in research can take many different forms of engagement and can be practiced through a variety of methods. Children

can take part in adult-designed studies as key informants, collaborate with adults as social actors or stakeholders in childhood services, or even lead research projects themselves. It is sometimes argued that only the exclusive status of being a child researcher can be considered as ‘full participation’. However, this evaluation of children’s participation is critiqued, for example, by Christina Ergler as being essentialist in assuming to know what is meaningful for children and as being too little critical in asking what it means for children to be treated as a ‘mini-clone-researcher’. Following this critique, the terms ‘childcentred’ and ‘child-led’ research do not suggest that the latter may be more appropriate for acknowledging children’s agency or for producing more valid knowledge about children. Nevertheless, they indicate a different relation between adult researcher and children. ‘Child-centred research’ is usually used for studies designed by adults who include participatory methods in their design to empower children to participate in the investigation. In contrast, ‘child-led research’ refers to practices of involving children in research by handing over responsibility for planning, carrying out, and disseminating research to children, whilst the adult researchers position themselves as supporters of the children’s research activities. Practices and Methods of Child-Centred Research

Child-centredness is an approach of dealing with children that has been a key concept in early childhood and primary education for many decades. It promotes the individuality and autonomy of children and advocates a pedagogy of choice. In accordance, child-centred research can be described as a practise that seeks to offer children choices of participating in research. Although the research is initiated by the adult researcher, children are offered multiple methods that empower them to participate in the ongoing inquiry—most often in the production of data. Initiated by the adult researcher, the studies usually focus on concerns of children and childhood. Following the rationale that children are experts about themselves and have authentic knowledge about childhood, children’s participation aims at finding out how children view and experience

Child-Centered/Child-Led Research

their worlds and at developing a more nuanced understanding of children’s lives. The methods that children use in child-centred research cover traditional methods such as interviewing and observing, mapping and diagramming, but they also include practical activities such as role play, drawing, taking photographs, making artefacts, playing games, or taking the researcher on a tour. Alison Clark and Peter Moss’ ‘mosaic approach’ has become widely known as a methodology that offers even young children manifold ways to engage in research projects. Drawing on the pedagogy of Reggio Emilia schools in Italy, the mosaic approach conceptualises participatory methods that allow children to find their own form of expression and communication and that oblige the adult researcher to listen carefully to the children. One possible point of critique addresses the tendency to borrow methods from child-centred pedagogy. The repertoire of methods in childcentred research quite obviously includes activities that children typically engage in in their daily practise in childhood institutions. Explicitly or implicitly, these activities are offered to children as being ‘child-friendly’. The reliance on child-friendly methods is seen to be problematic in two ways. First, it indicates a desire to know what is best for children. The critique that it is somewhat paradoxical to emphasise the competence of children and yet rely on the adult researcher to find the right methods to develop children’s participation has been largely acknowledged. Participatory methods that mirror pedagogical approaches may also unintentionally invoke children’s complicity to meet school-like expectations rather than to serve their emancipatory interests. Furthermore, the obligation to offer children a variety of participatory methods must be critically weighed against the danger of obscuring the original research interest. Practices and Methods of Child-Led Research

Child-led research is described as a practice that enables children to follow their own interests. Rather than offering children a choice of methods that allow them to engage in an adult-designed project, the adult researcher empowers children to

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conduct their own study by offering them training and support in developing research skills. The content follows the children’s interests. The responsibility for carrying out their research as well as disseminating the results also rests with the children. Although this implies an appreciation of children’s rights to follow their own interests, the demands for training in ethics are increased for child researchers. Child-led research is a relatively new approach. At first glance, it seems to avoid some of the paradoxes of child-centred research. Positioned as researchers who follow their own interests, children seem to be less likely to be complicit with adult-led research agendas and child-friendly methods. However, a wider research agenda seems to be almost taken for granted when child-led research is discussed. Child-led research is centred on children’s lives; accordingly, children’s interest in childhood concerns becomes mandatory for doing child-led research. At the same time, children get involved in the problem of producing knowledge about other children: In child-led research, children are considered experts not only on their own lives but also as experts on other children’s lives. It is argued that children may have better access to other children’s views, just as they may have insider perspectives into peer culture concerns. The dilemma of producing knowledge about other children is one of the ethical issues of child-led research to be resolved. Adult researchers also face an ethical dilemma with respect to publishing outcomes of child-led research. Sometimes, papers actually name children as authors and include their data and findings. More often, the literature on child-led research focuses on the processes of children’s research and evaluates children’s research activities in terms of skills and educational benefits children gain. Increase in self-esteem, taking initiative, or increased capacity to engage in their own learning emphasise the educational quality rather than the importance of the findings. Without questioning the value of evaluating the impact child-led research has on children, adult researchers will have to keep a critical eye on their own desire to turn child-led research into an educational project or even an instrument of fostering children’s development.

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From Participatory Techniques Towards a More Relational Understanding of Research With Children

Research With Children as a Relational Process

Although the concept of empowerment relies on an oppositional model of power, childhood A central concern of child-centred and child-led researchers who analyse their experiences in doing research is a correction of the power imbalance research with children often come to a more between adult researchers and the researched dynamic understanding of power. In an empirical children. In response to the exclusive rights perspective, power comes into sight as moving of  the adult researcher to define ways and fluidly and constantly between different actors. norms of being a child as a form of domination, Children may use methods in an unexpected way, c hild-centred and child-led research are ­ practice opposition, resistance, or even refusal to advocated as possibilities for creating more ­ participate. Although power and powerlessness reciprocal research relationships. The promise constantly shift between the actors, they all parof ­reciprocity challenges traditional binaries of ticipate in complex networks of being powerful. constructing  the adult–child relationship—for ­ example,  mature–immature, powerful–­ It has been largely through ethnographic projects in childhood studies that researchers have powerless, ­knowing–unknowing. Yet in much of come to understand the power relations between the literature on children’s participation in the different actors as complex, situational, and research, the concept of ‘empowerment’ actually dynamic. In the ethnographic research tradition, it stabilises the adult–child binary. Childhood is the adult researcher who seeks to establish researchers, who engage in this critique, prioriforms of participation in the children’s lives. tise relational models of doing research with William Corsaro, for example, established the children over participatory techniques. well-known approach of just sitting in play areas and letting the children react to him. Especially in Empowering Children’s Participation? his longitudinal ethnographic project with Louisa Empowerment is a term that figures centrally in Molinari on children’s transition from elementary the discourse on child-centred and child-led to primary school in Italy, the researcher estabresearch. Empowering children to voice their lished himself as clearly less competent than the interest and to participate is a strategic aim most children because, at the beginning of the project, central to the methodology of participatory he neither spoke the Italian language nor knew the research. Critical analyses show how the notion of routines of the elementary school. empowerment is likely to rely on an understandBy letting the children draw him into their ing of power as a commodity that can be distribactivities, he became gradually included in the uted. In childhood research, it is often thought of children’s peer-culture relations. This is an interas a capacity that is owned by the researcher, who esting example of childhood research that does can then hand it over to the child. not rely on traditional power hierarchies but This understanding of participation is critically starts with the immaturity of the adult researcher discussed as acknowledging too little that the perand practices research with children as a gradual ceived increase of power on the children’s side is process of becoming related to one another. accompanied by their dependency on the adult In some publications on children’s participation researcher to share or not share his or her power in research, the research tradition of ethnography with the children. As long as the individual child is dismissed as being too intrusive into children’s is considered dependent on the researcher as facililives. Other authors argue that ethnography is a tator of his or her participation, the hierarchical central method for understanding children as dynamic between adult and child remains paracompetent agents of their own lives. In the condoxically intact. The concern that children’s parduct of research ‘with’ children, ethnography ticipation in research may rely on their schooled offers possibilities to practice research as a situdocility of accepting their subordinate position as ated process, during which relationships between children leads to a critique of the tyranny of different actors are indeterminate and open, participation. undergoing constant renegotiations.

Child-Centered Design

The terms of child-centred and child-led research have been criticised for relying on a very generalised, sometimes even idealised understanding of the agentic and competent child and having little to offer about how the adult researcher concretely relates to this child. Research with children must engage in research practices that are sensitive to different, messy, indeterminate forms of relating to and being and doing with one another. It remains to be seen whether the terms child-centred and child-led research are adequate to carry an understanding of childhood research as a practice of relating to one another.

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Gallagher, M. (2008). “Power is not an evil”: Rethinking power in participatory methods. Children’s Geographies, 6(2), 137–150. doi:10.1080/ 14733280801963045 Konstantoni, K., & Kustatscher, M. (2016). Conducting ethnographic research in early childhood research: Questions of participation. In A. Farrell, S. L. Kagan, & K. Tisdall (Eds.), The Sage handbook of early childhood research (pp. 223–239). London, UK: Sage. Tisdall, K. (2016). Participation, rights and participatory methods. In A. Farrell, S. L. Kagan, & K. Tisdall (Eds.), The Sage handbook of early childhood research (pp. 73–88). London, UK: Sage.

Christina Huf See also Childhood; Childhood Studies; Ethnography; Narrative Research Method; Participatory Research Methods; Photo-Elicitation, Research Method of; Power Relations in Research

Further Readings Burman, E. (2017). Child-centered education and beyond: Shifts, continuities and contradictions from whole children to feral parents. In E. Burman (Ed.), Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd Rev. ed., pp. 251–271). Oxford, UK: Routledge. Christensen, P., & James, A. (Eds.). (2017). Research with children. Perspectives and practices (3rd Rev. ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Clark, A., Flewitt, R., Hammersley, M., & Robb, M. (2014). Understanding research with children and young people. London, UK: Sage. Clark, A., & Moss, P. (2017). Listening to young children: A guide to understanding and using the mosaic approach (3rd expanded ed.). London, UK: Jessica Kingsley. Corsaro, W. A., & Molinari, L. (2017). Entering and observing in children’s worlds. A reflection on a longitudinal ethnography of early education in Italy. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices (3rd Rev. ed., pp. 11–30). London, UK: Routledge. Ergler, C. R. (2017). Advocating for a more relational and dynamic model of participation for child researchers. Social Inclusion, 5(3), 240–250. doi:10.17645/si.v5i3.966 Gallacher, L. A., & Gallagher, M. (2008). Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking through ‘participatory methods’. Childhood, 15(4), 499–516. doi:10.1177/0907568208091672

Child-Centered Design The aim of child-centred design is for children’s rights, experiences, feelings, and ideas to be at the heart of decision making with respect to diverse scenarios (i.e., environmental, social, political). The impetus for child-centred design stems from the inclusion of children’s rights within the international rights framework. This entry focuses on child-centred design, its origins, and how children’s voices, experiences, and ideas are integrated into decision making in different contexts and forums. The benefits and challenges of child-centred design are also considered. Child-centred design is crucial in the development of policy and practice and a significant consideration in children and childhood studies.

Children’s Rights The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that all children everywhere have the right to participate in decisions that affect their daily lives. The attention on rights, voice, and participation set an agenda for the inclusion of children’s voices and bodies in decision-making processes. Over the decades, children and young people have in varying degrees been involved in child-centred participatory processes—from the local scale, where children have been involved in consultations around the design of play facilities in their communities, to city youth-led panels, national committees, and international frameworks championing the inclusion of young people in policy design.

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The process of child-centred design has also emerged from a growing acknowledgement that children are social actors in their own right, with sociologists and children’s geographers campaigning for children’s voices to be at the centre of research, policy, and practice. This shift, away from viewing young people as principally objects, towards viewing them as actors with their own views and experiences has provided much of the underpinning theoretical and methodological tools for child-centred design.

Community Development and Participatory Planning Child-centred design in community development and local participatory planning has become a common articulation of children’s participation. The well-cited manual of children’s participation by Roger Hart offers a tool for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in the development of child-centred design initiatives. The involvement of children and young people in urban design projects has been developed by the Child-Friendly Cities initiative, an international set of principles for the consideration of children’s rights in the participation and design of their communities and neighbourhoods. A child-centred design approach to Child-Friendly Cities is more than the design of play spaces; it is the recognition that young people can contribute to all aspects of community design—for example, road layouts, community centres, and housing provision. Karen Malone has written extensively on childcentred design in the context of sustainable urban development. The UNECSO funded Growing Up in Cities project had the dual aim of understanding children’s experiences of city life in diverse contexts and exploring participatory methodologies for the design and shaping of city spaces. This project, its methodologies, and recommendations have been widely influential in the uptake of childcentred urban design principles and practice. The Dapto Dreaming project in Australia aimed to involve young people in a child-centred design process in relation to a new housing development. This included working with 150 chil­ dren ages 5–10 years, involving them in childfriendly design surveys, workshops, and child-led guided tours; the outputs of these efforts were

incorporated into the development brief and subsequent infrastructure. This project and others have shown the potential of child-centred design, further advocating for the inclusion of young people’s voices, bodies, and experiences at the centre of urban design processes.

Research Processes In research across the social sciences, children and young people are also actively involved in the design of research agendas, processes, and outcomes. Involving children and young people in the design of research projects that are essentially about children’s everyday lived experiences is ultimately of benefit to the research for practical, theoretical, and empirical reasons. Child-centred design is often framed as participation in the research design process, a co-design process with adult researchers. Thus, a child-centred design process recognises the child as having an active contribution in the design of the research agenda, in the choice and shaping of the methodological tools, and importantly in the analysis of the research data and being involved in the research process. A plethora of guidelines exists considering the methodological, ethical, and practical implications of child-centred design processes. Ethically, for example, there needs to be a consideration of the actors involved, with guardian consent gained from parents and caretakers as well as, of course, the young people themselves. It is also important to consider the space of child-centred design so that activities and participation are happening in spaces where young people feel comfortable and that are easily accessible to them. A consideration of the method of child-centred design is also vital, thinking through how best adults can facilitate a child-centred design process. Methodologies may include creative tools such as photography, diaries, and drawings.

Products and Planning There are other avenues and opportunities for child-centred design—for example, in the development of children’s products. The involvement of children in this process, as with all participatory processes varies, from the central inclusion of

Child-Centered Design

children as design partners to being part of the original conception of the product to their involvement in key decisions about its form, function, and design to the other end of the scale, where children play a minor role in the testing of products at the final stages of production. In other contexts—for example, emergency planning—it is recognised that child-centred planning frameworks are vital in the design, implementation, and execution of disaster mitigation. In disaster-prone environments, from floods to earthquakes, child-centred design for the mitigation of loss of life and children’s participation in the decision and planning process is seen as vital.

Benefits and Challenges It is important in the context of research, urban design, or disaster planning that child-centred design is given the time and space to develop other ways of knowing, which may (or may not) be different from adults’ views and experiences. It is important to make space for children’s experiences to be considered, using appropriate tools and methodologies for children’s participation. Despite the benefits, there are numerous challenges associated with child-centred design. For example, children and adults often have differing cultures of communication, meaning that young people can be excluded on the basis of their everyday routines and spaces of communication (i.e., invitations to participate are often disseminated through adult channels of communication). Differential power relations are also problematic in design processes, with adults often exerting their ideas, bodies (in terms of how they present themselves and their bodily actions), and ultimately, power in the decision-making process. Despite these challenges, there are many benefits of child-centred design, including positive outcomes for the process and output, the potential for positive child–adult relations, the development of transferable skills, and the benefits on an individual basis to the participating child. Indeed, there are many examples of child-centred design, in terms of the active participation of children and young people in the process, whether it be curriculum design in schools, design of neighbourhoods, or research developed though a child-centred design process.

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However, many of these examples are one-off, single initiatives or projects, rather than ingrained processes of children’s participation in institutions and governments—those making and shaping key decisions about young lives. In other instances, examples of child-centred design are publicised— for example, the design of a children’s hospital environment, a museum, or play park. But in many cases, this has involved adults thinking on behalf of the child about what child-centred design may look and feel like. Although projects such as these may be applauded for the consideration of the child, a more active approach involving children themselves is needed to achieve a child-centred design outcome. The use of technologies is increasingly being considered in participatory, child-centred design projects. For example, in India, in conjunction with a national nongovernmental organisation (Humara Bachpan Campaign, which advocates the rights of the child and their participation in urban planning), children and young people have been involved in the design of a mobile app to map and record their everyday experiences of the city. In this example, children were involved in the design and testing of the app, data collection, analysis, and dissemination to city stakeholders— a child-centred process. The child-centred design of products, urban forms, hospital environments, school curriculums, research agendas, and tools shows that children’s rights, ideas, bodies, and experiences have been integrated into many ways of working. However, there is still much work to do for child-centred design to be placed at the centre, rather than the periphery, of policy and practice. Sophie Hadfield-Hill See also Child-Friendly Cities; Children’s Rights; Children’s Social Participation, Models of; Participation Rights, UNCRC; Participatory Research Methods; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Bishop, K., & Corkey, L. (Eds.). (2017). Designing cities with children and young people: Beyond playgrounds and skateparks. London, UK: Routledge.

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Christensen, P., Hadfield-Hill, S., Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2017). Children living in sustainable urban environments: New urbanism, new citizens. London, UK: Routledge. Hadfield-Hill, S., & Zara, C. (2018). Being participatory through the use of app-based research tools. In B. Carter & I. Coyne (Eds.), Being participatory: Researching with children and young people (pp. 147–170). New York, NY: Springer. Hart, R. (1997). Children’s participation: The theory and practice of involving young citizens in community development and environmental care. London, UK: Earthscan. Malone, K. (2016). Children’s place encounters: Placebased participatory research to design a child-friendly sustainable urban development. In N. Ansell, N. Klocker, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Geographies of global issues: Change and threat (pp. 1–30). New York, NY: Springer.

Child-Friendly, Concept

of

The concept of child-friendly can be defined as suitable for children; child-centered; by and/or at least for children; adapted to children’s age and specific needs; protective, safe, promoting, and respecting child participation; respecting integrity and dignity of children; avoiding any kind of discrimination of children; and/or providing qualified and supportive services to children. This means setting up cultural, social, economic, political, ethical, aesthetic, and physical contexts in which children can live their childhoods in an appropriate space. This entry examines the rise of child-friendly ideologies, the link to children’s rights, and the concept’s main fields of impact.

The Rise of Child-Friendly Ideology The 20th century was the century of the child. A child-centered ideology has grown and continues to influence practices linked with policy, legacy, welfare, health, and education, leading to an ever more child-friendly world. Emerging especially in the field of childhood studies and of children’s rights studies, the concept of child-friendly is strongly linked with the place of the child and childhood in society and its evolution throughout

the ages. Children have an important demographic representation in every society of the world. However, in a sociohistorical context where adulthood is the dominant norm and adults are at the head of the social system, institutions, organizations, environmental management, and the overall functioning of society, children have a dominated status. Spaces organization do not specifically focus on the children as citizen or consumers. The world is organized by and for adults, and even if children are directly or indirectly concerned by those spaces or services, they are not initially adapted for them. Children are, on the one hand, different from adults since humans are biologically, cognitively, psychologically, and psychologically developing in their first years of life. On the other hand, they share similarities with adults since they are of course human beings, subject to rights, with an active impact on their environment. They also have different and similar needs than adults, and they deserve to be able to fully enjoy their environment and the services at their disposal. Related to this understanding of the child as being at the same time similar and different to adults, child-friendly environments and practices tend to decrease discrimination between adults and children and to be intended for children. The concept of childfriendly reflects a consideration of how to organize and adapt the child’s environment to him or her. A child-friendly context is adapted for children and allows them to appropriate their experience and feel good about it.

Connection to Children’s Rights The child-friendly concept is strongly linked with the well-being of children and children’s rights. With the goal of improving the capability and agency of children and of decreasing the gap between adult and children’s accessibility to the world, child-friendly refers to a system which guarantees respect and effective implementation of the rights of all children at the highest attainable level, giving due consideration to the child’s level of maturity and understanding. Childfriendly can be defined by the principle of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989 that describes universal principles guaranteed to every child. The concept of

Child-Friendly Cities

child-friendly maintains that children will be respected as individuals, will be able to participate actively in their environment, and feel at ease in their everyday life. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child can be a guideline to implement child-friendly practices and environments. A child-friendly element can also be defined with the three Ps of protection, participation, and provisions, which give the child the guarantee that his or her well-being is respected and that his or her voice is heard and taken into consideration in all matters affecting him or her in the different benefits he or she gets in every context of his or her life. They promote children’s participation in society and its organization, allowing them to give their opinion about everything concerning them. In this perspective, children should be heard to define what makes an environment or service child-friendly according to their conceptions. This guarantees them a place of active actors in society including children. This also provides children with basic protection and conditions for their development.

Fields of Impact The meaning of child-friendly is mainly related to specific fields (e.g., justice, education, research, urbanization, etc.). Each specific field has its own contextual understanding of what child-friendly means to them. For example, children can be involved in justice, either directly (as defendant, victim, witness) or indirectly when decisions taken have an impact on their lives (divorce proceedings, custody). Child-friendly justice is accessible, age appropriate, fast, diligent, adapted to and focused on the needs of the child, respecting the right to due process, respecting the right to participate in and to understand proceedings, and respecting the right to private and family life and the right to integrity and dignity. Another example concerns child-friendly cities. To be considered child-friendly, a city’s policies have to consider children as inhabitants and give them (through councils for example) the opportunity to participate to the elaboration or urbanization process. Such cities guarantee the protection of children (against violence, exploitation, discrimination, etc.), give them safe and secure spaces to play and walk, and provide services adapted to

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them. Child-friendly cities consider children as active citizens and as partners by hearing them to take decisions about the organization and take into account their needs and specificities. These examples show that even if every context translate the concept of child-friendly in his own understanding, general features can be found in each of them and refer to the general definition of the concept. Maude Louviot See also Agency; Children’s Cultures; Children’s Rights; Children’s Social Participation, Models of; ChildCentered/Child-Led Research; Child-Friendly Cities; Education, Child-Centered

Further Readings Council of Europe. (2011). Guidelines of the committee of ministers of the Council of Europe on childfriendly justice. Strasbourg, France: Author. James, A., & James, A. (2008). Key concepts in childhood studies. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Moss, P., & Petrie, P. (2002). From children’s services to children’s spaces: Public policy, children and childhood. New York, NY: Routledge. Riggio, E. (2002). Child friendly cities: Good governance in the best interests of the child. Environment & Urbanization, 14(2), 45–58. doi:10.1177/ 095624780201400204

Child-Friendly Cities The Child-Friendly Cities Initiative is a global movement towards the development and governance of cities that are safe, inclusive, and where young people have opportunities to participate in local decision making and community life. The initiative, launched in 1996, was born out of the recognition of children’s rights with the formulation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989; 54 articles aligned to all aspects of children’s lives including social, cultural, economic, and political rights. The Convention recognises the rights of children, anywhere in the world, irrespective of their physical, social, political, religious, or ethnic background. This entry explores the mandate of the Child-Friendly

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Cities Initiative, the role of United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund in promoting the initiative, and the importance of children’s participation in urban life.

Mandate of the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative In the context of the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, children’s rights are valued, respected, and satisfied in city planning and governance. Their needs, voices, and experiences are placed at the centre of governance through the promulgation of law, policy development, and the allocation of funds to child-orientated programmes and initiatives. A further influencing factor for the ChildFriendly Cities Initiative came from mounting recognition from international agencies that urban areas across the world were facing unprecedented crisis. Cities are increasingly met with a myriad of challenges associated with urbanisation, from population pressure and demand on existing services and facilities to environmental degradation; urban childhoods are thus increasingly under strain. Initiatives from the local to the international scale have paved the way for a global commitment to sustainable cities and places. The recently adopted UN-Sustainable Development Goals is one such example, cementing the importance of making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. Another influencing factor for the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative has been the emphasis on participation in the context of global agendas and policies. There has been increased recognition that the input of people in the development of goals and actions makes for more sustainable decisions and localised support for initiatives. The emphasis on participation is a crucial component of the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, recognising that children and young people play an important role in their communities and thus their needs and experiences should be duly considered and consulted. Given the diversity of children’s experiences of cities, across vastly different social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, and the subsequent impact on their social and spatial encounters, it is widely recognised that their views and experiences should play a core role shaping the cities of the future.

Role of United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund is also a key stakeholder in advocating for child-friendly cities. They were founding partners (along with UN-Habitat, the Italian Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the Environment and the Istituto degli Innocenti) of the International Secretariat for Child-Friendly Cities (2004) which over the years coordinated activities, supported cities with research expertise, provided a platform for networking, and shared effective policies and practices. The ‘framework for action’ developed by the Secretariat is seen as a guide for the implementation and development of Child-Friendly Policies. In summary, the framework advocates the following: (a) for children’s rights to be at the heart of city-based decision making, (b) for cities to support the involvement of children’s experiences and perspectives in neighbourhood and citywide decisions, (c) for cities to ensure that children’s needs are met with respect to access to basic services, and (d) for cities to put in place necessary steps to safeguard young people from violence in their everyday lives.

Children’s Participation in Urban Life Participation is a core characteristic of childfriendly cities whether it be participation in shaping the needs and priorities of the city, or more broadly, participation in community life. Growing up in Cities, an international collaborative research project was a key driver in considering young people’s participation in research and community development and has inspired much of the subsequent work on young people’s participation in the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative. The project sought to understand the experiences of urban children across eight countries (e.g., Argentina, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India, Norway, United States, and Poland) and used a participatory framework to guide this process. The project acknowledged that children and young people were actors in their own right with their own unique experiences, feelings, and needs, thus could articulate their own experiences of the city. Today, young people are encouraged to participate in the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative through a variety of

Child-Headed Households

methodologies including youth panels and creative workshops, addressing the diverse ways in which young people might want to and be able to participate. The Child-Friendly Cities Initiative has been widely lauded as a positive framework for action for the recognition of children’s rights in the planning for sustainable cities. However, despite the uptake of the framework by cities around the world, there remains much work to do to ensure cities provide the opportunities and basic infrastructure which children need in their urban environments. There are numerous challenges associated with building an infrastructure to support children in cities, including (a) assessing the effectiveness of strategies put in place by the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative, in terms of the governance of their policies; (b) monitoring and evaluating the participation processes through which children are engaging with the initiative, to ensure that their participation is more than tokenistic; (c) ensuring cities across the Global South, which are home to the majority of the world’s children have the support and tools necessary to apply a child-friendly cities framework to their policy and practice; and (d) working towards a collaborative, interdisciplinary framework of action, involving diverse stakeholders, including policy makers, engineers, teachers, and social scientists. As cities, global agencies and the international community work towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, initiatives such as the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative will become ever more critical in addressing the challenges faced by young people and recognising the role that they can play in shaping urban futures. Sophie Hadfield-Hill See also Child-Centered/Child-Led Research; ChildCentered Design; Children’s Rights; Participation Rights, UNCRC; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); Urban Childhoods

Further Readings Chawla, L. (Ed.) (2002). Growing up in an Urbanising world. London, UK: Earthscan and UNESCO. Driskell, D. (2002). Creating better cities with children and youth: A manual for participation. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315071930

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International Secretariat for Child Friendly Cities. (2004). Building child friendly cities: A framework for action. Florence, Italy: Innocenti Research Centre. Malone, K. (2017). Child friendly cities: A model of planning for sustainable development. In K. Bishop & L. Corkery (Eds.), Designing cities with children and young people: Beyond playgrounds and parks. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315710044 United Nations Children’s Fund. (2017). Child friendly cities. Retrieved October 20, 2017, from https://www .unicef-irc.org/research/195/

Child-Headed Households Child-headed households are a domestic arrangement encompassing young people living independently without a functioning coresident adult. In the absence of a common definition, some use the term to include not only households with all members under the age 18 years but also households where the head is aged 18–25 years, though the latter are more often referred as to as youthheaded. Households with no adult present (unaccompanied) are often distinguished from those in which adult(s) are present but are terminally ill, disabled, or elderly and thus do not play a significant role in caring for children and running the household (i.e., providing food, clothing, and psychological support; accompanied). Terms such as sibling-headed and junior-headed household are also widely used. High parental death rates and overstretched extended family networks, especially in SubSaharan Africa due to HIV/AIDS, have led to the formation and study of this care arrangement since the late 1990s. More recently, climate change in smallholder farms in these African settings has also been linked to displacement and the emergence and vulnerability of child-headed households. Children left behind as a result of parental labor migration in other contexts such as China have also been the object of study, yet they are rarely referred to as child-headed households; moreover, some scholars advocate for clearly distinguishing temporary and more permanent arrangements. With a focus on households in which a child acts as primary caregiver to all child(ren) in the household following parental

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death, this entry describes their prevalence and reasons for formation, living conditions, and effect on children’s coping and resilience.

Prevalence and Reasons for Emergence The lack of a common definition and the fluidity of this arrangement (i.e., children may move in and out of adult-headed households) makes monitoring prevalence and comparing across time periods and locations/settings difficult. In the early times of study, the rise in child-headed households was interpreted as indicative of an overburdened extended family system. In a 2011 study, Charlotte Phillips found that official estimates are generally low (0.5–13% of all households in several sub-Saharan African countries), yet large variation exists across countries, particularly if accompanied households are also included in the count. Few countries gather this information overtime, thus fueling debate as to whether child-headed households are on the rise. Although numbers are not necessarily increasing in sub-Saharan Africa, a decrease of unaccompanied child-headed households due to placement of children with adults in the community may lead to an increase in accompanied child-headed households if adults provide inadequate care and children de facto continue to head the household, as has been documented for example in South Africa. The causes for emergence and maintenance of child-headed households vary, not being limited to parental deaths (mainly due to HIV/AIDS). Divorce, domestic violence, children running away from abusive homes, and parental migration for employment may also result in children being left behind to care for themselves. Poverty seems to be a major issue, although other family configurations may be even more vulnerable in some contexts. The presence and ability of extended family to foster do not necessarily prevent the creation of child-headed households. Indeed, researchers have documented many children preferring to live by themselves than to move in with relatives in order to avoid maltreatment, sibling separation, and loss of inheritance.

Living Conditions Although most child-headed households consist of up to three children led by an adolescent,

larger households and households headed by younger children—related or unrelated to other children in the household—are also common. The eldest child generally heads the household regardless of their gender, thus taking on primary responsibility for daily caregiving and decision making. This includes providing basic needs, advising and supervising younger siblings, and doing or assigning to other children a range of house chores. This may contribute to changing gender norms as heads of household take on roles traditionally not assigned to them (e.g., boys washing dishes and clothes). In other contexts, however, rigid sociocultural gender norms and expectations may further disadvantage children such as boys who resist to take on non-masculine roles in Swaziland. Income generation is a challenge faced by many child-headed households confronted with unmet basic needs (food, clothing, shelter, education, and health care). Often unable to secure formal employment, children perform diverse tasks in the community such as hair braiding; gathering wood, water, or grass to thatch roofs; or unloading trucks in a local store in exchange for food or money. Vulnerability to sexual exploitation by sugar daddies or sugar mammas has also been documented. Taking up these new responsibilities and inability to afford uniform, transportation, and school fees may disrupt education both by dropping out of school and negatively affecting academic performance. Discrimination/exclusion; verbal, physical, and sexual abuse; and bullying by peers and teachers due to misinformation about HIV/AIDS may also contribute to school drop-out. Lack of school attendance may not only limit social interactions but also reduce future employability of young people. In other settings, however, it is a commitment to education that resulted in the emergence of temporary child-headed households. For example, families in remote rural areas of Namibia build huts near schools so that nonorphan children can complete their education. Children often remain in their deceased parents’ house. In fact, since preserving this inheritance requires physical presence in many settings, this is a common reason given by children not to abandon the family house and move into their relatives’ homes following parental death. Cases of property grabbing and exploitation of orphans by fostering adults—relatives and others, and

Child-Headed Households

abuse in the absence of adult representation have been widely documented and may result in homelessness or inappropriate housing conditions (e.g., when corrugated iron sheets used as roof are taken away) or at least deprivation of basic goods such as linen, clothing, and cooking utensils.

Coping and Resilience Given increasing pressures on extended families, child-headed households have been framed as a viable coping mechanism by which children alleviate the loss of parental care by developing and maintaining other supportive relationships with peers and adults. Though not consistently supportive, extended family members, neighbors, friends, and teachers are sources of material, informational, and emotional support for childheaded households. Peers often provide companionship and adults play a key role in the well-being of orphan children. In this line, for example, support from adults, relatives, and community members has been associated with better access to information and lower levels of emotional distress in Rwanda. Positive adult role models in the community also play an important role in the development of gender identity and the socialization of children, necessary for social integration in their communities. Several studies have documented children’s own contributions to their social networks, thus acknowledging children as both agents and recipients of support. Besides the impact on education, research has documented a number of negative effects of childheaded households on the physical and psycholosocial well-being of both child caregivers and care recipients. Difficulty in providing for daily needs increases the risk of malnutrition and other health conditions. At times, children fear that they may be HIV-positive themselves and struggle to access health care and medication. This may be compounded by the stigma of HIV/AIDS surrounding parental death and, in some settings, perceptions of hostile adult surveillance. As a result of such policing, for example, a study of child-headed households in South Africa found that girls were viewed as whores and boys as thugs. At least partly due to the dual pressure of caring for themselves and their younger siblings and mourning the parental loss, a number of studies have documented higher levels of social and emotional

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distress and risky behaviors among orphans living in child-headed households than in other living arrangements. Poverty and lack of adequate supervision may also contribute to risky sexual behavior and unhealthy intergenerational relationships as well as to sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. Substance abuse and risky sexual behavior may, in turn, increase the risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/ AIDS. Household heads and other children living in child-headed households also display strengths. Several studies in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and other countries have documented positive consequences of living in child-headed households. These include, most notably, skills in social networking, conflict resolution, and time and money management, strong sibling relations and sense of responsibility to care for other children in the household, decision-making ability, and emotional maturity. Resilience and adaptable coping mechanisms may be developed through community interventions and interpersonal networks of support. Certain level of well-being may derive from subverting social norms and generational hierarchies and gaining power and autonomy within the family unit. However, this does not translate for these children into being treated as equals to adults in the community. In fact, children living in childheaded households are more likely to be exploited than children living with at least one adult authority figure, and administrative barriers often interfere with their ability to access child support grants directly. The dearth of studies measuring comparative well-being quantitatively, and the presence of competing agendas on how to best respond to child-headed households may partly explain these diverse perspectives on well-being. A range of interventions have been developed overtime to support children in child-headed households such as inter-generational mentoring programs to provide advice and guidance, financial and educational assistance from government and nongovernmental organizations to children living in child-headed households, initiatives aimed at strengthening family safety nets to support children, and more broadly, HIV/AIDS educational programs to reduce stigma. The form of intervention an author advocates for (e.g., placement of children in institutions or under adult supervision

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vs. children as capable of governing their own households with appropriate community support) tends to depend on how child agency and competency are perceived. Systemic interventions that respond to a range of children’s needs while addressing the roots of discrimination and actively involve child-headed households in making decisions to improve their well-being are needed. Concerns over social jealousy and stigmatization of orphan children voiced by researchers and service providers call for rethinking how aid is channeled to the most vulnerable families. Mónica Ruiz-Casares

interventions with child-headed households in Zambia. Children’s Geographies, 10(4), 399–411. doi:10.1080/14733285.2012.726071 Phillips, C. (2011). Child-headed households: a feasible way forward, or an infringement of children’s right to alternative care? Retrieved from https://files.eric .ed.gov/fulltext/ED527864.pdf Ruiz-Casares, M., Gentz, S., & Beatson, J. (2018). Children as providers and recipients of support: Redefining family among child- headed households in Namibia. In M. R. T. de Guzman, J. Brown, & C. P. Edwards (Eds.), Parenting from Afar: The reconfiguration of the family across distance (pp. 219–244). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190265076.001.0001

See also AIDS Orphans; Caregivers, Children as; Children Living With HIV in Africa; Orphan Care; Orphans

Further Readings Caserta, T. A., Punamäki, R. L., & Pirttila-Backman, A. M. (2017). The association between psychosocial well-being and living environments: A case of orphans in Rwanda. Child & Family Social Work, 22(2), 881–891. doi:10.1111/cfs.12308 Collins, L., Ellis, M., Pritchard, E. W. J., Jenkins, C., Hoeritzauer, I., Farquhar, A., . . . Nelson, B. D. (2016). Child-headed households in Rakai District, Uganda: A mixed-methods study. Paediatrics and International Child Health, 36(1), 58–63. doi:10.1179/20469055 14y.0000000152 Evans, R. (2012). Safeguarding inheritance and enhancing the resilience of orphaned young people living in childand youth-headed households in Tanzania and Uganda. African Journal of AIDS Research, 11(3), 177–189. doi:10.2989/16085906.2012.734977 Lobi, T., & Kheswa, J. G. (2017). Exploring challenges of adolescent females in child-headed households in South Africa. Journal of Human Ecology, 58(1/2), 98. doi:10.1080/09709274.2017.1305606 Mkhatshwa, N. (2017). The gendered experiences of children in child-headed households in Swaziland. African Journal of AIDS Research, 16(4), 365–372. doi:10.2989/16085906.2017.1389756 Newlin, M., Reynold, S., & Nombutho, M. M. W. (2016). Children from child-headed households: Understanding challenges that affect in their academic pursuits. Journal of Human Ecology, 54(3), 158–173. doi:10.1080/09709274.2016.11906998 Payne, R. (2012). ‘Extraordinary survivors’ or ‘ordinary lives’? Embracing ‘everyday agency’ in social

Childhood The notion of childhood refers to both a stage of life and a perception of children as different in nature from adults. How childhood is understood affects children’s daily lives by influencing childrearing norms, schooling, a wide range of scientific truths, and children’s place in society. In the 21st century, childhood is an established social category. However, the meaning of the concept of childhood constantly shifts based on time, space, beliefs, and needs. Childhood is also experienced and thought of differently across categories of race, ethnicity, religion, social class, gender, and sexuality. What the stage of childhood encompasses is highly debated in legal and scholarly circles. Age is one of the ways in which childhood has been defined. However, childhood has also been demarcated according to children’s physical capacity to work, attend school, and take care of their siblings and themselves. Childhood might denote innocence, vulnerability, and purity, but it also might serve to highlight the notion that children are political subjects with agency who actively participate in making worlds. The variability of conceptions of childhood is vividly expressed through the myriad disciplines that study childhood. What is emphasized about childhood differs slightly across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. This entry offers an overview of how various disciplines and conceptual frameworks have contributed to the development

Childhood

of the notion of childhood. Specifically, this entry examines how childhood has been explored in the fields of history, psychology, education, geography, anthropology, sociology, law, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies.

Childhood in History Scholarship relating to the history of both the family and education illuminates how contemporary understandings of childhood have been shaped by specific social, cultural, financial, and political circumstances. Key historians addressing childhood include Neil Sutherland, Joy Parr, Tamara Myers, Mona Gleason, Dominique Marshall, Cynthia Comacchio, Hugh Cunningham, John Bullen, Veronica Strong-Boag, and Linda Pollock, among others. Family historians trace how the notion of childhood has changed over time. They are interested in the various historical shifts that have led them to speak of the social construction of childhood. Historians agree that the notion of childhood emerged as early as the 17th century. Enlightenment thinkers idealized childhood as a distinct and important category through health, psychology, and education discourses. A foundational and controversial text in the history of childhood is Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, published in 1962, which forwarded the idea that childhood was not considered a separate stage until the 18th century, before which children were invisible and not socially valued as distinct from adults. Subsequent texts, notably Linda Pollock’s Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900, challenged the evidence Ariès used in his analysis. Through a thorough investigation of autobiographies and personal letters, Pollock argued that parents of previous centuries indeed had a conception of childhood and highly valued their children. Another influential account of the notion of childhood was outlined by Viviana Zelizer in Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Zelizer noted that the appreciation of children as a financial benefit to families’ economies shifted in the 19th century. With the advent of psychological accounts at that time, childhood was provided an emotional value. Through this

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transformation, not only did childhood become priceless, but child labor became illegal. Which sources and evidence are used to define childhood (e.g., the critiques outlined in Forgotten Children) has been a key point of discussion among historians of childhood. Some historians suggest that the history of childhood has been dominated by changing interpretations of childhood at the peril of studying real children’s lived experiences through primary sources created by children. Today’s focus is on how to incorporate the diversity of children’s lifeworlds while tracing the historical construction of a notion of childhood, and how to reveal children’s voices while locating the historical child within complex and evolving discourses of childhood. Historians of education assert that contemporary understandings of childhood have been highly influenced by the advent of public education. Specifically, they highlight the importance of agerelation discourses during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in defining how childhood is viewed today. The delineation of an age for school entrance and the transition from elementary to secondary school framed three main stages of childhood: (1) young childhood, (2) middle childhood, and (3) adolescence. Education historians also emphasize the role that educational projects have played in both the constructed nature of childhood and state formation. A key example is the residential schools for Indigenous children that, through violence and genocide, defined which childhoods were valued and which were not worth living. Stories of these undervalued childhoods are now being shared by the children who experienced violence themselves. Cases in point include the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the Australian Stolen Generation initiatives.

Childhood in Psychology Since the early 1900s, childhood has been the focus of research and practice in psychology. Child development is the specific area of psychology that addresses childhood by separately studying two distinct periods: (1) early childhood and (2) middle childhood. Child development, as its name implies, is concerned with children’s growth and well-being. It conceptualizes childhood as a

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stage of life that is predictable, progressive, and universal. Children develop their cognitive, emotional, social, and physical capacities and abilities through a process that allows them to engage in ever more complex activities, relationships, skills, and dispositions. Although child development considers the importance of the social context within which children develop, its conception of childhood disassociates children from ethical and political issues and concerns. This is the reason for which psychology is argued to be depoliticized. Childhood is an important and formative transitional period toward adulthood and full human realization. Theorists such as Jean Piaget (through concepts such as ages and stages), Lev Vygotsky (through his definition of scaffolding), and Fraser Mustard (through his insistence on the importance of brain development) have been instrumental in defining childhood within child development. Critical psychology challenges these apolitical conceptions of childhood and emphasizes that childhood is a governable stage of life. Erica Burman’s groundbreaking Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, now in its third edition, offers three important contributions. First, Burman argues against universal approaches and for a situated notion of childhood that takes race, class, and gender discourses seriously in the shaping of childhood. Second, she links the construction and normalization of childhood to nation-state building. In other words, she explains how childhood becomes thinkable and manageable through developmental psychology. The establishment of a specific body of knowledge and language about childhood is a significant tactic for the governing of children’s lives. Finally, childhood as a governable category is implicated in colonial and nationalist projects that, in turn, differentially affect children’s everyday lives.

Childhood in Education Education has been an important driver in shaping childhood as a social category. Two important concepts within education have contributed to current conceptualizations and understandings of childhood: (1) schooling and (2) child centeredness. The introduction of compulsory education in the 19th century reshaped childhood forever. The

social, cultural, and political position that children occupy in society shifted, along with how children experience their daily life. When laws were passed to restrict children’s participation in low-paid labor generated by the industrial revolution in Britain, children were moved from mills and mines to educational institutions. In fact, mass education of children and the regulation of childhood through the process of schooling can be considered the hallmark of modern childhood. Over time, children became segregated by age in early childhood education institutions and schools. Today, albeit in indirect ways, the institutionalization of children in educational institutions continues to be linked to the need for a workforce in the labor market (either preparing children for labor participation later in life or allowing family members who support children to work). Educationalists Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1700s, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel in the 1800s, and Maria Montessori and John Dewey in the 1900s are known as important contributors to the idea of child-centeredness, which today dominates popular understandings of childhood in disciplines such as children’s geography, child studies, and early education. A childcentered approach encourages children to be active participants in their own formation, as opposed to being directed or prompted by an adult. This approach sees children as capable individuals who are able to learn and explore independently through the support of pedagogues.

Childhood in Geography Within geography, childhood has evolved as both a concept and a subfield, the former beginning with environmental aspects of developmental psychology in the 1970s and the subfield establishing itself 20 years later. The formal pairing of childhood and geography as a discipline originated with two closely timed scholarly movements in the 1970s, one at Clark University in Massachusetts and the other at the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. While the work of Bill Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren in Detroit used the term geography of children and the Clark University scholars used children’s geographies, both terms were foundational to the current discipline of childhood and geography. Clark University’s Jim

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Blaut, David Stea, Roger Hart, Denis Wood, Margaret Tindal, and Ben Wisner initiated the idea of children’s geographies, mapping, and place knowledge within a developmental psychology framework, while the Detroit project was an early step in politicizing children’s geography as radical, racial, and relevant in understanding marginalized populations (specifically children and urban African Americans). Methodologically, the developing field relied on interviews with children. Bunge’s methodology of extensive fieldwork and mappable data was situated knowledge in action well before Donna Haraway coined the term in 1988. In the childhood and geography field of the 1990s, the politics of spatially constructed social realms embraced feminist, Marxist, and global theories, foregrounding power in the discourse of children, space, and place. During this period, children’s rights gained increasing importance in the field due to their recognition in international law by widespread ratification of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). In the last 20 years, the role of children’s political identities has sparked an engagement of the childhood and geography field with poststructural inventing and reinventing of identities and spaces. This movement brings forward the concept of postchildhood and prompts a spatial turn that embeds childhoods in spaces and places in a fluid, varied, and complex relational stance influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, actor network theory, and posthumanism.

Childhood in Anthropology Anthropology, as the study of human behavior, carries sociological and psychological traditions that extend to the discipline’s study of childhood. Anthropology has a history of studying children’s everyday lives, generally conceptualized within socialization and enculturation processes. The discourse and theories on childhood in anthropology primarily frame childhood as a suspended, vulnerable time of pre-adulthood. Understandings of childhood in anthropology have historically been limited to the how of raising children, the who of their roles in society, and the what of their local roles in family and community. These understandings frame children within a cultural lens. Two perspectives toward childhood emerge within

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anthropology: Initially, children are seen as vulnerable preadults and later on they are constructed within a complex, agentic, and political lens. From the beginning of anthropological studies until the last decades of the 20th century, childhood was a topic generally limited to children’s involvement in education, rituals, socialization, and kin relationships. As late as the 1980s, the dominant discourse on childhood remained one of an age bracket (birth to age 18 years), with limited purposeful activity or usefulness within either scholarly or parental theories. The age-bracket framework of childhood positioned children primarily as preparing for reproduction and as workers, helpers, and contributors in the home and community. It defined children as vulnerable and relied on the developmental psychology and sociology research of theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and Claude Levi-Strass. The turning of this lens on childhood to one of a more complex, agentic framing is directly related to a pivotal global movement sparked by the UNCRC in 1989, which was adopted by every nation in the world except the United States and Somalia. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen a reenvisioning of childhood that proposes new understandings of children and encompasses more complex, interdisciplinary approaches. The UNCRC was part of a global trend of questioning how to give children voice. Much of the historical research on childhood is now framed as problematic or flawed because the majority of research data was derived from adults’ views and interpretations of children. Contemporary anthropological studies of childhood are inspired by the work of scholars Robert LeVine and Barbara Rogoff, who questioned both the approach of defining childhood in relation to adulthood and the idea of a mythological universal child detached from context. Their proposal of an agentic view of childhood as an active, unique, and political experience continues to reverberate across the field. Current movements in the anthropology of childhood recognize children’s multifaceted natures that include vulnerability and agency among other simultaneous and complex realities. Many of the contemporary anthropological developments have followed paths similar to those in feminist studies because of the marginalized nature

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of both populations. Children’s temporal, social, and cultural lives continue to be the focus of the anthropology of childhood, but childhood is positioned as complex, and the field gives prominence to children’s voices.

Childhood in Sociology Children have always been included in sociological study. Children are acknowledged as part of society, social institutions, and social relationships, but much of sociology’s history focused almost exclusively on adults and positioned childhood as a footnote to the main story. The concept of childhood flourished in the late 19th century, and over the next 200 years, the sociology of childhood came into existence and solidified. Over this period of time, sociology has framed childhood as a socially constructed concept defined by individual societies and changing depending on time, location, and culture. The work of Allison James and Alan Prout in defining the new sociology of childhood emerged in the 1980s and ’90s as a reaction to the dominant discourse on child developmental psychology and traditional theories of socialization. The binaric limitations of traditional sociology, which set out oppositions between agency or structure, nature or culture, and being or becoming, were increasingly deemed incomplete and unable to reflect the diversity of children’s lived experiences. The new sociology of childhood emerged to compensate and fill the middle, rounding out the concept of childhood as a more mediated, entangled network and positioning childhood as a variable of social analysis that valued the study of children’s everyday lives and understood children as active participants in social structures. In framing childhood as socially constructed and active, the new sociology also acknowledged both the role of childhood theorists and researchers in reconstructing knowledge of childhoods and the effectiveness of ethnography as a methodology. In a move away from the 20th-century focus on linguistics, discourse, and representation, contemporary sociology of childhood considers the materiality and relationality of being. Part of this movement is a burgeoning posthuman orientation that decenters the child in favor of larger networks of forces, challenging the dominance of

social construction models. Within scholarly works ranging from Affrica Taylor’s Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood to Spyros Spyrou’s Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies, childhood is framed in a context beyond the simplicity of a human world. Childhood in sociology has moved from a socially constructed notion to a more complex category that is situated within the world (instead of society) and constituted through relations beyond the human.

Childhood in Law Historically under the law, children were considered to be their parents’ property, and in most patriarchal cultures, such as those in the Western world, children were owned by their fathers. In Europe and North America, children were seen, by the late 19th century, as a group who needed to be protected from society’s ills. Social reformers set out to save disadvantaged children, which led to the development of child welfare systems whose primary goal today is child protection. The law, like dominant constructions of childhood, sees children first and foremost as part of a family. The United Nations’ 1989 UNCRC Preamble on International law denotes the family as “the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children.” Until they are 18 years, children are expected to live in the family home, follow their parents’ rules, attend school, and otherwise remain in society’s private sphere. Independent children are the exception. These include street children, unaccompanied migrant children, children orphaned by armed conflicts, AIDS, or other causes, and many others. Scholars who focus on independent children and their needs, such as Jonathan Todres, argue that the laws in many parts of the world idealize childhood and thus fail to meet the needs of the millions of children who live outside of families. The notion that children have rights is a recent one. In 1924, the League of Nations put forward the Geneva Declaration, which is widely acknowledged as the first international declaration on children’s rights. Later efforts, in 1948 and 1959, expanded those rights, but it was not until 1989, when the United Nations passed the UNCRC, that

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childhood as a life stage was proposed as a universal category. The legislation has been used to argue for the protection of children, to highlight power relations and structural inequalities between children and adults, and, importantly, to clarify that children have rights because they are human. Through the UNCRC, children’s rights now apply to persons between birth and 18 years. Flowing from this international convention, the laws of its signatory countries clearly divide childhood from adulthood based on age. One result of this divide is that children under 18 years are subsumed within the family, and the law affords them fewer rights than adults in areas such as voting, employment, and medical decision making. In general, the law serves two main functions in terms of children and their families: it reinforces parental authority and provides a safety net. Some family law critics contend that the law’s sharp distinction between the categories of child and adult variously serve to deny children their rights, limit the scope of those rights, or refuse to grant them standing to assert their rights. Thus, children must rely on adults to voice their rights for them. In terms of the notion of childhood, the UNCRC proposes that all children have the right to enjoy a childhood. Although the UNCRC has had a significant impact in the provision of care, education, and well-being to children across the globe, it has also generated much controversy. First, it has been difficult to implement the general philosophy of the UNCRC in everyday practice. Second, several scholars have argued that the UNCRC supports Western ideologies and discourses of childhood, making the legislation a dangerous colonial tool.

Childhood in Gender/Sexuality Studies Scholarship within gender and sexuality studies has contributed to contemporary understandings of childhood by acknowledging the centrality of gender and sexuality in the making and unmaking of diverse and unequal childhoods. This scholarship has opened up the question of what a normal childhood entails and who is included and excluded within such a definition. It has also challenged the idea of childhood innocence and introduced the phrase “the politics of childhood” through a careful analysis of power relations and

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questioning psychological understandings of children’s gender and sexual development. Feminist perspectives disrupt the idea of an essentialized girlhood or boyhood, rethink children’s gendered identity negotiations, and explain both the role of dominant gender discourses in children’s lives and children’s agency in conforming to and resisting these discourses. A notable example is how the girl child has become an especially pertinent topic in discussions on childhood in the Global South. Queer studies disrupt taken-for-granted heteronormativity and its invisibility within the concept of childhood. In other words, it queers childhood. Mindy Blaise’s Playing It Straight!: Uncovering Gender Discourses in the Early Childhood Classroom offers examples of how children perform gender in their daily lives.

Childhood in Critical Disability Studies Critical disability studies also bring alternate perspectives to the dominant individual, biological, and deficit models of childhood. This scholarship locates dominant and normative engagements with disability within particular social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. These critical perspectives interrogate the exclusionary and pathologizing effects of dominant sociocultural constructions of disability, including normative pedagogies and educational standards, as well as other normalizing policies, practices, institutions, and material environments that act to exclude children with special needs from what is considered educational success. Importantly, critical disability studies makes visible the taken-for-granted ways in which children with disabilities are marginalized.

Childhood in Indigenous Knowledges Indigenous peoples is a term that references a land’s original people and their descendants. Indigenous peoples have a long history of theoretical framings and approaches to childhood. While approaches vary with different Indigenous peoples, there are also similarities. Many Indigenous worldviews include childhood as a major phase in their philosophy of life. For some Indigenous groups, childhood is a time of education, but it is not limited to a Western definition of

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curriculum in schools. Rather, it is an approach to transmitting cultural traditions, language, ways of viewing the world, and other knowledge to generations. This knowledge transmission still occurs in a variety of ways, typically outside of structured educational systems. In many settler colonial countries, Indigenous cultures, formal (Western) and informal (Indigenous) learning are blended in a way that is sometimes explained as “walking in both worlds.” Many Indigenous cultures share approaches to educating children. These approaches include, but are not limited to, the significant role of Elders in raising children and supporting the community, and a strong focus on spirituality and sacred teachings for children. Childhood is often described as a period of joy, experimenting, awareness, and responsibility. Rather than being ascribed linear age categories, childhood is viewed as more fluid phases. Children are seen as both individuals and part of the collective simultaneously. Learning and community are closely tied together in many Indigenous cultures, with understandings that supporting children is the responsibility of the entire community. Childhood is both a time to nurture spirit and an opportunity to experience belonging, mastery, responsibility, and generosity. Within some Indigenous worldviews, children are viewed as a gift from the Creator who carry their own gifts to share. This results in a communal approach to childhood as deserving of respect and space to grow. Historically, three major periods of change occurred in Indigenous childhoods: (1) precolonization, (2) colonization from the 1500s until 2007 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and (3) contemporary Indigenous childhoods of the 21st century. A fundamental change to Indigenous childhood came during the 15th century with colonialism around the world. During this period, led primarily by Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch, and French exploration of the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, India, and East Asia, major efforts were made to subjugate Indigenous populations, with irrevocable impacts on Indigenous childhoods. These efforts continue today with both national and commercial claims to land and resources in many countries. The adoption of United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

in 2007 brought another significant change to Indigenous childhoods. This global legislation protects the rights of Indigenous children and focuses on improving the economic and social conditions of Indigenous peoples. The UNCRC also covers Indigenous children. In the 21st century, two major impacts on Indigenous childhoods are methodological changes in research and national attempts at reconciliation policies and programs. The vast majority of research completed with Indigenous people has been done to benefit external interests, not the Indigenous people, nation, and community. Furthermore, the bulk of this research was done by settlers (non-Indigenous people). This situation is changing through the work of a growing body of Indigenous scholars, such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Eve Tuck. Many countries, notably Australia and Canada, have implemented national reconciliation reports with recommendations. In spite of more than 500 years of colonization, the richness of Indigenous childhood remains, nurtured by myriad diverse cultures.

Childhood and Postcolonialism Widespread focus on the impacts of modernity and industrialization, paired with institutional forgetting of colonial damage to Indigenous peoples and lands, worked to silence the stories of childhoods outside of Western ontologies and epistemologies for the majority of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many foundational studies of childhoods during this period ignored other childhoods entirely in favor of a singular White settler childhood lens. These studies did not consider the lasting psychological impacts of colonization for children growing up in colonial democracies, and they failed to challenge the normative Western discourses that allowed impoverished and deficient childhoods in colonized nations. The normative behavior of invisibilizing entire populations perpetuated institutional colonial frameworks. Scholars drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said foregrounded the ongoing effects of colonialism and reframed understandings of childhood by problematizing much of what had been accepted as the norm, thereby initiating thinking on

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multiple childhoods. Notable texts such as Gaile Cannella and Radika Viruru’s Childhood and Postcolonization: Power, Education, and Contemporary Practice and Burman’s Developments: Child, Image, Nation contributed to rethinking the inequities embedded within Western conceptualizations of childhood. These contributions have expanded notions of childhood identities by forwarding concepts of hybridity and mimicry and opening up to the notion of multiple childhoods. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Sarah Hennessy See also Child; Childhood, Anthropology of; Childhood Studies; Children’s Rights; Disabilities; Indigenous Childhoods; Postcolonial Childhoods; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); Universalization of Childhood

Further Readings Aitken, S. C. (2001). Geographies of young people: The morally contested spaces of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203995747 Australians Together. (n.d.). The stolen generations: The forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families. Retrieved from https://australianstogether .org.au/discover/australian-history/stolen-generations Battiste, M. (2000). Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Burman, E. (2018). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. Cannella, G. S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization: Power, education, and contemporary practice. New York, NY: Routledge Falmer. Cunningham, H. (2012). The invention of childhood. London, UK: BBC Books. Helleiner, J., Caputo, V., & Downe, P. (2001). Anthropology, feminism, and childhood studies. Anthropologica, 43(2), 135–137. Holloway, S. L., & Valentine, G. (2000). Children’s geographies and the new social studies of childhood. Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, 8, 1–26. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Lancy, D. F. (2012). Why anthropology of childhood? A short history of an emerging discipline. AnthropoChildren, 1(1), 273.

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Pollock, L. (1983). Forgotten children: Parent-Child relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W., & Honig, M. (Eds.). (2009). The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Spyrou, S. (2018). Disclosing childhoods: Research and knowledge production for a critical childhood studies. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Milton Park, UK: Routledge. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (n.d.). Website. Retrieved from http://www.trc.ca/

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The anthropology of childhood explores the commonalities and diversity of children’s lives around the world. A substantial body of anthropological research on children and childhood exists in the traditional four fields of anthropology (archaeology, cultural anthropology, physical/biological anthropology, and linguistics) as well as in multiple subfields, including educational anthropology, medical anthropology, sociolinguistics, and psychological anthropology. The Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association, established in 2007, provides a platform for contemporary research on children and youth. The focus of the anthropology of childhood is that the cultural context is the key influence on children’s lives because it shapes their circumstances and the meanings attached to those circumstances. This entry explores the history of the anthropology of childhood and theoretical points of view. It also examines the influence of international conventions concerning children and global influences. This entry further considers the powerful ethnographic and qualitative methods that have influenced the field and some of the major topics and issues that the anthropology of childhood has addressed over time, including children as social actors; peers and children’s play; attachment and social trust; language socialization; and child refugees and migrants. This entry begins by examining five key assumptions underpinning the anthropology of children and childhood.

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Five Key Assumptions Robert A. LeVine proposed five basic assumptions for the anthropology of children and childhood. First, all cultures recognize a period of childhood as distinct from adulthood, with children maturing as they age. Cultures vary, however, in the specific stages and competencies ascribed to different ages. Second, children engage in activities deemed important to their cultural belonging and development. In Eurocentric societies, this centers on schooling, and while formal schooling has expanded around the world, children elsewhere may engage in a range of play or subsistence and work-related activities. Third, material, symbolic, social, and environmental conditions for children vary resulting in a diversity of cultural pathways in children’s maturation and development. Fourth, parenting beliefs and practices reflect cultural norms and ideals regarding the kinds of persons they want children to become—their goals for children. And finally, the anthropology of childhood recognizes that children are active participants in learning and acquiring information, and not passive recipients of culture. While the specifics may vary, these major propositions hold across cultures. The anthropology of childhood offers an important challenge to the remarkably unrepresentative samples and conceptual frameworks on which most research on children is based. Joseph Henrich and colleagues coined the term WEIRD societies and pointed out that 96% of child development research in the leading six psychology journals has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies (North America, Europe, Australia, and Israel), representing only 12% of the world’s population. A U.S. undergraduate student is 4,000 times more likely to be a research participant than a randomly selected person from outside WEIRD societies. A rich ethnographic literature on the world’s children in their cultural contexts is a necessary counterbalance showing the diversity of contexts in which children live, as Myra Bluebond-Langner and Jill E. Korbin have shown.

History and Theoretical Approaches A broad range of theoretical approaches drive anthropological research on children. Interest in

children and their role in culture has a long history in anthropology. Before concerted ethnographic work on children and childhood began, travelers, colonials, and missionaries had written accounts of children living in very different circumstances than children in European societies. These accounts found their way into early anthropological speculations about the role of children and childhood. The early evolutionists, sometimes referred to as armchair theorists, for example, envisioned children as on an evolutionary track on their way to maturity similar to societies evolving to a single standard of civilization. Ethnographic field-based research on children and childhood began in the 1920s, most notably with the work of Margaret Mead. At the urging of her mentor, Franz Boas, Mead went to Samoa to determine whether adolescence, a period of storm and stress in the United States, was the same everywhere, grounded in biology, or shaped by culture. Mead’s work was not the only ethnographic study of childhood around the world and is part of a rich ethnographic record. Another early classic in the 1920s was the work of Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands that employed cultural variation in kinship patterns to challenge the dominant Freudian theory of the Oedipal complex as a regular part of childhood. The systematic study of childhood in anthropology was pioneered by John and Beatrice Whiting and their colleagues with their Six Cultures Project of the 1960s. Originally envisioned as a study of 100 cultures, research teams followed the same methods and analytic strategies in communities in the United States, East Africa, the Philippines, Mexico, India, and Okinawa. Communities were described, parents were interviewed, and children were systematically and naturalistically observed. Children of Different Worlds followed up this project, comparing 14 cultures on a wide range of social development dimensions and antecedents, including rich descriptions of the cultural contexts of each community. Theoretical approaches have been proposed for understanding children and childhood in context, many building on the Whiting’s early formulations of the cultural learning environment. Super and Harkness described the developmental niche of the child that includes both the physical and social settings that shape childcare and development.

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Their concept of the developmental niche was accompanied by the idea of parental ethnotheories that are shared beliefs and scripts shared by parents, children, and the larger social context. Moving the lens somewhat wider, ecocultural theory as developed by Thomas S. Weisner encompasses context and the more distal environment. The ethnotheories and local niche are organized by daily routines and activities and activity settings. For example, in many parts of the United States, activities might include soccer practice, playing video games, going to a play date, doing chores, a bedtime routine, and so forth. Each such activity has characteristics that have cultural force that directs and organizes children’s behavior: What are the goals and values for doing those activities; what tasks have to get done; what resources are needed for them; who are the people and social relationships typically present; how do children feel about those activities; and how predictable and stable and common are they? Activities like these are repeated thousands of times in a child’s life, making them powerful socialization contexts. Activities like these (e.g., time for sleep) also occur almost everywhere but can take very different forms, so provide an important unit of analysis for comparing children’s lives across cultures. The cultural context, then, influences children’s development by providing pathways for development. Imagine these pathways as comprised of everyday activities and routines—the stepping stones along the path. Moving wider still, ecocultural theory encompasses the physical world and social institutions that promote and constrain activities. Carol M. Worthman and colleagues further build on and overlap with the concepts of the developmental niche and ecocultural theory in proposing a bioecocultural model. This approach asks how various biological mechanisms work such that culture “gets under the skin” through a process of embodiment. The moral direction of child development also is an essential part of theory and description of childhood in anthropology. A consideration of the cultural context is needed to understand what kinds of children are considered good children, what developmental outcomes are desired, and what happens to children who do and do not exhibit these valued patterns of behavior.

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International Agreements and Global Influences The ethnographic and comparative research that anthropology has led has made many contributions to international research, work on the effects of globalization, and related topics. For example, anthropological attention to children and childhood also has been influenced by international agreements stimulated by globalization and its often negative impact on children’s wellbeing. The 1989 United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) has three basic principles: (1) protection of children from a range of harms (from intrafamilial abuse to war-related traumas); (2) provision of what children need (from the basic physical needs for food and shelter, to emotional needs for love and caring); and (3) participation by children themselves in matters concerning them insofar as their developmental capacity permits (from family dissolution to educational issues). These provisions of the UNCRC stimulated both international efforts to address children’s needs and research directions about how best to understand children’s circumstances. It was then and continues to be clear that children around the world suffered from a range of insults to their development and well-being. The UNCRC emphasis on children’s circumstances has persisted, for example, in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals that contain several goals aimed at improving, and measuring, child well-being. The UNCRC also drew attention to children’s voices rarely being sought on issues of concern to them. The United Nations Convention stimulated a body of research, largely in an emerging interdisciplinary field termed childhood studies and largely in European countries that had ratified the Convention. This body of research that sought to make children a more integral part of research and to give credence to the child’s perspective can be seen in a multitude of studies, including ambitious comparative international studies including the Children’s Worlds and the Young Lives projects, that sought to measure and understand children’s subjective well-being. In addition to the diversity of contexts in which children live, the world is globalizing and

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changing rapidly. Children and families have access to an unprecedented amount of new information, people, material things, and connections. Although the more affluent West and East are influencing this process, there also is pushback and resistance from other communities.

Anthropological Methods for Studying Children and Childhood Multiple methodological approaches have been applied to the study of children and childhood. Anthropological methods are focused on the holistic context of the child’s world. Such methods emphasize the meanings, intentions, goals, and moral directions that guide behavior and thought and the lives and development of children. Understanding cultural activities and cultural models often requires mixed strategies, integrating qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods are based on verbal accounts, observations, text, video, and photos, and represent the world through narratives, stories, vignettes, and visual modes. They can be both person-centered and context-centered. Qualitative methods can be quantified through coding and comparative analysis. Quantitative methods use numbers and variables as the primary way to represent the world. Ethnography—the study of the way of life of a community—is an important holistic method and key to cultural understanding. Ethnography includes participant observation by researchers in a community and in-depth, qualitative conversations with children themselves, parents, and community members. A key to all cultural data is to include the meanings of activities that make up community life and to incorporate the experience and points of view of those whom one is studying. Ethnography can include a whole suite of methods in addition to qualitative ones, such as systematic behavior observations, community surveys, and the use of questionnaires and more structured interviews. Cross-cultural methods can also include biological and biosocial indicators of stress and genetic relatedness and other physiological indicators. Melvin Konner, Worthman, and Meredith Small have all written extensively on these topics.

Examples of Anthropological Work on Issues Affecting Children and Childhood A broad array of issues have been included in anthropological research on children. The following are some illustrative examples: Children as Social Actors

Social development is deeply influenced by culture since the components of culture outlined heavily emphasize, and are enacted as part of, daily routines, activities with scripts for behavior and norms which are shared, and activities that are driven by social relationships along developmental pathways. Social development includes, among other topics: social responsibility and caretaking; gender; sociolinguistics and language; attachment; socioemotional patterns, such as shyness, aggression, and prosociality; play; and social intelligence. Social development varies according to gender, societal complexity, subsistence base of the community, small or larger scale social organization, urban or rural settings, and whether family structure is primarily extended or joint, or conjugal and smaller household level. There are cultural influences in children’s development from before birth through youth. For example, Dutch parents are less likely than U.S. middle-class parents to believe that babies are innately more likely to sleep regularly and so their ethnotheories about sleep and baby care emphasize physical and social management of sleep. Babies need rest, regularity in routines, and a clean environment in the Dutch view, as Sara Harkness and Charles Super have shown. Sure enough, 6-month-old Dutch babies slept or rested nearly 2 hours longer than U.S. babies, were put to bed an hour earlier, and were calmer resting in bed. Similarly, Alma Gottlieb has shown that babies among the Beng in the Ivory Coast of West Africa are intentionally provided multiple caretakers from early in life to pull the infants from a (happy) world they are believed to have come from prior to birth, into the social world of their community. This ethnotheory organizes multiple caretaking and social trust. Babies and older children were sometimes angry and frustrated, of course, and these behaviors were interpreted as signs that children wanted to return to their pre-birth spiritual

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world. Infancy and early childhood are often experienced as times where a child’s survival and health is at risk and so many communities with high early mortality emphasize a pediatric mode of care—focused on physical and motor development, protection from threats and the maintenance of an alert, quiet calm behavior. In middle childhood, or the juvenile period of maturational development, children take on more social responsibility, do more childcare and other domestic tasks, begin formal education, and generally are believed by most societies to have increased social intelligence, cognitive ability, and responsibility awareness. Sibling caretaking, and the socially distributed care of younger children generally, is very widespread around the world. There are many cultural and ecological-demographic circumstances that are associated with greater socially distributed care and greater task and social responsibilities for children. These include heavy maternal and paternal workloads, larger family sizes, joint or extended families, and single parenthood. Learning responsibility at this time of development is connected to emotional learning of obligation and respect in many communities. Girls are generally preferred as caretakers and for doing tasks, but boys also do so as needed. The U.S. middle class is low in emphasizing such training compared to other communities. Play and Peers

Children’s play and games is a universal feature of children’s development and occurs around the world in all known cultures. David Lancy suggests that in most of the world, however, adults seldom engage in play with children. Also, in many cultures, the elaborate use of special toys, media characters, and commercial symbolic partners in play are less salient than in more affluent, Western middle-class communities. However, children are remarkably creative in making their own toys and using found objects for play. Aggression and conflict is universal among children and with adults, but there is wide variation in the tolerance and frequency around the world. Communities that emphasize social order, egalitarianism, a greater sense of moral discipline and shame for misbehavior, and emphasis of

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responsibility and task sharing, generally report lower levels of aggression among children. Children who are living in a setting with greater threats to them, such as a favela in Brazil, or a dangerous neighborhood in the United States, experience more aggression and have to constantly protect themselves and be protected from such threats. There are many very stressful and difficult contexts children face around the world, and anthropology has documented many of them. Attachment and Social Trust

Attachment systems have universal features (the attachment-sensitive period in children and the stress-buffering roles of privileged caretakers), but with enormous diversity, not uniformity, in their contexts, practices, cultural meanings, and outcomes. Anthropologists and others have described children’s acquisition of trust and social attachments using many ways of learning, not only through the attachment mechanism; also, most societies utilize multiple, socially distributed care which might include sibling caretaking and is thus not exclusively maternal care. Anthropology has an extensive descriptive evidence base for assessing close, trusting relationships in their real family and community contexts (with siblings, neighbors, extended family, schools, and other situations, for example). Robert LeVine, Heidi Keller, David Lancy, and Naomi Quinn have all written on these topics. Anthropology does not a priori object to making assessments and judgments about children’s development (in this case, regarding security, or social trust, or other aspects of attachment and development and learning). The important finding is that children learn how to appropriately feel, show and receive security, trust, and social competence in diverse ways around the world. Hence, assessments that are made in psychology and other fields should include attention to contexts and goals for development that vary around the world and in Euro-American contexts as well. Language Socialization

Current U.S. middle-class language socialization of children emphasizes direct dyadic talk and

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teaching of the child by a parent or other adults. This is illustrated by the recent attention to the “30-million Word Gap” by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley. This is the idea that middle-class U.S. children purportedly hear 30 million more words, or directed speech toward them, than poor children. This finding has not held up to current research by Douglas E. Sperry, Linda L. Sperry, and Peggy J. Miller. Anthropological studies of language socialization in many other cultures show that children learn through indirect and overheard speech going on around them because they are attuned to the social context, as shown in research by Elinor Ochs. Multiparty and bystander speech, narrative and story-telling skills, and other ways of acquiring language are common and widespread around the world and in diverse ethnic and social economic status groups in the United States and Europe. Children acquire rich cultural knowledge through social participation in everyday routines and activities, mimicry of others, observational learning, apprenticeship in doing tasks and other activities, in relations with siblings, peers, and extended family (not exclusively with a parent directing speech only to that child), and other ways. Child Migrants and Refugees

One consequence of migration flows, both internal in countries and international, is not only the migration of children and families together but also the separation of parents and children. The circumstances that lead to family separations vary and are increasing due to severe poverty and economic oppression, war and conflict, environmental dislocation, inequality and discrimination, and other often catastrophic pressures. One consequence is families can be separated for long periods of time with minimal or no communication, resulting in children and parents left vulnerable in uncertain conditions. Another is a circumstance of parenting from afar as described by Maria de Guzman, Jill Brown, and Carolyn Edwards. Migration and other dislocations are surely harsh and disruptive. The standard family model (co-resident conjugal family in a single household) already is not the expected pattern around the world, and migration and globalization create yet more nonWestern-standard parenting and child-rearing contexts which anthropology studies. Both the

sending and receiving sites are important for children, and parents, siblings, grandparents, and other caregivers, both near and far, have important roles in providing financial support, direct and indirect care, and in children’s well-being.

Future Directions Consider the many other entries in this encyclopedia and other materials you read about children and families. Ask about these: In what ecocultural context, developmental niche, and cultural learning environment were those data collected? There is a long way to go to fully incorporate all the world’s children into childhood research. A much more representative database for the study of child development is needed. The next generations of students and citizens and scholars, including those reading this volume, are the ones to do this cross-cultural field research. Jill E. Korbin and Thomas S. Weisner See also Caregivers, Children as; Childhood; Childhood Studies; Children’s Rights; History of Childhood; Language Learning/Acquisition; Well-Being, Children’s

Further Readings Bluebond-Langner, M., & Korbin, J. E. (2007). Challenges and opportunities in the anthropology of childhoods: An introduction to children, childhoods, and childhood studies. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 241–246. doi:10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.241 de Guzman, M. R. T., Brown, J., & Edwards, C. P. (Eds.). (2018). Parenting from afar and the reconfiguration of family across distance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190265076 .001.0001 Gottlieb, A. (2004). The afterlife is where we come from: The culture of infancy in West Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.3366/ afr.2006.0039 Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1999). The social world of children learning to talk. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. James, A., & James, A. (2004). Constructing childhood: Theory, policy and social practice. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Konner, M. (2010). The evolution of childhood: Relationships, emotion and mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Childhood and Architecture Lancy, D. F. (2014). The anthropology of childhood: Cherubs, chattel, changelings (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9781139680530 Montgomery, H. (2009). An introduction to childhood: Anthropological perspectives on children’s lives. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. LeVine, R. A. (2007). Ethnographic studies of childhood: A historical overview. American Anthropologist, 109, 247–260. doi:10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.247 LeVine, R. A., & New, R. S. (2008). Anthropology and child development: A cross-cultural reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ochs, E., & Izquerdo, C. (2009). Responsibility in childhood: Three developmental trajectories. ETHOS, 37, 391–413. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1352 .2009.01066.x Otto, H., & Keller, H. (2014). Different faces of attachment: Cultural variations on a universal human need. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139226684 Quinn, N., & Mageo, J. M. (2013). Attachment reconsidered: Cultural perspectives on a Western theory. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Small, M. F. (2001). Kids: How biology and culture shape the way we raise our children. New York, NY: Doubleday. Sperry, D. E., Sperry, L. L., & Miller, P. J. (2018). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development, 1–16. doi:10.1111/cdev.13072 Super, C. M., & Harkness, S. (1996). The “Three R’s” of Dutch child rearing and the socialization of infant state. In S. Harkness & C. M. Super (Eds.), Parents’ cultural belief systems: Their origins, expressions, and consequences (pp. 447–466). New York, NY: Guilford. doi:10.1002/1097-0355(199624)17:43.0.co;2-s Weisner, T. S., & Lowe, E. (2005). Globalization and the psychological anthropology of childhood and adolescence. In C. Casey & R. Edgerton (Eds.), A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and psychocultural change (pp. 315–336). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470996409.ch18 Whiting, B. B. (Ed.). (1963). Six cultures: Studies of child rearing. New York, NY: Wiley. Worthman, C. M. (2010). The ecology of human development: Evolving models for cultural psychology. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 41(4), 546–562. doi:10.1177/0022022110362627

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Architecture

The study of childhood and architecture deals with the interface between the social construction of childhood and the design of spaces for children. Research in this field focuses on the various arenas in which children’s everyday lives take place, and the way design expresses common ideas and conventions of proper childhood and constructs forms of action and interaction between the children and their human and physical surroundings. This field of inquiry emerged in relation to two permutations in recent decades within social sciences: (1) the emergence of the new childhood studies which view childhood as a social phenomenon and (2) the spatial turn in social sciences focusing on the spatial and physical aspects of social life. Modern childhood is characterized by spatial and temporal separation from the adult world. Thus, children’s daily lives take place within designated spaces constructed as suitable for them considering the contents, activities, and interactions involved. Studying the interface between architecture and childhood focuses on the design of space as bearer of social and cultural meanings. Research on this subject mainly reveals how adults’ agency in managing and organizing childhood manifests in designing relevant physical spaces. Nonetheless, this field of inquiry reveals aspects of children’s agency as they conduct themselves in spaces adults design and manage for them. This entry discusses the social meanings attached to the design of specific spaces for children in the public and private sphere, including the residential neighborhood, schools and playgrounds, the house, and the nursery. This discussion concerns the architectural planning of the space and the design of the objects it contains. As a basis for this discussion, the next section presents two theoretical frameworks for discussing space as a social production and as a social construction, and their possible applications to the study of the design of spaces where childhood takes place. Based on these approaches, architecture of designated spaces for children is further discussed as reflecting values, beliefs, and ideas about childhood, and as constructing patterns of childhood as well as the agency of children and adults.

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Space as a Social Product and a Social Construct “Space as a social product” is an approach focusing on the social processes underlying the production of space. Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre suggests a dialectic conceptualization of space as produced across three dimensions: (1) the perceived space (the work put into creating the space), (2) the conceived space (the knowledge underlying this work), and (3) the lived space (space use and the experience related to it). Applying his approach to research the interface between architecture and childhood focuses on the way design as a spatial practice embodies common ideologies about childhood as well as pedagogic approaches that enable them. Similarly, users’ experience of the space is understood to be derived from the knowledge used for its design, anchored in the body and bound to symbolizing processes that attach meaning to being in the space. Michel Foucault’s work on the production of space as derived from knowledge also considers space and its design as bearers of power. In applying his approach to studying the design of spaces for children, architecture is conceptualized as a technology of control that creates docile bodies based on the ability to place individuals in the space, supervise their movement, monitor their actions, and evaluate their performance. “Space as a social construct” is an approach focusing on space as constructed by social actions and interactions as well as bearing meanings that shape identities and forms of action. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes dimensions of power stemming from the spatial organization of social life. In his view, spatial design bears symbolic meanings, and the experience of living in it embodies the social order into the individual. Thus, the habitus, an ensemble of everyday practices that include the social action and the intention and awareness that underlines it, is an embodiment of the socialspatial order reflected in the individual’s behavior while interacting with his or her surroundings. Applying this approach to the study of the design of spaces for children offers a way to investigate arenas where space carries the symbolic meaning of imbalances in power, knowledge, and authority between children and adults, manifested in the way such spaces are planned and managed. In

addition, this approach views the children themselves as active subjects constructing their own identity with respect to power relations. Philosopher and historian Michel de Certeau distinguishes between strategies and tactics that are used to constitute space. Strategies are the rational, calculated, planned actions used to design, map, schedule, and organize users’ activities in the space. By contrast, tactics are the ways people that are subjected to the strategies used to appropriate the space. Tactics can be subversive, creating alternative ways for being, moving and acting in the space, regardless of planners’ intentions. Applying this approach to the study of childhood and architecture allows one to examine planning as a strategy used by adults to organize daily settings where children experience their childhood while also looking at the tactics children employ to appropriate their environment in their various uses of the space.

Design as a Reflection of Values, Beliefs, and Ideas About Childhood Designing spaces for children reflects cultural concepts about proper childhood and beliefs about adults’ ability to shape childhood patterns to ensure optimal child development. Amy Ogata characterizes modern childhood as a sacred and protected phase. Childhood is seen as a developmental process that is best managed not only to guarantee the best life chances for each child but also for designing future society. Thus, designing spaces for children aims to protect and improve children. The design of spaces for children expresses common conventions that define proper childhood by specifying appropriate activities for children and the nature of the interactions they should be involved in. According to these conventions, children should engage in study and play within secure and nurturing contexts. Thus, the security of designated spaces for children is constructed by their separation from the surroundings and by the interactions the designs allow. In this manner, schools, playgrounds, and spaces for organized activities for children have physical borders to enable supervision of those entering and leaving the area, and in allowing adult monitoring of children’s activities.

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Planning the built environment for childhood requires defining the activities and the nature of interactions within it. Thus, the design of schools constructs child–adult interaction in a context of teaching and studying. The design of playgrounds emphasizes aspects of independence, creativity, and exploration constructing adult–child interaction in a context of encouraged play and fun under protective supervision. In both spaces, the design is based on a developmental approach that binds together children’s chronological age, their bodily size, and their abilities. These are used to define both the activity in the space and its contents while being interwoven with interactions that carry meanings of protection and empowerment. Unlike designated spaces for children in the public sphere, the design of domestic space revolves around an intimate and emotional relationship. Studies emphasize the centrality of children in designing the home as the physical space of family life. John Gillis points to a curatorship side in designing a home, related to the way a home keeps childhood memories, experiences, and objects even when it is long gone. Other researchers emphasize how the partitions in the design of a home express different functions such as resting, playing, eating, and bathing, as well as carrying meanings of privacy or publicity attributed to them and manifested in their location in the domestic space. Thus, locating the playroom near the living room or the kitchen emphasizes that family life is arranged around the children’s needs and functions. It also reflects the performative aspects of parenting and the centrality of play in constructing a good childhood that allows the development of creativity and imagination. The sleeping arrangements, on the other hand, express the construction of childhood as separated from adulthood in some aspects of life and emphasize the value of privacy for adults and children alike. However, there is a trend of continued growth in the relative space that children, their activities and belongings occupy in the design of the domestic space.

children and adults. Roy Kozlovsky conceptualized the architecture of childhood as a mode of knowledge and a regime of power used by the welfare state to govern children. This works to mold their subjectivity as future citizens that are characterized by self-regulation, agency, and personal choice. In his view, the design of spaces for children is based on three organizing principles: (1) self-regulation, (2) conceptualizing childhood in developmental terms, (3) and functioning as a site for the production of knowledge about children. The latter is attained by making children an object of adult scientific observation. Constructing children as acting upon a developmental logic works to substantiate adult authority without using coercion. The ability to speak on behalf of scientifically recognized needs imparts this authority with beneficial meanings. Thus, designing built environments for children translates scientific knowledge into a material form that works to persuade subjects to act and interact in a certain way. From this perspective, school design is used to discipline bodies, place individuals in space, supervise and regulate their movement, monitor and evaluate their actions, and motivate them to perform as the planners and managers find fit. The design of playgrounds motivates actions that emphasize independence, creativity, and free choice while of observing, supervising, and monitoring children. And the design of residential houses and neighborhoods execute the welfare state’s interest in promoting the desired childrearing patterns without overtly forcing or coercing parents and children. In this context, family domestic relationships are constructed in relation to consumer culture while emphasizing the centrality of children as emotional subjects whose behavior and development can be affected by the design of their surroundings. Designing the domestic space also constructs the identity of parents, specifically that of mothers, in terms of responsibility for children’s well-being and accommodation of their needs.

Constructing Patterns of Childhood

Architecture of Spaces for Children and Agency

The design of spaces for children transforms pedagogic concepts into material settings in a way that allows social practices and forms of interaction. These are working to construct identities of

Whether analyzing the architecture of childhood spaces as reflecting concepts about childhood or as means of constructing patterns of childhood,

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most of the study of the design of spaces for children tends to focus on the agency of adults in shaping and managing childhood. At the same time, a growing body of work focuses on the agency of children regarding the design of environments by adults for children. Kim Rasmussen distinguishes between “places for children” designed and managed by adults for children and children’s places that are created by the children appropriating the places they are in. Her conceptualization, applicable in both built and open spaces, is based on seeing childhood as organized in an institutionalized triangle connecting the three domains of a child’s everyday life: (1) home, (2) school, and (3) recreational facilities. Children’s places are formed as children appropriate their environment or parts of it. These places are formed out of the way children choose and use them and attach meanings to them using creative and interpretive means, which are sometimes different to those their creators intended. This form of children’s agency is evident in the appearance of the space and it affects the experience of being in it and using it. However, a better understanding of the interface between childhood and the architecture of designated spaces for children takes more than observing aspects of children’s reproductive or transformative agency regarding their surroundings. It requires an understanding of the meanings children attach to the design of these spaces as well as their practical or aspired involvement in the planning of such spaces. Hadas Nezer-Dagan See also Child-Centered Design; Material Culture, Children’s

Further Readings Burke, C. (Ed.). (2005). Special issue: Containing the school child: Architectures and pedagogies. Paedagogica Historica, 41(4–5), 489–494. doi:10.1080/00309230500165635 Gutman, M., & de Coninck-Smith, N. (Eds.). (2008). Designing modern childhoods: History, space and the material culture of children. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. doi:10.1086/651157 Kozlovsky, R. (2016). The architectures of childhood: Children, modern architecture and reconstruction in postwar England. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315612560

Ogata, A. F. (2013). Designing the creative child: Playthings and places in midcentury America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. doi:10.5749/minnesota/9780816679607.001.0001 Rasmussen, K. (2004). Places for children–children’s places. Childhood, 11(2), 155–173.doi:10.1177/ 0907568204043053

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Nature

The relationship between childhood and nature is rooted in broader discussions of the separation between, or entanglement of, two key concepts: (1) nature and (2) culture. The question arises whether childhood is a nature-associated or a culture-associated category, or a hybrid one. Since the 18th century, a number of different perspectives, as well as pedagogical approaches, have been put forward. This entry provides an overview of the nature, continuities, and divergences of the most influential approaches, which include romantic perspectives on childhood and nature, rational and rights-based perspectives on the nature of childhood, naturedeficit understandings of childhood, outdoor and place-based education with their focus on children’s connections to place, and reconfigurations of childhood as natureculture entanglements.

Romantic Perspectives on Childhood and Nature Discussions about childhood and nature were popularized in the 18th century by Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) with his view that children, like nature and unlike culture, are innocent. Rousseau argued that the purity of nature and the innocence of the child go hand in hand. He became a strong proponent of educating children in nature and by nature to maintain their innate close relationship, and of separating children from society’s (culture) evils. Rousseau’s educational approach was extended by Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), who introduced kindergartens (children’s gardens) in Europe in the 18th century set in natural environments to provide opportunities for children to grow and learn outdoors. Although Rousseau’s romantic beliefs of nature as pure and innocent influenced Froebel in his creation of kindergartens, he was also inspired

Childhood and Nature

by his own scientific training on nature’s laws and order. Thus, kindergartens both respected children’s inherent nature and embraced the laws of nature. Rousseau’s views on childhood and nature also reached North America in the 19th century. Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817– 1862), like Rousseau, believed it was important to educate children in nature. However, Thoreau’s distinctive perception of nature was primarily inspired by the wildness of North America’s landscapes. He argued for finding human nature in the uncultivated natural world.

Rational and Rights-Based Perspectives on the Nature of Childhood These romantic understandings held strong in the 20th century, but with a few twists as scientific rationalism became the authority for explaining the nature of childhood. Rather than focusing on the romantic notion that children are innocent beings close to nature, a rational naturalism emphasized children’s cognitive capacities and ability to learn about nature. It was thought that if children had a positive experience with nature during childhood, they would grow up committed to conservation. Building on these ideas in the 1980s, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward Osborne Wilson coined the term biophilia to refer to children’s genetic predisposition to engage and bond with the natural world. The biophilia theory understands children’s attraction to nature as instinctive, innate, and developed through developmentally appropriate opportunities to learn about the surrounding natural world. If their innate curiosities and attraction toward the natural world are not encouraged, proponents of biophilia theory suggest, children might develop biophobia, an aversion or indifference toward nature. Nature education is a children’s rights-based view that positions children as future saviors of nature who have a right to be environmental stewards.

Nature-Deficit Understandings of Childhood Scientific studies that explained children’s relation to nature continued into the 21st century. Some studies have shown that exposure to nature may reduce symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity

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disorder, improve eyesight and cognitive functioning, and promote self-confidence and self-awareness. Some researchers believe that direct contact with nature is crucial for the mental and physical health of both children and adults. An increasingly urbanized Western world is seen by some as putting children at risk for a nature-deficit disorder that carries implications for health and well-being. In his influential book, Last Child in the Woods, American writer Richard Louv suggests that children have become detached from their natural connections due to an absence of core experiences with nature. Children with nature-deficit disorder (a nonclinical diagnosis) grow up lacking a sense of environmental stewardship and conservation. Louv attributes the increasing gap between children and nature, in part, to parents’ fears of strangers, traffic, and nature itself; growing demands on children’s time that reduce opportunities for free play and exploration; and increased interest in digital devices.

Outdoor and Place-Based Education Both romantic and scientific explanations of the relationship between childhood and nature have inspired pedagogical methods for teaching children, including forest schools—both the Scandinavian schools of the 1950s that minimized indoor learning facilities and emphasized being outside in all weather and today’s forest schools that are based on an ecologically conscious curriculum and use natural environments as the primary learning sources. Although the forest school movement continues to grow around the globe, other pedagogical approaches have gained popularity in North America in the last 20 years. Placebased education, one of the most popular, positions the local community, the local culture and history, and the natural and built environments as the contexts for children’s learning. This educational approach emphasizes hands-on, realworld experiences that support children in making a stronger connection to the natural world. Inspired by the works of educational reformer John Dewey (1859–1952), place-based education is an approach to curriculum development and instruction that considers children’s daily experiences as the foundation upon which learning is constructed. The places where children live and learn are inducted into the practices of all school

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subjects. In practice, place-based schools integrate elements of project-based, learner-centered, experiential practices to motivate, and inspire children to establish authentic relationships with the human and natural communities surrounding them, enhancing social responsibility and environmental stewardship.

Childhood as Natureculture Entanglements More than at any other time in history, 21st-century ecological challenges have required that researchers conceptualize children’s relationships with nature. Scientists who theorize a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene insist the cause of many current ecological problems is the belief that humans are more important than, and separate from, nature. Given this argument, childhood researchers have renewed discussions around the natures of childhood. For instance, the Common Worlds Research Collective, inspired by feminist environmental humanities, asserts that pedagogical approaches need to question the idea that humans and the environment are two separate entities or that nature and culture are distinct. Provocatively, they focus their attention on the connections between humans and nonhumans (e.g., animals, plants, weather). Adopting Australian childhood scholar Affrica Taylor’s term natureculture, they propose that nature and culture are inseparable. Rather than focusing on creating perfect natural worlds for children, common worlds researchers emphasize the importance of pedagogies that engage with the actual imperfect worlds that children inherit and coinhabit with other human and nonhuman entities. This ecological, more-than-human orientation signals a shift from a humancentric perspective to one of active engagement, reciprocity, and care for a living, breathing, responsive world. This shift in orientation has the capacity, in the process of changing the ways people interact, to restructure views of childhood, children’s relationships with the planet, and children’s place in the world. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Randa Khattar, and Sarah Black See also Childhood; Childhood Nostalgia; Early Childhood Education; Ecology and Environmental Education

Further Readings Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J., & Mador, M. (Eds.). (2008). Biophilic design: The theory, science, and practice of bringing buildings to life. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. doi:10.1177/ 0270467609349597 Sobel, D. (2016). Nature preschools and forest kindergartens: The handbook for outdoor learning. St. Paul, MN: Redleaf Press. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. London, UK: Routledge.

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Figuration

The academic study of the child and childhood takes a variety of approaches to its objects of study. Empirical work in fields such as sociology and psychology, for example, offers observations and resulting interpretations of data concerning actual children. At the same time, theoretical work in these and many other fields, such as geography and cultural studies, simultaneously question accounts of the child on two-related grounds: (1) that they are subject to the partiality and limitations of any such truth claim; and (2) that adult views of children are necessarily incomplete, if not downright inaccurate by virtue of the difference between these two categories of existence. The theoretical concept of figuration belongs to the latter of these approaches. This entry offers a definition of figuration and examines figuration’s specific impact on the understandings of children.

Figuration Defined Drawing on Donna Haraway’s original theorization of the concept in feminist science studies, figuration as it concerns the child refers to the simultaneously semiotic (meaning-making) and material process that generates versions of the child wherever they appear and to the resulting versions. A given child is the effect of a particular process of figuration and it is the resulting figuration. For example, the process of figuration in neurology might involve creating a visual presentation of the child’s brain using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The

Childhood Embodiment/Embodied

process of figuration involves the machine, the process of taking the image, and the positioning and treatment of the child-body relative to the machine. The material images resulting from this process, along with their interpretation by medical experts, constitute a particular figuration of the child. A figurational approach takes these images and their meanings as both powerful and contingent: The images may provide the evidence for surgical intervention; for example, if they indicate that development has gone awry in a given child, but they are also subject to the ways in which MRIs are interpreted by physicians as a (disordered) brain, relative to what has been constituted as an image of the normal child brain. This figuration is contingent insofar as, for example, MRI images are not equivalent to the child brain itself and due to the fact that MRI images do not simply present objective information. Instead, experts must learn to read MRI images, and as such, they generate information that is not separate from but rather dependent on that particular process of interpretation.

Effects of Figuration This approach offers a means of conceptualizing invocations of the child in any domain—from scientific concepts of development to pediatric medicine, childcare practices, magazine depictions, and cultural theory—as material-semiotic, and therefore, as located in time and place, and as particular rather than universal. Figuration seeks to account not only for how adult discourses and practices generate particular instances of the child but also the many ways in which the resulting material-semiotic particularities generate or body forth wider worlds of significance. For example, in 19th-century British evolutionary discourse, over the course of its development from infancy to adulthood, the child literally embodied the whole of human evolution. This theoretical approach also seeks to make evident diverse figurations of the child and with them a range of possible effects. A series of figurations may consolidate a particular version of the child; they may produce hierarchies among groups or categories of the child; or they may underlie or arise from struggles over the child. For example, the child as a developing body is nearly ubiquitously consolidated in invocations of the child

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both in the United States and transnationally. At the same time, in the United States, the priceless child identified by Viviana Zelizer as a modern invention is figured as a middle-class White child full of potential, while the Black and Brown child is more consistently figured as already failed—a problematically reproductive girl-child and a destructively violent boy-child. As Haraway has suggested, to inhabit these figures as a theorist is both to account for their power and to make space for alternative, more liberatory figurations. Claudia Castañeda See also Child; Childhood; Childhood Studies; Developmentality; Priceless Child

Further Readings Castañeda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, bodies, worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_witness@second_ millennium. Femaleman Meets_Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York, NY: Routledge. Zelizer, V. A. R. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Childhood Embodiment/Embodied The notions of embodiment in childhood and the embodied child need to be understood in the context of a famous quotation by Alfred North Whitehead that ‘the safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’. Although by far the majority of children live in the ‘developing’ world, and this difference with the rest of the world will most likely only increase, most research on children (on White Western bodies) reflects geopolitical inequalities as it is still generated mainly by wealthy postindustrialised countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. This entry, therefore, traces philosophically the distinction between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of bodies work in adult–child relationships and why embodied experience and the body have been

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rendered inferior to the mind in theories and practises. Attention is paid to the binary logic put in place by Western metaphysics and how historically the relationship between mind, body, and world was not seen as political. This gradually changed and gained ongoing momentum in the 20th century. Poststructuralists now argue that all major inequalities are embodied: race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and place. These have consequently been built on by critical post-humanists who also include ‘nonhuman’ bodies (animal and matter).

Emotions and the Body The dualism between mind and body has had an incredibly strong foothold on Western thought, with its roots in the writings of ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Plato likens the self to a winged two-horse chariot driven by a charioteer (reason), who has difficulty with one of the horses, a wild, disobedient, emotional animal in need of control. This is especially the case with children, who are positioned as closer to nature in their uncivilised wildness but also in their perceived purity and innocence. Plato’s influence manifests itself in the idea that emotions are individual, subjective, inner mental states, thereby stripped the self from its social, cultural, and political context. Here, a connection can be seen with some currently popular approaches to controlling and managing one’s emotions, such as ‘emotional intelligence’ and ‘emotional literacy’. In the philosopher René Descartes, one finds the most extreme expression of the Platonic mind–body dualism that characterises modernity. Universal, timeless knowledge of the ‘outside’ world is obtained on the ‘inside’ of the self (as conscious, self-aware, self-contained, independent, rational, and mature). As a result of these ontological (‘onto’ means being; the ‘furniture’ of the world) influences on what it means to be a ‘self’ or ‘subject’ the body is considered to be inferior to the mind. Children’s bodies in particular are conceptualised as ‘unfinished’, ‘immature’, and as constantly changing and growing.

Different Theories About Embodiment Children’s bodies are seen to be in need of regulation, normalisation, and civilisation as part of a

developmental, maturation process, which has informed scientific realist approaches in childhood research. Jean Piaget’s highly influential ‘genetic epistemology’ (the basis of most educational programmes globally) pays attention to children’s direct sensory experiences but postulates that children have (Kantian) ‘schemas’, or cognitive structures, that shape their understanding of the world with increasing complexity. The scientific, biological child is ‘cut up’ into different stages through which he or she develops, and complex processes of development are isolated and separated into, for example, the social, the cognitive, the emotional, the moral, and the ­physical—each separate category having its own development that can be quantified and measured against a universal standard. Children’s bodies are a special case of human bodies that are ‘leaky’ (e.g., snot, vomit, faeces, urine) in the sense that they gradually learn to control and regulate what goes ‘in’ and ‘comes out’. Moreover, their permeable bodily boundaries require protection from the outside world. Seen as lacking resilience and ‘at risk’ from harm, children’s bodies require intense and continuous surveillance and regular assessment and measurement against preestablished norms (milestones). Nowadays, children’s bodies are often seen negatively as the site of social and cultural problems, such as teenage pregnancy, childhood obesity, binge drinking, and self-harm—mainly Western concerns—as opposed to concerns about health and safety when children live in poverty. The sensing body that is temporal and spatial is considered a threat to cultural order, not to be trusted, and in need of control through rational means (e.g., educational interventions). In other words, the body itself is ‘the mere backdrop’ to the ‘thinking’ self and with it comes the morality that children and young people (when they are ‘ready’, that is, old enough) should take responsibility for their lifestyle choices. As neoliberal, autonomous, free individuals, they need to learn to resist bodily temptations through reason—like the Platonic two-horse chariot. Although social constructivism (Lev Vygotsky) does not essentialise children, a biologised psychology is assumed. As a biological entity in the world, children’s bodies are governed by natural laws and are, therefore, objects of science. By

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nature, the mind matures (unfolding ontogenesis), a process that can be ‘scaffolded’ or ‘mediated’ through culture by a more knowledgeable (mature) adult. Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky was interested in interpersonal processes. So, the nature–culture binary (based on the mind–body dualism) is assumed, which, in turn, has made the sex–gender distinction possible. The child’s body is seen as a blank slate with history and culture marking it with, for example, gender. In other words, gender is the ‘cultural’ inscription on what is regarded as the ‘naturally’ sexed body. It is not until the linguistic and cultural turn (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) of the early 1970s that the political dimension of mind–body dualism comes to the fore. Since the linguistic and cultural turn, scholars assume that there is no unmediated access to the ‘real’ child by nature (as it is in reality, untouched by cultural inscription) and claim that all knowledge is a historically, linguistically, and socioculturally mediated intersubjective process. Bodies are understood as sites of experience through which children embody and actively respond to the sociocultural and historical context. For key thinkers during this period—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler—all knowledge construction is mediated through semiotic systems that are not politically neutral (discourses). For example, the cultural constructions of children’s embodiment have an impact on society, including fashion (e.g., sexy clothing for young girls, tattoos), food, sports, music, architecture, and school curriculum. So, topics in the school curriculum related to embodiment—for example, health and sex—are regulated by the government, the church, school administrators, scientific theories, and often moralising worksheets, textbooks, or both. These discursive practises produce racialised, gendered, sexualised, and ableist identities that, although socially constructed, are regarded as ‘natural’ in social constructivism and scientific realism. For Butler, gender is a ‘doing’—that is, has performative agency. Gender is not an essence, or attribute, of individual child bodies but manifests itself at the point of action. Her separation of sex (natural) and gender (cultural) has made room for the previously excluded experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex children.

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A gendered, embodied self comes into social being over time through a continuous process of enacting specific norms that become internalised. For Butler, the repetition of bodily movements regulates the materiality of a child’s sexed body. Although gender is a separate theme in childhood studies, many argue that it intersects with other dimensions of embodiment, such as race, poverty, ethnicity, class, disability, consumption, and place. Hence, a link is often made with postcolonial theories. The social constructionism of the linguistic turn does not imply that culture replaces nature, in a deterministic kind of way, as if the self has no agency. Embodied selves exist as individual ontological units in space and time and are all different from one another. But there is no binary between the individual and the social. The social constructs the individual. Therefore, topics such as ‘healthy food’ are not taught as if this knowledge were universal and appropriate for ‘all’ children but always in relation to social, cultural, ethnic, and other situated differences. It has, therefore, been argued that it is better to refer to ‘childhoods’ than to ‘childhood’ and similarly, not to use the plural ‘children’ because it marks depersonalisation and does not do justice to the multiplicity, ambiguity, and complexity involved in work with children. For phenomenologists, embodiment and subjectivity are relational in the sense that children’s bodies at the phenomenological level are not autonomous and individuated but are always intertwined with other bodies. The body is always experienced relationally, as for example, in parental practises such as cuddling, co-sleeping, and breastfeeding with a blurring of bodily boundaries when human bodies intimately touch and intermingle as expressed in the concept ‘interembodiment’ or ‘skinship’.

Porous (Child) Bodily Boundaries Since the ontological turn (‘ontos’ means being), there has been a radical rethinking of the relationship between the knowing (human) subject that is active and the body that is supposedly passive. The embodied child is not an entity bounded by his or her skin and in a particular ‘position’ in space and time that ‘precedes’ relations; rather, the embodied child emerges as a ‘result’ of these relations that are not only discursive but also

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material. Drawing on quantum field theory, feminist philosopher and critical post-humanist Karen Barad has introduced the notion of ‘intra-action’ as opposed to ‘interaction’. Interaction tends to be used to describe social relations between humans who exist ‘before’ the encounters (as, e.g., the nipple of a mother’s breast and a baby’s mouth). This postulates separately existing individual entities (the nipple, mouth, etc.) with inherent properties (soft, warm, etc.) in contrast to intra-action that describes the entanglement between bodies and the nonhuman that already exist ‘before’ the encounter. This postulates separately existing individual entities (the nipple, mouth, etc.) with inherent properties (soft, warm, etc.). Resisting the temptation to follow only human bodies means doing justice to how, for example, during breastfeeding, the atmosphere in a room or the furniture or the clothes mother and child are wearing are all part of the phenomenon one observes and tries to describe and explain. Critical post-humanism also disrupts the idea that researching children’s embodiment should be done either by the natural sciences (e.g., neurosciences) or the social sciences. Transdisciplinary approaches are being called for. For example, biologists have shown that cells of a foetus in utero not only infiltrate cells of the mother, but they, in turn, infiltrate cells of subsequent foetuses the mother gives birth to. This decentring of the individualised human body does not mean doing away with the human but rethinking what the human ‘is’. This also includes the fact that the human body is made of more nonhuman cells than human ones and that childhood researchers should also include what can be observed at microlevel, not only at macrolevel (e.g., by observing children’s bodies with the human eye). For a post-humanist, the embodied child has porous boundaries and does not exist as a stable, bounded entity that can be described, measured, and observed in space and time but is a phenomenon. The Cartesian ‘substance’ ontology is replaced by a ‘relational agential ontology’. Other philosophers who have influenced this radical rethinking of embodiment are Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Rosi Braidotti. They return to the monist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, who offers a radical alternative to the

dualistic philosophy of Descartes. This shift in ontology, as well as in epistemology and ethics, has brought into existence notions such as the ‘transindividual’, ‘transcorporeality’, and ‘distributed agency’. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘assemblage’ is of interest for embodiment. Child as assemblage includes the body but also connects with a multitude of (also unconscious) processes, affects, passions, desires, behaviours, thoughts, and materials that have agency but cannot always be accurately described or even articulated. This rethinking of the positioning of the body in childhood research, prioritises movement, and experimentation. Post-humanism has been critiqued for not connecting with postcolonial theory and the relational ontologies of indigenous knowledges. Karin Murris See also Deleuze, Gilles; Developmental Psychology; Emotional Intelligence; Gender; Intersectionality; Posthumanism and Childhood; Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

Further Readings Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Cannella, G. S., & Soto, L. D. (Eds.). (2010). Childhoods: A handbook. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Coffey, J., & Watson, J. (2015). Bodies: Corporeality and embodiment in childhood and youth studies. In J. Wyn & H. Cahill (Eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies (pp. 185–200). New York, NY: Springer. Lupton, D. (2012). Infant embodiment and interembodiment: A review of sociocultural perspectives. Childhood, 20(1), 37–50. doi:10.1177/0907568212447244 McFall-Ngai, M. (2017). Noticing microbial worlds: The posthuman synthesis in biology. In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. M51–M69). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. London, UK: Routledge. Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. London, UK: Routledge.

Childhood Identity Constructions

Childhood Identity Constructions Identity constructions could be seen as one of the most implicated concerns in areas related to contemporary sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Identity constructions can lead to ignorance in ways that remain far from simple or clear, particularly when conceptualised, as open and evolving, as philosopher Julia Kristeva claims. This entry adopts a Kristevan lens to examine identity constructions in children and childhood. From this perspective, childhoods are seen as deeply and crucially implicated in active performances of everyday lived realities, orientations, and attitudes. Specifically, this entry elaborates on the notion that childhood is in various ways manufactured—a product of its physical, social, and political context.

Split Subjects Through Kristeva’s theory of the subject in process, everyone is a ‘split subject’. Accordingly, the ongoing construction of childhood identities counters any positivist or theoretical neutrality. Through the theory of the subject in process, childhood identity is always connected to the surrounding context and environment by which they are governed. When childhood identity is open and evolving, as claimed in the opening quote, whatever one knows about children and childhood remains always incomplete, and furthermore, it becomes obsolete the very moment that it becomes ‘known’. In the contemporary anthropocentric, globalised context, ‘open and evolving’ childhood identities evoke what has also been referred to as a ‘mystery’, of the subject. This raises the idea that childhoods are never completely products only of their own experiences, but instead that children are always ‘split subjects’ that are continually called into question. Questioning of split selves and mysteries plays out in both conscious and unconscious constructions. It also demonstrates a concern with disruptive forces affecting the constructing narratives, for example, in such things as tonality, rhythms, contradiction, meaninglessness, disruption, and silence, according to Rachel Widawsky. This element is what Kristeva calls the semiotic, a central aspect of the

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subject in process, and of this rethinking of childhood identity constructions.

Childhood Identity and the Semiotic The semiotic acts by creating meaning in the signifying process. According to Kristeva, the semiotic is the process of signification which always works and acts alongside the surrounding structural, or the symbolic, order. In other words, the surrounding societal rules, cultural beliefs and values, laws, behaviours, and institutional actions and structures govern, affect, and shape childhood identity constructions. The semiotic plays out alongside and within these structures, in the nuances, rhythms, tones, and energy that shift and collide between them. In this view, the semiotic is concerned with making meaning of the structural context. It is a space where feelings, experiences, interpretations, readings of, and engagements with the surrounding symbolic governance inhere: It makes the symbolic order matter. It is through the semiotic that the emotions, memories, and desires that the governance evokes are formed, and these drives then underpin identity constructions, as a result of and reaction to the symbolic structures. Through this lens, the symbolic and the semiotic are inseparable— the individual subject is always both semiotic and symbolic. The on-going process of signification in the construction of childhood identities can be seen as occurring through the semiotic in a number of ways: The semiotic links the subject to its context; it counters the homogeneity of the symbolic structure; it preexists the subject; and it energises the subject. Each of these elements illustrates the non-unitary way in which children as subjects in the process are continually called into question and defy a single view solution or identity construct. The semiotic links child subjects to their context by recognising the signifying, communicative aspect of their social and cultural lives. This includes their relationships and place within their community and their developing understandings of their surroundings. Semiotic meaning making emerges in children’s pleasure, or desire, as well as in their abjection, fear, disgust, or abhorrence in their daily living situations. It connects them to their context, not in an event, feeling or

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identifiable ‘thing’ that can be captured; rather, the semiotic lies mostly in the unconscious, and it ‘speaks’—that is, it gives meaning, or signifies—in ways that children cannot hold on to or necessarily describe. The semiotic can be seen as that which is often repressed or marginalised in society. In children’s lives, it might be the complex factors that make it difficult to generalise their development, responses, or ways of thinking or being. In connecting children to their surroundings, the semiotic element thus explains that understandings of, or responses to, the symbolic environment are formed in a far deeper inner self, in the unconscious, than what could be either mouldable or predictable by each child or by those around them. It has been described as the ‘uncanny strangeness’ by Kristeva of meaning, elevating a crucial element in children’s forming subjectivity, that might be experienced as a frightening, unnameable sense. Drawing further on Kristeva, without the semiotic element, individuals risk slipping into a homogeneous lack of meaning and emptiness. The semiotic counters the homogeneity of the symbolic structure. The symbolic structure of childhoods, in Kristeva’s account, represents what is knowable, a certain stasis and stability. The semiotic ‘attacks’ this stasis. It makes space for the unknown that underlies behaviours, actions, and children’s ways of being: the ways in which they perform and perceive their childhood. The semiotic ‘attack’ therefore adds complexity to the known, conscious, symbolic structure. Further, it is, in Kristeva’s terms, ‘translinguistic’, a disruption that breaks the mould and transgresses rules, as it conveys meaning and significance: That is, it is beyond language. By ‘othering’ the subject even within itself, the semiotic heterogenises expectations and rules, through the fluid, unknown energies that ‘move through the body’. The semiotic thus constantly reconstructs childhoods unconsciously and unpredictably. If one follows Kristeva’s view on the semiotic, it can be seen as similar to the maternal body, in that it exists before the subject itself. Its elements and drives are an already preexisting environment in which the subject comes about and continues to be formed. Thus, the semiotic reaffirms the subject in process as irreducible to a particular theory of understanding and opens up the idea of the subject to presymbolic functions that transgress knowing.

The notion that the semiotic preexists the subject moves it beyond stasis, beyond the symbolic. It is what might underlie the uncertainty arising in swings between, for example, childhood moods, desires, abilities, and regressions. Through these transgressions, the semiotic is an energising force. Reaffirming its ‘translinguistic’ nature, the semiotic ‘expresses the things that language leaves out’. It allows the processing of what children might ‘sense’ about a situation, group or person. This notion of the semiotic is thus energising in its potentiality, in childhood beings and becomings, including through the expulsions and rejections that drive their constant renewal. The semiotic thus validates children’s sometimes uncategorisable, indescribable reactions to situations, individuals, experiences, or ideas. A Kristevan perspective on the semiotic suggests that one should not only resist attempts to fit childhood identities into scientific theories or models but further, that they are so unknowably and ongoingly formed by unconscious energies, that they elude conscious knowing. Furthermore, conscious attempts to know the subject re-emphasise the opposite, as childhood identities can be known only within the stasis of the status quo of the already known symbolic written or unwritten rules and structures. As such, a Kristevan lens invites puzzlement, an understanding of nonknowledge, by inviting permanent questioning and a through a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances.

Concluding Comments Drawing on Kristeva’s account of the subject-inprocess complicates expectations of an essential and knowable ‘I’. The particular importance of conceptualising childhood identity constructions through a Kristevan lens lies in its explication of the raw intimacies of the self and of subject formations in childhood. It emphasises the ‘mystery’ and unknowability of calling identities into question, for the self, and even more strongly, for another. This conceptualisation of childhood identity constructions implicates childhoods in contemporary cultural and identity crises of Otherness arising for example in local and global migration, or in worldly anthropocentric concerns involving

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reciprocal interrelationships and interdependencies with more than human things and the planet itself. Sonja Arndt See also Child as Other/Stranger; Childhood; Childhood Embodiment/Embodied; Childhood Studies; Children’s Perspectives

Further Readings Applebaum, B. (2015). Needing not to know: Ignorance, innocence, denials, and discourse. Philosophy of Education, 448–456. Arndt, S. (2015). Young children’s education and identity: A response to the European refugee crisis. Educational Philosophy and Theory. doi:10.1080/001 31857.2015.1100905 Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2016). A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(1), 16–25. doi:10.1177/ 1463949115627896 Ffrench, P. (1995). The time of theory: A history of Tel Quel (1960-1983). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in poetic language (M. Waller, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1998). The subject in process. In P. Ffrench & R. F. Lack (Eds.), The Tel Quel reader. London, UK: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (2008). Does European culture exist? Paper presented at the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation VIZE 97 prize, Prague Crossroads. Retrieved from http://www.vize.cz/download/laureatJulia-Kristeva-en-speech.pdf Latour, B. (2011). Politics of nature: East and west perspectives. Ethics & Global Politics, 4(1), 71–80. doi:10.3402/egp.v4i1.6373 Lechte, J. (1990). Julia Kristeva. London, UK: Routledge. O’Loughlin, M. (2009). The subject of childhood. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Oliver, K. (2002). Kristeva’s revolutions. In K. Oliver (Ed.), The portable Kristeva (pp. xi–xxix). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Peters, M. A., & Besley, T. A. C. (2015). The refugee crisis and the right to political asylum. Educational Philosophy and Theory. doi:10.1080/00131857.2015 .1100903

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Sadehi, C. T. (2012). Beloved and Julia Kristeva’s the semiotic and the symbolic. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2(7), 1491–1497. Stainton-Rogers, R., & Stainton-Rogers, W. (1992). Stories of childhood: Shifting agendas of child concern. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Stone, L. (2004). Julia Kristeva’s ‘mystery’ of the subject in process. In J. D. Marshall (Ed.), Poststructuralism, philosophy, pedagogy (pp. 119–139). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. doi:10.1007/1-4020-2602-1_7 Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Widawsky, R. (2014). Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic work. Journal of American Psychoanalytical Association, 62(1), 61–67.

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Philosophers have long written about childhood, often extensively. Their theories of childhood both express and shape their larger philosophies of ethics, politics, rationality, and human nature. Western philosophies of childhood do not develop in a historical progression; rather, they take diverse forms across different times and places. Likewise, they are informed in many different ways by culture, religion, and history. This entry introduces, in historical order, some of the more influential philosophies of childhood from the dawn of ancient Greek philosophy to the present. It includes both philosophical and theological perspectives, which are not always historically distinct. It focuses particularly on philosophers who not only write at length about childhood but who are also significant philosophers in the historical canon.

Ancient Philosophers Ancient philosophers, writing from the 5th century BCE to the collapse of the Roman Empire, developed a broad diversity of theories of childhood that both reflected and challenged their cultures and continue to influence thinking over the ages. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428?–348/47 BCE) discussed childhood at length in his two great works of social theory, The Republic and The Laws.

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Both boys and girls are affirmed as important social agents but at the same time disordered in their passions and therefore in need of rigorous education in rationality and justice. It is because of humanity’s beginning state of active unruliness that Plato called for censorship of poetry, for the noble lie that people belong to natural social classes, and for a philosopher king who can teach social wisdom. Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 BCE) argued, in contrast, that children are not irrational but rather prerational—that is, filled with innate natural potential that can be socialized and developed. For this reason, Aristotle opposed Plato’s view that children should be raised in common and claims instead that they are best raised by their naturally invested parents. Children prove that humanity is a social animal that is fulfilled by cultivating its inborn social virtues. In different ways again, some of the authors of Jewish and Christian scriptures interpret childhood as an exemplar of human perfection. Genesis 1 affirms human innocence as the image of God filled with moral and spiritual purity. The gospels sometimes lift up children as the greatest in the kingdom of heaven and models of righteousness. At the same time, other Jewish and Christian scriptures view childhood as innately corrupt. The fifth commandment is for children to honor their parents, and Paul’s New Testament letters depict childhood as emblematic of human sinfulness and need for a second spiritual rebirth. Most early Christian philosophers of the 2nd– 4th centuries took a positive view of children as direct images of God and moral examples. Clement of Alexandria (150–215 CE) argued that adults should imitate children’s simplicity, joyfulness, and freedom from hypocrisy. Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) emphasizes childhood’s innocence, freedom from desire, and indifference to worldly status. John Chrysostom (349–407) interprets Jesus’ welcoming of children to mean that humans enter the world free from passions and filled with natural wisdom. However, as the Roman Empire disintegrated, the Neoplatonic thinker Augustine (354–430) developed a much darker view that childhood is the prime evidence of humanity’s original sin, claiming that even newborns are undisciplined, violent, and in need of taming in order to grow

toward happiness and peace. Innocence, for him, meant inability to harm due to lack of strength.

The Middle Ages A similar diversity of philosophies from the 5th to 15th centuries—including from the first female philosophers of childhood—tended to be strongly influenced by Aristotelianism, particularly as interpreted through the then dominant culture of Islam. The 7th-century Qur’an contains a diversity of philosophies of childhood, mostly interpreting children as divine blessings to parents and communities. Often, against notions of children as property, they emphasize children’s moral and spiritual agency—for example, in stories of young Abraham rejecting his father’s polytheism. At the same time, the Qur’an also contains interpretations of children as temptations or trials that divert parents from the higher rewards of heaven. And sometimes childhood symbolizes humanity’s overall need for submission (Islam) from the moment of birth to death. Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) combined Islam with Aristotelianism to formulate a complex schema of children’s moral, spiritual, and social development. Children are born like soft clay or uncut jewels, lacking form or shape. They need to be fertilized and carved toward social virtues so that their natural reason is not spoiled or squandered. Moral development occurs over three stages, from helping others to treating others as equals to placing others’ needs above one’s own. A similarly Aristotelian approach is found in the influential Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), for whom children illustrated his natural law theory that the human aim is to realize its naturally God-given rational potential. This teleological capacity develops in four 7-year phases: (1) complete irrationality, (2) being able to learn from others, (3) being able to think for oneself, and (4) at 21 years of age, starting to think beyond oneself about others and society. The first woman to publish in English, Julian of Norwich (1342–1416), argued for a mystical notion of infants as innately wise. Jesus is the seeker’s true Mother, the one who “may give her child suck of her milk” as the precious food of life in union with divinity. Likewise, childhood shows that the sufferings of earthly existence cry out for

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a divine loving mother of all. At the same time, the female theologian Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) argued for an Aristotelian view that children needed to be socialized into reason and virtue. She subordinated mothers’ authority over boys and girls to that of fathers as more fully endowed by nature and God with the capacities to teach the young rationality.

Modernity Philosophers from the 15th-century Renaissance to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 19thcentury Romantic period took a sometimes intense interest in childhood and draw highly diverse conclusions. The Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) formulated a developmental perspective around humanity’s unique capacities for a reason. Unlike animals, humans are born with tremendous rational potential: “Consider the agility of a child’s mind for absorbing every kind of teaching, and the flexibility of the human mind in general.” Good upbringing and education are essential as the bases for all happiness, justice, and scientific advancement. In contrast, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) returned to Augustine’s argument for children’s sinfulness. Education must be disciplined because “it is utterly impossible for these foolish young people to instruct and protect themselves.” Similarly, John Calvin (1509–1564) insisted that children’s “whole nature is a seed of sin.” However, this meant they needed broad public attention, which led Calvin to found Europe’s first public schools and children’s hospitals as vital components of just societies. In contrast again, John Amos Comenius (1592– 1670) popularly argued that “infants are the living images of the living God” and “he who takes little children in his arms may be assured that he takes angels.” What is more, children “are given us [adults] as a mirror in which we may behold humility, gentleness, benign goodness, harmony, and other Christian virtues.” The great Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) took a perhaps surprisingly dim view of children as exemplars of moral and scientific irrationality. Children possess, for Descartes, the merely embodied existence that the mind must transcend in

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order to achieve any measure of rational autonomy. But the most influential early modern philosopher of childhood was John Locke (1632–1704), who considered children extensively in both his widely read Some Thoughts Concerning Education and throughout his other major works on epistemology and government. Like Aristotle, Locke saw in childhood the beginnings of the unfolding of reason. However, unlike Aristotle, he defined reason in terms not of social virtue but individual liberty. As a consequence, newborns are like white pages or wax, completely lacking innate ideas but ready to have science and morality written on them. “Nine parts of Ten are what [children] are, Good or Evil, useful or not, by their Education.” Reason develops in stages from infant (indeed late fetal) direct sensory experience to the increasing association of experiences into ideas and eventually, around age 21 years, to higher order reflection about ideas. Although Locke originated the modern idea of rights, he excluded children entirely from them because of their undeveloped rationality. A different Enlightenment view is found, however, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who also wrote extensively about children, both in his widely influential Emile, or On Education and in his major ethical treatise The Social Contract. In both, he argued against Locke that children are born like noble savages in a state of natural wonder and goodness as yet uncorrupted by society: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Children begin life with a healthy self-love that is the proper basis for good societies. However, Rousseau also thought children should have no rights, in his case to preserve their childhoods from public corruption. In contrast, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), throughout his writings and, in particular, in his last work, Education, argued that children start out life as unruly animals, driven only by want, instinct, and desire. The fundamental task of education is “changing animal nature into human nature” through discipline into autonomous moral and scientific reasons. Kant also denied children all rights because they lack the rationality to exercise them.

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Childhood in Western Philosophy

The philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) viewed childhood as the temporal starting point of humanity’s education into its own humanity. As he put it, “We are not yet human beings, but are daily becoming so . . . and with this purpose, God has put the fate of our race in our own hands.” Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) fused Lockean and Romantic perspectives into the idea that children are capable of rational and spiritual development by educating their innate capacities for self-discipline. She also argued for equal education for boys and girls and for women’s vital roles in educating children for society. The most influential Christian modernist on the subject of children is the founder of modern Protestantism, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Schleiermacher’s voluminous writings on childhood took the largely Romantic view that children are “the pure revelation of the divine,” exhibiting humanity’s deepest capacities for wisdom, joy, and love. It is not adults who baptize children but children who baptize adults into immediate union with the sacred sphere of nature. Likewise, children are the preeminent model of his central theological concept of “the feeling of absolute dependence” since only children fully experience humanity’s true relationship with God. The utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) saw children’s development as basic to a free, just, and liberal polity. Mill argued that children’s potential for rationality should be realized through universal and gender-neutral public education.

The 20th Century Twentieth-century philosophy is broadly characterized by a turn to language as the core human concern. Anglo-American philosophy tends to focus on the logic of ordinary language use, and European Continental philosophy, on the meaning of linguistic difference. This period produced few philosophies of childhood, although there do arise interesting suggestions around play, agency, and alterity. John Dewey (1859–1952), prior to this linguistic turn, argued that childhood is a time of growing rational agency. In his influential writings on progressive education, Dewey claimed that “education

is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness.” Dewey emphasized that children are not passive educational recipients but, especially through direct experiences of nature, active learning participants. The analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) used children to explain his concept of understanding as a language game. However, children participate in language games largely passively, with the active ability to critique one’s inherited linguistic world being reserved for adults. “The child learns to believe a host of things. . . . Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed.” The continental philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) used childhood in part to explain how “historical consciousness” is less “something a person does” than something that “absorbs the player into itself.” Both children and adults are passive–active participants in the “play” of the interpretation of meaning, even if adults might expand the dialogue more broadly toward different others and cultures. The Catholic personalist theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984) argued that childhood is the human ideal, insofar as it is a time of profound openness. “We do not move away from childhood in any definitive sense, but rather move towards the eternity of this childhood.” The human purpose is to become “children of God” able to experience total trust. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) used the condition of infancy to develop her concept of natality, meaning “the new beginning inherent in birth” that grounds the distinctly human “capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” throughout life. That humans are born as new bodies makes them socially free agents and able to revolt against power, as well as deserving “the right to have rights” as political subjects. Perhaps the 20th-century philosopher who pays the most attention to childhood was the Continental philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), who critiqued teleological conceptions of childhood through his notion of children’s difference or alterity. Children “are neither stages on a genetic axis nor positions in a deep structure” but exercise power from below through their affective force of desire. Children reveal “the double affirmation of becoming and the being of becoming,” and adults,

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particularly as they dismantle inherited social structures, are always becoming-child. Although not exactly philosophers of childhood, it is important to mention Matthew Lipman (1923–2010) and Gareth Matthews (1929–2011). They argued in the 1970s, contra developmental psychology, that children from early ages are their own cognitive agents capable of critical inquiry in all philosophical questions. Finally, the poststructuralist feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva (1941–) argues that childhood infuses language with two oscillating elements: (1) a semiotic or unstructured, poetic, emotional side, rooted in early infancy and maternity; and (2) a symbolic or structured, cultural, paternal side rooted in the ego’s need for separation from the mother. Meaning throughout life is thus a negotiation between its competing and gendered early childhood influences.

More to Do Western philosophies of childhood are thus highly varied across history. There are many more than those mentioned here. Although often simplistic and dehumanizing, they are also often innovative and influential. They help inform many modernday assumptions about both children and larger human concerns. At the same time, more philosophical work is needed if contemporary ideas of children’s agency and rights are to be theoretically grounded and children themselves liberated from their second-class scholarly and social citizenship. John Wall See also Children as Philosophers; Children in Postcolonial Literature; Children in Romantic Literature and Thought; Critical Theory, the Child in; Dewey, John; Locke, John; Philosophy, the Child in; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Further Readings Augustine. (1961). Confessions (R. S. Pine-Coffin, Trans.). New York, NY: Penguin Books. Clement of Alexandria. (1994). Paedagogus. In R. Alexander, J. Donaldson, rev., A. C. Coxe (Eds.), The ante-Nicene fathers: The writings of the fathers down to A.S. 325 (Vol. 2., pp. 213–216). Peabody, MS: Hendrickson.

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2009). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Penguin. Dewey, J. (1997). Experience and education. New York, NY: Touchstone. Julian of Norwich. (1966). Revelations of divine love (C. Wolters, Trans.). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Kant, I. (1960). Education (A. Churton, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves (L. Roudiez, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Locke, J. (1989). Some thoughts concerning education. In J. W. Yolton & J. S. Yolton (Eds.), The Clarendon edition of the works of John Locke. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Rousseau, J. J. (1979). Emile, or, on education (A. Bloom, Trans.). New York, NY: Basic Books. Schleiermacher, F. (1990). Christmas Eve: Dialogues on the incarnation (T. N. Tice, Trans.). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon. Wollstonecraft, M. (2014). Thoughts on the education of daughters. Charleston, SC: Open Library; Nabu Press.

Childhood Insanity In the course of day-to-day living, most people— including children and young people—oscillate between mental health (feeling good) and transient stress or mental distress (feeling not so good); sometimes mental distress persists or life events are such that people are pushed further along the continuum into mental disorder or mental illness (i.e., feeling not so good as to warrant specialist help from formal psychiatric or mental health services). This entry explores mental health and mental illhealth in children and young people. Aspects considered include terminology, risk and protective factors, illness types, treatment approaches, and the various professionals involved.

Terminology ‘Insanity’ is a somewhat archaic term that is better conceptualised in contemporary childhood studies as a dynamic between mental health and mental ill-health. This dynamic can be construed as movement along a continuum with a state of general psychological well-being at one end and serious debility—often referred to as ‘mental illness’—at

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the other. In between these two extremes are stated that can variously be described as ‘stress’, ‘mental distress’, ‘mental health issue’, ‘mental health problem’, and ‘mental disorder’. Mental ‘health’ is not just the absence of mental disorder or mental illness and in children and young people requires (a) the capacity for the child or young person to realise his or her own potential; (b) secure family and home environments, including freedom from poverty, sufficient shelter, and adequate nutrition; (c) an ability to form and maintain personal relationships; (d) achievement of age-appropriate psychological milestones; (e) equitable opportunities to play, learn, and achieve; and (f) an altruistic understanding of right and wrong. Shortcomings in any of these areas increase the risk of a child or young person developing persistent mental distress that may, in turn, lead to mental disorder or mental illness. Globally, knowledge of risk and protective factors in children and young people’s mental health is becoming increasingly important because of the significant economic and social burdens associated with mental ill-health and because as many as half of all adult mental disorders begin in childhood. According to the Global Burden of Disease Pediatrics Collaboration, mental ill-health is a major cause of disability in teenagers and young adults, with suicide being the second cause of injuryrelated death (after road injuries) in this age group. The terminology used to describe those with mental ill-health varies according to the beliefs people have about its origins, local legal codes, the specific era being considered, and power imbalances. Some terms—‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’, for example—are no longer fashionable, although ‘mad’ is still relatively common; some colloquialisms still in use remain pejorative (psycho, nutter, and headcase); some terms are specific to the medical specialty of psychiatry (‘mentally ill’ and ‘psychiatric patient’); some are specific legal terms (e.g., mental disorder is used in United Kingdom mental health legislation); and some terms reflect changing political or societal views of mental ill-health (e.g., ‘mental health issue’, ‘trauma survivor’, ‘service user’, or ‘consumer’ of mental health services). Although a variety of social, psychological, religious, and cultural perspectives on mental health and mental ill-health exist, the medical perspective, via psychiatry, still dominates. This is evident

in the two main classification systems used for mental disorder: (1) the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 and (2) the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases-10. Regarding children’s mental health, both systems identify specific mental disorders that are particularly associated with childhood as well as disorders that affect all age groups but that are commonly seen in children and young people.

Types of Disorders Disorders that tend to be specific to childhood include hyperkinetic disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, in which children are overly excitable and able to focus on a specific activity for only a short period of time; conduct disorders, sometimes referred to as ‘behaviour problems’ because of the child’s antisocial, aggressive, or defiant behaviour; some specific anxiety disorders such as social anxiety (extreme wariness of new people or situations) and separation anxiety (which may lead to the child’s refusing to attend school because of a fear of being separated from a parent); and developmental disorders (e.g., the delays in developing bladder and bowel control seen in ‘enuresis’ [bedwetting] and ‘encopresis’ [soiling]). Disorders occurring in all age groups but that are particularly common in children and young people include mood disorders, including depression and anxiety disorders such as phobia, ­obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder; eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa; self-harm (which is often a consequence of another mental disorder such as depression or borderline personality disorder rather than a disorder in itself); personality disorders, most notably borderline personality disorder, which is largely a disorder of emotional regulation; and psychotic disorders (such as schizophrenia) in which an individual’s thoughts, feelings, or experiences become detached from reality. Psychotic disorders tend to be seen in teenagers and young adults rather than in younger children. Both Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 and International Classification of Diseases-10 take a ‘biomedical’ perspective on mental ill-health. Although this perspective is the dominant perspective worldwide, it is not

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universally accepted, and there are many criticisms of the biomedical conceptualisation of mental distress. Several conditions listed in both Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 and International Classification of Diseases-10 as mental diseases or disorders are not generally accepted as mental illnesses, even though the behavioural consequences of these conditions often bring individuals with these conditions into contact with mental health services. Autism, learning disability, and substance misuse are three particular examples that create conceptual anomalies in childhood mental illness. Many working in learning disability (or intellectual disability or, to use more archaic terms, ‘mental retardation’ or ‘mental handicap’) would question the value to a child of a ‘mental’ diagnostic label when social and educational, rather than medical, interventions are more likely to benefit the child and his or her family. The picture is similar with autism (or to the use of the contemporary term, ‘autistic spectrum disorder’), which is a general developmental disability, often involving no degree of intellectual impairment. Substance (alcohol or drug) misuse has to be contextualised within societal, legal, and age norms. In Western societies, many teenagers experiment with alcohol and drugs such as cannabis or amphetamine, despite access to or supply of these substances being illegal. Yet few end up with longstanding problems. Although teenagers occasionally getting drunk or smoking cannabis would generally raise few eyebrows, most professionals who work with children would be worried by younger children engaging in these activities or teenagers’ dependence on these substances.

Professionals Involved Aside from psychiatry, several other disciplines can be found in children’s mental health, including psychology and psychotherapy, social work, occupational therapy, psychiatric–mental health nursing, and art and creative therapies. Most of these disciplines take a more nuanced psychosocial approach to childhood mental ill-health than psychiatry; however, to be fair, most psychiatrists acknowledge that childhood mental ill-health also has social and psychological dimensions. The distinction between psychiatry and the other,

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nonmedical professions is perhaps the emphasis given to biological dimensions: Psychiatry might consider childhood mental ill-health from a biopsycho-social perspective, whereas other disciplines might consider it from a social-psycho-bio or psycho-social-bio or even psycho-socialpolitical perspective. The ‘stigma’ of mental illness is also an issue, and consequently, many in the other disciplines prefer to talk of ‘a range of emotional, behavioural, and mood problems’ rather than labelling a child with a stigmatising psychiatric diagnosis. Indeed, there is a move in some countries to refer to ‘behavioural health’ rather than mental health. Interestingly, amongst mental health service users (patients), there is often a split about whether a formal psychiatric diagnosis is helpful or not: Many of those labelled with ‘borderline personality disorder’, for example, have found the label meaningless, pejorative, or discriminatory, preferring instead a general description along the lines of ‘struggling with emotional control’.

Treatment Approaches Treatments for mental health problems in children and young people vary according to the type of problem and the training and theoretical stances of the various practitioners. As medical practitioners, psychiatrists are the largest group of professionals able to prescribe pharmaceuticals, so medication is often a primary intervention from them, especially in conditions such as depression and anxiety for which there is a putative biological explanation. Psychotherapeutic approaches (from a variety of theoretical stances, including psychodynamic, behavioural, cognitive behavioural, and humanistic) are also very common. From an evidence-based perspective, there is some evidence that antidepressant medication, cognitive behaviour therapy, and some other psychotherapeutic approaches work well for depressive disorders in children. For anxiety disorders, behavioural and cognitive behavioural approaches seem to have the best outcomes, although, for posttraumatic stress disorder, there is some evidence for a controversial treatment called ‘eye movement and desensitisation reprocessing’. Behavioural approaches informed by social learning theories appear to work best with developmental disorders

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such as enuresis and encopresis; however, medications can help some children avoid the shame associated with these conditions (e.g., desmopressin, an antidiuretic drug, is used for enuresis). Parenting programmes (usually based on behavioural or cognitive behavioural principles) have the best outcomes for conduct disorders. A principal treatment for a borderline personality disorder is an eclectic therapy called ‘dialectical behaviour therapy’, although there is little evidence that any of the available treatments for self-harm—which is very common in borderline personality disorder—are particularly effective. Serious selfharm (such as nonsuperficial cutting with a sharp instrument, hanging, or overdosing of medicines or poisons) is always a medical emergency, and emergency services should be contacted in these circumstances. Eating disorders can be life-threatening, so the usual first-line treatment is physical stability and weight gain (which might mean feeding the child or young person artificially) before any form of psychotherapy. The usual first-line treatment for psychosis is antipsychotic medication; however, identifying early (prodromal) signs of psychosis and intervening early can alleviate the need for intense or persistent medication. There is some evidence that social and psychological treatments (e.g., family, psychosocial, creative, or cognitive behavioural therapies) may also be beneficial to young people with psychosis. Steven Pryjmachuk See also Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology; Counseling Children; Developmental Psychology; Mental Health, Child

Further Readings American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: Author. Fonargy, P., Cottrell, D., Phillips, J., Bevington, D., Glaser, D., & Allison, E. (2015). What works for whom? A Critical review of treatments for children and adolescents (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Global Burden of Disease Pediatrics Collaboration. (2016). Global and national burden of diseases and injuries among children and adolescents between 1990

and 2013: Findings from the global burden of disease 2013 Study. JAMA Pediatrics, 170(3), 267–287. Rey, J. M. (Ed.). (2015). IACAPAP e-textbook of child and adolescent mental health. Geneva, Switzerland: International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions. Retrieved from http://iacapap.org/iacapap-textbook-of-child-andadolescent-mental-health Thapar, A., Pine, D. S., Leckman, J. F., Scott, S., Snowling, M. J., & Taylor, E. A. (Eds.). (2015). Rutter’s child and adolescent psychiatry (6th ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley. World Health Organisation. (2016). International statistical classification of diseases and related health problems (10th ed.). Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Retrieved from http://apps.who.int/classifications/ icd10/browse/2016/en

Childhood Nostalgia The term nostalgia was coined by a doctor, Johannes Hofer, in a medical dissertation from 1688, to define a recurrent ailment of Swiss mercenaries, who were afflicted with a pathological longing for their native mountainscapes and homely fare as they were stationed abroad. While medical discourse thus defined nostalgia as a pathological fixation on a place that one was forced to leave behind, the Romantic poets reinvented nostalgia by transferring it from a medical to an aesthetic context, redefining it as an elegiac desire for the child one once was. Rather than a longing for a particular type of place, it now became a desire for a particular time. Moreover, nostalgic longing was divested of its pathological connotations, as the Romantics linked the nostalgic project to reconnect to the child one once was to poetic genius, construing the child as a born poetic genius, fully apprehensive of the wonders of the natural world, its perceptions, and emotions not yet dulled by habituation and oversaturation. Instead of progress, maturation is now understood as deterioration. Accordingly, the best one can do is to try and recuperate childhood susceptibility as much as one possibly can, an endeavor in which poets were thought to excel. This entry provides an overview of the changes childhood nostalgia has undergone since the Romantics invented the concept in the late 18th century.

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The Romantic Era The Romantics defined childhood as an immaterial, ephemeral frame of mind that one can only imperfectly and momentarily recover as adults in likewise immaterial, mental sensations. In the course of time, however, childhood nostalgia was increasingly commoditized. The wondrous innocence of the juvenile frame of mind was reified in specific artifacts, most notably toys. As toys were embedded within specific practices of gift-giving, they also enabled the adults who dispensed these gifts to children to share in the child’s joy of playing with the gift, offering them the occasional opportunity to escape from the daily grind of duty and labor back into a magic world of play and entertainment which they are supposed to have left behind. Thus, childhood nostalgia acquired an ever denser material dimension that is some­ what at odds with the Romantic paradigm it sprang from.

Childhood Nostalgia Under Consumerism The nostalgic cultures of toys, media, and giftgiving have undergone substantial changes in the course of the 20th century. First, electronic and digital media transformed the recollection of childhood from an esoteric into an exoteric social practice by creating a vast range of platforms for the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children’s toys and media products that is quite unprecedented. Increasingly, childhood nostalgia feeds off the tangible memorabilia of one’s youth, and the potential of the new digital media to satisfy this hunger is practically limitless. Radio and TV programs, movies, and pop songs have become newly available through online facilities such as YouTube, while countless Web forums and online communities recycle collectibles from the past, whatever their original medium may have been. While childhood nostalgia initially emerged as the rather exclusive preoccupation of an artistic elite, which subsequently became embedded within practices of gift-giving that were only accessible to the upper and middle classes, it finally fell within anyone’s reach in the second half of the 20th century, where affluent Western societies are concerned.

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Childhood nostalgia did not only change in scale, however, but also in kind. For a long time, wealthy adults could enjoy a vicarious incidental indulgence in the wonders of childhood by giving the toys, games, and media that they once had or wanted to have to children, thus reliving their former pleasure by watching their children play or playing along with them. However, the culture of gift-giving changed from the 1960s onward, as children were directly targeted by marketing strategies promoting novel toys, games, and media that did not have much in common anymore with the playthings their parents used to enjoy. The much-discussed generation gap that opened up in the 1960s was also, and perhaps primarily, a consumer generation gap. Children and adolescents increasingly played with toys, enjoyed games, listened to music, and purchased clothes with which their parents were completely unfamiliar and were even meant to dislike. However, the first consumer gap generation refused to let go of their youthful entertainments and toys once they had reached adulthood, and went on collecting and enjoying them anyway, and this time for themselves only, without the excuse of gift-giving to children. The pop music that put their parents off when they were teenagers still remained a part of their adult lives, and the times when pop concerts were only attended by teens and tweens are long gone. Pop festivals have become multigenerational events. This remarkable shift is indicative of the extent to which the relations between the generations have changed. With the proliferation of youth cultures from the 1960s onward, the epithet adult ceased to be an honorific one. The ideal was now to remain Forever Young, as Bob Dylan keenly realized as the voice of the newer generations. The result of the changing relationship between the generations is that toys, games, and affiliated media products can be marketed through at least two successive cycles for both first-time and second-time consumers. Thus, childhood nostalgia has become endemic in the 21st century. Elisabeth Wesseling See also Childhood; Digital Media; Intergenerational Relations; Material Culture, Children’s; Toys

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Further Readings Austin, L. M. (2003). Children of childhood: Nostalgia and the romantic legacy. Studies in Romanticism, 42, 75–98. doi:10.2307/25601604 Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. New York, NY: Basic Books. Buckingham, D., Bragg, S., & Kehily, M. J. (Eds.). (2014). Youth cultures in the age of global media. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Cross, G. (2004). The cute and the cool: Wondrous innocence and modern American children’s culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP. Goldstein, J., Buckingham, D., & Brougère, G. (Eds.). (2004). Toys, games, and media. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. Jenkins, H. (1998). Introduction: Childhood innocence and other modern myths. In H. Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader (pp. 1–37). New York: New York UP. Wesseling, E. (Ed.). (2017). Reinventing childhood nostalgia in contemporary convergence culture. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis.

Childhood Poverty Childhood poverty can be defined simply as when children receive insufficient material resources, such as food, shelter, clothing, and access to services, for surviving and thriving during the first two decades of life. The measures used tend to vary by context. One 2017 article published in Economics Letters found that globally, 19.5% of the world’s children are estimated to experience the most extreme forms of poverty. Children are also disproportionately affected by poverty, with one out of every two people living in extreme poverty around the world under 18 years old. In highincome countries and using different measures, children are still more likely to be poor than the population as a whole. In the United States, a quarter of the population is children but a third of those living in poverty are children. Poverty has a profound impact on children’s life chances and well-being and is, therefore, a violation of children’s rights and an assault on dignity, equity, and human flourishing. Yet, behind this relatively straightforward definition and stark figures are concealed a multitude of contested debates.

This  entry examines how childhood poverty is conceptualised and measured; why there is a specific focus on childhood poverty; the effects of poverty for children’s lives, well-being, and life chances; how the causes of childhood poverty are understood in the academic literature; and how responses to childhood poverty are constructed in policy discourses.

Concepts and Measurement Poverty is often conceptualised in monetary or multidimensional terms, in relation to absolute or relative standards. Absolute or extreme poverty is typically expressed as households living below a poverty line, such as the World Bank’s threshold of living on less than US$1.90 a day or some other estimation of ‘basic needs’. Measures of relative poverty also rely on a monetary poverty line, but this is drawn in comparison with what is considered the average for the specific country or context. For instance, households in the United Kingdom that receive less than 60% of median income, adjusted for household composition, are frequently referred to as ‘poor’. The concept of relative poverty, whilst not measuring inequality, does recognise that ‘usual’ living standards differ by context and that consequently the situation of an individual must be judged in relation to others in their own society. Poverty measures have value in making the scale of the problem visible, working out who is most affected, enabling the measurement of change over time (i.e., whether the numbers of people living in poverty increasing or decreasing) and linking this to social or policy change, and serving as a useful tool for advocacy. However, such measures raise other questions, including who decides on how much is enough on which to live, whether poverty can be defined purely in monetary terms, and lastly, the relevance and accuracy of measures of household income to assess childhood poverty. Whilst income is undoubtedly crucial, there are other material deprivations that might affect children more directly than monetary poverty, such as access to water, health services, schools, and transport. Household-based income poverty measures assume an equal sharing of resources within the household, yet these may be allocated differently, between adults and children, between males and

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females, and so on. For example, families facing economic constraints may be forced to choose which children attend school or the order in which family members eat, for example, prioritising those with heavy manual work and/or according to gender and age-related norms. Highly influential in conceptualising relative poverty was the sociologist Peter Townsend, who linked multiple deprivations (e.g., nutrition, food, education, and health) with the human rights framework to include within the definition of poverty, aspects such as exclusion from participation in everyday life and activities normal for the surrounding society, such as holding or attending ceremonies for rites of passage or attending activity clubs. Poverty is here understood as a denial of choices and opportunities, which leads to social exclusion due to insufficient income. Recognition of the need to move beyond a focus solely on income has led to the conceptualisation of poverty as multidimensional, including access to basic services and schooling as well as housing conditions within poverty measures. A multidimensional approach has formed the basis of measures such as the UN Human Development Index which ranks countries on ‘progress’ in the dimensions of health (e.g., life expectancy), education (e.g., expected years of schooling for children), material living standards (e.g., gross national income per capita), and the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which uses the same three dimensions, but with a broader range of indicators. Proponents argue that such indices can serve to question national policy priorities, such as why countries with the same GNI per capita have different human development outcomes. Critics contend that such indices do not capture inequality within countries, so progress is achieved by capturing ‘low-hanging fruit’ rather than reaching the most marginalised social groups. In response, Goal 1 of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals commits states to ‘end poverty “in all its forms” everywhere’ with the principle of ‘leave no one behind’, meaning that the Goal will not be achieved unless it is achieved for everyone. A further critique is that such indices do not account for global political economy, such as the imposition of neoliberal economic policies on countries in the Global South by international financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF and

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instead are used to castigate national governments for insufficient ‘progress’. Alternatively, instead of framing poverty as a condition (i.e., living in poverty) or a state of being (i.e., being poor), another approach has been to conceptualise and understand processes of impoverishment. Impoverishment as a relational process by which someone is, or becomes, poor. Thinking about impoverishment as a relational process enables a move beyond labels or categories or a focus on measurement. It is relational in the sense that historical, global, and social processes, including colonialism and the spread of capitalism have led to some groups in a certain part of the word enriching themselves materially and politically at the expense of others. Impoverishment is also experienced relationally. The lives of impoverished children are constructed in opposition to normative ideals of childhood and found to be lacking and impoverished children are often excluded from taking part in social life.

Why Childhood Poverty? Children are often invisible in poverty figures, obscured by a focus on the family or household. For instance, it was only in 2013 that the World Bank started to disaggregate poverty data by age. Yet, as noted earlier in this entry, children are disproportionately affected by poverty and this is a consistent finding across low-, middle-, and highincome countries and using different research methodologies. Children tend to be born into younger or less established households with less material resources. Children incur additional costs to the household and in many contexts are not able to earn an income, although children may contribute through other means, such as caring for younger siblings so freeing up adults for waged employment. Within income poverty measures, typically an allowance (equivalisation) is made to account for the extra needs children bring to households, therefore, for the same absolute level of income a parent with children would be poorer than an adult without children. The concept of childhood poverty is often used synonymously with child poverty, yet the former is typically employed in childhood studies, in line with the move away from a focus on the individual developmental trajectories of the child, to

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conceptualising childhood as both socially constructed and a permanent feature of the social structure. Child poverty is more commonly used within social and public policy. Poverty affects all age groups, yet within childhood studies, particular emphasis is placed on understanding how children’s marginal position in society shapes the manifestation and experience of childhood ­poverty. Children are often in positions of dependency on adults and have lower social status, less power and access to resources, and there is also an  equal distribution of resources between ­generations. One can, therefore, consider poverty as ‘generationed’.

Consequences of Childhood Poverty Research studies across the globe have well-documented the profound and often long-lasting effects of poverty on children’s lives and well-being. Poor children are less likely to survive in the early years of life; tend to have worse physical and mental health; experience negative impacts on physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development due to factors such as undernutrition; and do less well at school. Longitudinal studies have shown that those who experience poverty in childhood have poorer health in adulthood and are more likely to die earlier, as well as having less economic and social opportunities. Poverty also increases risks of other forms of harms. Children may enter hazardous forms of work to support families or pay for schoolingrelated costs. Poor girls are more likely to marry young because families may not be able to provide for their needs or seek to guarantee their future economic security. Although children of all backgrounds may experience violence, poor children are at greater risk of some forms of physical and emotional violence due to the stress on the household, unsafe living environments (e.g., gangrelated violence), and underresourced schools and public services. Poverty can, therefore, be understood as a form of structural violence as in this case, poor children experience greater harm than their less disadvantaged peers. Some children are at greater risk of experiencing poverty than others. Typically, those children who are more likely to be poor include children

from marginalised racial, linguistic, or other social groups, such as Dalits in India; disabled children or those in institutional care or living on the streets; and whilst this differs by contexts, girls are often at greater risk, owing to wider gender norms which shape the intra-household allocation of resources and can privilege boys. Children living in female-headed households are often more vulnerable to experiencing poverty, given that women are typically in lower-, paid employment, face gender discrimination in the labour market, and have to balance care labour in the home with waged work. This has been referred to as the ‘feminisation of poverty’. An intersectional approach helps examine the way in which children’s lives are shaped not only by their location in the generational order but also by class, and how this intersects with social stratification along other dimensions, such as gender and race. Qualitative research with children has documented the lived realities of poverty for children’s lives. Across contexts, children broadly highlight similar themes, stressing not only material deprivation but also the impact of poverty on social relations and feeling stigmatised at school and in the community. A seven-country study focusing on the lives of adults and children living in poverty in China, India, Norway, Pakistan, South Korea, Uganda, and the United Kingdom found that feelings of shame and being shamed were at the heart of everyday experiences of poverty. Striking similarities were found across contexts, such as children not inviting friends home, not asking parents for things which they knew they could not afford, and being bullied at school. Processes of shaming lead to shame becoming internalised and shape children’s sense of self and actions which may lead to further disadvantage, such as discontinuing at school. This can be understood as symbolic violence. Children also discuss the important ways in which they work to support their families and whilst this can cause physical harm or present difficulties in combining work and school, they are also stress how work is a source of pride and a way of learning skills for the future, as well as being essential for family survival. Furthermore, research on how poverty is ‘generationed’ has highlighted the increased pressure on impoverished children to extend contributions

Childhood Poverty

to social reproduction (the everyday practices by which societies are maintained over time) by processes of globalisation, such as changes in the global economy (e.g., demand for cash crops) and the so-called ‘poverty reduction strategies’, accompanied by market liberalisation policies and the cutting of public expenditure, have in many contexts increased families’ impoverishment and the need for children’s paid and unpaid labour.

Causes of Poverty and Policy Responses Understandings of the causes of poverty and how these then are translated into policy responses tend to fall along a spectrum from those who emphasise individual behaviour, especially of parents, to those who highlight structural factors. Policies aimed at addressing childhood poverty are also underpinned by constructions of children and childhood. The former stance views poverty as an individual failing, connected to the concept of ‘cultures of poverty’ namely that people remain poor because of their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours, such as having low aspirations, being ‘work shy’, preferring to live on benefits, or by abusing drugs or alcohol. Powerful discourses exist, such as the ‘deserving poor’ the ones who work hard, trying to get by, in contrast with the ‘undeserving’ poor—those who rely on benefits or welfare. Whilst children are very often seen as ‘innocent’ and so deserving, their parents may not be. And since it is often argued that parents have the greatest responsibility to provide for their children’s welfare, it follows that children can fall into the undeserving category. The alternative perspective is to see children as a ‘public’, rather than a ‘private good’, and therefore one where rights principles demand some level of societal responsibility for children’s welfare. Poverty is also viewed as being transmitted intergenerationally as children suffer from the poor decisions of parents and in time come to adopt similar attitudes and behaviours, so remaining poor. The pathologising of impoverished people often reflects and permeates media and popular discourse, such as ‘poverty porn’ programmes like the United Kingdom television programme

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Benefits Street which focused on the lives of welfare recipients in Birmingham and focused on the lack of motivation of residents to seek employment and their criminal activities. Within such approaches, children are constructed as inherently vulnerable and in need of saving in order to secure happy and healthy development. This has roots in historical ‘child saving’ movements, emerging in Europe and the United States in the 19th century which displayed paternalistic, classed, racialised, and colonial concerns with deviance from Western liberal, bourgeois normative constructions of childhood, which was seen to lead to future criminal activity. As a result, poor families are subject to a greater degree of surveillance and paternalist control. In the United States, for example, families who receive child welfare are 4 times more likely to have children removed for alleged child maltreatment, which is a particular concern given that this does not address the root causes of stress on the household and inability to provide for children’s needs. Similarly, cash transfer schemes in the Global South are often made conditional on families ensuring children go to school or attend health check-ups, suggesting a lack of trust and that families do not have children’s best interests at heart and can reinforce stigmatisation of poor families. Others focus on the economic, social, and political structural factors which impoverish people such as lack of economic opportunities or jobs with decent wages and conditions, insufficient social protection and lack of access to quality services, including health and education. A relational and generational approach is needed as whilst not all impoverished children will experience poverty in adulthood, poverty in childhood undermines opportunities and both increases the risk of poverty later in the life course and the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Locating poverty at the intersection of the structural and relational means understanding how the processes through which poverty impacts on children’s lives and may be generationed reside largely outside of the control of children and families. For example, poor families may not be able to afford the costs of health care or experience living conditions which worsen health. If a parent becomes injured working in unsafe conditions, despite held high aspirations to go to university and train to become a

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doctor, a child may leave school to go to work to support the family and so have fewer qualifications and thus earn less in adulthood. Rather than modifying individual behaviour or raising aspirations, a relational and structural approach attends to the root causes of the unequal distribution of resources in society and so call for reform of systems of taxation to increase redistribution and greater investment in public services for both children and families. Addressing childhood poverty rests therefore not only on the moral case for societies to support and protect children but on the instrumental imperative to use childhood as an entry point for policy to address life course and intergenerational poverty. An alternative approach, which to some extent is a hybrid of the positions previously outlined, constructs children as future human capital, possessing knowledge, skills, and personal characteristics, which can be developed and harnessed for future economic productivity and so contribute to poverty reduction via national economic growth. The formation of human capital is central to neoliberal economics and circulates through international development discourses deployed by organisations such as the World Bank. On the one hand, this approach leads to a focus on children, in particular, early childhood given the emphasis on the importance of the early years for children’s development, and also gives scope for more comprehensive multisectoral policies for children, covering health, education, child protection, and often also social protection. On the other, human capital approaches are problematic as children are constructed as objects of development, as adults in the making, valued for future economic contributions, rather than considerations of children’s rights and social justice. It also constructs children as passive, rather than examining the ways in which children negotiate and contest processes of impoverishment in their daily lives. Such approaches have roots in colonial projects of civilising and educating the colonialised and so children (thereby the nation) are constructed as a deficit or stigmatised as ‘other’ with formal schooling presented as the panacea for a whole range of problems, including poverty. Moreover, approaches founded on boosting human capital can be argued to reinforce and reproduce the same global economic system predicated on an

unequal distribution of material resources and opportunities that is at the root of poverty, rather than being truly transformative and envisaging a more just world for all. Kirrily Pells See also Children and Social Policy; Human Capital, Child as; Intersectionality; Structural Violence; Vulnerability of Children; Well-Being, Children’s; Young Lives Study

Further Readings Abebe, T. (2007). Changing livelihoods, changing childhoods: Patterns of children’s work in rural Southern Ethiopia. Children’s Geographies, 5(1–2), 77–93. doi:10.1080/14733280601108205 Balagopalan, S. (2014). Inhabiting “Childhood”: Children, labor, and schooling in postcolonial India. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Boyden, J., & Bourdillon, M. (Eds.). (2012). Childhood poverty: Multidisciplinary approaches. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hopkins, L., & Sriprakash, A. (Eds.). (2015). The ‘Poor Child’: The cultural politics of education, development and childhood. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Lister, R. (2004). Poverty: Key concepts. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Minujin, A., & Nandy, S. (Eds.). (2012). Global child poverty and well-being: Measurement, concepts, policy and action. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Morrow, V., & Pells, K. (2012). Integrating children’s human rights and child poverty debates: Examples from young lives in Ethiopia and India. Sociology, 46(5), 906–920. Newhouse, D., Pablo, S. B., & Martin, E. (2017). New global estimates of child poverty and their sensitivity to alternative equivalence scales. Economics Letters, 157(C), 125–128. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2017.06.007 Penn, H. (2005). Unequal childhoods: Young children’s lives in poor countries. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203465349 Ridge, T. (2004). Child poverty and social exclusion: From a child’s perspective. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Walker, R. (2014). The shame of poverty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Childhood Publics

Childhood Publics This entry introduces the term ‘childhood publics’. Publics describe a cultural and political phenomenon involving the assembly of people around matters of common care and concern. The concept provides a way of bringing experiences of childhood closer to political imaginaries and public life. This entry begins with a short history of publics. This entry further explores children’s exclusion from publics, publics as situational configurations of strangers, childhood idioms, and the future of publics and children’s potential place in them.

A Short History of Publics The theory and practice of gathering around issues of common concern is as old as democracy itself, even if its forms and objects of concern have evolved in response to contemporary realities. Jürgen Habermas, amongst others, has argued that the public sphere, a product of European Enlightenment discourses, emerged in the separation between church and state, the invention of capitalist markets, and the emergence of civil society. Publics were the outcome of a particular cultural and historical moment in time that was characterised by a rise of a merchant class in the 17th and 18th centuries that sought to influence the economic activities of emerging nation-states. The move away from cottage industries and the development of work outside the home, the invention of the printing press and the subsequent creation of readers (of newspaper, novels, and pamphlets) also played a role in the development of a public sphere. A public was the gathering of mostly men in public, private, and hybrid meetings places (agoras, homes, bars, cafes, and salons), spaces that were relatively unencumbered by state power and private commercial interests, to discuss and deliberate issues of common concern. Publics are brought together through practices of communication, in particular, those practices that involved public address. Historically, such discursive gatherings happened face-to-face; argumentation and debate took place in order that assembled members could reach reasoned consensus and action on the issues being considered.

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As societies grew bigger, these publics became virtualised, becoming more imagined or represented. Contemporary practices of communication create publics through a diverse range of media with audio, visual, and textual texts created and received by a range of audiences. Importantly, these discursive practices are not dyadic, between writers-readers or speakers-listeners, the interlocutors are many and varied, and different media circulate amongst them.

The Exclusion of Children as Publics From antiquity public life excluded those who were not free (slaves, women, foreigners, and children) and many of those exclusion persisted into the emergence of publics in contemporary British, German, and French societies (Habermas’s original cultural focus) and other post-industrialised nations, as feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser and others have shown. Taking the case of children, a group yet to be fully addressed by the literature on publics, the rise of schooling and the decline in children’s work meant that children became increasingly excluded from labour negotiations, despite historical examples of working children striking for example. The continued age-restrictions on normative understandings of citizenship also meant that children, like women before them, continue to be excluded from opportunities to influence their countries, and this exclusion persists. These are exclusions that are of course amplified where childhoods intersect with categories and experiences of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and caste. The focus on discursive practices, especially the heavy role of speech in public address, has meant that children are further excluded and/or disadvantaged from traditional public practices. Public address often involves particular and learned forms of expression, like argumentation, turn-taking, and listening, practices that most children, as well as uninitiated adults, are not well versed in. Yet children do encounter and experience public life, belong to and traverse various publics, and often engage in public address. They are also readily present in the meetings places which host public address as well as creating their own meeting places.

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Publics as Situational Configurations of Strangers More recent theoretical developments on what publics ‘do’ offer fresh opportunities for thinking about the intersections between childhood and public life. The literature on publics has returned to a definition of the political as a practical art involving moral and ethical questions and not just formal politics alone. Here, public life has been conceptualised by geographer Clive Barnett as ‘a family of practices of sharing with others’, and there has been a renewed interest in everyday life, people’s lived experiences, and thinking about what matters to people, what moves and propels them to connect to the wider world. There has also been a broadening in our understanding about who participates in publics, as well as how they participate. The idea that publics are emergent and situational configurations of strangers who are brought together through things that matter to them has been helpful because it allows us to position previously unimaginable persons, the poor, the immigrant, the woman, the child, in the category of the stranger therefore extending possible membership of a public. Furthermore, the original notion of a reading public has of course been critically extended with the advent of new technologies. As well as reading publics, it is possible to consider viewing, producing, and curating publics alike, publics in which children and young people are often active participants. Such media have diversified forms of address and textual circulation allowing us to imagine contemporary publics as far more multimodal then their yesteryear counterparts and providing children and young people new avenues for engagement. What might the forms of expression and modes of address sound and feel like in childhood publics?

Childhood Idioms The idea of idioms of childhood publics is useful when it comes to considering the ways in which matters of common concern are expressed within childhood publics. Historical records from the women’s movement show that, in the absence of formal political incorporation through voting,

women employed a range of ‘idioms’ (domesticity, motherhood, and supporting roles) to access public life and public arenas. Contemporary research of children and young people’s everyday lives provides us with a number of examples of idioms of childhood publics. Banter, charm, daydreaming, hanging out, humour, insouciance, noise, ‘pester power’, play, stickers, and trading cards are all examples of ways in which children demand attention from each other as well as from their adult interlocutors. As cultural theorist Michael Warner has argued, publics come into being and stay alive through mutual and distributed practices of paying attention. These idioms are far from trivial, though might easily be dismissed as such. They point towards the very embodied ways in which childhood publics might be imagined with many of those idioms invoking an image of bodies in motion, commotion, and reverie. Caring for others, both human and nonhuman, so often associated with children and forming part of children’s lived experiences, can also be considered an idiom of childhood publics. Importantly, these idioms are not to be dismissed as functioning for purely developmental or educational purposes and outcomes. They are modes of expression and public address that culturally mediate children’s participation in larger collectives, which may or may not, like any other publics, emerge into a communicative network and action. In line with shifts away from old forms of citizen engagement and with new forms of political interest emerging, idioms of childhood publics show where civic culture in childhood lies. Banter, charm, and humour become resources to be deployed in negotiations with authority; caring for animals, nature, friends, parents, and/or siblings demonstrates a habit of responding to vulnerability and practices of solidarity; play, insouciance, and daydreaming become resources for everyday childhoods as well as political imaginaries.

The Future of Publics ‘Publics’ is a controversial term which overlaps with other cultural and political entities and terminologies such as audiences, collectives, crowds, and commons. Contemporary uses of the term have been productive in considering the assembly,

Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising

configuration and movement of strangers around issues of common concern. Theories of publics still need to further embrace temporality and its lived experiences, including experiences in childhood and the relationship between childhood and public life. The plurality of children’s experiences is also a key consideration both within and across nationstates. The Euro-centrality of the concept of publics, with its heavy focus on the spoken word as a key medium of communication, does raise questions about its cross-cultural relevance, including when it comes to children. As anthropologists have argued convincingly, personhood is assigned, acquired, and lived in many different ways, with different temporalities and rhythms. Embracing more multimodal and sensory approaches to communication will be especially important for exploring, recognising, and constructing childhood publics across time and place. Sevasti-Melissa Nolas See also Apps (Mobile Applications); Children as Photographers; Children’s Work; iPad; YouTube

Further Readings Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56–80. doi:10.2307/466240 Goodnight, G. T. (1992). Habermas, the public sphere, and controversy. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 4(3), 243–255. doi:10.1093/ ijpor/4.3.243 Habermas, J. (1984). The public sphere: An encyclopaedia article. New German Critique, 3(Autumn), 49–55. Livingstone, S. (2005). On the relation between audiences and publics. In Livingstone, S. (Ed.). Audiences and publics: When cultural engagement matters for the public sphere. Changing media – changing Europe series (Vol. 2., pp. 17–41). Bristol, UK: Intellect Books. doi:10.1177/01634437070290050806 Nolas, S. M. (2015). Children’s participation, childhood publics and social change. Children & Society, 29(2), 157–167. doi:10.1111/chso.12108 Nolas, S. M., Aruldoss, V., & Varvantakis, C. (2018). Learning to listen: Exploring the idioms of childhood. Sociological Research Online. Online First. doi:10.1177/1360780418811972

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Sen, A. (2005). The argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian history, Culture and identity. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. New York, NY: Zone Books.

Childhood Representations Media and Advertising

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Representations of childhood in the media and advertising play a central role in the ways members of society perceive and understand this period in the life cycle. On the one hand, in general, these representations reflect the ways people think of childhood as distinguished from adulthood, the place it occupies in their social reality, aspirations projected for children growing up, and institutional responsibilities. On the other hand, media narratives are constructed selectively. Thus, they convey media producers’ views about proper childhoods, deviations from them, and how children should be treated. At the same time that such representations re-present selected ideologies and values, they also serve to shape social perceptions, some of which may well be stereotypical and/or misguided. Given the media’s ubiquity, these representations impact the ways people relate to children in the real world, as well as what, presumably, children are perceived to need from families, social institutions, and policymakers. This dynamic of representations as both re-presenting reality but at the same time also socially constructing views of childhood is the rationale for the need to critically examine them, and what they tell people, young and old, about themselves and others. An integrated review of studies of contemporary representations of childhood in media productions including advertising in various countries around the world reveals recurring themes. This entry explores the most central of them, paying close attention to a few of the major themes shared around the world, followed by an analysis of the dynamic process through which culturally specific meanings are engendered in localized contexts. Notably, some of the central themes addressed in this entry are complementary, some are contradictory, and others are freestanding.

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White Childhoods One dominant theme in representation of childhood, across all dimensions of screen media, including advertising, is the prevalent modern romantic media construction of childhood as an innocent period of life, one characterized, centrally, by play, friendships, and creative curiosity. Notably, these images of the happy child are nearly exclusively White, in their racial color and culture. In other words, the ideal childhood constructed by media producers, distributed worldwide, has been normalized as White and middle class. Advertising, in particular, in its attempt to appeal to audiences with purchase capacity, concentrated their efforts on children growing up happily, in White, heterosexual, middle-class, suburban families: The blue-eyed, sweet baby in the diaper commercial; the blonde girls’ imaginary tea party in a cereal commercial; the freckle-faced boy covered with mud, returning from a football game in a laundry detergent commercial. Beyond their specific references, these and many similar images share a very specific North American lifestyle that is constructed and communicated via the media as the desired, normal, and happy childhood. Notably, significant changes in the racial composition of children (and adults) in media content have become more common as western demographics shifted significantly and people of color gained, gradually, more social and cultural capital, as well as purchasing power. Complementary, childhood representations, too, have become more inclusive, introducing children of color within the middle-class framework and way of life that dominates programming for children and families. In addition, the development of all Black programming—particularly in situation comedies as well as in advertisements aimed at Black ­families—contributed to mainstreaming images of blackness as another version of middle-class childhood. Some children’s programming has pursued the route of mixed ethnic groups, with one member of each ethnicity or race standing for the entire category, being integrated within what is perceived to be a melting pot of normal childhood. These changes notwithstanding, content analyses of screen content available to children around the world continue to present a consistent picture: Over two thirds of characters are Caucasians.

Viewed globally, then, programs produced in North America and distributed worldwide suggest that the commonly experienced childhood is a middle-class, Western, White one which in turn serves as a measuring stick against which all other childhood deviations are measured or compared.

Gendered Childhoods These racialized childhoods presented in the media are confounded by another major social category— the gendered nature of childhoods. Media and advertising content construct childhoods as largely segregated by gender. Therefore, the message communicated suggests that boys and girls live in very different worlds in terms of their interests, environments, personality traits, behaviors, aspirations, and even the clothes they wear, and the toys and games they play. Boys’ childhoods seem to be dominated by outdoor adventures, sports and technology, physical and aggressive behavior, competitiveness, and sexual lust. Girls’ childhoods focus on beautification, emotionality, personal relationships, pursuit of romance, and care giving activities focused on the private sphere. Conventions of audio–visual language employed by media producers to depict such segregation are clear and distinct: Boys’ worlds are signified by quick pace of events, fast editing that demarcates action, strong sounds, and music. In contrast, girls’ worlds are dominated by pink, purple, and pastel colors; dreamy feeling created by use of soft camera filters, slower pace, and soft music. In parallel, advertising emanating from the toy industries present what is presumed, too, to be gender-appropriate worlds: Vehicles, weapons, action figures, construction activities for boys; dolls, arts and crafts, fashion accessories, and household play sets for girls. These gender-segregated worlds closely align with traditional perceptions of gender roles and stereotypes, confirmed by the accumulated research on gender portrayals in children’s television. It suggests that boys and girls inhabit two different worlds, have very different cultural interests and tastes, and have very little in common. This is an instructive example of the dynamic interplay between reality and its representations: By presenting gender-separate children’s worlds, these culturally slanted constructions socialize

Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising

new cohorts of children to a reality that neglects shared aspects of boys’ and girls’ lives, such as similarities of their emotional, social, and physical existence and needs. Thus, the findings regarding these constructions of gendered childhoods suggest that one should consider seriously that childhood representations employed in the  media and advertising serve as a cultural mechanism that feeds into a clear female and ­ male gender binary that perpetuates gender inequalities—both in their portrayals in media ­ culture and in real life.

Independent Childhoods Childhoods are often portrayed in the media as an insulated period, highly disconnected from all other social institutions and phases of life. Thus, the children portrayed seem to live in a world of their own, devoid of family structure or adult authority who take responsibility for them. This is particularly noticeable in popular culture when children (as well as animated animals or imaginary creatures representing children) fend for themselves, go on adventures to fight evil and save the world on their own, embark on journeys and explore the world independently. The absence of adults in many portrayals of childhoods occurs in many cases where parents are often deceased or just absent. This absence, coined by researchers as home alone (following the hit movie by this name), reinforces a perception of childhood as a period of independence. This is particularly the case of portrayal of boys, as noted earlier. Overall, these children are portrayed as sophisticated consumers, possessing advanced technological skills, who sustain themselves socially and economically, manipulate adults they encounter, and have no need for caring, responsible parents. Indeed, adults are often portrayed as representing evil forces or as superfluous in this world. When parents do appear in these framings, they are often presented as inadequate and irrational; as the target of humor, who are tricked and manipulated by their children. Such narratives are more frequently found in advertising, playing with the incongruity of parent–child role reversals as an attention-getter. The portrayal of childhood as a separate, independent period of life may be assuming a role in

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the reinvention of contemporary constructions of childhood, which may be attributed to the mediatization of society. The concept of mediatization refers to the changing nature of the world according to which media and the institutions that produce and operate them are claimed to impact all aspects and dimensions of personal and social lives. Accordingly, portrayals of children, situated in a world of their own in media narratives, may be understood to be a response to cultural changes that extend beyond the psychological explanation of children’s desire to be left alone. Indeed, representations of childhood characterized by technological sophistication that facilitates independence and social power may be giving voice to cultural anxieties over the pervasiveness of media technologies in children’s lives and the potential reversal of social hierarchies: Children are presented as the all-knowing experts, parents as novices and unsophisticated, and childhood as a period of unlimited freedom.

Vulnerable Childhoods A host of media narratives present various forms of childhoods that are vulnerable to societal and natural forces. They include images of marginalized children in crisis circumstances following violent conflicts and wars, natural disasters, or domestic situations (e.g., children who are victims of sexual abuse, abduction, or neglect; homeless children), and children with various forms of disabilities. The most visible framework of the vulnerable childhoods of crisis is in news coverage, documentaries, and public campaigns of social change organizations. Interestingly, the vulnerable childhood of crisis theme is often located in the Global South, involves childhoods of color, and portrays disempowered children as victims of violence, famine, dislocation, and almost always in circumstances over which they have no control. In contrast to the independent White children narrative, discussed previously, they are portrayed as passive actors, who lack voice or power to affect their own destiny. In many ways, these childhood representations have come to symbolize the brutality of the human condition and arouse sympathy and compassion toward societies in crisis. However, juxtaposed to the idealized White childhood, images of suffering children become associated with othering

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(i.e., projection that such a person is not one of us) childhoods of color. Furthermore, they become a subject for Western voyeurism. For example, fundraising campaigns to benefit children in dire circumstances often frame such childhoods as calling for redemption and salvation by the Western world. Such a narrative reaffirms the binary benefactor–beneficiary perspective, and parallelism of the west versus the rest. One manifestation of vulnerability is related to narratives and representations of sexual abuse, child pornography, and pedophilia. This may be due to the view that sexual innocence is one of the key assumptions of most societies’ perceptions and taboos regarding childhood. Often, stories of sexual abuse are recounted by adult survivors who share memories of the trauma as well as recovery. Here, childhood trauma is intertwined with its lasting existence in the lived experiences in adulthood. Sexual threats have gained more attention recently given the pervasiveness of online engagement and its perceived potential risks such as lurking pedophiles and free access to child pornography, as well as the discourses around the sexualization of childhood perpetuated through popular culture. Such concerns receive heavy media coverage reflecting deep societal anxiety about children’s safety. The gendered and class-related nature of many of the narratives related to threats to sexual innocence are revealed in portrayals in which White suburban girls are commonly vulnerable victims and lower-class males the predatory perpetrators. Similarly, this is evident in selective media coverage of child abductions, as opposed to very limited attention devoted to human trafficking of women, for example. Highlighting the former in news stories reinforces the general finding that media representations of vulnerable childhoods tend to focus on crimes inflicted on innocent children in safe environments by strangers when in reality most sexual and abduction crimes against children are actually committed by someone from the family’s own social circle. This media frame of stranger danger and the tendency of some outlets to sensationalize the sexual assaults associated with abductions serve to entrench the perception of the happy idealized and safe childhood, infiltrated by outside evil. Another manifestation of childhood vulnerability theme relates to children with disabilities who

are largely absent from the media, except in cases of depictions of injured children in crisis circumstances. Where these rare incidences can be found—for example, in images of deaf children, children with autism, or children with mobility challenges—they are often portrayed from a deficit model which emphasizes what children with disabilities cannot do rather than from a cultural perspective that acknowledges what they can and do accomplish. For example, the rich culture of deaf children proficient in American Sign Language is shadowed by depictions of marginalization and alienation. Autism, too, is mostly described as a problem, often expressed as a parental tragedy or casts in medicalized terms, rather than simply and directly as part of a spectrum of human differences. While some exceptions to the vulnerable-deficit model of children with disabilities are emerging recently in the media, the more common approach is symbolic annihilation, a concept used to refer to the absence and/or marginalization of certain human categories from the social world portrayed in mainstream media. In contrast, a focus on malicious children seemingly stands in opposition to manifestations of vulnerable childhood; as portrayed in news stories of child delinquency, murderous street children, and child soldiers. Yet, such outliers can also be perceived as vulnerable children who are products of horrible circumstances and social abnormalities. Thus, even such extraordinary representations of childhoods serve to reconfirm the norm of the ideal childhood, where children are protected, safe, innocent, and well meaning.

Exceptional Childhoods At the other end of the continuum of childhood vulnerability lie representations of exceptional childhoods of stardom: gifted stars and celebrities. Prodigy news stories appear in a host of areas, with stories of child performers, Olympic winners, genius scientists, and technological wizards, as well as entrepreneurs who start a business/ campaign/social movement. These childhoods are often depicted as a mixture of talent, privilege, and admiration. But childhood celebrities often face significant challenges, such as lack of privacy, public scrutiny and stigmatization, and a deep

Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising

longing to experience a normal childhood that is often portrayed as stolen away. Here, too, the exceptional childhood measures itself in relationship to a definition of normalcy, strongly rooted in the White, Western framing as a protected time for education, play, accompanied by peers, and cast in suburban lifestyle. The child prodigy’s emotional, social, and physical well-being seems to be sacrificed for the benefit of the family, the audiences, or the nation as a whole. Exceptional childhood portrayals also confuse the distinction between childhood and adulthood as the talents and abilities of the extraordinary child challenge the authority and power of the adults in their society, and serve as a warning sign for the dangers of transgressing from the constructed idealized childhood.

Contextualized Childhoods Evidence from around the world suggests that countries differ greatly in their construction of what children need and what their rights should be. Accordingly, representations of childhood in locally produced media content around the world are often flavored by the unique cultural context of the country in which they appear and its historical and contemporary views of the child and childhood more generally. Several case studies inform us about the interplay between representations and the reality in which they are ground. For example, a study in Taiwan explored the proliferation of images of the child computer user and concluded that rather than an expression of the cultural notion that information and communication technologies empower children, these representations framed children as the future of the nation. As such, they were portrayed as dependent on schooling and government policies that, supposedly, safeguard the proper use of technologies and healthy cognitive development into productive adult citizens. The safety of home use under lack of appropriate parental guidance is challenged as childhood is constructed as the nation’s responsibility, rather than of private citizens. Australian news broadcasts, as another local example, present foster care negatively, as sites of conflict for children from broken families. These reports are intertwined with historical justifications for removing indigenous children from their

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families and placing them in foster care with White families, as part of a discourse of the national mission of civilizing indigenous communities. Analysis of representations of children in television news in Albania introduced the concept of adult gaze to describe the perspective employed by the media in stories about children that cater to an adult audience and focus on an adult figure. Such a demonstration of power hierarchies is not unique to Albania. Childhood representations in the news are almost always emerging from an adult point of view and perspective and directed at adult audience. In so doing, the childhoods portrayed inform audiences more about adults’ understandings and framing of childhoods, than on children’s own lived experiences of childhoods. However, what was found to be unique in the Albanian case was that the study also demonstrated that politicians played the most frequent role in news stories about children, using such stories for political gain in an environment where television stations’ owners have strong political affiliations. Films created around the world provide a particularly rich ground for exploring the relationships between diverse cultures and their representations of childhoods. Many of these films challenge the hegemonic Western perspective dominant in content traveling the world, most notably, via Hollywood films as well as Disney movies and programs. Films that present childhoods of displacement and migration, labor and life in the margins, as well as the impact of globalization on childhoods around the world offer multiple perspectives on what it means to be a child in the 21st century. Given that childhood is a fluid, socially constructed category, deeply embedded in its cultural context, and constantly shifting, its representations are shaped in multiple ways. While the Western notions of childhood dominant popular culture circulating around the world, there are growing influences of multiple cultures contributing to the ever-changing ways media and advertising negotiate these concepts with reality. Dafna Lemish See also Child Prodigy; Childhood Studies; Different Childhoods; Disabilities; Gender; Parenting; Race and Childhood in U.S. Context; Racial Formation; Racism; Vulnerability of Children

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Further Readings Drotner, K. (2013). The co-construction of media and childhood. In D. Lemish (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook on children, adolescents and media (pp. 15–22). New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203366981.ch1 Duvall, S. S., & Moscowitz, L. (2016). Snatched: Child abductions in U.S. news media. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Götz, M., & Lemish, D. (Eds.). (2012). Sexy girls, heroes and funny losers: Gender representations in children´s TV around the world. New York, NY: Peter Lang. doi:10.5771/1615-634x-2013-3-424 Kapur, J. (2004). Coining for capital: Movies, marketing, and the transformation of childhood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kaziaj, E. (2016). “The adult gaze”: Exploring the representation of children in television news in Albania. Journal of Children and Media, 10(4), 426–442. doi:10.1080/17482798.2016.1203805 Kehily, M. J., & Maybin, J. (2011). A window on children’s lives? The process and problematics of representing children in audio visual case study. Journal of Children and Media, 5(3), 267–283. doi:10 .1080/17482798.2011.584376 Lemish, D. (2010). Screening gender on children’s television: The views of producers around the world. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9780203855409 O’Connor, J. (2011). From Jackie Coogan to Michael Jackson: What child stars can tell us about ideologies of childhood. Journal of Children and Media, 5(3), 284–297. doi:10.1080/17482798.2011.584378 Olson, D. (Ed.) (2017). The child in world cinema. Lexington, KY. doi:10.1080/14616690701412855 Olson, D., & Rampaul, G. (2013). Representations of childhood in the media. In D. Lemish (Ed.), The Routledge international handbook on children, adolescents and media (pp. 23–30). New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203366981.ch2 Ponte, C. (2007). Mapping news on children in the mainstream press. European Societies, 9(5), 735–754. Riggs, D. W., King, D., Delfabbro, P. H., & Augoustinos, M. (2009). “Children out of place”: Representations of foster care in the Australian news media. Journal of Children and Media, 3(3), 234–248. doi:10.1080/ 17482790902999918 Shaw, P., & Tan, Y. (2015). Constructing digital childhoods in Taiwanese children’s newspapers. New Media & Society, 17(11), 1867–1885. doi:10.1177/ 1461444814535193

Childhood Studies Childhood studies is a multidisciplinary academic field focused on childhood and the everyday lives of children. It emerged in the late 1980s in response to a series of critiques about the way that prior research had either ignored children or treated them solely as objects of adult socialisation and biological development. Also known as ‘child studies’, ‘children studies’, or the ‘social studies of childhood’, it is a thriving and dynamic area of scholarship across Europe, the Americas, the Antipodes, and some parts of Asia and Africa. There are degree programmes, dedicated research centres, research networks, and specialist academic journals devoted to the sociocultural study of childhood. This entry provides a brief history of the field and outlines some of the core theoretical assumptions of what has been called the ‘new paradigm’ in the study of childhood. The concluding section takes stock of how these foundational claims have been elaborated over the past three decades as well as more recent critiques and reevaluations.

A Fledgling Field Broadly speaking, up until the 1980s, children were treated in academic study in three dominant ways. The child studies movement, which began in Britain at the turn of the 20th century, understood children as presocial beings embarking on a naturally occurring course of maturation towards adulthood. This was premised on developmental psychology and the idea that children develop through a series of predictable and universal stages. Much of this research focused on mapping ‘normal’ developmental pathways and the study of children who did not meet key milestones. A second approach focused on processes of socialisation, or the ways that younger members of a society learn about and internalise the adult world. In this approach, children were considered presocial until values, cultures, and appropriate behaviours were transmitted to them by adults. Third, many areas of study simply did not include children in their remit. Studies of the family, for example, treated it as a unified whole and did not distinguish the specific and differentiated

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experiences of children. In some disciplines, such as political science or political philosophy, children were almost entirely invisible. Their lives were not considered relevant to the issues being studied, such as formal structures of governance, policymaking, or political action. Starting in the 1960s, these approaches to the study of children and childhood came under increasing scrutiny. The publication of Centuries of Childhood by French historian Philippe Ariès marked a critical turning point. Ariès made the bold argument that childhood was a modern invention that did not exist before the 15th century in Europe. Contemporary views of adults and children as completely different beings who, as a result, require distinct clothes, games, spaces, and activities were not held in the medieval period. Instead, children were simply considered to be small adults. Even though Ariès’s specific claims have been contested, his general argument has had widespread and enduring influence within childhood studies. A result of his work was the understanding that ideas about who children should be, and what they should do, change because of historical, political, economic, and social forces. This idea, that childhood is a social construct, won widespread approval within the fledgling field of childhood studies. Many scholars turned towards studying variations in global childhoods as well as how representations in images, multiple media sources, and policy both reflected and contributed to changing ideas about children and childhood. By the 1990s, a growing group of scholars were developing critiques of traditional scholarship. They argued that it operated on the assumption that children are in some way deficit. In comparison, adults were represented as the gold standard of what it means to be human and ‘society’ was treated as synonymous with ‘adult society’. Pioneers of childhood studies, including critical psychologists such as Erica Burman, pointed out that these traditional approaches assumed that children were relatively passive, not shaped by their own activity but by naturally occurring processes or adult actions. As a result, traditional scholarship tended to be future oriented, focusing on who children would become when they grew up and what sorts of interventions would best ensure this trajectory.

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The phrase ‘children are beings not becomings’, coined by Danish sociologist Jens Qvortrup in opposition to these approaches, encapsulates the growing demand to research and analyse children’s present-day lives and their contributions to the societies they live in. It also captures the moral and political imperative of many strands of childhood studies—namely, a commitment to recognising children’s common humanity. Critiques of traditional approaches to studying children were also directed towards research methods. Research about children’s experiences and perspectives typically relied on proxy reports; for instance, parents were asked to describe their child’s feelings and attitudes. Childhood studies pioneers questioned what might be missing from these accounts. Experimental research was criticised on moral grounds for treating children in much the same way as animals in ethological research. Critics also asserted that experimental activities were often nonsensical and the language used misleading for child subjects. Rather than attributing children’s inaccurate or confused responses to limitations in their development, scholars argued that the problem lies in the research methods themselves. They established that if tasks and language were clarified, made meaningful, or children were researched in contexts they were familiar with, child research subjects demonstrated greater capabilities. Furthermore, laboratory research assumed that children’s understandings and developmental pathways would be the same regardless of the contexts and locations in which they occurred. This contradicted growing understanding of the importance of context for understanding human behaviour, that expectations about children shape their development and that such expectations differ greatly across time and place.

A New Paradigm By the late 1980s, these innovative ideas began to coalesce into a distinct field of study and research agenda. Pioneers of childhood studies were inspired by feminist endeavours to ensure that women were visible in all academic disciplines and to introduce gender as a key category of analysis. They also took note of efforts to form an academic field of study that took women’s

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experiences and social position as its distinct focus. Indeed, these trailblazing childhood studies researchers suggested that the same thing needed to happen with children and childhood. In their estimation, scholarship focused on children and childhood was critical to improving knowledge about the social world. Knowledge would continue to be very partial if the experiences, perspectives, and contributions of children were not taken into account. There was also a political impetus for this scholarship—namely, a desire to improve the status and well-being of children. Policies, programmes, and social practices based on incomplete, inaccurate, or culturally inappropriate ideas about childhood were susceptible to failure. Even worse, such ill-informed interventions often made children’s lives worse or created new problems for children. Key here was the assertion that the ways childhood is constructed and experienced are the consequence of power relations. Researchers began to collect empirical evidence demonstrating that in most societies children were treated as secondclass citizens and were subordinated by adults. They developed conceptual arguments demonstrating that children could be considered a minoritised or marginalised social group. Because of this, most aspects of children’s lives were seen to be dictated by adults, who were imbued with the social authority to impose norms, policies, and actions regardless of children’s perspectives and experiences of them. Researchers also demonstrated that although different societies had contrasting ideas about childhood, particular constructions began to dominate globally. Depictions of childhood as a time of happy innocence, but also an essentially vulnerable phase of life that required special protections as well as freedom from ‘adult’ obligations, originated in capitalist countries in the Global North and were often imposed on children in the Global South. Extensive research demonstrated that these ideas not only contradicted many locally held views, but their imposition ended up denigrating local practices, often targeting them for replacement with deleterious consequences. In 1990, building on this momentum, anthropologist Alison James and sociologist Alan Prout published the edited volume Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues

in the Sociological Study of Childhood. In the book, they offer a six point ‘emergent paradigm’ that crystallised an agenda for the sociocultural study of childhood: •• Childhood is a social construction differing in time and place. However, it is present as a sociocultural institution in many, if not all, societies. •• Childhoods are differentiated by social cleavages such as gender, class, and ‘race’. Likewise, childhood is a way that the social world is categorised and thus deserving of analytic attention. •• The present-day lives of children are worthy of study in and of themselves. •• Children are social actors, involved in worldmaking activity. •• Ethnography is well suited to understanding children’s active participation in their lives from their own perspectives and ‘voices’. •• Childhood research does not just report on the world. The questions asked, interpretive frameworks used, and findings published affect everyday constructions of childhood.

Although this ‘new paradigm’ has been elaborated and contested, it remains an influential rallying call for childhood scholars across academic disciplines well into the second decade of the 21st century. This was not the only attempt to map out a research agenda about childhood, however. Scholars from other social science and humanities disciplines, such as children’s literature and history, were engaged in similar work but tackling questions specific to their disciplinary field. How does a researcher find children in the historical archives? How does adult power inflect the authority of the author in children’s books? Often, developments within specific disciplines engaged with the ‘new paradigm’ proposed by Prout and James. Children’s geographies is one such example, with geographers offering insights into the spatiality of childhood. Constructions of childhood shape spaces, and spaces in turn shape adult–child relations and subjectivities. A focus on spatial connections also added conceptual resources for understanding the globalisation of childhood and its interrelationship with local variations.

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Developments and Debates in Childhood Studies The final section of this entry considers some of the key themes and questions that continue to occupy childhood studies scholars and thereby shape this developing field. The Uniqueness of Childhood Studies

Given childhood studies’ emergence from a critique of traditional approaches to research about children, it is perhaps unsurprising that researchers have a relatively unified perspective about what the field is not, but some fundamental differences persist in formulating what childhood studies is. For some, childhood studies is primarily about generating a new image or construction of ‘the child’. These researchers have investigated and sought to demonstrate how children’s capabilities have been fundamentally underestimated in a multitude of settings. Drawing on research in global contexts, they have shown, for example, how children act as language and cultural brokers for adult family members, have the capacity to provide care for kin or in paid labour, and can make competent decisions about complex medical conditions. Others argue that the uniqueness of the field does not lie in reconstructing the child but in continually raising question about the child: Who is considered a child? How does this change across contexts? What are the impacts of being considered a child or adult? Much of this literature builds on the concept of ‘generationing’, introduced by Finnish sociologist Leena Alanen. Generationing refers to the material, social, and political processes that make childhood, assign and interpellate certain people into children and others into adults, and thereby shape their possibilities for action. Although the ‘new paradigm’ noted the researcher’s role in reconstructing childhood, Prout and James insisted on the need to maintain analytic distance from the interests of the subjects of study (e.g., children). In contrast, a third group within childhood studies sees its role as a critical and active force in challenging the subordinate status of children and working for their wellbeing, much in the way that early women’s studies understood its task. In the terms of Berry Mayall,

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a British sociologist, this is a call to develop a childhood studies for children, rather than just about children. Notwithstanding these divergent ways of understanding the unique tasks of childhood studies, most scholars would agree that although there is a vibrant and expanding field of childhood studies, its broader impact has been limited. Developmental psychology continues to dominate in policy, professional practice, and parenting advice. Many parent disciplines remain unaware of the empirical and conceptual advances within the subdisciplines that make up childhood studies. These parent disciplines continue to be marked by an absence of children or to view children under the twin concepts of development and socialisation. Why this is the case and how to engage people beyond childhood studies is an ongoing question for many researchers. Childhood or Childhoods?

A related debate has to do with a question anticipated by the ‘new paradigm’. Does the critical and analytic force of childhood studies lie in a focus on commonality or diversity within childhood? Some scholars argue that it is crucial to understand the way children are viewed and treated simply because they are children. Paying attention to children as a social group helps researchers attend to the specific ways in which generation works to shape people’s opportunities, status, and subjectivities. It provides insights into the ways in which children may be marginalised, regulated, or made invisible in social and economic policy and practices. By corollary, it provides a means to advocate for social justice for children. These scholars are concerned that attending only to difference undermines efforts to address the structural injustices facing children. Corporal punishment is an example. Children are one of the only, if not the only, groups in most societies that can be legally subjected to physical chastisement. This relates to the ways that children are often understood as wild or antisocial, requiring the firm regulation of an adult, in combination with the limited political power children have to combat such violence. In understanding corporal punishment as a children’s issue, rather than an individual

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predicament, the possibility for redress is increased. This approach has yielded a large body of empirical research into adult–child power relations and the structural position of childhood. Another group of scholars argue that focusing on commonalities across childhood is problematic. It can end up masking diversities in children’s lives, including the ways that class, gender, ‘race’, ability, and global location make for very different and unequal childhoods. These scholars stress that without attending to ‘multiple childhoods’, one experience of childhood can come to be viewed as representative of all, making those children whose lives do not conform appear ‘deviant’ or ‘at risk’. They also stress that achieving social justice for children will fail. For example, projects designed to achieve children’s participation rights are often done in schools or formal governance settings. These projects tend to expect competences associated with articulate, middle-class children. By emphasising one form of participation, they can make other ways that children are involved in their communities, such as work or political activism, appear to be aberrant. Intersectional approaches have been productively taken up by these scholars to examine topics including gendered childhoods; the categorisation, segregation, and exploitation of colonial child subjects; and the impact of dislocation and loss of traditional livelihoods on children’s lives. There has been a growing acknowledgement that both approaches have important contributions to make to understandings of children and childhood, as well as limitations. Several efforts have been made to move beyond the dichotomised debate of either commonality or difference. For instance, anthropologist Sarada Balagopalan draws on postcolonial theory to argue that there is an untapped productivity of research documenting the lives of children in the Global South. Beyond providing empirical examples of diversity, it can aid in reconceptualising childhood, thereby shedding light on ‘commonalities’ of children’s lives and how these understandings can contribute to progressive social change. Moving Beyond the Nature–Culture Binary

Social constructionism has been the dominant, and generally accepted, way of thinking about

childhood throughout most of the field’s history. Scholars have begun to argue that although early efforts to denaturalise childhood by focusing on its sociocultural character were very important, this simply reversed priorities. Although developmental psychology was critiqued for prioritising the biological, childhood studies prioritised the social and cultural acts of interpretation and meaning making involved in constructing childhoods. The problem is that this assumes that culture and nature are entirely separate spheres, governed by entirely different, even incommensurate, processes. The consequence is that children’s embodied experiences, including bodily and maturational changes over time, have been ignored in much of childhood studies. Drawing on actor–network theory, critical realism, or new materialisms, research has attempted to bring the body and temporality into childhood studies. Similar points are being raised about the limits of social constructionism as an explanatory force. By reducing childhood to the realm of interpretation and meaning making, it becomes more difficult to understand why particular constructions of childhood persist or change or why new constructions develop. Scholars have indicated the importance of understanding the way that, for example, changes in the political economy, new technologies, and environmental devastation fundamentally reconstitute childhood on a global scale. Rethinking the Autonomous Child

There has been a widespread view that the subject of childhood studies research is the child, children, and childhood with a particular interest in children’s perspectives and social action. This has produced a plethora of empirical research documenting children’s ‘voices’, especially through ethnographic and participatory methodologies. Researchers have argued that a focus on children and children’s cultures is insufficient because it abstracts them from the communities and social relations that shape their lives. With a rising attention to relationality in much social theory and the emphasis on generation as a relational social category, there have been calls to include adults in childhood studies research and attend to the ways that adults, young people, and

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infants are also affected by generationing. Others have argued that the focus on seeking children’s voices, in contrast to listening to proxies about their lives, is based on the faulty assumption that there is an authentic voice to be found if only the proper methods are used. Yet voices are always shaped by the temporal–spatial context. A second, and related, critique has to do with agency. Much childhood research has been at pains to demonstrate not only children’s autonomous action but their agency, or ability to make a difference to assumptions, practices, and institutions. Scholars have suggested that children’s agency has become both a beginning and end, with researchers going out and looking for agency, finding it, and then valorising children’s agency. In response to this tautology, proposals have been made to attend to both the possibilities and constraints on agency, including global capitalist restructuring, conflict, and the social, political, and economic ramifications of being positioned as a child. Others are widening the scope of agency by considering the ways in which bodies, spaces, and things can be agential. The difficult, challenging, or negative sides of agency are highlighted in contrast to a purely celebratory view. Others are retheorising agency as a relation rather than individual possession, for example. Despite these points, most critics do not reject a focus on children’s perspectives and action so much as call for nuance and contextualisation of their social practices.

For some, this is a laudable goal but one that has not been fully achieved in practice due to institutional, funding, and communication barriers. For others, interdisciplinarity has a role to play in knowledge production, but its value and success is based on solid disciplinary knowledge and methods. For still others, there is a reluctance to associate with the field of childhood studies due to a perception that interdisciplinarity simply leads to confusion and a less rigorous knowledge base. These questions are further complicated by the geopolitics of knowledge production. Financial and epistemological recognition of research on childhood tends to be granted to academics working in richer countries or higher status institutions, and most childhood journals and conferences are based in countries of the Global North. Researchers working in the Global South have the experience that their important contributions and insights receive little acknowledgement or have limited impact on the overall field. There is a significant concern that this has led to a preponderance of Eurocentric conceptual frames in childhood studies. In combination with the dominance of English in the world of academic publication and distribution, this has restricted cross-national communication, so disciplinary or interdisciplinary insights in one region may not necessarily transfer to others. These five themes highlight pressing questions for the future of the study of children and childhood, one that pioneers and emerging scholars of childhood studies are well placed to deliberate.

A Multidisciplinary Field

As the name suggests, childhood studies is not linked to any particular discipline. Certainly, the many conferences and dedicated academic journals attest that childhood studies has been a fruitful meeting place for scholars from different backgrounds, allowing them to cross disciplinary boundaries in their efforts to investigate and analyse complex social phenomenon. From these encounters, some truly interdisciplinary research has been born. Overall, however, it is less clear whether childhood studies has managed to transcend disciplinary boundaries or create a truly integrated field. In part, this may be the consequence of mixed or ambivalent perspectives on interdisciplinarity.

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Rachel Rosen See also Autonomy; Child Study; Childhood; Nature Versus Culture; Nature Versus Nurture; Sociology of Childhood

Further Readings Aitken, S., Lund, R., & Kjøholt, A. (2008). Global childhoods: Globalization, development and young people. London, UK: Routledge. Alanen, L. (2001). Explorations in generational analysis. In L. Alanen & B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualizing child–adult relations (pp. 11–22). London, UK: RoutledgeFalmer. Aries, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood. London, UK: Pimlico.

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Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Imoh, A. T. W. D., Bourdillon, M., & Meichsner, S. (Eds.). (2019). Global childhoods beyond the northsouth divide. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge, UK: Polity. James, A., & Prout, A. (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London, UK: Falmer Press. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology for childhood: Thinking from children’s lives. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood: Towards the interdisciplinary study of children. Abingdon, UK: RoutledgeFalmer. Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W., & Honig, M. S. (Eds.). (2011). The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Spyrou, S., Rosen, R., & Cook, D. T. (Eds.). (2018). Reimagining childhood studies. London, UK: Bloomsbury Press. Wells, K. (2009). Childhood in a global perspective. London, UK: Polity.

Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives From reading the key texts of the new sociology of childhoods—for example, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood by key thinkers in the childhood studies field Allison James and Alan Prout—one learns that children and childhoods are theorised, constructed, and reconstructed in different discourses. Taking this notion as its starting premise, this entry on childhoods, time, and temporality addresses how childhoods are a temporal encounter and how the notion of childhood relates to the idea of time. It becomes evident that childhoods are, for human beings, temporal encounters that are vibrant, changing, and shifting. This is well-documented by the work of historians of childhoods as well as philosophers of childhoods. At the same time as understandings of the temporality of childhood—and its disappearance (see,

for instance, the work of Neil Postman)—are developed, there are every day constructed ‘new’ childhoods. Notions of time and temporality in these ‘new’ and ‘emerging’ childhoods are important to consider through multiple theoretical threads and frameworks. This entry discusses philosophical concepts of time and development in relation to children and childhoods and in particular draws on the thinking of key philosopher’s engagement with time and their use in contemporary scholarship.

Philosophy, Childhood, and Time This section is a philosophical genesis of thinking about and with time in relation to children and childhoods. Although children and childhoods have been researched extensively in both the social sciences and humanities over the past 30 years, limited attention has been paid to the connectedness of time and temporality to these concepts. This discussion of time and temporality begins by introducing some of the key thinkers whose work is relevant to this entry. René Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher, separated out and privileged the rational from the emotional in development (as well as the objective from the subjective). The notion of linear time and development was born as part of the Cartesian (Descartian) contributions to both philosophy and, ultimately, to views of childhood and adulthood, women (emotional), and men (logical, rational), and the hierarchies of what modernity ended up suggesting was more or less important in different individuals’ development. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was the Genevan and French philosopher who provided a further rationalisation of the linearity of development through his attention to the child’s growth towards reason and the conditions required to produce the mature, adult mind. Rousseau amplified the discriminatory nature of this pathway, characterising the development of the main character of his thesis, the feminine girl Sophie as acceptably emotional, dependent, and nurturing, with less emphasis on the necessity of logical and rational educational outcomes compared with the masculine boy protagonist Emile and his journey to citizenship. Although time units encourage measurement and the quantification of time, and perhaps linear

Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives

movement and a conception of progress over time, they also mask the cultural and spatial construction of beings. Distended and disordered time allows one to question the Cartesian logic and modern philosophy that rests on the notion of linear development as well as progress. One of the most important and relevant threads about time and temporality in childhood engages with new historicism or cultural history represented by the French poststructural philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984). The work of Foucault relates to the poststructural theories of power, truth, language, governmentality, and technologies of the self. His theoretical work historicises the notion of a subject—for example, child or childhood—and provides the much-needed genealogy and the relevant method. Through the extension of Foucault’s work, language, thought, discourse, and speech are of critical importance in understanding and analysing the ways that subjectivities are formed through cultural norms in these perpetual childhoods. Time becomes one of these cultural forms. Time shapes identity formation: Children engage actively in their development and suppress the notion of guided development in time. This involves a development and understanding of the self in relation to a number of external elements. Foucault’s work on subjective selves and the selfconstitution of subjects suggests that children’s identity is formed and constituted by socially constructed ideologies and norms, in which all human and nonhuman entities exist and to which all individuals are expected to conform. Other relevant philosophical threads involve Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), renowned French philosophers and thinkers, and in Guattari’s case also psychoanalyst. Their work introduced the notion of the ‘rhizome’, which focused on contingency, nonlinearity, the unpredictable, as well as uncertain movements and a micropolitics of political action. Rhizomatic temporality and time means for children and childhoods nonlinear approaches to the ways in which children and childhoods are constructed and reconstructed. Another important thinker relevant to this section is French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930– 2004). Through his work, one can perceive the notion of time as having the qualities of an

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‘aporia’. An aporia, according to Derrida, speaks to the problem of inquiring into the nature and experience of time; that is, one can never arrive at an understanding of time. Time appears as ever present and ever passing, and yet the apparent laws of time require that one cannot escape from time in order to observe these very qualities. The inquiry into time is an aporia entirely because it is an inquiry based on an inquiry that already is being undertaken; the inquirer’s passage may be barred, may be impossible, but it is nevertheless a way to go, an enduring question. Such inquiry into the aporia of time has an educational and pedagogical thrust; it explores temporal contexts and devices through which childhoods are considered to be more or less pedagogical.

Time and Childhoods Time in childhoods is associated with temporalities and growth, with readings of a child and childhoods, and thinking divergently with theories and philosophies about how childhoods are conceptualised and dissected, distinguished, and ‘timed’. From the perspective of ‘time’, rethinking the notion of time in children’s development could be a very powerful disruptive and therefore liberating and exhilarating experience for children and their childhoods, as the different theoretical and philosophical frameworks in this entry point out. What happens when the established way of thinking of or about childhood and development is challenged? What one often finds in the research literature is that traditional ways of thinking of time and temporalities of childhoods perpetuate inequalities, homogenise children, and essentialise childhoods. Prout, in his significant work Future of Childhood, presented an important argument. In futurefocused educational discourses, time has become a commodity, a defining factor in the way adults perceive and seek to affect children’s being and becoming. Time is perceived as structured and measurable, as a ‘duration’ and as an ‘occasion’ during which an action, process, or condition exists and continues or is extinguished. Time is a series of linear instances, the flow of which can be (re)routed through human intervention and to predetermined outcomes. The temporal dimensions of childhood dictate multiple, and often contradictory, philosophical, and practical

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enactments. Childhood time is not something orderly and controllable, stretched from any fixed point into the future, but something that is being lost, mismanaged, manipulated, and endangered by encroaching global and market forces. In a New Zealand–United States collaboration, childhood studies and early childhood scholars Marek Tesar, Sandy Farquhar, Andrew Gibbons, Casey Myers, and Marianne Bloch have explored how such contradictory notions of time have been employed in numerous methodologies and philosophies aimed at benefitting children and their childhoods. Children’s being and becoming, habits of mind, relationships with the world, and preferred and also not-so-preferred models of behaviour are entrenched as values that early years educators, researchers, and teachers accept, recognise, and respect to varying degrees. Ironically, despite their best intentions, the application of philosophies and methodologies have sometimes missed the mark and left the child behind and subjected children to measurements, treatments, and pedagogical experiments. Yet these philosophies and methodologies are often justified as being right on time. There is, then, an enduring task to question the ways in which time and temporalities of early childhood are understood and to engage with a growing interest in understanding the philosophies and methodologies that shape and place childhood as childhood (and adulthood as adulthood). These philosophies and methodologies demand more and more clearly that they be heard and elevated in light of the contemporary political and policy environment. Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, one of the key U.S. methodologists of educational and cultural discourses, argues that alternative readings of development emerge through using philosophy and theory as a method. This approach allows a merging of analyses of childhood, philosophical concepts of time and temporality, place, space, and often popular culture, to outline how the development of a child may be resisted through the notion of ‘time and temporality’. The premise of working with notions of ‘childhood, time, and temporality’ is that the time of childhood is thought of as both a ‘duration’ and an ‘occasion’: Childhood is measured, tweaked, adjusted, and timed. The idea of working with the temporality of ‘timing childhoods’ can mimic the notion of a ticking clock. Childhoods thus operate within binaries of a Cartesian heritage, where adults, and policies about

children and their childhoods, are concerned with notions of measurement, ‘the next step’ and ‘correct’ and ‘right’ timing—established ways of thinking of and about childhood and development, arguing that they perpetuate inequalities, homogenise children, and essentialise childhoods. This approach thinks divergently with theories and philosophies about how childhoods are conceptualised and dissected, distinguished, and timed. As such, this approach draws on new epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political groundings. A number of thinkers think with time and temporality to create a ‘crack’ in the narrative of children’s development through the notions of time and temporality. As U.S. psychologist Joel Bennett argues in his book Time and Intimacy, ‘Time is a framework we impose that captures succession, change or evolution. Temporality is the actual activity or process of succession and change’ (p. 157). Distinguished childhood studies scholars Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien argue that when one talks with adults about their childhoods, the concepts of mobility and time become pertinent in their memory-infused narratives. Time runs slowly in the mornings and in school and disappears quickly in the afternoons. Time is a continuity divided, paradoxically, into three parts: (1) the past, which is a continuity but no longer exists; (2) the future, which is a continuity but does not yet exist; and (3) the present, the now, the moment, which exists but is discrete. And for children, it is adults who invented and use the notion of the clock in daily events, institutions and children’s lives, to segregate, measure, and define their childhoods. This illustrates the paradox of the measure and the measured: Time may be said to measure motion, or motion may be said to measure time. Marxist French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) argued that with ‘modernity time has vanished from social space’ and that in an era that values the economic and political uses of space, time becomes an outcast, a segregated category, exploited and moulded, and fragmented as a means for monetary profit. Time has become, in Lefebvre’s terms, subordinated, detached (but not separated) from space. The problem of development for any children is that from a rational humanist perspective of any kind of timing and space, adults cannot imagine children being without supervision, without protection and, most important, without a future—and without growing up.

Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives

The denial of the temporality of childhood is challenging and dangerous and perpetuates the notion that to become a child, one must act like one as a self-evident truth. In theatre studies, the clothes people wear are indicative of the person they become. So if adults put on the clothes of their own children, they become their children’s age again. Therefore, not only language but also clothes are carriers of cultures and subjectivities. Children are dressed in particular clothes of particular time periods to reflect temporalities and, often, also ideologies. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), the well-known French thinker and psychotherapist, argued that the ego develops in relation to the other through the process of time. The other in this sense is an adult in the child–adult binary. Through his theory, childhoods are captured in a perpetual motion of time. Childhood happens once in everyone’s life, and adults tend to look back at it, see it, feel it, think about it, and dream it as ‘other’, as a distant notion that no longer belongs to them. Walter Benjamin (1892–1949), the famous German philosopher and thinker, argues that in the past, the time of recurring rituals and festivals enabled a connectedness, perseverance, and endurance of the past in the present, whereas in industrial times this has been replaced by a temporality of the clock and calendar, measurement, and calculation. It therefore represents work with a human resource and is replaced by an empty, meaningless succession of homogeneous instances and events. In discourses of histories of time, childhood can thus be perceived as a protracted temporality. As such, time is captured in one particular ideological space and place, which determines how childhoods are developed and how children should grow up.

Time and Temporality Through the Popular Culture Lens Thinking with popular culture is yet another way to consider time and temporality in relation to children and childhoods. J. M. Barrie, in his seminal story of Peter Pan, argues that temporality is always involved in the event of childhood and children— and childhood is ‘the beginning of the end’. This notion of child development does not go in stages or follow maturation, critical or sensitive periods, as traditional child development theories state.

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Instead, Peter Pan portrays the notion of the denial of development, of that one child who resists the temptation to grow up. In other words, adults fail to solve or understand what they have coined as ‘childhood’, and the temporalities of this event remain mysterious. Yet a lot of resources are invested in the act of ‘mapping’, ‘analysing’, ‘diagnosing’, and subsequently ‘correcting’ the child’s mind and childhoods rather than focusing on time and temporality. In what has been described as a timeless tale wherein ‘childhood dreams live forever’, the story of Peter Pan can be read as a subversive action to undermine the normalcy of child development. Peter Pan is a child in time. His development is intertwined with the concept of time and conveys a sense of concreteness and definiteness. Yet time encapsulates difficulties and dangers. Nonetheless, in Peter Pan’s life in Neverland, time is not an entity that is encountered or a concept perceived in isolation. ‘Time and temporality’ is a formula to designate time in its circumstances: ‘time and eternity’, ‘time and motion’, ‘time and duration’, and ‘time and space’; these forms of time formulate Peter Pan and his gang’s environment. For children, walking on the island, working, and thinking with ideas of time and motion places time in the context of productive change, practices, and cracks in established ways of thinking about child development. There are multiple ways of conceptualising notions of time and temporality in relation to children and childhoods. Philosophical thought in the humanities and social sciences is important to help tease them out. Marek Tesar See also Benjamin, Walter; Children’s Time Use; Deleuze, Gilles; Lacan, Jacques; Peter Pan; Philosophy, the Child in; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Time, Concept of, in Children Time and Childhood *Author’s Note: The plural, childhoods, is used in this entry to represent the nonsingularity of childhood.

Further Readings Barrie, J. M. (2004). Peter Pan. New York, NY: Penguin. Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bennett, J. B. (2000). Time and intimacy: A new science of personal relationships. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Christensen, P. M., & O’Brien, M. E. (2002). Children in the city: Home, neighborhood, and community. London, UK: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (2000). Hospitality. Angelaki, 5(3), 3–18. doi:1108/17506180710817729 Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings (1972–1977). Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. New York, NY: Harper and Row. James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1997). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London, UK: Falmer. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Carlson, D., Tesar, M., & Anderson, K. (2015). Methodology brut: Philosophy, ecstatic thinking, and some other (unfinished) things. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(7), 612–619. doi:10.1177/1077800414555070 Koro-Ljungberg, M., Löytönen, T., & Tesar, M. (Eds.). (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and postanthropocentric. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Lacan, J. (1968). The language of the self: The function of language in psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. London, UK: Continuum. Prout, A. (2003). Future of childhood. London, UK: Routledge. Tesar, M., Farquhar, S., Gibbons, A., Myers, Y. C., & Bloch, M. (2016). Childhoods and time: Rethinking notions of temporality in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 359–366. doi:10.1177/1463949116677931

Childing Childing is a verbal form of a hypothetic verb to child that does not exist in English nor in most of modern languages. But this verb does exist in ancient Greek, as shown in Heraclitus fragment 52, which reads aion pais paizo . . . basileus paizou,

or “Time is a child childing, a childish kingdom.” What Heraclitus is saying is that childing is the action of a child that takes place in aionic time—a time inherently connected to childhood. This entry examines children’s unique relationship to time and questions whether childing has a place in contemporary institutions, including schools.

Children and Time Ancient Greeks had several words for time: aion, chronos, kairos. Chronos is the time of the clock, the numbered movements of nature according to before and after relations. It is composed of past and future, the present being a limit between them. It is also the time of science. Chronos is the same for every human and nonhuman or inhuman being. Kairos is the time of opportunity, the moment, the quality that introduces a difference in the undifferentiated movements of chronos. It is the time of rhetoric and of war. Aion is eminently durative and qualitative: the intensity of an artistic experience. It is the time of childhood. Children, in this view, do not feel time passing through chronos but they experience it in aion, in a kind of not moving, deep, and concentrated way. Aion is the time of a child and the time of play. When a child is playing, the child seems to be out of chronological time, as if time does not pass or as if the child is experiencing an everlasting present. It is the time of the eternal return. For this reason, many translators have concluded that aion is a child playing. This is not wrong as far as playing is one of the main things that children do, but this translation does not fully convey the scope of childing. In our time, words and things are different. In modern Greek, aion means century and, as in most languages, the word childing does not exist. We have in a sense invented it to help us think the relationship we have with children and childhood, especially in educational institutions. In this sense, one question might be of interested of child scholars reading this entry: What is the place, if any, for childing in our institutions?

Childing in a Contemporary Institutional Context Our social life is mainly organized by chronos, and so are our educational institutions, such as schools. Indeed, in schools, the programs,

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schedules, courses, syllabi, and nearly everything is organized under the realm of chronos. We plan, aim, and organize our educational life according to a time that expects of everyone the same things in the same amount of time. Is there any space for childing in schools nowadays? It is interesting to go back to the Greek word from which school is derived. Schole, with the meaning of free time, is a space with a different time than social time. As Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons have shown, in school, schole time has largely been lost. But in its origin, at least, time in school looks closer to aion than chronos to the extent that it is much more open to childing than today. This issue is related to another difficult question: What is childhood? Our society also usually responds to this question chronologically: a stage of life, understood as a line of consecutive, successive, and irreversible chronological movements. If we were to respond to it aionically we should answer that childhood is a form, intense, of experiencing life. We think, under chronos, that childhood is the first part of our lives that we abandon when we grow up: every adult has been a child but needs not to be anymore a child in order to be able to become an adult. In this perspective childing is limited to a stage of life. But what if we considered life as an intensity, duration, deepness of experience? Could we exercise childhood and childing as adults? Could childing be a possibility of experience not only for children but also for adults? Could the creation of the conditions for the emergence of chiding in schools be considered an educational aim? This problem takes us to what the education of childhood is about and how we consider the meaning and sense of an educational practice. In the Western tradition, so-called, education has been dominantly understood as the formation of childhood. In effect, educational policies, discourse, and practices are established so as children could become the socially desired adults, citizens, members of the ideal society that educational institutions will help to achieve. In a sense, this understanding implies an oblivion of childhood and childing. This obliviousness probably explains why our schools are so chronological and the time of childing is concentrated and minimized during the breaks. But schole and aion inhabit every school at least virtually. And if we consider childing an unforgettable dimension of life then one of

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the tasks of a teacher could be conceived as creating the conditions so that every child could experience childing in school, not only as a form of break but as a form of expressing another possibility of being in the world. Even more, every teacher could think of childing as a possibility not only for children but also for themselves to inhabit differently school. Maybe we are a little far from education as the formation of childhood and closer to a childhood of education. This happens because aion is also the time of thinking and writing. What is the time of teaching? What kind of times experiences can a teacher offer to herself and her students while teaching? In what way can teachers conceive themselves as childing beings? It is not bad to finish this exercise on childing with questions. Maybe this is all what childing it is about—namely, opening oneself to childhood, its time, its way of being in the world, or to childing itself. Walter Omar Kohan See also Children as Philosophers; Schooling; Time and Childhood; Time, Concept of, in Children

Further Readings Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense (M. Lester with Charles Stivale, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1969 as Logique du sens. Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit.) Kennedy, D. (2006). The well of being: Childhood, subjectivity, and education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Liddell, H., & Scott, R. (1966). A Greek English lexicon. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2013). In defense of the school. Leuven, Belgium: E-education, Culture & Society. Rancière, J. (1988). Ecole, production, égalité [School, production, equality]. In X. Renou (Ed.), L’école de la démocratie [School and democracy]. Paris, France: Edilig, Fondation Diderot.

Childism Childism is sometimes defined as viewing the social from the perspective of childhood. This includes taking children’s experiences and

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perspectives seriously, but it also goes beyond. In this context, viewing implies conducting objective analyses of children’s positions in society and in social theory with a view to carrying out theoretical reconstruction relating to criticism of, and claims about, social justice and recognition for children. While childism includes both a political and a scientific dimension that are interrelated but not identical. This entry offers a definition of childism, exploring its central claims and its limitations.

Childism Defined Politically, childism puts forward the radical notion that despite differences in age, body size, brain development, experience, and power, children and adults are inherently of equal worth, and children’s perspectives and experiences should thus be considered on the same footing as those of adults. Thus, the political dimension of childism may also be defined in terms of advocacy for the recognition of children and their rights. However, the concept has also been used in the opposite sense, for instance in the work of the American psychotherapist, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, to address discrimination against children, a position that is usually defined as adultism. Full recognition of children’s democratic rights involves a range of ethical and methodological challenges. John Wall has argued that the main aim is to ensure that children’s experiences and interests make a difference to how power is exercised. Only then is democracy truly representative, seen from a childist perspective. One tool that could promote that agenda would be to give everybody, regardless of age, the right to a vote, as politicians are typically more attentive and loyal to the interest of citizens with voting power. Children’s right to vote could take the form of the right to choose either to vote oneself or to let another person vote on one’s behalf. Of course, a baby cannot make such a choice, but this could be solved by giving the baby’s guardian (typical a parent) the right to vote on his/her behalf, albeit with the restriction that the moment the child wishes to vote or hand over his/her vote to another person, s/he has the right to do so. As Wall points out, this solution is not without risks and pitfalls; nevertheless, a reform of the democratic system

that is informed by childism and which also addresses the related methodological and ethical challenges and pitfalls would not only enhance children’s democratic rights but would also ensure a more radical and inclusive democracy for others who, for one reason or another, are excluded from voting.

Childism’s Central Claims Scientifically, childism’s central claim is that to understand childhood properly is to understand society differently, and therefore that insights gleaned from childhood research not only generate knowledge about children’s lives and perspectives but can potentially also shed light on human life, society and social changes more broadly, thereby also helping to revise existing theories and ensure more accurate analyses of the social, including social change. Childism challenges fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions in the humanities and social sciences, creating a basis for rethinking social theories and gaining new or deeper insights into decisive issues in contemporary society, including identifying and opposing child-discriminatory mechanisms in relation to democracy. From a social science perspective, a major goal of childism is to acknowledge childhood as a social phenomenon and to integrate critiques, generated by the new social studies of childhood (also known as the second wave of childhood studies), that target existing research and policies. These critiques regard the children–adults distinction as a false and dualistic construction; they also interrogate the practice of adultism, that is, the habit of taking the adult as the norm in all situations, and as a result, addressing children as the other, taking their position in the social order as natural and legitimating discrimination. Childism may, thus, be regarded as analogous to feminism, which has challenged the dualistic construction of women and men, thereby generating insights into discriminatory mechanisms and contributing to theoretical reconstruction and development. Thus, childism makes a common case with feminism, as well as anti-ethnocentrism, anti-sexism, and the like, in its critique that mainstream research and policy are based on White, heterosexual, adult middle-class male norms. It

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follows from this that calls for inclusion, social justice, and recognition must reject mainstream approaches and any notion of equality based on these norms, and instead embrace a differencecentered approach that seeks to restructure basic social norms as well as ontological and epistemological assumptions in everyday institutions, politics, and research. Following this line of thinking, childhood researchers have de- and reconstructed traditional models of citizenship with a view to designing more inclusive and difference-centered models.

Childism’s Background and Limitations Childism is inspired by, and owes a considerable debt to, feminist and anti-racist approaches; however, childism also adds to and reformulates these approaches as—just like mainstream approaches— they often naturalize the othering of children, for instance, in the case of the social construction of children as care receivers and adults as caregivers. Thus, the feminist ethic of care has been reconstructed from a childist perspective that deconstructs the dualistic construction of caregivers and care receivers and replaces the related dependence– independence dualism with the notion of interdependency. Likewise, other theories including Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, Niklas Luhmann’s concept of trust, and child development models in psychology, have been reconstructed based on insights from childism. Although childism has deconstructed dualistic models of children, the approach nonetheless conceptualizes children as simultaneously “the same but different” compared to adults. This idea acknowledges children’s difference, compared to adults, in terms of body size, brain development (including the absence, in healthy children, of brain degeneration), years of life experience, position in the social order, and generationally-based experiences and competencies; while simultaneously recognizing that differences between ­children—due to contextual differences, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, age, and so on may be equally—or even more—significant. Nevertheless, children’s differences compared to adults pose (and expose) certain methodological and ethical as well as theoretical and societal issues, suggesting that research from a childist perspective can

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offer unique insights. One example is that researching power relations (e.g., in participatory research practices or in society) from a childist perspective exposes the matter of age, enabling new theoretical concepts to flourish, such as the generational order, generational ordering, and generagency. Another example is that childhood exposes new dynamics and inequality fault lines, as well as hopes and fears related to social changes triggered by the global economy, environment, and new technologies. Thanks to its focus on children’s experiences and agency, childism offers us a kind of sociological microscope through which to scrutinize such changes. Hanne Warming See also Adultism; Child-Centered/Child-Led Research; Childhood Studies; Children’s Rights; Citizenship; Generationing

Further Readings Moosa-Mitha, M. (2005). A difference-centred alternative to theorization of children’s citizenship rights. Citizenship Studies, 9(4), 369–388. doi:10.1080/13621020500211354 Wall, J. (2009). Childism and the ethics of responsibility. In A. Dille & D. Pollefeyt (Eds.), Children’s voices: Children’s perspectives in ethics, theology and religious education. Leuven, Belgium: BETL, Peeters. Wall, J. (2013). Childism: The challenge of childhood to ethics and the humanities. In A. M. Duane (Ed.), The children’s table: Childhood studies and the humanities (pp. 68–84). Athens: University of Georgia Press. Warming, H. (2013). Theorizing trust—Citizenship dynamics. In Warming (Ed.), Participation, citizenship and trust in children’s lives (pp. 10–31). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137295781_2

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Art

The arts are an essential tool for helping us understand the human experience. The arts, especially storytelling and play, are universal tools for children’s meaning making. The arts enable children to understand different perspectives and experiences, generating empathy and solidarity. Anna Stetsenko argued that creativity is an integral

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aspect of the human condition, that creativity is central in every moment of knowing, becoming, and acting. For these reasons and many more, scholars have always been interested in defining and operationalizing creativity so that we might be better able to foster it, teach it, and be it. This entry starts with an introduction to the historical relationship between children and art. The entry continues with a discussion of how the distinct philosophical traditions that underlie different conceptualizations of children and art provide foundational knowledge of the multidisciplinary field. Next, the focus shifts toward children and social justice art that begins with a framework of social justice art that is situated in the tradition of critical education. Finally, empirical examples illustrate the relationship between social justice art and children, more specifically, the discussion demonstrates the implications of social justice art as an ethical, culturally relevant practice with children. This entry develops an argument and rationale for the relevance of social justice art with children, particularly in the contemporary moment of increasing social and cultural inequity and civil unrest.

A Brief History The arts and creativity have long been considered an important facet of childhood. Many folklores exist about childhood as a period of creativity and children as natural born artists. Embedded within these myths are ideas of children as innately aware and capable of tapping into a mysterious creative source, which oftentimes puts a prescient awareness on children and implies that art making is a sacred or holy act. The Romantic movement’s view of childhood as an idyllic time of innocence, wonder, play, joy, and connection to nature persists through these ideas. Since that time and through formal education, critics have blamed overly structured schooling for killing children’s naturally creative impulse. These stories contribute to the social construction of childhood as both innately and naturally different from adulthood— children are simply more creative than adults. The pervasiveness of these ideas is evident in Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that supports the idea of childhood as a universal, global phenomenon wherein all children shall be

guaranteed “the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.”

Disciplinary Perspectives Psychological studies of art and creativity have focused on identifying traits, characteristics, skills, and intelligence factors that inhibit or encourage creativity. An emerging subfield of neuroscience is exploring genetic and biological factors, or lack thereof, of creative people. Current key findings from this area illustrate the relationship between nature and nurture in fostering creativity, particularly through practice, repetition, and being challenged by new experiences and ideas. An influential scholar in this field is positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose studies on happiness led to the concept of flow, defined as a heightened state of attention, focus, and total engagement. Later, Csikszentmihalyi explored the relationship between flow and creativity. He identified creativity as a key source for meaning and found people are happiest when they are being creative “designing or discovering something new.” Scholars of human development have studied how children develop creativity and have thereby provided insights about the central role of pretend play in art and creativity. This field has focused on play, art, and creativity as an interrelated developmental process through which children coconstruct knowledge. From this perspective, the focus is on the process of art, rather than the final product. Children’s play and art making involve imagining something that does not yet exist; integrate symbolism and complex cognitive processes, such as divergent thinking; and also foster emotional awareness and intelligence, self-regulation, social skills, and empathy. Sociocultural perspectives of learning and development in the tradition of psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky emphasize the interrelated and interdependent relationship between individuals and society. This perspective conceives of child development and art-making as involving shared, public meanings and cultural artifacts as well as personal experiences and transformations. Arts education scholars have argued that children’s experiences with art provide a creative foundation for life; with others and alone,

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children can imagine other worlds through art. Elliot Eisner, along with many others in the field, argues that arts education can generate positive learning and developmental outcomes for children, particularly skills related to creativity, including analytical skills, higher level thinking, critical reflection, self-regulation, and problem-solving. Art educators and advocates like the National Endowment of the Arts (United States) have long argued for school and classroom settings that encourage children’s art and pretend play in curriculum and recess, thereby contributing to imagination, curiosity, literacy, and skill development. The U.S. educator John Dewey viewed public education as central to the democratic project of a fair and just society that depends upon a moral and engaged citizenry and had a significant impact on arts education. In Art as Experience, Dewey argued for the central role of experience as a dynamic interactive process between individuals and their environments that can be made sense of and represented through art. Dewey’s view that art can function as experience reflects a view of art as a transformational process of meaning making that can generate new insights and moral purpose. Maxine Greene’s work on the social imagination and aesthetic imagination reflect her commitment to the importance and value of art for fostering children’s capacity to imagine new possibilities for seeing the world differently— what it could be, and who the children are and might become. For Greene, all forms of art are acts of creation that are never completed, that facilitate the exploration of the full human experience and enhance the pluralities of persons as members of communities.

A Theory of Social Justice Art The arts have long been used as a tool for social change, particularly because of the central role of the imagination in the act of creating, which is about bringing into the world something that does not yet exist. Critical arts scholarship builds on educational theorist Paolo Freire’s notion of praxis and conceives of art as a cycle of action–reflection (praxis) that can enhance an individual’s understanding of themselves, others, and their sociocultural worlds and generates the tools necessary to reimagine and take action toward social justice.

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Marit Dewhurst’s text, Social Justice Art, provides a framework for engaging children in art for activist and social justice aims. Dewhurst offers a theoretical and methodological road map that includes strategies, lessons, materials, curriculum along with a warning that social justice art must be grounded in children’s lived experiences and specific sociocultural contexts. That context matters is an undergirding theme of this entry because art and social justice are rooted in experience and practices that are culturally relevant to the community in which the art is produced. Dewhurst’s framework is organized by three overlapping and interdependent activities: (1) questioning, (2) connecting, and (3) translating. Social justice art with children involves intentional design and facilitation where artists, educators, facilitators, youth workers, and mentors work alongside children to provide the tools and scaffolding necessary for children to make connections between their art and social justice, critically question existing inequities and injustices, and translate their ideas and vision into an art form.

Children and Social Justice Art This section provides examples of social justice art with children. The scholarship on social justice art merges at four thematic intersections: (1) views children as capable, active agents and meaning makers, (2) embraces the socioculturally situated nature of art making, (3) children’s art is collaborative and inherently social, and (4) is a learning process organized by critical reflection and action. In Poverty Is Two Coins: Young Children Explore Social Justice Through Reading and Art, Judith Dunkerly-Bean and colleagues exemplify the generative potential for using art, literature, and play to explore social justice with preschoolaged children. The researchers used a re/scripting framework focusing on children’s play, dialogue, and drawings that demonstrated children’s ability to navigate, negotiate, and disrupt social injustice. Their discussion of three key themes shows how children’s identities, knowledge, and actions regarding social justice are interrelated to the contexts and spaces in which they are embedded, specifically for this group of preschoolers, was the mediating role of dominant ideologies of the teachers and the school sites.

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Pretend play, storytelling, drama, and theater are all forms of art that draw upon embodied narrative processes. For young children, these art practices have been used to create socially just learning spaces that are respectful, culturally responsive, and honor children’s varied ways of meaning making. Lee Anne Bell bridges the arts and narrative for her antiracist teaching framework in Storytelling for Social Justice. Although Bell focused on middle childhood through adulthood, her framework is relevant for thinking through how stories can support critical thinking about social issues that make them more tangible and personally relevant. Reflecting a view of art and stories as cultural tools, stories and counterstorytelling can be used as a method for understanding and challenging oppression and injustice. Stories and literature with social justice themes can be read, discussed, and reinterpreted through art and performance with children to support their learning and understanding of historical and contemporary forms of oppression effect their own lives and communities. An example by Maria Hatzigiannis and colleagues in Australia used Karagiozis, a Greek children’s shadow puppet theater, to explore broad themes related to in/justice and multiculturalism in the Australian contexts with a focus on the arriving/settling experience. Karagiozis as a method involves children as playwriters and audience of a performance related to a social issue of concern where the puppeteer will often dialogue and opportunities for children to imagine, respond, and cocreate different scenarios and outcomes. They found Karagiozis supported children’s learning and social awareness through the use of humor and imagination to explore both marginal and dominant group themes and values related to multiculturalism. In “Art-Making as Social Justice in Za’atari and Calais,” Kimberly Clair found that engaging with children living refugee camps through the arts provided opportunities for community and relationship building, allowed children to process their traumatic experiences through expressive forms, and transformed their environments into a place where they felt a sense of belonging. Social justice art with children is an invitation to what Maxine Greene refers to as critical inquiry and sense making that may open “us to visions of

the possible rather than the predictable; it permits us, if we choose to give our imaginations free play, to look at things as if they could be otherwise.” From this view, children are considered active social agents and cultural producers who make meaning of themselves and the world as they actively create it. The idea that art is a tool for meaning making, world making, and social justice reflects the dynamic, socioculturally situated nature of art as both an individual and social process. Kristen P. Goessling See also Children as Competent Social Actors; Children as Photographers; Children as Political Subjects; Play, Theories of

Further Readings Bell, L. A. (2010). Storytelling for social justice. New York, NY: Routledge. Clair, K. (2017). Art-Making as social justice in Za’atari and Calais. Peace Review, 29(1), 40–47. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Delgado, M. (2018). Music, song, dance, and theatre: Broadway meets social justice youth community practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dewhurst, M. (2014). Social justice art: A framework for activist art pedagogy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Dunkerly-Bean, J., Bean, T. W., Sunday, K., & Summers, R. (2017). Poverty is two coins: Young children explore social justice through reading and art. The Reading Teacher, 70(6), 679–688. doi:10.1002/trtr.1566 Eisner, E. W. (2002). The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Hatzigianni, M., Miller, M. G., & Guinones, G. (2016). Karagiozis in Australia: Exploring principles of Social Justice in the arts for young children. International Journal of Education and the Arts, 17(25), 1–20. Heath, S. B. (2001). Three’s not a crowd: Plans, roles, and focus in the arts. Educational Researcher, 30(7), 10–17. Sawyer, K., John-Steiner, V., Moran, S., Sternberg, R. J., Feldman, D. H., Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2003). Creativity and development. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Children and Borders—Cyprus

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Borders—Cyprus

The so-called border in Cyprus was partly established in 1956 in the island’s capital, Nicosia, as part of the British colonial power’s attempt to control the mounting tensions between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. It was extended in the city in 1964 following the violence that erupted between the two communities and further expanded in 1974 as a result of the Turkish invasion and occupation of 37% of the island’s territory. The border extends from east to west for 180 kilometers dividing the island in two. It is guarded by the respective armies of the two sides and the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. The purpose of this entry is to provide an overview of research on children’s views of, perceptions about, and experiences with the border in Cyprus. The entry first discusses the contested character of the border in contemporary Cyprus. It then explores Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children’s experiences of crossing the border following the opening of a number of checkpoints in 2003. The entry concludes with a brief discussion of children’s oppositional understandings of the border.

The Border as a Contested Entity The Turkish invasion resulted in thousands of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot refugees, with the former moving to the south (the area controlled by the Republic of Cyprus) and the latter moving to the north. In 1983, the Turkish Cypriot authorities proceeded to unilaterally declare the occupied north a state under the name of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (often referred to as a ‘pseudostate’ by Greek Cypriots); it is, however, not recognized as a state by any country other than Turkey. The meaning of the border in Cyprus is contested, with the two sides viewing it in radically different ways. For many Turkish Cypriots, the border is a safety line that separates two distinct states and offers a form of security from the Greek Cypriot majority. For them, the division line is a real border, a permanent solution to the political problem that has come to be known as ‘the Cyprus Problem’.

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For Greek Cypriots, on the other hand, the division line is not a border in the legal sense. Although they might occasionally use the term border, Greek Cypriots often refer to the division line with other names—‘the Attila Line,’ ‘the Green Line,’ ‘the occupation line,’ or ‘the cease-fire line’—to signal that this is a temporary line of separation that resulted from the illegal Turkish invasion and occupation of the island’s northern part. It is therefore a temporary line that has to be removed as part of a comprehensive solution that will reunify the island.

Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Children’s Border Crossing Experiences In 2003, and after 29 years of complete separation between north and south, the Turkish Cypriot authorities partially lifted the ban on the movement of populations between the two sides, allowing controlled crossings. Initially, this controlled movement was facilitated through one checkpoint in Nicosia, but now there are several such checkpoints along the division line. From the Turkish invasion of 1974 and until 2003, the border stood practically as a total means of territorial separation between the two sides with very few individuals crossing over in exceptional cases with special permits. During this period, the United Nations-controlled buffer zone, or the Green Line, served as a meeting space for individuals—both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots—who were part of the bicommunal efforts to build understanding and rapprochement between the two sides. Since 2003, thousands of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have crossed the division line, many of them refugees who left their homes behind in 1974. As Lisa Dikomitis has documented in her ethnographic study of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot refugees who were displaced following the 1974 war, these visits (especially during the first years after the lifting of the ban) became highly emotional acts of pilgrimage by the refugees who returned to their homes with their families after almost three decades. For those who were born before 1974 and had memories of their homes, these were return visits to places they remembered. For the younger generation of children who were born after 1974,

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however, this was their first encounter with a part of their country, about which they learned a lot from their families and school but had never experienced directly. In their study (published in 2012) Miranda Christou and Spyros Spyrou explored 10- to 12-year-old Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children’s views and experiences of border crossings following the partial lifting of restrictions in the movement of populations on the island in 2003. Christou and Spyrou reported that many of the Greek Cypriot children who crossed the border to visit the occupied north, expressed their resentment at being required to show their passport or ID to cross to the other side of their country. Because they did not recognize the occupied north as a legal state, they saw this requirement as being clearly unjust. They expressed a sense of fear, anxiety, and insecurity as well as intense disappointment and a sense of injustice and anger, both during their experience of crossing at the actual checkpoints and when exploring the rest of the north during their visits. Many of these children who visited the north came from refugee families; their parents and grandparents were forcefully displaced in 1974, and they, themselves, grew up with no direct experience of this part of their country. As a number of studies have shown, in the absence of real-life experiences for many of these children, the occupied north and its inhabitants were constructed in the realm of the imagination. Their visits to the other side were therefore colored to a great extent by the political climate of the division in Cyprus and the nationalistic educational system in which they were educated as well as their more specific upbringing in refugee families. During their initial visits, these children were confronted with their families’ homes, which were inhabited by Turkish Cypriots or Turkish settlers, and many found confirmation for what they had learned until then about the unjust state of affairs in their country. They witnessed the emotional reactions of their parents and grandparents at the sight of their homes and came to realize that although their families were the rightful owners of these properties, they had no real power to reclaim them. Christou and Spyrou’s study also revealed that children’s journeys to the north facilitated to some

extent the crystallization of prevailing negative cultural assumptions about ‘self’ and ‘other’ stemming from children’s socialization on the conflict. But children reported instances reported in which these experiences helped them humanize the other by forcing the children to reevaluate their existing attitudes, stereotypes, and understandings. Greek Cypriot children’s experiences greatly contrasted with the experiences reported by the Turkish Cypriot children who crossed to the south. For Turkish Cypriot children, crossing to the south was a more enjoyable experience filled with excitement. Their visits to the south were mostly associated with enhanced opportunities for shopping and entertainment. The relatively closed economy in the north (due to its international isolation as an illegal state) has been experienced as highly constraining by Turkish Cypriots, so having access to the south following the opening of checkpoints offered new opportunities for participation in a much larger consumer market. This sense was further reinforced following Cyprus’s membership in the European Union in 2004. Interestingly, some of the children in the study reported feelings of sadness when returning to the north at the end of a trip to the south. Contrasting this with the pilgrimage-type experience of Greek Cypriot children who visit the north, in their 2012 study, Christou and Spyrou describe Turkish Cypriot children’s experience of visiting the south as being of the touristic type, more like the unproblematic experience of people who visit another country for fun and entertainment.

Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Children’s Oppositional Understandings of the Border The oppositional understanding of the border held by the two communities at the official level was largely affirmed by the findings of this study, with Greek Cypriot children viewing the border as a temporary arrangement and Turkish Cypriot children seeing it more as a permanent solution and as the equivalent of an international border. The researchers, however, also reported that some Greek Cypriot children (as was the case with the majority of Turkish Cypriot children) saw the border as providing some sort of security through the de facto separation of territory.

Children and Borders—Palestine

It is also worth noting that not all children can or wish to cross the division line. Although both Greek Cypriots and citizens of other countries who wish to cross to the north are allowed, only Turkish Cypriots can cross to the south. Turkish settlers who live in the north are not allowed to cross to the south because they are considered by the Republic of Cyprus to have entered the country through an illegal port of entry in the occupied north. But apart from these children who cannot cross to the south, there are also Greek Cypriots who refuse to cross to the north for ideological reasons. As mentioned earlier, Christou and Spyrou found that some of the children included in their sample expressed strong feelings—very much in line with their parents’—about their refusal to show their passports in order to cross to the other side whose political authority they clearly did not recognize. Spyros Spyrou See also Borders, National; Children as Political Subjects; National Identity; Political Geographies of Youth

Further Readings Christou, M., & Spyrou, S. (2012). Border encounters: How children navigate space and otherness in an ethnically-divided society. Childhood, 19(3), 302–316. https:/dx.doi.org/10.1177/0907568212443270 Christou, M., & Spyrou, S. (2014). What is a border? Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot children’s understanding of a contested territorial division. In S. Spyrou & M. Christou (Eds.), Children and borders (pp. 131–148). Houndmills, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Demetriou, O. (2007). To cross or not to cross? Subjectivization and the absent state in Cyprus. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 987–1006. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.14679655.2007.00468.x Dikomitis, L. (2012). Cyprus and its places of desire: Cultures of displacement among Greek and Turkish Cypriot refugees. London, United Kingdom: I. B. Tauris. Hadjipavlou, M. (2007). Multiple stories: The “crossings” as part of citizens’ reconciliation efforts in Cyprus? Innovation, 20(1), 53–73. https://dx.doi .org/10.1080/13511610701197866

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Borders—Palestine

The complexity of Palestinian children’s perspective on the borders of Palestine is embedded within the historical change of the region. Palestine’s borders have been consistently contested for the last century, with Palestinian people having little to no input in the process. Global politics continue to complicate the geographic and political boundaries of Palestine today. To understand Palestinian children’s conceptions of borders, it is important to place Palestine into a larger historical context. This entry provides a historical account of how Palestinian borders have been altered as a direct result of colonization. It then discusses Palestinian children’s construction of the borders in relation to their own daily realities under occupation.

Colonization: Defining Palestinian Borders After World War I, Britain and France drew the contemporary borders of countries in the Middle East, including Palestine, but its borders changed rapidly thereafter. In 1917, the British government signed the Balfour Declaration, which granted a Jewish Homeland in Palestine without the consent of the Palestinian people. In 1947, the United Nations proposed to create a state for the Jewish people in Palestine that would leave Palestinians only 43% of mandated Palestine land. Palestinian people protested such land division, but because of global politics, their protests were ignored. Meanwhile, Jewish immigration amplified, and attacks against Palestinians by Jewish militant groups increased. The withdrawal of the British forces from Palestine in 1948 laid the foundation for Jewish militants to control more land. In addition, on May 14, 1948, on the day of expiration of the British Mandate over Palestine, the Zionist leadership declared Israel a state in Palestine. On the following day, military forces from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq invaded Palestine, and the ensuing 10 months of fighting resulted in the displacement and expulsion of approximately 80% of the Palestinian population, which then came to be known as al-Nakba (in Arabic, catastrophe, or disaster) which accompanied the reassigning of Palestine’s borders. Israel carved 77% off of the

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mandated border of Palestine, and Palestinian refugees were forced to settle in neighboring countries, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. From 1948 to 1967, Palestine was controlled by three different political entities: Israel, Jordan controlling the West Bank, and Egypt controlling the Gaza Strip. After the 6 days war in 1967, Israel additionally occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This resulted in yet another refugee crisis known as al-Naksa, stemming from the Israeli rejection of UN pressure to withdraw from the occupied territories. After this rejection, the international community began to recognize Israel’s pre-1967 borders, or what is sometimes referred to as the Green Line, and the subsequent Palestine borders, which include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, making up only 22% of mandated Palestine. In 1993, an attempt at a peace treaty was drawn up in the Oslo Accord. The 1967 borders of Palestine were to be reinstated as Israeli forces withdrew from the occupied territories. Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip had already been grouped together, shrinking the portion of land belonging to the Palestinians to two thirds for 1.1 million people. The plan outlined in the Oslo Accord split the West Bank into three areas, according to populations and the political interests of the Israeli government. Area A is governed by the Palestinian Authority, Area B is governed by both the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and Area C, which makes up about 61% of the entire West Bank, is governed by Israel. The Oslo Accords were not successful due to expansions of Israeli settlements instead of withdrawal. The Israeli government continues its attempts to depopulate Palestinians by means of land confiscation and illegal settlements, which have contributed to the formation of an invisible border around the divided areas of the West Bank. This invisible border has since been made concrete by the construction of a wall designed to keep Palestinians out that began in 2002 and cements Israel’s control of Area C, drawing its concept from the fence that was put up to enclose the Gaza strip following the first Intifada in 1987.

Palestinian Children’s Construction of Borders The continuous changing of borders has created multiple realities for children in Palestine at

different times in history. Children of every generation have experienced a change on the ground of which the borders were altered, but this did not negate family or individual narratives of the Palestinian land and geographic boundaries. Palestinian children narrate Palestine’s borders as they were before the establishment of the state of Israel; for them, Palestine’s borders do not encompass Israel. These narratives have been passed on to the next generation. Thus, children who did not experience al-Nakba are still able to relate to it as a part of their individual and collective identity, as their familiarity of Israel as an occupier currently, is reinforced with personal experience. The second and third refugee generations reinstate the same notion; their roots are not cemented to their current residences: Whether they live in a refugee camp, city, or a village within the occupied territories, Diaspora is not home. The notion of belonging to a place other than their physical location is accompanied by continuous enforcement of displacement due to land confiscation, illegal settlements, and lack of political stability. The narratives of oppression have not changed; on the contrary, children are not only recalling their parents’ and grandparent’s narratives of al-Nakba and al-Naksa, but they are combining them with their own personal experiences of oppression. For Palestinian children, border concepts are paradoxical. On one hand, a border is associated with their homeland prior to the establishment of Israel; on the other hand, it is manifested in their daily experiences of forceful checkpoints, new Israeli settlements, confiscation of their homes and land, the zoning of different areas (A, B, or C), and the Apartheid Wall, which limits their mobility within the different sections of the West Bank and from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. These visible structured, alternative borders, which are not recognized by the international community, are imposed with identification coloration requirements that the Israeli state employs to discriminate Palestinians as unequal or nonequal citizens. These ID cards are used to determine Palestinians’ geographic location and restrict movement throughout territories. For example, Palestinians who reside in the West Bank have orange identity document cards and cannot visit or reside in East Jerusalem. However, Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have blue ID cards, which authorize

Children and International Development

them to visit the West Bank as explained by Helga Tawil-Souri of New York University. Within this context, Palestinian children are forced to conceptualize borders of both the past and present and also of the future. The concept of borders for Palestinian children has come to be complex in that borders deny freedom, identity, and stability.

Conflicted Realities of Borders Palestinian children assign different meanings and realities to borders as a result of their constant alterations enforced by Israeli military actions. In reality, Palestinian children have to engage with an exclusively mutual reality; one reality might be farfetched, because it is one associated with a historical narrative, and the other is a daily experience for both the Palestinian community and their family members, planted with humiliation, oppression, and unpredictability. Children are familiar with the latter reality by reason of land confiscation and the continuous changing of the borders, which has divided community, dispersed and geographically separated families over time and in various locations, including diaspora, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Palestinians living in Israel. Although children are grasping two conceptual realities about a Palestinian state border, their lack of consent to such border changes enhances their ownership of the land narrative, allowing them to belong to a different border than the one they are confined to within what is known as the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The collective narrative includes awareness of the loss of land that serves to strengthen the bond between the different Palestinian generations residing in different locations. It can be argued that the division of the Palestinian community by border assignments aims to dismiss history and identity. On the contrary, the division actually strengthens the Palestinian collective narrative by demonstrating that despite a difference in location and a lack of definitive borders, the identity of a Palestinian is part of a unified consciousness. Although the Palestinian community is scattered among different geographic locations, this division will continue to be one of the pillars for recognizing the future of the Palestinian borders for children. Janette Habashi

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See also Borders, National; Childhood Studies; Children and Nationalism; Children’s Perspectives

Further Readings AbuZavyad, Z. (2017). After 50 years of occupation, it is time for justice and peace: If not sharing the state, then a fair sharing of the land. Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, 22(2), 34–43. Retrieved from http://www.pij.org/details .php?id=1775 Akesson, B. (2014). Arrested in place: Palestinian children and families at the border. In S. Spyrou & M. Christou (Eds.), Children and borders (pp. 81–98). Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Beinan, J., & Hajjar, L. (2014, January). Palestine, Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflict: A primer. Middle East Report [Online]. Retrieved from https://web.stanford .edu/group/sper/images/Palestine-Israel_Primer_ MERIP.pdf Biger, G. (2008). The boundaries of Israel: Palestine past, present, and future. Israel Studies, 13(1), 68–93. doi:10.1353/is.2008.0005 Lagerquist, P. (2004). Fencing the last sky. Journal of Palestine Studies, 33(2), 5–35. doi:10.1525/ jps.2004.33.2.5 Shafir, G. (2007). Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and its discontents. Contexts, 6(4), 46–51. doi:10.1525/ ctx.2007.6.4.46 Tawil-Souri, H. (2012). Uneven borders, coloured (im) mobilities. Geopolitics, 17(1), 153–176. doi:10.1080/ 14650045.2011.562944

Children and International Development International development has to do with economic and human development in different countries, particularly since independence from colonial rule after World War II. With the establishment of various multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, international development has focused on relieving poverty and improving living standards in former colonies and otherwise poor countries. Children and youth studies have critically examined the ways that international development engages young people and vice versa.

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To understand the implications of international development for children, it is necessary to understand how young people have traditionally figured into development discourse. This entry first traces the history of development interventions on behalf of children, from innocent objects of development to rights-based participation. It then describes how children have been included in particular development agendas of the new millennium. Throughout, the idealized childhood propounded by the development industry consistently imposes neoliberalization and problematically codifies idealized Western childhoods as universal.

Children as Objects of Humanitarian Intervention International development’s focus on children has been instrumentalized in bolstering the kinds of political and economic liberalism underlying development efforts, but its roots can be found in charity and humanitarian aid targeting children— which still largely influences interventions for poor children around the world. In the 18th century, European humanitarianism focused on children through Christian social movements in colonial projects as well as responding to natural disasters. There were many charitable children’s organizations in the Global North at local and national levels in the 19th and 20th centuries. These efforts expanded internationally at the end of World Wars I and II, with a great number of European children displaced by the conflicts. Save the Children was established in 1919 and, as the name connotes, was founded on the notion that children were in need of saving from an array of adverse circumstances that characterized the postwar era. In fact, Save the Children founder and originator of the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, Eglantyne Jebb, was among the first to argue that because of children’s particular vulnerabilities, the principle of neutrality should be applied to all children in contexts of armed conflict. Children were thus roundly codified as victims and not perpetrators of violence. Similarly, the United Nations Emergency Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was founded in 1946 to respond to the needs of European children who were orphaned or displaced in World War II. As

that need dissipated, however, UNICEF shifted to focusing on children in the newly independent but poor countries of the Global South. Primarily targeting health issues and child survival in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the agency gradually turned its attention to broader issues of poverty reduction as part of the UN’s wider movement to end poverty associated with colonialism and the rise of national independence. Children’s issues were thus placed squarely within the context of new, international development efforts that were also part of the geopolitics of decolonization. The objectives of child-focused international nongovernmental organizations such as Save the Children as well as intergovernmental agencies such as UNICEF shifted again in the 1980s when disastrous structural adjustment programs caused massive damage to efforts to ensure children’s health and eradicate child poverty worldwide. In some ways, however, this response inadvertently facilitated the retreat of the state from the welfare services that structural adjustment programs necessitated; as a result as civil wars and other social upheavals raged across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, international nongovernmental organizations found their efforts necessarily relegated to emergency relief services as well as the health and welfare services that failing and impoverished states were neglecting. These organizations still largely viewed children as hapless victims in need of intervention for their very survival. Although on one level this may be true—particularly in contexts of war, disaster, and persistent structural violence—the approach took children as mere objects of humanitarian intervention; indeed, several scholars have argued that children’s innocence is often problematically represented as emblematic of all humanity in ways that patronize developing countries as infantile. Postcolonial scholars have critiqued how colonial powers—and later, international nongovernmental ­organizations—viewed and treated colonized nations and natives as childlike and thus in need of civilizing. The assumptions rooted in colonial domination and native infantilization manifested in mid-20thcentury programs that targeted children directly for humanitarian intervention so as to transform their lives in the direction of broader progress and

Children and International Development

modernization. Poverty reduction in this context was as much about national growth as concern for child well-being, per se, but it had the effect of depoliticizing development efforts and decontextualizing childhood in favor of universalized standards, often based on economic and political liberalization. There are a few international instruments that have had an impact on the interaction between international development and children.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Such notions of progress are reflected in children’s rights discourses after the 1989 drafting and promulgation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Over 40 years in the making, the UNCRC was the culmination of numerous documents drafted due to a sense, following the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, that children were in need of special protections not adequately covered by nonbinding declarations such as the UDHR, or even the Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Instead, the UN moved to build a human rights framework to be enforced through international law. On the eve of the United Nations’ International Year of the Child in 1978, the UN proposed a draft text for the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the UNCRC did not gain final approval from the UN General Assembly until 10 years later in 1989. In September 1990, after 20 states had ratified it, the convention became legally binding. The UNCRC’s 54 articles set out to guarantee children’s civil, political, economic, social, health, and cultural rights. The UNCRC fast became the most ratified UN human rights convention in the history of the organization, and every country but the United States has signed on. The UNCRC has not been without its critics, however. Aside from the postcolonial critiques of human rights mentioned earlier, many dissenters saw the UNCRC as a Western-centric document that promotes the notion of the ideal child at once as both a sovereign, rational individual of a liberal democratic society and as a dependent who should be quarantined in child-specific spaces. Although many countries rushed to sign the convention, some regional bodies proceeded quickly to qualify the UNCRC with declarations of their

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own that they felt more closely reflected their social values. The Organization for African Unity’s 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, for example, closely resembles the UNCRC while at the same time emphasizing children’s communal responsibilities. In spite of these efforts to assert regional autonomy over discourses of child well-being, the hegemony of the UNCRC persisted in setting the universal standard for a singular, idealized childhood based on modern theories of both social progress and child development to which societies should aspire. Some also saw the promulgation of the UNCRC as an outcome of the broader failures of international development to eradicate global poverty and engender world peace despite concentrated mid- to late-20th-century efforts. This allowed for the naturalization of hegemonic notions of progress in the hands of childhood’s future adult subjects, with the notion of the immature child operating as metaphor for postcolonial nations’ underdevelopment resonating throughout development discourses. Furthermore, development discourses placed increasing emphasis on culture as a barrier to socioeconomic progress, citing harmful traditional practices and the failure of parents as duty bearers as primary obstacles to the fulfillment of children’s rights. International development accordingly shifted concern toward instigating culture change to remake the ideal childhood in line with neoliberal individualism, drawing attention away from structures of inequality and lack of social provisioning. Despite critiques of children’s rights, children’s rights-based approaches became the standard modus operandi in the 1990s, revealing a deep ambivalence about the place of childhood as both a protected and empowered category—and, indeed, reflecting broader doubts about modern humanitarianism. Such unease has resulted in challenges for the implementation of children’s participation in development efforts. Arguably a foundation of children’s rights along with provision and protection, many organizations made participation a stated priority in their rights-based programming, but they found it difficult to implement in practice because of varying cultural and organizational notions of child

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participation. As a result of this and other political and cultural resistance to the notion of rights, many organizations pulled back from their earlier child rights frameworks in the first decade of the 21st century, focusing instead on the Millennium Development Goals and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals discussed next.

Children and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) In an effort to reduce extreme poverty, world leaders gathered for the Millennium Summit in September 2000 to commit to a new global partnership with a time-bound set of targets for addressing various dimensions of poverty. These became known as the MDGs—eight targets regarding hunger, disease, education, gender equality, and environmental sustainability, among others. These targets were to be met by 2015 with the goal of significantly reducing poverty. According to UNICEF, the MDGs could be achieved only if children’s rights to education, health, and protection were met. Out of this came several global initiatives that explicitly targeted children, including education for all to achieve MDG 2: universal primary education. Under rights-based approaches, education had attained a central role in both individual and national development, but this goal to universalize education took on new urgency under education for all. However, by 2015, only about a third of all countries had reached every goal of the program, including gender parity and quality improvement in education. However, many critical childhood studies scholars pointed out that the drive for education had the adverse effect of making children more dependent on adults by stigmatizing certain forms of labor—especially when performed by children. Cindi Katz went so far as to suggest that the push for mass education was deskilling young people in developing countries, who used to learn essential life skills in the community. Furthermore, many have observed how emphasis on formal education has encouraged high aspirations to education while also causing the devaluation of manual, rural, and unskilled forms of labor in favor of white-collar jobs reserved for

the educated—even as universal education has been difficult to attain and possibilities for young people to obtain skilled employment are still rare in many countries. As 2015 drew to a close, it became clear that despite great strides, not all MDGs would be universally met. So the international community created an even more ambitious and comprehensive set of interconnected goals for 2030. The SDGs include 17 points to address the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, including new targets having to do with climate change and environmental sustainability, economic inequality, peace, and justice. These goals are supported by 169 concrete targets measured by 230 specific indicators. Fifty of these indicators concern children directly, yet some organizations have expressed concern that the SDGs do not explicitly protect and ensure children’s rights, thus continuing to treat children as objects of, rather than participants in, development. UNICEF argued that children must be at the center of the SDG agenda if it is to reach its goals by 2030. However, the SDGs continue to rely largely on principles of economic liberalization, privatization, and free trade without examining their role in growing income inequality and its deleterious effect on children.

The Continued Paternalism of International Development Targeting Children Narratives of innocent childhood suffering and child empowerment continue to sit uncomfortably side by side in the marketing of development efforts on behalf of children. Throughout this history, both local and international organizations have consistently encouraged charitable contributions to children’s causes based more on the former than the latter. Ostensibly, charitable acts can therefore serve the primary purpose of fulfilling the needs of the givers—even at the expense of the targeted group. Such charity on behalf of children is not therefore transformative; rather, it upholds status quo international power dynamics and translations of childhood need while also stripping children of their personhood. Moreover, those same actions often dehumanize—and even demonize—their thoroughly racialized parents.

Children and Nationalism

In this sense, the colonial project to parent the children of the Global South is rejuvenated through development interventions. At times, development practices necessarily reify the child— out of and away from family and community contexts—to make children the singular objects of charity, aid, and development. And yet if there is one lesson years of childhood and development studies has taught, it is that children’s lives are necessarily relational because of the dependence of children on older generations when children are young—but also because of the ways in which younger and older generations become interdependent as children grow and gain agency. International development practice still struggles to embrace this relational interdependence in childfocused programming. Kristen E. Cheney See also Children’s Rights; Education; Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); Postcolonial Childhoods; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); Well-Being, Children’s

Further Readings Ansell, N. (2017). Children, youth and development. (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Boyden, J., & Bourdillon, M. (Eds.). (2012). Childhood poverty: Multidisciplinary approaches. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Boyden, J., & Dercon, S. (2012). Child development and economic development: Lessons and future challenges. Oxford, UK: Young Lives. Burman, E. (1994). Innocents abroad: Western fantasies of childhood and the iconography of emergencies. Disasters, 18(3), 238–253. doi:10.1111/j.14677717.1994.tb00310.x Cheney, K. E. (2007). Pillars of the nation: Child citizens and Ugandan national development. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Levinson, B. A., Foley, D. E., & Holland, D. C. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: Ethnographies of schooling and local practice. Albany: State University of New York Press. Twum-Danso Imoh, A., & Ame, R. (Eds.). (2012). Childhoods at the Intersection of the local and global. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Valentin, K., & Meinert, L. (2009). The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children’s rights. Anthropology Today, 25(3), 23–28.

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Nationalism

Nationalism involves references to the national community, economy, history, symbols, traditions, habits and rituals, and feelings of attachment for land as well as pride in and maintenance of these. Childhood and children have particular roles to play in many of these. The emergence of modern childhood and the consolidation of the modern nation are closely intertwined. They occurred during the 19th century, when a modern conception of childhood emerged, associated with the ideas of a duty to learn and freedom from work and with the concept of the dependent child requiring careful tending as a human becoming. Children’s development became central to the process of modernization, and consequently it had to be closely supervised and regulated by the state in accordance with the scientific child-rearing knowledge and practices developing at the time. Children growing up in modern nation-states are raised as national citizens and are special sites of investment. This entry describes how through participating in different institutions such as the family, preschool, or school, children are socialized to associate their identity with the nation and develop emotions for and attachments to the national community and territory. It also discusses how children contribute to the (re)production of the nation and forms of nationalism. Childhood and children are often seen as the future of nation-states. In the past, and still today, children’s physical and mental health was closely linked to that of the developing nation-state since its development and future hinged on children. However, the nature of this dependence has changed over time. Today, for example, children are thought about as resources for the nation, such as human capital or as economic investment, and as contributing to the nation’s competitiveness in the global economy. Economists, especially, argue that investing in children makes good economic sense for nations; with a healthy, educated future workforce, the national economy can

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achieve higher productivity, and thus future welfare spending can be reduced. Children are also socialized to see themselves as part of the nation, to become national subjects in their identities, views and beliefs, practices, and feelings. Nationalism is a form of ideology that constructs its space as a homeland inhabited by an imagined community with shared characteristics, such as a common culture, language, assumed race, or religion with which children learn to identify, feel, and become attached to. Feeling and attachment to the nation is called patriotism. National imaginaries and patriotism are cultivated in children through parenting, participation in the national culture and institutions, consumer culture, and mass and social media. As children learn and adopt these views, identities, practices, and feelings, they express preferences for national tastes or perform everyday activities in national ways or according to national customs or support national sport teams to express their identity. Children are not only passively socialized into being national subjects; they also actively produce and reproduce the national imaginary and associated practices and feelings in their everyday life. Children’s identification with and enactment of the nation is most visible in societies experiencing conflict. In these societies, children mobilize very early on and feel the us and them divisions as they refer to national differences, but they also resist and reshape the differences on their own terms, which has little to do with how these are leveled at them. In times of peace, children live their lives in national institutions where the nation blends into the fabric of everyday life, so it is hard to discern but still shapes routines, habits, norms, rhythms, and feelings. Being punctual or late, starting and finishing the workday or school day, eating meals at a certain time all organize the national rhythm of a day.

The Formation of the Future National Citizenry Historically, the state’s interest in children has always concerned the nation’s future. As historian Harry Hendrick asserts, children represent investments in future parenthood, economic competitiveness, and a stable democratic order. Tied to national

projections, such as economic prosperity or the democratic ideal, children’s present lives and their future trajectories are intensively administered and regulated through national laws, policy, politics, welfare, care, and education. In this relationship, the state is considered to be a political body, whereas childhood is a form of political existence and children are the subjects of state regulation. The forms this dependence takes are reciprocally linked to representations of childhood and the nation, based on notions of development and progress. Representations of childhood are rooted in religious and political legacies of the modern imagination, reimagining the world and the place of humans within it, which is marked by progress. The emerging psychological knowledge of the individual and the development of the child have gained a central position in this imagination and have become closely intertwined with the development and progress of nations. To facilitate children’s development, a whole host of institutions concerning children’s education, care, welfare, and health were established with the formation of nation-states, and these contribute to the management of childhood so as to bring childhood in line with national projections. Scientific knowledge from different disciplines that was produced for these institutions also informs the policies and practices that seek to manage and regulate children’s lives, well-being, and growing up. However, policies and institutions, notions of childhood, and scientific knowledge are in constant flux, continuously transforming the relationship between the nation and childhood. For example, whereas earlier social policy saw children as family members, more recently children have been viewed as more autonomous and in many contexts, such as the Nordic welfare states, as rights-bearing individuals legislated for or provisioned independently from their families. Administrative measures and scientific knowledge have thus come to target children directly instead of regulating mothers or family life. Children’s individual achievements, health, and well-being are frequently measured, monitored nationally, and compared internationally. These are then bound up with assessments of the progress nation-states make in many realms, such as the economy or happiness. Because children are important to the nation, other relationships around childhood are also

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regulated. For example, Erica Burman, professor of psychology and women’s studies, argues that national agendas often intensively shape women’s conduct as cultural as well as biological reproducers and their practices as facilitators of children’s development and socialization. Children’s position in society is related to that of women. Women’s sexual purity and their right to decide whether to have children are often tied to their responsibility for raising the next generation for the nation-state. Sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis lists three aspects related to the right to decide about having children: First is maintaining or increasing the population as part of the national interest. Second is controlling the size of the population to avoid future disaster, prevalent in colonial and neocolonial contexts. Third is controlling the composition of future generations, which could be informed by racist and classist discourses forming part of neocolonial development projects.

Formation of Children as National Subjects Besides the family, consumer culture, and mass and social media, education is tasked by governments to promulgate nationalism in children. National education policies set out notions of citizenship for students and citizenship education, and curricular materials are imbued with patriotism and visual, textual, and participative forms of national discourses. Institutional practices also contribute to the continuous signaling and performance of the nation, such as raising the flag as part of ceremonies, singing the national anthem with the appropriate body comportments, participating in national sports, or using nationally sanctioned language. The role of institutions is paramount to the nation in constructing and setting limits, establishing normative frameworks, and generating hierarchies of knowledge and status. In institutional practices, the nation is evident in internalized and naturalized habits, such as national practices of eating, dressing, and celebrating. In these practices, the nation is reproduced as the taken-forgranted order of things and ways of life. Within the cognitive-developmental paradigm, there is a large body of work considering how children learn to identify with the nation. Martyn Barrett, professor of psychology, draws on

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cognitive and social psychological theories to explain how children grow in the developmental domain of national identification and acquire attitudes toward their nation. Children develop a national identification by drawing on knowledge of and attitudes to the state that hinge on specific sociohistorical contexts. The cognitive paradigm places the child’s views center stage when describing how the environment—including families, education professionals, and people the children are in contact with or who produce different materials for them—socializes the child. Professor of social sciences Michael Billig explains how established nation-states routinely reproduce themselves through symbolic resources and forms of nationalism. However, the geographical and ideational space of the nation merely seems natural and neutral. National spaces are in fact filled with hierarchical political, social, and emotional relations and attachments and discourses that contribute to children’s formation of national feelings, sensibilities, and belonging and to their identities. Sociological research explores how children learn to identify with the nation as part of the larger political processes that constitute their daily lives or as they partake in national projects that often ascribe to them homogeneous or unified national identities. Through participating in political processes, either knowingly or as part of their everyday life, children reproduce these prescribed ways of being. National identity is more likely to be de-emphasized in contexts of relative ethnic homogeneity. Children who belong to the ethnic majority in a nation are less likely to prioritize an identification with a national place or culture. Children also use cultural distinctions originating in historical and political tensions between countries to mark their identities and belonging. In societies divided by internal cultural and ethnic divisions and conflicts, children often valorize national identifiers—frequently mixed with racial, ethnic, gender, or class markers—and use these as symbols of superiority, exclusion, or oppression. Studies have powerfully demonstrated how children form dynamic identities within the complex politics enveloping their daily lives. For example, social anthropologist Jason Hart describes how children who are the grandchildren of an originally dispossessed people now living in

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a Palestinian camp in Jordan were influenced by three sources of nationalism: the Palestinian nationalist movement, the Jordanian state, and the Islamist movement. The children took up, resisted, and reshaped the complex cultural politics present in their daily lives and that shaped their familial and extrafamilial relations. There is much less available research that explores nationalism and children in societies that are free of ethnic conflict or the institutional contexts children experience. Children in institutions are also exposed to national cultures, such as celebrations or national practices of eating, schedules, virtues, or traditions. For example, researcher Sirpa Lappalainen reveals how the organization of time is an important part of national pedagogy in the Finnish preschool culture in which children and their families are taught to be prompt and punctual and that educators consider as a Finnish virtue. In Lutheran preschool celebrations, race and gender form an important part of celebratory practices and play a large role in reproducing the national culture.

Children Actively Produce the Nation The nation is often understood as an entity that children learn to identify with later in life rather than as processes within which children’s lives are entangled at the present. It is also assumed that young children lead separate lives from adultdominated arenas and agendas, such as nationalism. Children’s lives are often more connected to their most immediate environment, and although it is acknowledged that their lives are shaped by larger processes and forces, there is less possibility of them participating in these. Everyday nationalism is a perspective that views nationalism as part of social interactions in which people engage in the local places of everyday encounters. In this view, the nation is an ongoing process in which children can also participate and that continuously reinvents itself, adjusting to the changing circumstances of the social, political, and economic world. Michael Skey, lecturer in media and culture, draws together the ways national forms of knowledge, practices, and emotions are embedded in institutional settings and coordinate, sustain, and naturalize particular notions and experiences of the world. Temporal regularities, national cultures,

and customs help individuals find their way around the moral orders of a given nation and coordinate their activities across particular locales. This also allows individuals to experience themselves as unitary and stable entities and as national subjects. Experienced as part of everyday life, particular assumptions and practices of the nation emerge as self-evident, taken for granted, and to a degree, obscure other potential alternatives in serving the dominant views in nations. In this view, identity, homeland, and attachments are produced through and reiterated in routine habits, symbolic systems, and familiar material environments. Although it is difficult to identify these processes, because they blend into the fabric of everyday life, they could at any moment turn into opportunities for expressing patriotism or for emotionally charged resistance. In these mundane practices, even children as young as few years old mobilize particular representations of the nation and homeland in their identifications and use them to include and exclude others. Here, the difference is recognized based on constructs of the nation and nationality and where they intersect with race, class, gender, religion, language, land, and other cultural markers. Glenda MacNaughton, professor of learning and educational development, discusses, for example, how very young children in preschool perform the mythical ‘White nation’ of Australia by favoring dolls of White skin color. Race and color do matter to children, and they see Whiteness as being desirable, whereas otherness is seen as exotic and darker skins are to be feared; thus they creatively re-create the institutional culture of White Australia within their preschools. These types of stereotypes, categorizations, and biases relating to an imaginary nation composed of a homogeneous and unified body of people in a bordered national space not only lead to levels of exclusion but also sit uncomfortably with the reality of multicultural and globalizing societies today. In a transnational world, the nation-state remains the prime organizing political and social force. Children are still considered, socialized, and taught to become national citizens foremost, because one cannot be a citizen of a contemporary nation-state and still have some form of legitimate identity. Zsuzsa Millei

Children and Social Policy See also Childhood Identity Constructions; Children as Citizens; Children as Political Subjects; Cultural Politics of Childhood

Further Readings Barrett, M. (2013). Children’s knowledge, beliefs and feelings about nations and national groups. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis. Beneï, V. (2008). Schooling passions: Nation, history, and language in contemporary Western India. Sanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London, UK: Sage. Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London, UK: Brunner Routledge. Hart, J. (2002). Children and nationalism in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. Childhood, 9(1), 35–47. doi:10.1177/0907568202009001003 Hendrick, H. (1997). Children, childhood and English society, 1880–1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lappalainen, S. (2006). Liberal multiculturalism and national pedagogy in a Finnish preschool context: Inclusion or nation-making? Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 14(1), 99–112. doi:10.1080/ 14681360500487777 MacNaughton, G. (2001). Silences and subtexts of immigrant and non-immigrant children. Childhood Education, 78(1), 30–36. doi:10.1080/00094056.200 1.10521683 Millei, Z., & Imre, R. (Eds.). (2015). Childhood and nation: Interdisciplinary engagements. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Scourfield, J., Dicks, B., Drakeford, M., & Davies, A. (2006). Children, place and identity: Nation and locality in middle school. London, UK: Routledge. Skey, M. (2011). National belonging and everyday life: The significance of nationhood in an uncertain world. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Yuval-Davis, N. (1998). Gender and nation. London, UK: Sage.

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Social Policy

‘Social policy’ refers to political planning and implementation that affects the ‘welfare’ of populations, including health, education, housing, and income maintenance. Promoting child welfare is a foundational purpose of social policy: Services for

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children and families were central to the development of ‘welfare states’ in the Western world and represent an important aspect of what, reflecting the increased emphasis on social service provision within international development policy and programming, has come to be referred to as ‘global’ social policy. This entry explores reasons the welfare of children came to be regarded as a political concern, looks at some of the historical developments related to children and social policy, and examines key themes in social policy for children.

Welfare of Children as a Political Concern There are a number of possible answers to the question of why governments and other political agencies and actors care about child welfare. The relative vulnerability and helplessness of children is generally seen as placing a moral claim on adults, particularly parents but also on the wider adult community. The doctrine of parens patriae is the expression of the belief that children in need of support and protection have a moral claim on the state, which has the power and duty to assume the responsibilities of parents in certain circumstances. Of course, this is not the only reason child welfare is a matter of political concern. The idea that ‘children are the future’ is one of the most oftrepeated political clichés, deployed to buttress the claim that public expenditure on services for children represents an investment in the progress and prosperity of the entire society. Schooling and welfare services for children are also viewed as a means of promoting conformity and consensus; in other words, they can be seen as mechanisms for social control. This became a significant theme in the literature on children and social policy from the 1970s, following the publication of works such as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Anthony Platt’s The Child Savers, and Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families, each of which served to cast doubt on the progressive direction of child welfare reforms. The concept of ‘moral panics’ has subsequently become an important tool for making sense of the history of social policy for children and families, suggesting that during periods of social change, anxiety about young people

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(typically those from poor or minority backgrounds) serves as a stimulus for government action aimed at tightening control over the young.

Historical Developments Looking at the history of children and social policy the work of theorists such as Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault suggests that early modern statebuilding was associated with increased political interest in children, associated with establishment of institutions such as schools, foundling hospitals, and orphanages. The foundations for modern child welfare services were established in the 19th century. Of particular importance was the development of systems of medical provision and public health, mass schooling, and legal and institutional frameworks for the protection of children against economic exploitation, moral and physical neglect, and ‘cruelty’ of various kinds. States passed laws regulating—and ultimately, banning—child labour, mandating school attendance, and providing for removal of children from parents deemed deficient. During the 20th century, as the welfare functions of the state expanded, various kinds of public supports were made available in many European countries to all families with children. These included cash benefits to support the costs of child-rearing, medical and dental services, nursery schools, and childcare services for preschool children. Of course, significant differences were and continue to be observable across countries in terms of the range and level of supports to families. The Scandinavian countries, along with France, have long been hailed as exemplars for publicly provided supports for families, whereas in Continental European and Anglo-Saxon countries, the state’s role in the provision of benefits and services for families has traditionally been less extensive. The concept of welfare state regimes—first deployed by the Danish political economist Gösta Esping-Andersen to examine the balance of welfare provision between states, markets, and families—has been used extensively to examine differences between clusters of countries, particularly in respect of social security but also in relation to services. Within the welfare regime literature, ‘de-familialisation’ has been developed

as a tool to distinguish between regime types on the basis of the supports offered to families; ‘defamilialising’ regimes relieve pressure on families through provision of supports such as cash benefits for families with children, parental leave, and early years services. The positive benefits of such policies, in terms of social investment in contemporary policy discourse, are represented by increased social mobility and boosting ‘human capital’. This social investment perspective, however, has been subject to criticism for its prioritisation of labour market participation and positioning of children primarily as future workers. From a rights-based perspective, children are seen not just as future citizens and workers but as participants in society in the here and now. In this respect, the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child by the United Nations (UNCRC) in 1989 represents a key moment in the history of social policy for children. The rights accorded to children under the convention go beyond protective and developmental provisions to encompass autonomy rights such as freedom of conscience and freedom expression. Of particular importance has been Article 12 of the convention, which refers to the right to participate in decision making. Although fairly limited in scope, Article 12 has been instrumental in the development of a plethora of initiatives and institutional frameworks for policy consultation (to varying degrees) with children at local, regional, national, and international levels. Although not a new concept, citizen ‘coproduction’ of services has in recent years become an increasingly important theme in the policymaking literature generally and in the literature on child policy, most notably in the work of Kay Tisdall. This reflects concerns with combatting tokenism and promoting meaningful participation of children and young people in planning, implementation, and evaluation of services and policy initiatives. As with other human rights instruments, the UNCRC has relatively weak provisions for enfor­ cement. A mechanism for individual complaints is provided for under a protocol adopted in 2012, but the convention mainly influences national policymaking through its monitoring and reporting mechanism. Recommendations made by the

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Committee on the Rights of the Child via national reports cover a broad range of policy areas, including child welfare and protection, youth justice, child participation, and policies for groups of children deemed particularly vulnerable, such as indigenous and ethnic minority children, children with disabilities, asylum-seeking and refugee children, and children in state care. Although state parties can, and do, ignore recommendations, these national reports are considered a useful tool for policy advocacy. Another important way in which the growing emphasis on children’s rights is shaping social policy at national level is through the appointment (sometimes following the recommendation of the Committee on the Rights of the Child) of national advocates for children such as an ombudsman for children or a children’s commissioner. Functions vary but these can include scrutinising government policies (e.g., through use of ‘childproofing’ tools for legislation and policy initiatives); providing advice to the administrative, legislative, and judicial arms of the state; and serving as a complaints mechanism that children can use in relation to the actions of public bodies and social service providers. The UNCRC sets out a global standard for childhood, one that almost every state in the world, with the exception of the United States, has committed to upholding. Clearly states around the world differ significantly in terms of the resources available to uphold children’s rights. At the most basic level, the rights of children to life, survival, and development, which state parties are committed to safeguarding under Article 6 of the convention, are threatened by vast disparities in income and wealth globally, the effects of armed conflict, and the impact of environmental degradation and climate change. There has been significant progress globally in respect to reducing infant and child mortality rates, and targets set for 2015 under the Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000 were achieved in many, but not all, parts of the world. Since 2000, many low- and middle-income countries have adopted some form of cash transfer payment scheme for families with children, progress has been made in respect to combatting diseases such as malaria, and the number of children out of school worldwide has decreased.

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In 2015, a more ambitious set of targets was adopted under the Sustainable Development Goals, the successors to the Millennium Development Goals. There are real concerns, however, that progress will be slowed or even reversed in years to come due to insufficient political action on climate mitigation and adaptation and consequent increased pressures on, and conflict over, vital resources such as clean air, water, food, and energy. This is not an issue for only the Global South: The causes and effects of rising global inequality, climate change, and forced displacement are matters to which social policy in all countries must respond if the welfare of the current and future generations of children is to be protected. Karen M. Smith See also Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights; Children’s Rights; Children’s Rights, Critiques of; Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on; Welfare State

Further Readings Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York, NY: Pantheon. Esping-Andersen, G. (2002). Why we need a new welfare state. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rose, N. (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Smith, K. M. (2014). The government of childhood: Discourse, power and subjectivity. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Tisdall, K. (2017). Conceptualising children and young people’s participation: Examining vulnerability, social accountability and co-production. International Journal of Human Rights, 21(1), 59–75. doi:10.1080/ 13642987.2016.1248125 Wells, K. (2014). Childhood in a global perspective. (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Technology

The study of technology provides rich questions for the broad field of childhood studies. These technologically oriented questions provide a critical approach to theorising the construction of

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childhood within and through particular technological paradigms, relationships, or both. More than this, these questions, through the work of Martin Heidegger, reveal the very technological essence of childhood as a construction; likewise, the study of childhood at the same time contributes to the study of technology. This entry engages with the philosophy of technology in order to highlight a range of critical issues and questions concerning childhood and technology, with a particular focus on the construction of childhood as in some way technological.

Heidegger on Technology In A Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger challenges thinking about technology so as to reveal the essence of technology, an essence that he shows to be largely hidden by the predominating tendency to regard technology within the narrow instrumental terms of causality. As regards childhood and technology, instrumentalism can be observed in a proliferation of research aimed at augmenting the child’s learning through the addition of didactic machinery, such as an application on a tablet for language learning, or code writing and robotics activities for cognitive development. Instrumentalism can also be seen in attempts to rationalise all elements of a child’s learning to maximise the outputs of that learning for both child and society. Heidegger argues that the instrumental definition of technology is certainly a correct definition in that technology does indeed refer to the tools that humans use and the purposes for using those tools (and hence the research and application of instrumental applications of new technologies for children’s learning may be legitimate). However, Heidegger argues that a correct definition of technology is not the same thing as the essence of technology. The tensions between the instrumental and the essential are of interest in the study of technology and childhood because of what they reveal about childhood and more widely about being. On the subject of instrumental definitions, Heidegger charges that modern societies are naive in their relationship to the idea of technology and limited in their thinking of technological practices. Such limitations can be seen as symptomatic not

only of technological instrumentalism but also of economic instrumentalism. His concern is to open up thinking about technology, to reveal limitations in thinking and what might be the cause of such limitations, to reveal the implications of limited thinking concerned with technology, and to offer a reconceptualisation of technology that suggests not so much a radical new way of thinking but rather a radical return to a way of thinking about technology that reestablishes a philosophy of technology within the domain of poetic being. Here, the idea of poetry encourages a theorisation of what is ultimately, although expressed here in somewhat simple terms, a creative practice through which the very being of being is revealed. The research of interest is then the study of what is brought into being by any technology and technological relationship—for instance, of what is brought into being by educational software that optimises behavioural reinforcement techniques through the offering of gamelike rewards and of what is considered a normal childhood, given the concerns about the time spent engaged with an electronic screen. Heidegger’s point, and approach, to theorising technology is then, at least to some extent, analogous to the study of childhood, with its similar attention to genealogical theorisation of concepts and practices and to the limitations and possibilities evident in discourses of childhood. Both childhood and technology, in this sense, become a device for making sense of progress and tradition, theorising political, sociological, and philosophical ideas, relationships, and practices.

Technological Polemics The necessity for theorisation is evident in the endurance of a tendency to take an anxious or urgent approach to the relationship between technology and childhood with little to no attendance to a host of significant assumptions. Two very polemic, and very anxious, approaches are of particular concern for the study of childhood. On the one hand, there is the view that unfolding the child’s true nature is harmed by the presence of technology (a position one can see in the development of Rousseau’s ideas about childhood and education and that has contemporary manifestations in, for instance, the work of The

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Alliance for Childhood and of Neil Postman and Richard Louw on the contemporary disorders of childhood in a technological society). On the other hand, there is the idea that the child is naturally predisposed to engage with, and add to, advancing a technological world (a position that connects the work of writers and educators, including Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and Seymour Papert, and more recently, educational organisations such as The Erikson Institute). Although these positions appear oppositional, they are enjoined in their concern for the developmental nature of childhood. For the latter group, the technological concern about development leads towards a mechanical understanding of the child as a naturally cybernetic system. The technological world and the child are, in this structuralist paradigm, mutually constituting. For instance, observations of how the child learns and how the child adapts furnish the study of cybernetics with ideas for what is required to make an artificial system that similarly adapts through feedback loops. The influence of this thinking extends beyond concerns about the explanation of systems to the legitimation of interconnecting systems. In other words, childhood and technology are engaged in a natural and inevitable relationship when observed as sharing certain universal organisational properties. The idea of nature as in some way essential to technology is evident in this thinking and is writ large in the work of 19thcentury German educator, Friedrich Froebel, who suggested that the purpose of education involved an essential relationship between the child and the objects of interest in his or her world, objects that influence the child’s being and that demand the child’s knowing. Although Froebel’s work may have been largely (and arguably rightly) associated with a Romantic tradition of leaving nature to take its course in the education of the young child, it is also evident in his view that the nature of the learning child is as a being preprogrammed to make sense of objects in the world, that there is something particularly technological about the natural relationship between the child and the world. His work reveals that there is something particularly technological about childhood and that distinctions between nature and technology are constructed for particular purposes. Although for

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some Romantic views on childhood, such theories of a technological essence to childhood seem heretical, the concern here, returning to Heidegger, is that the very construction of these distinctions is largely forgotten in, and as a result of, modernity.

Technology and Society Hence, the study of technology within the field of childhood studies has a significant contribution to make to the critique of theories of the nature of childhood and provides evidence of the technological assumptions that form the essence of those theories. For philosophers including Michel Foucault, Jacques Ellul, and Jacques Donzelot, the connection between technology and childhood is a political dimension that is evidence of a particular manifestation of the technological society and/or a governmental rationality (or governmentality). Here, the study of childhood includes the study of childhood as a device in a technological society that operates across spheres in the organisation of what is known and done. Writers including Chet Bowers and Neil Selwyn add to this critique through a concern for the experience of ‘community’ in postindustrial technological societies. They challenge any sense that technology is neutral and present evidence of how both childhood and technology are constructions that amplify social and political inequalities. Any thesis that assumes technology to be neutral, to be acultural, is amplified by a tendency to overlook technological genealogies. Of most significance here is the way in which the very word technology operates to include some technologies, typically new technologies, and to exclude other technologies that have been forgotten as technological and are understood rather as somehow now natural in the child’s world. A natural toy is no longer technological. The purpose of such an oversight might be to reasonably protect a tradition. The task for adults when considering the education of the child, at least as inscribed by Hannah Arendt in her essay on education, is to work within this space of new and old, conservation and progression. In this sense, exploring beliefs about childhood and technology at the same time reveals beliefs about, and attitudes towards, progress.

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This work reveals, in addition, that the concerns of critics about technology and childhood, concerns focused on the developmental harm caused by the world of new technologies, are entirely technological. Their developmental sense of childhood emphasises the efficacy of a natural system compromised by the presence of deleterious artificial influences, such as new computational devices, and by the absence of other natural influences, such as forests and animals and other ‘real’ children in their immediate rather than mediated environment. This tension between nature and society, or nature and culture, operates around childhood in a way that reinforces beliefs about the distinction between nature and technology. And as with the cybernetic construction of childhood, it plays a significant role in uncritically constructing the norms of the child’s being and his or her world. A failure to question those beliefs leads to an absurd forgetfulness that, following Heidegger, is symptomatic of modernity—absurd in the sense that technological anxieties are replayed, from generation to generation, like Sisyphus eternally pushing a rock up a mountain, yet with no awareness that this one journey is destined to be replayed for eternity. Such absurd thinking reflects what Julian Young has referred to as an epistemological chauvinism when thinking about technology and childhood in contemporary policymaking. The constitution of these distinctions is challenged in the work of new materialist and posthumanist movements, including notably the Common Worlds Research Collective. This has provided a new turn (or perhaps a re-turn) in the theorisation of childhood and technology. New materialism actively critiques the binaries of nature and culture, natural and artificial. The new materialist turn, perhaps ironically, returns to the work of Froebel. The turn here is important to understand on account of the tensions within interpretations of Froebel’s work. These tensions reveal the tendencies to think about technology in narrow terms. Consider Froebel’s contribution to the technologies of the child’s play—the gifts designed by Froebel that remain common to early childhood settings around the world. Froebel’s studies in nature led to a holistic theory of education that is well known for its influence on educational technologies and

less known for the reasons that these technologies were designed. Each of the gifts reflected Froebel’s study of the essence of the universe and each worked to release knowledge of that essence through holding those essential properties. Although technology should not be thought of as simply the material gifts, tools, or things, which the child is (intentionally or otherwise) observing, using, breaking . . . these things have an important function that opens a way to thinking about childhood. Consider, for instance, the role of a spool of cotton in the work of Sigmund Freud. As a grandfather Freud observes his grandson playing a game with the adults through the spool. The spool is chucked out of the cot and is returned by an adult. The game becomes fort da, and through it, Freud observes his grandson observing the world, developing a relationship to technology and to technique. These observations are presented in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; hence, the observations then lead to new techniques in understanding a ‘child’ that lead to new tools for influencing psychoanalytic development. Adults (policy makers, parents, and teachers) are confronted by incessant advice on the urgency of creating technological opportunities for children to realise their full potentials, at the same time as they are threatened with anxieties about the short- and long-term developmental costs of children’s engagement with technology. That one can find research to support contending positions such as these suggests that the challenge for the study of childhood is not to search for empirical certainties but rather to make sense of the deeper meanings and relationships. This task involves asking questions about technology and childhood that avoid assuming one knows what these terms mean and that explore their remarkable mutual construction. Andrew Neil Gibbons See also Digital Childhoods; Digital Literacy; Digital Media; Froebel, Friedrich; Montessori, Maria

Further Readings Arendt, H. (1961). Between past and future: Six exercises in political thought. London, UK: Faber and Faber. Froebel, F. (1886). Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel. E. Michaelis & H. K. Moore (Trans.). London, UK: Swan, Sonneschein.

Children and the Law, United States Gibbons, A. (2007). The matrix ate my baby. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In M. Heidegger (Ed.), The question concerning technology and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans., pp. 3–36). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Papert, S. (1993). The children’s machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York, NY: Basic Books. Peters, M. A. (Ed.). (2002). Heidegger, education, and modernity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Websites Common Worlds Research Collective. Retrieved from http://commonworlds.net/

Children and the Law, United States While children are excluded from some legal rights extended to adults, their lives are profoundly impacted by the law. This entry outlines the basic tenets of how laws in the United States impact the lives of children. It includes discussions of children’s rights and obligations, parents’ rights and obligations to their children, the child welfare system, the juvenile justice system, and the primary areas of civil law impacting children. The entry highlights the balance of interests among the government, parents, and children. It encompasses U.S. Supreme Court decisions, federal legislation, and foundational legal doctrines.

Children’s Rights and Obligations Children in the United States receive protections, rights, and obligations through federal and state laws. The Constitution, which establishes foundational rights for individuals in the United States, remains silent in granting rights specifically to children. This silence reflects historic views of children as property of adults and without developmental differences from adults. As society’s

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perspective on children shifted to adopt a view of children as developmentally different from adults and to label childhood as a life stage, laws granting youth rights and protections emerged. Beginning in the late 1800s and continuing through the present, children maintain rights and obligations in the areas of education, family life, juvenile justice, child welfare, and civil claims, such as torts, contracts, and property.

Parent and Government Rights and Obligations As laws governing the rights and obligations of children developed, it became necessary to establish the rights and obligations of parents and the government also. The rights of children, parents, and the government often stand in tension with one another, as each seeks to establish the best interests of children without violating the legal rights of others. The U.S. Supreme Court cases Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters found parents have the right to raise their children without the unreasonable interference of the government, the right to establish a home, and the right to direct their children’s education in a reasonable manner. These court cases also recognize the government interest in requiring school attendance, regulating schools, and directing the curriculum in schools. The government maintains a role in protecting children through the parens patriae doctrine, which establishes the authority of the government to protect those unable to protect themselves. This includes protecting children from their parents when necessary.

Education The right of the government to institute compulsory school attendance laws establishes education as a prominent area of law for the development of children’s rights. In public schools, children have the right to freedom of expression and to privacy; however, these rights have limitations. Brown v. Board of Education supports equal opportunities for children to receive education, and other Supreme Court decisions grant students expressive first amendment rights in public schools. These decisions also provide qualifications that the rights of students do not override the role of

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schools in providing education. First Amendment rights may not unreasonably interfere with schoolwork or the right of other students to be let alone. Similarly, while youth maintain some privacy rights within the school environment, schools have an interest in preventing drug use and the nature of the school environment decreases the privacy expectation of students.

Determination of Parental Status The legal determination of who constitutes a parent raises important considerations in determining the rights of parents to raise their children without unreasonable interference from the government. Historically, children born to unmarried parents did not receive the full rights of children born within wedlock and unmarried parents did not have legal standing to make a claim against the other biological parent. This framework shifted in the mid-1900s, establishing equal rights for children and rights for parents regardless of marital status. In most states, the law recognizes two individuals as the legal parents of a child. The law grants rights first to the biological parents and requires termination of these parental rights before granting full parental rights to any other individual. Case law cites the harm to family integrity and privacy as the result of challenges to paternity and seeks to limit this harm by recognizing the rights of the biological parents. When valid challenges to paternity arise, the courts look first to the genetic connections of the parents to the child and then to the intent of the parties when engaging in a relationship with the child. In loco parentis, Latin for in the place of parent, provides a legal doctrine for recognizing the rights of other individuals in a child’s life (e.g., a step-parent, grandparent, or foster parent) to maintain a relationship with that child based on the role the adult fills, ranging from visitation to legal or physical custody of the child.

Abuse and Neglect In addition to rights, parents also have obligations to their children. The failure to meet these obligations results in the government overseeing the family, removing the children from the home, and/ or terminating parental rights due to child neglect

or abuse. Determinations of neglect and abuse rest on the parental obligation not to endanger their children. Neglect encompasses the failure to provide for the children—including food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical care—and the failure to protect the children. Abuse comprises physical, sexual, and psychological maltreatment. A finding of physical abuse considers the actions of the child that prompted the use of force, the parent’s degree of reasonableness in the use of force, and the control the parent had over the force. The court will consider the persistence of the child’s pain and the duration of any physical markings. It will look for proof that the injury was not accidental, through examination of the injury and physicians’ expert testimony. Sexual abuse includes considerations of age, coercion, and consent. A finding of psychological maltreatment may rest on the condition of the child or the treatment of the parent. When examining the condition of the child, the court may look to physical indicators of emotional harm, such as failure to grow without a physical explanation.

Foster Care and Termination of Parental Rights Abuse and neglect findings may result in the temporary removal of children from the home. In these cases, the children enter into foster care. When children enter into the foster care system, the government assumes custody of the children, while the parents maintain legal rights over the children. Foster care aims to provide a temporary home for the children while the legal parents improve their ability to provide a safe home. Foster care placements may include homes of family members, known as kinship care, homes of families in the community that have licenses from foster care agencies, and larger group-homes or facilities. Foster parents maintain most day-to-day decision-making responsibilities for the children, while the state remains responsible for the safety of the children. Concurrent planning for a return to the biological parents and adoption often occurs, as the court considers the efforts of the parents working toward the return of the children and the efforts of the government to support the parents. If parents do not meet the court requirements for the provision of a safe home and

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supervision of the children, the court has the authority to terminate the rights of the parent. The court must first find clear and convincing evidence the parent is unfit and then find the termination of parental rights is in the child’s best interest.

Adoption The termination of parental rights enables the adoption of children. With the termination of parental rights, the biological parent no longer has any legal parental rights to the child. Adoption provides the adoptive parents the same legal rights and obligations as biological parents. Through the adoption process, the court investigates the best interest of the child and examines the qualities and conditions of the prospective parent. Adoption decrees replace the birth certificates of the adoptees, expunging the names of the birth parents, granting adoptees with a new last name, and prohibiting knowledge of the birth parents. Proceedings that are closed to the public and exempt from open-record laws maintain confidentiality of the adoption, in addition to the possibility of criminal or contempt charges for disclosure of information regarding the proceedings. Open adoptions allow for the child and biological parents to maintain a relationship, often facilitated through an intermediary adoption agency.

Juvenile Justice The child welfare system regulates government intervention into abuse, neglect, foster care, and the termination of parental rights, while the juvenile justice system facilitates government intervention into antisocial behavior of children and youth. Youth enter the juvenile justice system for engaging in delinquent behavior or status offenses. Delinquency encompasses behaviors that qualify as crime when adults act in the same manner; the only difference is the actor is a legal child rather than a legal adult. Each state determines the age at which individuals are subject to adult criminal court jurisdiction. Each state also determines the age at which adult criminal court has jurisdiction for more serious crimes committed by youth who have not reached the legal age of adulthood. Status offenses encompass behaviors that violate laws specific to

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youth; if adults engage in similar behavior, it would not qualify as a crime. For example, skipping school, running away, drinking alcohol, and disobeying parents are all status offenses and within the jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice system maintains a historic goal of rehabilitation and protects the rights of the youth in the system. The process of adjudicating a youth delinquent contains fewer formalities than the adult criminal justice system but still results in serious consequences. The juvenile court emerged in the late 1800s as a mechanism to control and reform youth engaging in delinquent behavior. Few protections existed for youth in delinquency court until the late 1960s, when the Supreme Court recognized the serious consequences of courtinvolvement and granted due process protections for youth. The Supreme Court decision in In re Gault recognized the need for due process protections for youth. The Court, citing the severity of possible punishments in the juvenile justice system, established youth rights to defense counsel, notification of charges, cross-examination of witnesses, and the right against self-incrimination. In Supreme Court cases following In re Gault, youth received rights to the same standard of proof as afforded to adults in criminal court—beyond a reasonable doubt—and the prohibition of double jeopardy. Youth in delinquency court still do not have U.S. Constitutional rights to a jury trial, speedy trial, or bail; although some states do provide these rights to youth. Youth may enter the juvenile justice system through referrals by law enforcement (i.e., arrests), parents, schools, victims, and social service agencies. The U.S. Supreme Court found the outcome of youth encounters with law enforcement must take into consideration the age and circumstances of youth. The circumstances that amount to custody by law enforcement, thereby triggering the requirement of a Miranda warning, must consider the age of the youth. Legal limitations on search and seizure apply within school settings, although student privacy rights in schools also have legal limitations. School disciplinary policies and the placement of police officers in schools for safety purposes contribute to an influx of youth moving into the juvenile justice system through schoolrelated referrals and incidents. This process has become known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

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Following an adjudication of delinquency, youth will receive a disposition. In the juvenile justice system, disposition options include probation, placement in a facility, or participation in an alternative-to-placement program, often based in the community. Dispositions imposed by the juvenile court have indeterminate time frames and release from facilities depends on successful completion of the rehabilitative programming. Youth processed and found guilty in adult criminal court face more long-term legal consequences than youth in the juvenile justice system. The U.S. Supreme Court found some Constitutional protections for these youths, including the prohibition of the death penalty for youth under the age of 18, life without parole for youth under 18 with a nonhomicide conviction, and laws mandating sentences of life without parole for youth under 18. Federal laws offer financial incentives for states that comply with standards set by the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act. The Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act requires states to remove youth from adult corrections facilities entirely, or in approved circumstances to maintain sight and sound separation between youth and adults in correctional facilities, to keep status-offending youth out of secure detention or confinement facilities, and to address disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile justice system in each state.

Contracts, Torts, and Property Law Children have a special status in areas of civil law, in addition to the legal systems designated specifically to address youth issues. Laws governing the rights, obligation, and protections of youth in the areas of contracts, torts, and property take into consideration the developmental differences between children and adults. Generally, children under the age of 18 may not enter into a contract. This restriction reflects a desire to protect children from coercive adults. Children who do enter into a contract prior to the age of 18 have the ability to void the contract based on age. This foundational legal framework restricts marriage to individuals over the age of 18, except with parental consent and judicial approval. Restrictions on the ability to contract also impact children’s rights to property. Although children have the ability to own

property, they do not have the contractual rights to manage property. Often, a legal guardianship is required, so an adult can manage property on behalf of the child. Similarly, in most cases, an individual must be over the age of 18 to write a will, and most children’s property will pass to their parents upon death. In the area of tort law, children maintain some responsibility for wrongdoing, depending on age. Legally, children under the age of 5 do not have capacity to be negligent. Children over the age of 5 carry a legal responsibility that increases with age. A determination of a child’s legal responsibility in a torts claim rests on a judgment of what constitutes reasonable behavior of other children the same age, intelligence, and experience. Generally, children who participate in adult activities, such as driving a car or using a firearm, will carry the same level of responsibility as an adult engaged in the same activity.

International Law The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) provides a framework for the rights of children across the world. This international treaty establishes children as deserving of specialized care and consideration, in addition to the provision of basic human rights. These rights include, but are not limited to, protection from discrimination, preservation of identity, the opportunity to be heard, freedom of expression, and rights to education, health treatments, and parental care. The UNCRC prioritizes the best interests of the child and asserts that any separation from parents, against the will of the child, does not occur without judicial review. The United States has not ratified the UNCRC, which renders it without legal authority in the United States and limits its influence in establishing youth-related policies across the country. Further, in order to comply with the treaty, the United States would likely need to review and revise policies related to juvenile justice and immigration to bring U.S. laws and practices into compliance with the UNCRC.

Emancipation The mature minor doctrine establishes a basis for courts to allow children to make legal decisions

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related to their own wellbeing before the age of majority when they articulate a well-reasoned preference to the court. Similarly, the legal process of emancipation allows for children to receive legal rights of an adult and removes children from their parents’ authority and financial support permanently. Emancipated children also lose many of the legal protections afforded to children. Once emancipated, children hold the rights to contract, marry, make medical decisions, and manage property, among other adult rights, but they are also subject to legal liability for their decisions. In deciding whether to emancipate a child, the court will look to the best interest of the child and the cause for the emancipation request. The laws impacting children in the United States reflect the rights and obligations of children as balanced against the rights of parents, and the obligation of parents and the government to protect children. While children have some legal rights, often these rights have accompanying limitations and children still carry obligations to obey their parents and the law. Emily Pelletier See also Child Welfare; Children’s Rights; Juvenile Justice, International; School Desegregation, U.S.; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Abrams, D. E., Ramsey, S. H., & Mangold, S. V. (2017). Children and the law: Doctrine, policy, and practice. St. Paul, MN: West Academic Publishing. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Feld, B. C. (2017). The Evolution of the Juvenile Court: Race, Politics, and the Criminalizing of Juvenile Justice. New York, NY: NYU Press. doi:10.2307/j .ctt1pwtbmh Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48 (2010). In re Gault, 387 US 1 (1967). J. D. B. v. North Carolina, 564 U.S. 261 (2011). Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 2002. 42 U.S.C. 5601 (2012). Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923). Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012). New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985). Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).

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Ramsey, S., & Abrams, D. (2011). Children and the Law in a Nutshell. (4th ed.). Minneapolis, MN: West Academic Publishing. Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005). Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969). Woodhouse, B. B. (2008). Hidden in plain sight. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. UNICEF. (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. New York, NY: UNICEF

Children and U.S. Adoption Literature Literary representations of adoption can be found in all periods of writing in the United States, beginning with 17th-century Puritan texts such as sermons and diaries and continuing through today with nonfictional work such as memoirs and essays and creative forms such as novels, short stories, poems, and plays. The treatment of adoption in this literature varies as widely as the genres themselves, reflecting the cultural norms associated with adoption beliefs and practices at the time. In particular, these concerns involve the amount of secrecy or openness associated with adoption and the degree to which adoption is either stigmatized or embraced as an alternative to forming families through biological kinship. This entry considers how a study of representations of adoption in American literature can reveal much about how conceptions of children, families, and the nation interrelate and also change over time. The United States can be said to have a special relationship to adoption, having led Western nations with passage, in Massachusetts in 1851, of the first adoption law designed to protect the interests of the child. With its strong emphasis on bloodlines and inheritance, England did not pass a similar law until 1926. Although U.S. family law is influenced by English common law, the Massachusetts statute represents a milestone in the history of the nation, which frequently associates itself with the qualities of childhood, youth, and optimism and fosters a sense of identity that is acquired or chosen rather than inherited. In this sense, U.S. culture is positively inclined toward adoption as an expression of self-making

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and hopeful potential. Many literary representations of adoption reflect these affirmative qualities. However, despite being known as a nation of self-starters that rewards merit, not lineage, in the United States adherence to genealogical norm endures, resulting in an overall attitude of ambivalence toward adoption.

Colonial Through Nineteenth Century In literature of the 17th-century Puritans, adoption is an open rather than a secret matter, sanctioned by the Bible and religious teachings that describe parallels between the adoption of a child by caring adults and the adoption of a believer by God. Preacher Cotton Mather (1663–1728) in his 1711 sermon, “Orphanotrophium. Or, Orphans wellprovided for,” writes that families should open their homes to orphaned children and introduces the notion of adoption as salvation, a trope that runs through literature about adoption through the present time. Adoption was also consistent with the Puritan practice of “placing out,” whereby children lived with nonbiologically related adults for the purposes of education, support, or training. However, this embrace of adoption was mediated by a Calvinist society that was highly patriarchal and intensely genealogical. For example, to be included in the assumed contract between God and his elect, a child had to be born to church members; even then, the child was not necessarily saved. This genealogical belief system led to restrictive understandings of kinship. John Winthrop (1588–1649), governor of the Massachusetts Colony, famously asserted the connection between family and community when he wrote in “A Defense of an Order of Court” that family is a microcosm of society and vice versa, but he also expressed ambivalence about adoption when he said that a family is not obligated to accept all newcomers. By the early 19th century, literature about adoption began to flourish in the United States, in tandem with the development of fiction as a popular form of reading for a growing middle class, including children. By the 1820s, historical romances about the republic enjoyed popularity. Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) hailed the U.S. founding fathers at the same time that

they grappled with the encroachment of White settlement on American Indian lands. Both Child and Sedgwick show the complexities of adoption across cultures. They follow the popular genre of the captivity narrative with its three-part structure of capture, affliction, and redemption to depict White children abducted by Indians. They also depict young Indians in indentured service to Whites and Whites’ voluntary immersion into Indian families and tribes. In Sedgwick’s re-creation of the Massachusetts settlement under Governor Winthrop’s rule, an Indian girl, Magawisca, taken captive during the Pequod War, serves the governor’s household and forms bonds with Puritan children; at the same time, the White protagonist’s captured sister marries and is presumably happy with a Pequod brave. Child, in her novel, produces a bold narrative of Indian–White intermarriage, with the child of this marriage adopted into Anglo culture. By the 1850s, the domestic novel surpassed the historical novel in popularity. Orphans and adoptions figure prominently in these narratives about White, middle-class U.S. childhood. Why so many stories of adoption in the Jacksonian era? The answer involves more than formal considerations of plot: Homeless children can have more adventures than children nestled securely in a family circle. The outpouring of adoption fiction in the mid-19th century responded to widespread changes in U.S. society, with writers representing the anxieties and hopes associated with these changes through the trope of adoption. The adoption plot emerged as a form commensurate with a new republican conception of the family as a nonhierarchically grouping of individuals whose will to be together is as important as blood ties. The adoption plot also correlated positively with the celebration of democratic individualism, freedom from English influence, and sense of unlimited U.S. potential. Bestsellers such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Susanna Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) fuel a spirit of democratic individualism by demonstrating how a child severed from biological roots acquires identity through resourcefulness, independence, and opportunity—all qualities aligned with the nation’s sense of itself as a growing republic. Adoption in these novels tells the story of a nation that is cohesive yet elastic,

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capable of extending its boundaries to absorb new ideas and individuals. The adopted child thus embodies a belief in individual improvement and in national progress not only deemed possible but also divinely ordered. Adoption also serves a corrective function in these 19th-century novels. By definition, conservative and recuperative adoption replicates the original family structure and thereby calms middle-class fears over instabilities caused by demographic change and unprecedented national growth. Readers’ apprehensions over urbanization and immigration were assuaged by narrative plots that begin with familial rupture but end with domestic security. If orphans symbolize unchecked liberty and the threat of social disorder, then happily placed adoptees illustrate the positive effect of freedom suitably restrained. Such is the case for White middle-class children. African American children, such as those found in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical novel Our Nig (1859), fair less well. The orphaned Topsy in Stowe’s novel is educated but neither adopted nor loved by a White abolitionist woman who takes her in; the abandoned Frado in Wilson’s tale suffers debilitating cruelty and neglect at the hands of the White northern family that shelters her. The shaping power of gender and class are also evident in adoption literature of the 19th century, sometimes called the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. The number of female adoptees surpasses that of male adoptees in these narratives, as if to suggest that in accordance with their expected domestic roles, girls are better served by adoption than boys. Ellen Montgomery in Warner’s novel and Gerty Flint in Cummins’s exemplify the female adoption success story, with their protagonists’ compliance, piety, and domesticity. In contrast, male protagonists such as those found in Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) are often mentored by an adoptive figure but not adopted. Alger’s boys accept help as a means toward independence and financial success; Twain’s Huck bonds with an escaped slave before setting out, alone, for the westward territory. Louisa May Alcott, famous for depicting U.S. childhood in Little Women (1868–1869), demonstrates in a sequel, Jo’s Boys (1886), that class and

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breeding make some children more adoptable than others. The boy most resistant to Mrs. Jo and Professor Bhaer’s reformist school agenda is Dan Keane, a street orphan who first appears in Little Men when he is accepted on a trial basis and then expelled for rowdy behavior. Dan is the most troubled and romantic of Jo’s boys. Although he has the benefit of a Plumfield education, he cannot settle on a career path as the other boys do. He is fundamentally different— that is, different by nature—and no amount of adoptive care can bridge the gap between his original, wild state and the evolved, cultivated young man that his teachers wish him to become. In short, Dan is too independent, too severed from genealogical supports, to benefit from adoption.

Twentieth Century to the Present Jo’s Boys presages the direction that adoption literature took in the first half of the 20th century. Just as a Calvinist belief in original sin had given way to a 19th-century sentimental culture of Christian nurture, faith yielded to scientific views of adoption influenced by Darwinian principles. Whereas religious teachings had placed value on the saved child, whose adoption often helped reform others, now the child was assessed in terms of its genetic makeup. Instead of emphasizing the ameliorative effects of nurture, adoption literature reflected these new developments in science and psychology as well as the emerging schools of social work. A practice of matching children and adoptive families according to appearance and traits such as ethnicity and race emerged. Adoption became secret and often carried a quality of suspicion or stigma. One novel about displacement and alienation, Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), conveys the failure of nurture when its female protagonist, uneducated and pregnant out of wedlock after a summer fling, ends up married to her adoptive father. William Faulkner, in Light in August (1932), explores the confounding pull of blood, the stigma of illegitimacy, and racialized difference in his portrayal of the ill-fated, mixed-race Joe Christmas, who is first abandoned, then adopted and abused, and eventually rejected by his society. Joe’s final act of murder is both revenge for the mistreatment he endures and a suicidal wish.

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The stereotype of the murderous adoptee also appears in the novel The Bad Seed (1954), by William March. In this novel, which was adapted for film, the concern about bad blood becomes hysteria when a devoted mother, Christine Penmark, realizes that her seemingly perfect little girl, Rhoda, is a cold-blooded murderer. The explanation for Rhoda’s evil actions comes when her mother, who was adopted as a young child, discovers that her birth mother was Bessie Denker, a notorious serial killer. Rhoda is the irredeemable “bad seed” who has inherited her birth grandmother’s criminality. Wharton’s theme, that the adopted child falls victim to self-serving adoptive parents, is also playwright Edward Albee’s focus in his autobiographical The American Dream, which premiered in 1961. Although some literature promotes a positive view of adoption, from a contemporary perspective it also reflects a genealogical bias. For example, Valentina P. Wasson’s classic The Chosen Baby (1939), aimed at children as well as adults, was groundbreaking for its time but was subsequently criticized for stigmatizing adoption with the words such as chosen and special. Adoption literature from the second half of the 20th century to the present is abundant and multifaceted. It has been fueled by the open adoption movement, campaigns for adoptee and birth mother rights, wide-ranging scholarship on adoption and kinship, and popular representations of adoption in film, news, and other media. In the 1970s, activists agitated for open records; their efforts, focused on adoptees’ rights to know their origins, took place within a larger context of sexual liberalization and civil rights advocacy. The search movement, which resulted in adoptees uniting with birth mothers, helped reconfigure adoption in a way that shifted voice and power, even if minimally, from adoptive parents to birth parents; it also generated resistance from birth mothers who wished to remain anonymous. Trailblazing author and proponent of open adoption Betty Jean Lifton writes first-person accounts of the psychological effects of being adopted in Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter (1975) and Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (1979). Lorraine Dusky’s Birthmark (1979) addresses the social pressure unmarried women in the 1950s and 1960s felt to relinquish their

children and led the way for numerous memoirs by birth mothers, including a lively discourse that continues today about language, voice, and power, such as whether to replace the term birth mother with first mother or mother. An accelerating rate of transnational and transracial adoptions in the early 1990s focused attention on the flow of children from one nation to another and related issues of assimilation and cultural preservation. As adoption practices moved from secrecy to openness, literature reflected this shift. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born (2000) tells the internationally adopted child its birth story, acknowledging both losses and gains involved with adoption. A body of work has emerged by Korean American adoptees as this cohort reaches maturity—for example, Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Somebody’s Daughter: A Novel (2006) and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015). A large corpus of literature recounts the experience of international adoption from China. The children’s books When You Were Born in China by Sara Dorow (1997), Mommy Near, Mommy Far by Carol Peacock (2000), and We See the Moon by Carrie A. Kitze (2003) all address the child’s origins and the historically elided role of the birth mother. Children’s literature similarly explores metaphors that honor rather than stigmatize the adoptee. For example, Rose Kent’s Kimchi & Calamari (2007), narrated by a Korean–Italian adoptee confused about his identity, suggests how adoption can lead to a fusion of identity and new understandings of self, family, and nation. Popular fiction, such as Gish Jen’s Love Wife (2004) and Anne Tyler’s Digging to China (2006), explores the complexities of international adoption from various points of view and in disparate voices. Adoption across U.S. cultures is the subject of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and Pigs in Heaven (1993), which address issues of identity as well tribal rights. Rose A. Lewis’s I Love You Like Crazy Cakes (2000), Mary Zisk’s The Best Single Mom in the World (2001), and Jean Davies Okimoto’s The White Swan Express (2002) embrace nontraditional families, including those with single mothers. The adopted child’s physical difference from its adoptive parents is explored in

Children and Youth in Prison

Katie-Bo: An Adoption Story by Iris L. Fisher (1988) and Is That Your Sister? A True Story by Catherine Bunnin and Sherry Bunnin (1992). Reflecting current trends, A Mother for Chocco by Keiko Kasza (1992) rejects matching physical traits as a goal of adoption and relies instead on standards of care and commitment. Contemporary literature continues to address the diversity of the adoption experience across race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and nationality. The most successful of these texts include points of view of all involved in the adoption process—birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents—and suggests ways to rethink notions of family so that adoption is seen as part of the norm rather than the exception and comes to be celebrated rather than stigmatized. Carol J. Singley See also Adoption, History of; Adoption, Transnational; Children’s Literature; Young Adult (YA) Literature

Further Reading Askeland, L. (2006). Children and youth in adoption, orphanages, and foster care: A historical handbook and guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Callahan, C. (2011). Kin of another kind: Tansracial adoption in American literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carp, E. (Ed.). (2009). Adoption in America: Historical perspectives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Homans, M. (2013). The imprint of another life: Adoption narratives and human possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jerng, M. (2010). Claiming others: Transracial adoption and national belonging. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Laird, H. (Ed.). (2002). The adoption issue [Special issue]. Tulsa studies in women’s literature, 21(2). Nelson, C. (2003). Little strangers: Portrayals of adoption and foster care in America, 1850–1929. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Novy, M. (Ed.). (2001). Imagining adoption: Essays on literature and culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Singley, C. (2011). Adopting America: Childhood, kinship, and national identity in literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Children

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Youth

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Prison

According to Juvenile Justice Statistics: National Report Series Bulletin, as of 2018, there were over 55,000 children who are held in prison and training facilities in the United States. A 2014 study by the Justice Policy Institute found that the U.S. public pays at least $8 billion a year for these facilities, but some estimates suggest the cost is much higher. In the past, the criminal justice system treated those under 18 years old similarly to adults. In fact, the first person sentenced to death in colonial North America was a child under the age of 18 years. Under the English common law, those 7 years of age and older could be treated as adults. In fact, some children as young as 10 years old have been given the death penalty and subsequently executed. Fortunately, much has changed since the 19th century. Researchers and policy makers have discovered childhood and the developmental stages through which children progress. Because of this, the juvenile justice system developed with the goal of rehabilitation. This entry examines the origins of juvenile delinquency, how it intersects with race, class, and gender, and the criminal justice system’s response.

The Discovery of Childhood and Juvenile Delinquency Beginning in the mid-1800s, those involved in the child savers movement worked hard to enact laws and change public sentiment for those under the age of 15 years. Child savers promoted child labor laws, compulsory education, better social environments, and better family situations for children. Child savers also fought to have the criminal justice system see juveniles as different from adult criminals. The goal was to develop a juvenile justice system that focused on children’s developmental needs and sought to rehabilitate rather than simply punish them. In 1899, Cook County (Chicago), IL, started the first juvenile justice court system in the United States. In the first few decades of the 20th century, every state would do the same. Initially, the juvenile justice system had few procedural safeguards; the juvenile court judges were allowed to do what they thought was necessary for the rehabilitation

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of the child. As a result, juvenile justice courts were typically less punitive in nature and assigned lower levels of punishment. However, this would not always the case. By the 1960s, the juvenile court had developed some procedural safeguards, such as the right to confront witnesses and the right to an attorney. In the 21st century, childhood, adolescence, and even young adulthood are recognized as a distinct period of life, which are separate from adulthood. People in the United States tend to offer juveniles a number of rights that increase as children grow into adults. For instance, at age 13 years juveniles may consent, without their parents’ approval, to participate in some activities on the Internet. By age 16 years, many states allow people to get a driver’s license. At 18 years old, juveniles have reached the age of majority and can leave their parents’ home, enter into contracts, and be charged with a crime as an adult and serve time in an adult jail or prison. However, American law does not allow people to purchase and consume alcohol until they are 21 years old. Additionally, most car rental companies do not allow people to rent a car until they are 25 years old. The period of time for which children, adolescents, and young adults are expected to remain dependent is increasing. This can be seen in several ways. Child support payments from non-custodial parents may be required until the person turns 21 years old. Juveniles who commit serious delinquent acts can be sentenced to juvenile life, meaning they are kept in a training school until he or she is 21 years old. During Barack Obama’s presidency, young adults became able to stay on their parents’ health insurance plan until they turned 26 years old. Contrasting from today, there was a time in recent history that juveniles in some states were allowed to marry as young as age 14 years (with their parent’s or the court’s approval). In other states, there was no specified age to get married as long as their parents or the courts provided written consent for the marriage.

Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender From the late 1990s through 2015, there has been a sharp decrease in the number of juveniles placed in residential treatment. Glaring disparities remain regarding the race, class, gender, and sexuality of

juveniles of those who are placed. In the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Canada, ethnic minorities are more than three times more likely than White, non-Hispanic children to be placed into residential treatment. In fact, in many parts of the United States, racial and ethnic minorities make up a majority of all youth placed. There are several reasons for this large disparity. Minority youth are more likely to live in poverty and to be more likely to live in dangerous neighborhoods. In addition, minority youth are more likely to be surveilled by law enforcement, more likely to be arrested for similar crimes committed, and receive longer sentences than Whites for similar crimes. Girls are incarcerated much less often than boys but also for less serious infractions. In the United States, girls are three times more likely than boys to be placed for status offenses such as curfew violations and underage drinking. Female delinquency experts, such as Meda Chesney-Lind, have noted that, as girls make up an increasing proportion of placements, their placement for serious crimes have not increased. It seems to be the case that girls’ minor infractions are now being met with formal sanctions such as residential treatment whereas in the past they may have been handled informally. Although not quite as high as other categories, juveniles identifying as homosexual are 2 times more likely to be placed for status offenses. The experience of homosexual juveniles seems to be similar to that of girls: relatively harsh punishment for minor infractions.

Increasing Rights for People Involved in the Criminal Justice and Juvenile Justice Systems The 1960s was a time when both the adult criminal justice and juvenile justice systems were affording more rights to those accused. It was during this time that the Miranda warning was codified and the death penalty was ruled to be a “cruel and unusual punishment.” From the 1960s through the early 2000s, the rights of those in the adult criminal justice and juvenile justice systems were somewhat eroded. Later, in the 1970s, the United States Supreme Court reversed its earlier decision and found the death penalty was no longer to be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Children and Youth in Prison

Additionally, it was during this time that public sentiment began to change. There was the 1974 research article by Martinson that was interpreted to mean that nothing works when it comes to rehabilitating those who had broken the law. Media outlets also began to report on the superpredator criminal and delinquent offender. Popular culture movies in the 1970s such as Dirty Harry and Deathwish painted pictures of criminals that were allowed to murder and rape with impunity because the criminal and juvenile justice systems had afforded too many rights to law breakers. As a result of the research articles and popular culture movies, everyday Americans were now more interested in the adult criminal justice and juvenile justice systems. There was more pressure on policy makers than ever to analyze and rectify the current issues at hand. There was time for a reform. From the 1970s through early 2000s, juvenile justice reform lead a charge that resulted in juveniles having harsher punishments and being treated more like adult criminals. For instance, some states removed certain delinquent acts from the juvenile court. Therefore, in some states, there were instances when the crime of murder was only adjudicated in the adult court. Meaning, those juveniles who committed murder would be treated like adults. Other states developed a way that specific juvenile offences could be waived, after a court hearing, to the adult court. Finally, other states began to waive all juvenile offenders to the adult courts and it was up to the offender’s lawyer to petition to move the offender’s case back to the juvenile court.

Juveniles as Super-Predators It is true that criminal and delinquents acts, both property and violent crimes, peak in the late teens. From ages 18 to 25 years, the number of crimes decreases by about half. This seems to be true cross-culturally. Those in their late teens and early adulthood appear to be the biggest risk takers and most likely to commit criminal acts. Despite what some individuals may think, the juvenile court was originally designed to deal with children who had committed very serious acts such as rape and murder. When the public hears about those under 18 years being dealt with by the juvenile court,

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many people believe that the offender (delinquent) will only receive a “slap on the wrist” for their delinquent acts. In contrast to this belief, even in the adult criminal justice system, judges tend to take into account the offenders’ age and the seriousness of his or her crime. If people who commit criminal acts are to be rehabilitated, it is most likely going to happen when the person is young. The popular media has shaped public sentiment by focusing disproportionately on the serious delinquent acts committed by juvenile delinquents. Many adult criminals have had some involvement with the justice system when he or she was a juvenile. However, rehabilitation of children is not impossible and can be a goal of the juvenile justice system, as well as the adult system, particularly with young-adult, first-time offenders.

Need for Rehabilitation In the first half of the 20th century, judges and prosecutors sought ways to keep children in the community. In contrast, by the late 1900s, increasing numbers of juvenile delinquents were placed in training schools (i.e., juvenile prisons) as well as placed in adult prisons. This get tough approach to adult criminals and juvenile delinquents can be seen by instances when juveniles were executed for delinquent acts that they committed before they turned 18 years old. By the 2000s juveniles would, once again, be treated differently than adult criminals. Until 2005, juveniles 16 years of age and older who were adjudicated in the adult court could be given the death penalty. It was until 2012 that juvenile courts were not required to sentence a juvenile delinquent to life without the possibility of parole. There is no question that prison can be a dangerous place. There are countless instances where the offender, rather than be corrected, may actually be taught to be a better criminal while being incarcerated. Additionally, there is strong research that suggests that prison can damage people psychologically and may break the offender rather than correct them. Incarcerated juveniles, because their brains have not fully matured, are even more susceptible to psychological trauma and to learning to identify as a criminal. Contrary to what some individuals may think, juveniles have the capacity to be rehabilitated. In

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fact, those delinquents who have committed very serious acts such as murder and rape can, with the proper intervention, go on to lead productive lives and play meaningful roles in their communities. The single best predictor of a juvenile delinquent becoming an adult criminal is not the severity of the crime, but rather how early in life they started participating in delinquency. Early intervention in the lives of delinquents, therefore, is essential and can save taxpayers millions of dollars. For every juvenile delinquent who becomes an adult criminal, society spends more money as the criminal processes through the criminal justice system (e.g., police, courts, corrections, probation, and parole).

Juvenile Training Schools Juveniles, like adults, may be incarcerated because of their behavior. Facilities are typically categorized by risk factor: minimum, medium, and ­maximum-security levels. Juveniles who are at a training school are in juvenile prison. When individuals visit a maximum security juvenile facility, they will see the security features, cells, and solitary confinement that are similar to adult prisons. Minimum security facilities may simply have locked doors. Maximum security juvenile facilities may have razor wire fences, sally ports, and locked cell doors where juveniles spend most of their time. Those juveniles who do not comply with the training school rules run the risk of being placed into solitary confinement. Some penal experts consider solitary confinement to be “cruel and unusual punishment” with respect to adults. Due to their age and intellectual and emotional development, juveniles are even more likely than adults to be damaged by solitary confinement. Juvenile incarceration costs between $30,000 and $70,000 per year per juvenile. Part of this is because juvenile facilities must provide education for every juvenile who has not completed high school. Juvenile incarceration, like adult incarceration, should only be used as a last resort: because the person is a danger to society. Compared to the brain development of an adult, juveniles have immature brains. They are more likely to rely on emotion rather than logic. Young people have trouble recognizing the future consequences of their actions. They have difficulties with motivation, impulse control, judgment, and culpability.

Incarcerating juveniles can exacerbate their mental health problems. Some studies have shown that one of three incarcerated juveniles had clinical depression when they entered the facility. Juveniles are also much more likely than adults to have suicidal ideation and completed suicides. Juveniles who are placed in solitary confinement are 15–20 times more likely to kill themselves compared to those who never encounter solitary confinement. When many juvenile delinquents are placed into the same facility, many of them will increase their chances of substance abuse violence, and adjustment problems. If incarceration is bad for adults, it is much worse for children. Approximately five out of seven juveniles will return to training schools within a year of release. Nearly one in 10 juveniles is sexually abused in a training facility. Incarcerating juveniles, particularly for property crime, interrupts their psychological and social development. Congregating many juveniles with psychological issues can cause major problems. Incarcerated juveniles, like adults, can learn antisocial behavior from one another. Juveniles, therefore, upon release may to violate the law more instead of less. Also, there is a natural aging out of delinquency. Most youth engage in risk-taking behavior, but as they get older this behavior decreases even when there is no intervention. Incarcerating juveniles tends to disrupt the aging out process and keep the juveniles in the mode of risk taking. In fact, just under half of all incarcerated juveniles have developmental disabilities that can be exacerbated by incarceration. Many of these developmentally delayed children will not return to school when released.

Concluding Comments Juveniles have immature brains and should be dealt with as such by the justice system. In the 1800s, Americans have passed child labor laws, mandatory education laws, and tried to save or rehabilitate children who were in bad social or family situations. Since the late 1800s the United States has treated juveniles differently—through the juvenile justice system. The United States has gone through periods of time where rehabilitation was the focus and where punishment was the focus. The most extreme measure that juvenile

Children as Citizens

justice can take to correct a young person is to incarcerate them in training schools. Training schools are expensive and detrimental to the development of children. Training schools congregate many juveniles with problems and exacerbate mental health problems, learning disability problems, and antisocial behavior. More than 70% of all incarcerated juveniles who are released will return. Children should only be incarcerated because they are a danger to others. Children should only be incarcerated as a last option. Daniel W. Phillips, Ariel E. Carter, Eric M. Carter, and Wesley V. Carter See also Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U. S. History; Police; Children and, Street Children; Street Children, History of; Violence; Youth Gangs; Youth Justice

Further Readings Benner, G. J., Sanders, E. A., Nelson, J. R., & Ralston, N. C. (2013). How individual and school aggregate baseline behavior levels moderate response to a primary level behavior intervention. Behavioral Disorders, 38(2), 73. Chesney-Lind, M., & Jones, N. (Eds.). (2010). Fighting for girls: Critical perspectives on gender and violence. Albany: State University of New York Press. doi:10.1007/s10964-010-9618-2 Cullen, F. T., & Jonson, C. L. (2014). Labeling theory and correctional rehabilitation: Beyond unanticipated consequences. In D. P. Farrington & J. Murray (Eds.), Labeling theory: Empirical tests (pp. 63–88). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. doi:10.4324/ 9780203787656–4 Feld, B. C., & Schaefer, S. (2010). The right to counsel in juvenile court: The conundrum of attorneys as an aggravating factor at disposition. Justice Quarterly, 27(5), 713–741. doi:10.1080/07418820903292292 Finkelhor, D., Turner, H. A., Shattuck, A., & Hamby, S. L. (2015). Prevalence of childhood exposure to violence, Crime and abuse: Results from the national survey children’s exposure to violence. JAMA Pediatrics, 169, 746–754. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics .2015.0676 Hockenberry, S. (2018). Juvenile justice statistics: National report series bulletin. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Justice Policy Institute. (2014). Calculating the full price tag for youth incarceration. Washington, DC: Author.

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MacKenzie, D. L., & Farrington, D. P. (2015). Preventing future offending of delinquents and offenders: What have we learned from experiments and meta-analysis? Journal of Experimental Criminology, 11, 565–595. doi:10.1007/s11292-015-9244-9 May, J., Osmond, K., & Billick, S. (2014). Juvenile delinquency treatment and prevention: A literature review. Psychiatric Quarterly, 85(3), 295–301. doi:10.1007/s11126-014-9296-4 Moore, S., & Hobbs, A. (2016). Guardian Ad Litem. In C. J. Schreck, M. J. Leiber, K. Welch, & H. Ventura Miller (Eds.), Encyclopedia of juvenile delinquency and justice. New York, NY: WileyBlackwell. doi:10.1002/ 9781118524275.ejdj0226 Moore, S., & Hobbs, A. (2016). Juvenile justice alternatives initiative. In C. J. Schreck, M. J. Leiber, K. Welch, & H. Ventura Miller (Eds.), Encyclopedia of juvenile delinquency and justice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. National Research Council. (2013). Reforming juvenile justice: A developmental approach. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. O’Neill, S. C., Strnadová, I., & Cumming, T. M. (2017). Systems challenges to community reentry for incarcerated youths: A review. Children and Youth Services Review, 79, 29–36. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth .2017.05.025 Snyder, H. N. (2012). Juvenile delinquents and juvenile justice clientele: Trends and patterns in crime and justice. In B. Feld & D. Bishop (Eds.), Oxford handbook of juvenile justice (pp. 3–30). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780195385106.013.0001

Children

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Citizens

Citizenship is a key concept in the social and political sciences, which over the past two decades has also filtered into childhood studies. During this period, there has been a surge in theorizing and especially empirical studies of children as citizens in regard to rights and participation. The concept of citizenship, although commonly defined primarily in terms of the individual’s relationship to the nation-state, essentially also encompasses the self—other relationship in regard to local communities and global society—and extends beyond rights and into the realm of responsibilities, participation, and identity. In her 2007 article entitled,

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Inclusive Citizenship: Realizing the Potential, Ruth Lister refers to citizenship as a momentum concept (i.e., a developing concept which continually unleashes more and more egalitarian and antihierarchical potential). Today, the concept of citizenship is common currency not only in liberal and communitarian circles but has joined the ranks of what Gerard Delanty, in his 2000 book Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture and Politics, has termed “radical theories of politics” which connect citizenship with theories of radical democracy and inclusion. This conceptual evolution has entailed a turn toward critical analytical approaches that reveal power relations, such as showing how the generational order intersects with other social orders (e.g., class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality) that produce discrimination, domination, and exclusion. There has simultaneously been a shift away from thinking about citizenship as a formal status, towards a focus on practices and the identity dimension of citizenship, including the subjective feeling of belonging which has been referred to as lived citizenship. These developments in theorizing about citizenship make the concept compelling in critical analyses of childhood as a social phenomenon, and of the social positioning of children of all ages in all circumstances. This entry presents these developments, starting with critiques of adultism in theorizing about citizenship norms, and then turning to Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and Delanty’s concept of citizen identity as a learning process, as these approaches offer a means to understand how children acquire a citizen identity. The entry further explores how the right to care is essential to children’s citizenship and draws attention to how children’s lived and intimate citizenship is both locally spatialized and influenced by global dynamics in the form of communication, international legislation, and flows of ideas. The entry concludes by exploring why more research is required to fully understand children as citizens.

analyses of children’s citizenship. In his book Citizenship, Social Class and Other Essays from 1950, Marshall conceptualized citizenship as a formal relationship between the individual and the state. He was preoccupied with the rights of the working class, and (like everybody else at that time and also more and less today within mainstream social science) he took children’s position in the generational order, including their exclusion from some citizenship rights, as natural. Thus, although his addition of social rights to the political and civil rights enshrined in traditional liberal theories of citizenship constitutes an important development of the concept of citizenship, potentially enabling analyses of inter- and intragenerational inequalities and social (in)justice, the notion of universal rights that runs through his theorizing contains a false universalism in which the norm for a citizen is imbued with adultism. This norm, combined with a dualistic construction of children and adults in which children are constructed as the other, implies that children are positioned as citizen becomings rather than citizen beings. Acknowledging this, and adding the critique that traditional citizenship theorizing is based on false assumptions about the autonomous self, Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha argues for a redefinition of citizenship rights in her 2005 article, A DifferenceCentered Alternative to Theorization of Children’s Citizenship Rights. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and anti-racist scholarship, she proposes a relational, difference-centered approach to children’s citizenship rights that goes beyond a focus on formal rights to encompass the lived experience of citizenship in which rights are practiced and perceived, participation is acknowledged and valued, and a subjective feeling of belonging becomes possible. Her approach is in line with the “radical theories of politics” and lived citizenship approach previously mentioned.

Adultism in Theories of Citizenship Norms

The theoretical developments in citizenship studies have also enabled acknowledgment of the identity dimension of citizenship. Here, Honneth’s theory of recognition is helpful in understanding how rights as practiced and perceived (conceptualized as legal recognition) and participation as acknowledged and valued (conceptualized as

The aforementioned theoretical developments and resulting concept of lived citizenship emerged from a gender- and diversity-inspired critique of T.  H. Marshall’s influential theory of social citizenship, which has also played a central role in

Children’s Identity as Citizens

Children as Citizens

social recognition) constitute two out of three central axes for children’s acquisition and maintenance of an identity as an equal citizens, and thus also their attainment of a feeling of belonging. Thus, in his 2007 book, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, he emphasizes that people’s relationship to themselves is based on an intersubjective process in which their attitude towards themselves and others emerges in their encounter with other people’s attitude towards them. He argues that if human beings are systematically denied recognition, individual suffering and social alienation will result. In his 1995 book, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, he suggests that the development and maintenance of a positive self and self-other relationship requires three kinds of recognition: emotional, legal, and social. Emotional recognition is about giving and receiving love and care in a relationship of mutual dependence (interdependence). Such relationships constitute the basis for establishing and maintaining self-confidence, which in turn is the precondition for mustering the courage to engage socially. Legal recognition is about enjoying the same rights as everybody else, which is intrinsic to one’s positioning as a morally responsible person and constitutes the basic premise for self-respect and respect for others. Social recognition is about being acknowledged and valued for one’s participation and is the basis of a person’s relationship to his or her concrete characteristics and abilities, and for achieving a feeling of belonging to a given community. Gerard Delanty’s everyday perspective on learning citizenship, which was presented in his 2003 paper Citizenship as a Learning Process: Disciplinary Citizenship Versus Cultural Citizenship, takes this line of thinking a step further in regard to understanding the processes that shape children’s (and other people’s) acquisition and maintenance of a feeling of belonging, as well as the capacity and preference for active citizen participation. In the article, he explains that citizenship identity grows—or is damaged—in and through everyday practices in a continuous learning process. Thus, children do not primarily acquire the identity and capacity to act as citizens through being taught about rights, duties, and culture, as seems to be the underlying assumption in many

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governmental strategies, but rather through social practices in everyday life. It is through these practices that children negotiate and learn about their citizenship rights, duties, and identities and acquire the capacity and motivation to act as citizens. Critically, Delanty emphasizes that the latter goes beyond cognitive competencies inasmuch as it also includes bodily and emotional dimensions such as unreflexive dispositions and motivations. Building on these ideas, he introduces a distinction between disciplinary and inclusive citizenship learning, in which the former produces exclusion and alienation, whereas the latter enhances a positive citizenship identity. Inclusive citizenship learning processes require difference-centered equality and respect. This involves not only rights and social recognition based on certain norms for what constitutes the good citizen but also a more basic appreciation of difference and a radical politics of democracy. Children’s inclusive citizenship learning processes also require that their experiences of harm and oppression can be voiced, and are only really inclusive if this voicing also creates a basis for change. Inclusive learning processes, therefore, not only enhance children’s ability to acquire a feeling of belonging and the competences and motivation for participation but also empower them with respect to their position in a given community by challenging adultism and bringing about changes in social institutions and culture. Conversely, children’s disciplinary citizenship learning is based on norms that define the right citizen or “the right kind of participation,” and which may be based on an adultist approach that intersects with other discriminatory mechanisms such as patriarchy and ethnocentrism. Such citizenship norms lay the foundation for discrimination between those who live up to the norms and those who do not, and by extension for what—to borrow a concept from Honneth— might be termed lack of recognition or even disrespect, with negative consequences for children’s feeling of belonging and their capacity for participation.

Adultism in Policy and Practice All these considerations urge us to focus on the situation of citizen norms and the related positioning of children in policy and practice, including

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the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is supposed to support children as citizens. However, the Convention is not unambiguous in this regard. Thus, for instance, Article 12 both ascribes children the right to express their views and to influence decision making but at the same time moderates these rights with reference to age and maturity, thereby displaying an adultist tendency in the norms it establishes for good citizen participation. Arguably, therefore, although in various other respects the Convention defines norms that counter child discrimination, it does not protect against age-based discrimination— quite the contrary. Moreover, in his 2014 book chapter Adultism and Age-Based Discrimination Against Children (in Dagmar Kutzar and Hanne Warming’s Children and Non-Discrimination: Interdisciplinary Textbook), Manfred Liebel argues that the same picture is evident when it comes to national legislation. It is crucial to pay attention to how adultist norms of what it takes to be a citizen are sustained in international conventions and national laws in order to engage in a critical analysis of children as citizens, as this poses barriers to recognition and inclusive citizenship learning processes and to children’s identity as equal citizens. Conversely, it could be argued that children receive positive discrimination too, for instance through protection rights. Although this could be seen as move towards a difference-centered approach to children’s citizenship, it still takes for granted a dualistic construction of children as vulnerable and in need of protection versus adults as robust and not in need of protection, which resonates with other dualistic constructions of children and adults in regard to competence, maturity, knowledge, etc., which lay the foundations for discrimination and nonrecognition. Finally, in some cases children may experience protection rights as discriminatory, for instance the right to protection from work (in the UN Convention On The Rights Of The Child 1989, Article 32), with the result that some children (either because they need to work to ensure their own and/or their family’s survival, or because they want to earn their own pocket money) evade this protection and enter the illegal or gray zone labor market, where they are exposed to exploitation and unregulated work environments. Such examples stress

the importance of not only analyzing children’s formal position and rights but also of studying practices and experiences, including those of the children themselves, as suggested by the lived citizenship approach.

Children as Glocal Citizens In terms of lived practice, children’s positions as citizens are spatialised in interrelated local and global power relations, as alluded to in the word glocal. Thus, children’s lived position as citizens is spatially multiscalar: Because children can transfer part of their citizenship identity from one space to another in the form of motivation, competencies, and interpretive schemes; because spaces as power relations are interrelated; and because even the most intimate issues have become the object of rights claims and governmental strategies. In regard to the transference of citizenship identity dimensions, Moosa-Mitha has shown how young people’s ways of relating to a given community, in addition to the citizen norms they are met with in that community, are connected to how they identify with and feel a sense of belonging or non-belonging to other communities at different scales and involving different kinds of distinctions (e.g., age, gender, religion, and ethnicity), as well as non-place-bound (e.g., virtual) communities. Regarding the link between space and power relations, the dualistic construction of children versus adults and the prevalence of adultist citizenship norms are global phenomena, which make them a central force in the shaping of children’s lived position as citizens through the interwoven discursive mechanism and material aspects. However, they are also subject to continuous change and negotiation at a local scale. Moreover, both as global and locally spatialized phenomena they are challenged and sustained through international regulation and increased trans-place communication and flows of ideas and information, for instance, ideas such as “the child as a competent agent,” “children as rights bearers,” and “children as the future of society,” as well as theories of child development. Likewise, such flows carry ideas about what it means to be a citizen involving both rights claiming (e.g., the right to care; and disciplinary citizenship norms such as those related to neoliberalism). Whether these

Children as Citizens

ideas enhance children’s position as equal citizens (beings) or rather position them as future citizens (becomings) depends as much on how these ideas are interrelated in practice as on any inherent essential meaning. This includes ideas about the right to care.

The Right to Give and Receive Care and Children’s Intimate Citizenship The idea of the right to care as a necessary supplement to the civil, political, and social rights identified by Marshall was first put forward by feminists for the purpose of theorizing women’s citizenship. As argued by Tom Cockburn in his 2005 article on Children and the Feminist Ethic of Care in the journal Childhood, this is potentially a valuable addition to theorizing about children’s citizenship, since the concept encompasses both the right to give and receive care. However, it could also have the opposite effect if it intersects with dualistic constructions of adults as caregivers and children as care receivers, in which caregivers are constructed as those who have control, and care receivers are depicted as not knowing what is best for them. Thus, the right to care needs to be coupled with the redefinition of the citizen subject from an autonomous self towards a relational self, and the consequent replacement of another dichotomous construction; namely dependence—independence with interdependence. Only then will the right to care enhance children’s position as equal citizens. Otherwise, children risk being labeled only as care receivers, neglecting their competences, responsibilities and contributions as care givers. This risk arises due to the generational order that constructs children as dependents and intersects with their othering, that is, with a discursive construction of children based on a dualistic view of children and adults which regards adults as the norm and depicts children as not-yet-rational, not-yet-reliable, not-yet-mature, and/or not-yet-responsible. The practice and lived experience of children’s right to receive and give care constitutes a core axis of what might be termed children’s intimate citizenship—a concept which like the concept of social rights is based on critiques of the publicprivate divide in traditional models of citizenship. The concept was introduced in Kenneth Plummer’s 2003 book, Intimate Citizenship: Private

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Decisions and Public Dialogues. Using this concept, he addresses how even the most private decisions and practices as well as the innermost emotional dimensions of our identity have become inextricably linked with public institutions, partly due to rights claiming and identity politics and partly to various governmental strategies including those inspired by neoliberal citizenship norms. Besides the right to care, children’s intimate citizenship also involves issues of “who to be cared by and who to care for?”—and not least “how?—and about ‘good parenting,” including support for schooling and the right to have a say (or not). Moreover, it also involves doing and feeling kinship and the meaning of blood relationships versus other relationships; feeling and practicing belonging to places, cultures, religions, and sexualities; and health and body practices and feelings.

Future Research on Children as Citizens The theoretical developments in citizenship studies that have ushered in a focus on lived and intimate citizenship makes the citizenship approach very powerful and promising for critical analyses of children’s positions and agency in society. Although it can be argued that there has been a surge in theorizing and especially empirical studies of children as citizens in regard to rights and participation, there is much more to be done in the field of research into children as citizens, not least in regard to spatialized analyses of children’s lived and intimate citizenship in a world characterized by global flows of ideas and information. Hanne Warming See also Adultism; Children as Political Subjects; Citizenship; Generationing; Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC; Participation Rights, UNCRC

Further Readings Baraldi, C., & Iervese, V. (Eds.). (2012). Participation, facilitation, and mediation: Children and young people in their social contexts. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203119617 Cockburn, T. (2012). Rethinking children’s citizenship: Theory, rights and interdependence. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

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Children as Competent Social Actors

Earls, F. J. (Ed.) (2011). The child as citizen: The annals of the American academy of political and social sciences series (Vol. 633). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hart, R. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Geneva, Switzerland: UNICEF International Child Development Centre. Invernizzi, A., & Williams J. (Eds.). (2008). Children and citizenship. London, UK: Sage. Kutzar, D., & Warming, H. (Eds.). (2014). Children and non-discrimination. Tallinn, Estonia: CREAN and University Press of Estonia. Lister, R. (2007). Inclusive citizenship: Realizing the potential. Citizenship Studies, 11(1), 49–61. doi:10.1080/13621020601099856 Moosa-Mitha, M. (2005). A difference-centered alternative to theorization of children’s citizenship rights. Citizenship Studies, 9(4), 369–388. doi:10.1080/ 13621020500211354 Nakata, S. (2015). Childhood citizenship, governance and policy: The politics of becoming adult. London, UK: Routledge. Percy-Smith, B., & Thomas, N. (Eds.). (2010). A handbook of children and young people’s participation. Perspectives from theory and practice. London, UK: Routledge. Wall, J. (2016). Children’s rights: Today’s global challenge. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Warming, H. (2011). Children’s participation and citizenship in a global age: Empowerment, tokenism or discriminatory disciplining? Social Work & Society, 9(1), 119–134. Warming, H. (Ed.). (2013). Participation, citizenship and trust in children’s lives. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Children as Competent Social Actors The idea that children are competent social actors was a founding tenet of the ‘new’ social study of childhood. It has been a powerful—and problematic—concept. Turning away from a purely developmental view of children and childhood, researchers were urged to recognise, and demonstrate, children’s active role in shaping their own lives, the lives of their families and communities, and broader society. There was a particular emphasis on reconceptualising the child in the research process itself, moving towards children

as active participants in research about their own lives, and sometimes as co-researchers. However, at the same time that the concept of the child as a competent social actor was flourishing, the idea was also being contested—particularly regarding the moral and philosophical roots of the concept, and how this concept operated as a Eurocentric normative claim about childhood. This entry offers an overview of the concept of the child as a competent social actor, highlights links to other key concepts in childhood studies, and explores several key connected debates concerning individualism, Eurocentrism, and competence.

Theories Supporting Children as Competent Social Actors The child as a competent social actor was included as one of six key tenets of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, as outlined by Alan Prout and Allison James in their seminal text. The concept of children as competent social actors is closely linked with other concerns in childhood studies towards understanding children as ‘beings in their own right’ rather than incomplete ‘becomings’ or future adults. Prout and James highlighted what they viewed as the failings of disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, which had largely focused on childhood as a period of socialisation and ‘becoming adult’, both biologically and socially. In the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, researchers across disciplines turned their attention instead to grapple with the here-and-now of childhood. For example, in the United Kingdom, the Economic and Social Research Council Children 5–16 Research Programme examined children’s social lives across 22 different research projects in order to develop new knowledge about children as competent social actors. The diverse topics studied included how children negotiate pathways through social welfare services, children’s experiences of online worlds, and disabled children’s experiences and perspectives on social life. As these examples suggest, the concept of the child as a competent social actor was a powerful one. It highlighted children’s important contributions to social life, which previously had gone unrecognised in academic research. The concept also opened up spaces for children to have a direct voice in social research about their lives, where

Children as Competent Social Actors

previously their own perspectives were rarely sought. Researchers reconsidered the role of children in the research process itself—from being the subjects of study about them, to active participants whose views are taken seriously, to children being involved as co-researchers themselves, and in some cases, children were supported to plan and lead their own research projects.

Children and Participation Rights The concept of the child as competent social actor is tied closely to other key concepts in childhood studies, particularly children’s participation rights as enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. With the inclusion of participation rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child departs significantly from preceding children’s rights instruments—which focused mainly on protection and welfare—and presented a view of the child as a subject in their own right, with the right to express their views and have those views taken into account. Clearly, then, children’s participation resonates with the image of the child as a competent social actor. Similarly, the concept of the child as a competent social actor goes hand in hand with considerations of children’s agency. For example, Berry Mayall traced a distinction between what it means to be a social actor and what it means to be an agent. She argued that while a social actor does something, an agent does something that makes a difference. Theorisations of children’s agency provoke questions about what it means for children to be competent social actors. The image of the child as a competent social actor with agency, participating meaningfully in family, community, and society, has gained some level of traction outside childhood studies and beyond academia. However, the field was slow to problematise this core notion. The moral and philosophical underpinnings of the idea of children as competent social actors raised particular concerns. Some scholars claimed that childhood studies had focused on establishing children as ‘beings’ without challenging the core argument about what it means to ‘be’. For example, Prout argued that by emphasising children as beings in their own right, childhood studies risked endorsing the myth of the autonomous and independent

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person. Kylie Valentine traced the intellectual history of this myth back to Enlightenment-era liberal theory, much of which purposefully constructed White, property-owning men as the (only) rational subject capable of reason and therefore the (sole) natural holders of political rights. This dominance of Eurocentric views in childhood studies has been subject to sharp criticism. For example, Michelle Salazar Pérez, Cinthya M. Saavedra, and Janette Habashi argue that the reliance on Global North perspectives in childhood studies perpetuates the European colonial project. Further critiques of the concept of children as competent social actors have focused on the sociocultural specificity of how childhood is understood, and a failure of (Eurocentric) childhood studies to grapple with that. For example, scholars such as Afua Twum-Danso Imoh and Tatek Abebe have highlighted key cultural values such as reciprocity, respect, and responsibility in Ethiopia and Ghana. These are not well-accommodated by individualistic understandings of the child as a competent social actor. Similarly, researchers in the Nordic countries have pointed out that discourses of the child as a competent social actor are so well accepted in those countries that they are almost compulsory—creating taboos around vulnerability, needs, emotionality, and acknowledgement of power asymmetries.

Questioning the Concept of Competence The concept of competence itself has also been questioned. Competence is often framed as something that children intrinsically have or lack, often attributed to a ‘magic number’ in chronological age. Research from child protection in Norway demonstrates that adults may implicitly use competence as a tool to marginalise children who do not perform the role of the rational, mature, knowledgeable subject convincingly enough. Similarly, research from community activism in Tamil Nadu, India, and in Scotland suggests that adults may exclude children or limit their participation in community organising if they are assumed by adults to lack competence. Alternatively, a relational view of competence would suggest that where required, adults could support and enhance children’s competence—and that children and

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Children as Consumers

adults can learn with and from each other, supporting each other’s competences in different situations. As these critiques demonstrate, the concept of children as competent social actors must be problematized, in any sociocultural context, and the Eurocentric roots of the concept must be remembered and unsettled. Rather than simply demonstrate that children are competent social actors, there is rich opportunity to ask what it means for children to be competent in different contexts, and what it means for children to act, within entangled social relations. These relations may include those with other humans but also with nonhuman actors, spaces, materials, technologies, policies, and histories. Rather than assume a preexisting competent social actor, relational perspectives look at the ways that subjects are mutually constitutive, tracing flows of power and agency. There are also calls to unsettle the dominance of European perspectives in childhood studies. For example, Fikile Nxumalo and Stacia Cedillo have called for anti-racist, decolonial, and non-anthropocentric theoretical approaches, grounded in posthuman geographies, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and Black feminist theory. The concept of the child as competent social actor remains important, particularly in terms of fostering respect for children as fellow beings. However, it may be that childhood studies is beginning to unsettle this takenfor-granted mantra, moving towards theorisations of interdependence, plurality, and relationality.

Early Years, 34(1), 4–17. doi:10.1080/09575146.2013 .854320 Le Borgne, C., & Tisdall, E. K. M. (2017). Children’s participation: Questioning competence and competencies? Social Inclusion, 5(3). doi:10.17645/ si.v5i3.986 Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing ‘place’ in early childhood studies: Thinking with indigenous ontoepistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 99–112. doi:10.1177/ 2043610617703831 Pérez, M. S., Saavedra, C. M., & Habashi, J. (2017). Rethinking Global North onto-epistemologies in childhood studies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 79–83. doi:10.1177/2043610617708875

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Consumers

In the course of the 20th century, children’s culture has been inextricably entwined with consumer culture, as children have moved from being seen as extensions of the mother’s purchasing habits, to being viewed as vulnerable to marketing discourse, to being recognized as fully empowered market participants. This has only intensified and deepened in the early years of the 21st century. This entry examines the history of children’s consumer practices, the expansion of children’s consumerism since the 1980s, children’s markets, and some specific issues shaping children’s consumerism in a digital culture.

Caralyn Blaisdell See also Agency; Global North Childhoods; Global South Childhoods; Participation Rights, UNCRC; Socialization Paradigm; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (2nd ed., pp. 7–34). London, UK: Falmer Press. doi:10.4324/9781315745008-2 Kalliala, M. (2014). Toddlers as both more and less competent social actors in Finnish day care centres.

The Long History of Children’s Consumer Practices It is easy to overlook the long history of children being approached as consumers by the marketplace. Many recent commentaries on children as consumers reference the rise of television in the 1950s as the critical moment in which children were targeted specifically as consumers. But such a view overlooks a longer history of young people as consumers, for example, in the mid-1700s in Europe, middle-class families purchased items such as furniture, books, and playthings, specifically designed for their children’s nurseries. In the early 1800s, newspapers began to recognize children as audiences and began to create periodicals

Children as Consumers

specifically addressing the young reader, and the late 1800s saw an explosive growth in children’s goods as the mechanization of factories made it possible to produce goods more cheaply, forcing businesses to seek out new demographic groups such as children. Vivian Zelizer’s work Pricing the Priceless Child illustrates how adults’ orientation to children in the United States between 1870 and 1930 shifted from seeing them as having a productive and economic value to the family, to being economically useless, but emotionally priceless. Zelizer’s recent work argues that children have long engaged in consumer culture, not just as consumers, but also as producers, and as distributers. Daniel Cook’s work on the children’s apparel industry in the early 1900s traces the shift of children’s subjectivity as consumers. Cook argues that children’s apparel was sold in the 1910s and 1920s, and it was largely to the mother. It was in the 1930s that department stores began to cater to the child as a consumer and began to orientate their wares to the child’s perspective, what he calls pediocularity. Gary Cross also points to the 1930s as a critical moment in the development of children’s consumer culture, as it is when the toy industry began to directly appeal to the child by producing toys based in the fantasy and imagination and instead of toys (such as dolls) catering to parent’s desires to train children for their futures. Both Cook and Cross point to the 1930s as a shift toward an awareness of children as legitimate consumers in their own right. This recognition of the child as a consumer played an important role in the acknowledgment of children’s status as persons with rights. These works show how the construction of childhood is inextricable from the marketplace, a narrative that goes against the assumption that there was a golden age of childhood when the child was free from commercial interests. The involvement of children in the marketplace expanded greatly in the 1950s with the advent of television. Disney first broadcast the Mickey Mouse Club in 1955 and became major advertisers of children’s companies such as Mattel and Hasboro. Disney produced the show for middleclass suburban households during the slow time slot between the daytime soap operas and the dinner hour. Children were often left alone to watch TV after school and Disney was able to speak

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directly to a child audience. Cheaply produced children’s animation followed Disney’s example, and by the 1960s, Saturday morning and afterschool were firmly established television institutions that segmented children from the adult audience.

The Expansion of Children’s Consumerism The 1980s established the groundwork for the expansion of children as consumers. The 1980s was a period of intense commodification and increasing segmentation of the youth market. Youth were targeted more explicitly and more intensely as consumers by the media marketplace as regulations that protected children from marketing were removed, which allowed for character licensing. At the same time, cable television fractured the TV audience and allowed for the development of channels specifically for a child audience. This new intensity can be traced to three radical changes in the mediascape. Firstly, the deregulation of the media in the United States that allowed characters on television shows to also promote products, opened up the opportunity for character licensing. Media content became less about gathering large audiences and more about promoting character merchandize. This would set the foundation for the transmedia texts such as Lego or Spiderman in the 2000s. Secondly, the rise of cable television fractured the television audience, intensifying the market segmentation of young people and launching new broadcasters such as Nickelodeon. Throughout the 20th century, marketers have shifted from grouping young people together in large, unwieldy categories to dividing them into smaller age-based market segments, all of which offer more unique and intense marketing opportunities; the toddler in the 1930s, the teenager in the 1950s, and the tween in 1980s are all segmented categories of young people with origins in consumer culture, as media, manufactures, retailers, and advertisers segmented and interpellated stages of youth into discrete marketing categories. Niching young people into smaller and tighter market segments offered more unique and intense marketing opportunities for companies. Age-based market segmentation created more possibilities for

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items to become obsolete as young people aged out of each stage. The Strawberry Shortcake back pack that was beloved by a 6-year-old child was no longer acceptable by the time a child turned 8 years, creating the need to purchase a new backpack. The niching of children into smaller categories is exemplified by Disney, which has numerous properties that target specific age groups from the Disney Baby merchandize line to various TV channels including Disney Junior that caters to ages 2–7 years, Disney XD that targets ages 6–14 years, and ABC Family that targets ages 14–34 years. In this intense market segmentation of young people, babies are even positioned as consumers. For example, Toys ‘R Us has a store extension Babies ‘R’ Us. It is also a common occurrence to register for baby showers. There is even a BabyTV channel, owned by Fox Network, which broadcasts in close to 100 countries. Positioning babies as an audience and as a consumer market does more than sell products, it is an ideological act that naturalizes consumption as a basic human activity and legitimates the incursion of consumer culture into the basic core of our everyday lives. It also furthers reifies consumer subjectivity as a natural component of human subjectivity. The assumption that children are naturally consumers took time to congeal in the late 20th century. James McNeal, a pioneer of children’s marketing, first wrote about the child as a consumer in 1969 in the Journal of Retailing, and his ideas met with resistance as many (including marketers) felt that by defining children as consumers sullied the innocent state of being a child. During the 1970s, there were intense debates on the commercial exploitation of children. Many felt that children were caught up at a young and younger age in the marketplace, by a manipulated form of consumer culture that had deep resources making it seem nearly impossible for young people to avoid. But slowly these ideas waned as the children’s cultural industries became more powerful and began to forge deeper incursions into children’s lives.

Children’s Markets In 1987, McNeal outlined the complex engagement of children with the commercial marketplace. McNeal argued that children are three

markets simultaneously. They are a current market, where they make their own purchase and wield their own economic power in the marketplace. They are a future market in which companies cultivate their future purchasing power, hoping to make them lifelong customers loyal to specific brands and products. And finally, children are an influential market that has power to influence the consumer practices of the family. McNeal’s work has had far reaching impacts on the marketing industry that has defined and framed children as these three markets and continues to do so. Arguments on the exploitation of children by the marketplace tend to frame children as unwitting, vulnerable subjects that are defenseless against the corrosive powers of the marketplace. On the other side of the debate, it is argued that children are savvy consumers and are empowered by a marketplace that addresses their desires. David Buckingham has pointed out the limitations of both sides and has suggested that these polarized debates obscure the complex relations that young people have to the marketplace. Instead, he suggests that one must see children’s consumption, not as an individualistic activity, but as embedded within the social relations and practices of families, peers, and communities. Of course, it is also important to be reminded that not all children participate in consumer culture equally. Alison Pugh’s ethnographic study of families from various socioeconomic backgrounds reveals the complexity of how families interpret and deploy consumer culture as they engage in the construction of childhood. Pugh outlines how the tensions and pressures to consume are negotiated differently by rich families and by poor ones. Her work exemplifies Buckingham’s notion that consumers are embedded within social practices and social relations. Economist Juliet Schor has argued that children and teens are the epicenter of American consumer culture. She suggests that young people’s tastes drive the marketplace, that their opinions shape how brands strategize, and that they command the attention of advertisers. Many brands that are not geared specifically to children have a strategy that includes young people based on McNeal’s argument that children are an influential market. While Schor’s argument is in reference to America, it can be extended farther. Children’s culture is at

Children as Legal Subjects

the epicenter of a global media culture. For example, the top selling movie in China was Transformers 4 (2014), an intellectual property that started as an imported toy from Japan, then an animated TV show in 1984, before being made into a transmedia movie franchise in the 2000s. Two of the top 10 transnational media companies are active in children’s media (Viacom and Disney), while many of the others have children’s media as a component of their portfolios.

television characters to promote products have grown into complex transmedia franchises that cross promote intellectual properties. In this context, the child consumer is constantly being surveilled and mined for information that can be used by companies to increase their sales. As in the past when consumer culture helped define the child as a subject, today’s new world of digital capitalism refines what it means to be a child and the experiences of childhood. Natalie Coulter

Contemporary Challenges Today, new methods of advertising and marketing to children are developing as media technologies and communications change rapidly. Companies are targeting children more vigorously than ever before and in ways that raise new ethical concerns. Digital technologies further erode the traditional barriers between commerce and culture. Online games gather data that is sold to third parties. Retailers routinely scout out social media to decide if they will purchase a licensed property, looking for the number of shares an intellectual property will have. Toy companies incorporate digital technologies right into the design of the toys, which also gather data. These new smart toys, often lauded as educational and a form of active play, raise many ethical concerns around safety, privacy, and even identity fraud. Today, virtually all major toy brands have digital content that allows the company to directly communicate with the child consumer. At an industry conference in 2017, Mattel stated that they are no longer a toy company but a content company, meaning that they produce media content in order to sell licensed products. Barbie is a perfect example of this. There is a Barbie website with games, video clips, and her own vlog, a Barbie movie franchise, and even a Barbie magazine. As children engage with the digital properties by liking certain Barbie tweets, or making choices in the Barbie games, or adding certain Barbie products to their wishlist, Mattel can virtually keep a daily monitor on its customer’s attitudes, preferences, and desires and allow Mattel to stay evergreen (an industry term that means constantly keeping a brand fresh). The seeds that were sown in the 1980s with deregulation of children’s media that allowed for

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See also Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective; Consumer Socialization; Material Culture, Children’s; Priceless Child; Toys

Further Readings Buckingham, D. (2011). The material child. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Cook, D. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1108/jfmm.2005.9.2.244.1 Coulter, N. (2014). Tweening the girl: The crystallization of the tween market. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Cross, G. (2009). Kids stuff: Toys and the changing world of American childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kline, S. (1995). Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and children’s culture in the age of marketing. London, UK: Verso. Pugh, A. J. (2009). Longing and belonging: Parents, children, and consumer culture. Oakland: University of California Press. Schor, J. B. (2014). Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer cult. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Schrum, K. (2004). Some wore bobby sox: The emergence of teenage girls’ culture, 1920-1945. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/ 978-1-349-73134-3

Children

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Legal Subjects

In law, which is the discipline that by definition deals with rights, to be a rights-holder is to be entitled to have certain claims of one’s own legally

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protected and thus forcefully satisfied. To be a duty-bearer is to be held accountable for one’s deeds, for one’s condition as a member of a society whose members have ties with each other. To be a rights-holder and a duty-bearer, in its fuller sense, is to be a full-fledged legal subject vis-à-vis the law and society (i.e., a citizen, someone who is a necessary member of the present community). The status of children as legal subjects, which is tantamount to the status of their rights-holding and duty-bearing capacities, is relevant because throughout history, or more specifically, Western history, children have been legally understood mostly as property of their parents and objects of adult and State protection. Thus, historically their status as legal subjects has been reduced to being present objects and future (legal) subjects. Only recently, since late in the 20th century, has this conception begun to shift toward an understanding of children as subjects with a dignity that allows them to have rights here and now. This entry examines the shift toward a greater recognition of children as legal subjects. This entry further highlights how this shift has contributed to children’s legal standing while addressing some of its problems and shortcomings, such as the persistence of an adultist depiction of children’s legal subjecthood and the almost total exclusion of duties from the concept(s) of children as legal subjects, which can also be attributed to adultism.

Children’s Rights Children’s historically feeble legal subjecthood took a step forward with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), adopted in 1989, which has since helped to settle the fact that children are rights-holders (i.e., have rights, though, as will be seen, not necessarily bear duties). The UNCRC’s guiding principles, found in its Articles 2, 3, 6, and 12, underline children’s emerging higher status, calling for the UNCRC to be interpreted and implemented always bearing in mind children’s best interests (Article 3), without discriminations of any kind (Article 2), protecting children’s life, survival, and development (Article 6), and respecting children’s views (Article 12). The so-called 3 Ps, which are another way in which the guiding principles of the Convention are categorized, speak of children’s rights to

Provision, Protection, and Participation, that is, of the right of children to have their basic needs satisfied, their integrity protected, and their voices heeded. Children, thus, are said to be worthy of the utmost respect, as young members of the human society. This international recognition of children as rights-holders has permeated regional and national legal systems, raising a global awareness of the importance of children’s rights as well as setting new standards to evaluate the compliance with children’s rights law. Ombudspersons for children’s rights have emerged in various countries worldwide, budgets have been assigned at the local, regional and international levels to assure the implementation of the UNCRC, and citizenship education has been introduced in the national curricula of many countries, helping with it to raise children’s own awareness of their rightsholding status. Furthermore, children themselves have used their rights discourse to struggle for further rights, initially not included in international instruments such as the UNCRC, as is shown by the example of children in the majority world fighting for their right to work with dignity. In short, the discourse of children’s rights, and with it the acknowledgment of children as rightsholders, has achieved a mainstreaming unheard of before. Of course, issues have been raised against this mainstream discourse of children’s rights. Some theorists find that acknowledging children as rights-holders does not necessarily address the problematic and under-theorized nature of this acknowledgment. Others, including policy makers, have decried the apparent clash of children’s rights with parental rights, though it has been forcefully argued that this is a real clash only for those who still understand children’s rights as embedded in the strict and hierarchical field of family law, a field which very often still seems impervious to perspectives on children’s agency and rights deriving from childhood studies and children’s rights studies. On a practical level, advocates of the UNCRC denounce the poor implementation record of the principles and norms enshrined in it as a major pending issue for the full realization of children’s rights, and thus for a strong and meaningful understanding of children as rights-holders. But in any case, it is safe to say

Children as Legal Subjects

that the legal common sense, internationally and within most countries worldwide, acknowledges children as rights-holders. However, the kind of rights-holders children are and, more generally speaking, their legal subjecthood, that is, the articulation of the kind of rights-holders they are with the ability to bear duties, is definitely not a settled matter yet.

Children as Rights-Holders: Legal, Moral, and Political Issues When talking of kind of rights-holders, the discussion here is not whether the rights that children hold are legal rights (i.e., those granted by a certain legal system, or moral rights and those acknowledged by a certain moral theory). That is an important distinction for children’s rights theory, but it deals with different and not necessarily contradictory issues: On the one hand, whether children do have rights, which is a legal issue, and on the other, whether children should have rights, in which case, what rights, which is a moral issue. And of course, an affirmative answer to any of these two questions strongly suggests that the other will also be answered affirmatively. To talk about the kind of rights-holders children are implies talking about the kind of subjects they are for the rights discourse (i.e., their stance as legal subjects) and the answer to this question will definitely condition, in the same direction, the answer to whether children should have rights and to whether they do have rights, in any strong sense of the word rights. This is so because the question of children’s stance as legal subjects is not only moral or legal, but most decisively political, that is, dependent on who wields the power to define children’s legal subjecthood. For law and its makers and interpreters—who have always been adults—legal subjects have normally been equated with the so-called competent (i.e., rational, agentic, autonomous) human beings, and these have also always been, and keep on being, identified with adults. Every rights discourse has been elaborated by adults and with this adult legal subject as the model for whichever legal subject, and that includes the discourse on the rights of children, and the UNCRC itself. This circumstance, which is a clear case of adultism, has shaped the making of the discourse of

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children’s rights, including the understanding of children as rights-holders, and remains a main source of its shortcomings. In the mainstream discourse of children’s rights, conspicuously represented by the UNCRC, adults depict children as adults-to-be, thus needy of full protection and provision which are two of the aforementioned 3 Ps. However, as such notyet-adults they are deemed to be still insufficiently rational and competent, and consequently capable only of a restricted and supervised third P of participation, which is the one granted by Article 12 of the UNCRC. Because of this alleged incomplete rationality and competence, children are understood to be only rights-receivers, never rightsmakers, which inevitably downsizes their stance as rights-holders. There are various issues that expose the arbitrariness of this adults’ underestimation of children, such as the fact that adults tend to define children’s actions as insufficiently rational because of being children’s, or that children are demanded a standard of rationality that adults would struggle to comply with, or that rationality is itself a standard not required of adults to participate in social life as full-fledged rights-holders and dutybearers. And all of these facts point to that most important political one of adults being the ones who decide what is rational and what is not, as well as who is a full-fledged legal subject and who is not, and of adults reassuring themselves that rationality and full-fledged legal subjecthood are precisely the province of adulthood. Politically speaking, then, if one were to take children as legal subjects seriously one would have to acknowledge at least two things. First, that we, adults, keep on representing the child legal subject under the shadow of the adult model, and second, that we, adults, also keep on claiming ourselves as the only ones entitled to the child legal subject’s legitimate representation. So, even if it has become quite obvious that children are rights-holders, the question about the kind of rights-holders they are is still, to say the least, very problematic.

Children as Duty-Bearers Adultism is also revealed in the almost absent place of duties in the diverse representations of children as legal subjects. Children’s supposed

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incompleteness derives in them being normally represented as developing and in process of socialization (i.e., as presocial beings) and thus entitled to be provided for and protected by society, but not obliged to provide for and protect it. So, the counterpart of adults being the only ones entitled to a full participation in society is that they are the only ones responsible for the fate of society. This adultist displacement of children to the lower margins of society has exceptions, such as the one found in the African Children’s Charter, whose Article 31 expressly enshrines children’s responsibilities. Acknowledging children’s responsibilities, the African charter represents children not only as beings in need of others but also needed by others, responsible not only of their personal future but of the present of their societies. Thus, the presence of duties in the African Children’s Charter shines as an element that reinvigorates rights, and children themselves as legal subjects, that is, as rights-holders and duty bearers. Matias Cordero Arce See also Adultism; Children as Citizens; Children’s Rights; Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on; Critical Legal Studies; Minority Group, Children as; Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); Working Children

Further Readings Archard, D. (2015). Children: Rights and childhood. New York, NY: Routledge. Cordero, A. M. (2015). Maturing children’s rights theory. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 23, 283– 331. doi:10.1163/15718182-02302006 Cordero, A. M. (in press). Who is (to be) the subject of children’s rights. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. T. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining childhood studies. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Freeman, M. (2011). Children’ rights as human rights: Reading the UNCRC. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M. S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.5209/soci.56250 Sloth-Nielsen, J., & Mezmur, B. D. (2008). A dutiful child: The implications of article 31 of the African children’s charter. Journal of African Law, 52(2), 159– 189. doi:10.1017/s0021855308000089

Children

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Philosophers

It may be argued that children are much better suited to doing philosophy than adults. Everyday concepts, ideas, practices, and knowledge, taken for granted by adults, are often questioned by children. In many ways, asking questions about such everyday issues is akin to what philosophers have done since antiquity. Philosophers of childhood and education have emphasized this ability in children as a kind of fitness for philosophy, and have suggested that, when it concerns philosophical knowledge, children have an advantage. There are at least three reasons for this that concern children’s unique relationship to language, time, and conceptions of subjectivity. This entry examines these three factors and further explores why some skepticism prevails about children’s ability to be philosophers.

Children’s Conceptions of Language The first reason given for children’s philosophical ability is that children are still in the process of learning things that many adults just do without giving it closer thought. The many aspects involved in learning a mother tongue give perhaps the clearest example of this. When learning to speak, the child not only learns the meaning of new words. Also, one could say that the child learns a world. The child learns what chairs, cars, trees, love, parents, siblings, numbers, anger, and so on are; they learn what running and crying is. The child learns linguistic norms and rules. She learns how to point and how to understand an instruction. In learning all those things, children have to figure out what point they have in the life of those they live with. Thus, children ask questions such as “What is love?” or “What is a number?” or “Why do we sit on chairs?” or “Why do people get angry?” or “Why can’t I be angry?” Sometimes, such questions are asked explicitly, and at other times children ask them by experimenting with words. The fundamental questions in learning language—What does X mean? or Why do we call X X?—are very philosophical questions. To explore such questions, we need to consider not only the meaning of words, but also the moral, epistemological, and ontological aspects of the

Children as Philosophers

phenomena at hand. It may be argued that, when learning language, children orient themselves philosophically in the world.

Children’s Conceptions of Time Another reason why children may seem prone to philosophy is that, at least in activities often associated with childhood such as play, they work with different conceptions of time. By adulthood, we approach time as measurable and chronological. As philosopher of childhood Walter Kohan has argued, however, childhood involves an approach to time as aionic. Aion refers to the intensity of time, an immeasurable duration that is not successive. To see childhood as aionic is not to conceptualize it as a specific period of life, but rather as an approach to living, a particular quality of experience associated with playfulness. In childhood, time plays. This playfulness with time or in time, with and in experience, is a condition that can raise certain kinds of philosophical questions. Hence, philosophers as different as John Dewey, Simone Weil, and more recently Walter Kohan have suggested that adults may need to become more childlike, even to unlearn knowledge that establishes preconceptions, in order to pay attention to phenomena at hand; that is, in order to philosophize. The notion of childhood that emerges from such conceptions of time, then, is not bound to chronological age but refers to an approach to life that can be adopted by anyone.

Children’s Conceptions of Subjectivity The third reason children may be particularly prone to philosophy is more existential. In the wake of neo-materialist and post-humanist thinking, we can see a reconceptualization of the subject. Rather than conceiving the subject as a delimited substance, it is a process, or is in process. Whereas adults often have a relatively stable understanding of themselves as selves, a reified self-understanding, perhaps, children are often still searching for their identity. This idea is not particular to the new, post-humanist framework. John Dewey was already thinking along similar lines in his Democracy and Education when he describes adulthood as stiffened in maturity, and childhood as characterized by immaturity. For

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Dewey, immaturity is not an inability, but rather marks the ability to grow, or our being in the process. This means that who you are, what you are, and how you should live are still in question. Fundamental existential questions about the self have no set answers. The self is still in question. However, post-humanists further emphasize that the self is not only in process but also in multiple. There are many selves-in-process, and children seem quite aware of this, asking themselves, and experimenting with, who they are or who they may be in various situations or contexts.

Skepticism of Children as Philosophers The idea that children can be philosophers has met some criticism. Although childhood may contain some conditions for philosophy, and philosophers may ask questions akin to those of children, some respond that this does not mean that children are philosophers. Philosophy, one may argue, involves more than an inquisitive approach to language, time, and the self. Professional philosophers spend years in schools and universities to understand the questions at hand. Moreover, developmental psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg have tried to show that young children lack what may seem to be the most fundamental ability for philosophy, the ability for abstract reasoning. There are two main responses to such a critique. One is to simply show where and when children show a capability for abstract reasoning. Another response is to show that philosophy is not necessarily abstract, but can be a concrete response to real-life experiences. Philosopher Gareth Matthews’ criticism of Piaget is one example of how both responses are combined. Matthews gives many examples that show that young children are quite capable of abstract reasoning, but he also shows that much of their reasoning emerges out of a puzzlement about things in their immediate environment. He argues that it is precisely this puzzlement that is missed in the ways that developmental psychology (in its early stages, at least) interprets children’s reasoning. It is in the way children ask questions, in the way they are puzzled by their encounters with ideas, the world, and others, that they demonstrate their capacity for abstract thought, and it is their ability to remain in this

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puzzlement that demonstrates their ability for philosophy. Their philosophical abilities do not lie primarily in the answers they give. In a similar vein, later developmental science, for example, the research by Alison Gopnik, emphasizes children’s ability for advanced inquiry, for testing ideas, and forming new hypotheses. These abilities, she argues, are an expression of philosophical thinking and essential to childhood.

Children’s Thinking in Philosophy Since its beginnings in antiquity, philosophers have returned to children’s thinking both with a focus on what it means to learn philosophy (Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the morals of the youth, among other things), and as a point of departure for advancing philosophical ideas (e.g., early discussions between rationalists arguing that children have innate knowledge and abilities for reason, and empiricists arguing that children are blank slates that are filled with knowledge through experience). Following those discussions, the romantics’ responses to Kant, the philosophy of Hegel and, in the 20th century, the later works of Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy, all involved a turn to the playfulness and puzzlement in children’s thinking, in terms of one or all of the reasons for children’s ability for philosophy previously outlined. These turns to children in philosophy have raised new questions about the role of philosophy in the education of children. For example, within the Philosophy for Children movement, the role of philosophy in schools is discussed as a way either to introduce philosophy to children or to respond to the philosophy children are already involved in. Both approaches are based on the assumption that children are able to think philosophically. However, these approaches are also at risk of romanticizing childhood; they risk assuming that particular children are involved automatically in inquiries of meaning, in aionic ways of living with time or existential self-explorations, that they are naturally intrigued by their puzzlement, or that they even notice it at all. Moreover, there is a danger of universalizing children’s philosophical capabilities, especially within developmental science, without sufficiently accounting for cultural and social differences. Hence, in recent years, the focus on

children’s philosophy, of children as philosophers, has been on the particular ways in which children philosophize in particular social and cultural settings, and on how children’s philosophy involves their immediate environment. This has meant that some researchers have tried to show how children’s ways of engaging with their environment, with language, with stories, and all kinds of practices are actually relevant to how professional philosophers deal with philosophical questions about ontology, knowledge, subjectivity, ethics, and beauty. Viktor Johansson See also Childhood in Western Philosophy; Childhood Studies; Childing; Philosophy for Children; Time, Concept of, in Children

Further Readings Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby: What children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life. New York, NY: Picador. doi:10.5840/ teachphil20143719 Kennedy, D. (2006). The well of being: Childhood, subjectivity, and education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kohan, W. (2015). Childhood, education and philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship. London, UK: Routledge. Matthews, G. B. (1980). Philosophy and the young child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with Pictur ebooks. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9781315718002 Turner, S. M., & Matthews, G. B. (Eds.). (1998). The philosopher’s child: Critical essays in the Western tradition. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Children

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Photographers

From Lewis Hines’s campaign photography on child labour in the early 1900s to Dorothea Lange’s portraits of the Great Depression, Steve McCurry’s portrait of 12-year-old Sharbat Gula, the ‘Afghan Girl’ in the mid-1980s, and Sally

Children as Photographers

Mann’s controversial ‘Immediate Family’, children have been the subject of much public photographic practice. Child and family portraiture is also a recognised genre of photography which emerged with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the rise of the middle classes. School photographs are a further familiar mode of documenting childhood, and children’s images are used the world over to sell products and raise money for charitable causes. It is fair to assume that, historically and internationally, children themselves have also been producing a considerable body of photographic images, through practices of family photography at home and on holiday, as well as taking photographs of their friends and leisure pursuits. Such practices are ever more prolific with the advent of digital photography and the inclusion of photography in mobile devices that children have ready access to. Yet, despite the emphasis in childhood studies on children and youth as producers of culture, we know surprisingly little about children as photographers themselves, and there are few known examples of children’s photography in the history of photography. Those stories that come to light only surface in cases where the young photographer becomes a famous professional, adult photographer. A notable such example is Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894–1986), who started taking photographs when he was seven years old, producing an impressive archive of his family members, and of automobiles which fascinated him as a child. Lartigue would use a stool to reach his camera, which was poised over a tripod higher than himself. Similarly, after he become a renowned director, the pictures that the young Stanley Kubrick took as a high school student are today in circulation. This curious omission of the child photographer is perhaps unsurprising—a similar fate befell women photographers and photographers of colour, as well as amateur photographers more generally, who until recently were largely written out of photography’s largely White and male history. Recent research makes it harder to sustain such an exclusion from the narrative of photography. For example, Mike Sharples and colleagues show how children are reflectively aware of both the photographic act and its impact, as well as the

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different properties of the photographic image from the subject of its representation. They argued that children who produce photographic pictures are not adult photographers in apprenticeship. Instead, they exhibit different intentions in their image composition and can be critical of adults’ idealised and posed images. Children in Sharples and colleagues’ study valued authenticity and informality over technical proficiency. In the absence of more historical documentation of the child photographer, we might instead consider the contexts in which it becomes possible for children to take on the role of photographer(s). In this vein, children as photographers readily come into being through artistic, educational, development, and research projects, domains which often overlap. Photography projects with children in schools, youth centres, and other leisure spaces are increasingly common. Many go undocumented beyond their life span, but most have common features of creativity, self-discovery and self-expression, and skill development, as well as the exploration of themes of identity, belonging, history, and community. Wendy Ewald’s Portraits and Dreams is an example of a longstanding photographic engagement with Appalachian children in the United States, who photograph their lives and communities. The academy award winning documentary film Born into Brothels by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman documents an art intervention project in Kolkata, in which children of prostitutes made pictures of their everyday life and presented thus an overlooked perspective of life there. Another context in which children are publicly recognised as photographers is through competitions occasionally run by charities, newspapers, and educational institutions. The Young RSPCA in the United Kingdom runs an annual photography competition for young people 18 years and under. In 2017, The Telegraph, a UK broadsheet, ran The Little Picture Competition, inviting children under 8 years of age and those between 9 and 18 years to submit photographs of their family holidays. Also in 2017, the City of Sydney in Australia ran a children’s photography competition for 3- to 11-year-olds, Little Sydney Lives. Children’s photography has been widely used as a tool in research with children, as well as in social work and community settings, particularly through

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techniques such as photovoice or the photo diary, in which children are given cameras in order to produce images of their lives, communities, and environments. The technique of photovoice is today widely used by community workers and action researchers as a participatory photographic practice with the aim of empowering children. The technique originates in the work of Caroline Wang and colleagues, who have sought ways through which to access more insightful data about the health conditions of women in rural China. In social science and childhood research, children’s own photography has often been used as a research tool through which to access children’s own views of their worlds and experiences. Photography, along other visual and creative methods, is positioned as a technique which may help overcome language skills, abilities, age restrictions, as well as balance power relations between children and researchers and/or practitioners. However, there are different perspectives on these issues. A notable criticism is that the understanding of photography as providing a language that is somehow closer to children’s communication strategies promotes an essentialist understanding of childhood. Through the employment of children’s photography in research, children’s views and arguments have been made visible. Phil Mizen has explored working children’s own perceptions of their labour and working environments and conditions. Similarly, Marjorie Faulstich Orleana has shown how pictures that her children interlocutors produced provided a view of their urban environments that differed greatly from what state policy assumed. Melissa Nolas and colleagues (The Connectors Study) have used digital photography with children creating a project archive of over 5000 children’s photographs of different aspects of their everyday lives in three cities (Athens, London, Hyderabad); this has resulted in the online Children’s Photography Archive, the first open archive of children’s photography of their everyday life. Photography is a key way in which children can relate to public life, and a key medium in the creation of childhood publics. A less instrumental approach to understanding the child photographer as she uses the camera to navigate her world and surroundings is waiting to be explored. Christos Varvantakis and Sevasti-Melissa Nolas

See also Childhood Publics; Children and Art; Family Photography; Photo-Elicitation, Research Method of; Photovoice, Research Method of; Visual Methods

Further Readings Clark, C. D. (1999). The autodriven interview: A photographic viewfinder into children’s experience. Visual Sociology, 14(1), 39–50. Fehily, C., Fletcher, J., & Newton, K. (2000). I Spy: Representations of childhood. London, UK: I. B. Tauris. Godfrey, M., & Whitley, Z. (2017). Soul of a nation: Art in the age of Black power. London, UK: Distributed Art. Mizen, P. (2005). A little ‘light work’? Children’s images of their labour. Visual Studies, 20(2), 124–139. Orellana, M. F. (1999). Space and place in an Urban Landscape: Learning from children’s views of their social worlds. Visual Sociology, 14(1), 73–89. Pollen, A. (2015). Mass photography: Collective histories of everyday life. London, UK: I. B. Tauris. Sharples, M., Davison, L., Thomas, G. V., & Rudman, P. D. (2003). Children as photographers: an analysis of children’s photographic behaviour and intentions at three age levels. Visual Communication, 2(3), 303–330. Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health, Education and Behavior, 24(3), 369–387.

Children

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Political Subjects

Children are routinely overlooked in discussions of politics. If they are mentioned, it is as passive ‘objects’ of politics rather than active ‘subjects’. This applies equally in the political arena itself, probably in ordinary discourse and certainly in academic texts. A brief review of standard works on political theory shows that children are rarely mentioned at all, and that when they are, it is almost always as objects of adult concern or as burdens on adults. Occasionally, the possibility that they might be considered as political agents is briefly considered, only to be quickly dismissed. In actual political debate, policies that directly affect children are frequently matters of great public

Children as Political Subjects

concern, often dominating the front pages of newspapers. Education, child health, child poverty, child abuse, children’s safety, and youth crime—all regularly feature as important issues. Children’s voices, however, are rarely heard in these debates, and their absence is seldom questioned. This entry examines the common assumption that children do not have the intellectual or moral capacity to understand and take part in politics. Next, this entry considers how children’s legal and social status, as subordinate to adults, has impacted their ability to be taken seriously as political subjects. This entry further explores children’s right to vote; how children are impacted by the politics of the family, school, and work; children’s political activism; and their political education.

Children’s Capacity Children are commonly assumed to lack sufficient mental capacity to engage in politics. This assumption is often based on what it is held that psychology teaches us about children’s capacity. The reality of psychological research and thinking, and its implications for these questions, is more complex. Since the questioning and revision of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s framework in the 1980s, there has been increasing recognition by psychologists that children’s mental capacities are highly variable and often underestimated. For example, conventional wisdom on children’s inability to give reliable evidence in court has been turned upside down by recent research. Sociologists have also shown many ways in which children’s competence is achieved in particular situations or contexts, rather than being an invariable function of age and ‘maturity’. Outdated or oversimplified versions of ‘what psychology tells us’ remain current, however, and continue to be referred to as authority for children’s exclusion. This applies especially to many of the politics textbooks, whose authors can seem rather detached from developments in other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, and social theory. Whilst many social scientists have in recent years turned from ideas of children as objects of ‘socialisation’ to seeing them as social actors in their own right, very little of this thinking has penetrated political theory. The result is that

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children’s exclusion from politics in theory, and their exclusion in practice, tend to be mutually reinforcing.

Children’s Legal Status Children have very limited legal status in their own right, tending to be seen as appendages of their parents and represented by them. They are not able to make decisions about where they live or enter into financial contracts. They are barred from many places and restricted in others. They have limited control over their own bodies or to protect themselves from the use of force. In most countries, they can still be legally hit by their parents and in some also by teachers or police officers, in ways that would be counted as assault if inflicted on an adult. In most countries, they cannot consent to sexual relationships, even with other children. Children also have a very particular social status. In many parts of the world, they are expected to be with their family, at school or ‘playing’ in places set aside or deemed suitable for that purpose. Their presence anywhere else tends to be seen as anomalous. It is considered permissible to ban them from places where they are considered to be a potential nuisance, in ways that would be regarded as unacceptable discrimination if applied to any other group. Whether or not one agrees with these limitations on children’s legal and social status, it is clear that they provide a powerful reinforcing context for children’s exclusion from political life. John O’Neill has suggested that ‘social contract’ theory, long dominant in political thought, itself has the effect of excluding children, by framing them as appendages to adults.

Should Children Vote? Many questions around children’s status as political agents focus on whether or not they should be allowed to vote in elections or referendums or to stand as candidates. In most countries, the minimum age for participation in formal politics—or at least for voting in national and local elections— has for many years been 18 years, and there have recently been campaigns that aim to reduce this to 16 years. The case for this reform now appears to

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have achieved widespread acceptance (although paradoxically, many young people remain unconvinced). However, the suggestion that children younger than 16 years should be able to take part in politics continues to be widely regarded as ridiculous. Few would support John Holt’s proposal that the right to vote, along with all the rights of adult citizens, be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants such rights. The arguments against children’s participation in politics again revolve mainly around their status and their capacity. In terms of status, they are seen to have less of a stake in society because they cannot act in the ways that adults do. For many people, it therefore makes sense for children to be represented politically by their parents. (Some have even argued that parents should have an additional vote to be cast on behalf of their children, until such time as children are deemed ready to exercise this right for themselves. This is vulnerable to the counterargument that it would foment division and hostility between parents and nonparents, without actually giving children genuine representation.) There is an element of circularity to all this, in that children’s inferior status is used to support their political exclusion, whilst their political exclusion is precisely what prevents them from challenging their inferior status. In relation to capacity, it is sometimes argued that children’s and adolescents’ brain development does not equip them to make difficult judgements or to assess risk. However, it could equally be argued that political participation does not necessarily require those particular skills and that in any case many adults do not possess them in abundance. In fact, it may be argued that decisions about voting centre mainly on values and on trust and that children are often at least as able as adults in those respects. It has also been forcefully argued in recent debates that children’s future orientation makes them better qualified than adults to make long-term political decisions or at any rate that their position should be represented in ways in which it currently is not.

Politics in the Family There is, of course, more than one kind of politics. There is the formal politics universally

recognised as such—elections, government, Parliament, or a similar legislative body, local authorities. There are also the politics that take place in organisations—trade unions, clubs and societies, the workplace—where strategic decisions have to be made; different visions, values, and interests compete; and people struggle for power and influence. But the day-to-day life of families can also be seen in terms of politics, or ‘micropolitics’. The feminist movement has a long history of challenging ‘patriarchal’ power in the family, and equally, the arguments or negotiations that take place between parents and children, or between brothers and sisters, in the course of family life, can be seen as having a political dimensions, where political concepts such as rights, power, and democracy may not only be seen as relevant by an observer but may frequently be called in support of claims by the participants themselves. The family has been seen by some theorists as ‘the cradle of democracy’, on the grounds that it is there to help one learn to negotiate, to give and take, to understand and respect others, to stand up for our own rights, and to work together. Of course, different families teach different lessons. What is clear, however, from any attentive study of how families work, is that children are very definitely social actors, regardless of whether their independence is encouraged, or suppressed, in particular families.

Politics at School Another setting not recognised as part of formal politic, but where politics is definitely practiced, and learned, is the school. For most children in most countries, school is where they spend most of their time outside the home. The lessons they learn there, not so much from teaching as from their experience, arguably structure much of their understanding of politics. Research conducted in a primary school many years ago by Olive Stevens showed not only that children as young as 9 years had a fair understanding of political issues but that children’s understanding of democracy and authority came very much from their experience of how decisions were made and power exercised in the school. In many schools, the experience will be one of arbitrary, even oppressive, authority; this contrasts with the experience of children in

Children as Political Subjects

some ‘alternative’ schools where children (individually or collectively) have considerable power and responsibility. An early pioneer of the latter approach was the Polish paediatrician and children’s advocate Janusz Korczak, whose orphanages in Warsaw between the wars had an explicit ethos of respect for children as persons in their own right, with children’s courts, children’s parliaments, and a children’s newspaper. Many schools now have pupil councils or other expressions of a democratic approach, but these are very often experienced by children and young people as tokenistic. It takes some boldness and courage on the part of teachers and school managers to allow children to have a real say in how the school is run, but the results can sometimes be inspiring.

Politics of Work Millions of children are active in the world of work—in the affluent West more than is often recognised in contemporary times, but especially, and on a large scale, in the Global South. This includes children working at home to maintain themselves and their families, and also children working in factories, building sites, streets, and other locations to earn cash for themselves and their families. Children in these situations have organised themselves on a large scale, with more or less assistance from adults. In South and South East Asia, in sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America, working children’s organisations have demanded better conditions and protection from exploitation. They have also challenged the abolitionist approach promoted by the International Labour Organisation, on the grounds that it does not distinguish between children’s work and ‘child labour’, ignores the benefits that can come from appropriate work, does not recognise the reality of children’s situations, and in practice often exposes children to worse exploitation and greater poverty. In this way, children are practically demonstrating how they have distinct interests and claims to make and that, when they are conscious of these, they are fully able to express themselves as political subjects. In India, for example, working children’s organisations have engaged with local government to promote children’s participation in community planning and educational provision.

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Children’s Political Activism Working children’s organisations are not the only example of children’s political action in practice. There are many instances, from the 19th century to the present day, of action by school students including strikes and demonstrations, either to demand better treatment in school or to express strongly held views on wider political or societal issues. There was widespread action by school students in 2003 to protest against the Allied invasion of Iraq. The school strikes and demonstrations led or inspired by the Swedish school student Greta Thunberg in response to the climate crisis have attracted widespread notice and perhaps shamed some adults into taking this existential threat to our global environment more seriously than hitherto. As well as organising separately, children may work together with adults—with college and university students on joint campaigns, or with a wider range of adults in a variety of locations including political parties and ‘single issue’ organisations. The ‘Black consciousness’ movement in 1980s South Africa was led by schoolchildren and received much praise for this. Conversely, when children came to the fore in the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that they should be protected from politics and confined to the private world of family. The American students who have more recently survived school shootings and gone on to campaign vociferously for gun control might disagree with her.

Political Education Children’s political participation is frequently held to depend crucially on the quality and availability of political or ‘citizenship’ education. Of course, if political education is an important underpinning for political participation, this arguably applies to adults as much as children—unless one believes that people magically acquire political knowledge and judgement on reaching adulthood. There may be nervousness about talking politics in school for fear of teachers being accused of ‘indoctrination’. This can lead at best to citizenship education that focuses rather blandly and boringly on institutions and formal processes, and at worst to nothing at all. There is evidence from work done in

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schools—for example in the United Kingdom by organisations such as the Electoral Reform Society and The Politics Project—that schoolchildren have an appetite for political education that engages with real issues and that helps them to act and think as political subjects. Nigel Thomas See also Childhood Publics; Children as Citizens; Global Politics of Childhood; Political Rights of Children; Working Children’s Movement

Further Readings Coles, R. (1986). The political life of children. New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly. Cunningham, S., & Lavalette, M. (2016). Schools Out! The hidden history of Britain’s school student strikes. London, UK: Bookmarks. Holt, J. (1975). Escape from childhood. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican. Korczak, J. (2018). How to love a child and other selected works: Volume 1. Ilford, UK: Vallentine Mitchell. Liebel, M. (Ed.). (2012). Children’s rights from below: Cross-cultural perspectives. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Morey, M. (2014). Reassessing Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959). Law, Culture and the Humanities, 10(1), 88–110. doi:10.1177/ 1743872111423795 Nolas, S.-M. (2015). Children’s participation, childhood publics and social change: A review. Children & Society, 29(2), 157–167. doi:10.1111/chso.12108 O’Neill, J. (1994). The missing child in liberal theory: Towards a covenant theory of family, community, welfare and the civic state. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. doi:10.3138/9781487585853–006 Stevens, O. (1982). Children talking politics: Political learning in childhood. Oxford, UK: Martin Robertson. Thomas, N. (Ed.) (2009). Children, politics and communication: Participation at the Margins. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Thomas, N. (2013). ‘Children and Politics’. In H. Montgomery (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies in childhood studies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wall, J., & Dar, A. (2011). Children’s political representation: The right to make a difference. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 19(4), 375–392. doi:10.1163/157181811x547263

Children

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Victims

Children can experience victimization on myriad levels. Indeed, around the world, children suffer the effects of adversity, persecution, maltreatment, neglect, sexual, physical, and psychological violence resulting in death or, sometimes permanent, physical, and/or psychological trauma, thereby ending or undermining their prospects for a selfdetermined and happy life.

Forms of Victimization There are multiple forms of victimization that impact children. These include: •• Peer-to-peer interpersonal and relational violence (e.g., bullying), including school shootings and knife crime; street and gang violence, cyberbullying, and other online victimization (blackmail, sexting, online child pornography, suicide, and mental health conditions promoted via web forums, sexual grooming, gaming, and gambling addiction); •• Other relational violence including domestic abuse, sexual abuse and exploitation, neglect, online grooming/sexual exploitation; •• Trafficking, forced prostitution, violence against street children; •• Religious or cultural practices including forced-, early and very early marriage, circumcision or female genital mutilation, breast ironing, exorcism, gender selective abortion, or infanticide of girls; •• Injury/violence, displacement or instrumentalization in the context of war, political/social unrest or military regimes (e.g., baby/child abduction, targeted sexual violence, forcing children into military service); •• Persecution, violence, or displacement as part of genocide, ethnic cleansing or re-education (e.g., Jews in second World War Germany, Australian Aboriginal people, Uyghur people in China, Yazidi people in Iran); •• Terrorism and radicalization (including online); •• Displacement/migration/death due to natural disaster/effects of global warming (e.g., epidemics, famine, poverty, or social/political unrest);

Children as Victims

•• Structural violence including child poverty, lack of education, food, or housing.

Given the range of ways in which children are victimized, when examining children as victims, one must take into account a number of considerations. First, it is difficult to clearly differentiate forms of victimization as many of them are closely related and are best understood in each specific case and in context (e.g., effects of global heating, famine, social unrest, and displacement may be closely related). Second, while some of them have clear legal (e.g. sexual exploitation) or policy (e.g., structural violence) remedies (effective or not) in many countries/internationally, others have none. For example, the victimhood of global heating: when children are climate refugees, and end up dead on a beach or as unaccompanied minors in a European refugee camp, there are no immediate legal or policy remedies to invoke, and they might appear victims of nameless circumstance. Further, while there is no ambiguity around the victim status of a child who drowns crossing the sea, this status is more contested for those who survive and travel on as unaccompanied minors. Acknowledging them to be children (deserving of protection) and victims (refugees) confers rights upon them a young adult economic migrant does not have; further it invokes the need for remedies where these are not clearly defined. So when and how children are positioned as victims is important as it has consequences for them and the agencies/international community encountering them. Third, victim status also relates to the presence and effectiveness of legal or policy definitions of victimhood internationally and nationally. For example, where no (or a very low) age of sexual consent is specified, children would not feature as victims of sexual abuse, or would not be considered children, while an outside agency might still consider them as such. So, victim status can be fluid and shifting depending on the context it is discussed in. Fourth, adding to the fluidity of the victim position is the fact that in some cases the child can be both victim and perpetrator (e.g., child soldier, gang violence, bullying), making them ambiguous and risky to engage with while undermining their status as vulnerable and deserving help.

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In summary, the status of a child as a victim needs to be considered in context, as it is not just dependent on legal definitions of crime and codes of law (e.g., age of consent), but being defined as a victim has multiple consequences for those it defines as well as for those individuals/agencies encountering them (as depending on status they will be called upon to take responsibility, afford remedy or prevent victimization). Hence, the attribution victim itself deserves closer examination vis a vis that of the figure of the child.

The Ideal Victim Criminologist Nils Cristie’s classic concept of the ideal victim highlighted value hierarchies in attribution of victimhood meaning some victims were assumed more deserving of the status than others. The ideal victim was the one who was weak/vulnerable, respectable/innocent, blameless concerning the circumstances of victimization, and where the perpetrator was big bad and crucially a stranger, that is, not in a personal relationship to the victim. Further the victim must strike a fine balance between demonstrating enough agency to establish victimhood, while remaining weak/passive enough not to come into conflict with other external interests. Christine Schwöbel-Patel develops this concept to explore contemporary legal, social, and political consequences of the construction of the ideal victim in international law, identifying weakness, vulnerability, dependency, and grotesqueness as its core attributes. These features, she argues, merge into a feminized, infantilized, and racialized stereotype of victimhood that functions perfectly in the context of what she calls an attention economy (i.e., a context that rewards the unambiguous, extreme, and spectacular while obscuring the complex, moderate and considerate). The notion of the ideal victim can be considered alongside the “figure of the child,” which, as Nick Lee, Erica Burman, and others have argued, is based on an implicit understanding of children as dependent and thus passive, immature, and thus lacking in knowledge, while also innocent, weak, and thus vulnerable, in need of protection. Just as Schwöbel-Patel highlights with her reference to infantilization, the child appears to be the ideal victim. Yet it is also clear that in many of the cases previously discussed children will emerge as

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ambiguous victims, difficult to reconcile with the clear-cut idea of the ideal victim and the binary system of the law. It is for example well established that children and young people who engage in criminal, violent, or antisocial behavior (including involvement with gangs, theft, criminal damage, sexual exploitation of younger peers) are often themselves victims (e.g., of domestic abuse, neglect, or sexual exploitation). Yet, due to their perceived lack of innocence and passivity authorities struggle to acknowledge their victim status as it is far more straightforward to treat them as offenders. Similarly, all cases of relational violence present a victim that is in a (potentially ongoing) relationship with, or dependency on, the perpetrator and might not want to see them punished for various reasons. Clear attribution of victimhood is then troubled by implications of consent and personal choice, and thus agency. Further where sexual victimization is concerned, the child’s apparent agency and lack of sexual innocence (i.e., contradicting their status as a child) might allude to potential agendas of seduction and entrapment. Similarly bullying cases often see victims who are themselves also perpetrators of bullying, and in cases where online interactions are involved original agency is often hard to establish (who shared what and with what intention). As suggested earlier, the unaccompanied child refugee is ambiguous as they have shown a great deal of agency, determination, and resourcefulness, while what they are a victim of is not clearly defined, and most comfortably couched in terms of nameless circumstance meaning there is no perpetrator to blame or system of law to hold responsible for remedy. Again, agency translates into the possibility of there being an agenda (economic migrant, sent by their parents for a better life, including them posing as a child when they are not). Importantly, there are reasons children who experience violence or adversity might not see themselves as victims, and/or actively avoid the attribution. For example, Jane Callaghan and colleagues report consternation at the reluctance of some young women who experienced forced and/ or very early marriage to consider themselves as victims, something that can make the work of support agencies more difficult. Similarly, Dorte

Marie Søndergaard highlights that research into bullying as well as sexual exploitation shows that frequently children do not see themselves as victims or explicitly (even fervently) refuse this attribution. Lindsay O’Dell, Sharon Lamb, and others have shown that the passivity and intensity attached to the victim attribution means those assigned the label feel trapped, immobilized in a position of passive suffering, dependent on external intervention to be rescued and forever defined by the lasting damage the experience of victimization is supposed to have inflicted on them (this is particularly true for ideas around sexual abuse, where the deservedness of the victim position and the truthfulness of the victimization is sometimes considered conditional on how long term and life determining the resulting suffering is). This can make recovery difficult or impossible for those who feel obliged to conform with such implicit ideas about true victimhood, or those who wish to take charge of their life, and despite early marriage not to be burdened or scarred by the victim attribution that comes with associations of being tainted or irreparably damaged.

Resilience The concept of resilience is important in the context of children as victims as it speaks to the question of remedies and addresses the fact that in many cases, nation-states and the international community struggle to prevent remedy or even appropriately prosecute the circumstances under which children become victims. Promoting resilience means they might not have to. Michael Rutter originally defined resilience as the ability to overcome adverse conditions (i.e., a “bounce-backability”), and suggested a combination of social and environmental factors that meant in certain conditions the encounter with serious risk can still have a good outcome. Promoting resilience in children has become a cornerstone of government initiatives to promote child wellbeing and to mitigate the impact of victimization (before it has even happened). However, critics have raised concern that the concept is sometimes misunderstood as a characteristic to be instilled or found within individuals (rather than one emerging from, or residing in, social/environmental context). This places the burden of fostering it on single agencies or

Children as Witnesses

even parents, while also providing an excuse for not addressing and changing the circumstances that cause children to become victims in the first place. Johanna Franziska Motzkau See also Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia; Children as Witnesses; Resilience; Violence; Young Offenders

Further Readings Callaghan, J. E. M., Gambo, Y., & Fellin, L. C. (2015). Hearing the silences: Adult Nigerian women’s accounts of early marriages. Feminism & Psychology, 25(4), 506–527. doi:10.1177/0959353515590691 Drumbl, M. (2012). Reimagining child soldiers in international law and policy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mattingley, C., & Hampton, K. (1988). Survival in our own lands: Aboriginal experiences in ‘South Australia’ since 1836. Adelaide, Australia: Wakefield Press. Schwöbel-Patel, C. (2018). The ideal victim of international criminal law. European Journal of International Law, 29(3), 703–724. doi:10.1093/ejil/chy056 Søndergaard, D. M. (2015). The dilemmas of victim positioning. Conferno: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics, 3(2), 36–79. doi:10.3384/ confero.2001-4562.1506267

Children

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Witnesses

Children can bear witness in many contexts. This entry focuses on just one of these contexts—the legal context (i.e., when children testify as part of criminal legal proceedings on events, they are assumed to have experienced in their past). Notably, the majority of child witnesses called in criminal proceedings are also victims of the alleged crime, which most frequently is a form of violence (including domestic abuse) or sexual exploitation. This entry does not address children’s participation in other types of civil or family law proceedings (including immigration law) or address children as witnesses of personal, historical, or political events more generally (e.g., witnesses of persecution, war, or natural disasters). Against the backdrop of a historical outline, this entry discusses the key challenges children face as

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witnesses and considers questions about children as reliable and credible witnesses and the implications for legal practice. Also examined are international differences in child witness practices.

A Short History of Children as Witnesses There is no record on children as witnesses in premodern times, but children’s low social status means that it is unlikely they would routinely have been given such a key role in legal proceedings, just as they would not have had influence in politics for example (unless they were high-born). In one of the earliest comments on children as witnesses from the late 19th century, a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court noted that children should not be excluded from giving evidence just based on age, but that each judge should establish whether the child knows the difference between truth and falsehood. This is still common practice in some jurisdictions today, but there was (and still is) no overall guidance on how this should be done, meaning it is up to individual judges (or police officers) to determine. An 18th-century English example reported by John Spencer quotes a Mr. Justice Maule who is persuaded of a young girl’s competency as a witness when she confirms that she fears God will send her to hell if she lies. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, such an expression of “fear of God” as an indicator of moral maturity would have been a common measure of a child witness’s competency (and reliability). Children, nonetheless, traditionally have had a dubious reputation as court witnesses and would have been called in exceptional circumstances only. The Salem witch trials are among the earliest and most notorious set of cases that were routinely cited throughout the 20th century as a cautionary tale about child witnesses’ lack of reliability. In 1692 in colonial Salem, MA, 19 villagers were convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death based on testimony given by a group of children (even though the children had recanted their testimony during the trial). Particularly in the U.S. literature, this case is often referenced as the root of the deep mistrust legal practitioners hold against child witnesses. Since the early 20th century, distrust in children as witnesses by the general public and by the legal profession has

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been informed by particular understandings of psychological research into child development. In particular, early theories about children’s memory and cognitive development were taken to confirm that children were too immature to remember accurately, were easily manipulated, and prone to confuse fantasy and reality. This continual mistrust is for example reflected in the minimum age (10 or 14 years) specified for witnesses in most U.S. states until the mid-1970s, in German courts’ frequent reliance on psychological experts to assess the credibility of child witnesses, and in the corroboration laws that applied in many countries until the late 1980s (e.g., the United States, Australia, and England/Wales). These laws admitted children’s testimony only if there was an adult eyewitness who could confirm their evidence. Attitudes toward child witnesses in Northern America and Europe shifted dramatically as a result of societal change during the 1970s and 1980s. As feminist ideas gained traction, there was growing understanding of, and public awareness for, sexual victimization of women and children. In this context, there was a realization that existing corroboration laws (and overall reluctance to admit children as witnesses) made it almost impossible to prosecute clandestine crimes such as child sexual abuse where the victim was usually also the only witness. As a result, attitudes and laws in Northern America and Europe gradually changed (e.g., allowing children’s uncorroborated testimony specifically in cases of alleged sexual abuse). Subsequently, however, North America as well as Europe (e.g., England and Germany) saw a number of high profile miscarriages of justice in alleged child abuse cases (e.g., the MacMartin Preschool case). These often lengthy cases with multiple defendants rested on evidence given by children that was later found to be unreliable and shown to be the product of coercive and manipulative questioning by wellintentioned interviewers and parents. Amidst ever growing societal concern about the apparent omnipresence of child abuse, parents and professionals in these cases had become overly zealous in their aim to get children to disclose abuse. These cases sparked an intense research interest in children’s suggestibility (i.e., whether they can be coached or manipulated into remembering or reporting false events), a topic that had so far not been on the scientific agenda. While research by

Gail Goodman and colleagues underlined even small children’s ability to accurately testify when interviewed appropriately, the attention of the media and the public was caught by the research of Stephen Ceci and colleagues, who showed that under certain conditions children could be made to believe and/or report (even bizarre) events they had never experienced. Taken together, these cases and reactions to them (including a heated debate about the ethics of researchers implanting false memories into children) apparently contributed to a renewed atmosphere of disbelief in children’s testimony, undermining trust in child witnesses, and making the just prosecution of child sexual abuse more difficult as parents, professional, and potential jury members would be wary about children’s statements.

Child Witnesses’ Credibility and Childhood Ambiguity Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provides the international legal foundation for children’s right to speak as witnesses. In summary, it requires signatories to allow children who are capable of forming their own views to freely express those views in all matters affecting them and for them to be given due weight in accordance with age and maturity, particularly in judicial proceedings concerning them. It is clear that the historical ambivalence toward, and doubt in, children as witnesses resonates within the article. In particular, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child does not directly convey the right to speak and be heard, but makes it doubly conditional (i.e., their speaking is conditional on a judgment of capability, while being heard is weighted depending on age and maturity). Sociologist Nick Lee argues that the ambivalence expressed here is not a failure on the part of the Article to recognize children’s agency and competences but is a means to contain and manage the sociological phenomenon that he terms childhood ambiguity. This ambiguity originates in what he calls the “figure of the child” (i.e., a common understanding of children as incomplete or as becomings rather than beings, thus dependent, and in need of protection and care but also guidance due to the many deficits they are considered to present as not-yet-adults). As a result, the

Children as Witnesses

commitment to enable children to speak for themselves is tempered by concerns about their ability to speak as competent witnesses, as well as by concerns that speaking in legal contexts may be detrimental to their welfare (hence warranting their exclusion in the name of protection). Courts operate on the assumption that all witnesses require the faculties to observe, remember and accurately report a past event, while appreciating the importance of being truthful. Adults are commonly by default considered to have those faculties, while children, due to the way they are understood as provisional, yet to complete their journey to adulthood, would by default be seen as potentially lacking some or all of these faculties; for example, due to their lack of cognitive abilities, awareness of social conventions concerning truth telling, or a tendency for irrational thinking. This makes them doubly ambiguous witnesses who in court do not just have to demonstrate that their specific witness account is accurate and truthful (something every witness will be tested on), but whose performance will also have to overcome the general doubt in their capacity as a witness that precedes them by virtue of being a child. Lee argues that Article 12 of the United Nations convention cannot resolve this childhood ambiguity (as it is inscribed into the general discourses and wider social practices surrounding childhood in modern societies), but that, by making childhood ambiguity explicit, it places some of the burden of managing that ambiguity onto policy makers and practitioners in individual nation states when it would otherwise rest solely on the shoulders of individual children and child witnesses in particular. Current international child witness practices can then be understood as diverse attempts to respond to and manage childhood ambiguity. Over the past decades, policy makers in many North American, European, and Australasian countries have developed various approaches and special measures to honor the promise of facilitating children’s testimony and amplifying their voice (e.g., implementing measures like video recordings of witness statements, life video links, or specially trained interviewers, experts, or intermediaries), while at the same time guarding child witness’s welfare (e.g., sparing them open court appearances, adapting the court environment or avoiding

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hostile cross-examination). The efforts take place all the while making sure children are enabled to give reliable evidence (a fearful child witness may not speak, or get confused and not remember or respond accurately), as well as complying with the respective jurisdiction’s legal rules and objectives to guarantee a fair trial based on admissible evidence (which might necessitate hostile crossexamination of child witnesses or their direct encounter with the accused in court). It is important to note that perceptions of children as witnesses and victims of sexual abuse present an added, often gendered, complexity. Erica Burman and others have argued that discourses around childhood traditionally appeal to core cultural assumptions about origin, (sexual) innocence, goodness, and immanence. Here, innocence is associated with the idea of (sexual) purity and thus truthfulness. This means that children who, as victims of sexual abuse, do display some sexual knowledge, fail to comply with the image of the a-sexually innocent and naturally truthful child. So, paradoxically, the very knowledge implied in their victimization can make them appear less credible. Similar issues arise as a result of implicit expectations of children as victims to appear passive and vulnerable. This means where child witnesses/victims display anger, determination or initiative, or are violent and uncooperative (which is not unusual), this will undermine their perceived credibility as victims and thus witnesses, dramatically lowering their chances to have their case brought to court or even investigated. Adult victims of rape face similar problems.

Child Witness Practice Today: International Examples Criminal legal procedure differs significantly between nation-states and even within them. There are two core models of legal procedure: First, adversarial, where a jury of sworn members of the public hears evidence brought by two opposing parties (prosecution and defense), in a court run by a neutral judge, the jury deliberate secretly and declare which side won the argument (e.g., United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia); and second, inquisitorial, where there is no jury but a judge/judges investigate(s) a case as well as hearing evidence brought by

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prosecution and defense, deliberate(s) and make(s) explicitly reasoned judgments (e.g., Germany, France, Norway). The structure of a legal system has a huge impact on how children are considered and dealt with as witnesses, what opportunities they are given to speak, and how what they say is heard and used. Consequently, children’s experience of being a witness differs dramatically. For this reason, any research into children as witnesses is best understood in relation to the context the research is conducted in (i.e., what national legal practice it is based on and designed to inform). England and Wales (Similar to Scotland, Northern Ireland, Australia)

There is no minimum age for witnesses, and decisions about competence and credibility initially rest with police and later the prosecution when considering the likelihood of a conviction. There is a long tradition of researching and improving child witness practice, implementing a wide range of special measures. These include video recording initial interviews with the police, which informs prosecutors’ decisions and can later be played in court to replace some of children’s testimony, live video links so children do not have to come into court for cross-examination, and intermediaries to support children while giving evidence. Israel

Although Israel’s legal system is similar to that of the United States, where witnesses’ live court appearance is key, all encounters of child witnesses with legal processes in Israel are mediated via a trained intermediary. They interview the child using a protocol specially developed in research by Michael Lamb and colleagues, make judgments about competence or the need for expert assessments, frequently appear in court to give evidence and be cross-examined on children’s behalf, as well as relating opinions about their testimony. Where children do testify in person, special measures such as screens or video links may be used. Still, corroboration laws do not permit a conviction based solely on the uncorroborated testimony of an under 12-year-old.

Germany (Similar to Austria)

Young, preschool children are routinely called as witnesses, but police/prosecutors or judges will often request assistance from psychological experts specially trained to analyze the credibility of witness statements (using statement validity analysis, which has a long tradition in German forensic psychological research and practice). The expert reviews the case files, personally interviews the child witness, analyzes the statement, and reports back to the prosecutor or live in court. Further, children have a victim advocate who represents them during proceedings, live video links may be used, and the child can only be questioned by the presiding judge (who relays others’ question). Nordic Countries (e.g., Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland)

The Nordic countries run different versions of an integrated child protection system based on the Barnahus model (“children’s house model”). This is considered one of the most far reaching and comprehensive attempts to shape legal practice around children’s needs. The Barnahus is a ­custom-built center where specially trained multiagency teams cover all areas of child welfare and protection. Here, child victims/witnesses are interviewed by a trained expert within days of a crime report, and this is video recorded so it can be shown in court later replacing children’s appearance. Crucially, other legal professionals (i.e., the judge, defense, and prosecution) attend this interview from behind a one-way mirror to relate questions for the interviewer to ask, thereby also covering cross-examination and rendering further witness statements/appearances unnecessary. United States

The different U.S. jurisdictions vary greatly in their approach to child witnesses and while there are many research-based recommendations for helping child witnesses (e.g., video recording statements or close-circuit TV links to avoid court appearance), it is usually left to judges’ discretion whether they allow them. The Constitutional (6th Amendment) rights of the defendant to confront any witness against them means children usually

Children as Workers

have to give evidence in open court and will face cross-examination. There is no set age for competence, and it is still up to individual judges to establish this (e.g., by asking children to explain the difference between truth and lies as part of competency hearings they may call on experts’ views).

Concluding Thoughts Internationally, the need to facilitate and support children’s access to justice is widely recognized and significant improvements have been made to child witness practice over the past decades. Still, it is also recognized that there are persistent problems with the way children are heard and with perceptions of their credibility. This is reflected in recurrent high-profile cases where prolific child abuse has gone undiscovered for years, as well as in the persistent problems researchers report in improving child witness practice. Overall, prosecution and conviction rates for child sexual abuse remain very low, indicating more work is needed to better understand what undermines longstanding efforts to improve these proceedings. Johanna Franziska Motzkau See also Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia; Children as Legal Subjects; Children as Victims; Children’s Rights

Further Readings Bottoms, B. L., & Goodman, G. S. (Eds.). (1996). International perspectives on child abuse and children’s testimony: Psychological research and law. London, UK: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781483327501 Burman, E. (1997). Telling stories. Psychologists, children and the production of ‘false memories’. Theory and Psychology, 7(3), 291–309. doi:10.1177/0959354397073001 Callaghan, J. E. M., Fellin, L. C., Mavrou, S., Alexander, J., & Sixsmith, J. (2017). The management of disclosure in children’s accounts of domestic violence: Practices of telling and not telling. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 26, 3370–3387. doi:10.1007/ s10826-017-0832-3 Goodman, G. S., Jones, O., & McLeod, C. (2017). Is there consensus about Children’s Memory and Suggestibility? Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 32(6), 926–939. doi:10.1177/0886260516657358

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Lamb, M. (2016). Difficulties translating research on forensic interview practices to practitioners; Finding water, leading horses, but can we get them to drink? American Psychologist, 71, 710–718. doi:10.1037/ amp0000039 Lee, N. M. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Motzkau, J. F. (2010). Speaking up against justice: Credibility, suggestibility and children’s memory on trial. In P. Reavey & J. Haaken (Eds.), Memory matters. London, UK: Psychology Press. Spencer, J. R., & Flin, R. (1993). The evidence of children: The law and the psychology. London, UK: Blackstone Press.

Children

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Workers

Historically, children have been defined in terms of biological age. Scholars, however, criticize this definition because of the predominance of developmental perspectives on children that ignore sociocultural experiences. Accordingly, there is no universal definition of children even though the United Nations declared those who are under 18 years of age as children. However, many countries are still reluctant to conform to this age criteria, and they argue that cross-cultural children’s lived experiences are not reflected in the definition. This entry sheds light on the definition of working children and historical insights on portraying child labor and the related issues behind this characterization. It also highlights the historical and academic debate about the best interests of children as workers and “participation versus protection.”

Definitions Defining working children is a prolonged debate in academia, including legal and social policy studies over the world. In terms of the interplay between age and work eligibility, the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) 1999 Convention No. 182 (C. 182) diminished alleged controversies demonstrating that people who are under 18 years can legitimately work if they have gained the general minimum age for work (which is usually lower than 18 years). In addition to age, the ILO

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declaration stresses the nature of work, which must not fall within any of the criteria of the worst forms of child labor. The ILO elaborated the four “worst forms of child labor”: First, all forms of practices of slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for the sake of war or armed conflict. Second, any use, trade, or business of children in prostitution, the sex trade, and pornography. Third, using, procuring, or offering children for illicit activities, such as the production and trafficking of drugs or smuggling, as defined by international treaties. Last, work that is likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children in terms of the nature and circumstances of the work wherein it is carried out. In other words, working children can be defined as children who work within the parameters of age and the nature of work as outlined here. Otherwise, children as workers would not be acknowledged in the economy or would be treated as offensive. However, the scenario for many developing countries sings a sad song.

History of Working Children Children have been involved in work (domestic or outdoor) throughout most of human history. They have always made an active and significant contribution to an economy because they started working as soon as they were able to. Children usually started their work imitating other family members as a game and gradually learned to lend a helping hand in and around the household. Thus, they become full-fledged workers in their teenage years. This was an inbuilt part of the history of children as workers until the industrial revolution. However, children’s working has been conceptualized as child labor by industrial societies, a distinct characterization of working children, in Western Europe and North America. Thus, child labor becomes a historical product of industrial society underpinned by unbridled capitalism as well as the neoliberal market economy. A growing volume of literature shows that child labor is used locally and globally for the sake of serving the interest of capitalists in terms of their convenience and material profit. In the United States, for example, children then became

useful as laborers because of their size, incapacity to bargain, loyalty, manageability, and willingness to work for lower wages. Thus, globally, some industries, such as the hand-rolled cigarette industry in Bangladesh, prefer children as workers because of their small hands and fingers, in the African gold mining industry because they have no wage-bargaining skills, and in the UAE as camel jockeys because of their light weight.

The Best Interests of Children as Workers This characterization of working children as child labor underpins the historical debate about the children’s best interest in terms of the notion of exploitation, stirring debate in light of the growing public sensitivity against the work of children. Then, the prohibition of child labor became a concern throughout the world. Consequently, there were mounting controversies about questions of who should decide the best interest for children and who should determine the policies and programs intended to protect them. Not surprisingly, most of the children in developing countries, such as Bangladesh, are compelled to work for their own survival, to support parents and siblings, or to continue education. In addition, parents perceive it as a normal way of life through the lens of “normalization of cultural practices.” However, developing countries have made several legal and policy attempts to remove children from hazardous works. Of ­importance, these actions produced several contested views and tensions about the philosophy and rationalities behind the overestimation of child labor. The most debated discourse is about how the international standards and legislations of bodies such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the ILO perceive childhood as well as working children. These organizations tend to homogenize or universalize working children in terms of conceptualization of childhood from developmental or biological point of views. However, researchers in the school of the “new sociology of childhood” argue that huge cultural differences need to be considered in conceptualizing working children. Therefore, these Eurocentric and adultcentric perceptions and conceptualizations of working children are likely to overshadow

Children at Risk

or underestimate the lived and cultural experiences of working children. This new paradigm also suggests reconstructing children as active participants, agents, bearer of duties, and part of a whole economic and social chain leaving the hegemonic discourse that children are incompetent, weak, and incapable. In addition, children’s work supports children themselves in terms of survival, schooling, learning experiences, gaining self-esteem, and self-identity. However, it also results in negative impacts on children such as dropping out of school and working in soul-killing drudgery. As a consequence, developing societies (e.g., Bangladesh) have encountered a dilemma or cultural ambivalence about whether children should be permitted to work or protected from alleged hazardous works. Even though the best interest of children is socioculturally constructed, balancing between children’s right to participation and protection (right to decent life) is quite challenging. Many researchers argue that in developing societies, such as Bangladesh, removing children from work is a utopian project when tens of thousands of children cannot worry about having alleged rights without having three meals. Of importance, many children are not concerned about their work condition; rather, they are more concerned how adults treat them in terms of abuse, exploitation, and bullying. Before an intervention is undertaken, it is urgent to understand thoroughly the meaning of work for children and it merits and demerits for them. Having been considered in this way, intervention should be set to protect children’s best interest. Some researchers also worried about the adultcontrolled debate of child labor and rights because children are excluded from this dialogue. They argue that children are active agents, who can understand their circumstances, who have their own sense about the problems they face and constructive ideas about potential solution; they have a unique understanding of how work affects their lives and how their situations could be improved. In addition, for some children work is merely for spending or wasting money rather than for supporting family or their education. So the best interests of children are intimately connected to their specific situations of life and l­ivelihood. In contrast, it is more imperative to understand the

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meaning of their work because some children’s work is constructive. Under the circumstances, some researchers underscore the importance of needs over rights and stress that working children and their work need to be acknowledged in terms of the right of human dignity. Therefore, it is imperative to revisit how children’s dignity and rights have been violated on a daily basis by coworkers and employers and to take necessary actions in response. Tauhid Hossain Khan See also Child Labor; Childhood Studies; Children’s Perspectives; Children’s Rights; Children’s Rights, Critiques of; Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on; Children’s Voices; Children’s Work; Domestic Workers, Children as

Further Readings Arce, M. C. (2012). Towards an emancipatory discourse of children’s rights. International. Journal of Children’s Rights, 20(3), 365–421. doi:10.1163/157181812X637127 Bhabha, J. (2009). Arendt’s children: Do today’s migrant children have a right to have rights? Human Rights Quarterly, 31(2), 410–451. doi:10.1353/hrq.0.0072 Burr, R. (2002). Global and local approaches to children’s rights in Vietnam. Childhood, 9(1), 49–61. doi:10.1177/0907568202009001004 Donohoe, M. (2008). Flowers, diamonds, and gold: The destructive public health, human rights and environmental consequences of symbols of love. Human Rights Quarterly, 30(1), 164–182. doi:10.1353/hrq.2008.0003 Myers, W., & Boyden, J. (1998). Child labour: Promoting best interest of working children. London, UK: Save the Children. Woodhead, M. (1998). Children’s perspectives on their working lives. Stockholm, Sweden: Radda Barbnen.

Children

at

Risk

The concept of risk positions children as passive potential victims of direct harm and environmental factors. The concept assumes shared definitions of the concept of childhood within and across

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nation boundaries. This entry describes how children are at risk from poverty, hunger, and sexual and physical assault by powerful others in times of war and in child services. The risk is not internal to the child as in, for example, the risk of injury through brittle bone disease. In keeping with the aims of this volume, the risk is seen as originating in hostile and impoverished social contexts. Childhood is defined differently across the world. Those 10 years of age may have familial responsibilities in some African and Asian countries; females 12 years of age may have an infant child in India; and in China, 4-year-olds may be in full-time employment. Different states in the United States vary in legal age qualifications for driving, drinking, and sexual relationships. Age qualification for accessing health and social services in the United Kingdom differ across geographical administrative areas.

Poverty Poverty is a predictor of poor health. Children described as at risk of poverty or social exclusion live in households with at least one of the following three conditions: (1) at risk of poverty after social transfers (income poverty), (2) severely materially deprived, or (3) with very low work intensity. In the European Union, an average of 26.4% of the population up to 17 years of age is at risk of poverty or social exclusion. In Romania, 49.2% of those up to 17 years of age are at risk of poverty. There are similar estimates of risk for Bulgaria (45.6%) and Greece (37.5%). The lowest percentage of those under 17 years of age at risk of poverty or social exclusion is in Denmark, Finland, and Slovenia.

Hunger Undernutrition in children includes fetal growth restriction, stunting, wasting, deficiencies in vitamin A and zinc, and suboptimum breastfeeding. Globally half the 3 million annual child deaths from, for example, malaria and measles have malnutrition at their root. Over 160 million children under 5 years old are stunted by hunger. Half of all stunted children live in Asia and over one third in Africa. In the United States, 13 million children live in households lacking the means to get enough

nutritious food on a regular basis. This is known as food insecurity. Children in food insecure families are at risk of hunger and malnutrition. The most food insecure families are Black, Hispanic, or headed by single parents, and 25% of households with children living in large cities are food insecure. In Australia, 900,000 children are at risk of hunger and malnutrition. High-risk groups include families of people with disabilities, refugees, and Indigenous Australians. In the United Kingdom, up to 3 million children risk going hungry during the school holidays, leaving them vulnerable to malnutrition and undermining their education and life chances; most of these children have parents in poverty.

Sexual and Physical Assault Risk of Assault in Wartime

Article 27 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits wartime rape and enforced prostitution in international conflicts. Amnesty International describes war rape as a weapon of war. Children are at risk of systematic rape used as a weapon of war in ethnic cleansing. In the 20th century, systematic rape has been used in conflicts in Bosnia, Cambodia, Uganda, and Vietnam. Children are also at risk of rape as a nonsystematic crime. Over 20,000 women and girls were raped during the Japanese occupation of the Chinese city of Nanking. In World War II, Soviet soldiers in Berlin raped over 100,000 women and girls. British soldiers were accused and convicted of sexually abusing children in Belgium and the Netherlands during the winter of 1944 and 1945. Wehrmacht forces committed rapes of Jewish women and girls during the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and rape was also committed against Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian women and girls during mass executions primarily carried out by the Selbstschutz units. Jewish girls were particularly at risk of rape during the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, women and girls were kidnapped by German forces for prostitution in brothels. In Italy, the 7,000 women and child victims of the mass rape after the Battle of Monte Cassino by Goumiers—colonial troops of the French Expeditionary Corps—are known as Marocchinate.

Children at Risk

Mass rapes were committed in Polish cities taken by the Red Army. In Kraków, the Soviet occupation was accompanied by the mass rape of Polish women and girls. At the end of World War II, Red Army soldiers are estimated to have raped around 2,000,000 German women and girls. Female deaths resulting from rapes committed by Soviet soldiers stationed in Germany are estimated to total 240,000. An estimated 500,000 women and children were raped during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. In certain war gang rape instances, the objective of infecting women interned in rape camps was the systematic effect of HIV soldiers specifically selected to spread HIV AIDS to those raped. United Nations (UN) peacekeepers have also been found guilty of committing rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and children. UN soldiers in Haiti have been accused and convicted of raping 14-year-old boys. Risk in Services

Within institutional services, children are at risk of assault, particularly sexual assault. Scapegoated children are at risk of being the focus of psychiatric interventions when a family intervention or one focusing on the caregiver would be appropriate. Child Sexual Assault

Numbers of children at risk of sexual abuse are difficult to determine due to underreporting; children are frequently frightened, threatened with extreme harm, ashamed because the abuser has said they were complicit, or silenced by claims that speaking out will lead to a family breakup. In the United States, child sexual assault (CSA) is categorized under child maltreatment. CSA is not uniformly defined in the United States. Children are regarded as legal minors, and ages for majority vary between states. Ranging from age 16 to 18 years old, minors are not considered able to give informed consent—the key criterion for a charge of child maltreatment. Incest is treated differently and receives lower sentences everywhere but Arkansas, California, Illinois, New York, and North Carolina. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau estimates that 20% of girls and 5% of boys have experienced sexual abuse. Children

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most at risk are between the ages of 7 and 13 years old. In China, sexual abuse is a threat to the estimated 37% of rural children left behind as caregivers seek work in cities. Roman Catholic priests throughout the world and Islamic clerics in large rural schools in Pakistan put children at risk of sexual assault. It has been estimated that one in five children in Israel is at risk. The closed nature of some religious groups (e.g., Haredi Jews, Moslems, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons) can keep any assaults unknown to those outside the group. In response, Kol V’oz is now a center for Jewish children worldwide to report CSA. In the United Kingdom, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children states that 90% of CSA is perpetrated by those known to the child, a third of assaults are committed by children, and disabled children are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted. Annually, there are 50,000 reports, 82% concerning girls; media exposure of prominent abusers is increasing the number of reports daily. It is estimated that 13% of child Internet users are solicited online. Over 50,000 children are subject to child protection orders. Complex investigations of CSA involving several agencies, for example, social services, child health services, the police, probation services, and education are known as Section 47 investigations. In 2017, there were over 190,000 Section 47 investigations in the United Kingdom. One child in every 65 is the focus of a multiagency investigation. There are large regional differences: In Blackpool, the figure is 1 in 14, and investigation figures are 5 times the national average. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international agreement designed to protect the rights of children and provides a child-centered framework for the development of services to children. The UK Government ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991. The Children Act of 1989 requires local authorities to give due regard to a child’s wishes when determining what services to provide under Section 17 and before making decisions about action to be taken to protect individual children under Section 47. These duties complement requirements relating to the wishes and feelings of children who are, or may be, looked after, including

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those who are provided with accommodation under Section 20 and children taken into police protection—Section 46(3)(d). The 2010 Equality Act in the United Kingdom places a responsibility on public authorities to have due regard for the need to eliminate discrimination and promote equality of opportunity. This applies to the process of identification of need and risk faced by the individual child and the process of assessment. No child or group of children must be treated any less favorably than others in being able to access services. Craig Newnes See also AIDS Orphans; Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia; Childhood Poverty; Consent, Sexual; Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of; Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting; Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924; War and War-Affected Children

Further Readings ekathimerini. (2017, November 20). Four in 10 children in Greece at risk of poverty. Retrieved from http:// www.ekathimerini.com/223430/article/ekathimerini/ news/four-in-10-children-in-greece-at-risk-of-poverty Hunger Notes. (2017, October). 2016 world hunger poverty facts and statistics. Retrieved from https:// www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-povertyfacts-and-statistics/#children1 Miller, A. (2002). For your own good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux. Newnes, C. (2018). Youngsters. In C. Newnes (Ed.), A critical A-Z of electroshock. London, UK: Real Press. Newnes, C., & Radcliffe, N. (Eds.). (2005). Making and breaking children’s lives. Monmouth, UK: PCCS Books. No Kid Hungry. (2017, October). Food insecurity. Retrieved from https://www.nokidhungry.org/ problem/hunger-facts

Children in Postcolonial Literature ‘Postcolonial’ refers to peoples and places that were formerly subject to colonial occupation and is usually used with reference to modern European

colonialism. Sometimes used with a hyphen, ‘postcolonial’ acknowledges both the historical transition of societies from subjugation to independence and the cultural and material power relations that remain instrumental in defining collective and individual identities and opportunities beyond the formal end of colonial rule, both in terms of material culture and symbolic representation. This entry first briefly discusses the place of children in the field of postcolonial studies and then describe the place of children in colonialism. The rest of the entry briefly describes the relationship between the child and colonialism and then considers the representations of children and childhood that are most definitive of postcolonial fiction: The use of child narrators to voice the complexities and hybrid affiliations of postcolonial situations and the popularity of the ‘bildungsroman’ as a genre capable of tracing trajectories of growth and development that diverge from the aspirations of the Global North.

Place of Children in Postcolonial Studies Neocolonial ideologies are an ongoing concern of the academic field of postcolonial studies as scholars investigate how and why the Global North continues to set the parameters for global political and economic relationships, often to the detriment of states in the Global South, and to analyse the linguistic and cultural representations that perpetuate discriminatory practices with their roots in colonialism. Resistance is also a predominant focus of this diverse and interdisciplinary field, and ‘postcolonial theory’ is used to critique the political activities and associated cultural forms that are developed to counter neocolonialism and to promote new decolonial approaches and transnational modes of citizenship. Across these intersecting concerns, literature plays a vital role. In assessing the place of children in postcolonial literature it is imperative first to consider the way in which colonialism constructed and imposed models of development on colonised societies that suited European cultural and economic aspirations. The next step is to think about the means by which postcolonial writers have sought to challenge and circumvent these. The Kenyan writer Ngugı wa Thiong’o has called this activity ‘decolonising the mind’, and it

Children in Postcolonial Literature

continues to be a primary aim for many postcolonial writers who address the pressures of globalisation, political instability, and environmental catastrophe. Postcolonial texts can be understood as ‘writing back’ to the metropolitan centre, to use a concept drawing on Salman Rushdie’s essays. The idea was popularised by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s foundational study, The Empire Writes Back (2002); many postcolonial writers choose to ‘write back’ through narratives of individual development. The figure of the child is prominent in postcolonial reimagining of nations and peoples as free from oppression.

The Child and Colonialism Arising in tandem with capitalist economics, the European colonial enterprise produced great wealth and knowledge that were unevenly distributed. Colonialism was founded on an assumption that the coloniser deserved to accrue the most benefit, for they had seen the opportunity and made the initial investment. Although the first colonisers saw themselves as explorers and were often awed and humbled by the places they discovered, as soon as they began to systematically use the resources and populations for their own benefit, the relationship became exploitative. Edward Said, the Palestinian critic often credited with being the founder of postcolonial studies, argued that this sense of intellectual entitlement and moral superiority was held by all colonial actors to a greater or lesser extent, whether scholars, politicians, or entrepreneurs. Said called this mindset ‘Orientalism’ and investigated how it presented an idea of the East not only as exotic and desirable but also as savage and threatening. Colonialism altered the way colonised societies functioned and imposed ideas of the human and of individual development on them to which Western discourses of the child and childhood were crucial. These were largely based on the ideals of the European Enlightenment according to which the child was born unruly but capable of gaining logic and reason with the correct social and educational conditioning. The centrality of the child to colonial ideology comes from the notion is universally recognised figure that childhood is a natural state. As such, the child provides a transparent metaphor for relations between

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races and cultures, making divisions instituted by colonialism appear to fall into a natural hierarchy, with the colonised equated with the child and the coloniser with the adult. The child, understood as possessing a naive consciousness in need of training, was widely used in colonial discourse as a way of categorising and disciplining native populations (e.g., the frequent treatment of Hindus as naive or infantile in colonial India). In colonialism’s earlier days, the education of colonised people to become self-sufficient was promoted. However, by the late 19th century, this commitment had given way to the use of coercion and military force alongside the soft power of education to control natives who were presented both in the press and in government documents as ill-behaved children, often beyond reform. Childhood as a phase was used to define the relationship between races so that Africans, for example, were considered to be in an earlier or more ‘primitive’ state than Europeans and their backward stage of growth justified European imperialism as assisting them towards a more ‘civilised’ way of life. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this understanding of races as hierarchically arranged but growing towards the same goal of godly perfection (monogenism) was challenged by ‘scientific racism’ formulated by thinkers, including Robert Knox in Britain and Arthur de Gobineau in France. They argued that humanity was divided into permanent racial types so that race was equated with species and the development of non-White peoples was limited (polygenism). According to this view, the European child had to be protected from damaging contact with colonised people and places because this could lead to the ‘degeneration’ of the civilised population as a whole, hence colonial administrators often sent their children home to be educated and paranoid practices of racial segregation arose. The construction of the child in the colonial imagination hinged on the relation between White (coloniser) and non-White (colonised), whether the monogenist or polygenist view was taken. Although polygenism was successfully overthrown by Darwin’s theory of evolution, the modern idea of the child remains a paradox with significant implications for North–South relations. As JoAnn Wallace defines it, ‘The child represents

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potential or futurity . . . “and” a subjectivity and corporeality in need of discipline’ (p. 173). It is this complexity that adheres to the ostensibly simple figure of the child that postcolonial writers interrogate with a focus on resisting the disciplinary practices of (neo)colonialism and exploring possible postcolonial futures.

The Postcolonial Child Postcolonial literature (often referred to in the plural as ‘literatures’) is as diverse and eclectic as the critical practices used to analyse it. As well as literary theory, scholars use anthropology, history, development studies, cultural geography, psychology, and many other disciplinary approaches in order to make sense of its plurality of themes. Prominent concerns include slavery and indentured labour; racial politics and representation; gender; religion; education; language; the loss and reimagining of indigenous pasts; resistance, violence, and conflict; and migration, diaspora, and hybridity. The child has an important part to play across these intersecting topics; indeed children are often used to make connections between them and the values, and meanings attached to the child and childhood globally have been shaped by the political and cultural preoccupations of writers and critics working to make sense of postcolonial experiences. When postcolonial studies began to see itself as a discrete field in the 1980s, the representation of children was often linked to national identity. Fredric Jameson’s controversial article ‘ThirdWorld Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (1986) argued that postcolonial texts (then often known as ‘third world’) should be read as national allegories—that is, as presenting the growth of national consciousness through their characters and scenarios. Jameson’s ideas were particularly influential in relation to the postcolonial novel, the form being a Western one used in the education of colonial subjects who were often unaware that literature could exist outside of Europe. When they began ‘writing back’ to the coloniser, they found the form ripe for postcolonial reinterpretation. Taking a Marxist stance in line with that of earlier anti-colonial thinkers such as the psychiatrist and revolutionary Franz Fanon Jameson, and other scholars on the left were keen to emphasise

that national freedom had to incorporate the dismantling of the colonial mentality in which colonised people internalised the inferior, infantile status they had been given. Many novels that have become staples of postcolonial literature reading lists can be productively read in this way. For example, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) presents a resilient Nigerian society in which traditional elements are brought into dialogue with both the vestiges of colonialism and the pressures of modernity. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) narrates the fantastical life of a collection of children ‘handcuffed’ to the history of their nations (Pakistan, India, and the contested state of Kashmir) and whose fates foreground the questions of belief, belonging, and how to come to terms with the bloodied history of postcolonial nationhood. Following two boys whose trajectories from partition to Indira Gandhi’s emergency in the 1970s diverge radically, the novel uses magical realism mixed with historical fiction to demonstrate that there are multiple, interwoven narratives of incipient nationhood that the growth of postcolonial children can be used to explore. The shifting multiplicity of postcolonial identities present in many postcolonial texts of this period and the altered meanings of nationhood in an era of globalisation has led many critics to view Jameson’s model as useful but limited. The work of Homi Bhabha on hybridity and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on deconstruction and subalternity, amongst others, has demonstrated that fresh ways of being and thinking can emerge in postcolonial writing that seeks to push postcolonial discourses of resistance beyond a commitment to nationhood.

Child Narrators The newly generative forms of postcolonial texts are often facilitated by child narrators, the use of an idiom associated with childhood, or both. Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize–winning The God of Small Things (1997) is a prime example of how children are used both to emphasise the intergenerational trauma of colonial rule and to discover how it intersects with other stratifications of power, particularly caste and gender. This text also focuses on boy and girl twins, whose divergent experiences present both the specific linguistic and

Children in Postcolonial Literature

psychological pressures facing postcolonial Indians and the questions of authenticity versus hybridity that many writers of postcolonial literature contend with. The use of child narrators, or adult narrators presenting themselves through their own childish eyes, is common in texts dealing with the violence, displacement, or loss that accompanies the fight for and arrival of national independence. Often, children are used to negotiate between warring parties; sometimes, they are literally used as shields for clandestine activity or as go-betweens, as is the case in Bapsi Sidwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988, later published as Cracking India). The novel is set in a Parsi family in Lahore in the aftermath of the Partition of India and narrated by a disabled girl with unusual and revealing insights into the motivations of characters of all genders, classes, and castes. The child’s perspective provides a means for writers to explore the strangeness and alienation in many colonial and postcolonial situations. Children often have the advantage of passing unseen or of switching between roles, reminding one of the popularity of child characters in earlier colonial texts, particularly Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) in which the protagonist is at once an impish street kid, a British spy, and a Buddhist disciple. Examples of texts employing the child’s voice include the following: •• Assisa Djebar’s Fantasia (a semiautobiographical novel about the struggles of a family in colonised Algeria told partly by Djebar’s child self: 1985), •• Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (a child soldier narrative set in an unidentified African Nation: 2005), •• Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (two girls negotiate the difficulties and lack of opportunity faced by women in Zimbabwe during the war of independence: 1988), and •• Patricia Grace’s Potiki (a Maori community threatened by a land developer whose narrative is partly told by a disabled child with a sixth sense: 1995).

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman Many postcolonial texts featuring children might be described as bildungsromane: novels of

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growing up in which the protagonist passes through various challenges or hardships before gaining a deeper understanding of his or her situation even if not reconciled to it, as happens in the traditional bildungsroman, for which Johann Von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) is the prototype. These novels both assert the value of narrating a life beginning in childhood and offer a critique of models of development that assume that modern children’s lives will have certain features, including the provision of basic needs, access to education rather than an expectation of paid labour, protection from exploitation, and so forth. The elongated period now occupied by childhood in the Global North is often presented in fiction as featuring both a fiercely protected innocence and an awareness of the threats that might make childhood disappear ‘too soon’. Child characters in postcolonial fiction are often more exposed to the hardships that make up the lives of the greater part of the world’s population and are instrumental in resisting them. Rather than depicting the risks posed to a romantic ideal of childhood, postcolonial writing often questions how children can be active in forging new social and political arrangements and how growing up is made difficult to the point of impossible for those on the underside of a globalised world. In Chris Abani’s Graceland (2002) the protagonist, Elvis, negotiates the lively but dangerous city of Lagos and the tensions between traditional and imported global cultural forms before fleeing to the United States, whereas in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, a young girl comes of age amidst political unrest in Zimbabwe before also leaving for America. Both novels demonstrate that the child in postcolonial literature is a mobile and necessarily transnational figure. In some recent African writing, notably Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), characters return home so that the transcultural nature of postcolonial identities and nations is deliberately explored and the developed North–developing South binary challenged. Transculturalism is associated with opportunity but also with loss. Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother (1996) denies the promise and potential attached to children altogether as its protagonist prefers to claim her deliberate

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isolation and sexual independence as the only outcome of her insecure heritage and upbringing (her mother was a member of an almost extinct Carib community on the island of Dominica, and her father was of African and Scottish descent). This interrogation of the futurity associated with the child is present in many postcolonial texts and indicates that indeterminacy is one of the key features of the postcolonial condition and its representation. J. M. Coetzee’s oblique novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013) takes place in an unnamed location populated by migrants from a political upheaval across the sea that no one is able to remember clearly. Questions about the future of the child character around which the narrative centres are so tightly reined in by the lack of cultural awareness and political aspiration in the society in which he finds himself that the very idea of a ‘normal’ childhood seems inconceivable. Although the child in postcolonial literature remains attached to the specific narrative of a nation or a people in many instances, the figure of the child and the period of childhood as understood in the Global North are decisively challenged by writing that presents the pressures exerted by postcolonial situations and the resilience required to confront them. The diversity and difficulty of childhood in these contexts can be understood only by critically examining accepted models of childhood and their relation to (neo) colonial ideology, a challenge that postcolonial literature takes on through its inventive and multifaceted representations of children. Veronica Barnsley See also Children in Romantic Literature and Thought; Children’s Literature; Children’s Social Participation, Models of; Critical Children’s Literature Studies; Young Adult (YA) Literature

Further Readings Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (2002). The empire writes back: Theory and practice in postcolonial literature (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London, UK: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1986). Third-world literature in the era of multinational capitalism. Social Text, 15, 65–88.

Landry, D., & MacLean, G. M. (1996). The Spivak reader: Selected works. New York, NY: Routledge. Mcleod, J. (2000). Beginning postcolonialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Neuwenhuys, O. (2013). Theorising childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectives. Childhood, 20(1), 3–8. doi:10.1177/0907568212465534 Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London, UK: Heinemann Educational. Wallace, J. (1994). De-scribing the water babies: ‘The child’ in post-colonial theory. In C. Tiffin & A. Lawson (Eds.), De-scribing empire: Postcolonialism and textuality (pp. 171–183). London, UK: Routledge. Young, R. J. (2009). What is the postcolonial? ARIEL: A Journal of English Literature, 40(1), 13–26.

Children in Romantic Literature and Thought The figure of the child in romantic literature and thought provided a shift in understanding children and childhood at the end of the 18th century. The romantic period in England and Europe—broadly defined as a changing aesthetic in art, music, literature, architecture, and culture, reacting to the rigidity and rationalism of earlier movements, such as the Enlightenment and neoclassical period—spanned roughly the mid-18th to mid19th centuries. Major characteristics of the romantic movement include a focus on the natural world, individual perception, spontaneity, creativity, sensibility, and the emotional over the rational. The figure of the child lies at the intersection of this changing aesthetic. This entry looks at (a) the romantic reimagining of the child and (b) the child as depicted in English Romantic poetry. According to Philippe Ariès in Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, prior to the 19th century, children are most often depicted in art and literature as miniature or scaled-down versions of adults. The romantic period, however, recreated the figure of the child as a vehicle for Romantic conceptions of innocence and nature. Two philosophers, John Locke

Children in Romantic Literature and Thought

and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contributed significantly to this romantic reimagining of the child, specifically in the context of education and the natural world. English romantic poetry encapsulated the figure of the child in relation to nature, but other writers of the period incorporated elements of this new understanding of the child in literature written for children. Finally, the romantic movement on the continent, coupled with changing political ideologies and growing German nationalism, led to the publication of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Children and Household Tales (1812). Taken together, this convergence of philosophy and literature created a new understanding of the child that continues to inform the understanding of children and childhood into the 21st century.

The 18th Century and the Emergence of the Romantic Child Two philosophers who contributed to the change in the conception of the child during the romantic period were John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. John Locke, a British, enlightenment philosopher of the late 17th century, is known for his theory of the tabula raza, which marked an early foray into what eventually became cognitive psychology and educational theory. Rousseau, a French political philosopher and novelist of the 18th century, similarly discussed the education of the child but did so in the context of the natural man and the natural world. John Locke and Education

According to Locke, and contrary to Augustine conceptions of original sin, children enter the world unformed, or as blank slates, on which a moral education can be written. Locke first outlined this concept in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1693): “Whence comes it [the mind] by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the MATERIALS of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE” (Chapter I). This compelling theory of mind found its way into the literature of the romantic period in a

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variety of ways, but an experience of the natural world became the basis for the child’s imagination and moral sense. Locke’s concept of the tabula rasa has been popularized to varying degrees in the centuries since, particularly in broader discussions of nurture versus nature. Equally important to the changing depiction of the child and childhood during the romantic period, however, was Locke’s treatise on education, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). In his treatise, Locke outlined the ways children can best acquire a virtuous and moral education founded on the principles of cultivating a sound mind and body. Locke delineated the most effective means of raising a child in excruciating detail, from daily ablutions in cold water, to sleeping on a hard bed, to regular bowel movements. Rousseau and the Child of Nature

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French writer and philosopher, also helped shape the conception of the romantic child. Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education (1762), describes a young man’s education as that of the natural man’s. According to Rousseau, Emile’s education emerges naturally with his growing up and should occur in the countryside, away from the corruption of the city and society. Rousseau took issue with Locke’s theories on education at numerous points, pointing out the inconsistency between wanting the child to bathe using cold water while advising against drinking cold water at any time of year. He agrees, however, with Locke and other writers on the need for children to experience sufficient bodily exercise, calling it the “wisest of their precepts.” Rousseau outlined his own program for the education of his charge, referring to hygiene, for example, as a virtue, and asserting that temperance and industry serve to instill a moral sense in the child. More than these, Rousseau believed that instilling the desire to learn in a child’s mind is the best grounding for that child’s education. Locke, Rousseau, and the Rational Moralists

Both Locke’s and Rousseau’s insistence on experience as the arena for the moral education of the child has wider implications for English

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romantic poets such as William Wordsworth. At the same time, Locke’s educational theories and Rousseau’s philosophy were taken up by another group of writers at the beginning of the 19th century in Britain known as the rational moralists. This group, including notable authors and thinkers such as Thomas Day and Maria Edgeworth, believed in literature as an instrumental force in forming a child’s moral character. Although only indirectly influenced by romantic sensibilities, these writers still recognized the innocence and malleability of childhood and were interested in developing a literature for children that was not solely concerned with Christian piety. Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783) is a dialogue between a tutor and his two charges, Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, who provides them with moral instruction and an education in class. Edgeworth’s books for children were no less instructive but endeavored to provide more entertainment for their child readers. The Parent’s Assistant, or Stories for Children (1800) is a collection of stories that best exemplifies Edgeworth’s attempt to instruct her young readers in the virtues of honesty and industry. Unlike other writers of children’s books such as Sarah Trimmer and Hannah Moore, Edgeworth was concerned less with piety than she was with community, class, moral behavior, and maintaining an ideological status quo. However, unlike her romantic contemporaries, Edgeworth was writing for a child audience rather than using the figure of the child to further an interest in romantic sensibilities. Nonetheless, a character such as Simple Susan, from the story of the same name, is reminiscent of the romantic child found in Wordsworth and Blake.

The Child in English Romantic Poetry Interest in the natural world emerged, in part, from the effects of the industrialization and urbanization of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For romantic poets such as Blake and Wordsworth, the link between childhood and the natural world was foundational. The watershed year for the romantic period in England was 1798, coinciding with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including poems such as “The Rime of

the Ancient Mariner,” “We Are Seven,” and “Tintern Abbey.” The innocence and wisdom that characterizes the romantic child is evident, for example, in the depiction of the child in “We Are Seven,” who insists her family of seven includes her two siblings whose graves lie beyond the family cottage. According to their Preface to the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge define poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Their intention was to represent the commonplace in the “real language of men,” a simplicity of language echoed in German romantic writers, such as Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Feeling, language, and the natural world in this way became intricately bound up with the figure of the child. Blake and the Innocence of Childhood

William Blake, set apart from other romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Shelley, was a poet, an engraver, and a Christian mystic. He wrote two poem cycles that have a direct bearing on the construction of the romantic child: The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience. Blake wrote these cycles as complementary pairs and as a way of expressing innocence and experience as contrary states of being. The Songs of Innocence features poems such as “The Lamb,” in which the woolly lamb becomes an allegory for the meek and mild nature of Christ. The poem is childlike in both form and content, having a lilting, simple rhythm reminiscent of a child’s catechism. The poem is written in the interrogative, the child speaker asking the question, “Little lamb, who made thee?/Does thou know who made thee?” The response to this question is an assertion of both Christ as the Son of God and of Christ’s gentler qualities and connection to childhood: “He is meek, and he is mild,/He became a little child.” Other poems in The Songs of Innocence reinforce the nature of salvation in relation to the figure of the child. “The Chimney Sweeper,” while depicting the dangerous work of the sweep, has the speaker reassuring Little Tom that faith in Christ will ensure that all is well. Tom’s dream, in which hundreds of sweeps are taken up into

Children in Romantic Literature and Thought

Heaven by angels, reinforces the primacy of salvation in the face of privation: “And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,/He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.” The poems from The Songs of Experience depict childhood in a much different light. The poems from the two cycles are paired, such as The Lamb with The Tyger, the two Chimney Sweepers, and the two Nurse’s Songs. Strikingly different in form and imagery, The Tyger describes a state of being contrary to the meek and woolly lamb. Blake did not, however, necessarily intend for these poems to be read as simple binaries. The figure of the Tyger is threatening and characterized by images of fire and darkness; nonetheless, the poem asks the question, “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” Such a question draws attention to the nature of a God responsible for creating both the lamb and the tiger. More poignant, and serving as more of a direct parallel to its counterpart, is “The Chimney Sweeper” from The Songs of Experience. Unlike the hope of salvation characterizing little Tom’s dream in “The Chimney Sweeper” from The Songs of Innocence, the sweep from The Songs of Experience has been abandoned by both God and parents and sent to work as a sweep: “Because I was happy upon the heath,/And smiled among the winter’s snow,/They clothed me in the clothes of death,/ And taught me to sing the notes of woe.” The child in this poem is removed from salvation and the promise of Heaven, and God becomes institutionalized and linked to parental abandonment. Wordsworth and the Wisdom of the Child

A well-known line from Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” reads, “The child is father of the man;/And I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety.” This line helps explain the figure of the child as the author of adulthood. Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” reinforces such a connection. Here, the speaker is aware of the relationship between his child and adult selves, understanding that “Our birth is a sleep and a forgetting,” recognizing the spiritual nature of childhood while simultaneously grieving its loss. Ironically, Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray, or, Solitude” is the poem that seems to best exemplify the figure of the romantic child. Lucy is a child of the

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moor, solitary and innocent; and more than this, she is dead. The poem is a haunting recollection of the child Lucy, her Moorland wanderings, and the snowy night she disappears. The speaker’s recollection fixes Lucy as a child, forever innocent and subsumed by the natural world. In this way, the ideal child is one who is fixed and unchanging rather than mutable and subject to growing up. The Grimm Brothers and the Rise of the Folktale as Children’s Literature

Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, two German brothers who worked as librarians and philologists and who extensively studied German literature while supporting their family, were interested in a national German literature. Popular legend has the two brothers roaming over the German countryside and collecting the stories of the folk. However, the two brothers gathered folktales from friends, family, and governesses, which they in turn revised for publication. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Children and Household Tales, published in 1812, was collection of 86 tales that were folk narratives of the German people and not compiled for children. The plain language of the tales recalls Wordsworth’s comment on the use of the language of common humanity in the Lyrical Ballads. The Grimms’ tales include a range of stories about animals, objects, daughters, and youngest sons. These characters often depart from or are cast out of civilization; they experience hardship and testing in the natural world, typically in dark forests or the wilderness. The focus on the childlike hero and the natural world suffused with magic provides a link with the poetry and sensibilities of the English romantic poets. Representative stories by the brothers Grimm include Snow White, Rapunzel, Aschenputtel, The Raven, and The Water of Life. Once the brothers realized the popularity of their collection, they revised the stories for the consumption of children. This revision process often meant conflating variants of the same tale and incorporating Christian and middle-class values. The 1819 edition of Children and Household Tales included 170 tales, many of which were revised for a middle-class child audience. More than any other text of the romantic period, the Grimms’ collection of fairy

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tales has persisted in popularity through the 21st century, with countless stories being revised, reworked, and retold in print, or adapted for television and film. William Thompson See also Ariès, Philippe; Childhood and Nature; Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm); Innocence; Locke, John; Wordsworth, William

Further Readings Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life (R. Baldick, Trans.). New York, NY: Knopf. Austin, L. M. (2003). Children of childhood: Nostalgia and the romantic legacy. Studies in Romanticism, 42(1), 75–98. doi:10.2307/25601604 Demers, P. (Ed.). (2015). From instruction to delight: An anthology of children’s literature to 1850 (4th ed.). Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press. Lerer, S. (2008). Children’s literature: A reader’s history, from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. McGavran, J. H. Jr. (Ed.). (2012). Time of beauty, time of fear: The romantic legacy in the literature of childhood. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Plotz, J. A. (2001). Romanticism and the vocation of childhood. New York, NY: Palgrave. Ruwe, D. (2014). British children’s poetry in the romantic era: Verse, riddle, and rhyme. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Welch, D. M. (2011). Blake and Rousseau on children’s reading, pleasure, and imagination. The Lion and the Unicorn, 35(3), 199–226. doi:10.1353/uni.2011.0022 Wierda Rowland, A. (2012). Romanticism and childhood: The infantilization of British literary culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Zipes, J. (2015). Grimm legacies: The magic spell of the Grimms’ folk and fairy tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Children Living With HIV  in Africa According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, as of 2017, an estimated 2.1 million children were living with HIV in 2016, with 1.9

million coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Ninety percent of children under 15 years of age acquired the disease through mother-to-child transmission, otherwise known as vertical transmission, while a small percentage were the result of horizontal transmission, including sexual transmission through sexual abuse or coercion, or early sex. Global statistics show that 6% of people living with HIV are children under the age of 15 years, with 9% and 11% accounting for new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths, respectively. Of these global estimates, a United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund analysis estimated that Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia, respectively, had high distribution of new infections among children 0–14 years. Twenty-five percent of the HIV-infected adolescents are living in three African countries (Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya). In Africa, the first observations of HIV infection in children were identified in the early 1980s, while in East Africa similar observations were made in the mid-1980s. This was due to high infection rates among women of childbearing age as well as mother-to-child transmission. This led to the need to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the disease. With the introduction of antiretroviral therapy (ART), a Paediatric AIDS Clinical Trials Group 076 study carried out in 1990 found that ART administered to the mother and infant around delivery significantly reduced mother-to-child transmission. Unfortunately, resource-limited settings have experienced major barriers to effective prevent mother-tochild transmission of the disease. The World Health Organization estimates that 1,000 ­children continue to be infected with HIV each day, with most new cases (97%) occurring in middle- and low-income countries. This is in addition to new cases due to horizontal transmission. This entry focuses on symptoms and treatments, stigma and discrimination, and the long-term effects.

Symptoms and Treatments HIV expresses itself differently in infected individuals. Some of the common clinical manifestations of HIV infection in children include failure

Children Living With HIV in Africa

to thrive, recurrent pneumonia, recurrent diarrhea, hepatomegaly, generalized lymphadenopathy, and oral candidiasis. While some remain mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic for more than a year, others may develop severe HIV-related signs and symptoms in the first year of life. HIVinfected children are particularly susceptible to common childhood and opportunistic infections due to immature immune systems. They may experience a rapid progression of HIV disease if diagnosis and treatment is delayed. High mortality rates in this group of children may be because of many several factors, including intercurrent infections, malnutrition, and lack of access to early diagnosis and basic health care. HIV also puts the child at risk for developmental impairments which affects both the child’s growth and neurocognitive functions. Preceding the introduction of ART, the clinical course of HIV infection in this group was highly variable with two general patterns of survival described. At least 20% of infants diagnosed with HIV experienced rapid progression of disease and died of AIDS-related complications by 4 years of age, while survival time for the remaining children was placed at approximately 9–10 years of age. That being the case, early diagnosis and treatment have been found to reduce HIV progression and prevent transmission. The introduction of ART in the 1990s saw the reduction of new HIV infections among children, thus reducing the mortality rate while allowing for normal growth and development in this group. One of the major challenges in the introduction of ART in Africa is the inadequate infrastructure to deal with the number of people infected. Limited pediatric HIV diagnostic facilities in sub-Saharan Africa have meant that most HIV-infected children are diagnosed very late in the course of illness or not at all. Reasons for these challenges stem from the chronic underresourcing of health systems, the underdevelopment of strategic public health leadership, the attrition of health personnel, and the high prevalence of poverty, factors that already limit the delivery of many less complex primary health-care services. With the introduction of ART, the price of medication was high and most people in developing countries did not have access to them, becoming an international concern. Consequently, people

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living with HIV/AIDS formed alliances or movements with nongovernmental organizations and activists that fought for the rights for access to treatment. Over the past years, the introduction and availability of ART has dramatically improved in developing countries. Different organizations, activists, movements such as Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, together with governments, aided in increasing the coverage of ART in sub-Saharan Africa. For example, in South Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign spearheaded the campaign for pharmaceutical companies to reduce the cost of ART and pressurized the government to shift from their initial AIDS denialist position and improve policies. Since then, there is rapid and wide scale roll out of ART. Despite the challenges mentioned, today there is increasing access to ART for children with government policies and efforts by international donors seeking to make treatment freely available through national ART programs. Significant efforts have been devoted to the development and increased access to pediatric ART medication. In 2010, the World Health Organization recommended lowering the age threshold for universal initiation of ART from 12 months to 24 months of age based on the statistics of the higher infant and young children mortality from HIV in resource-limited settings (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) when compared to American and European cohorts of HIV-infected peers. In 2014, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS launched the ambitious fast track targets “90–90–90” to help end the AIDS epidemic. By 2020, 90% of people living with HIV know their HIV status, 90% of people who know their status receive treatment, and 90% viral suppression for those on ART. This call also applies specifically to children and adolescents. Despite these developments, the number of children becoming newly infected with HIV remains unacceptably high especially in low-income countries. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund 2018 statistics show that less than half (43%) of children living with HIV are on ART. Critical intervention among children remains low; it is urgent that children living with HIV are identified and enrolled in treatment interventions with clear and consistent linkages to care and support.

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Challenges to efficient pediatric ART include adherence factors such as dosing volumes, children being unable to swallow the pills, lack of disclosure of HIV status, handling of pediatric ART by caregivers, as well as their experience and capacity to administer ART to younger patients. Many children with HIV do not access treatment because they are unaware of their status. Some may not have been tested. Caregivers have also been known to keep the child’s status a secret, posing higher risks for children. Disclosure has been known to reduce the need for secrecy and can also reduce the stigma around HIV if it normalizes the disease. It is also seen as beneficial in encouraging infected persons to access services and improve treatment compliance. Authorities recommend disclosure as a vitally important aspect of care offered to those who are HIV positive. The disclosure of a child’s HIV status has been found to present unique challenges and many parents wish to protect their children from the negative social and psychological effects of knowing their disease condition. Research has found that delayed or nondisclosure of HIV status to infected children to be associated with poor adherence, psychological, and coping outcomes. Increased involvement of children in their treatment and better access to social support are some of the benefits that have been found in children who know their status.

Stigma and Discrimination Stigma and discrimination remain significant barriers to inclusion, access to prevention, treatment, care, and support among this group. HIV/AIDSrelated stigma and discrimination shapes all aspects of HIV treatment for people living with the disease. Despite the paucity of research into how stigma specifically affects HIV-infected children, it has been highlighted that many experience stigmatizing attitudes and bullying from peers in both school and community settings which leads to problems in school attendance and accessing peer support. In some cases, children who are HIV positive are actively excluded from schools. Countries like Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa have put laws into place that ensure that all children regardless of status have access to schooling regardless of their status. Despite this opportunity,

this group of children still often find themselves stigmatized especially in cases where their caregiver is known to have died of HIV/AIDs related complications, with many of them choosing not to disclose their status. Overall this affects the child’s school experience. Stigma may also affect the child’s access to health facilities, as caregivers are afraid to disclose their status to them hence delaying management of the disease. Children living with HIV also experience internalized stigma (selfstigma). This causes them distress and when coupled with stigma and discrimination from the outside places them at high risk for psychiatric issues such as depression, suicide and substance abuse which in many cases complicates the management of the disease. Social rejection, discrimination, physical violence, and other stigma related experiences increase the risk for psychological problems among HIV-infected individuals, which may also hamper treatment behaviors. Stigma and discrimination exacerbate the material and psychological problems these children already face.

Development: Neurocognitive and Mental Health Effects Living with a chronic illness increases one’s vulnerability to developmental problems. One of the earliest and most devastating markers of HIV infection in children is neurological. One 2000 study found neurodevelopmental delays in 8–13% of those infected. A correlation has been found between severity of neurodevelopmental problems and severity of HIV-related illness. Delayed developmental milestones, poor expressive, and receptive language development and motor development skills are some of the direct impact of HIV on neurodevelopmental of the child. These children are also at increased risk of developing mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, conduct issues, and substance use. A multitude of stressors such as poverty expose the HIV-infected child to various psychosocial risk factors that often co-occur and negatively impact the child’s development. As previously noted, the effects of stigma and discrimination as well as delayed disclosure are notable. This group of children have also often had to deal with the effects of loss of a loved due to the disease. They are forced to face and try to understand their own possible death

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and that of their loved ones. Most of the time, they are not emotionally or mentally mature to deal with such complexities of life. A combination of these factors increase risk for the already at-risk child. With this knowledge, HIV management clinics have included psychological support as part of the child’s routine care because of their vulnerability. Programs such as VUKA and CHAMPS were developed in South Africa and have been found to improve the mental health of children involved. Teen Club program by the Baylor International Paediatric AIDS Initiative is also another program aimed at improving the lives of infected children and has been integrated in countries such as Uganda, Botswana, Malawi, Lesotho, and Swaziland. In 2015, the 68th world Health Assembly requested that a Global Accelerated Action for Health of Adolescents (AA-HA!) should be developed. During the 2017 Global Adolescent Health Conference, the major report “Global Accelerated Action for the Health of Adolescents” was launched by the World Health Organization. The report highlights that most adolescent deaths can be prevented with good health services, education, and social support. Therefore, there is an urgent need to accelerate all-rounded treatment for those living with HIV.

Growing Into Adolescence and Adulthood The rollout of ARTs decreased mortality rates among HIV-infected individuals, bringing about the survival of infected children into adulthood. As they survive into adulthood, there is need to transfer them to adult care. This transition of care from pediatric to adult care has become an issue of concern as it involves the individual taking responsibility for their own health and disease management. Practitioners have reported that adolescents and young adults are generally unprepared for their transition into adult care, raising new challenges for sustaining retention in the care continuum. Some of the challenges adolescents who are transitioning face are the lack of services (programs) dedicated to meeting the unique needs of this group. Aside from lack of infrastructure—a common theme in developing countries as ours— there exists a lack of knowledge with how to understand and manage young people, this is translated in lack of adolescent-friendly services, a

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lack of communication and support between service providers and adolescents. The transition of care to the responsibility of young people themselves involves complex changes of clinics, models of care, and health-care providers; thus, the success of the transition process greatly impacts the success of ART in adolescents and young adults. It is a well-known fact that adolescence presents a vulnerable period for the individual, more so the adolescents living with HIV, as these changes can lead to care disruptions. Poor transition of care increases the risk of non-­ adherence to ART, emergence of viral resistance and loss to follow-up, with implications for individual patients as well as for the overall epidemic. It is not enough to push “90–90–90.” There is need for the health-care providers to prepare the HIVinfected adolescent both clinically and psychologically for this change. Guidelines and policies are needed to ensure integration of ­adolescent-friendly services that will ease the burden of the transition process. Improving clinical capacity to ensure that they are speaking a language the adolescent understands, together with championing both peer support and collaboration, promotes successful transitioning into adulthood. Manasi Kumar, Nduku Wambua, and Otesetwe Musindo See also: AIDS Orphans; Pediatrics; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Adejumo, O. A., Malee, K. M., Ryscavage, P., Hunter, S. J., & Taiwo, B. O. (2015). Contemporary issues on the epidemiology and antiretroviral adherence of HIV-infected adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa: A narrative review. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 18(1), 20049. doi:10.7448/IAS.18.1.20049 African Network for the Care of Children Affected by AIDS. (2006, July). Handbook of Pediatric AIDS in Africa. Washington, DC: USAID. Dahourou, D. L., Gautier-Lafaye, C., Teasdale, C. A., Renner, L., Yotebieng, M., Desmonde, S., . . . Leroy, V. (2017). Transition from paediatric to adult care of adolescents living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa: challenges, youth-friendly models, and outcomes. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 2017(Suppl 3), 21528. doi:10.7448/IAS.20.4.21528

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Deacon, H., & Stephney, I. (2007). HIV/AIDS, stigma and children: A literature review. Cape Town, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council. Earls, F., Raviola, G. J., & Carlson, M. (2008). Promoting child and adolescent mental health in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 49(3), 295–312. doi:10.1111/j.1469–7610.2007.01864.x Lodha, R., Upadhyay, A., Kapoor, V., & Kabra, S. K. (2006). Clinical profile and natural history of children with HIV infection. Indian Journal of Pediatrics, 23. doi:10.1007/bf02825480 Loewenson, R., & McCoy, D. (2004). Access to antiretroviral treatment in Africa new resources and sustainable health systems are needed. British Medical Journal, 328, 241–242. doi:10.1136/ bmj.328.7434.241 Martino, M., Tovo, P., Balducci, M., Galli, L., Gabiano, C., Rezza, G., & Pezzotti, P. (2000). Clinical profile and natural history of children with HIV infection. JAMA, 284, 190–197. Posse, M., Meheus, F., van Asten, H., van der Ven, A., & Baltussen, R. (2008). Barriers to access to antiretroviral treatment in developing countries: A review. Tropical Medicine and International Health, 13(7), 904–913. doi:10.1111/j.1365–3156.2008.02091.x Pulsifer, M. B., & Aylward, E. H. (2000). Human immunodeficiency virus. In K. O. Yeates, M. D. Ris, & H. G. Taylor (Eds.), Pediatric neuropsychology: Research, theory, and practice (pp. 381–402). New York, NY: Guilford. Short, S. E., & Goldberg, R. E. (2015). Children living with HIV-infected adults: Estimates for 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. PLoS One, 10(11), e0142580. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0142580 UNAIDS. (2008). Report on the global AIDS epidemic. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. UNAIDS. (2014, May). No adolescent living with HIV left behind: A coalition for action. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. doi:10.1111/1468–0009.12265 UNAIDS. (2014). 90–90–90: An ambitious treatment target to help end the AIDS epidemic. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. UNAIDS. (2016). Children in HIV factsheet. Retrieved from http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_ asset/FactSheet_Children_en.pdf UNAIDS. (2017). Ending AIDS: Progress towards the 90–90–90 targets. Retrieved from https://www.unaids .org/en/resources/documents/2017/20170720_ Global_AIDS_update_2017

UNAIDS Data 2017. (2017). Retrieved from https:// www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/media_asset/ 20170720_Data_book_2017_en.pdf United Nations Children’s Fund. (2011, June). Opportunity in Crisis: Preventing HIV from early adolescence to young adulthood. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Vranda, M. N., & Mothi, S. N. (2013). Psychosocial issues of children infected with HIV/AIDS. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, 35(1), 19–22. doi:10.4103/0253–7176.112195 World Health Organization. (2010). Antiretroviral therapy for HIV infection in infants and children: Towards universal access. Recommendations for a public health approach. 2010 revision. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. World Health Organization. (2014). Global update on the health sector response to HIV. Geneva, Switzerland: Author.

Children Who Murder Children who murder are grimly fascinating because they challenge normative ideas about both the nature of childhood and the nature of violence. Can children be inherently ‘innocent’ if capable of murder? Can such violence be inherently ‘evil’ when committed by children? This entry examines the public fascination with children who murder, murder’s legal definition, reported risk factors connected to children who murder, and the challenges children who murder pose in the criminal justice system.

The Public Fascination With Children Who Murder Cases that involve children who murder can become highly publicised and are often seen as symbolic of wider concerns about the breakdown of society, law and order, and of childhood itself. However, it is only very unusual cases of the already-unusual category of ‘­children who murder’ that reach public consciousness— for example, the unusually young age of the two boys involved in the death of James Bulger in Liverpool, England, in 1993, the unusual multiple murders committed by ‘Medicine Hat Girl’ in Alberta, Canada, in 2006, or the unusual

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‘patricide’ involving a 14-year-old girl’s murder of her father Stephen Osiaw in Begoro, Ghana, in 2014. Such high-profile cases can skew public understandings of children who murder. Research suggests that, around the world, most cases involve older, teenage perpetrators; male perpetrators; similarly aged or older victims; stranger or acquaintance victims; and singlevictim homicides. These case characteristics are very similar to those found in cases of ‘adults who murder’. In particular, as with adult cases, child-perpetrated homicide is overwhelmingly a male activity, and boys’ use of lethal violence is often understood in terms of how they construct, perform, and contest particular forms of masculinity. However, because these are ‘adult’ forms of masculinity, Adrian James and Chris Jenks have suggested that children who murder are often subject to a process of ‘conceptual eviction’, whereby public discourse (for example, through news reports, political commentary, or judicial statements) works to remove the perpetrator from the category of ‘child’ altogether. This serves to re-establish a discourse of childhood which is premised on an assumption of inherent innocence. Girls’ use of lethal violence is perhaps more complex still, since it violates normative constructions of femininity as well as those of ‘child’, resulting in a process of double ‘conceptual eviction’ in the girls’ removal from the categories of both ‘child’ and ‘female’.

Murder as a Legal Term ‘Murder’ is a legal term and its definition requires criminal court proceedings where evidence is tested and guilt is determined by the administrators of justice. Given this context, it is important to recognise that a child cannot ‘murder’ in cases where the child is below the age of criminal responsibility, and this age varies around the world between 6 and 18 years. So, while all children can ‘kill’, only children who have reached the age of criminal responsibility can ‘murder’. This means that doing historical and/or comparative research on this topic is difficult, because ages of criminal responsibility vary widely over national (and regional) jurisdictions, and over time. Furthermore, because there are a range of social and

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legal factors that determine whether someone is ultimately categorised as a ‘child murderer’, social researchers often find that the term ‘children who commit homicide’ a more useful category to work with. This category includes both murder and manslaughter and, while it is more inclusive of children who kill, it is also subject to variations in definition, depending on the jurisdiction in question. An additional research challenge is that researchers do not always use the same definition of ‘child’, meaning that some research studies extend the cohort age up to 21 years, while others impose a lower limit, often at the start of the teenage years. Another definitional complexity concerns the issue of children who are engaged in armed conflict, or ‘child soldiers’. As Susan J. Song and Joop de Jong estimate in their 2015 study on child soldiers, anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 children are involved in armed conflict in many parts of the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Syria. While such children may be included in the category of ‘children who kill’, they would not necessarily be defined as ‘children who murder’ and their culpability in any war crimes (including murder) is contentious, due to both their assumed (age-related) vulnerability and the nature of their recruitment into soldiering, which often involves abduction and coercion.

Risk Factors The earliest research that investigated children who commit homicide tended to focus on very small and highly selective samples, often involving rich detailed case studies. Such methods were illuminative of specific behavioural processes and they contributed to early theories that drew on notions of maladaptive families, organic psychological disorders, and impulse control deficits. In particular, studies from the middle of the 20th century were influenced by John Bowlby’s research and the idea that early deprivation of parental love and affection plays a significant role in such cases. However, the identification of socialisation practices in explaining child-perpetrated homicide also manifested in other theoretical frameworks, such as

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behaviourist theories of ‘modelling’ and psychoanalytic theories concerning ‘ego defects’. Risk factor models began to emerge in the 1970s. These drew not only on the alleged emotional, cognitive, and psychological characteristics of the child but also on particular assumed characteristics of the victim, such as ‘helplessness’ and ‘provocativeness’. While these approaches added a useful transactional dimension to the theoretical models, it was often in a way that implicitly blamed the victim. Furthermore, such models failed to recognise wider social forces and contexts. Typologies emerged soon after, often using the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders constructs to correlate children who murder with a range of diagnostic categories such as conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and anxiety and depressive disorders. Other typological approaches focused on the characteristics of the offence (e.g., ‘conflict-based’ vs. ‘crimebased’) and on the victim–offender relationship (e.g., ‘familial’ vs. ‘non-familial’). More recent research has claimed that more structural variables, such as residential neighbourhood deprivation, low socio-economic status, and being born into unemployment, are more predictive of childperpetrated homicide than individualistic variables. Homicide cases that involve child perpetrators are significantly more likely to be reported in the mass media than those that involve adult offenders. Sometimes—most notably following the murder of James Bulger—such cases have elicited a ‘moral panic’, with subsequent demands for greater surveillance and increased discipline of children, and harsher sentences for ‘all’ children who may become involved in criminal activities. However, children who murder do not always elicit such responses, and there have been notable cases that have elicited public sympathy rather than opprobrium (e.g., the murder of Silje Redergard in Trondheim, Norway, in 1994).

Children Who Murder in the Criminal Justice System Children who murder also present challenges to criminal justice systems, which are premised on

the assumption that crime is an adult activity. They also present challenges for juvenile justice systems, which are premised on the assumption that children do not commit such serious crimes. Thus, in many countries—including the United Kingdom and the United States—children are tried for murder in adult criminal courts and in ways that are entirely inappropriate for their age in terms of the architecture, language and communication, and the presentation of the courts and its administrators. Furthermore, many jurisdictions apply the mandatory life sentence to children who murder, sometimes without possibility of parole, which may have a disproportionate effect on children, given that the sentence may be for longer than their life span to date. For at least some of their sentence, children who murder are sent to secure state institutions. Despite United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child recommendations that such institutions should operate as a ‘child-oriented system’, they vary around the world in the extent to which they support and rehabilitate or punish and brutalise. Amanda Holt See also Bowlby, John; Child Depravity; Children and Youth in Prison; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); Violence; Young Offenders

Further Readings Adams, K. A. (1974). The child who murders: A review of theory and research. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 1, 51–61. Gerard, F. J., Jackson, V., Chou, S., Whitfield, K. C., & Browne, K. D. (2014). An exploration of the current knowledge on young people who kill: A systematic review. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 19, 559–571. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2014 .07.002 Holt, A. (2017). Parricides, school shootings and child soldiers: Constructing criminological phenomena in the context of children who kill. In L. O’Dell, C. Brownlow, H. BertilsdotterRosqvist (Eds.), Different childhoods: Non/ Normative development and transgressive trajectories (pp. 132–145). London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315623467-10

Children’s Bodies James, A., & Jenks, C. (1996). Public perceptions of childhood criminality. British Journal of Sociology, 47(2), 315–331. doi:10.2307/591729 Shumaker, D. M., & Prinz, R. J. (2000). Children who murder: A review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 3(2), 97–115. Song, S. J., & de Jong, J. (2015). Child soldiers: Children associated with fighting forces. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 24(4), 765–775.

Children’s Bodies Children’s bodies are fundamental matters of interest, research, and disputes in childhood studies. In a risk society, children’s bodies are at the center of increasing moral panics in multiple domains. For instance, on one side, children are threatened by inactivity: Lack of physical activities, screens, and video games are blamed for increasing obesity rates. On the other side, many children are medicated for their excessive activity, as in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Social norms about what children’s bodies have to be like have never been so multiple, precise, and sometimes contradictory. Children also figure to be the first victims of junk food, pollution, climate changes, and the like, and their sexuality is a matter of concern as they grow up. In some societies, however, the problems of children’s bodies may be very different: malnutrition, overwork, exploitation, and so on. Infant rates of mortality reveal huge inequalities between and inside countries, but everywhere, adults’ physical domination, domestic violence, and abuses are still very frequent. Overprotected or mistreated, children’s bodies are at the center of adults’ worries about what is bad or good for them and what children are able to do or not. To understand how children’s bodies are understood and treated, the purpose of this entry is to give a historical overview of different theoretical approaches that are important for childhood studies. It is impossible to mention all the authors who have contributed to this history; instead,

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only some of those still relevant to research are discussed here. In addition, the plural word bodies is used to underline not only the diversity of the bodies themselves (with age, gender, race, etc.) but also the multiple approaches that describe what bodies are and the different language games involved in naming something a body. All cultures do not use a specific word for designing an entity per se. The simple fact that one can speak of the body or that one can say that children (and adults) have a body may be challenged by visions of nondual living existence, overcoming the traditional division between mind and body included in language, a heritage of Cartesian philosophy grounded on Christian beliefs separating body and soul. For instance, in Chinese traditions, the meaning of the word body relates to a process of actualization of its reality, not as an already distinct object given in the world as a separated entity. This kind of cultural tradition carries a more fluid and open meaning of the body that is surprisingly closed to today’s conceptualizations. In his phenomenological approach of perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated that things and body are made from the same stuff. The limits between the bodies and their world are not given a priori: They can be analyzed as the result of a double process of subjectification and objectification.

The Medical View of Children’s Bodies Children’s bodies are at first inscribed in the history of Western medicine as both a category of thought and a specific way of caring for children. The rise of a medical vision of children is easy to understand and is linked to their high rates of mortality in the past, but the legitimacy of medical sciences still dominates representations of children’s bodies. The first medical books dedicated to pregnant women and young children were written in the 15th and 16th centuries. But a radical shift came with the Enlightenment, the critique of all the prejudices and traditions that corrupted children’s innocence and constrained their vitality, the claim for a natural life, soon translated in a positive and rational

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knowledge of children’s bodies. The discovery of the smallpox vaccination by the English physician Edward Jenner at the end of the 17th century is a good example of the ideological fight between traditional care and the rationality of modern medicine, which entails the trust not only in the power of the experts but also in the resources of the children. This biological conception of children’s bodies has spread all over the world, and age has become an international metric for children’s growth. During the development of nation-states from the 18th century, children’s bodies also became public goods. This went hand in hand with the creation of tools for governments, such as statistics, which as the word indicates, are linked to the state. The rise of children’s labor regulations in Europe, in defense of families’ authority and industrial interests, is typical of this special public protection dedicated to childhood, aimed to help children’s bodies become strong and healthy adult bodies, ready to work and to fight for the country. From the idea of growth to that of development, the end of the 18th century marked another turning point with the norms extending from physical and physiological to intellectual and psychological. Researchers blurred the border between mind and body, showing how emotions and cognitive skills are inscribed in humans’ neurobiological evolution or, in a psychoanalytic approach, how desires and imaginaries are rooted in early childhood development. Very young children’s brains are the new land of discoveries in neurocognitive sciences, underlining the existence of children’s multiple potentialities, which have to be socially recognized; at the same time, however, the role of early language and cognitive stimulation is emphasized for children’s future academic success at the expense of a holistic view of children’s bodies.

Social Sciences, Embodiment, and Socialization Finally, in the 20th century, social scientists joined the research. In particular, the concept of the techniques of body, developed by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in 1934, pointed out that the

socialization process is at the same time physiological, psychological, and social, considering the person as a whole. He demonstrated using anthropological examples that what may be considered as natural activities—such as sleeping, eating, and even spitting—vary depending on the cultural context. For instance, there is no natural way of walking, Mauss wrote, stressing both human body and material culture as tools of cultural practices. Postures, gestures, and expressions of emotions also involve a sociocultural process that children learn. The study of early childhood education demonstrates how children’s bodies are from the beginning supervised, controlled, and normalized, even if each culture has its own categories of perceptions of safety and risk, purity and pollution. This production of the socialized bodies is also very clear in French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of tastes, which shows that food and hygienic habits, physical activities, bodies’ expressions, their values as capital, and more depend on social classes and are a matter of fights of legitimacy in the social space. These practices and schemes of perception constitute a system of dispositions, a habitus, which is profoundly incorporated from early childhood in the body image of one’s self as a natural set of behaviors. At the same time, these dispositions may involve a critical reflexivity in relation to the possibility of their objectification. Thus, from the very beginning children’s bodies are constituted not only in a social context but also made with social resources, leading to the notion of embodiment. If adults play a key role in children’s socialization, notably through imitation and guided participation, Mauss was also one of the first social scientists to put an emphasis on peer cultures, describing the importance of children’s groups as social resources for socialization between children themselves with their own values, norms, and practices. But his studies never tried to understand children’s perspectives as social scientists have done since the 1980s, showing how children use their bodies as resources in social interactions—for example, in resisting adults’ authority or conveying their appearance and their social rank among peers.

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With a different theoretical framework, the philosopher Michel Foucault stressed surveillance, discipline, punishment, and segregation as ways of policing dangerous populations (including children). He also demonstrated that repressive constraints upon the bodies are also productive in the process of subjectification, when norms are not only imposed from the outside but also internalized as constitutive of the person as subject. It makes room for a deeper understanding of power, defined as microphysics. It also underlines how knowledge and power are bound together in children’s bodies as sites of biopolitics.

Toward Postmodern and Amodern Children’s Bodies Developed in the 1980s by Bruno Latour among others, the actor network theory also leads to a renewal of the understanding of children’s bodies. It gives a new importance to material culture, emphasizing the associations between humans and artifacts. It also underlines how the reality of the world is put in tests by the actors in analyzing how the multiple dichotomies of modern categories of thought are constructed and performed, such as individual and collective actors, agency and structure, nature and culture, and so on. In addition, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and disability studies provide further emphasis on the importance of body and materiality. For example, in relation to language, Judith ­Butler stressed the importance of the body as a gendered performance where its materiality is an effect of relations of power. Instead of a naturalistic vision of the body, her work shows that the body’s vulnerability is intrinsically linked to a critical agency. All these studies participate to a wider movement, which underlines the need for a critical and reflexive study of norms, values, and classifications regarding the body. These are put into tests of reality and are enacted into p ­ ractices whether in scientific or everyday life a­ ctivities. Finally, instead of a vision of children’s bodies as purely social and cultural constructions or on the contrary as biological, researchers stress the

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importance of the materiality of the body. More precisely, considering the plurality of its modes of existence, they study empirically how the actors themselves, including children, are involved in inquiries into defining the importance (or not) of the body’s materiality and its power, testing their hybridity between vulnerability and resistance. This question is that of the very beginning of human life, the constitution of children’s bodies as materiel and symbolic forms of mankind. Definitions of the humanity of children (and adults) are questioned in Donna Haraway’s work about cyborgs, new technological figures, monsters, and animals. All these hybrid subjects–objects disturb one’s ordinary sense of differences between human and nonhuman beings. Between fiction and science, her thoughts open a radical political epistemology for an amodern conception of humans’ bodies. Conceptions of children’s bodies have to remain open; in Ethics, Benedict de (Baruch) Spinoza claimed that no one has yet determined what the body can do. Undoubtedly, ethics must remain at the heart of the study of children’s bodies, even if they seem to disappear, for example, through Internet practices or with the increasing possibilities of medical and biotechnological transformations. Pascale Garnier See also Biopolitics of Childhood; Childhood; Childhood Embodiment/Embodied; Development; Gender; Human Development Index; Posthumanism and Childhood; Spinoza, Baruch; Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London, UK: Routledge. Burke, R. S., & Duncan, J. (2015). Bodies as sites of cultural reflection in early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York, NY: Routledge. Douglas, M. (1967). Purity and danger. London, UK: Routledge.

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Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York, NY: Random House. Garnier, P. (2014). Childhood as a question of critiques and justifications: Insight into Boltanski’s sociology. Childhood, 21(4), 447–460. doi:10.1177/0907568213491770 Garnier, P. (2015). Between young children and adults: Practical logic in families’ lives. In L. Alanen, L. Brooker, & B. Mayall (Eds.), Studying childhood with Bourdieu (pp. 57–77). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Haraway, D. (2004). The Haraway reader. New York, NY: Routledge. Jullien, F. (2011). The silent transformations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of body. Economy and Society, 34(2), 70–88. doi:10.1080/03085147300000003 (Original work published 1934) Merleau Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of perception. New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1944) Prout, A. (Ed.). (2000). The body, childhood and society. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan Press. Turmel, A. (2008). A historical sociology of childhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Vandenbroeck, M., De Vos, J., Fias, W., Olson, M. L., Penn, H., Wastell, D., & White, S. (2017). Constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education. London, UK: Routledge.

Children’s Bureau, United States The establishment of the U.S. Children’s Bureau (USCB) in April 1912 marked the first time that a national government created an agency solely to investigate and report on the needs of a nation’s children and youth. With a meager budget of only US$25,640 for its inaugural year of operation, the agency’s mandate and scope put a small staff to work investigating and reporting on what the bureau and its supporters defined as the whole child. The law creating the agency mandated its scope to broadly include “all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and

child life among all classes of our people.” This entry describes the origin of the USCB, its work over four decades, and its legacy and continued work. The opening of the USCB was an important turning point in social welfare history. More specifically, it was clear recognition of a national government’s responsibility for ensuring the welfare of a country’s youngest citizens, distinct from the needs of adults. It also highlighted important issues concerning children’s rights and the role of government in the United States and beyond. In its first five decades of work, the USCB was the most important single entity in the federal government shaping a modern definition of childhood and government responsibility for children’s welfare. Importantly, the bureau conducted the first federal studies on infant, child, and maternal mortality. It implemented the first federal programs directed at saving babies’ lives and improving children’s health. The USCB provided oversight for the successful implementation federal child labor laws, studied the rise of juvenile courts, and designed the first federal economic support program for children. The agency also designed and oversaw federal policies for disabled children, as well as adoption and foster care. At the international level, the USCB was an active participant in Pan American conferences as well as the League of Nations, and United Nations. A reorganization of the federal government in 1946 diminished the USCB’s influence and undermined the idea that a single agency should work on behalf of the whole child. Despite this history, the Children’s Bureau continues into the 21st century as an important advocate and resource about the circumstances of children and adolescents in the United States.

Origins of the USCB In her 1905 book, Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation, progressive activist Florence Kelley argued that “a right to childhood . . . follows from the existence of the Republic and must be guarded in order to guard its life” (p. 3). Kelley was closely connected to the network of male

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and female reformers identified as progressives. Progressive politics included a wide range of causes. The settlement house movement, a variety of women’s organizations, advocates for improved children’s and maternal health care, anti-child-labor activists, proponents of mother’s pensions, and the early juvenile courts were among the most vocal supporters calling for policy reforms to advance the health and welfare of children. Kelley was closely linked to Chicago’s Hull House cofounder Jane Addams and Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald. At the urging of Kelley and other like-minded activists, in ­January 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt sponsored the first of seven White House Conferences on Children and Youth that were organized approximately every 10 years until 1971. As a result of the 1909 meeting, several participants lobbied Congress over the next 3 years to establish a federal agency focused on improving children’s lives. On April 8, 1912, President William Howard Taft signed the legislation establishing the USCB within the Department of Labor and Commerce (37 Stat., 79). The bureau moved the next year to the newly created Department of Labor. As a nod to the important role women played in advocating for the bureau’s creation, Taft named former Hull House resident Julia C. Lathrop as the USCB’s chief, making her the first woman to head a federal U.S. government agency.

The Children’s Bureau’s First Four Decades of Work Lathrop knew that although the Children’s Bureau was established with little opposition, some issues, especially child labor, birth control, and perceptions that a federal agency might ­interfere with parental authority, might sabotage the USCB. The politically astute Lathrop chose to focus on saving babies lives as the agency’s first work. Lathrop’s small staff and an army of mostly female volunteers conducted the first infant and child mortality studies in the United States. The findings pointed to poverty, poor sanitation, and ignorance of modern health-care practices as the primary reasons that so many

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American children died of preventable disease. The findings were revolutionary because they rejected notions accepting the inevitability of children’s deaths. Science and medicine, along with good public hygiene, the education of mothers about best practices in infant and childcare, as well as required birth registration were initiatives the USCB embraced as fundamental to advancing children’s basic rights to life and good health. The agency’s pamphlets on infant and childcare were among the government’s most popular publications at a time when one in every 10 babies died within the first year. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson allocated the USCB $150,000 from wartime funding to implement Children’s Year, designed to highlight the need to protect children’s interests when much of the nation’s resources focused on winning the war. The USCB’s staff and volunteers ran a wide range of programs intended to improve the lives of children and adolescents. These included a back-to-school campaign discouraging wage work for school-aged children, well-baby contests, educational outreach to mothers and older siblings (often called little mothers) about child hygiene, health diagnostic clinics in schools, and advocacy of organized recreational activities for children and adolescents. Groups such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Consumers League used the USBC’s early work and Children’s Year experience to lobby for passage of the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Prevention Act. Sheppard-Towner was a popular education and diagnostic health program overseen by the USCB in cooperation with state departments of health. Sheppard-Towner funds helped reduce the nation’s high infant and maternal mortality rate from 75.6 deaths for every 1,000 lives births in 1921 to 67.9 in 1929. Sheppard-Towner funding was used to organize diagnostic health clinics, train midwives, and disseminate health-care information, and encourage parents to use private physicians for medical and prenatal care. Despite Sheppard-Towner’s emphasis to use private physicians for medical care, the American Medical Association (AMA) and health

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insurance companies loudly opposed SheppardTowner as socialized medicine run by unqualified women. Most likely as a nod to the program’s popularity, the AMA conceded that if an initiative like Sheppard-Towner proved worthwhile, it should be housed in the male-dominated and physician-led U.S. Public Health Service, not the female-led and social work–oriented USCB. The AMA-led opposition and a general political atmosphere rejecting progressive political reforms encouraged Congress to let Sheppard-Towner funding expire in 1929. Nevertheless, Sheppard-Towner was a significant pioneering effort in public policy for women and children. The USCB reported that Sheppard-Towner funds supported 183,252 health conferences, the establishment of 2,978 diagnostic health clinics, and reached more than 4,000,000 infants and preschool children and approximately 700,000 pregnant women. It is worth noting that Sheppard-Towner did not address the need for safe birth control or the significant impact of family poverty in health outcomes. It did, however, prove that government could play an important role in reducing the preventable deaths among mothers and children. The USCB’s second chief, Grace Abbott, led the agency during Sheppard-Towner and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout her tenure from 1921 to 1934, Abbott continued to face opposition from the AMA and U.S. Public Health Service. When the USCB’s third chief, Katharine F. Lenroot, took control in 1934, the nation was in the depths of the Great Depression and calls for government help dominated public policy debates. The new political atmosphere provided opportunities to quickly advance child welfare policy at the federal level. Consequently, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lenroot, the USCB’s Martha May Eliot, MD, and recently retired Abbott wrote the child welfare sections of the 1935 Social Security Act (Titles IV, V, and VII). With the Social Security Act’s passage, for the first time in U.S. history, federal law defined childhood dependency as birth through age 17 years. The Social Security Act also made the federal government the parent of last resort, ultimately responsible for the basic

economic and emotional security of the nation’s youngest citizens. Specifically, the Aid to Dependent Children program provided federal funding, matched by states, for payments to mothers and children living in poverty without a male breadwinner in the household. Aid to Dependent Children was weakened as a safety net for children because of inadequate compensation, state control that perpetuated discrimination based on race and ethnicity, and the exclusion of children whose parents were divorced or had never married. Nonetheless, those weaknesses were later amended. The Social Security Act’s influence is also important because it funded prenatal, postnatal, and early child health care for the nation’s most needy mothers and babies. Similar to Aid to Dependent Children, the health-care section was later amended to also include health care for children in foster care. In addition, the Social Security Act provided federal funding for basic health-care and educational opportunities for children with disabilities. Another New Deal initiative, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) included the first successful federal law regulating child labor. This was a long-sought victory for the USCB supporters active in the anti-child-labor movement. Activists were disappointed in 1918 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional and when the 1924 Child Labor Amendment was not ratified by the necessary number of states. Although the FLSA was a victory, it ignored children engaged in agricultural work and domestic labor. Still, FLSA worked hand in hand with state and local mandatory school attendance laws to reshape ideas about acceptable work for children. FLSA banned the most egregious industrial wage labor and street work for anyone under the age of 14 years and regulated the wage labor of adolescents through age 17 years. Despite its less than comprehensive protections, FLSA established in federal policy the idea that access to education through high school, not wages, was a major part of the right to childhood. With the onset of World War II, the USCB further increased its influence through nursery school, juvenile delinquency studies, and implementation

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of the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program. Designed as a means for maintaining morale in the military for young fathers, Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program provided medical, nursing, and hospital care for the wives and infants of enlisted men in the military services’ four lowest pay grades. One in every seven infants born in the United States from 1943 to 1946 were Emergency Maternity and Infant Care Program babies. After four decades of work, the USCB seemed to have a bright future, seemed to be growing. To the surprise of its leadership and supporters, however, shifts in the political climate and the Truman Administration’s 1946 government reorganization ended the bureau’s chances to advance its philosophy that a single federal agency should serve the nation’s children. The creation of the Federal Security Administration in 1946 lowered the USCB’s rank within the government, now housed in the new Federal Security Administration, and took away the bureau’s regulatory authority. Symbolically, the Children’s Bureau also lost United States as part of its name. The Federal Security Administration became the Department of Health Education and Welfare in 1953 and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1979.

The Children’s Bureau’s Legacy and Continued Work In 1951, Martha May Elliott, MD, was named the Children’s Bureau’s fourth chief. She was followed in by Elizabeth Oettinger in 1957 who held the job until she was named Health Education and Welfare’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Planning in 1967. Oettinger’s departure was followed by a brief time by Pardo Frederick Delliquadri and then in 1969 Edward Ziegler. Delliquadri and Ziegler were the first men named to head the agency. Ziegler led the Children’s Bureau’s participation in the last White House Conference on Children and Youth held in 1971. He also advocated for and established the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect within the Children’s Bureau. In the decades after World War II, the Children’s Bureau has focused most of its attention

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on promoting policies and disseminating information intended to protect the nation’s most vulnerable children. In the over 100 years since its establishment, the Children’s Bureau is far from the powerful federal agency its founders envisioned in 1912. Nonetheless, the Children’s Bureau’s public policy influence is clearly evident in the United Nation’s 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Within the United States, the Children’s Bureau continues to serve as the only federal agency focused solely on children’s welfare. Kriste Ann Lindenmeyer See also Addams, Jane; Child Labor; Child Mortality; Child Welfare; Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Briar-Lawson, K., McCarthy, M., & Dickinson, N. (Eds.). (2013). The Children’s bureau: Shaping a century of child welfare practices, programs, and policies. Washington, DC: National Association of Social Worker Press. Children’s Bureau. (2012). The Children’s bureau legacy: Ensuring the right to childhood. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Retrieved from https://www.childwelfare.gov/ pubPDFs/cb_ebook.pdf Hawes, J. M. (1991). The children’s rights movement: A history of advocacy and protection. Boston, MA: Twayne. Kelley, F. (1905). Some ethical gains through legislation. New York, NY: Macmillan. Ladd-Taylor, M. (1986). Raising a baby the government way: Mothers’ letters to the children’s bureau, 1915–1932. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ladd-Taylor, M. (1994). Mother-work: Women, child welfare, and the state, 1890–930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lieberman, A., & Nelson, K. (Eds.). (2013). Women & children first: The contributions of the children’s bureau to social work education. Washington, DC: Council on Social Work Education. Lindenmeyer, K. (1997). “A right to childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and child welfare, 1912–1946. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Lindenmeyer, K. (2007). The greatest generation grows up: American childhood in the 1930s. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. Muncy, R. (1991). Creating a female dominion in American reform, 1890–1935. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Children’s Consumer Culture See Children as Consumers; Child Consumption: A Vygotskyan Perspective; Consumer Socialization

THE SAGE Encyclopedia of

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES

Editorial Board Editor Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden

Associate Editors Sarada Balagopalan Rutgers University–Camden

Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus

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Editorial Board Tatek Abebe Norwegian University of Science and Technology Jill Bradbury University of the Witwatersrand

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein University of Reading Ingrid Palmary University of the Witwatersrand

Erica Burman University of Manchester

Ann Phoenix Institute of Education, University College London

Lise Claiborne University of Waikato

Bengt Sandin Linköping University

Marisol Clark-Ibáñez California State University San Marcos

Oddbjorg Skiær Ulvik Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science

Raquel S. L. Guzzo Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas Karl Hanson University of Geneva

Hans Skott-Myhre Kennesaw State University

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES 2 Editor Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden

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Contents Volume 2 List of Entries   vii Entries C (Cont.) 447 F 741 D 589 G 809 E 683

List of Entries ABC Books Abortion Addams, Jane ADHD. See Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity ­Disorder (ADHD) Adolescence Adolescence, History of Adolescent Pregnancy Adoption, History of Adoption, Transnational Adoption, Transracial Adultism After-School Centers Age Age Assessment, in Migration Age Compression Age of Consent Ageism Agency AIDS Orphans Andersen, Hans Christian Anorexia Nervosa Anticipatory Socialization Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children Antislavery Movement, Role of Children Apprenticeship Apps (Mobile Applications) Ariès, Philippe Artificial Insemination Assent, Children’s, in Research Asylum, Children as Seekers of Attachment Theory Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Autism, Child Development, and Theory Autism and Neurodiversity Autonomy

Babysitting, U.S. History of Baptism Barbie Doll Bechstein, Ludwig. See Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Beings and Becomings, Children as Benjamin, Walter Bernstein, Basil Best Interests Principle Bettelheim, Bruno Better Baby Contests Bilingualism and Multilingualism Binet, Alfred Binge-Watching Biopolitics of Childhood Birth Birth Control Birth Order Blank Slate, Children as. See Tabula Rasa Boarding Schools Borders, National Bourdieu, Pierre Bowlby, John Boyhood Boyhood Studies Breastfeeding Bronfenbrenner, Urie Brownies’ Book Buddhism Bullying Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept Bullying and Parents Bullying and Teachers Bullying in Schools Capitalism and Childhood Care, Feminist Ethic of Care, Institutional Caregivers, Children as Care-Work

Babies’ Rights Baby, Social Construction of Baby Farms vii

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Carroll, Lewis Child Child Abuse. See Abuse and Child Abuse Child Actors in Film and Television Child Actors in Theater Child and Youth Activism Child as Method Child as Other/Stranger Child Attachment Interviews Child Beauty Pageants Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective Child Depravity Child Domestic Work Child Labor Child Labor in Europe, History of Child Marriage Child Mortality Child Neglect Child Pornography Child Pregnancy Child Prodigy Child Prostitution, Sex Work Child Psychology, Clinical. See Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Child Soldiers Child Study Child Suicide Child Trafficking Child Welfare Childcare Child-Centered/Child-Led Research Child-Centered Design Child-Friendly, Concept of Child-Friendly Cities Child-Headed Households Childhood Childhood, Anthropology of Childhood and Architecture Childhood and Nature Childhood as Figuration Childhood Embodiment/Embodied Childhood Identity Constructions Childhood in Western Philosophy Childhood Insanity Childhood Nostalgia Childhood Poverty Childhood Publics

Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising Childhood Studies Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives Childing Childism Children and Art Children and Borders—Cyprus Children and Borders—Palestine Children and International Development Children and Nationalism Children and Social Policy Children and Technology Children and the Law, United States Children and U.S. Adoption Literature Children and Youth in Prison Children as Citizens Children as Competent Social Actors Children as Consumers Children as Legal Subjects Children as Philosophers Children as Photographers Children as Political Subjects Children as Victims Children as Witnesses Children as Workers Children at Risk Children in Postcolonial Literature Children in Romantic Literature and Thought Children Living With HIV in Africa Children Who Murder Children’s Bodies Children’s Bureau, United States Children’s Consumer Culture. See Children as Consumers; Child Consumption: A Vygotskyan Perspective; Consumer Socialization Children’s Culture Industry Children’s Cultures Children’s Drawings and Psychological Development Children’s Geographies Children’s Hospitals Children’s Libraries in the United States Children’s Literature Children’s Mobility Children’s Museums Children’s Music Industry, U.S. Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights Children’s Perspectives

List of Entries

Children’s Radio Children’s Rights Children’s Rights, Critiques of Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on Children’s Social Participation, Models of Children’s Television, U.S. History Children’s Time Use Children’s Voices Children’s Work Christianity Citizenship Classroom Discipline Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Clothing, Children’s Colonialism and Childhood Columbine (High School) Massacre, U.S. Communion, Holy Community of Learners Concerted Cultivation, Parenting Style Conduct of Everyday Life Consent, Children’s, in Research Consent, Sexual Consumer Socialization Corporal Punishment Counseling Children CRC. See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Critical Children’s Literature Studies Critical Legal Studies Critical Pedagogy Critical Race Theory Critical Realism Critical Theory, the Child in CRT. See Critical Race Theory Cultural Capital Cultural Politics of Childhood Cyberbullying Darwin, Charles Day Care Death, Children’s Conceptions of Death Rates, Children’s, Historical Deleuze, Gilles Depression Development Developmental Psychology Developmentality Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) Dewey, John

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Diaspora Childhoods Dickens, Charles Different Childhoods Digital Childhoods Digital Literacy Digital Media Digital Mobile Technologies Disabilities Disabilities, Children With—Global South Disability Studies Disability Studies in Education Discipline and Childhood Disney Distributed Violence Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara Dolls, U.S. History of Dolto, Françoise Domestic Chores Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of Domestic Workers, Children as Early Childhood Education Early Marriage Ecological Approaches. See Bronfenbrenner, Urie Ecology and Environmental Education Education Education, Child-Centered Education, Co-operative Education, Inclusive Education and Nationalism in Late Imperial China Education for All (EFA) Education Versus Care Emerging Adulthood Emotion Regulation (Children) Emotional Intelligence Enabling Education Network (EENET) Enlightenment and the Child Ennew, Judith Erikson, Erik Ethics Ethnicity Ethnography Eugenics Evolutionary Developmental Psychology Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition Family Family Photography Fashion, Children’s

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Fatherhood Fathers/Fathering Federal Indian Boarding Schools, U.S. ­Architecture of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Feminism Feral Children Fetal Personhood Film, the Child in Folklore, Children’s Food Studies and Children Foster Care, U.S. Foster Parenting Frank, Anne Freire, Paulo Freud, Anna Freud, Sigmund Froebel, Friedrich Gay and Lesbian Parenting Gender Gender Identity Gender Independent Children Generation Gap Generational Approach Generational Conflict Generationing Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924 Gesell, Arnold Gifted Children Girl Power Girlhood Girlhood Studies Girling Girls Global North Childhoods Global Politics of Childhood Global Politics of Orphanhood Global South Childhoods Global Womb Globalization of Childhood Governmentality Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Growing Sideways. See Queer Childhoods Growth Habitus Hall, Granville Stanley Health

Health Care Hidden Adult, in Literature Hinduism Hine, Lewis Historical Methods History of Childhood Home Learning Environment Homeschooling Homeless Children and Youth Homes, Institutional Hope Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine Human Capital, Child as Human Capital Theory Human Development Index Human Rights Identity Imaginary Companions Immigrant Children Immigration In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Inclusion in Schools Indigenous Childhoods Infancy Infant Mortality Rate. See Child Mortality Infantilization Innocence Institutionalization of Childhood Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Intelligence Testing Intergenerational Learning Intergenerational Relations Interiority International Child Saving International Child Welfare Organizations International Children’s Aid Organizations International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) Interpretive Reproduction Intersectionality Interviews iPad Isaacs, Susan Islam Judaism Juvenile Courts Juvenile Courts, U.S. History Juvenile Delinquency

List of Entries

Juvenile Justice, International Juvenocracy/Juvenocratic Spaces Key, Ellen Kindergarten Klein, Melanie Korczak, Janusz La Leche League Lacan, Jacques Language, Social, and Cultural Aspects Language Learning/Acquisition League of Nations Least-Adult Role in Research Lego Life Mode Interview Lindgren, Astrid Literacy/Literacies Literature, Golden Age Literature for Children. See Children’s Literature Locke, John Mannheim, Karl Material Culture, Children’s Media, Children and Medicalization of Childhood Mental Health, Child Mid-day Meal Militarization Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Milner, Marion Miniature Adulthood Minority Group, Children as Modernity Montessori, Maria Montessori Schools Moral Development, Cultural-Developmental Perspective Mothers/Motherhood Moveable Books Mulberry Bush School Narrative Research Method Narratives, Children’s National Identity Native American Children, Religion and Spirituality Natural Growth, Parenting Style Nature Versus Culture Nature Versus Nurture

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Neurocognitive Development Neuroscience Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) Numeracy Learning in Early Childhood Obesity One-Child Policy, China Opie, Iona and Peter Orphan Care Orphan Homes Orphan Trains Orphans Orphans and Orphanages as Childcare in the United States Out-of-School Children Paganism Parental Advice Literature Parenthood Parenting Parenting Children Parenting Studies Parenting Styles, History of Parents of Children With Disabilities Parents With Disabilities Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC Participation Rights, UNCRC Participatory Action Research Participatory Research Methods Pedagogy Pediatrics Pedophilia. See Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Peer Culture Peer Group Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich Peter Pan Philosophy, the Child in Philosophy for Children Photo-Elicitation, Research Method of Photovoice, Research Method of Piaget, Jean Piaget’s Interview Methods: From Clinical to Critical Picture Books Play, Theories of Play Therapy and Autism Playground Movement, U.S. History Playgrounds Playrooms

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Pocket Money Political Geographies of Youth Political Rights of Children Popularity Popularity, Social Media and Popularity and Gender Postcolonial Childhoods Posthumanism and Childhood Postman, Neil Postmodern Childhoods Power Relations in Research Pregnancy Priceless Child Private Schools Professional Conversations With Children Protection Rights, UNCRC Provision Rights, UNCRC Psy Disciplines Psychoanalysis, the Child in Psychosocial Studies Puberty Quantitative Methods Queer Childhoods Queer Children, Representations of Queer Studies Race and Childhood in U.S. Context Racial Formation Racial Innocence, Child and (U.S. History) Racism Reality Television Recapitulation Theory Reflexivity Refugees Reich, Wilhelm Relational Violence Religion and Children Representations of Childhood in Early China Reproductive Choice Residential Child Care Resilience Restavek Riot Grrrls Rites of Passage Roma Children Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Same-Sex Parenting Save the Children

School Desegregation, U.S. School Dress Codes School Readiness School Story, The School Uniforms School Violence Schooling Schooling, Gender, and Race Scouting, Boys Scouting, Girls Sea Hospitals Self-Esteem Self-Starvation. See Anorexia Nervosa Sesame Street Sex Education, Psychoanalysis in Sexual Citizenship Sexual Exploitation of Children Sexual Orientation Sexualities Education Sexuality and Childhood Sibling Rivalry Slavery, United States Social and Emotional Learning Social Exclusion and Bullying Social Inclusion Social Media, Children’s Use of. See Digital Media; Digital Mobile Technologies; Media, Children and Social Welfare Regimes Social Work Socialization Socialization Paradigm Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Sociology of Childhood Special Education Spencer, Herbert Spielrein, Sabina Spinoza, Baruch Spock, Benjamin Sport Stage Theories of Development Standpoint Theory State Socialism, Childhood During Steiner, Rudolf Stepparents Strange Situations. See Attachment Theory; Child Attachment Interviews Street Children Street Children, History of

List of Entries

Structural Violence Subjective Well-Being Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Sully, James Sunday School Supplementary Schools Surrogacy Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Sutton-Smith, Brian Tabula Rasa Teddy Bear Teen Magazines Teenage Fathers, United Kingdom Teenage Mothers. See Adolescence Pregnancy Teenager Television Series Teenagers Temple, Shirley Theme Parks Time, Concept of, in Children Time and Childhood Toilet Training Toys Toys, Digital Toys, History of Toys, Optical Toys, War Toys and Child Development: Montessori, Piaget, and Vygotsky Transgender Children Transitions Transnational Childhoods Transnational Families Transnational Migration Trauma-Informed Care Tween Unaccompanied Minors, Migration UNCRC. See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Undocumented Children United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

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Universalism Universalization of Childhood Violence Virtual Materiality Visual Methods Vocational Education Vulnerability of Children Vygotskij, Lev. See Vygotsky, Lev; Zone of ­Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev) Vygotsky, Lev Waldorf Schools War and War-Affected Children Watson, John B. Welfare State Well-Being, Children’s White House Conferences on Children (U.S.) Wholeness Approach Winnicott, Donald W. Women and Children Wordsworth, William Workhouses Working Children Working Children’s Movement Young Adult (YA) Literature Young Lives Study Young Offenders Young-Girl, Theory of Yousafzai, Malala Youth Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S. Youth Clubs Youth Culture Youth Gangs Youth Justice Youth Sexting Youth Studies Youth Studies, Birmingham School Youth Work YouTube Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

Children’s Culture Industry

Children’s Culture Industry What is meant by the term ‘children’s culture industry’ depends on the context in which it is used. In such disciplines as economics and marketing, or in national and international forums on labour and industry, it is a neutral term denoting companies involved in producing toys, books, television, films, digital games, clothing, collectibles, and experiences for children. In social theory, the term takes on a critical connotation derived from two sources—the Frankfurt School critique of the ‘culture industry’, on the one hand, and what Daniel Thomas Cook has called the moral project of childhood, on the other. This discussion will first consider the different meanings of ‘culture’ evoked by the term ‘children’s culture’, provide a brief outline of the history of industrial production of children’s culture, consider its transition to a ‘culture industry’ as conceptualised by the Frankfurt School, and reflect on how this industry has been viewed in relation to childhood as a moral project.

Children’s Culture The separation of children from the adult world is not an historical or anthropological constant. Archaeological findings of miniatures in ancient times and different places are not necessarily evidence of ‘children’s culture’ in the form of ‘toys’, as such objects were likely to have been as much for adult amusement as for children’s. The idea of ‘childhood’ emerged as part of the complex of social and ideological changes associated with the industrial revolution, on the one hand, and the European Enlightenment, on the other. In other words, the idea of a ‘childhood’ that warranted the production of distinctive objects for children’s entertainment and education emerged at the same time as the social and technological changes that facilitated their industrial production. In that sense, the children’s culture industry is as old as ‘childhood’ itself. The complexity of the term ‘culture’ is compounded when combined with ‘children’ to make ‘Children’s Culture’. The usual distinction between a group’s shared understandings, everyday practices and artefacts (their ‘culture’) and

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the ‘Culture’ produced by the group’s creative artists is complicated by the child–adult relation of dependence and nurture/power. While we can distinguish between the culture produced by children themselves (e.g., playground games and rhymes) and the culture produced by adults for children (children’s books, e.g., or commercially produced toys and games), the relations of nurture and power which bind children to adults makes this to some extent an artificial distinction. The culture produced by children emerges in contexts inseparable from institutions (including language) and material culture shared with and provided by adults. The word ‘culture’ as it is currently understood came into the language between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, when ‘culture’ (fine art, poetry, and music) was conceptualised as a transcendent sphere of inspired creation which offered both a refuge from industrial society and a critical space from which it could be judged. At the same time, the middle-class family was constituted by what Colin Campbell has called a ‘romantic ethic’, which positioned women and children as carriers of emotional and aesthetic values that stood in opposition to the economically rational work world of middle-class men. New ideas of maternal love and of childhood as a time requiring nurture and play were central to this separation of middleclass family life from the world of work. In other words, the social world brought into being by capitalist industrialisation located both ‘children’ and ‘culture’ in the realm of the ‘sacred’—a sphere of value to be protected from ‘profane’ commercial concerns. It should be noted that in the 19th century this protection did not extend beyond the boundaries of the middle class and that the right to a ‘childhood’ defined in terms of freedom from work and the right to learn and play continues to be more aspiration than reality for children of the global poor. The association of childhood with imagination and play created a market for children’s toys and books. Children, as the historian J. H. Plumb put it, became a field of commercial enterprise. He noted that whereas in 1730 there were no specialist toy shops in London, by 1780 they were ‘­everywhere’, and by 1820 there was substantial trade in toys and children’s literature. Industrial

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production of tin toys supplanted artisanal production of wooden toys in the German city of Nuremberg at the end of the 18th century, and by the end of the 19th century, there was a mass market in children’s books and magazines in both England and the United States. Industrial production of things made for children was thus well established by the first half of the 19th century and continued to grow into the 20th century. The extent to which this constituted a ‘children’s culture industry’ in the sense evoked by the Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, however, is debatable.

What Constitutes the Children’s Culture Industry When the term ‘culture industry’ was coined by Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s, its critical resonance was immediately evident to readers who took it as given that ‘culture’ and ‘industry’ were separate spheres of human activity. ‘Culture’ was associated with imagination, creativity, and beauty, and ‘industry’ with regimented workers on production lines. The idea of a ‘culture industry’— the subjection of creativity and imagination to the technological rationality of the assembly line and the profit imperatives of business—was thus viewed as a travesty. The moral imperative separating children from commerce and the belief that childhood is a time of imaginative freedom further compound the critical resonance of the term ‘children’s culture industry’. What constitutes a children’s culture industry in the Frankfurt School sense as opposed to an industry that produces things designed to meet children’s perceived need for play is not just a question of commodification. A shift in focus from children’s need to play to the industry’s need for profit is hardly definitive, as commercial producers of children’s books, toys, clothing, and entertainment must always and everywhere have turned sufficient profit to stay in business. More to the point is a shift from producing things for children to play with to shaping children’s imaginations so that the ‘contours’ of their play—what they play with and for how long—are set by the industry. In other words, what constitutes the children’s culture industry is

its penetration of children’s imaginations and manipulation of their desires so that children’s play is harnessed to an entertainment-product cycle administered by distant adult others in the interest of corporate profits. Precisely when this shift occurred is debatable. It could be argued that it began in the 1930s, with direct targeting of children by radio advertisers, or the licensed production of character toys. Stephen Kline, in ‘Out of the Garden’, credits Disney with pioneering the merchandising link between screen characters and licensed products in the 1930s, first in relation to the cartoon characters Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, and, in 1938, with the film ‘Snow White’. If the children’s culture industry is defined in terms of capturing children’s imaginations in order to sell merchandise, then this initial articulation of entertainment with product spin-offs can certainly be seen as its inception. It was not until the last two decades of the 20th century, however, that the children’s culture industry effectively incorporated children into the market and redefined childhood as inextricably linked to consumption. The children’s culture industry expanded exponentially in the 1980s through coordination of toy and television production. The success of the first ‘Star Wars’ film in generating a market in franchised products had shown how profitable character marketing could be, and the strategy was soon adopted by toy companies like Hasbro and Mattel. Rather than buying advertising time in relation to an existing programme, toy marketers and licensing agents cooperated in developing their own ‘properties’—characters and programme concepts, along with the merchandise for which the programme was an extended advertisement. By the end of the century, the entertainment-product cycle had passed through a myriad of characters, each accompanied by a product universe of toys and licensed ‘kids’ stuff’. The release of children’s films was—and is—similarly tied to licensed merchandise. With the equation between children and consumption effectively normalised, children were turned into one of global capital’s most lucrative markets. By 1999, global sales of toys (including video games) totalled $71 billion and by 2016 they had risen to $90 billion.

Children’s Culture Industry

Like the ‘hit music’ associated with the emergence of teen culture in the 1950s, the toys and paraphernalia (back packs, lunch boxes, stickers, T-shirts, pyjamas, underwear, etc.) produced as part of the promotional universe of children’s movies and television programmes have a limited life span as desirable objects. The end of a series, or the release of a new film, can render the contents of a child’s toy box redundant. Generic toys like building blocks, dolls, toy cars, and train sets are still produced, largely in Europe, and marketed to middle-class parents whose educational or environmental concerns direct them to the niche market in tasteful toys. The shelves and online catalogues of mass marketers like Toys R Us or chain stores like Walmart, however, are filled with the latest ‘commoditoys’—toys characterised by their capacity to stimulate rather than satisfy longing, their short but intense shelf life as objects of desire, and their promotion through television, children’s films, computer games, and— since 2010—tablet and smartphone games. Even Lego, a toy which began its career as wooden blocks in the 1930s and as bags of gender-neutral plastic blocks in 1947, moved through a series of desire-inducing packaging transformations in terms of age and gender-differentiated ‘stories’ in the 1980s and 1990s to its current incorporation into the product universe of the children’s culture industry—Lego movies, Lego app-games, and Lego Marvel Superheroes. Tablet and smartphone games extended both children’s immersion in the culture industry’s symbolic universe and the capacity of the children’s culture industry to monetise children’s play. Immersion in games based on favourite programmes or movies intensifies active engagement with the characters, and, while most are free to download, many require in-game purchases to move through the game. Reports of children running up massive debts on their parents’ credit cards were legion in the years immediately following release of the iPad in 2010—7-year-olds spending 6,000 dollars on the ‘Jurassic World’ iPad games in-app purchases of Dino Bucks, 8-year-olds spending 980 pounds on virtual donuts in a Simpson’s iPad game, and so on. Central to these stories was the fact that the children did not understand that real money was involved. The

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ensuing panic was as much moral as financial. In the United States, lawsuits filed against Apple, Amazon, and Google by the Federal Trade Commission resulted in the companies agreeing to repay parents for children’s ‘unauthorised’ purchases. Childhood might be commodified, but actually taking money from children continues to be unacceptable. Belief that children should be protected from the market generates continuing criticism of the children’s culture industry. The Alliance for Childhood European Network Group, for example, includes the commercialisation of childhood in its list of ‘threats’, and The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, founded in the United States in 2000, describes itself as part of ‘the movement to reclaim childhood from corporate marketers’. Similarly, the Christian organisation Mothers’ Union claims a membership of four million women across 81 countries who ‘care passionately’ about the commercialisation of childhood. Whereas in the early 2000s children were actively promoted as a ‘lucrative market’—most notably by the IQPC group, which organised global marketing conferences under the ‘Kid Power Exchange’ logo—by 2017, the group no longer listed Kid Power amongst its corporate events. This hardly indicates that it is any less acceptable to profit from selling things to children, but it might be argued that active mobilisation of opposition to the commercialisation of childhood has made celebration of children’s market potential less blatant. The conditions in which toys and electronic devices are produced also make identification of the children’s culture industry and its products with the ‘magic’ of childhood a precarious achievement. Labour rights and consumer activists, drawing on the same iconography of childhood as a time of enchantment, have criticised working conditions in Chinese factories, where the bulk of bigbrand toys are produced. This has forced the industry to take responsibility—or at least be seen to be taking responsibility—for reducing the gap between the rhetoric of fun and fantasy used to sell the products and the pay and conditions of the workers who make them. In 2004, the International Council of Toy Industries established an ethical supply chain programme—ICTI Care—to improve working conditions in factories

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contracting to the global toy industry, declaring themselves ‘100% committed to promoting safe and fair working conditions throughout the toy industry supply chain’. A 2015 report titled ‘The Other Side of Fairy Tales: An Investigation of Labor Conditions at Five Chinese Toy Factories’ would suggest that this 100% commitment did not meet with 100% success. Subsequent launch of a confidential auditor assessment tool enabling toy factories to evaluate the performance of on-site auditors serves to indicate that ICTI Care continues its efforts, but given that the industry sells itself through association with the magic of childhood, it is ever vulnerable to reputational damage. The children’s culture industry remade childhood as a time of desire and consumption by drawing on Romantic constructions of childhood as a time of play and imagination. That these ideas of play and imagination were connected to the ‘sacralisation’ of childhood as outside the ‘profane’ realm of the market, however, left the children’s culture industry with a legacy of ambivalence. This legacy of ambivalence would seem to be enduring, and each turn of the entertainmentproduct cycle is subjected to moral as much as financial accounting. Beryl Langer See also Capitalism and Childhood; Disney; Children’s Television, U.S. History; Toys

Further Readings Campbell, C. (1989). The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. China Labor Watch. (2015). The other side of fairy tales: An investigation of labor conditions at five Chinese toy factories. Retrieved from http://www .chinalaborwatch.org/report/111 Cook, D. T. (2017). Childhood as a moral project. Childhood, 24(1), 3–6. Engelhart, T. (1987). The shortcake strategy. In T. Gitlin (Ed.), Watching television. New York, NY: Pantheon. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2002/1947). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In J. Edmund (Trans.), The dialectic of enlightenment (120–167). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kline, S. (1993). Out of the garden: Toys and children’s culture in the age of TV marketing. Toronto, Canada: Garamond Press.

Langer, B. (2002). Commodified enchantment: Children and consumer capitalism. Thesis Eleven, 69, 67–81. Plumb, J. H. (1975, May). The new world of children in eighteenth-century England. Past & Present, 67, 64–95.

Children’s Cultures Children’s culture is a subject that has been informed by work across a number of disciplines: anthropology, cultural studies, folklore, history, media and communications studies, and sociology. The nature of culture is itself needs defining before an understanding of children’s culture can be developed. Culture as a concept is complex and has many distinct meanings, but in this context refers to the beliefs, customs, and practices of a specific society or group, in this case, children. This entry considers children’s culture in its traditional everyday practices, in which children construct and transmit their own culture through peer-to-peer interaction; and the way in which commercial culture, media, and technology have combined with traditional patterns in children’s play and culture in shaping new forms of contemporary children’s practices. Throughout history, there have been competing views about the value of certain cultural practices, with some being viewed as more worthy than others. Thus, ‘high’ cultural practices (e.g., opera, classical music, theatre, fine arts) are often contrasted with the everyday cultural interests of the general population (i.e., popular culture). In a challenge to a view of culture which places emphasis on the high arts, the cultural theorist Raymond Williams suggested that culture constitutes the ‘stuff’ of everyday life and that ‘culture is ordinary’. This is the understanding of children’s culture that informs this entry. Further, it should be recognised that children’s culture is not monolithic. There are multiple cultures, shaped by geographic location, ethnic identity, age, gender, and so on. Children’s everyday cultural practices have, historically, been viewed through two very separate traditions of work. The first of these is the study of peer-to-peer cultural practices, that is, those texts, artefacts, and practices that children construct,

Children’s Cultures

transmit, and reconstruct in their friendships and interactions with others. This area of study has largely focused on oral culture and has not addressed in any depth the digital cultures of childhood, in which children produce and/or exchange digital texts with and for other children. The second tradition is that of a study of children’s engagement with adult-produced cultural materials, largely commercial products, which includes digital products. What this categorisation omits are the cultural practices that are produced and enjoyed by children in intergenerational groups, such as sports activities. This last group of activities falls outside of the scope of this review. In addition, this structure of the field of study needs to take account of work on children’s culture which attempts to bridge the areas of childlore ‘and’ commercial/digital culture. This is a relatively recent area of study that is growing in significance and, therefore, is considered towards the end of this entry.

Childlore Childlore is the study of the folklore or folk culture of children and young people. It examines the oral cultures and artefacts produced by children for children. Children’s folklore historically has focused on the documentation of rhymes, jokes, proverbs, games, and customs, passed on orally through generations. It records and analyses the cultural practices that are transmitted by children and does not consider adult culture, other than those aspects of adult culture that are appropriated by children. The study of children’s oral cultures has a long history, with the first significant historical study being published in 1801 by Joseph Strutt (1747– 1802). The final chapter of his book, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, detailed the games of children, some of which are still prevalent in contemporary society, including skipping and ‘Hide and Seek’. William Wells Newell’s 1883 Games and Songs of American Children was the first major collection of children’s culture in the United States. Since those early days, there have been numerous accounts of children’s play, outlined by Marsh and Bishop in their account of early childlore studies. They identify the way in which the contributions of Brian Sutton Smith

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and Iona and Peter Opie in particular in the mid20th century were distinctive for the ways in which children were actively engaged in recording their own oral and game cultures, whereas earlier work had largely captured adults’ recollections of their play. The lore and language of childhood continues to be of interest to contemporary audiences, with folklorists such as Steve Round and Elizabeth Tucker developing historical accounts which make clear the continuation of certain practices in current societies. Their accounts also consider the discontinuities and offer some explanation about why certain traditions may have died out. For example, Roud points out that certain physically aggressive games, such as British Bulldog, have disappeared from contemporary UK playgrounds because of a concern about risks. Other traditions in the study of children’s peer-to-peer cultural practices analyse the practices, beliefs, texts, and artefacts that children and young people produce and share with each other, and explore how peers construct their own cultural worlds. Subjects that are explored in this field include an examination of friendships, the construction and maintenance of peer groups, and the development of cultural routines which enable children and young people to feel that they belong to a particular social group. There is a body of work that focuses largely on adolescents, which considers the concept of subculture. There are various conceptualisations of subculture, but most of the definitions emphasise the way in which subculture consists of social groups that adopt particular behaviours, practices, and values that are specific to those groups. Often these groups adopt values that are subversive of the larger cultural context and members resist conforming to cultural norms and standards. Studies have focused either on examining the concept of subculture itself or detailing the practices of specific subcultural groups, such as ‘mods and rockers’ in the 1960s. Work in recent years has questioned the relevance of the concept of subculture in the light of new understandings of power as complex and non-hierarchical, with some arguing that the processes involved in constructing neo-tribes and micro-networks are more representative of the complexity and fluidity of the identities of contemporary children and youth.

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It is the case, of course, that children’s peer-topeer cultural practices do not occur in a vacuum. Inevitably, children draw on the world around them in complex ways. William Corsaro’s notion of ‘interpretive reproduction’ has gained significance in the field because of its value in describing the way in which children and young people appropriate and recontextualise knowledge from the adult world in their peer-to-peer cultural practices. Play is a central trope in much of the literature on children’s folk cultures, as it is through play that children construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct their understandings of the world, but creativity through other means of production is also recognised as an important means for children to express their cultural understandings. Paul Willis, for example, considered the symbolic creativity of young people in everyday life. He emphasised the importance of grounded aesthetics, which celebrates the way in which young people make sense of their everyday world through creative production. There is a growing recognition within the field of folklore that a hegemonic approach has been prevalent in the past, in that in the main, it is only the traditions of certain groups that have been the focus of study. Lucy Wright, a contemporary folklorist who studies the practices of girls in the north of England who engage in carnival Morris dancing, a tradition which has been largely ignored by folklorists, argues that biases around gender, class, and ethnicity have impeded progress in the recognition and study of more diverse cultural practices. She and other scholars, such as Kyra D. Gaunt, have argued for a more expansive focus, with a need to explore and document the childlore of Black and minority ethnic children, girls, children with disabilities, and working-class groups, amongst others. It can be seen, therefore, that the academic study of children’s vernacular cultural practices has a long established history and can be characterised as moving from a phase in which accounts which were very much focused on the capturing of adults’ memories of childlore, to a recognition that the voices of children themselves need to be strongly heard in work of this nature. This dynamic—the perspectives and interests of adults versus children in relation to children’s cultural practices—is also one that characterises the

second major tradition in the study of children’s culture, the examination of the role of the market economy within it.

Children’s Consumer Culture There is an extensive body of work that has considered children’s cultural practices that involve commercial products and services. This has been embedded within a field that has examined children’s popular culture. Much of what has been discussed by scholars in previous sections can be categorised as popular culture, that is, culture that is enjoyed by the masses, and so the inclusion of this section is not intended to suggest that other aspects of children’s culture, such as toys, should be considered separately, as located somehow outside of popular culture. Nevertheless, there are specific aspects of these popular cultural practices that deserve specific attention, such as the extent to which children’s culture is appropriated, or manipulated, by commercial interests. Stephen Kline, Gary Cross, and other scholars have documented the history of the commercialisation of children’s culture. The cross-marketing of toys, television, film, and other cultural artefacts has a long history, as is demonstrated by the well-documented account of the way in which Disney agreed to licenses for products related to its first feature film, Snow White, in the 1930s. Indeed, David Buckingham and Dan Cook, in their various historical accounts of the emergence of the child consumer, suggest that the tradition can be traced back to the emergence of instructional primers and playthings in the 16th century, although it was not until the 18th century that products designed for children, including books and toys, were produced on a large scale, subsequently informing the creation of children’s areas in department stores. Much of the work in this field has explored the dichotomy between conceptualisations of children as passive dupes of market economies and global multinational companies, contrasted with notions of children as agents who can resist consumerist discourses. Inevitably, children’s engagement with commercial culture falls within this polarised dichotomy. Children have agency to use commercial products in different ways, although the extent to which they can do this is shaped by the

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nature of the products themselves. Recent research in this area has posited the notion of the situated child consumer, in which the specific context of a consumptive practice needs to be considered in order to understand it as an ontological enactment, as Steve Woolgar proposes. In more recent decades, given the digital revolution that has taken place, it is inevitable that accounts of children’s cultural practices have focused on children’s engagement with media and technology. Research in this area has examined how children’s cultures are shaped by, amongst other things, mobile technologies (smartphones and tablets), and a range of media and consumer products, such as video games. The Internet has become increasingly important to children’s culture, even from a very young age, with YouTube being the most popular site/app for young children. Research in this field indicates that children both appropriate technologies and sites originally designed for adult use, such as Facebook, and also engage in cultural practices in sites aimed at children, such as virtual worlds and online game sites. In constructing the field of study in this way, there is no intention to indicate that the traditional practices identified in childlore, which involve peer-to-peer transmission and recontextualisation of culture, do not exist in contemporary cultural practices that are shaped by media and technologies. Indeed, it can be seen that technology provides a means of expanding the possibilities in this regard. Children can, and do, share their everyday cultural practices with others through sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and Periscope, and undoubtedly as new social networking sites emerge, they will be appropriated by children for the purpose of peerto-peer communication. A further aspect of more recent research on children’s cultural practices in the media age is the recognition that it is not possible to separate online and offline spaces, as children’s play and cultures cut across, and in some cases merge, these domains. For example, Seth Giddings relates how through play with Lego, children move from the play with physical bricks to encounters with their virtual representations on screen, in complex gameworlds. Marsh and Bishop also trace this growing phenomenon, pointing to the way in which the ‘real’ and virtual are imbricated through

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the processes of ‘chronotopic lamination’, in which activities take place across time and space and layers of a cultural activity may thus link to the past, present, and future, and through ‘intensified bricolage’, in which children’s cultural texts are laminated in complex ways which index local/global, public/ private, and physical/virtual dimensions. Recent work in this area acknowledges that whilst some of the forms in which children’s cultural practices emerge are new, enshrined in them are long-standing traditions that have shaped children’s play for centuries. This body of scholarship has focused on examining how far childlore and consumer culture interact and, thus, brings together two fields which hitherto have operated largely independently (whilst acknowledging the influence of each). These studies examine how traditional rhymes and games interact with contemporary media and how the processes by which lore is passed on are being augmented by technology in the digital age. For example, Kathy Marsh’s work in Australia is based on ethnomusicological field research in school playgrounds. It analyses singing games, dance routines, rhymes, and taunts, and explores how these are informed by a range of sources, including the media. Work in the United Kingdom undertaken by Andrew Burn and collaborators has also explored the relationship between children’s vernacular play cultures and their media-based play, tracing the way in which popular culture shapes play and is integrated into traditional play practices, as in the case of the well-established genre of war games now being informed by video games such as ‘Fortnite’.

Conclusion The two main traditions in the study of children’s culture, childlore and research on commercial interests in children’s play, are likely to continue to examine the subject from their separate perspectives and sets of interests. However, it is increasingly clear that the boundaries between these different traditions are being reshaped by recent scholarly work on the way in which the market economy, media, and technology merge with traditional patterns in children’s play and culture to produce new and interesting cultural practices. In the years ahead, it is inevitable that digital technologies will continue to have an ever-growing

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presence in the construction, reconstruction, and performance of children’s cultures, and therefore, scholarly work in this area will expand. This research will need to take account of the way in which specific technologies and practices shape children’s cultures (e.g., virtual reality, wearable technologies, and artificial intelligence), but it will also need to pay attention to the ways in which children have always been quick to incorporate new interests into their established cultural practices. In 1969, Iona and Peter Opie noted, in their extended analyses of children’s folkloric and play performances, that children are always quick to test out in their play new ideas, stories, and characters that have captured their imaginations. The respect for the enduring creativity and innovation that characterises children’s play and lifeworlds is a consistent feature of research in this field, but we need to remind ourselves that issues of power, identities, diversity, and social exclusion also require attention in the years ahead if we are to develop a more comprehensive understanding of children’s cultures. Jackie Marsh See also Childhood; Cultural Capital; Folklore, Children’s; Peer Culture; Play, Theories of

Further Readings Buckingham, D. (2011). The material child: Growing up in consumer culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Burke, A., & Marsh, J. (Eds.). (2015). Children’s virtual play worlds: Culture, learning and participation. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Burn, A., & Richards, C. (Eds.). (2014). Children’s games in the new media age: Childlore, media and the playground. London, UK: Ashgate Press. Cook, D. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Corsaro, W. A. (2015). Sociology for a new century: The sociology of childhood. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cross, G. (1999). Kids’ stuff: Toys and the changing world of American childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gaunt, K. D. (2006). The games Black girls play: Learning the ropes from double-dutch to Hip-Hop. New York: New York University Press.

Kline, S. (1993). Out of the garden: Toys, TV and children’s culture in the age of marketing. London, UK: Verso. Marsh, J., & Bishop, J. C. (2014). Changing play: Play, media and commercial culture from the 1950s to the present day. London, UK: Open University Press. Marsh, K. (2008). The musical playground: Global tradition and change in children’s songs and games. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1969). Children’s games in street and playground: Chasing, catching seeking, hunting, racing, duelling, exerting, daring, guessing, acting, pretending. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Roud, S. (2010). The lore of the playground: One hundred years of games, rhymes and traditions. London, UK: Random House. Tucker, E. (2008). Children’s folklore: A handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Williams, R. (1989). Culture is ordinary. In R. Williams (Ed.), Resources of hope: Culture, democracy, socialism (pp. 3–18). New York, NY: Verso. (Original work published 1958) Woolgar, S. (2012). Ontological child consumption. In S. Sparrman, B. Sandin, & J. Sjoberg (Eds.), Situating child consumption: Rethinking values and notions of children, childhood and consumption (pp. 33–52). Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press. Wright, L. (2017). Girls’ carnival Morris dancing and contemporary folk dance scholarship. Folklore, 128(2), 157–174.

Children’s Drawings and Psychological Development Children’s drawings have been collected and studied for more than a century. Researchers have been interested in describing the main features of children’s early drawings and describing the stages of development in drawing and the characteristics of drawings at each stage. Cultural variations in drawing styles and conventions have been identified. Theories of drawing development consider drawing as a window on a child’s mind, as an aspect of cognitive development that can highlight a child’s intelligence or maturity, or as a skill apart from other aspects of development. This entry discusses stages of development in drawing, drawing

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as a way to measure intelligence, and drawing as an assessment tool in therapeutic intervention.

Drawing and Stages of Development Drawings have been used to identify children’s emotional state and as a means of therapy. Like language, drawing is a way of representing the world for children and is an early development of symbolism. Young children enjoy making marks and drawing and will do this with enjoyment given paper and pens or other media with which to experiment. Systematic records of aspects of children’s development have been made since adults first became interested in recording and investigating changes in children. In 1887, Corrado Ricci published his book, The Art of Little Children, consisting of drawings by a group of Italian children. In 1895, Louise Maitland noted that children under the age of 10 years seem to prefer drawing the human figure. M. C. Schuyten, in 1901, produced the first scoring system for pictures of a man, comparing measurements of different parts of the body with classical standards. This did not prove very useful, but it was a first attempt at an objective measuring scale to compare children’s drawing ability. He also made studies of drawings by children with learning disabilities and identified correlations between drawing ability and academic attainment. Carla and William Stern collected a boy’s drawings from the age of 4–7 years, providing a longitudinal case study of the changes in one child’s drawing with maturity and practice. This was published in 1910. The first attempt to identify stages in drawing development was made in 1913 by Georges-Henri Luquet, who wrote about his daughter’s drawings from the ages of 3 to 8 years. According to Luquet, there are three stages, beginning with early drawing at 18 months with a fortuitous realism stage. The stage begins with scribbling, with no intention to represent objects; making marks is spontaneous perceptuo-motor activity with developing hand-eye coordination. During this stage, Rhoda Kellogg identified some universal early shapes and scribbles, such as circles, crosses, and lines. These shapes are later combined to develop representational drawings. Toward the end of this stage, children may begin to name some of the things

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they draw as some scribbles remind them of people or objects. Between 3 and 5 years of age, children’s drawing is in the second intellectual realism stage according to Luquet. Initially, their sustained intention may not be recognizable to others (failed realism). Drawings are schematic and symbolic: They draw what they know, not what they see. A characteristic of this stage is the drawing of tadpole humans: a circle with facial features plus two vertical lines for legs. As children get older, these tadpoles gradually develop more features and more accurate proportions. Different explanations have been given for tadpole. Kellogg argued that they are a natural development of earlier scribble forms, but Norman Freeman suggested that young children have problems in planning drawings. They remember the head and legs first and then have no room or attention left to fill in the other features. Tadpoles are an economical and effective means of communicating the idea of a person, and there seem to be conventions among groups of peers. However, Maureen Cox found that children choose the drawing most like their own as the best drawing of a person, suggesting that this is how they see people. During their 4th to 5th year, drawings become representational in intent even though children’s naming of their pictures may be idiosyncratic. Congenitally blind children produce similar drawings to sighted children, which, together with the universality of forms and scribbles, suggests that drawing development is very similar across cultures. From 5 to 12 years of age, a child’s drawing repertoire expands, with the third stage of visual realism achieved by 7 to 9 years of age. In this stage, children can produce action scenic drawings and draw accurate proportions. They can also represent three-dimensional space using depth, occlusion (showing an object in the foreground partially masking one behind), foreshortening, and perspective. Luquet considered that drawing development stops at early adolescence. For Luquet, the shift from intellectual to visual realism is a shift from egocentric to non-egocentric thinking. His stages of drawing development fit well with Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. For example, a child who draws a standardized house whatever their real one looks like is showing egocentrism, a characteristic of Piaget’s

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preoperational stage. Luquet’s stages also fit Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder’s stages of spatial development. The intellectual realism stage occurs during Piaget’s preoperational stage in which egocentrism will lead children to draw objects in relation to each other independent of the observer’s viewpoint. At 4 and 5 years of age, children draw a metal disc (e.g., a coin) as a circle whatever orientation they see it in. Their drawings convey what objects are and their relation to other objects. At 7 to 8 years of age, according to Piaget, children are entering the concrete operational stage, and this is where Luquet’s visual realism stage fits: Children are now capable of decentred thinking, so they can distinguish different viewpoints. This increased flexibility and relativity indicates a move away from egocentrism. Piaget included drawing in his studies of development, taking an experimental approach to drawing: He asked children of different ages to draw the same things under controlled conditions to compare how they approached the problem. Piaget’s stages of spatial development begin with canonical representation, in which people, houses, and so on are drawn from the front, even when oriented differently—showing what things are, to their best advantage. Occlusion is absent in young children’s drawings; objects are drawn transparent or separated, although there is evidence, according to Cox, that children can use some occlusion from 4 years, dependent on the task. Drawing in perspective begins to develop at 7 to 8 years of age during the concrete operational stage, with the convergence of receding oblique lines at about 14 years of age. Luquet and Piaget, then, both argue that drawing develops in stages. However, what children use drawings for appears to change with age. Drawing begins as a graphic to tell a story and only later becomes a skill for replicating scenes faithfully.

Drawing as a Way to Measure Intelligence In the 1920s, Florence Goodenough, working in the United States, devised a way to use children’s drawings as a measure of intelligence. This was revised by Dale Harris in the 1960s. The Draw-aMan test takes only minutes to complete. It is a standardized point-by-point scoring system for

human figure drawings. The child is asked to draw a man, a woman, and themselves. The scoring system gives points for the presence or absence of significant body parts (e.g., head, eyes, fingers), down to precise details (eyelashes, fingernails). Scores can then be matched to age-related norms to give a maturational age. It is easy to use and reliable and was widely used. Performance on the test correlated moderately with scores on IQ tests, and it has been used by schools to group children as they enter school. However, drawings of people are not culture free; use of the test may lack validity with children from different cultures or backgrounds. It has been found that Bedouin children draw stick figures for men but triangles for women, perhaps representing how women dress in their culture. Traditionally, Aboriginal children in Australia draw people as semicircles. African children are more likely to include genitals in drawings than Western children. How art is taught also influences how children draw. Chinese children taught art through step-by-step methods show more advanced drawing techniques than children from the United Kingdom, but drawings may be more formulaic. The way art is taught in the United Kingdom has also changed over the last 100 years, affecting what and how children draw.

Drawing as an Assessment Tool in Therapy Analysis of children’s drawings is an assessment tool for child psychiatry and therapeutic interventions, because they may provide evidence of maltreatment as well as indicating emotional states. Children who find it difficult to talk about what has happened to them for whatever reason may also be able to communicate more easily through drawing. Family drawing in particular can be useful in suggesting how children perceive themselves, how they perceive their parents, and as an indicator of their mental organization. Children who have been abused or maltreated may omit themselves or particular family members from pictures, and there may also be body distortions and a lack of detail. Drawing may also help in remembering important events. Children enjoy drawing from an early age. Drawings may capture entire stories in the early years rather than representing single events or

Children’s Geographies

people. Stages in drawing development have been identified, with some universal marks and developments identified. However, there are cultural differences in representations and in the way art is taught that affect children’s free drawing. Drawings have also been used as a way to measure intelligence and to identify those who have been maltreated, but caution needs to be exercised here. Susan J. Atkinson See also Children and Art; Developmental Psychology; Intelligence Quotient (IQ); Intelligence Testing; Piaget, Jean; Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Cox, M. V. (1997). Drawings of people by the under-5s. Abingdon, UK: Falmer Press. Golomb, C. (2002). Child art in context: A cultural & comparative perspective. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Jolley, R. P. (2010). Children and pictures: Drawing and understanding. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Slaughter, V., & Brownell, C. A. (Eds.). (2012). Early development of body representations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Children’s Geographies Children’s geographies, one area of childhood studies, is an interdisciplinary sub-field comprising research by human geographers, educationalists, psychology, sociology, and other cognate disciplines. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines childhood as a period until 18 years of age. However, work in this sub-field has more usually emphasised the social constructedness of childhood. Scholarship has drawn attention to the spatial, cultural, and historically situated ideas, laws, and policies that shape childhood and children’s experiences. It therefore can be seen to depart from biologically essentialist and chronological approaches to defining a child. Accordingly, there is no universal category of child or childhood given how children’s lives and experiences are shaped by social identity, such as gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, disability, and different encounters with people and

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places. A plurality of ‘childhoods’ is conceptualised in social constructivist approaches. Childhood studies remains predominantly focused on a small number of countries in the Global North but recognises the marked global differences and inequalities in children’s lives. In acknowledgement of the blurred boundaries of childhood, youth, and adulthood, non-linearity of time in lived experience, and interpersonal and relational dimensions of children’s lives, more recent work has often favoured the expanded term ‘geographies of children, youth, and families’. This entry examines the development of children’s geographies and critiques of the field of study, how it has been informed by critical theory, and the specific relevance of children’s geographies to understanding children’s lives in the Global South.

Development of Children’s Geographies First emerging in the 1970s, children’s geographies has been infused with a new energy and sense of direction since the 1990s. The boundaries of childhood, in relation to biological age, spatial in/exclusion, development, and intersubjectivity, are key discursive themes. Two founding areas of children’s geographies are William Bunge’s empirical studies in the 1970s into spatial oppression of children in Detroit and Toronto and Jim Blaut’s empirical work on children’s mapping capabilities. Bunge departed from geographical investigation of the time that was deeply involved in quantitative enquiry, instead using mixed methods including observation of children at play to draw attention to social and environmental inequalities. In turn, Bunge spawned a series of investigations into children’s lived experiences and the relationship between the social and environmental. Particularly important was the contribution of Cindi Katz, who expanded upon these insights in research comparing rural Sudan and New York to understand the role of the environment in social and cultural reproduction, along with elucidating the local and relational impacts of global economic restructuring. Intersections between geography and developmental psychology, most associated with the work of Blaut, offered unexpected insights into map reading abilities of children aged as young as 3 years old living in the Global North and

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South. Children were revealed as more competent at younger ages than had been recognised previously. Especially noteworthy were early age skills in spatial cognition including abilities to mentally map neighbourhoods. This advanced that visual representation develops prior to literacy (continued traction of these ideas is evident in the popularity of baby sign language classes). It pointed towards the limitations of work of developmental psychologists who had analysed that children were psychologically immature and in need of support to become normal adults.

Critiques of Children’s Geographies Critiques of early children’s geography are particularly concerned with the ways in which the child and children were defined biologically, and sociospatial development measured against age. For instance, extant emphasis on ‘becoming’ was viewed in tension with increasingly dominant social conceptions of the child and children as ‘beings’. Geographers and other social scientists were interested in reconceptualising the child and children as human beings in their own right. Resultant binaries have been debated on the biological and social, along with debates over the extent to which these categories do really constitute a divide (e.g., nature-social). Work that has blurred the biological-social in children’s geographies use a range of approaches from actor network theory, non-representational theory, and research on education and enrichment activities. Peter Krafl’s work has considered more-thansocial children’s geographies, for example, and Sarah Holloway and Helena Pimlott-Wilson’s work have investigated organised forms of play (e.g., drama clubs, football, and music lessons) with focus on the Global North. Key concerns that cross this work, despite contrasting understandings of how and when the nature-social ‘binary’ emerged in children’s geographies, are interests in blurred boundaries between the body and scientific facts, the affectual and emotional in children’s lifeworlds, and the relational and intersubjective subject. These concerns bring together the biological, social, and psychological. More recent concerns have addressed non-linearity and development with human and more-than-human

geographies. Further research has opened up from focusing primarily on the child, with attention given to the experience of youth, parenting, and families.

Children’s Geographies and Critical Theory From the 1990s onwards, a social approach to children’s geographies has flourished informed by critical theory. In this strand of research critical perspective is variously informed by Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism. Characteristic of this work is attention to experiences of the world as opposed to focusing on abilities and development. In turn, this was also informed by debates happening beyond the discipline of geography through new social studies of childhood such as research from sociology and anthropology. The importance of listening to children’s voices to understand space and marginalisation is central in this critical turn. Questions of what makes ‘good’ parenting, child-guardian relationships, gendered division of labour, and the privatisation of children’s education and care have also been notable concerns. A number of studies have shown how notions of a normal childhood vary depending on places, context, and social identity. For instance, ideas of an idyllic childhood of freedom, playfulness, and innocence are challenged by studies undertaken both in the Global North and South that have highlighted childhood as a period shaped by work, responsibility, and poverty. Research in the United Kingdom has addressed issues of class differentiation in accessing ‘good’ schools and enrichment activities in out-of-hours education. Investigating children’s experiences of the move from primary to secondary school in a low-income area, Diane Reay revealed awareness of perceptions of ‘demonised’ institutions and concern about outsiders’ judgements of the child and school. Out-of-hours activities can be seen as integral aspects of social reproduction. By including the perspective of children taking part in these activities benefits have been shown for enrichment as well as sheer enjoyment. Opportunities are provided that support development and can build confidence, along with fostering a well-rounded profile that supports educational and career pathways.

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More recently, there has been important work on other forms of social differentiation, drawing on intersectional theorisation, informing children’s geographies. Intersectionality, a term coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, refers to the ways in which social categories of difference, such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and disability, need to be understood in relation to each other in order to reveal how power is organised across time and space. It builds upon existing scholarship on childhood experiences, identities, and inequalities by thinking across and between categories of difference in relation to how power is organised across space and place. The ways in which forms of social difference is reproduced in particular spaces is a central concern in childhood geographies with scholarship on school space focused on religious identities, gender, race, sexual identity, and class. It connects with issues in children’s geographies around social justice and change, voice and agency, and collective action and resistance. Children’s geographies have also offered insights into social and economic policy. Under New Labour, far-reaching educational reforms in the state sector were crucial to social and economic policy. During this period from 1997 onwards, schools were tasked with a greater responsibility than ever before to produce economically viable future citizens who were creative, resilient, and individualistic. As part of this project schools as institutions were expected to perform a key role in ensuring social inclusion and enabling social mobility of those identified as the brightest and most talented (although usually the means of measuring meant those students identified were already weighted in the middle classes). A number of studies in this area have broadened the range of institutional contexts that are conceptualised as educational spaces, such as preschool nurseries, after-school clubs, museum education programmes, forest schools, and so forth. Moreover, attention has been provided to non-institutional spaces in which educational provision takes place such as within the family home, and in local neighbourhoods. New policies and programmes have gained in popularity in the United Kingdom for youth citizenship, namely National Citizenship Service’s The Challenge, giving emphasis to personal development, social

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mixing, and integration. Formal and informal education have been shown to shape identity and citizenship at different scales, from the personal to transnational. It is now commonplace for research in the subfield to reflect the blurred transitions between childhood, youth, and adulthood. In particular, this work recognises ways in which social structures and agencies shape lives of young people and children and how social identity is bound within these structures and processes. In fact, a body of work has focused on the very boundaries between children, young people, and adulthood considering the labour market, education system, recreation, media, lifestyle cultures and subcultures, and the family. For instance, anti-school culture in working-class boys has been explored in relation to social reproduction. Class of origin can also shape labour market destination. Louise Holt shows how youth is understood as a social construct for young people that occupies a liminal group between adulthood and childhood and ‘out of place’ in either adult or child spaces. A number of geographical studies have considered children and youth in relation to landscapes of leisure and cultural industries. This includes the role of public space and private interests in neoliberal contexts such as drinking and clubbing cultures and consumption of music and fashion. Studies have also shown how landscapes are orientated towards the production of youth cultures through consumption practice—sales assistant work, bar and waiting staff, DJs and MCs, and so forth—are heavily securitised by closed circuit television and private security. Youth cultures might unsettle or disrupt normative ordering of landscapes. For instance, work has shown the subversion of planned urban landscape through, amongst other things, skateboarding, parkour, and graffiti practices. These activities are often policed, criminalized, and displaced where in tension with private interests and economic growth, such as the ongoing debate on the future of the Southbank Skatepark, in the undercroft of London’s Southbank Centre. Again issues of social differentiation are raised, where active consumers only are welcomed in city centres, otherwise subjects are identified as a threat or disruptive to public order. Furthermore, class, gender, race, and religious identity are significant social characteristics in creating exclusion and behavioural constraints.

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Moving away from child or youth-centric empirical approaches to children’s geographies, suprachild approaches consider instead the work performed by the representation of ‘the child’ in theory, literature, and film and what this says about human geography more broadly. Representational approaches have reflected on the figure of ‘the child’ in relation to enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinking. In this work critique is levelled at linear models of development (where a child over time becomes a rational and skilled adult, with rights). The well-being of privileged middle class children has become fetishized, as Katz argues, while for the majority of children the reality is a shrinking welfare state and public space. Children’s futures are configured, therefore, either as ones of capital accumulation or, most typically, of waste. Children are social actors and also a social category, which helps us to move beyond a narrow focus on the micro-world of the child, and instead to consider how children’s lives are inter-related to parents’ lives (e.g., intensive mothering). Future research might also attend more to work beyond intrafamilial relationships, to consider more fully extrafamilial relationships. Arguably to date there remains a conservatism to children’s geographies that has tended to privilege the normative and biological in terms of its inclusions and exclusions. There has also been continued calls for more focus on children’s geographies beyond the Global North.

Children’s Geographies in the Global South It is positive to see a growing body of research that has begun to address the ethnocentricity of the existing sub-field. Research on children’s geographies in the Global South has often explored its intersections with development geographies. For instance, important work has identified the contextual limitations of formal education in the Global South. Craig Jeffrey and Linda McDowell’s research with Dalit and Muslim young men has shown those who pursue education and yet remain excluded from career pathways that provide respected and secure forms of employment. Other work too has compared differences and intersections between Global North and South. Geographies of education met with the mobilities turn to consider the international market-place

for students. It highlights the contribution of scholarship that has taken seriously the relationship between the emplacement of education, on the one hand, and mobilities on the other. Interactions are drawn between structures/agency and fixity/flows to understand the relationship between individual and educational institutions and systems. Significantly in a world marked by increasing diversity and migration this research moves beyond the idea that children and young people grow, develop, and have agency in one national context. Accordingly, children’s identity formation, development, mobility, and place are considered together. Saskia Warren See also Childhood Studies; Intersectionality; Political Geographies of Youth

Further Readings Blaut, J. M. (1997). The mapping abilities of young children. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87(1), 152–158. doi:10.1111/0004-5608.00045 Bunge, W. W. (1973). The geography of human survival. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 63(3), 275–295. Holloway, S. L. (2014). Changing children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 12(4), 377–392. Holloway, S. L., Hubbard, P., Jöns, H., & PimlottWilson, H. (2010). Geographies of education and the significance of children, youth and families. Progress in Human Geography, 34(5), 583–600. doi:10.1080/0 0045608.2013.846167 Holloway, S. L., & Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2014). Enriching children, institutionalizing childhood? Geographies of play, extracurricular activities, and parenting in England. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(3), 613–627. Holloway, S. L., & Valentine, G. (2005). Children’s geographies and the new social studies of childhood. Childhood: Critical Concepts in Sociology, 163–188. doi:10.1177/0309132510362601 Holt, L. (2004). The ‘voices’ of children: De-centring empowering research relations. Children’s Geographies, 2(1), 13–27. doi:10.1080/1473328032000168732 Jeffrey, C., & McDowell, L. (2004). Youth in a comparative perspective: Global change, local lives. Youth & Society, 36(2), 131–142. doi:10.1177/0044118x04268375

Children’s Hospitals Katz, C. (2004). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Katz, C. (2016). The angel of geography: Superman, tiger mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. Progress in Human Geography. doi:10.1177/0309132517708844 Konstantoni, K., Kustatscher, M., & Emejulu, A. (2017). Travelling with intersectionality across time, place and space. Children’s Geographies, 15(1), 1–5. doi:10 .1080/14733285.2016.1255838 Philo, C. (2016). ‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells, before the dark of reason grows’: Children’s geographies at 12. Children’s Geographies, 14(6), 623–640. doi:10.1080/14733285 .2016.1187896 Reay, D. (2007). ‘Unruly Places’: Inner-city comprehensives, middle-class imaginaries and working-class children. Urban Studies, 44(7), 1191–1201. doi:10.1080/00420980701302965 Reay, D. (2008). Tony Blair, the promotion of the ‘active’ educational citizen, and middle class hegemony. Oxford Review of Education, 34(6), 639–650. doi:10.1080/03054980802518821 Valentine, G. (2003). Boundary crossings: Transitions from childhood to adulthood. Children’s Geographies, 1(1), 37–52. doi:10.1080/14733280302186 Waters, J. L. (2016). Education unbound? Enlivening debates with a mobilities perspective on learning. Progress in Human Geography, 41(3), 279–298. doi:10.1177/0309132516637908

Children’s Hospitals Children’s hospitals and care of sick children took many different forms and changed over time. Geographical conditions, political policies, religions, economic development, and demographic patterns all contributed to the picture. For example, in Europe 19th-century England, heavily industrialized with a growing urban population, contrasted with a small nation such as Sweden that was still largely agrarian, an elongated area on the Scandinavian Peninsula where much of the northern part of the country at the end of the 1800s had a population density of two persons per kilometer. This entry sketches some of the guises the care of children took with examples drawn from the British and Swedish contexts.

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With or Without Walls The historian Mary Lindemann has pointed out that institutions that have cared for children and functioned in some way as hospitals may have had walls, but often there were virtual institutions, systems aimed at caring for or influencing people’s lives and health. There were sometimes no physical institutions within the reach of children. Care may have been administrated sometimes through dispensaries, schools, the church, social organizations, groups of professionals, poor houses, or orphanages. Social policies and health policies were often intertwined with the construction of a legal apparatus intended to supply structural frameworks. Religion, politics, and the state played significant roles throughout.

Medieval Fragments During the medieval period, there were various types of institutions, often religious by nature or part of the monasteries found throughout Europe. Certain orders, such as the Cistercians, had a design for their monasteries that included the infirmary, often a building separate from the main parts and outside the outer wall. Although the monks were cared for there, there were other parts that dealt with the poor, with travelers, and perhaps with lepers and orphans. The emphasis was on care, not on sickness. Separate facilities were often found for leprosy. Common to many was that sometimes certain categories were excluded, such as sick and poor children or those with disabilities. These institutions were associated with Christianity and its spread, but it was not only in the West that such institutions were found. In the 10th century, even the large cities of the Islamic empires (such as Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus) had large hospitals called bimaristans. Medieval Sweden had few persons trained in various aspects of medicine. There is an interesting example that gives a glimpse of treatment: the socalled books on the art of healing. These texts, written in medieval Swedish, were excerpts from a hodgepodge of scripts of varying age and origin, some hundreds of years old. They were intended as guidance in treating disease and symptoms with medicinal plants. A bibliophile with a special

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interest in medieval texts translated these volumes into more modern Swedish in the 1880s, and parts were later reprinted. Some of the remedies found here remained in 19th-century treatment of disease and disease symptoms of both adults and children.

The Reformation The Reformation saw fundamental changes in the institutions that had been organized and supported by the church. In Sweden, the king, Gustaf Vasa, confiscated the wealth of the church, which often consisted of vast tracts of land and rents from this property and began to demolish the monasteries. The realization of the role that the church played in care of the sick and indigent resulted in a decree in 1528 that income should not be denied institutions caring for the poor, and in 1533, administration of care for the sick was regulated. Later in the Vasa dynasty, more responsibility was placed in the hands of the local parish, and an attempt was made to separate the sick (in hospitals) and the poor (in the parish cottages). The state had taken over, but some aspects of responsibility were returned to local authorities and clergy through the church laws of 1533 and 1686.

Midwifery Most concede that health care declined in Sweden as a result of the Reformation. High rates of mortality among children and infants were generally attributed to food shortages, poor hygiene, poverty, and conditions during birth. At the end of the 17th century, the country had 23 doctors, most of whom were not trained in obstetrics. The few doctors in the country were trained in Europe and often had experience from France, Germany, and the Netherlands. During the 1680s, a system of midwives began to develop, and the newly formed National Medical Board was given supervisory functions, including education and certification. At the end of the century, Johan von Hoorn, who had studied obstetrics in Europe, returned to Sweden and wrote, Den Svenska Wälöfwade Jordegumman (1697) [The Well-trained Swedish Midwife]. The interest led to the regulation of the profession throughout the country in 1711.

Although other professions within medicine such as doctors and nurses grew slowly and had few practitioners compared with other European countries, midwives played an important role in the health of children and were more powerful in Sweden than in other parts of Europe. Another institution that influenced the newborn was the establishment of a maternity home in Stockholm in 1775. Its purpose was to serve as a birthing clinic [Allmänna barnbördshus] and as a place to provide practical training in delivery.

Statistics Mercantilism, the economic theory dominating in 18th-century Sweden, included interest in statistics that revealed information about the resources of the state. Knowledge about the population, the future labor force, was critical. Beginning in 1750, the so-called Tabellverket summarized the population statistics derived from the church records compiled by the clergy. They recorded vital statistics, including births, deaths, marriages, causes of death, and unusual events. One shocking aspect discovered was the infant mortality rate: There were in excess of 200 deaths per 1,000 live births. Thus, concern with infants and children stimulated measures such as encouragement of breastfeeding of infants, improvements in the system of midwives, and concentration on diseases that afflicted children. A contemporary of Carl von Linné (a physician who was also known as Carolus Linneas), Professor Nils Rosen von Rosenstein, was asked by the Royal Academy of Science to compile information about children’s maladies, which was printed in the almanacs, 150,000 of which were distributed by the academy annually. In addition, these descriptions were published in book form in 1764. Children’s diseases and their symptoms were described and treatments recommended. This was one of the reasons Rosen von Rosenstein has been labeled the “father of pediatrics.” The spreading of such information in large quantities was also an integral part of fighting infectious diseases.

Infectious Diseases Infectious disease had long plagued people in all parts of the world, and European descriptions

Children’s Hospitals

usually begin with the bubonic plague on its journey to Europe in 1350. However, infectious diseases had been dealt with earlier. The Persian doctor Al-Razi (Rhazes – lat.) pioneered in numerous fields, including pediatrics, and compiled information on numerous contagious diseases. He wrote a book distinguishing smallpox from measles. Regarding children and care, inoculation against smallpox is interesting. Although it has been deemed by some scholars as unlikely, evidence from Swedish sources suggests that during the Great Northern Wars or the aftermath, Charles XII had the process described and a report sent to Stockholm. Whatever the source, inoculation was believed to have come from the East, and inoculation was favored by the Finnish and Swedish aristocracy in the 18th century and even the Swedish royal family. When smallpox vaccine was presented, news spread quickly to Sweden in the first years of the 19th century and was made compulsory in 1816. After that year, the sexton in each church was required to be a certified smallpox vaccinator. The local midwife sometimes also served in this capacity. The parish apothecary, sometimes merely a small chest with common medicines, was often in the hands of the clergyman’s wife and she, together with the sexton and the local midwife, often served as guardians of health.

The Growth of Hospitals The 18th and 19th centuries saw a proliferation of hospitals. In England, the 18th century was characterized by the voluntary movement, based on charity and Christian values. From London hospitals spread to the provincial cities. In Sweden, the founding of the Serafimer Hospital (1752) led to demands for hospitals in areas far from the capital. The struggle against venereal diseases also caused a demand for cure houses. A practical solution was to combine the two purposes. In 1781, there were 18 such hospitals; a total of 77 had been reached in 1904.

Children’s Hospitals per se The growth of children’s hospitals per se can be pinpointed to the 19th century. In England, 1816

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marked the opening of the first children’s dispensary. After comprehensive studies on the continent, the first children’s hospital in England was opened in 1852, the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Osmond Street. By the last decade of the century, there were 38 such hospitals in England. These institutions were supported largely through philanthropy, often by female philanthropists who were interested in the running of the establishments. They served in fund-raising as well. In Sweden, the first professor’s chair in children’s illnesses was created in 1845 and was located at Karolinska Institutet’s pediatric clinic at the Allmänna Barnhuset. In 1885, Kronprinsessan Lovisas Vårdanstalt [Crown Princess Lovisa’s Care Center] was founded (it closed in 1970). In Gothenberg, a children’s hospital was founded in 1859. Otherwise, at that time children’s hospitals were founded only in the capital city.

Epidemic Hospitals As the campaign against infectious diseases grew in the 19th century, so, too, did the special epidemic hospitals. Often temporary, they were conceived to isolate contagious patients and prevent the spread of diseases within the family, household, and the neighborhood. The place might be of a more permanent nature or some rented building temporarily equipped with equipment, an abandoned dance hall, or a railway car. Records of such centers have often disappeared. In the late 1800s in Gothenberg not only were places supplied for the patients, parents were offered chances to stay overnight. This was also interpreted as an incentive to get parents to use the hospitals. The actual numbers were often small, so separating rhetoric from objective reporting is difficult. These temporary epidemic hospitals often metamorphosed into a hospital’s infectious disease clinics.

Special Hospitals In addition to the children’s hospitals, there have been hospitals limited to particular diseases, such as the seaside sanatoria devoted to forms of extrapulmonary tuberculosis: tuberculosis of the lymphatic system, skin, skeleton, backbone, and joints. Initially, the patients were mostly children, although youths were later included. This type of

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establishment, which used natural treatments, had its origins in England (Margate, the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, 1791) and thrived in France, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1800s. Sweden had three seaside sanatoria founded around the turn of the century 1900 based on models from Europe. These all began as philanthropic endeavors that eventually were supported by local authorities and the state.

Development of Pediatrics In medical schools special chairs were created in pediatrics, and many medical specialties have wards to deal with the special needs of children. By definition pediatrics covers the age range from birth to adolescence. A fundamental building block when it comes to the care of infants and young children was the establishment of the maternal care centers (mödravårdcentral, barnavårdscentral) in 1938. Some areas already had such organizations in place when the legislation was passed. At hospitals specialties developed in various clinics and wards but are often administered under the umbrella of “The Children’s Hospital.” Such hospitals are often under royal patronage or that of wealthy businessmen or famous figures.

Harris, B. (2004). The origins of the British welfare state: Society, state and social welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Henderson, J. (2006). The renaissance hospital: Healing the body and healing the soul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Henderson, J., Horden, P., & Pastore, A. (Eds.). (2007). The impact of hospitals, 300–2000. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang. Jackson, M. (Ed.). (2011). The Oxford handbook of the history of medicine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kock, W. (Ed.). (1963). Medicinalväsendet I Sverige, 1813–1962 [The medical system in Sweden, 1813– 1962]. Stockholm, Sweden: AB Nordiska Bokhandelns Förlag. Lindemann, M. (1999). Medicine and society in early modern Europe: New approaches to European history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Porter, R. (1999). The greatest benefit to mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present. London, UK: Fontana Press. Poynter, F. N. L. (Ed.). (1964). The evolution of hospitals in Britain. London, UK: Pitman Medical. Risse, G. B. (1986). Hospital life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and teaching at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburg (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Changing Attitudes To study children’s hospitals, it is necessary to be aware of the contexts within which children live. The factors dealing with health need to be explored not only within walled institutions but also within the economic, social, political, and medical frameworks of the wall-less institutions. It is necessary to see not only the positive developments but also how society deals with famine, war, and epidemics. Medical development was significant but so also were changing attitudes toward children and their rights. Marie Clark Nelson See also Child Welfare; Death Rates, Children’s, Historical; Health; Health Care; Pediatrics; Sea Hospitals

Further Readings Cooter, R. (Ed.). (1992). In the name of the child: Health and welfare, 1880–1940. London, UK: Routledge.

Children’s Libraries the United States

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Children’s libraries in the U.S. context consist of specialized collections, services, staff, and spaces designed to meet the literacy, personal development, and community learning needs of children and adolescents. Usually existing within the publicly sourced operating budget and space of schools and public libraries, the services offered by children’s libraries can vary between communities depending on their needs, but almost universally include a lending collection of curated, developmentally appropriate books and media for children and teenagers, as well as literacy-based programs for children, teenagers, and families. The history of children’s libraries is closely tied to that of children’s publishing as well as to

Children’s Libraries in the United States

progressive education reform in the United States. This entry examines the early history of children’s libraries in the United States, their collections and programming, and outreach and partnerships. This entry further examines the values underpinning the concept of children’s libraries.

Early History While communities have found a way to publicly lend reading materials for centuries, modern public libraries were established and grew in popularity in the mid-to-late 19th century. American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie built over 1500 public libraries between 1881 and 1917, and as the Progressive Movement took hold in urban areas of the United States, librarians began advocating for children’s access to library materials, and collections and spaces designed especially for them. In 1868, a librarian named Lutie Stearns, speaking at a conference of the American Library Association, proposed developing specialized collections, spaces, and staff for children within public libraries. The next year Anne Caroll Moore was tasked with starting a children’s library in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and by 1911, she had started the first Children’s Department in the New York Public Library and opened their groundbreaking Children’s Room. Posing herself as an expert in literature for children, Moore oversaw the production of recommendations, bibliographies, and reference materials on books for children, as well as coordinating story times and other programs throughout the city. By the 1930s, children’s libraries were opening all over the country, and following progressive education’s focus on the individual, and the burgeoning field of child psychology, children’s librarians were relying less on the classics, and embracing reading choice for young people, which also meant embracing more popular literature that some deemed lowbrow. Librarians also noticed that while children were being well-served in their spaces, adolescents were being underserved. Women like Margaret G. Edwards, a librarian in Baltimore, led the charge in developing bibliographies, collections, and spaces for adolescents, who at the time represented a relatively new developmental stage.

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Collections and Programming Children’s librarians are trained in evaluation of literature and other materials and call on this training while building collections for their libraries. Factors for selection include positive trade reviews, community demand, popularity, local interest, curriculum topics, and maintaining a wellrounded collection in terms of subject interest and point of view. Providing free, unrestricted, and nonjudgmental access of the library collection to children and adolescents has been a strong value of children’s library work since its inception. Early literacy and humanities programming is a core service of children’s libraries. Traditional programs such as preschool story time, infant lap-sit, and book clubs for young readers are designed to fit into literacy scaffolding, create a positive association with books and reading, and model early literacy practices for families and caregivers. Incentive-based and program-heavy summer reading programs encourage kids to keep reading over summer vacation. Libraries are also beginning to embrace maker culture as a multiple-literacy platform to design programs that allow children to practice art and engineering concepts and model collaboration, imaginative thinking, problemsolving, and innovation. The renaissance of young adult publishing in the early 2000s influenced youth services in libraries. As more shelf space, and eventually dedicated collections, were developed to accommodate all of the books being purchased to meet demand, more libraries saw a need to dedicate a space to teenagers in the library, and hire specialists to serve them. Teen advisory boards allow teens in a community to have input on collections and programming, which is often focused on popular materials, popular culture, and fun.

Children’s Library Spaces Library spaces for children are often designed with child development and early literacy concepts in mind, including small tables and chairs, low shelves within a child’s reach, comfortable reading nooks, and safe, bright objects and educational toys to interact with. Many libraries are beginning to focus on play as an important aspect of early literacy and designing their spaces and programming around open-ended play concepts.

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Librarians provide materials, programs, and access to parents, caregivers, and siblings who are supporting children. Parenting books, caregiver accreditation classes, book lists, free museum passes, trainings for early childhood professionals, and Internet access for parents and caregivers in the library space are a few ways children’s libraries support families and caregivers. The library also offers public meeting spaces that can be reserved for after-school clubs, tutoring, and homeschool activities. Issues around library space arise when populations with different goals and styles of library use occupy the space at the same time. This tension often rises when groups of teenagers who view the library as a hang-out spot are sharing a library space with adult patrons or families.

Outreach and Partnerships Children’s libraries expand their reach beyond their space by engaging in outreach and partnerships with other community groups. School librarians partner with classroom teachers and other school staff to plan curriculum and activities in the school library, and they also partner with public libraries to create opportunities for wrap-around services for kids and families. Public libraries provide outreach, which could be supplying books, creating a story time, or designing a craft activity, to schools, day cares, after-school programs, summer camps, and other community organizations that serve children. Other common library partnerships can include performers, artists, musicians, and community members who can do skill-based programming, non-profit organizations, juvenile detention centers, intervention programs, or government agencies.

are also strong advocates for children and teenagers, both in the community and within their own organizations. Privacy is a core value of public libraries in general, and children’s librarians work to protect young patrons’ reading interests and library usage. Children’s privacy can be a controversial topic among library staff, and between library staff and parents, who might feel adults have the right to know what materials their child has checked out. Information literacy is taught in elementary and high school libraries as well as modeled in many public libraries. As the landscape of information sources changes rapidly, librarians support young people in finding and evaluating information, and teaching concepts of ethical usage. Equity of service is a topic many children’s departments are becoming concerned with. Public libraries are founded on ideals of equal access, but some libraries are recognizing systematic barriers to basic services, including library services and early childhood care and education, and are focusing their efforts on underserved populations. To some this seems at odds with the traditional library mission of nonjudgmental access and services for everyone the same, as it singles out community members with higher needs, while pulling back services from populations that have historically been well served. Advocates of equity over equality point out that since barriers to library services have existed in the past, outreach-heavy services that focus on underserved populations is a realistic step to achieving actual equality. Beth Ellen McIntyre See also Children and Technology; Children’s Literature; Literacy/Literacies

Values Core values of children’s libraries can be seen in the children’s librarian competencies Association for Library Services to Children, a division of the American Library Association. Children’s librarians have been concerned with access since youth materials started circulating in libraries, and they have been on the forefront of censorship battles for decades. Children’s librarians

Further Readings Campana, K., & Mills, E. J. (2019). Create, innovate, and serve: A radical approach to children’s programming. Chicago, IL: Neal-Shuman. Competencies for Libraries Serving Children in Public Libraries. (1999). American Library Association. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/alsc/edcareers/ alsccomps (accessed May 2019)

Children’s Literature Edwards, M. A. (1969). The fair garden and the swarm of beasts: The library and the young adults. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. Marcus, L. S. (2008). Minders of make-believe: Idealists, entrepreneurs, and the shaping of American children’s literature. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. doi:10.1353/bcc.0.0473 Thomas, F. H. (1984). The genesis of children’s services in the American public library: 1875–1906 (PhD dissertation). University of Wisconsin. ProQuest Dissertation Publishing (8301891)

Children’s Literature Children’s literature from any tradition or culture is defined, in part, by its audience—children and youth—and understood to be distinct from adult literature, as children, too, are different from adults. At the same time, children’s literature has never existed apart from adult literature. To give just one example of how children’s literature and adult literature are intertwined, in the 19th-century Anglo-American context many 19th-century authors now considered writers for children were publishing works with a dual audience in mind and much of what one considers to be the classics of the 19th-century American canon, including works by Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, was read by a multiaged audience. Thus, the Harry Potter phenomenon of the late 20th century, in which adults have adopted children’s books, has a long history. This entry explores the difficulty of defining children’s literature and further examines the development of Anglo-American children’s literature, key debates in the field, and the relevance of children’s literature to childhood studies.

Defining Children’s Literature Although the many different genres of children’s literature share most attributes with adult literature and they are evaluated primarily in the same ways—in terms of style, plot, power of language, imagery, ability to call forth emotion in the reader, and pleasure (though this is a slippery term)— children’s books from the past and in the present

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often contain lessons and instruction for the child reader to absorb. While the overt and heavyhanded didacticism of early children’s books is rarely found in mainstream children’s literature today, the pedagogical pressure to produce works that are good for their audience is a burden not shared with adult literature. Also, the label children’s literature may be applied as an umbrella term covering the books read by much older readers, as well—teens and even emerging adults. Beyond the matter of the audience’s age, yet perhaps not obviously so, children’s literature can be difficult to define further, given the constructed and contested aspects of its two constitutive terms, children and literature. The nature of the child reader—whether she is understood, for example, to be innocent and vulnerable or sophisticated and knowing, or some other position altogether— affects the content, style, structure, and materiality of the literature that is created for her. In form, function, and content, works of children’s literature represent their culture’s attitudes toward children and childhood, education, and entertainment. For example, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) reflects not only the author’s interests in wordplay, fantasy, and one little girl, Alice Liddell, but also the growing appreciation of childhood as a special and precious time of life distinct from the cares and responsibilities of Victorian upper and middle-class adulthood. While the word literature suggests a book hierarchy— those literary and those non—maintained by some gatekeepers such as critics, librarians, and educators, the big tent of children’s literature has grown, due in part to child consumer practices, the effects of the digital revolution on books and reading, the rise of Young Adult literature as a force within publishing in general, and the impact that childhood studies has had on the field of children’s literature studies. Works once considered outside of the realm of children’s literature—character-driven book tie-ins, digital works, graphic novels, and sequential art (comics), for example—may be considered children’s literature in the 21st century. Thus, children’s literature is a capacious term that includes works written specifically for pre-readers, young readers, or teenage readers as well as those works chosen by the young but not initially intended for a child audience.

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Children’s literature may be found in every literary genre, era, and region throughout the world, from traditional tales such as fables, folk, and fairy tales, to poetry, novels, periodical fiction, illustrated books, and picture books, graphic novels, and comic books. Children’s literature comprises both fiction and nonfiction, including information books, biographies, autobiographies, world history, ABC books, travelogues, photojournalism, and science books, among other subgenres. One form of children’s literature, the picture book, is (nearly) unique to children’s literature. A short work (typically 32 pages) conventionally aimed at pre-readers, the picture book relies upon the close interplay of word and image for meaning. In the case of wordless picture books, an important subgenre of the picture book, images alone carry the story and engage the reader. As Perry Nodelman, Maria Nikolajeva, Carole Scott, and other critics have argued, the picture book is a highly complicated art form employing multiple modes of communication that requires sophistication and skill from its readers in decoding symbols and interpreting narrative. What might be called the global economy of children’s literature is enhanced by the crosscultural appeal of many children’s books. Characters from children’s books often function as national ambassadors of goodwill, given their popularity and recognition around the world. Alice in Great Britain, Asterix in France, Pinocchio in Italy, Anne of Green Gables in Canada, Pippi Longstocking in Sweden, and the Cat in the Hat in the United States are all examples of characters from children’s books that continue to enjoy a global afterlife. The influence of these cultural icons and their brands from children’s culture spreads primarily in two ways: Through the translation of children’s books into other languages and their adaptation into other media such as film, television, and video games. Regardless of the delivery system of the story or poem, typically, children’s literature from any culture features child or teen characters or anthropomorphized animals standing in for youth. While conventional plotlines often concern topics such as domestic life or the efforts to reconfigure the family, journey and adventure, problems to be overcome, the search for identity, and interpersonal relationships, from the mid-20th century through the 21st century, once

taboo subjects such as sexuality, abuse, addiction, or political oppression (among many other topics) have been broached in children’s books.

History and Development of Anglo-American Children’s Literature While it is reductive to claim that any cultural moment constructed children and childhood in one specific way—simply as proto-adults, or essentially as dispensable workers in the family— as several historians of childhood such as Linda Pollock and Colin Heywood have made clear in critiques of Philippe Ariès’s formulation that childhood did not exist in the Medieval and early modern period, large-scale shifts in the constructed nature of children may be seen reflected in the children’s literature of particular cultures and eras. Thus, the history and development of children’s literature may be offered as one kind of evidence of how childhood was understood in a general sense, given that books were written in response to what it was believed that the child of the moment needed from his/her literature. Although an examination of children’s books from the Medieval period forward reveals that it was not the case that one type of children’s literature gave way to another—so that works of fantasy could be said to have entirely replaced didactic works, for example—broad and significant trends in the content, publishing, illustration techniques, and goals of children’s literature may be gleaned through an examination of the works published over time. Indeed, key shifts in the content of children’s books reflect differing ideologies about children and childhood as well as about what constitutes literature for them. These ideas have ebbed and flowed over time rather than followed a straight line of development. That is, one may find examples of moral or religious instruction, advice, entertainment, information, confirmation of normative social values, and challenges to conventional worldviews throughout the history of children’s books, even as certain of these qualities may be dominant in one era more than another. For example, the view that the child was tainted by original sin and in need of regulation and religious instruction required works that would contribute to his or her success in this

Children’s Literature

world and the next. Thus, religious works and conduct books dominated the few works of children’s literature found in 17th-century Christian European societies in which the belief in original sin was strong and infant mortality was high. Children of all classes were expected to contribute to the family’s survival, whether that meant physical survival or succession (through primogeniture or marriage in the case of upper-class or aristocratic children). Examples of such religious works and conduct books of the period include the medieval book of manners The Babees Book (ca. 1475) and James Janeway’s A Token for Children (1671–72) in which the good deaths of humble and holy children serve as inspirational examples for young readers to emulate during daily life or in facing death. Children’s literature was created in response to commercial concerns as much as cultural ones. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, market forces helped to shape Anglo-American children’s books. The emerging middle class, increasing leisure time, rising literacy rates, educational opportunities for (some) children, and burgeoning urban centers, among other factors, contributed to the shift away from an emphasis on the child as sinful and toward the child as playful. The playful child was also a reading child. Given these factors, in the mid-18th century, the publisher John Newbery recognized the potential for children’s books to become a successful commercial enterprise. Newbery launched and ran his London bookshop catering to the desires for imaginative works for the young. His A Little Pretty Pocketbook (1744) is an early example of a children’s book attuned to a child’s interest in play and fancy rather than the parents’ desire to promote primarily piety and morals through reading. By the turn of the 19th century, in their simple tales of growing up in domestic harmony, the British Rationalists, such as Maria Edgeworth, united a desire to instruct the child reader with a clear understanding of how children are socialized within the family and their communities by learning from the mistakes of others as well as their own. Punishment by death in a fire for playing with matches against direct orders, for example—a consequence shared by many a character in heavily didactic children’s books of the same period—is not a fate shared by

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Edgeworth’s child characters, whose natural naughtiness, inquisitiveness, or misplaced desires are, nevertheless, firmly corrected in the story through the child’s experience. At the same time, the Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth and William Blake, wrote admiringly about the innocent child and the imaginative child. These pervasive tropes became a kind of ideal against which childhood is still being measured. By the middle of the 19th century until its end, in both England and America, a time often called the golden age of children’s literature, works of fantasy, adventure stories, and domestic tales found widespread approval with both gatekeepers and child readers. Some of the books from this period, including works by influential writers such as Carroll, Mrs. Molesworth, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, and George Macdonald, continue to be read and adapted today. At the same time, sentimental tales such as Jessica’s First Prayer by Hesba Stretton (1867) in which abandoned, orphaned, and abused underclass children help to lead adults around them to salvation and Godly ways, were also very popular and often given as Sunday School reward books. Indeed, Jessica’s First Prayer outsold even Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. While their messages were consistently didactic and moralizing, the stories involving poor and neglected children were also appealing due to their heightened emotionality, character development, and street scenes of danger and privation. Whether a domestic novel showcasing the child as the light of the home, an adventure tale in which the child hero is both brave and successful, or a work of fantasy creating an imaginative world of freedom for the child, so-called Golden Age works identify the child as especially valuable and powerful either for his/her faith or for the beauties of his/ her uncorrupted nature and earnest desires to do good in the world, or for his/her unique perspectives. Broad trends in children’s literature of the 20th century include the rise of realism, series books, and fiction aimed at a teenaged audience. In America, the book packaging company started by Edward Stratemeyer, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, played a significant role in children’s

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publishing of the 20th century, releasing its first title in 1899 and publishing throughout the 20th century even after the deaths of Stratemeyer and his heirs. The enormously successful Syndicate introduced some of the most enduring formula fiction of the 20th century, including the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Nancy Drew. While the Stratemeyer books remained inherently conservative through the century—the young characters date heteronormatively, are polite and ambitious, but do not have sex, take drugs, or rebel against authority—Young Adult literature’s new realism of the 1970s reflected the social problems of the day, and created characters who dealt with these problems. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974) shocked some critics, teachers, and librarians given that the nonconformist hero is defeated physically and psychologically at the book’s end. Although a happy ending or resolution of conflict remains conventional in fiction for children and young adults, the open-ended or bleak conclusion to novels for youth readers became more common through the 20th century and into the 21st century. Other aspects of children’s literature were also slow to change: very few books featuring children and youth of color or written or illustrated by authors and illustrators of color were in print even into the mid-20th century. A former president of the International Reading Association, Nancy Larrick, published an article in 1965 in the Saturday Review exposing the lack of diversity in the children’s book world—acknowledged by many librarians, teachers, and parents—to a large audience. Larrick’s scathing exposé of the “all White world of children’s books” helped to further the cause which was picked up by the American Library Association and other organizations, some publishing houses, journals and newspapers, bookstores, and individuals. Yet while this article was both eye-opening and hard-hitting at the time, and the number of books featuring children of color and/or written or illustrated by artists and authors of color has increased, the percentage of works featuring or by persons of color remains very low and, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center from the University of ­ Wisconsin, has recently stagnated. One response to this ongoing problem within the children’s

book publishing world is the #weneeddiversebooks grassroots movement, started in 2014 by a group of concerned authors and illustrators, which advocates on behalf of diversity (broadly defined) in children’s books and works to promote changes in the publishing industry.

Debates About Children’s Literature While the need for greater diversity in children’s book publishing is hardly controversial in the 21st century, long-standing debates over where the focus of children’s books should reside—on the reader or on the book—have yet to be resolved. Some of the most important and longstanding debates within children’s literature studies are concerned with the purpose of children’s books and the means by which they are judged as meritorious. In other words, should the focus in children’s literature criticism, analysis, and reviewing be on the child or on the literature? John Rowe Townsend characterized this debate as a difference between the ideologies of book people and child people. Book people evaluate the literary and aesthetic qualities of children’s literature in the same ways that critics analyze literature written for an adult audience. Only those works deemed to possess literary quality qualify as children’s literature in this realm. According to some, works of bibliotherapy (books whose primary aim is to assist the child reader with a specific problem or loss), book tieins with movies or television series, concept books (teaching shapes, colors, or numbers, for example), or formula fiction found in commercial series such as the Goosebumps series of children’s horror fiction of the 1990s, may not rise to the level of children’s literature. Child people, by contrast, put the book’s audience first in differing ways: Considering the book’s impact on the child reader, appropriateness for a youth audience, popularity with children, and usefulness in the classroom. For child people, classics of children’s literature that are now seldom read by today’s youth—examples could include Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson—may not be considered appropriate children’s literature for today’s youth. Prizes that reward literary and artistic merit of children’s books may be found in most

Children’s Literature

countries or regions, including the Carnegie Medal in Britain and the Casa de las Américas prize for children’s books in Latin America. Major international awards for children’s literature include the Hans Christian Andersen Award and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. In America, the most prominent prizes are sponsored by the American Library Association: the Randolf Caldecott Medal awarded to the illustrator of the most distinguished picture book of the previous year (established in 1938), the John Newbery Medal awarded to the author of the most distinguished work of fiction for children (established in 1922), the Coretta Scott King award for outstanding work by African American authors and illustrators (established in 1970), and the Pura BelPré award for Latino/a author and illustrator of the most distinguished work of the previous year (established in 1996), among others. As long as the needs of the book (literary and aesthetic value) are understood to be in potential conflict with the needs of the child reader, the debate between book people and child people will resist resolution. Another area of debate within children’s literature concerns its place in educational settings. Children’s books, more often than works for adults, are most subject to banning and challenges. Once again, the construction of the child reader as vulnerable and impressionable leads some parents, guardians, community members, and teachers to judge books on particular topics or with a particular focus as inappropriate or harmful to children. Some of the most often banned or challenged books are classic and celebrated works such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, and the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling. Children’s literature remains a cultural and artistic site of innovation and creativity as well as contention and debate.

Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies A debate within children’s literature studies, for which some of the practices of interdisciplinary childhood studies may be said to respond, concerns the uneasy relationship between actual children outside of the book and the constructed child

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inside of the book. Since its publication, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) influenced generations of children’s literature through its provocative argument that there are no children in children’s literature other than those that adult authors construct for their own purposes and desires. Other scholars, including Perry Nodelman, whose The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (2008) traces the adult practice of children’s literature in a wide-ranging set of classic works for children, have followed Rose in focusing on adult figurations of children and childhood, which can erase actual children from the creation of children’s literature or render them unimportant and passive. Scholarship that discusses the real child alongside the constructed child may be said to participate in the childhood studies project. Marah Gubar’s research into children’s agency within the world of children’s theater and Victoria Ford Smith’s examination of the child collaborator in Golden Age and early 19th-century texts attest to the growing interest in examining the real child alongside the constructed child, a practice that the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies supports. As the case of picture books, board books, books for the bathtub, movable books, and digital books makes clear, understanding the children’s book as a material object, as well as a text (whether written, visual, or both), is a crucial aspect of children’s literature with salience for childhood studies. Unlike adult literature, children’s books are produced in various sizes. The chapbooks of the 18th century, through Beatrix Potter’s illustrated books, to the board books of the 20th and 21st centuries, for example, were created so that small hands could easily grasp the books and turn the pages. Picture books for the pre-reader are large, designed to be comfortable for the reader to hold for the child and encouraging the encircling of the child, thus enhancing the intimacy of the reading moment. Children’s literature has never been separate from popular culture, a key interest of childhood studies. The Disney phenomenon of the mid-20th century, along with other entertainment companies such as Pixar and Amblin Entertainment, participate in children’s literature through the many book tie-ins that spin off from successful

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family films. Beloved characters such as the Disney princesses populate books that retell the film’s plots or use the characters for wholly new stories. Characters first found in children’s books also star in television programs: Arthur (from the series by Marc Brown) and Caillou (from the series by French Canadian author Christine L’Heureux and illustrator Hélène Desputeaux) are two recent examples. Sesame Street (1969 to the present), the long-running educational show from the Children’s Television Workshop, extends its literacy project for young, especially urban, children through board books, picture books, digital books, and an active Internet presence. While some might suggest that these licensing agreements take children’s literature out of the educational, aesthetic, and literary realm to place it firmly in the commercial sphere, as the aforementioned discussion of the history and development of Anglo-American children’s literature makes clear, children’s literature has never actually been separate from consumer culture and its markets. An enlarged definition of children’s literature includes works that are more than books: toy books such as pop-up books, sensory books (such as “scratch and sniff” or tactile books), and electronic books and narrativized games in which child readers must actively engage with content read through a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Even the leapfrog toys—edutainment tools meant to support children’s reading skills—could be considered an aspect of children’s literature given that literacy and story are essential to this educational toy. Children’s literature studies play an important role within childhood studies given that children’s literature helps to illuminate the history of childhood, the history of education, sociology, and geographies of childhood, among other traditional disciplines. While children are readers of children’s books, they are also authors and activists who work on behalf of widening the audience of children’s books and bringing books to children who lack them. Lynne Vallone See also ABC Books; Critical Children’s Literature Studies; Hidden Adult, in Literature; Young Adult (YA) Literature

Further Readings Clark, B. L. (2003). Kiddie lit: The cultural construction of children’s literature in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. doi:10.1086/508911 Duane, A. M. (Ed.). (2013). The children’s table: Childhood studies and the humanities. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Gubar, M. (2009). Artful dodgers: Reconceiving the golden age of children’s literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.2979/vic.2009.52.1.143 Gubar, M. (2016). The hermeneutics of recuperation: What a kinship-model approach to children’s agency could do for children’s literature and childhood studies. Jeunesse, 8(1), 266–277. doi:10.1353/ jeu.2016.0015 Hunt, P. (1994). An introduction to children’s literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kidd, K. B., & Thomas, J. T. (Eds.). (2017). Prizing children’s literature: The cultural politics of children’s book awards. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis. doi:10.14811/clr.v41i0.349 Mackey, M. (2007). Literacies across media: Playing the text (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Martin, M. H. (2004). Brown gold: Milestones of African American picture books, 1845–2002. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203494714 Mickenberg, J. (2006). Learning from the left: Children’s literature, the cold war and radical politics in the United States. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.3138/cjh.42.1.147 Nikolajeva, M., & Carole, S. (2006). How picturebooks work. London, UK: Routledge. Nodelman, P. (1988). Words about pictures: The narrative art of children’s picture books. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Nodelman, P. (2008). The hidden adult: Defining children’s literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reynolds, K. (2010). Radical children’s literature: Future visions and aesthetic transformations. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Richardson, A. (2004). Literature, education and romanticism: Reading as social practice, 1780–1832. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.3366/rom.1997.3.1.119 Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan, or, the impossibility of children’s fiction. London, UK: Macmillan. Smith, V. F. (2017). Between generations: Collaborative authorship in the golden age of children’s literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. doi:10.14811/clr.v41i0.320

Children’s Mobility

Children’s Mobility From a pedagogical and historic anthropological perspective, children’s mobility is best approached from different perspectives. On the one hand, there is a global rise in children’s mobility due to refugee and migration movements. On the other hand, there is an urbanized mobility of children, which is a product of changing family concepts and changing parental working conditions. This has resulted in a child-specific, digital mobility that is characterized by the use of media in global digital cultures. This entry examines children’s mobility in relation to migration and digital cultures.

Children and Migration According to the annual report of the United Nations Refugee Aid Organization (UNOFlüchtlingshilfe), the number of refugees who flee from conflict, war, and persecution reached a peak in the end of 2015 with 65.3 million refugees worldwide—the highest number ever recorded by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). In 2014, the UNHCR recorded 59.5 million refugees, and in 1995, 37.5 million. Syria is the country with the most refugees, counting a number of 4.9 million. In addition, 6.6 ­million Syrian refugees are displaced within Syria. Furthermore, there are a number of conflicts in other countries as well: At least 15 new conflicts emerged over the last 5 years or arose again, not only in Syria but also in Iraq, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Burundi, Yemen, Ukraine, and Myanmar. According to the UNHCR, in 2015, a total of 12.4 million people were seeking refuge within their home country or across borders—half of them are children. Recent reports of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund and the UNHCR indicate that the number of unaccompanied and underage children (often separated from their families) rose to 300,000 in comparison to 66,000 in 2010 and 2011, 200,000 children since 2015 and 2016. Those children are left on their own to seek ­asylum, 170,000 of them in Europe. The report of the United Nations Children’s Fund documents the increase of these numbers: The share of unaccompanied minor refugees arriving by boat in

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Italy has risen from 72% in 2015 up to 92% between 2016 and 2017. During their flight—organized by illegal immigration networks—children and young people are not only exposed to the risks of accidents and sickness but also to sexual harassment and forced prostitution. During the long-winding latency for permissions to refugee camps, their access to education is not granted. They are trapped in their forced refugee-mobility, growing up on the flight and in camps within a de-territorialized zone between border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity, and diaspora. The only connection to their families at home is materialized in their smartphones, if they are in possession of one. Their living conditions are often described as inhuman. The current causes of migration, especially from Africa and the Middle East, are multifaceted: military conflict, hunger and thirst, natural disasters. These causes can be identified as a long-term result of centuries enduring colonization and postcolonialization, and continuously driven by capitalist societies. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri described the increase of migration movements at the beginning of the 21st century, paraphrasing Karl Marx, as a specter, which haunts Europe carrying the name migration. In their history of transnational colonialization and the post-Fordism arising from it they coined the term new-nomadism in order to describe a new unstoppable form of nomadism caused by the globalization of the markets and the production that created pushand pull-effects. Push-effects are considered as desertion from the tragic cultural and material production circumstances and pull-effects like the embedded hope of freedom and the promising participation at economic and cultural wealth in globalization processes. Simultaneously, there are proposals for other, decidedly nonanthropologic, post-human perspectives. Rosi Braidotti, who coined the term nomadic subject for feminist theories, demanded a new post-human theory of identity, which describes everyone as nomadic subjects, not only refugees. According to her, the center of economy of advanced capitalism is determined by the administration of life in a post-human form. The interdependence of technology and body is responsible for this symbiosis. Hybrid-connections of flesh and metal, which means cyborgs or techno-bodies, are the subject of this prosthetic

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culture consisting of dynamically and technologically mediated social conditions. As she goes on, hybrid forms of identity like this can be understood as pioneering for the ethical refoundation of societal participation and the building of community. They work as radical anthropocentrism critics. Anthropological perspectives refer to sedated mobility of children, automobility and social mobility in urban environments. Without human mobility there is no human life. The immobile newborn depends on the mobility of his or her caretaker and has to learn and develop his or her physical mobility step by step. The physical mobility enables the spatial mobility, which again is the basis for mental mobility. In its physical and cognitive development, as Freud stated, the child repeats, in his individual development, the history of human evolution: starting from the nomadic mobility of hunter and gatherer societies, to imperially and religiously motivated mundial mobility. Since the 19th century, the capitalistic form of production creates, through its growing dynamics, an increased social mobility that determined many people to leave their homes, especially in the countryside, and to move to cities or other countries for the promise of better living conditions and societal promotion opportunities. This process led to social uprooting and anomie, as Emile Durkheim defined it. But the 19th century also established an increased technological mobility through inventions such as the railway or telegraph and telephone that simplified communication over huge distances. Probably the biggest change was caused by the automobility as the motorized enhancement prosthesis between humans and their environment, enabling a mobile independence, and thus promising autonomy and individual movement. Through its global expansion, this kind of mobility gained an imperial quality. In 2006, mobility-theorists John Urry et al. contended that the paradigm of mobilities focused on automobility as a system of powerful socio-technical connections that influences local public spaces as well as the creation of social networks, a variety of gendered subjectivities, urban neighborhoods which are spatially segregated, and global connections in the range from transnational migration to terrorism or oil wars.

Today, children and young people as well as their parents spend a big part of their time within the automobile or in public transport to move between workplace, school, home, and living environment. An increasing child’s mobility and the transmission of the principle domestication (Verhäuslichung) into mobility machines is created not only by the double employment of both parents and their longer absence from the family home that make children stay longer outside of the family in supervised public institutions like school and other leisure facilities. This tendency is also caused by the multiplication of family concepts and the increase of patchwork families. To live in a patchwork-family system demands, especially from the children, to constantly move back and forth between two or three households, and to develop a habit of increased flexibility that requires special organizational and mobility skills as well as the required discipline to handle this domestic mobility over a longer period. Family researcher Sebastian Schinkel states that historically grown domestication organizing the family’s life is not questioned by a wider idea of the domestic sphere via a variety of external orientations and mobility patterns as the networks of relationships, free time activities, and telecommunication networks. According to Schinkel, it has to be addressed by the child’s mobility. From an anthropological perspective, it is important that the intensified automobility influences the individual physical mobility at an early age into a mode of constant sitting. Children move primarily in a sitting position from A to B, from school to the home, from mother to father, from sport club to music lessons. The philosopher Hajo Eickhoff, who wrote a cultural history of sitting on chairs, states that automobility and airplanes in combination with digital mobile media make humans highly mobile. But this doesn’t lead to an increase of their physical mobility, because they are using prostheses to overcome distances instead of their own body. They move but seated. After all, automobiles, trains, busses, and airplanes only accelerate the chair or set them in motion. The accelerated desire to move forward is only the other side of this motionless seated movement. The school is still the institution that drills human beings into sitting and limits the children’s movement and mobility toward the figure of

Children’s Mobility

Homo Sedens. In school, chairs and tables work together to silence the child’s body. What is kept from the child’s urge to move is supposed to become mental freedom. The sedative structures are already prepared in school to strengthen the civil forms at an early age. With this, so Eickhoff, the path for the sitting child—the Homo Sedens— is cleared to become the Homo Sedativus, who subjugate his or her own body following the same rules with whom he or she orders, specifies, subjects, or mauls the world. For this development, it  was insignificant that orthopedists diagnosed, that sitting on chairs for hours from an early age would damage the child`s skeleton. Meanwhile, the school tries to tackle this problem with ergonomically optimized school furniture as well as concepts like the “schools in movement” (­Bewegte-Schulen) which offers diverse sitting opportunities that allow individual sitting and working postures. By looking at the context of a growing digital mobility of children, time spent sitting won’t decrease.

Digital Mobility in Childhood and Youth For children between 5 and 13 years, it is hard to separate their analog and digital presence—they live in both worlds, in which they chat with their friends and are intertwined with their bodily surroundings. They can separate these worlds from each other, but won’t see the sense in separating them: Football is played on the field as well as in FIFA 17. Moreover, adults set the example of how to live within digital cultures, which becomes grotesquely clear when parents nowadays have to be explicitly asked by qualified staff of the elementary and primary sector to turn off their smartphones at least while they greet and say good-bye to their children. Many family living rooms are not filled with books anymore, but rather with big flat-screen TVs and gaming consoles. Public institutions are only accessible and available online, the distance between the actual physical places and the orientation in space are calculated by Google, and appointments are arranged online. But still, parents are concerned with the digital mobility of their children, because of the manifold studies that warn about the risks of addiction of smartphone usage from, for example, no one less than the inventor of the I-phone, Tony Fadell, himself, as

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well as the statistics that prove that immoderate consumption of digital media leads to inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and problems in language development of children. This is especially enhanced due to a lack of parental control over their children’s use of digital media, who are, although at home, simultaneously living in the virtual realities of smartphone apps, chat forums, and games. This loss of control was shown clearly by the media scientist Mark Poster by comparing this situation to the Victorian Era, where bourgeois parents could control the access and content down to the last object of the child’s room, which was usually located right under the roof of the house. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the situation has completely changed: Media as well as people compose a child’s world, learning is connected to people as well as to machines. A media technology of power now forms the child’s awareness as a set of discourses, images, and sounds arriving via the devices of stereos, televisions, telephones, game consoles, and networked computers. In the face of the actual state of children’s mobility, it seems useful to come back to the demand for an adjustment of the nomadic subject within the digital, including a reformulation of intra-actions, social participation, and communitybuilding between the human and the post-human. Birgit Althans See also Digital Childhoods; Digital Mobile Technologies; Immigrant Children; Transnational Migration

Further Readings Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. doi:10.22439/fs.v0i17.4305 Braidotti, R. (2013). Biomacht und postmoderne Politik [Biomass and postmodern politics]. In M. Schmidbaur, H. Lutz, & U. Wischermann (Hrsg.), Klassikerinnen feministischer Theorie. Bd. III: Grundlagentexte ab 1986 [Classic feminist theory: Vol. III. Basic texts from 1986] (pp. 27–38). Frankfurt am Main: Ulrike Helmer Verlag. Eickhofff, H. (1997). Sitzen [Sit]. In Chr. Wulf (Ed.), Vom Menschen: Handbuch Historische Anthropologie [From humans: Handbook of historical anthropology] (pp. 489–500). Weinheim, Germany: Beltz-Verlag.

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Hannam, K., Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Mobilities, immobilities and moorings [Editorial]. Mobilities. 1(1), 1–22. doi:10.1080/17450100500489189 Hardt, M. N. (2000). Empire. Frankfurt, Germany: Campus-Verlag. Piper, E. (1997). Mobilität [Mobility]. In Chr. Wulf (Hrsg.), Vom Menschen: Handbuch Historische Anthropologie [From humans: Handbook of historical anthropology] (pp. 198–201). Weinheim, Germany: Beltz-Verlag. Poster, M. (2006). Information please! Culture and politics in the age of digital machines. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1177/09579265080190 061003 Schinkel, S. (2013). Familiäre Räume: Eine Ethnographie des ‘gewohnten’ Zusammenlebens als Familie [Family room: An ethnography of the usual living together as a family]. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript. doi:10.14361/transcript.9783839423691 Urry, J. (2007). Mobility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Children’s Museums Children’s museums (CMs) have a history spanning more than 100 years. The first was the Brooklyn Children’s Museum founded in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899. Two decades into the 21st century, there are at least 400 CMs around the world and the field is continuously expanding. It is not altogether easy to define a CM. There are two associations today working internationally and worldwide with CMs: The Association of Children’s Museums in the United States, which was founded in 1962, and Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums, which was founded in 1994 to promote CMs in Europe, and became international in 2014. Even though CMs are a North American invention, today they are found in every continent. CMs are designed for children to reach, see, smell, and touch an exhibited world. They address children aged 1 to 12 years. Some museums are age-specialized, addressing mainly preschool children, while others reach across ages. However, fundamentally, CMs are family-oriented establishments encouraging and emphasizing intergenerational play and learning. This entry defines CMs, discusses their impact on learning, and explores their financial structures.

Defining CMs CMs are usually independent establishments and only sometimes, like the KunstLab—KODE’s Art Museum for Children in Bergen, Norway— integrated within traditional adult museums. KunstLab is physically located in a special area of the museum and produces special exhibitions for children. This is not the same as the educational programs that museums offer children in traditional (adult) museum exhibitions. The key idea with CMs is that they are primarily made for a group of people instead of about something. This has been the case from the start. Therefore, childhood museums, like the Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood in London, United Kingdom, are not CMs because they are about childhood (for adults) rather than being for children. Today, CMs can be specialized and thematized in different ways. That is why controversies around the definition and the museums’ uniqueness surface every now and then, questioning why they are museums when theme parks and amusement parks are not, while many, although by no means all, Science Centers are. Even though some CMs do house museum collections, this is not part of the definition of a CM, which adds to the confusion, as collections usually define what a museum is. CMs make up a distinguished area of child culture, along with theme parks, amusement parks, playgrounds, zoos, and lately KidZania, a company-founded interactive play establishment which since its beginnings in 1996 has been launched in 27 countries across the world. In contrast to some of the aforementioned establishments, CMs are generally not-for-profit organizations competing with commercial establishments for children’s and families’ attention.

CMs and Learning A key component of CMs is their focus on learning. Hands-on and interactive learning, which may not be possible in other contexts, is an essential element of CM-based learning. However, depending on the specific institution, learning content and outcomes can widely vary. Hands-On Learning and Interactivity

Play and learning are essential to CMs. The idea is that children learn through play; an early and

Children’s Museums

important slogan for the AMC was “where play inspires creativity and lifelong learning.” Play and learning are still important to AMC, as they are to Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums, KidZania, and traditional museums. The uniqueness of CMs lies in their early pioneering development as interactive educational institutions focusing on hands-on learning. The hands-on focus stems from the learn-bydoing pedagogies introduced by John Dewey (1859– 1952) in 1889. As pointed out by Margie I. Mayfield and Tim Caulton, different educational theorists have historically been sources of inspiration for CMs. These theorists include John Dewey and Maria Montessori (1870–1952) in the 1920s, Jean Piaget (1896–1980) in the 1960s, and today Howard Gardner (1943–). The central notion for these theorists is trust in children’s learning capacities and the idea that children learn through multisensory experiences and intelligences involving physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities rather than observing as the sole learning tool. According to Caulton, parallel to the pedagogical ideologies, the hands-on idea was developed institutionally along two lines: by CMs in the United States during the late 1800s and in European Science Centers at the beginning of the 20th century. Among other sources, it sprang out of a critique of traditional museums’ restrictions against touching museum objects. Hands-on interaction is what holds the field together, and this might also explain why some Science Centers define themselves as CMs. Michael Spock (son of the famous Dr. Benjamin Spock) revitalized CMs when he became head of Boston Children’s Museum at the beginning of the 1960s. He introduced new interactive exhibition designs where hands-on and touch became fundamental, and ever since then, this has been the only way of approaching children in CMs. In this way, he wiped out old ideas of glass cases and museum visitors as spectators by replacing the hands-off policy with touch. It is nevertheless impossible to neglect the fact that CMs are still solid visual sites accentuating the architecture of the institutional buildings with shapes and colors designed to attract children’s lust and learning. CMs are alternative learning sites and, by combining education and entertainment (learning and play), they fall under the concept of edutainment. The word edutainment accentuates the idea that

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one should have fun while learning, and learn while having fun. (The concept was first launched in 1948 by the Disney Corporation.) The educational focus has increasingly become more important to CMs, and today many of them work closely with educational systems, merging national school curriculum topics into exhibitions, activities, and outreach programs. Learning Content and Outcomes in CMs

From the beginning, the focus for learning in CMs was the natural sciences (e.g., the Brooklyn Children’s Museum). A traditional CM today usually displays a water table where children can play with water, provides musical instruments, a pretend grocery shop, a play restaurant and hospital, community activities such as fire engines, driving a bus, other shops, and theaters. Some museums draw on the local community in their exhibitions and most exhibitions encourage peer and intergenerational role play as well as exploring through the senses. The fact that most exhibitions are self-instructive and many younger children cannot yet read exhibition texts means a lot of emphasis is placed on parents or caregivers visiting the museums together with their children. Lucija Andre, Tracy Durksen, and Monique L. Volman describe different forms of learning in museums for children more generally. They mention, for example, learning through technology, child-adult learning, or child-environmentadult/peer learning. Even though both CMs and Science Centers have a hands-on approach, as pointed out by Mayfield, there is quite a difference between learning through play and learning through technology. In CMs, children are dependent on caregivers or other adults to contextualize their activities. However, there is research indicating that caregivers do not necessarily play or explain to children. They either sit around and wait or entertain themselves through social media or books while waiting. Some art museums also define themselves as CMs, like the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York, United States. The Children’s Museum of the Arts has a small collection of children’s drawings and an exhibition of adult and child art. The focus of this museum is not hands-on with the exhibitions but is instead on children’s own creative learning, exploration, and expression through art. Here, hands-on and interactivity comes to

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mean that children make drawings, work in clay or textiles, and try out and refine their artistic skills. For toddlers, it is about playing with paint and colors. What makes it a CM is partly that it is designed for children, which is emphasized by the interior layout and furniture suited to children’s body sizes. This material adaptation to children’s bodies is significant in many CMs and forces adults to accommodate to child ideals instead of the reverse. CMs are not in themselves defined as a research area or even as a strand more generally within museum studies or childhood studies. An ongoing debate within research about CMs is whether children do learn anything, and if so what and how they learn. Hands-on and interactivity as concepts are used more or less interchangeably. None of these concepts, however, as stated by Caulton, explore how or in what ways physical touch automatically generates learning outcomes in CMs. There has always been a concern about CMs’ position as learning and educational institutions. Their focus on education caused a furor during the 1950s because some people thought it would contaminate the whole museum sector and drive all museums to be about education rather than cultural heritage. It would be wrong to say that CMs are only about education and learning, as some museums host collections and engage in serious preservation and protection work of museum objects. Some of these objects are displayed as temporary or longterm exhibitions addressing both children and adults. It is also clear that some museums are located in buildings with historical significance, which in itself makes them interesting from a cultural heritage perspective. The fact that many CMs are located in buildings that were not built for their purposes and needs is more a standard than a digression. It took the world’s first CM, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, 70 years to get a specially designed building in which to develop ideas about children, learning, and play. In sum, CMs are made up of multiple aspects: material culture, exhibitions, buildings, geographical placement, and surrounding urban landscapes, making them nexuses of heritage, entertainment, and education with the aim of attracting both children and adults, since it is adults who bring children to CMs. Nevertheless, the content is mainly for children.

CMs, Outreach Programs, and Financing It is a significant feature of many CMs that they have been developed by grassroots movements consisting of adults with a spirit of entrepreneurship and strong beliefs in community life and social justice for all children. This is why most CMs are not-for-profit establishments. Financing is a dilemma for most CMs. Usually, it consists of a combination of state and city funding, alongside private and corporate money. Most CMs have a crew of people working with financing: directors of development and marketing, event managers, fundraising managers, and institutional giving managers. For example, a children’s art museum, like the Children’s Museum of the Arts, is competing for the same governmental funding as traditional art museums. CMs primarily receive funding on the grounds that they are child and family institutions—for someone—and secondly for their content—about something—the reverse of traditional museums. This makes it a difficult competition. Financing is also a reason why not all CMs belong to the organizations AMC or Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums. People buying AMC membership get free entrance to all CMs. For small CMs, this can lead to financial hardship. Most CMs are socially engaged and take comprehensive social responsibility for as many children as possible. They create outreach programming for children and schools as well as families and parents. For example, they offer parental courses or activities for young single mothers. Activities and camps are organized for less affluent children and some museums visit or lend educational materials to schools that are unable to afford visits. Strategies like “pay-as-you-wish hours” and taxdeductible memberships are offered to facilitate families to visit the museums. Directed donations also make it possible to create occasions when families can visit the museums free or for a symbolic fee. Children’s birthday parties, company outings, and weddings are other resources enabling children, parents, and adults who are more affluent to pay for less affluent children’s cultural participation. The profits from birthday parties, for instance, are used in some museums to fund scholarships for children to participate in museum programs, or they simply contribute to paying the rent. Adults meet to fundraise and donate money

Children’s Music Industry, U.S.

to allow CMs to reach as many children as possible and to uphold the ideal of CMs. Anna Sparrman See also Children’s Cultures; Child-Centered Design; Education; Intergenerational Relations; Material Culture, Children’s; Playrooms

Further Readings Andre, L., Durksen, T., & Volman, M. L. (2017). Museums as avenues of learning for children: A decade of research. Learning Environments Research, 20(1), 47–76. doi:10.1007/ s10984–016–9222–9 Caulton, T. (1998). Hands-on exhibitions: Managing interactive museums and science centres. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203271513 MacDonald, G. F., & Alsford, S. (1995). Museums and theme parks: Worlds in collision? Museum Management and Curatorship, 14(2), 129–147. doi:10.1016/0260–4779(95)00050-3 Mayfield, M. I. (2007). Children’s museums: Purposes, practices and play? Childhood, 175(2), 179–192. Shulman Herz, R. (2017). Children’s museums: A look back at the literature. Curator: The Museum Journal, 60(2), 143–150. doi:10.1111/cura.12196 Sparrman, A., Cardell, D., Lindgren, A.-L., & Samuelsson, T. (2017). The ontological choreography of (good) parenthood. In A. Sparrman, A. Westerling, J. Lind, & K. I. Dannesboe (Eds.), Doing good parenthood: Ideal and practices of parental involvement (pp. 113–126). London, UK: Palgrave. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-46774-0-10 Sparrman, A., Samuelsson, T., Lindgren, A.-L., & Cardell, D. (2016). The ontological practice of child culture. Childhood, 23(2), 255–271. doi:10.1177/0907568215602475 Wöhrer, V., & Harrasser, D. (2011). Playful experiments: Gendered performances in children’s museums. Science as Culture, 20(4), 471–490. doi:10.1080/0950 5431.2011.605925

Children’s Music Industry, U.S. The children’s music industry in the United States has evolved significantly over the last century, but throughout its history has been characterized by

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two significant differences from the mainstream music industry: (1) the business model of children’s music has long emphasized cross-selling of books, toys, dolls, and other child-focused consumer items and (2) the children’s music industry has a longstanding investment in combining educational ­values with entertainment. This entry examines the children’s music industry’s early history, its expansion in the 1960s to 1980s, its increased market intensification in the 1990s, and the eventual expansion of a tween music market in the 21st century.

The Early History of the Children’s Music Industry A commercial market for children’s music can be traced at least as far back as the mid-19th-century market for printed sheet music, with music for children commonly associated with Christmas sales. Recorded children’s music has been a part of the recorded music industry since its inception. Famously, the first successful phonograph recording was said to be Thomas Edison singing “Mary had a little lamb.” Many of the earliest advertisements for phonographs and gramophones highlighted children as listeners and consumers. Toy phonographs and gramophones were produced as early as 1905 and packaged with recordings of nursery rhymes. In the first decades of the 20th century, many companies released children’s records, and collector Diana Tillson identifies 1913–1923 as a Golden Age of children’s discs, when a large number of children’s recordings were sold packaged with books containing illustrations and lyrics. In the 1910s and 1920s, Victor Records pushed hard for schools to purchase phonographs as part of their music appreciation curricula and released many classical-music recordings targeting the school market. Classical singing styles dominated both the educational and the nursery rhyme recordings. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the U.S. folk revival was both an influential segment of the music industry and a major site in the development of the children’s music industry. Influential early folk musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, and Ella Jenkins, recorded children’s music starting in the 1940s and 1950s. This interest in children’s music by prominent folk artists continued through the 1950s and 1960s, when Peter, Paul, and Mary; Tom Glazer; and other

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Children’s Music Industry, U.S.

high-profile musicians would release children’s records. In later decades, major children’s artists like Raffi would emerge from local folk scenes, and in the 2000s, Dan Zanes consciously sought to continue this tradition. Children’s music by folk artists was notable in part for its focus on children’s development and well-being, its blurring of the boundaries between adult and children’s music, and its informal and vernacular singing styles. After World War II, the children’s recording industry expanded along with the rest of the media and consumer industries. Termed kidisks by industry insiders, children’s records were produced in large numbers by both established companies and new record labels started by book publishers and toy companies, representing as much as 20% of total U.S. record sales by the end of the 1940s. New vinyl disks allowed easier access for new entrants, cheaper prices, brighter toy-like packaging, and marketing of records for kids as unbreakable. Historian David Bonner describes this period as another “Golden Age of children’s records.” Stylistically these recordings departed from the classically trained voices of the prewar children’s records in favor of singing styles linked to popular music. Major labels brought in celebrities like the dancer Ginger Rogers and actor James Stewart to record children’s records, while influential new labels like Young Peoples Records developed original talent and tried to navigate between the commercial and educational extremes, often by building on connections to the folk scene. In 1963, Tom Glazer’s “On Top of Spaghetti” was a unique children’s record that became a crossover pop hit, reaching number 14 in the Billboard charts that summer.

The 1960s to 1980s The rock music and teenage youth culture that dominated the music industry in the 1960s had a significant influence on music for children. Young people were an important part of the audience for acts like the Beatles, who were themselves frequently derided as immature by critics. Later television-based acts like the Monkees were consciously created with child audiences in mind, and this period also saw the creation of Saturday morning cartoon shows based on pop music, including The Alvin Show, The Beatles show, The Archies, and Josie and the Pussycats. Music for children was increasingly tied to consumer

products. For example, breakfast cereals printed records by acts like the Archies and the Sugar Bears into their boxes as promotions. In the 1980s, the wave of toy-based cartoon shows included Hasbro’s Jem and the Holograms and Mattel’s Barbie and the Rockers, and in 1990, the boy band New Kids on the Block launched a Saturday morning cartoon. Children’s media became an important venue for marketing pop music, while mainstream pop music was increasingly targeted to child audiences. Even as bubblegum and cartoon shows expanded, the 1970s and 1980s also saw the reemergence of folk music as a dominant form of children’s music. In particular, Canadian singer– songwriter Raffi Cavoukian achieved unprecedented success through a formula of simple, folk-influenced, and traditional songs. Against the dominant commercial trend in children’s musical television, Raffi refused promotional tie-ins or merchandise (even as songs like Baby Beluga would be imminently merchandisable), and his music increasingly emphasized quasi-political themes, especially environmentalism. Other independent, folk-influenced artists in this period, including Bill Harly and Barry Louis Polisar, as well as the progressive rock duo Trout Fishing in America, initiated a strand of children’s music that emphasized gross, silly, or naughty songs, like Polisar’s “Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan.” By contrast to earlier efforts by folk musicians, these naughty songs did not seek to bring adults and children together but rather carved out a distinctive musical space for children where adults were not welcome.

The 1990s While the 1990s are not usually associated with influential children’s music, two developments are especially significant: First, several major record labels entered the children’s music market, trying to mimic Raffi’s success, and second, the expansion of home video and big box retailers dramatically changed the market for children’s music. In the early 1990s, most major record labels, including Warner Brothers, Sony, MCA, and BMG, set up children’s divisions and began to make significant investments in children’s music. Walt Disney Records, which had largely supported Disney’s film division (selling “book and tape” adaptations of animated movies, for example), established a

Children’s Music Industry, U.S.

“Live Artist Series” with established children’s musicians and also developed new acts. These efforts by traditional music companies largely failed, in part due to lack of investment but also because the business model for children’s recordings had long been distinct from that of the larger music industry, which relied on radio airplay as advertising for album sales. Children’s music, by contrast, never had widespread access to radio, and had long depended financially on consumer product tie-ins, the institutional educational market, and the dedication of artists committed to serving child audiences. Raffi’s example of high sales and national prominence appeared in hindsight to have been an exception, and even superstar Raffi grew his audience slowly, toured diligently, and cultivated relationships with local music audiences around North America. The other major development during the 1990s, which confirmed and intensified the long-standing trends, was the expansion of the home video market and the growth of big box retailers. As the home video market emerged, Disney, especially, focused on selling its newly resurgent animated musicals, like The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, directly to consumers in the home video market. Home videos were also a major outlet for popular children’s television shows like Barney and Friends. At the same time, big box retailers like Target and Walmart were expanding rapidly, competing directly with traditional music and video stores. Partly because of their distribution relationships with major media companies like Disney and Sony and partly because the home video market was growing so rapidly, these stores emphasized children’s home video sales over CDs or cassettes. Family purchasing habits shifted toward video cassettes and DVDs, most of which included significant musical content, making purchases of CDs or audio cassettes redundant. Corporate strategies at companies like Disney and Sony also emphasized cross-marketing, so standalone musical products rarely received the resources or investment they needed. In the 2000s, two developments consolidated these trends: the emergence of an independent kindie children’s music movement, and the consolidation of the tween marketing category with major investments in popular music for kids by corporate media entities. By the late 1990s, major media companies had largely given up on stand-alone

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children’s music, which left an opening for independent artists. The Internet also lowered distribution barriers, allowing independent artists to sell records nationally without representation by major labels. Laurie Berkner, Dan Zanes, and David Weinstone all began to play and record children’s music in New York City, initiating what would be termed the kindie movement of independent children’s musicians who were received by critics and parents as being more sophisticated alternatives to, especially, the dominant but by then widely reviled Barney. Other acts identified with the kindie movement that emerged over the following years encompassed an increasingly broad range of genres and styles, from indie rock, pop, and folk to hip hop, electronic, and ska. Berkner, Zanes, and Weinstone all appeared on Nickelodeon in the mid-2000s, giving them access to a national television audience, and Disney developed shows out of independent bands like the Imagination Movers. More recently, ­ Nickelodeon and Disney have shifted from using independent acts to developing young children’s musical acts internally, with shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! and the Fresh Beat Band. Independent children’s musicians continue to rely on local performance circuits in libraries and schools, and nontraditional music outlets like family music classes, in addition to record sales.

The Expansion of Tween Markets in the 21st Century Also starting around the turn of the century, children’s media companies began investing in tween music, targeting preteen kids between childhood and adolescence. In the late 1990s, teen pop acts like Britney Spears and NSYNC regularly appeared on children’s television networks like the Disney Channel, though questions about their appropriateness for child audiences eventually ended those relationships. Starting in 2002 with Hilary Duff, and then expanding meteorically in 2006 and 2007 with High School Musical, Hannah Montana, and other acts, the Disney Channel shifted its focus significantly toward pop music–based shows. Other products, like Razor and Tie’s Kidz Bop, had enormous success selling compilations of Top 40 pop hits rerecorded for kids. In the mid2000s, tween music acts were among the most successful overall: The High School Musical soundtrack was the top-selling album of 2006,

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Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights

and Kidz Bop’s releases regularly reached the top 10. Still the model of media and consumer product tie-ins remained at their core. Tyler Bickford See also Child Actors in Film and Television; Childhood Publics; Children as Consumers; Children’s Culture Industry; Children’s Literature; Children’s Radio; Children’s Television, U.S. History; Disney

Further Readings Bickford, T. (2012). The new ‘tween’ music industry: The Disney Channel, Kidz Bop, and an emerging childhood counterpublic. Popular Music, 31(3), 417–436. doi:10.1017/s0261143012000335 Bonner, D. (2008). Revolutionizing children’s records: The Young People’s Records and Children’s Record Guild series, 1946–1977. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Cooper, K., & David, S. (Eds.). (2001). Bubblegum music is the naked truth. Los Angeles, CA: Feral House. Coulter, N. (2014). Tweening the girl: The crystallization of the tween market. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Dunham, R. L. (1961). Music appreciation in the public schools of the United States, 1897–1930 (PhD dissertation). University of Michigan. Kok, R. M. (2008). Negotiating children’s music: New evidence for Schumann’s ‘charming’ late style. Acta Musicologica, 80(1), 99–128. Maloy, L. (2016). ‘Why couldn’t the wind blow backwards?’ Woody Guthrie’s songs for children. Woody Guthrie Annual, 2, 18–43. Stahl, M. (2011). The Synthespian’s animated prehistory: The Monkees, the Archies, Don Kirshner, and the politics of ‘virtual labor’. Television and New Media, 12(1), 3–22. doi:10.1177/1527476409357641 Tillson, D. R. (1994). Children’s musical play: The role of the phonograph. Ephemera Journal, 6, 86–98. Tillson, D. R. (1995). The golden age of children’s records. Antique Phonograph News, 12, 3–6.

Children’s Ombudspersons/ Commissioners for Children’s Rights An ombudsperson is an independent monitoring institution which is intimately connected to the principles of democracy and the rule of law. The

institution plays a significant role in the protection of human rights. Children’s ombudspersons (also known as Commissioner for Children’s Rights or Independent National Human Rights Institutions for Children) are defined as public institutions acting on behalf and in the interests of a single child or a group of children, and as an intercessor between a single child or a group of children and a public or private authority. It can be said to be a public watchdog for children’s human rights, as it is mandated to independently monitor the implementation and the full respect of children’s rights. This entry examines the development and role of children’s ombudspersons and the specific impact of children’s ombudspersons since the early 1990s.

The Development and Mandate of Children’s Ombudspersons In contemporary society, in most cases, persons below the age of majority do not enjoy the right to vote and as a consequence do not play a meaningful role in political processes and debates. They face significant obstacles in accessing legal and justice systems to claim their rights and/or to seek remedies for infringements on those rights. The aim of the ombudsperson for children’s rights is to voice children’s needs in social, political, and economic arenas, in order to further the respect of their rights as stated in international human rights treaties, in particular the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Ombudspersons for children have a reactive and proactive role. The first, reactive, provides remedies to violations of rights and provides children the possibility to lodge complains and directly claim their rights, while the second, proactive, role includes all the preventive activities undertaken by the children’s ombudsperson and is meant to remove risks of future violations. Over the last 30 years, the expectation that the states that ratified the UNCRC will set up children’s ombudsperson offices to monitor state compliance with international children’s rights norms has increased. Despite heightened attention from the international community, mainly propelled by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the  Child, which is the United Nations body

Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights

monitoring the implementation of the CRC (CRC Committee), it did not receive parallel attention from the academic community. In fact, despite the important mandate of these institutions, little research has been undertaken in this field. Thus, after the presentation of the origin of this institution and its historical evolution, this entry will, through the analysis of the main pertaining international legal standards, provide an overview of the particular characteristics of these institutions, with an attention to their role in contemporary society.

Children’s Rights Ombudspersons in the 1990s and Beyond Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a swift proliferation of children’s rights ombudspersons. By and large, this is a consequence of the participating states’ obligation to effectively implement the UNCRC. But the creation of the first specialized children’s ombudsperson dates back to before the adoption of the UNCRC. In fact, the first children’s ombudsperson was created in ­Norway in 1981 (the Norwegian Commissioner for Children), followed by Costa Rica in 1986 and the region of Veneto, Italy, in 1988. Successively, these first cases and the near universal ratification of the UNCRC led to a growing acceptance that creation of such institutions falls within the states parties’ commitment to implement the UNCRC. To be precise, the UNCRC does not include an explicit reference to the creation of children’s ombudspersons, but in 2002, the UNCRC Committee filled this void through the adoption of General Comment No. 2 (GC no. 2) on the role of independent national human rights institutions for the promotion and protection of the rights of the child. A GC is a ‘quasi-legal document’ published by the UNCRC Committee, which provides a detailed interpretation of an article or principle of the UNCRC, as well as guidance on the actions that need to be undertaken by governments for its implementation. GC no. 2 prescribes that under Article 4 of the CRC, states parties are required to undertake all appropriate legislative, administrative, and other measures for the implementation of the rights recognized in the UNCRC, and that the creation of Commissioners for Children’s Rights is precisely one of these general measures of implementation. In 2002, GC no. 2 furthered the

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idea that these institutions are instrumental to the implementation of all other substantive rights listed in the UNCRC and provided guidance on the establishment and operation of these institutions, for example, in relation to possible mandates and powers, creation processes, resource allocation, pluralistic representation, remedies for breaches of children’s rights, accessibility, child participation, and so on. In the transnational debate over children’s ombudspersons, GC no. 2 has become “something of a norm” for the implementation of the UNCRC and a benchmark for setting up these kinds of institutions in an effective manner. Notwithstanding, considering the variegated range of systems of government, states parties, even though fulfilling the principles outlined in GC no. 2, still have a large margin of discretion in shaping the form and mandate of these institutions. This has led to the proliferation of a diversity of types of children’s ombudspersons. Although these institutions have different forms, different headings, and slightly nuanced mandates and powers, they are all mechanisms which enhance governance transparency and the states parties’ democratic liability toward the fulfillment of children’s rights. One of the themes of current research is the critical investigation of the role of children’s ombudspersons as actors of good governance, and the analysis of the features that allow these institutions to better perform their reactive and proactive roles in an independent manner. Roberta Ruggiero See also Agency; Best Interests Principle; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Flekkøy, M. G. (1991). A voice for children, speaking out as their ombudsman. London, UK: Jessica Kingsley. doi:10.1002/pad.4230130214 Gran, B. (2011). The roles of independent children’s rights institutions in implementing the CRC. In A. Invernizzi & J. Williams (Eds.), The human rights of children: From visions to implementation (pp. 219–238). London, UK: Ashgate. Ruggiero, R. (2013). Ombudspersons for children in selected decentralised European States: Implementing the CRC in Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom. Interdisciplinary Journal of Family Studies, 18(2), 65–97.

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Children’s Perspectives

Children’s Perspectives The perspectives of children are often overlooked, undervalued, and frequently paternalized by the adults in their lives and the society surrounding them. Children are repeatedly viewed and valued as human becomings rather than human beings, and the specific perspectives, experiences, and expertise of children are habitually dismissed. Following the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 (specifically Articles 12 and 13), listening and honoring the perspectives of children has shifted from a social nicety to a legal obligation. Though children still find their voices ignored, suppressed, and/or silenced in many contexts within their everyday lives, children’s rights activists, politicians, policy makers, researchers, and practitioners use the existence of children’s perspectives as a symbol of the modern welfare state’s commitment to the values of freedom, care, and democracy. This entry explores the importance of listening to children’s perspectives by examining theories regarding the specific expertise held by children, by illustrating the role of children’s perspectives as a prerequisite for youth empowerment, and by highlighting specific barriers to the implementation of children’s perspectives.

Theories on Children’s Perspectives The importance of listening to children’s voices has been largely reinforced by the sociology of childhood. This theoretical framework, which emerged in tandem with the UNCRC, seeks to recognize children as active participants in their own lives and in the world surrounding them. This new approach to seeing children as social actors, rather than social objects, recognizes that children are able to understand and create their own views and shape their own identities and have a right to participate in their surrounding world. If society is to make decisions that truly capture the best interests of the child, children must be able to participate in settings where they have been historically denied those rights and where their voices remain unheard. The sociology of childhood conceives that children can create valid meanings of their world and their places within it, that children’s understandings of the world are different from but

not inferior to those of adults, and that children have unique perspectives and insights which can improve adults’ understandings and perceptions of children’s experiences. Berry Mayall, a theorist within the sociology of childhood, conceives youth as a marginalized group frequently viewed as passive subjects rather than autonomous beings. Mayall theorized that children and youth exist within a specific generational cohort, subsequently making them experts in their own lives—providing insight into a unique way of knowing and being. This thinking—termed the standpoint theory—argues that children’s viewpoint, although potentially different from that of adults, is valuable in and of itself and must be listened to, respected, and included within policy affecting them. What is more, as Mayall argues, is that by genuinely including the perspectives of children in policy affecting them, policy makers are more likely to ensure the best interests of the child are met, and that the best possible supports are developed and provided to the children and youth that require them.

Youth Voice as Empowerment Only when actively listening to the perspectives of those who are the most directly affected and who know the issues most intimately can supports be provided to individuals in a way that allows them to be empowered. This is why it is imperative that youth are genuinely consulted as curators of their own lives and experts in their own empowerment. Researchers Morten Skovdal and Eleni Andreouli demonstrated the importance of listening to the voices of children and youth. In their study, the authors examined the conceptualizations of Kenyan children who hold the primary responsibility of providing care for their ill parents. Researchers attempted to shift the viewing of caregiving children from the dominant deficit-based model to a strengths-based model. Their research found that the children interviewed did not speak of their lives in negative terms, but instead identified themselves as having great agency and autonomy, as being competent contributors, and of having a great deal of pride in their labor. This study illustrated the great importance of allowing children and youth the opportunity to share their unique insights into their own lives, rather than allowing and relying on the perspectives of others.

Children’s Radio

Barriers to Children’s Perspectives Laura Lundy, a researcher who examined the implementation of youth voice within policy affecting children in Ireland, found that there are three main barriers relating to the practice of listening to and respecting the perspectives of children. The first is that effective inclusion of the perspectives of children and youth is largely dependent on the cooperation of the adults in their lives. Adults may or may not be dedicated to providing such a space, or conversely, may have a vested interest in not complying with it at all. Adults’ concerns tend to fall into one of three categories: (1) skepticism about children’s ability or capacity to make meaningful contributions; (2) a worry that by giving children more control, adults will have less—­subsequently destabilizing the carefully crafted power structures in which youth exist; and (3) finally, concern that it will require far too great an effort to properly and wholly include the perspectives of youth. Second, Lundy found many adults had a very limited understanding and awareness of the importance of including children’s perspectives as well as those of the UNCRC. Adults must be made aware of the significance of providing space to include children’s perspectives and the vast effects it has on the child’s well-being and empowerment. Finally, adults must learn that respecting and honoring the perspectives of children is not just good pedagogical practice, but a legally binding obligation. Article 12 of the UNCRC states clearly that children must be consulted on matters that affect them. Therefore, the questions relating to the inclusion of children’s perspectives in social policy should not be Should we? but rather, How do we?. Youth are vital to a culture, a way of being, and a way of knowing. They provide direct insight into a generational cohort and culture, are agents of change within their own lives and their surrounding communities, and must be seen as experts and authorities in their development and empowerment. Though barriers to the inclusion of children’s perspectives within policy exist, adults are now legally obligated and morally accountable to view children as competent citizens and to seek out opportunities to include their perspectives throughout all facets of our society. Caitlin Wood

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See also Best Interests Principle; Children and Social Policy; Children as Citizens; Children as Competent Social Actors; Children as Legal Subjects

Further Readings Lundy, L. (2007). ‘Voice’ is not enough: Conceptualising Article 12 of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. British Educational Research Journal, 33(6), 927–942. Mayall, B. (2002). Toward a sociology for childhood: Thinking from children’s lives. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Skovdal, M., & Andreouli, E. (2011). Using identity and recognition as a framework to understand and promote the resilience of caregiving children in western Kenya. Journal of Social Policy, 40(03), 613–630. United Nations General Assembly. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989, United Nations. Treaty Series, 1577, 3. doi:10.18356/ 39ce05d2-en-fr

Children’s Radio In Britain, children’s radio, here defined as programming specifically aimed at child audiences, is synonymous with the public-service British Broadcasting Company (BBC), emerging on December 5, 1922, during the transition of wireless technologies from military monopoly to mass social use. With childhood constituted through hegemonic middle-class discourses of innocent and vulnerable malleability, A. E. Thomson, an engineer employed by the BBC (a private cartel that preceded the 1927 inauguration of the public service BBC), presented a few minutes of entertainment ‘just for children’. Eighteen days later, dedicated programming for children was consolidated as a central plank of British broadcast ­culture when The Children’s Hour commenced a run that ­continued until March 27, 1964, laying down a blueprint for subsequent children’s broadcast entertainment that extends to television programmes like Blue Peter (BBC 1958 ongoing) and the BBC’s current age segmented provision for children via CBeebies and CBBC. Within 2 years of Thomson’s initiative, the provision of children’s

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radio had expanded to include a Schools Broadcasting Service that aimed to offer educative expertise and stimulation usually beyond the reach of all but the most privileged schools. Overall, the emergence of children’s radio can be seen to both prefigure and exemplify the declared mission of Lord Reith, the BBC’s first directorgeneral, which public service radio should inform, educate, and entertain. This entry examines the early history of children’s radio, how UK and U.S. children’s radio differed, the content of children’s radio, and children’s ultimately passive role in children’s radio.

The Early History of Children’s Radio Unlike the BBC’s adult counterpart, which until the late 1930s was shaped by irregular scheduling designed to promote selective and focused listening and thereby mitigate the assumed problems of passive, habitual engagement by ill-educated listeners, The Children’s Hour was always afforded a regular schedule in order to avoid confusing the ostensibly undeveloped mind of the child. The contradictions of this position usefully illuminate the arbitrary construction of the adult/child dichotomy as well as the class snobbery of the BBC that chimed with cultural anxieties surrounding an emerging mass media and its associated ‘effects’ discourse. Notably, the advent of schools broadcasting is indicative that ‘effects’ discourses can constitute beneficial as much as detrimental configurations, especially in relation to children, whilst highlighting the crucial roles played by the BBC in both the circulation of such discourses and the regulation of childhood at intersections with education.

State Versus Commercial Children’s Radio By way of comparison, in the United States and its context of competing stations, children’s radio was always a commercial enterprise driven by a concern with profitable audience appeal, rather than public service values. Initially emerging in the 1930s via the Nestlé corporation sponsorship when the company attempted to expand the market for Ovaltine by mobilising what is now known as ‘pester power’ through dramatised adaptations of the hugely popular, but critically denigrated, Little Orphan Annie comic strips.

Other companies rapidly followed suit, notably the Kellog company with its sponsorship of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century. These adaptations created an immediate mass audience for children’s radio, whilst simultaneously, the supposed negative ‘effects’ of comic strip consumption transferred to children’s radio, though these cultural anxieties never escalated to the moral panic associated with 1930s cinema or television in postwar Britain. To an extent this was due to the self-censorship of radio producers on both sides of the Atlantic who were sensitive to the terms of domestic consumption. But equally, as a largely aural medium, radio did not engender anxieties about the undesirable or unwanted influences of visual realism on children’s imaginations, nor was radio seen to distract from children’s heavily sanctioned engagement with books, reading, and literate pursuits. In Britain, whether produced under the schools or the entertainment banner, children’s radio was always seen as complementary to school, rather than being either a substitute or a troubling form of competition. This was especially the case with The Children’s Hour which was consciously scheduled in the early evening as a liminal zone between school and domestic activities. Never lasting for more than 50 minutes, it is clear that the programme did not take its bearings from chronological measurements. Rather it references a popular poem by Longfellow, The Children’s Hour (1860) and its reverie of a twilight pause in the working day occasioned by the intrusion of children into a writer’s adult space. Characteristically, the pause inferred by the BBC broadcast is shaped by a magazine format that enabled a national standard for what, until 1937, were regionally produced broadcasts that included musical interludes and factual and fictional features presented by both guest expert speakers and familiar regulars, the now iconicised ‘Aunties and Uncles’. Here, guest experts conform to ­Bourdieu’s formulation of cultural intermediaries, that is, they function as gatekeepers of sanctioned knowledge, naturalised ‘good’ taste, and the regulation of legitimate cultural capital. This intermediary function is fully supported by the deference of regular presenters: a deference that positions the ‘Aunties and Uncles’ as liminal figures within the  play of the adult/child dichotomy since they

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possess neither the expert prestige that aligns with adulthood nor the inexperience and naiveté aligned with childhood. Within this liminal position, ‘Aunties and Uncles’ are also effective embodiments of the constituted differences between the informality of home and the formality of school and schools broadcasting. The tensions between child and adult, home and school, informal and formal education were epitomised in disputes over both the necessity and the efficacy of teaching children to pray occasioned by a 1940 wartime appendage, Children’s Hour Prayers.

Content of Children’s Radio Unlike their U.S. counterparts who drew on preexisting material for their children’s programming, British producers commissioned original stories, poems, talks, and music. Whilst this was largely a measure to meet tight budget restraints by avoiding the copyright fees accruing from existing publications, it nonetheless created employment for cohorts of composers, speakers, and writers, some of whom became household names on the back of radio exposure, such as David Seth-Smith—the Children’s Hour ‘Zoo Man’; S.G. Hulme Beaman— author of the Toy Town stories and plays; the Reverend G. Bramwell Evens—nature presenter and creator of the Romany character and stories; and the historical dramatist L. du Garde Peach, whose series included The Arthurian Legends, Tower of London, and Castles of England. The fame and popularity of writers, presenters, composers, and writers alike was never merely the product of radio exposure but usefully highlights children’s radio’s mutually supportive dynamic with print media in the guise of Radio Times: The Journal of the British Broadcasting Corporation and a welter of illustrated children’s annuals and collections of stories, poems, and nature articles. Similarly, in the United States, a reliance on adaptation ensured that print/radio and literate/aural intersections were integral to the constitution of children’s programming. Crucially, children’s radio has never been medium specific and constitutes a visual as much as  an aural experience. Equally, a variety of practices including readers’ letters, fan mail and competitions, ensured that the radio/print dynamic flowed  in two directions, constituting a producer/ consumer feedback loop that not only eschews

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ideas of passive audiences but can also be seen to prefigure contemporary, ‘new media’ interactive practices.

Children’s Role in Children’s Radio With that said, children were kept firmly in their place as recipients of programmes, rather than creators. Notably, in Britain especially, the regulation of childhood impacted on the employment of child performers even though they did form part of the British cultural landscape during the formative years of radio. In a classic tautology children who were able to perform under studio conditions were deemed precocious and therefore ‘unsuitable’ for the BBC’s child listeners, whilst ‘suitable’ children were readily identified as unemployable because of their propensity to wilt at the microphone. However, in the United States, child actors were recruited, for instance, Shirley Bell Cole played the role of Orphan Annie for the duration, though the medium ensured that the actor was subsumed into character and remained largely unknown, especially as compared to H ­ ollywood’s highly visible and famous child stars such as ­ Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney. Although the BBC did produce some child stars, notably Julie Andrews and Petula Clarke, their performances were confined to adult entertainment and segregated from children’s radio where it was the convention for female voice actresses to play the parts of children, ensuring that the medium and subsequent forms of broadcasting remained very much for children rather than by children. Josephine Dolan See also Child Actors in Film and Television; Childhood Identity Constructions; Children and Technology; Media, Children and Education; Children’s Television, U.S. History

Further Readings Critcher, C. (2012). Making waves: Historical aspects of public debates about children and mass media. In K. Drotner & S. L. Livingstone (Eds.), International handbook of children, media and culture (pp. 91–104). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781848608436.n6

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Dolan, J. (2003). Aunties and uncles: The BBC’s children’s hour and liminal concerns in the 1920s. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 23(4), 329–340. doi:10.1080/0143968032000126627 Hartley, I. (1983). Goodnight children … everywhere: An informal history of children’s broadcasting. Soughborough, UK: Midas Books. Moore, R. (2014). Capital. In M. J. Grenfell (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 98–113). London, UK: Routledge. Oswell, D. (1998). Early children’s broadcasting in Britain. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 18(3), 375–393. doi:10.1080/ 01439689800260241 Oswell, D. (1999). And what might our children become? Future visions, governance and the child television audience in postwar Britain. Screen, 40(1), 66–87. doi:10.1093/screen/40.1.66 Parker, S. G. (2010). Teach them to pray auntie: Children’s hour prayers at the BBC, 1940–1961. History of Education, 39(5), 659–676. doi:10.1080/00467601003685741 Santo, A. (2011). “Good morals are good business”: The cultural economy of children’s radio in the late 1930s. Popular Communication, 9(1), 1–21. doi:10.1080/154 05702.2011.536681 West, M. I. (1987). Children’s radio programs and their impact on the economics of children’s popular culture. The Lion and the Unicorn, 11(2), 102–107. doi:10.1353/uni.0.0295

Children’s Rights After explaining the emergence of the children’s rights concept, this entry presents the field of children’s rights studies, an interdisciplinary study field located at the intersection of childhood studies and human rights studies. It then discusses four key themes on which opinions related to childhood, children, and their rights diverge and that are central for understanding the extant diversity of approaches toward children’s rights. These divergent opinions are then presented in the form of four schools of thought in children’s rights. The conclusion hints at the field’s possible future developments.

The Emergence of Children’s Rights Children’s rights came into being as the result of a series of social and political processes that started at the beginning of the 20th century. At the end of the

19th century, in the context of uncontrolled industrialization and its dire consequences for the living conditions of poor working-class children, the thenemerging idea of children’s rights was limited to child protection. The child-saving movements of that time considered it their moral duty to alleviate the plight of vulnerable children whom they saw as passive victims and mere objects of intervention. With the advent and development of the welfare state, especially after World War II, children’s rights became increasingly framed within social welfare discourse. In addition to protection against all forms of violence and exploitation, children’s rights also included the right to special provisions, such as education, health care, family support, or social welfare services. During the 1970s, in step with other civil rights and antiauthoritarian emancipation movements, the exclusive attention to children’s protection and welfare rights was challenged and complemented by claims for children’s autonomy, including their right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and due process guarantees in judicial proceedings. The protectionist, welfarist, and autonomy approaches to children’s rights converged in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a legally binding international instrument that has been ratified by all United Nations member states, except for the United States. Even if the idea that children have rights has met with some resistance since the elaboration, adoption, and implementation of the UNCRC, in many parts of the world children’s rights have become part of mainstream policies and legal frameworks in relation to childhood and youth. Across all regions and in a considerable number of states, the UNCRC has set in motion a process that promoted national legal and institutional reforms aiming to advance the cause of children’s rights. With this, an increasing number of professionals must deal with the UNCRC and with other international and national legislative documents on children’s rights. The expansion of the children’s rights field over the last 40 years has given rise to a proliferation of views on the meaning and content of children’s rights. Even if more and more people agree about the importance of recognizing children’s rights, there is not necessarily a consensus on the precise meaning and content of the concept. The wellknown aphorism by Hillary Rodham, which was

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published in 1973, that “the phrase children’s rights is a slogan in search of definition,” seems to have lost none of its relevance.

Children’s Rights Studies Early writings in the field of children’s rights focused on philosophical and moral arguments in favor of or against children’s rights. Those arguing for the recognition of children’s rights also asked what kind of rights children ought to have and looked at the relative importance of these rights. This work aimed at fleshing out moral and political arguments about why children should or should not have certain rights rather than investigating the social consequences of children’s rights. Another strand of research came from the legal field and explored the context in which the UNCRC came into being, the vast thematic and geographical areas in which it is to be applied, the newly established national and international monitoring mechanisms, and the available implementation strategies. In parallel with the growing attention on children’s rights, within sociology a distinctive field of studies has developed that was initially termed the “new social studies of childhood” but is now more commonly called the sociology of childhood or childhood studies. This field applies general social science frameworks to children and childhood and investigates the social reality in which children’s rights operate and are enforced (or not). Childhood studies critically engage with major sociological themes, such as the tension between agency and structure, the question of the multiplicity and diversity of childhoods, or propose to include generation as a separate distinctive category, in addition to class, gender, and ethnicity. During the same period, the broader field of human rights, of which children’s rights is part, has been investigated by social science approaches that have led to more empirically based and self-reflexive research on human rights. This research on human rights looks at the environments in which rights discourses and policies are being produced, how these are translated into social practices, and what the social consequences are of human rights standards and implementation procedures. At the crossroads of childhood studies and social science approaches to the study of human rights lies the field of children’s rights studies, which is a straightforward interdisciplinary undertaking. The

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interdisciplinary perspective not only invigorates creative thinking but also approaches children’s rights from a variety of disciplines such as law, philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, or geography, to name just a few, with the aim to integrate knowledge stemming from each disciple as well as to find a synthesis between, across, and beyond scientific disciplines and paradigms. It is a comparatively small but recognized field of study, as demonstrated by the rising number of publications, research activities, and researchers involved. It continues to include research concerned with the instrumental dimension of children’s rights, such as advancing the implementation of the UNCRC on the local, national, regional, and global political levels or that looks at how children’s rights principles are transposed to particular legal fields, such as family law or juvenile justice procedures as well as to social domains that play important roles in children’s lives, such as education, health, or media. However, in parallel with these approaches, which largely endorse the existing children’s rights framework, self-reflective approaches to children’s rights have also emerged. These ways of thinking critically engage with the contexts in which children’s rights are produced and applied and that concentrate on understanding, analyzing, and explaining children’s rights practices. The study of children’s rights is hence no longer confined to the mere legal or philosophical study of what children’s rights are or ought to be but has integrated broader interdisciplinary perspectives that also examine the consequences of children’s rights in practice and the contexts in which they are applied. Children’s rights studies can hence be defined as an interdisciplinary field of studies that critically investigates the theoretical, empirical, and normative dimensions of the content, origins, and consequences of global, national, and local norms, practices, and discourses in the field of children’s rights, emphasizing children’s agency, social justice, and human dignity.

Divergent Notions on Children, Childhood, and Children’s Rights Children’s rights are a moral sensitive domain that must deal with strong and competing normative and ideological positions. Therefore, a consensus on the extent, priorities, or even precise content of

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children’s rights is often far from accomplished. To better understand the diversity of standpoints in children’s rights one can discern four themes or key issues that are at the core of most discussions. These themes are the childhood image, the debate on competence, the rights of children, and the difference dilemma. Childhood Image

Among the many ways of conceiving children and childhood, an important distinction is whether children principally represent the future (becoming) or the present (being). Especially since the Enlightenment period and its emphasis on the future enlightened society, children have been considered by and at large as citizens in the making rather than as full-fledged citizens in the here and now. The view of children as becoming sees them as persons who lack the features that characterize adults, for instance reason or physical independence. Childhood is conceived as a preparatory stage on the way to a terminus called adulthood. Children’s master status is that of not-yet: not-yet knowing, not-yet able, and not-yet being. Childhood studies have contributed to deconstructing this dominant image of the child as merely becoming a future adult, which has been for a long time children’s almost exclusive social position. Children’s rights and childhood studies have criticized the overreliance on developmental psychology and socialization theories and the almost exclusive focus on the adults that children will become without paying attention to children’s important actual social contributions. Examining children’s activities and contributions to their own lives and to the social world around them in the here and now, childhood studies privilege the study of the being child of the present over the becoming child of the future. This distinction between the being and the becoming child is a key analytical device for looking at the interplay between children’s present and future well-being that informs much current policy and research related to children and childhood. The Debate on Competence

Discussion also exists about what children know and what they are capable of. Are children p ­ hysically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally sufficiently

mature? Do they have enough experience to make well-founded decisions? Or are children insufficiently developed to make rational judgments on what is and is not in their interest? These questions are part of the debate on children’s competence that consists of at least three dimensions. First, there is a practical or empirical dimension that deals with how children’s competence should be assessed based on empirical findings and arguments. Findings from research on children’s cognitive development are invoked to argue about children’s competence or incompetence on a specific age. The central figure for this research is Jean Piaget, who distinguishes between the succession of stages in children’s intellectual development based on their gradual acquisition of intellectual skills. These stages are ordered temporally and arranged hierarchically on a continuum from infantile figurative thought to adult operative intelligence. These development stages are context-dependent, whereby children may be far more advanced for certain decision-making tasks than for others. Children’s competency indeed not only deals with a person’s cognitive abilities but also largely depends on contextual and interpersonal factors, including the commitment, training, and mandate of the person assigned to assess children’s competence or incompetence. Other important contextual factors include children’s experience, their degree of power over the circumstances, and their emotional autonomy in a given situation. Second, debates on competence include elements that refer to the values and interests at stake. Many legal arrangements or individual decisions concerning children prescribe the use of age limitations, competence tests, or both to allow or prohibit children’s access to certain goods or services—for instance, buying alcohol or cigarettes, casting a vote, obtaining a driver’s license, or being recognized as a reliable witness in court. Even if many of these age limitations refer to the practical or empirical dimension of children’s competence, they are not necessarily based on empirical data but instead are informed by underlying social interests and ideological preferences. A third dimension in debates on competence is a strategic one and is about the burden of proof. Do children have to demonstrate their competency or their incompetency? What is, in other words, the default position? Are children presumed incompetent unless it is shown that they

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are sufficiently competent? Or does the burden of proof need to be shifted whereby children are presumed competent unless there is proof that they are not? In debates over children’s competence, the empirical, ideological, and strategic dimensions intersect, making it often difficult to assess the quality of the arguments. However, by analytically separating these dimensions, discussions over children’s competence or incompetence in particular fields can be more easily understood. Rights of Children

An important point deals with the rights that children have or ought to have. Children’s rights generally involve a double claim and make up both children’s equal rights and children’s special rights. Children’s equal rights reaffirm children as full members of the human family and assert that children have the same rights to the protection of their fundamental human rights without discrimination based on age. Children’s special rights acknowledge children’s developing capacity as well as their vulnerability and hence encompass additional, special rights for children. The UNCRC contains civil and political rights as well as economic, social, and cultural rights, recognizing children’s general human rights and their special rights. Its content can be summarized by the so-called three Ps, which refer to children’s protection rights (e.g., against violence or exploitation), provision rights (e.g., education or health-care provisions), and participation rights (e.g., freedom of expression or the right to information). Dilemma of Difference

A final theme that cuts across the previous ones deals with similarities and differences between children and adults. Children are both different from and equal to adults. The question is, which differences between adults and children are in what cases relevant? Analogous to debates about women’s legal rights, children’s rights can be claimed to highlight children’s similarity to adults, emphasizing equal rights, or can be brought up to stress children’s differences, focusing on children’s special rights. Questions on the relative equality and difference between children and adults must be contextualized and must consider differences that make a difference.

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The difference dilemma, then, is whether, on the one hand, children or those who defend them should choose rights similar to the rights of adults (equal rights), with the risk that these equal rights are not adjusted to children and that risks insufficiently taking into account children’s specificity, or if, on the other hand, they should defend special rights, based on children’s particularity, while running the risk that these special (and different) rights may lead to new forms of discrimination. As for all dilemmas, it is difficult to give a final answer to the question of which differences and similarities between children and adults are relevant and which aren’t. So rather than making general abstractions to resolve the difference dilemma, an assessment of concrete contexts dealing with children’s equal rights or special rights is required.

Schools of Thought in Children’s Rights The childhood image, the debate on competence, the rights of children, and the difference dilemma all leave room for a broad range of approaches to children and their rights. To further map and explore different positions taken in the field of children’s rights, a distinction can be made between four “schools of thought” in children’s rights—paternalism, welfare, emancipation, and liberation—according to the positions taken on each of these themes (Table 1). Paternalism

A paternalist position considers children as dependent, future citizens (becoming) who are generally incompetent to make rational decisions. Their rights are limited to the right to be protected, be it by their parents, the state, or professional or voluntary benefactors who can rely on legal arrangements, institutions, and welfare organizations to treat children in a paternalist way. In the paternalist view, control over children has been justified by the need to protect children from themselves and others; by their very nature, children are considered to lack an adequate conception of their own present and future interests. Because what children are, can do, and deserve is considered essentially different from adults, paternalism does not have to deal with the dilemma of difference: In the paternalist view, children need special treatment and have special,

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Table 1

Schools of Thought in Children’s Rights Paternalism

Welfare

Emancipation

Liberation

Childhood image

Becoming

Becoming and being

Being and becoming

Being

Competence

Incompetent

Incompetent, unless

Competent, unless

Competent

Rights of children

Protection rights

Protection rights Provision rights Participation rights

Participation rights Provision rights Protection rights

Participation rights

Difference dilemma

Special rights

Special rights – equal rights

Equal rights – special rights

Equal rights

different rights that are intended to preserve their future well-being. What is in the best interests of children is completely decided by caring and loving adults who offer their help and exercise their authority over children. Paternalism has long-standing historical roots, both in philosophy and in activism on behalf of children and youth. Illustrative for paternalist approaches toward children are the social and political reform movements from the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, such as the child-saving movement that lay at the basis of the creation in the United States and in Europe of separate child protection and juvenile justice systems. Liberation

On the reverse side of paternalism is liberation (or anti-paternalism) that takes the exact opposite stance on all themes discussed. Liberation considers children to be independent actual citizens (being) who are competent to make well-founded, rational decisions. They have the right to autonomy and to full participation in society, the same way as do adults. Child liberationists consider the liberation of children to be part of a broader movement for the emancipation of society. The starting point is the claim for autonomy of children and the importance of their right to self-determination. Liberation strives for the recognition of children’s equality rather than their differences with adults. In this view, children are, can do, and deserve exactly what adults are, can do, and deserve. Only children’s equal rights need to be recognized, so there is a need to consider the dilemma of difference and to balance children’s general and special

rights. The liberationist approach to children’s rights was at the core of social movements in the United States in the 1970s which held that the separation of the worlds of children and adults is a form of discrimination that is oppressive and unjustified. Children should be entitled, according to the movement’s proponents, to the same rights and privileges as adults. Welfare

The childhood image defended by the welfare school of thought is more nuanced compared with both previous positions; children are considered both becoming and being. In the debate on competence, welfare considers children mainly as incompetent but accepts that proof can be given for the contrary; from a welfare perspective, the burden of proof lies on those who argue in favor of recognizing children’s competence. In line with its embracing of the UNCRC, the welfare approach to children’s rights acknowledges the three series of rights stressing, in order of importance, children’s protection rights, provision rights, and participation rights. To determine their position in the difference dilemma, the welfare approach, albeit to a certain extent acknowledging children’s equal rights, starts from children’s particularities and mainly defends children’s special rights. This approach to children’s rights is dominant in the child protection and child welfare sector in national politics but also in international development cooperation. The approach to children’s rights adopted by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the leading organization for providing humanitarian and developmental assistance to children in developing

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countries, is emblematic of the welfare school of thought in children’s rights. Even if United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund is guided by the UNCRC and embraces the full range of protection, provision, and participation rights, the organization’s main focus is children’s survival and protection rights. Emancipation

The emancipation school of thought also considers children as both being and becoming but in reverse order compared with the Welfare school of thought. Regarding the competence debate, emancipation shifts the burden of proof to those who deny children the exercise of their own rights; children are considered competent, unless it is shown that they are not. In listing the importance of rights, the emancipation school of thought opens with children’s participation rights and then acknowledges the importance of rights to provision and to protection. Confronted with the difference dilemma, emancipation starts its analysis from children’s equal rights but also acknowledges that children’s special rights in some instances, depending on the outcome of the assessment, might have stronger emancipatory effects. Working children’s organizations that have emerged in various regions of the world since the beginning of the 1990s provide an example of an emancipation approach toward children’s rights. Working children’s organizations want to participate in discussions on child labor and want their right to work in dignity to be recognized. The organizations consider children as competent beings whose general human rights should be acknowledged, including their right to work in dignity, but without jeopardizing their right to education, which is important for their future life chances. The organization of divergent views and opinions on children’s rights in four schools of thought aims to facilitate a better understanding of the diversity of the children’s rights field. However, the boundaries between the different schools are not always clear-cut, and in practice, people rarely adhere to fixed positions. The four schools of thought should therefore be considered as idealtypical stances that do not wish to impose particular views but are second-level constructs that serve to map out similarities and differences between children’s rights and adults’ rights.

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A Continuing Debate Children’s rights have become a mainstream advocacy tool in a vast array of fields directly and indirectly related to children’s lives. Various interest groups formulate their claims within the existing framework of human rights, using the UNCRC and other provisions from general human rights treaties to sustain their demands. The growing consensus on the strategic importance of the recognition of children’s rights as human rights does not however solve disparities between different approaches toward children’s rights. What children are, what they can do, what they deserve, and which differences between adults and children are relevant continue to fuel debates among children’s rights proponents. The four schools of thought in children’s rights provide a heuristic framework for situating the opinions defended in these debates. Given the expansion of children’s rights, further disputes in addition to the ones mapped out here are likely to arise. The vast impact of globalization on children’s lives, the increasing economic inequalities among and within countries, the lopsided burden of climate change, and the enduring moralization of public discourse on children and childhood all contribute to the rise of new controversies in the field of children’s rights. These include tensions between bottom-up and top-down approaches to children’s rights struggles involving future-oriented perspectives on children’s rights from a human capital lens and claims for recognizing past violations of children’s rights from a postcolonial perspective. Children’s rights provide a framework to discuss controversies such as these but of course that framework by itself will not resolve the matters at stake that are of a normative and, hence, a political nature. Karl Hanson See also Childhood Studies; Children as Legal Subjects; Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on; Developmental Psychology; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF); Working Children

Further Readings Alanen, L. (2010). Taking children’s rights seriously. Childhood, 17(1), 5–8. doi:10.1177/0907568209361011

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Archard, D. (2014). Children: Rights and childhood (3rd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Freeman, M. (1997). The moral status of children: Essays on the rights of the child. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Hanson, K. (2012). Schools of thought in children’s rights. In M. Liebel (Ed.), Children’s rights from below: Cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 63–79). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hanson, K. (2014). ‘Killed by charity’: Towards interdisciplinary children’s rights studies. Childhood, 21(4), 441–446. doi:10.1177/0907568214547453 Hanson, K. (2016). Separate childhood laws and the future of society. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 12(2), 195–205. doi:10.1177/1743872114529502 James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Minow, M. (1986). Rights for the next generation: A feminist approach to children’s rights. Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 9, 1–24. Quennerstedt, A. (2013). Children’s rights research moving into the future: Challenges on the way forward. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 21(2), 233–247. doi:10.1163/15718182-02102006 Reynaert, D., Bouverne-De Bie, M., & Vandevelde, S. (2009). A review of children’s rights literature since the adoption of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. Childhood, 16(4), 518–534. doi:10.1177/0907568209344270 Rodham, H. (1973). Children under the law. Harvard Educational Review, 43(4), 487–514. doi:10.17763/ haer.43.4.e14676283875773k Vandenhole, W., Desmet, E., Reynaert, D., & Lembrechts, S. (Eds.). (2015). Routledge international handbook of children’s rights studies. London, UK: Routledge. Verhellen, E. (2000). Convention on the rights of the child: Background, motivation, strategies, main themes (3rd ed.). Leuven, Belgium: Garant.

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The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is the major guiding force for the implementation of children’s rights. As soon as it was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, the convention was quickly ratified by all the nation-states in the world, except the United States and Somalia. For the past 30 years, the UNCRC has proved to be a key referent for nation-states for the interpretation of children’s

rights in policy, programme, and law enforcement. There is no doubt that the UNCRC has provided much-needed impetus to the children’s rights movement, which recognises children as full human beings in their own right. In fact, the convention has changed the perspective of children’s rights as an issue of justice and entitlement rather than the one of charity or humanity. Nevertheless, the children’s rights discourse has received many criticisms, especially for its conceptual anomalies and also from the vantage point of cultural diversity and political plurality. This entry examines some of the main critiques of the children’s rights framework, and its ongoing efforts to respond to them.

Conceptual Ambiguity and Dissonance There is no dispute that children deserved to be treated with dignity and respect, and its widely accepted that rights are essential to realise that commitment. Many activists and scholars accede to the merits of rights discourse on this front. However, the rights discourse has been criticised mainly for three reasons. First, there is an argument that the definition of children’s rights is vague and indecisive on many aspects. Scholars observe a lot of incoherency in its conceptual foundation. For example, there are concerns that the conceptual ambiguity, seeing children vulnerable, yet having voice, agency, and autonomy, offers scope for manipulation, especially in legal proceedings. Similarly, there are competing claims at stake such as ‘best interest’, ‘evolving capacity’, ‘will’, and ‘social interest’, and this creates a serious dilemma in its theoretical foundation. Also, there are trepidations on the lack of capacity of children and the consequences of enforcing children’s rights in society at large. Second, there are concerns about competing claims on rights and responsibilities in the children’s rights discourse. There is a perception that children are offered too many rights without responsibilities. In the rights framework, adults are mainly seen as duty bearers of guaranteeing children’s rights. But the problem here is the separation of rights holder from duty bearer, who is regarded as a moral agent for the implementation of children’s rights. This dependency is greater when the capacity of the child is less due to age, gender, economic deprivation, political turmoil, and cultural poverty. Apparently, the tension rises when

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children’s rights are placed up against adults’ rights, for example in matters related to family life, family court proceedings, parenting, and so on. The interpretation of UNCRC also implies that a great amount of mistrust is placed on adults, and that children’s rights have a privileged position in comparison to adult rights. This conceptual reconfiguration also offers space for nation-states to intervene in family lives as well as in adult–child relationships. Indeed, it is true that the UNCRC has provided the intellectual foundation, but the moral justification for giving rights to children over adults was not clear, so scholars have increasingly sought to address this concern over the years. Third, children from the majority world are caught up in a double jeopardy in this rights-based approach. There is a huge gulf between the normative standards established in the UNCRC and the social realities of the Global South. A plethora of literatures suggest that there is so much of complexity and fluidity in the processes that operates at the local and global levels within the social systems, structures, relationships, and so on. Nevertheless, through this individualised, liberal mode of children’s rights-based thinking, children’s lives are regulated and institutionalised with the use of scientific knowledge and essentialist understanding. So, the notion that envisages all children are the same and thereby contain the possibilities of children becoming different are questioned by several theorists. As a result of it, children’s lived experiences of their childhoods have gained significant importance in relation to context, relationship, power, agency, social status, privilege, and deprivation. Based on these theoretical advancements, the underlying assumptions of UNCRC have been criticised for being Eurocentric and ignoring the conditions of pursuing this rights-based agenda in places where children’s lives are adversely affected.

Childhood Studies and Postcolonial Perspectives It is obvious that the underlying assumptions of child welfare have been changed by the implementation of UNCRC, and this has gone hand in hand with a conceptual reconfiguration in childhood studies. Children, who were seen earlier as passive objects of adult concerns, slowly began to occupy a central role in research as subjects who merit

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treatment equal to that of adults. The multidisciplinary field of childhood studies recognises that childhoods are embedded in different political, social, cultural, economic, material, relational, and post-human realities. Starting from Philippe Ariès (1914–1984), the historical literatures show that the idea of childhood is a modernist proposition. Scholars further shed light on how development becomes knowledge, and it is exported around the globe with the help of neuroscience and developmental psychology; therefore, developmentalism and universalism have been critiqued for overriding the significance of cultural, social, economic, and political factors. From the postcolonial viewpoint, seeing childhood as a separate category from adulthood is a recent phenomenon, although this conceptual separation has been fruitful for liberating children from a subordinate position in family and public life. The necessity for a postcolonial view has slowly emerged in childhood studies, as the space for Eurocentric criticism has largely been confined in the name of disciplinary boundaries. With the postcolonial/decolonial perspectives, scholars began to look at multiple social realities—different ways of being and living in the world in the Global South. For example, the idea of individual rights is less considered in many cultures in Asia and Africa; rather, the individuals are expected to live a collective life with a commitment to maintaining the status quo, social order, hierarchy, and customs. The discrepancy here is that children live in the world in different ways, but in the Western world there is a strong focus on language and competence; this dominant view creates a repressive atmosphere in knowledge construction in the rest of the world. Informed by theories of childhood, many postcolonial scholars stress the need to respect epistemic diversity within the rights discourse. Thus, the fact that most childhoods in developing countries are viewed in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘deficit’ if they do not fit into the essentialist parameters needs to be re-evaluated. To that end, the contextualisation of UNCRC is often criticised for being Western; that is, for projecting the dominant image of the West. This is not easy to deal with, however, because there are subcultures and social divisions within each country; hence, each and every issue related to children is approached with different attitudes and perspectives.

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The UNCRC as a Majority/Minority World Discourse As a global document, the convention becomes a source of discussion and debate for many reasons. Postcolonial scholars critique the process of pathologising the majority world through universal children’s rights discourse, where Eurocentric standards are established to judge and rehabilitate deficit childhoods. Ironically, the voices, opinions, and best interests of children are often ignored when countries from the majority world take legal steps to deal with chronic social problems such as child labour, street children, vagrants, homelessness, poverty, compulsory education, and so on. This incongruity between legal enforcement and social realities has turned out to be crucial in transcending children’s rights in the majority world. There is also a concern that the convention has limited potential for recognising children as citizens, and the children’s rights regime undermines children’s capability, especially children’s political rights, and by doing so restricts children’s full participation in the society. Although participatory approaches and programmes may have benefited individuals at the personal level, their impact on overall social change and structural transformation is relatively elusive, and there are strong concerns that the neoliberal agenda of development and children’s rights strategically keep away participatory forces in an enclosed space, away from power structures. For cultural relativists, the image of the ‘globalised child’ envisioned in the UNCRC often fails to recognise the complex and difficult realities most children face around the globe. But the everyday experiences of ‘being a child’ should be understood in relation to particularities and context. For example, in the case of corporal punishment as against religious and cultural rights, or issues of intergenerational dependence in a family economy, are impossible to arrive at a definitive answer. But one cannot deny the usefulness of UNCRC, which has served as a tool for advocacy and produced counternarratives to dominant discourses and hegemonic practices, especially against vulnerable and disadvantaged children. One has to admit that universal rights cannot be perfect but can be used strategically to override existing oppression against children, especially in the developing countries where the safeguards are fewer. While abstract universalism incriminates certain cultural practices and social realities, abstract

essentialism undermines the ethical action of the child and implicitly takes a position that violations are permissible and indeed morally imperative. So, it is hard to judge from the viewpoint of ethics, because ethics is of course also connected to truth. Therefore, there is a need to constantly explore our understanding of childhood as well as children’s rights, instead of limiting our thinking on children’s rights to legal frameworks and conventions which could restrict our ability to move beyond essentialism, whether universal or relativist.

Children’s Rights as Living Rights There is a general impression that children’s rights can be achieved by imposing tougher laws in concurrence with the descriptions provided in the UNCRC. The fundamental problem is conceiving of rights as an end product rather than as a continuum where entitlements, duties, responsibilities, and social relationships compete with each other. So, what is more significant is not the translation of the UNCRC into legal frameworks, but how those rights are put into social practice and how they are internalised by everyone in the social world. To this end, the focus should be on understanding how children’s rights are experienced and given meaning by children themselves in their social worlds, which are shaped by structural constraints, social norms, and other socio-political factors. Therefore, for the realisation of children’s rights, the individual circumstances of the child and the collective social status ascribed to children in any given society are as important as the legal enforcement. Also, there are some concerns that the UNCRC has failed to fulfill its promises, and the translation of children’s rights from the UNCRC to implementation still remains a rhetoric rather than the lived reality. For example, many children still live in abject poverty, many children are still denied access to health care, education, and development, many children are still abused, exploited, and live in harmful situations, and many children are still subjected to everyday discrimination and injustice. Addressing those issues within the competing understanding of children’s rights is definitely a big challenge for the nation-states. Perhaps the strongest criticism of UNCRC has  come from the political left. They maintain that  the  superficial treatment of children’s rights actually diverts our attention from social change and

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structural transformation where power imbalances, economic disparities, and social oppression are hidden. They further condemn that children’s rights have been used as an excuse for justifying hegemonic action from the minority world over the majority world, which results in doing more harm than good for the living rights of children. They further argue that children’s rights are manipulated easily either to shield the failure of the nation-states or in defence of the nation-states for the political agenda. Despite all these shortcomings and criticisms, it is hard to deny that the UNCRC has not transformed the landscape of human rights by putting children at the forefront. Yes, there are still conceptual issues to be addressed, competing claims to be reconciled, and discrepancies to be removed, but there is a strong optimism amongst rights activists that the realisation of ‘children’s rights as living rights’ is possible at least in the future, if not at present. Vinnarasan Aruldoss See also Children as Rights Holders and Duty Bearers; Children’s Rights; Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924; Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Freeman, M. (2000). The future of children’s rights. Children & Society, 14, 277–293. Invernizzi, A., & Williams, J. (Eds.). (2011). The human rights of children from visions to implementation. London, UK: Routledge. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2013). Theorizing childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectives. Childhood, 201(1), 3–8. doi:10.1177/0907568212465534 Pupavac, V. (2001). Misanthropy without borders: The international children’s rights regime. Disasters, 25(2), 95–112. doi:10.1111/1467-7717.00164 Tobin, J. (2013). Justifying children’s rights. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 21, 395–441. doi:10.1163/15718182-02103004

Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on From a history of ideas approach, this entry traces the development of the idea of freedom rights for children, one of the great changes

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through the 20th century in our thinking about children and their rights. The term rights became popular in the 18th century when the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were signed. These documents enunciated freedom rights which applied only to adult citizens. In another sense of rights, namely welfare rights, children at least on paper and in some countries, already possessed them. The 18th-century English jurist Sir William Blackstone, in declaring the parents’ duties to provide maintenance, protection, and education, had already implicitly recognized a child’s right to receive these benefits from the parents. These rights enunciated by Blackstone were welfare rights and often unrealized ideals in practice. This entry examines the early development of children’s rights and several key declarations that have sought to entrench children’s rights.

Development of Children’s Rights The most influential English exponent of freedom rights in the 19th century was John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty. Mill argued that the law should not interfere in the life of an individual unless that person was harming another. But he went on to say that this important principle should not be applied to children. Indeed, he made an explicit exception for children. Mill was not against children being fed, cared for, and educated, but they could not have freedom rights until they reached maturity. Efforts to draw up lists of children’s rights and apply them universally belong to the 20th century. As early as 1910, a Polish doctor, Janusz Korczak, saw the need for a charter of rights for children and for international cooperation between governments to achieve it. Korczak, as a director of a Jewish orphanage, ran it along democratic lines and was one of the earliest to talk about children being the equal of adults. His emphases were on the right to love and the right to respect. In 1919, after the end of the World War I a British social reformer, Eglantine Jebb, the founder of Save the Children, moved partly by the effects of war on children, lobbied the newly established League of Nations to agree on a charter of children’s rights of which Jebb, Korczak, and Gustav Ador, who had been a president of the Swiss Confederation, had been the initial signatories.

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Declarations In 1924, the League of Nations adopted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. This was a brief five-point document generally repeating the view of the child as in need of a range of welfare rights. The first point was very general giving the child the means for normal development; the second spelling out the need for nourishment, health services, looking after orphans and waifs, and reclaiming “the delinquent child.” These points reveal the variety of motives in those who signed it—the child as innocent victim of a war where noncombatants were targeted, the child as requiring the help of adults to save them, also possibly a fear of the delinquent child who needs to be reclaimed, brought back from being a threat to society to being a cooperative member of society, and, in the final point, the child as the future preserver of a harmonious society. The child who was to be saved from the dangers of poor living conditions, lack of education, disease, other effects of industrialization, and now war was to become the savior of a future harmonious society. The one hint of a freedom right comes in the fourth point of the Declaration where the “child must be put in a position to earn a livelihood and must be protected against every form of exploitation.” This could be read to mean that the child had a freedom right to choose to work, though it is more likely that the child at that time worked from necessity. It is significant in respect of working children that the International Labour Organization was an affiliate of the League of Nations and sympathetic with the organizations lobbying for an international charter of rights for children. The next major international declaration of children’s rights was again triggered by a world war. After World War II, the United Nations General Assembly first adopted in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later, in 1959, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. All 10 principles of this latter document are based on the statement in the preamble that the child “by reason of his physical and mental immaturity needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection.” The emphasis is very much on protection—protection from neglect, from cruelty, from practices that may foster discrimination, and even from ignorance. “The child is entitled to receive education which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages.”

This last may seem a strange right in that the compulsory emphasis seems to take away rather than extend the powers and freedoms of the child. The child is not seen as an equal to the adult in the way Korczak had stressed. The 1959 Declaration is even more protective than the 1924 Declaration in that it does not recognize the child’s right to work for money, though it does recognize the right for the child not to be exploited. The 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child as well as national legislation of that time see children as relatively passive; states, acting in what they see as the interest of protecting children, pass laws that tend to restrict children’s powers and liberties rather than expand them. Under this view, the child, unlike the adult, cannot decide where to live, is compelled to go to school, cannot play a full and independent role in financial transactions, and is regarded as too immature to vote. Rights are here seen as welfare and as protections; the power to provide these protections is given to adults usually in the guise of parents and/or state authorities. In terms of the distinction between freedom rights and welfare rights, the 1959 Declaration in establishing claims for social, educational, and medical services for the child was concerned overwhelmingly with a child’s welfare rights. In the 1970s, a time of social activism in many countries, this view was challenged. In 1976, the New York Times referred to children as the last minority in the human rights movement. A new wave of women’s liberation was one factor in the development of children’s liberation. A major proponent was John Holt, whose book Escape From Childhood (1974) proposed extensive freedom rights for children, pointing out that many welfare rights took away freedom rights for children. He argued that children should have made available to them the same rights as adults, including the right to vote and to play a full role in economic affairs. He wanted to free children rather than control them. Children’s liberation was not confined to the United States. Holt’s work was translated into more than 14 languages, including Asian as well as European languages. Other writers in the 1970s, though more cautious than Holt, also bemoaned the restrictions on children. A child psychologist, Gerald Koocher, in his Children’s Rights and the Mental Health Professions, uses the phrase benign oppression when pointing out the dangers when a powerful group makes decisions for a less

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powerful group even if the more powerful group is acting with the best of intentions. His argument is that because children do not have the vote, their rights have been violated in the same way, as have the rights of all other minority groups that do not have political representation. This tension between welfare rights and freedom rights was partially resolved, though not without debate and disagreement, in the final international list of children’s rights of the 20th century, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. As of 2018 every member of the United Nations except for the United States was party to it. This Convention, late in the 20th century, has elements of the earlier 1924 and 1959 Declarations stressing the need to protect the child from economic, sexual, and other forms of exploitation, and the need for the provision of health, social, and educational services for the child. But especially in Articles 12–16, it also sees the child as a person with its own interests and point of view that must be listened to and taken into account in all matters that affect the child. While it was signed by all nations, including the United States who signed but did not ratify the Convention, there was no universal agreement on its content. Those nations that signed the Convention could put in Reservations or Declarations that would modify how the Convention was put into effect in their respective countries. For example, the Holy See put in both reservations and a declaration basically saying it supported the Convention except where it conflicted with Catholic religious belief. Other countries put in similar reservations excepting from the Convention their own mores, religious beliefs, or social practices. Since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, three Optional Protocols have been adopted. In 2000, the General Assembly adopted the Optional Protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the Optional Protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography. In 2014, a third Optional Protocol was adopted on a communications procedure that enables individual children to make submissions on specific violations of their rights under the Convention. This gain is a recognition of a children’s right. So, the Convention is a changing document and its operation overseen by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, a body set up by the

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Convention and whose membership is voted on by the member states of the Convention. Each member state must report regularly to this committee. These facts are important in considering another criticism of the Convention, namely that it is an attempt by Western developed nations to impose values on other nations. Some mitigation of this objection is provided by the way the Convention was drawn up by nations in very different stages of development and holding a variety of sets of practices and beliefs. Also, the membership of the committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention is voted on by all party states to the Convention and is geographically balanced with representatives from the different regions from the world. A further objection is the perhaps ideologically inspired view that rights, like other value-laden concepts, cannot be universal. This is a matter of complex debate among philosophers, but the fact that on the ground interpretation of the various provisions of the Convention is a matter of continued debate within the United Nations provides some defense against the description of cultural domination. A criticism coming from the opposite direction points to the ongoing violations of children’s rights, notwithstanding the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and makes reference to the number of children who are still exploited in work, prevented from being educated, suffering from malnutrition and the effects of war, and so on. Many of these critics argue that rights are just words and ineffective in practice. But National Reports to the Committee do indicate that a number of parties to the Convention have changed their national laws in response to the Convention. Article 12 seems to have been particularly effective as the practices of those who work with or for children are changing in the light of children’s right to be consulted on matters that affect them. The image of the child embodied in the Convention shows a child with an unprecedented degree of autonomy. While some have applauded this as long overdue recognition of children’s agency, others have argued that this would only be a pretense of autonomy, the child accordingly being left at an increased danger of exploitation of all kinds. David Archard provides a thorough discussion of the issues of child competence and autonomy as they relate to the Convention. Nevertheless, the balancing of children’s welfare rights to protection with their newly acknowledged

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freedom rights remains a contentious issue both in theory and in practice. Margaret M. Coady See also Autonomy; Children as Legal Subjects; Children’s Rights; Korczak, Janusz; Save the Children; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Archard, D. (2015). Children, rights and childhood (3rd ed.). Oxon, UK: Routledge. Assembly, U. N. (1959). Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Author. Assembly, U. N. (1989). United Nations convention on the rights of the child. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations. Cantwell, N. (1992). The origins, development and significance of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. In S. Detrick, J. E. Doek, & N. Cantwell (Eds.), The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: A Guide to the “Travaux Préparatoires.” Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. doi:10.1017/ s0731126500024756 Coady, M. M. (2005). The continuing importance of thinking that children have rights. Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics, 7(2), 47–57. Coady, M. M. (2008). Beings and becomings: Historical and philosophical considerations of the child as citizen. In G. MacNaughton, P. Hughes, & K. Smith (Eds.), Young children as active citizens: Principles, policies and pedagogies (pp. 2–14). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cook, D. T. (2009). Ratifying the convention amidst the messy cultural politics of American childhoods. Childhood, 16(4), 435–439. doi:10.1177/ 0907568209347692 Fass, P. S. (2011). A historical context for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 633(1), 17–29. doi:10.1177/0002716210382388 Holzscheiter, A. (2010). Children’s rights in international politics: The transformative power of discourse. Berlin, Germany: Springer. Margolin, C. R. (1978). Salvation versus liberation: The movement for children’s rights in a historical context social problems. (Vol. 25(4), pp. 441–452). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. doi:10.1525/ sp.1978.25.4.03a00090

Moody, Z. (2017). Transnational treaties on children’s rights: Norm building and circulation in the twentieth century. In Children’s Rights (pp. 37–50). London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.1080/00309230.2013.872682 Van Bueren, G. (2011). The child as citizen. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 633, 30–51.

Children’s Social Participation, Models of There has been increasing interest in many nations over the past 30 years about how to responsibly listen to the perspectives of children as a way of involving them in the fulfilment of their rights. The primary motivator for a global concern with this issue was the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. Article 12 of the Convention makes a strong, though very general, call for children’s participation: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

This is challenging, but worthy as a universal goal because, even though there are differences in what childhood and adulthood means in different cultures, there is an inherent asymmetry in power and resources between adults and children in all cultures. The critique is sometimes made by scholars that the UNCRC is a universal imposition of Western notions of rights but, while there are many cultural differences that need to be recognized in the exercise of children’s rights, the dominant view from child rights advocates is that Article 15 on the right of individual children to be listened to is fundamental to the fulfilment of their rights. Beyond the difficult issues of how to involve an individual child in personal decisions such as medical procedures, most of the body of writing that has emerged from the call of the UNCRC to address children’s participation focuses on group decision making. It focuses on the organized

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structures and processes through which adults choose to listen to or involve children in decision making related to projects or programs for them, or in the governance of their institutions, such as schools, clubs, or community centers. It does not address the equally important informal participation of children with adults in the everyday life of their community. This entry begins by examining children’s everyday participation with adults, before considering models for understanding children’s participation in decision making and potential ways to broaden perspectives on the subject.

Children’s Everyday Participation With Adults It is now well recognized in theory from the field of developmental psychology that children learn through their informal interactions with more experienced members of their community, both adults and children. In her analysis of children’s socially shared activities with adults in everyday life, Barbara Rogoff borrowed the term apprenticeship to capture her recognition of this way of learning with adults. Children in many countries also work with adults, primarily to help support their household. This kind of work has largely disappeared from childhood in the wealthier nations of the minority world, and most of the research and discussion on this subject discusses the deleterious effects of work on children and the developmental benefits of replacing it with schooling and other activities. There are however undoubtedly benefits that can accrue from work with adults that is not exploitive or excessive, and what the distinct qualities of adult child interactions might be in such settings is an interesting question worthy of study. While the concept of child has been differently constructed over time and across cultures, there are distinct differences in the power of elder members and younger members and so children’s interactions with their peers will typically be different from their interactions with adults. While the focus of public understanding, and research continues to be on adults imparting knowledge to children, in fact children participate richly in decision making and learning and producing knowledge with their peers. Consequently, when children of mixed ages and different abilities play together, there are qualitatively different kinds of opportunities for them to

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be involved in organizing and decision making than those that typically happen in conventional school structures where they are graded by age and ability into classes. A scaffold is an illuminating term for the kind of structures that the social world can provide to a child’s participation, learning, and development because it implies multiple routes to growth and a supporting structure. For these reasons, even though it is not addressed in this entry, the question of how adults “set the stage” by providing physical and social affordances for children to self-organize and make decisions with one another is as important as the question of how children make decisions with adults.

Models for Thinking About Children’s Participation in Decision Making Following the launch of the UNCRC in 1989, Roger Andrew Hart prepared an essay for UNICEF on the UNCRC’s implications for the participation of children because this was a part of the convention that was presenting international children’s agencies with more problems of interpretation than other sections of this progressive document. Because this issue had not previously been the subject of much conceptual writing, the essay received a great deal of attention. Much of this revolved around the graphic summary of the different ways that children become involved in carrying out projects together in the form of a “ladder of participation.” The primary purpose of this essay and the ladder diagram was to bring a critical perspective to a subject that at that time altogether lacked one and to thereby stimulate discussion on the issue. That goal was fulfilled but because it stimulated numerous adaptations, alternative suggestions, and some controversy, the diagram (Figure 1) was an introduction to the commentaries it sparked. The model has been useful for helping professional groups and institutions to rethink how they work with young people and from it to generate something more complex and useful to their particular context. There has however also been a tendency by some groups to apply the ladder as a fixed template to evaluate programs and projects. Also, the diagram is sometimes wrongly interpreted to mean that there is a necessary sequence to children’s developing participation in decision making.

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Figure 1 The ladder of participation Source: Roger Hart. Previously published in the Childhood City Newsletter (1980), City University of New York. Reproduced by permission.

While Hart had no intention of arguing that there needs to be a stepwise climbing of the ladder by children, the assumption of this by some is not surprising. The ladder metaphor was not designed for evaluating where children are on a scale of participation; its intention was to simply stimulate critical discussion on the degree to which adults and institutions afford opportunities for children to participate in decisions. For adults, the upper rungs of the ladder are a graphic expression of the range of opportunities that they should afford to children. The lower rungs refer to the kinds of opportunity that should be avoided by adults because they do not allow for the authentic incorporation of children’s perspectives into decisions, and they may

even have a negative impact on a child’s sense of their competence to do so. For those who use the ladder diagram with children their goal should be to remind them that they have the capacity and the right to be involved in decisions in any of these different ways; not that they should feel that they always need to be trying to perform in such ways. Some child rights advocates and researchers ask if we should even talk of levels of participation at all. As a result, they created different graphic models to show different forms rather than different levels of participation. It is important that the different degrees of children’s agency and participatory engagement by young people be recognized in looking critically at any program or project that claims to include children centrally in decisions about their lives. Because the top rungs are not equally accessible to all young people, and are commonly denied to them, there is value in having some way of representing these higher, forbidden, forms. Nevertheless, the scaffold metaphor, that was described above, might have been more suitable than a ladder for discussing different degrees of children’s participation in decision making because it implies a supporting structure and multiple routes to growth rather than sequential rungs. Michael Wyness contends that discussions of children’s predication in decision making have tended to remove adults from the process. The ladder was not intended to be about children’s gradually taking away power from adults in the simple-minded idea of children’s liberation; it was about the suggestion that adults should find ways to afford greater degrees of agency for children in the decision-making process with them than they typically do. It is unfortunate that many question the placement of the eighth rung as the highest rung when, it is presumed, that surely a child in power is the highest level. This sort of response expresses a common children’s liberation perspective whereby the question of children’s participation is entirely about children’s power and freedom from adults. While the issue of adult power versus children’s power is obviously central to the debate, an appropriate answer to the question of the eighth rung is of course that all engaged citizens, adults as well as children, should be able to discover that being able to work cooperatively with someone else is the ultimate goal for us all rather than necessarily being the originator or leader of an initiative.

Children’s Social Participation, Models of

It is unfortunate that so much of the thinking and writing about programs for youth development and children’s place in decision making is about leadership. It is typically used in many countries to refer to building the capacity of children and young people to take the role of leading in decision making, rather than more broadly learning the skills of participation: to follow, collaborate and support one another, as well as sometimes taking the lead in decision making. This is a reminder that differences in power are found not only between adults and children but also between children. As a result, child and youth membership organizations that are run by adults are often unnecessarily hierarchic, with older or more influential boys being placed in positions of authority. Beyond the debate over hierarchic models in children’s decision making, there have been numerous valuable advances in supporting organizations to plan, monitor, and evaluate children’s participation in decision making. Harry Shier moved the thinking on the subject forward by suggesting a series of three stages for each of the five levels of his model. First, whether there is an opening for a child to operate at that level; second, whether the opportunity to be engaged is there in terms of available people or resources; and third, whether there is an obligation, or agreed policy of the organization to operate at this level. This provides a useful guideline for an organization to look critically at what degree of affordance they offer for children to become engaged at different levels of participation.

Broadening the View of Children’s Participation in Decision Making The views of professionals and researchers working with children on children’s participation in decision making have changed over the past 25 years. At first, there was some excitement in the initial phase of developing different models for involving children in decision making. In many countries during the 1990s, following the UNCRC, there was a flurry of efforts by both governmental and nongovernmental organizations to set up formal structures and processes for involving children in decisions such as children’s councils, public fora, and consultations. Many observers subsequently concluded that while many formal processes were put in place for listening to

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children, they have not had a noticeable impact on improving governmental decisions on policy and planning decisions that affect children’s lives. This is partly related to poor design of the projects and the lack of systematic processes of long-term monitoring and evaluation, but others would add that this is related to the broader weakness of participatory development in general for people of all ages, and especially the poor and marginalized, to confront the broader workings of political power. One fundamental weakness of children’s participation in decision making is the narrow range of settings where it takes place and the small numbers of children who are typically involved. One needs to think of improving decisions not just in occasional formal settings for a few select children but in the full range of children’s everyday settings for all children, including schools, after-school programs, and children’s clubs or other membership groups. Among these, membership groups appear to offer a particular valuable setting for expanding children’s opportunities to make decisions with one another and with adults. In many countries, there has been a significant increase in the number of highly participatory children’s clubs in recent years. In comparison with the short-term projects approach to working with children on their rights, membership groups offer children a more sustained engagement with their rights and the opportunity to move to the center of determining the kinds of activities they engage in. Finally, it is worth noting the great irony that, during the same years when attempts have been made by many to improve children’s participation in decision making through the creation of new formal structures and processes of governance, children’s independent mobility has been severely curtailed in most urbanized nations. As a result, their freedom to make decisions with their peers in their free time, and to be socially engaged in nonformal ways with people of all ages in the everyday life of their community, has been increasingly replaced with time planned and managed by adults in more segregated settings. Yet, while the spatial range of preadolescent children has shrunk, older children are increasingly digitally connected to one another and to adults, and sometimes even to elected officials or local governance bodies. This has great implications for governance and how voices are heard. While these digital tools

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cannot replace direct participation in decision making, one must now consider them to be part of the equation. Roger Andrew Hart See also Children’s Rights; Participation Rights, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); Participatory Action Research

Further Readings Hart, R. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Essays, No. 4, UNICEF/International Child Development Centre, Florence, Italy: UNICEF Innocenti. Hart, R. (2008). Stepping back from “The ladder”: Reflections on a model of participatory work with children. In B. Jensen & A. Reid (Eds.), Participation and learning: Developing perspectives on education and the environment, health and sustainability. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Hart, R. (2013). Children, self-governance and citizenship. In C. Burke & K. Jones (Eds.), Education, childhood and anarchism: Talking Colin Ward. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kimiagar, B., & Hart, R. (2016). Children’s free association and the collective exercise of children’s rights. In M. Ruck, M. Peterson-Badali, & M. Freeman (Eds.), Handbook of children’s rights: Global and multidisciplinary perspectives. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis. Lansdown, G. (2001). Promoting children’s participation in democratic decision-making. Florence, Italy: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. Ratna, K., & Reddy, N. (2002). A journey in children’s participation. Concerned for working children. Bangalore, India: The Concerned for Working Children. Retrieved from https://www.pronats.de/assets/.../reddyratna-a-journey-in-childrens-participation.pdf Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Shier, H. (2001). Pathways to participation. Children and Society, 15(2), 107–117. Wyness, M. (2012). Children’s participation and intergenerational dialogue: Bringing adults back into the analysis. Childhood, 20(4), 429–442.

Children’s Time Use To understand children’s time use, we must first look at its development. Contemporary societies have been labeled as child-oriented, in which an

enormous amount of material and emotional resources is spent on children. Sociologists and anthropologists have referred to the contemporary privatization of childhood. Demographers and economists see modern families as valuing more the quality than the quantity of children. As put by Viviana Zelizer, contemporary children are economically useless but emotionally priceless. This entry examines historical perspectives on children’s time use and theories and research on children’s time use.

Historical Perspectives Societal perceptions and conditions on what children do have changed dramatically over history. Social historians like Philippe Ariès described an increasing sentimentality around the child starting from the late 17th century, in parallel with a decline of child mortality and an intensification of the nuclear family. The massive socioeconomic changes of early industrialization did not, however, bring higher protection for the majority of children. Historical archives from Western Europe and the United States from the 19th century reveal how boys and girls began to engage in paid or unpaid work at very early ages. This made childhood shorter, and the transition from childhood to youth became blurred. During the early 20th century, children’s time use experienced a strong transformation. Child labor was banned in many countries. Primary school systems were progressively universalized. The public developed new conceptions around children, increasingly seen as vulnerable subjects, while modern scientific theories emphasized the importance of child stimulation. Attitudes toward children’s independence started to develop. This was clear among urban middle-upper classes, living in affluent conditions and expressing a marked sentimentality toward children. This was less evident in working-class families, where children were exposed to stricter norms and more disciplinary practices at home, influenced by the difficult working conditions that disadvantaged mothers and fathers faced in domestic and paid work. By the mid-20th century, children’s play, unstructured leisure, and private consumption reflected important changes in time use. Since the 1960s, children’s time use has continued to change. Opinion surveys showed increasing moral concerns or panic around children’s lack of

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protection. During the 20th century, the average parent shifted from more authoritarian or strict to rather permissive. The last decades have witnessed the emergence of what Diana Baumrind defines as authoritative and involved parents, who are actively engaged in protecting, orchestrating, and directing children’s time use. Time-use data from the United Kingdom and United States from 1960 to 2015 shows radical changes in parents’ and children’s daily activities. Especially since the 1980s, in many industrialized countries, children’s time use has become highly structured. Children have increased their time spent with both mothers and fathers, spending also increasing amounts of screen-based time. In the 21st century, a global child-oriented norm seems to have driven children to a more rushed, controlled, and scheduled organization of their daily lives. In this context, we need to understand the factors that lead children to spend time in specific activities in contemporary societies.

Theories and Research on Children’s Time Use Theoretical Perspectives

Classical theories on childhood and children’s lives have discussed the role of two key aspects: (1) environments and (2) agency. The first refers to external factors from the environment in which children are socialized, including material, relational, or symbolic resources that are available to children, which affect their everyday life activities. The second conceptualizes children as subjects with agency, conceiving the child as an actor with intrinsic personal attributes which lead to spending more or less energy, effort, and time on specific activities. Recent research argues that children have agency but also that their daily activities during their life-course development are strongly influenced and constrained by environmental factors. Children’s time use has been conceptualized along three main analytical levels. First, at the micro level, the child’s characteristics are argued to intersect with family conditions, affecting how parents and families with different incomes, time constraints, and norms influence children’s time use. At the meso level, communities (e.g., neighborhoods with different collective resources) and schools (e.g., pedagogic strategy, resources, and school composition) have been argued to exert a critical role in children’s daily activities. Third, at

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the macro level, public policies and school reforms can provide support to families, communities, or schools, allowing such institutions to cope with constraints in supervising and stimulating children’s developmental time use. Empirical Evidence

Quantitative and qualitative studies provide relevant evidence on the factors influencing children’s time use. Studies found that girls are more active than boys in reading and studying, as well as in domestic chores, and boys are more prone to be high TV and electronic users. Girls spend much less time than boys on active leisure and sports. Also, gender gaps in children’s time use increase strongly during late childhood and adolescence. As children age, they generally spend more time doing homework, sleep less, and spend less time with parents. From late childhood and early adolescence, there is a sharp increase of children’s screen-based activities. Parents’ characteristics predict important variations in children’s time use. Children with parents in privileged social positions disproportionately engage in structured leisure, cultural, and educational routines and are actively supervised by parents in activities with human and cultural capital implications. In less-privileged families, children spend more time without parental supervision and in front of the screen (i.e., TV time). This captures socioeconomic gaps in resources and intensive parenting norms, contributing to the reproduction of social inequalities, as agued—among others— by sociologist Annette Lareau. Children with parents, and especially mothers, with long and inflexible work conditions, and those in singleparent families, were generally found to disproportionately engage in less-developmental time use, arguably as a result of differences in parents’ time constraints and stress levels. To date, the literature has provided insufficient evidence in three directions that need further examination. First, little is known on how children’s time use changes from infancy to the transition to ­adulthood. Second, the role of neighborhoods and schools in shaping children’s daily activities is poorly understood. Third, cross-national research on parental care time has not yet been translated into rich cross-country research on children’s time use. More research in these directions will be needed in the future.

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Concluding Thoughts Children’s time use has become increasingly structured, supervised by parents, and screen based across different industrialized countries over recent decades, in parallel to a shift toward a child-centered society driven by intensive parenting ideologies. Time-diary data show key gender and age differences in children’s time use but intersecting with inequalities in monetary, time, and norms across parents and families. Future research might further analyze three main lines of research: (1) longitudinal changes from infancy to the transition to adulthood, (2) the role of neighborhoods and schools, and (3) cross-country evidence on children’s time use. Pablo Gracia See also Concerted Cultivation, Parenting Style; Development; History of Childhood; Human Capital, Child as; Parenting; Parenting Styles, History of; Sociology of Childhood; Time and Childhood

Further Readings Ben-Arieh, A., & Ofir, A. (2002). Opinion, dialogue, review time for (more) time-use studies: Studying the daily activities of children. Childhood, 9(2), 225–248. doi:10.1177/0907568202009002805 Gracia, P., & García-Román, J. (2018). Child and adolescent developmental activities and time use in Spain: The gendered role of parents’ work schedules and education levels. European Sociological Review, 34(5), 518–538. doi:10.1093/esr/jcy029 Hofferth, S. L., & Sandberg, J. F. (2001). How American children spend their time. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(2), 295–308. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2001.00295.x Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal chances: Class, race and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Children’s Voices The notion of the child’s ‘voice’ is a central concern in child welfare discourses and practices as well as in social scientific childhood studies. A significant landmark for the emergence of the child’s voice in public and scholarly discourses has been the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). This entry is concerned with the subsequent definitions, purposes, and uses of the child’s voice and changes in

approaches over time with an emphasis on social science. Certain turning points may be observed in how the concept has been developed and treated from the 1990s until the 2010s, including continuities as well as criticisms.

Children’s Voices in Child Welfare Discourses Article 12 of the UNCRC states the right of the child to express an opinion and to have that opinion taken into account. Article 13 introduces the child’s right to information and to freedom of expression. Subsequently, organisations including charities, governmental and voluntary bodies, and service providers as well as scholars have developed voice-based approaches for child consultation, participation, and active citizenship. In governmental and charitable accounts, the child’s voice is typically understood as something that children naturally possess. Such accounts often suggest that contrary to previous eras in human history in which children were silenced and their thoughts belittled, the civilised world of modern times seeks instead to consult children about their opinions. Consulting children about issues that matter to them is considered a key responsibility of professionals and adults who work with them. The proponents of the ‘voice’ typically define the child as a key informant and expert on his or her own life. Voices will thus consist of meanings that the child constructs and expresses, including not only verbal but also other modes of expression, such as drawing or singing, for example. The job for the adult working with children is allowing children to express themselves; to do so in a child-appropriate, respectful, and ethical manner; and in this way share power with children. The same principles can be found in current social scientific research with children.

Children’s Voices in Social Sciences Childhood studies—especially the paradigm known as the ‘new social studies of childhood studies’—has taken a particular focus on children’s voices as a subject of empirical studies. Within this interdisciplinary paradigm, it has been argued that historically, children—usually in the Western world context—have been seen as objects of concern rather than as persons with voice. The argument is familiar from critical social studies

Children’s Voices

concerned with power inequalities. Drawing on feminist studies, for instance, it has been argued that children, like women, have long been silenced and marginalised not only in everyday life but also in conventional disciplinary research. As in the UNCRC, childhood studies have typically treated the child’s voice as a rights issue. The voice is one of several typical commitments of the field of childhood studies, including the idea that children are worthy of study in their own right, that childhood is a socially constructed notion, that children are not passive but active agents, and that participatory methods should be used in research with children. This so-called voice research field has often involved critical approaches addressing professional power over children in services such as education, health, and social services. Critical views have been expressed about theories by developmental psychology, medicine, and allied professions. Challenging the hegemony of developmental approaches (such as the tradition of pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget), childhood sociologists have promoted an alternative perspective to children’s competencies in expressing their voices. They have argued that children are too often denied agency in society because they are seen as vulnerable and incompetent. Instead, sociological views have suggested that children are not only shaped by society but also shape it in their own ways. Children might do this individually, with their peers, and reciprocally with adults. Childhood ethnographers and critical pedagogues have for several decades aimed at giving voice or listening to children’s voices both from rights and needs perspectives. Discussions about the child’s voice have typically been about whether adult professionals are willing to listen to children and how listening can be done successfully. They have drawn on complex debates having to do with children’s age and maturity and the credibility of their statements, as well as assessing whether children’s voices can be taken seriously and at what age this might be possible. In the last 20 years or so, researchers—as well as child welfare professionals more widely—have aimed at improving methods to better hear children’s views.

Defining and Accessing Children’s Voices Contemporary scholarly literature indicates that the notion of the child’s voice has multiple meanings.

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Within childhood studies, it may have both physical and metaphorical meanings that often go together. In social studies of childhood, it is meant to address major practical challenges for several child-centred and critical pedagogies: children’s rights and participation; social inequality and difference; speech and multilingualism; and perspectives, standpoints, representation, and research ethics. More generally, ‘child’s voice’ may refer to an individual’s political or legal right as a matter of self-expression, identity, agency, and personal choice or as a matter of interpersonal communication in which adults ought to listen to children better. Voices have often been, implicitly or explicitly, equated with agency, sometimes involving children as co-researchers or peer culture studies. However, from early on in these studies it has been noted that capturing the voices of children is not necessarily a straightforward task. At one level, there may be children who do not wish to take part in research, or children who are intentionally excluded from research by adult gatekeepers because of their vulnerability, young age, or lack of speech, for example. At another level, a challenge has been recognised in getting children to freely express themselves and accurately understand what they mean. There may also be children—in the same way as with adult respondents/research subjects—who are shy or do not feel comfortable communicating with researchers. Furthermore, a question may arise about how far the child’s voice is the same as a ‘view’. Attempts have been made to overcome such problems. For example, alternatives to interviews have been suggested to hear children better because the interaction with the interviewer in itself may be problematic. Alternative methods may involve scenarios, vignettes, and sentence completion tasks or methods that use computing technology. The goal has been to find methods with which children are familiar and comfortable. Researchers have also used creative alternatives such as role play and drama or the use of digital and new media technologies.

Critiques of Voice Research Voice research has faced increasing criticism in relation to discussions on rights. One major problem has been identified with the UNCRC that has tended to set children’s rights in opposition to adults. This may have led researchers to side with

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whom they consider as marginalised overlooking the perspectives of adults in the settings where research is conducted. The critics argue that distinguishing children too sharply from adults may ignore qualities and characteristics they may share with adults and how these same characteristics may intersect. This represents a challenge to the idea that childhood and children’s voices can be studied in their own right. Similar kinds of arguments have further stressed that voice research has often positioned children as independent rights holders, overlooking their social, economic, and cultural contexts. Certain dualisms that have been applied in other theoretical frameworks (such as critical feminist, race, or disability studies) may not directly apply to children in the same way. Seeing children dichotomously as active/passive, autonomous/dependent, or empowered/oppressed may not be realistic descriptions of children’s circumstances. A related criticism has to do with ‘diversity’. It has increasingly been argued that child participatory research concerned with voice is only gradually reflecting the diverse life circumstances of children, such as those of sick children, children with disabilities, children in humanitarian crisis situations, or children living in the Global South. Increasingly, there are criticisms of the UNCRC as being primarily informed by Western liberal assumptions and, for example, lacking a communitarian philosophy. From the end of 1990s, critical accounts have emerged suggesting that the promotion of child voice generally in public discourses had become a moral crusade, overlooking the potential if not the obvious problems involved. Research-wise, there have been increasing demands for transparency about what is reasonable and feasible concerning child voice. The demands have had to do with the nature of the voice itself as well as what is involved in listening. It has been argued that care had to be taken to distinguish rhetoric from practice. Listening to children is not necessarily ‘good’ but at worst intrusive and the cause of further distress: More listening may not inevitably mean more hearing. The recommendation follows that researchers should think about when and how to conduct research with children so that it is as ethical as they claim it to be. Furthermore, children may indeed have views to express, but it is not

evident that such views will always be clear or consistent at the time of the research encounters. The same argument equally applies to adult research subjects. In the 2000s, certain scholarly discourses began to pinpoint that the observation that children can exercise agency, as manifested in voice, should be a point of analytical embarkation and not a terminus. It is possible that children can be, at the same time, vulnerable and competent; however, their positioning in this respect tends to be in the hands of adults. There are increasing demands that childhood researchers reflect critically on their role in the process of representing children’s voices through their work. Such reflection would involve considerations of adult responsibilities towards children in terms of research validity, credibility, and ethics.

A Move Towards Reflexive Research Practices In the 2010s, newer perspectives have made a move away from individualistic rights issues towards interdependency between children’s voices and their sociocultural environments. Neither the voice nor an agency may be a property of an individual but relational in character. Alternatively, it has been suggested that if children’s rights are to be addressed, research could instead focus on a child’s right to a dignified and decent life. Recommendations for childhood researchers increasingly stress the need to become more aware of how children’s voices are constantly constrained and shaped by multiple factors. These may be the researchers’ assumptions about children, the use of language, the institutional contexts in which research takes place, and the overall ideological and discursive climates surrounding children. Instead of relying on authenticity, researchers ought to consider epistemologies and power relations in data generation and, thereby, more productive ways for representation. There are at least two major problems that reflexive research practices may aim to overcome. First, reflexivity has to do with the dichotomy between realism and anti-realism. It is a contradiction for the researcher to use modern, realist methods and then give postmodern, constructionist accounts of the data. The problem thus is that one cannot selectively regard certain things (such as

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children communicating about their wishes) as real and others as constructed (such as the concepts of ‘childhood’). Second, reflexivity is also related to the ambiguity of the researcher’s role as an actor in childhood settings. There will always be power imbalances because children do not initiate or fund formal or scholarly research projects themselves. How, then, to work with children and study children’s lives without rejecting the notion of voice? Suggestions have been proposed in scholarly literature. In practice, reflexivity in research may involve, for instance, paying attention not only to the verbal and audible outputs of children but also to silences and the nonverbal. The act of listening may be redefined. It may be possible to accept the messiness, ambiguity, polyvocality, nonfactuality, and multilayered nature of meaning in children’s stories without erasing the notion of the voice. For scholarly research especially, tight connections between practical research and (social) theory have been recommended to ensure good quality outcomes.

Voices and Other Possible Models for Human Interconnection Within the UNCRC-derived discourses and the socalled ‘voice research’, a particular model of the child’s voice has first been constructed and subsequently increasingly deconstructed. It is a model in which the voice is an innate possession of a child for the adults to retrieve. Contemporary critiques of this model suggest, however, that there have always been and will be other models that those working together with children can use and develop. For example, in the 2010s, child welfare literature still involves relatively little discussion on the pragmatics of communicative acts. In terms of both metaphorical and audible voices, it could be asked whether communication is a medium for exchanging messages or if it should be the focus of research itself. One issue related to both children’s metaphorical voices and agencies has to do with the primacy of the ‘mind’ in Western societies. Thinking of human interaction as a unidirectional process of transfer from one person to another is sometimes called the ‘conduit model’ of communication. The conduit model is monological: Language use is viewed from the perspective of the speaker.

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The view that the mind is the site, origin, and definition of purposive human action shapes cognitivist approaches to communication. It has been argued that this so-called conduit metaphor of communication is so much part and parcel of the broadly Western understanding that it is often difficult to see what is problematic about it. The voice research paradigm (with some exceptions) has been criticised for resting on this kind of Cartesian, fairly mechanistic definition of the voice. There are numerous social and other theories about human communication. One of them is sociocultural theory concerned with communicative acts and dialogue. ‘Understanding’, in such a view, has to do with A and B who speak and listen, the utterance, and the ‘world’. It implies connecting the utterance with a context where it is embedded. The contexts involve the concrete setting, knowledge, and attributes of people involved; their beliefs, experiences, and expectations; the institutional or other framework for action; relevances; and what is known about all these factors. Understanding is related to ‘responding’ in that one (may) takes time to think about how to react or what stance to take. The sociocultural approach suggests there will never be complete understanding in terms of ‘absolute match’. An immediate question might follow: If there is no ‘absolute match’, how do we then know that we have really communicated? One response is that of course adults can and do gain understandings of children’s lives. The difference in a mechanistic view is that from a sociocultural perspective the voice is seen as social and co-constructed instead of being monological, individual, fixed, straightforward, linear, or clear. Such a model suggests that the voices of children, rather than being autonomous expressions of their authentic individual being or of their distinctive cultures, may often consist of mimicking, reusing, and learning of adult talk. Understanding the voice also leads to understanding the social child as an actor, which may be the same or different from what is understood as an agent. In this case, alternatives to Cartesian ideas of rational voice may include concepts such as reciprocity, interaction, interdependence, and transparency.

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Voices and Social Change Child welfare and scholarly research discourses and practices take place in real-life contexts where they tend to implement and at least reflect the political and other currents of their time. In terms of the marginalised groups in societies, emancipation, and the voice have long been seen as vehicles for social change and advancing human rights. In the spirit of children’s rights, much progress may be observed, largely in the Western world regarding protecting children from harm and maximising their well-being. At the same time, there is a general consensus that advancements are not equally distributed across the world. Contemporary child welfare and research literature suggest several possibilities for the future regarding global child welfare and social research. To understand social change and voices, and vice versa, historical as well as spatial and contextual approaches may be needed simultaneously. First, a macrolevel question may be asked about whose voices count and with what kind of impact on children’s lived lives. Second, theoretical studies may look into how far children’s voices, in whatever form they take, can be taken as ‘views’ or indeed if there were alternatives to the voice research. Third, microlevel studies with children may detail and analyse children’s lives and communication in transparent ways that nevertheless are informed by consistent (social) theory. Such directions for research also involve considerations of who conducts it and the ongoing issues about power, structure, and agency across the world. Sirkka Liisa Komulainen See also Agency; Assent, Children’s, in Research; Child-Centered/Child-Led Research; Children’s Rights; Narratives, Children’s; Power Relations in Research

Further Readings Christensen, P., & James, A. (2008). Research with children: Perspectives and practices. London, UK: Falmer Press. Finnegan, R. (2002). Communicating: The multiple modes of human interconnection. London, UK: Routledge. Hammersley, M. (2017). Childhood studies: A sustainable paradigm? Childhood, 24(1), 113–127. doi:10.1177/0907568216631399

James, A. (2007). Giving voice to children’s voices: Practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials. American Anthropologist, 109(2), 261–272. doi:10.1525/aa.2007.109.2.261 Komulainen, S. (2007). The ambiguity of the child’s ‘voice’ in social research. Childhood, 14(1), 11–28. doi:10.1177/0907568207068561 Oswell, D. (2012). The agency of children: From family to global human rights. London, UK: Goldsmiths, University of London. Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 4–14. doi:10.2304/ gsch.2011.1.1.4 Spyrou, S. (2011). The limits of children’s voice: From authenticity to critical, reflexive representation. Childhood, 18(2), 151–165. doi:10.1177/ 0907568210387834 Tisdall, E. K. M. (2015). Children’s wellbeing and children’s rights in tension? International Journal of Children’s Rights, 23(4), 769–789. doi:10.1163/ 15718182-02304003 Twum-Danso, A. (2009). Reciprocity, respect and responsibility: The 3Rs underlying parent–child relationships in Ghana and the implications for children’s rights. International Journal of Children’s Rights, 17(3), 415–432. doi:10.1163/157181809X430337 U.N. General Assembly. (1989). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York, NY: Author. Watson, N. (2012). Theorising the lives of disabled children: How can disability theory help? Children and Society, 26(3), 192–202. doi:10.1111/ j.1099-0860.2012.00432.x

Children’s Work The problem of child work is a complex and multidimensional issue from which it is difficult to separate its social, cultural, and economic components. There is no consensus on what is meant by child work, since the term can have several definitions, depending on policies, programs, and authors. What for some is child work, for others is not. This entry discusses the child labour debate within academia and international policy making and identifies a number of elements that have different

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consequences and connotations according to the cultural context in which child labour is framed.

The Child Labour Debate In the last few decades, multiple definitions have been developed to measure and quantify the phenomenon of child labour; nevertheless, within public policies, these multiple definitions do not necessarily converge. The far-ranging debate within academia and international policy making about children’s work can be related in a broad sense to the fact that economic, moral, and ideological values define some activities as work, whereas others are not categorized in the same way. International organizations have focused their discourse on the eradication of child work. Based on the framework established by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), promulgated by the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has directed its attention to ending child work by 2025 in all its forms, mainly through national action programs. To achieve this, the World Health Organization (WHO) has focused on the health risks of child labour. Other lab institutions, such as the World Bank (WB), have based their strategy on the relationship between children and poverty. Institutions such as the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children have developed strategies aimed mainly at street children in poor and developing countries. Critical perspectives to rights-based approaches of child work, however, point out a lack of pragmatism from international organizations because they focus on unrealistic norms that have no connection to the ‘real world’. In fact, it is argued that children’s work exists because members of the world governing elite have yet to find the political and economic will needed to surmount the problem. In recent years, so-called child-oriented perspectives have gained importance for people and organizations that deal with child labour. This approach invites researchers to understand this issue from the perspective of children, who can reflect on their lives and their jobs in a way that adults do not consider. Even though they usually state that their work is not recognized, child labourers feel that what they are doing is useful and indispensable for their family and society.

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A central element in this debate is that those who oppose the prohibition do so by considering the conditions of the context that affect children’s work. That is to say, they think it is impossible to separate work from factors such as living conditions, exploitation, and the poverty that affects some communities. For them, the prohibition is not to consider these contextual elements, condemning children to poverty or exploitation and abandonment of illegality.

Children as Workers According to official data from the ILO, currently there are 152 million children in labour ­situations—that is, almost one in 10 of all children worldwide. Nearly half that number—73 million— do what has been called as the ‘worst form of child labour’ or ‘hazardous work’ that puts their health and safety directly at risk. The ILO defines child labour as all work of an economic nature carried out by children under the age of 15. Working from an early age has effects on school desertion, in addition to having physical and psychological risks. With that in mind, the majority of countries prohibit child labourers under the age of 15. In terms of gender, statistics show that the population of working male children is higher; female participation, however, might be in less visible forms of child labour—that is, domestic work activities that are not reported. In many examples, these tasks presuppose dropping out of school or keeping a double shift (e.g., when girls work outside their home and also perform domestic chores within their house). The consideration of gender differences in the context of child labour allows for a more solid basis to undertake actions aimed at their prevention. In this sense, domestic work is among the least known and regulated activities; it is assumed to be a culturally accepted activity, especially in the case of girls. Child workers and adult domestic workers who work in the privacy at home are invisible to the outside world and, therefore, particularly vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and abuse. Domestic work is even more dangerous when children fall victim to trafficking in human beings and are transferred to another city or country, especially if they do not speak the local language. There is a close relationship between gender and the underlying causes of trafficking in human

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beings: Girls are often victims of this crime because they are used mainly in domestic service or in the sex trade. This difference in the experiences of girls and boys makes it important to incorporate gender issues into studies, programs, policies, and ­awareness-raising work on child labour. Also, the temporal dimension of work is complex; in some cases, children’s work is temporary and in other cases full-time. In many cases, children work on a temporary basis, although in some situations their work might be categorized within statistical data as being full-time. Considering this background, the predominant vision of child labour sees this phenomenon as a danger, a risk, and a loss of social investment; in other words, it approaches child labour from a series of negative connotations related to its prohibition. According to this perspective, the abolition of child labour requires broad and deep initiatives approached from a human rights perspective, presupposing a holistic and multifaceted orientation to the society. The Norwegian author Per Miljeteig points out that child labour is not something that can be supported or opposed; it is not a specific situation or a homogeneous problem. Different situations and actions constitute child labour, which makes it clear that there can be no universal solutions to this phenomenon. Other scholars, such as German sociologist Manfred Liebel, author of Childhood and Work, explain that this openness to understand the phenomenon of child labour from its own protagonists allows an understanding of work from the subject’s perspective, which means to value working children as ‘social actors’, who through working contribute to their families and their social environment. Thus, child labour does not necessarily equate to exploitation or abuse, nor does it represent a social problem of past eras that needs to be eradicated. Scholars such as Jo Boyden, Birgitta Ling, and William Myers have argued that international organizations, governments, and employers’ organizations must establish strong connections with children, taking into account reasons for children to work and children’s perspectives on the main risks identified in their work. These connections should include both (a) empirical studies of children, especially surveys and case studies carefully documenting children’s opinions, and (b) direct dialogue with children, including through their own organizations where these exist.

Knowing how children consider the value and risk of their work can make it possible to design policies and programs that children themselves understand and support. It is more likely that actions conceived with the understanding and support of working children will be effective in promoting their full development while protecting children from abuse in the workplace. From an anthropological and a social approach, child labour offers alternatives for understanding the official discourses from international organizations (ILO, WB, United Nations). The child-oriented perspective allows a different understanding of the problem, one in which children’s work can be understood as a process of preparatory socialization for adult life, acquisition of skills, work as a form of class-consciousness, and the social division of labour. It is relevant to consider these perspectives, which depart from the economic views promoted by the discourses of global organizations. In many cases, the official discourse leaves aside elements that from alternative perspectives are considered positive (benefits), such as the promotion of autonomy, trust, acquisition of economic knowledge, work experience, and values related to resilience. Guillermo Rivera See also Care-Work; Childhood Poverty; Children as Workers; Children at Risk Global Politics of Childhood; Working Children’s Movement

Further Readings Boyden, J., Ling, B., & Myers, W. (1998). What works for working children. Smedjebacken, Sweden: UNICEF and Save the Children. International Labour Office. (2017). Global estimates of child labour: Results and trends, 2012–2016 [Online]. Retrieved from https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/ books/WCMS_575499/lang--en/index.htm Liebel, M. (2003). Childhood and work. Lima, Peru: Lifejant. Liebel, M., & Invernizzi, A. (2018).The movements of working children and adolescents and the International Labour Organization: A lesson on enforced silence. Revista Digital de Ciencias Sociales, 5(8), 89–112. Miljeteig, P. (1999). Understanding child labour. Childhood, 6(1), 5–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0907568299006001001 Weston, B., & Teerink, M. (2006). Child labor through a human rights glass brightly (Working paper No. 35). Retrieved from https://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/ workingpapers/2006/35-weston_teerink-2006.pdf

Children’s Television, U.S. History

Children’s Television, U.S. History As a separate genre, children’s television programming has its own history within the landscape of childhood studies, advertising, entertainment, and education. This entry briefly highlights the shift in children’s media options to include television, the introduction and role of child-oriented networks, and the shifting technologies and formats that promoted child viewing. Children’s television shows were initially modeled after children’s radio shows but quickly took their own pathway. Early shows cultivated a habit of viewership and independence in the child audience, using hosts, shorts, products, and messages that were both culturally approved and yet stimulated the notion of a child audience free of adult supervision. While commercialization and education would become a concern to scholars and educators, shifting the media to take on a more prosocial role, the history of children’s television demonstrates the success of directly addressing children in their homes and encouraging child culture. This entry examines early children’s television programming in the United States, its evolution since the 1960s, and the impact of cable television programming, including the rise of child and youth channels such as Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.

The Golden Era of Children’s Television Programming Commercial television for U.S. households started in the late 1940s, and by the end of the 1950s, most middle-class homes had a television. Television quickly became deeply entrenched in suburban family life. Akin to a fireplace or radio, television was promoted as an essential family gathering place; further, it offered children the opportunity for independent viewing while parents were preoccupied. As radio had earlier in the 20th century, television sets brought the promise of news and entertainment delivered directly to U.S. American homes. Scholars observe that the television soon restructured the American family, replacing the radio as the new electric hearth in American domestic space, centering the home and linking it to the world. As the new focal point for entertainment, news, and even childcare, since the

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television was embraced as a babysitter for busy parents, television offered a range of programming for the whole family, including children, whom new media formats and sponsors engaged directly in a variety of ways. Commercial television broadcasting and programming were adapted and modeled after commercial radio. Successful radio programs such as Let’s Pretend (1934–1954) had demonstrated the potential of a child audience. By contemporary standards, many of these shows seem simplistic and lack the flash available to children today. However, they set in place a way to address the child viewer and develop an audience for sponsors. An early and successful format for the iteration of children’s television programming was the local hosted children’s show. Local broadcast network affiliates would purchase large catalogs of cinema shorts like Popeye, The Three Stooges, and The Little Rascals, recycling them in hosted shows. Local stations would hire local entertainers to host and introduce cartoons and shorts. The host escorted the child viewers into the magical world of television, a tradition that continues today in interactive shows, for example, by Nickelodeon. Early shows would hire hosts to fill the time between shorts through scripted and nonscripted dialogue with children at home and sometimes a studio audience. Some hosts told stories, while others might tell jokes in a vaudeville style, presenting the adult as interacting with the viewer at home and inviting him or her to join the fun. The role of the local host was to engage the child viewer and promote the habit of daily viewership. This show format proved cost-effective and popular with the local sponsors since the hosts could serve as spokespersons both on the broadcast material and through personal appearances. Shorts were purchased in bulk and could be repurposed for additional episodes. Hosts were often characters from mythology, fairy tales, and children’s literature. Hosted shows stood out from the family dramas and hosts presented themselves as friendly child companions rather than parents, encouraging independent viewing. Adaption of the radio format to television included the financial model. Local broadcast networks were dependent on local sponsorship, with local businesses buying advertising airtime. Part of the advertising strategy included local hosts selling

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products and services to child viewers in hopes that child viewers would speak positively of products and businesses to their parents, who would, in turn, buy products and/or patronize local businesses. Children’s television programming in the 1950s had a limited shelf life, with minimal value in repeating content, low production costs, and/or little concern over the effects of viewing on children. Over time, concerns emerged about selling directly to children and children’s attraction to television, but in the early years, the format of hosted shows emphasized cultivating viewership. In addition to the local shows there were nationally broadcast shows such as Howdy Doody (1947–1960) and Captain Kangaroo (1955–1984). The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–1996) nationally premiered in 1955 on ABC. The Mickey Mouse Club emerged as a promise from Walt Disney to create educational children’s programming. The Mickey Mouse Club made its first appearance on Walt Disney’s Disneyland (1954–1958) in 1955, the same year as the opening of Disneyland. As a children’s television program, The Mickey Mouse Club became representative of national understandings of children’s needs and desires for television. The show, which ran weekdays, had daily themes and a range of segments, including musical numbers, original and cinematic cartoon shows, and educational and moralistic segments. The show’s original host, Jimmie Dodd, was a nonauthoritarian presence and was one of only a few adults to appear on the show, helping to underscore the importance of an adult-free space for the child. By 1955, when The Mickey Mouse Club premiered, Walt Disney and Disney television programming were promoting television as a family-friendly and child-friendly medium, establishing the Disney company as a safe companion for child viewers. Because Disney positioned itself as safe enough for children to view without adult supervision, local ABC affiliates were able to secure new sponsorship which was directed at children. The popularity of the Davy Crockett mini-series, which began as a segment on The Wonderful World of Disney, and the product tiein with the mid-1950s fad of Davy Crockett coonskin caps, likewise promoted the notion that television could serve as a medium for direct marketing to children.

Beyond the 1950s: Expansion and Education The 1960s saw an expansion of choices available for child viewers because of technological advances in receivers and frequency ranges. Early television was designed with government, specifically military, use in mind. As such, early television utilized very high-frequency bandwidth. Later, ultrahighfrequency (UHF) channels were introduced, but when UHF first arrived, most television sets did not include UHF receivers. In 1962, as a result of the All-Channel Receiver Act in the United States, U.S. television sets had to include a receiver for UHF frequencies. This mandate opened up a range of stations for local broadcasters. Typically, UHF stations were small, locally owned, nonprofessionally operated, and catered to smaller audiences than their very high-frequency counterparts. As national children’s television programming grew through syndication and franchise, UHF stations expanded the options available to the child viewer, and many local children’s shows moved to UHF stations. Much of early commercial television for children focused predominantly on entertainment, sprinkling in some educational and moral messages. However, the educational and cultural promises of the medium were also recognized. In the 1950s and 1960s, networks broadcast children’s specials such as the Broadway production of Peter Pan (1954) and the children’s opera Amal and the Night Visitors (1951). Children’s television programming continued to evolve, often mirroring social concerns. By the 1970s, as suburbanization took hold of America, new concerns about children’s wellbeing and education emerged, offering a new opportunity to children’s television programs. From these societal concerns emerged two, often interacting, genres of children’s television programming: (1) educational and (2) prosocial television. An early example of educational programming is the show Romper Room (1953–1994). Romper Room was aimed at preschoolers and included a variety of preschool-aged segments. Romper Room was unique in that it was both syndicated, with a national version shown throughout the United States, and franchised, wherein a local affiliate would create their own version. The goal of Romper Room was to introduce young viewers to preschool and kindergarten concepts, like etiquette and songs.

Children’s Television, U.S. History

Also aimed at preschool-aged children 2–5 years old, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001) took an explicitly prosocial approach to the child viewer. Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was centered on helping children with the emotional processing of their world and the use of imagination. Through the use of puppetry, direct and honest address, journey to the land of make-believe, and breaking the fourth wall, Fred Rogers endeared himself to children through mutual experience and opportunities to explore difficult topics like anger, divorce, sadness, and death. Viewers were introduced to important people they may interact with daily, like the mailman, and shown how to navigate new and often scary experiences, such as starting a new school or making new friends. Rogers adopted a developmental approach, arguing that children require specific types of nurture and instruction depending on their age. This approach limited the size of his audience and created a distinct alternative to commercial programming. While the industry avoided narrowing its audience to maximize advertising circulation, Rogers directed his show more clearly to young viewers’ needs and not to those of advertisers, stations, and networks. Shows such as Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood emerged from increasing concerns in this period about children’s well-being and education, concerns that would be applied to children in the inner cities with the advent of Sesame Street (1969–present). Suburbanization had created a gap in the K–12 preparation of children in low income, urban areas, gaining the attention of reformers who wanted to use television to address the education gap. Sesame Street emerged as a national effort to expand Head Start, which was a program of Johnson’s administration’s Great Society and War on Poverty. The creators of the show were charged with providing childhood education and resources to low-income families. Sesame Street, created and developed by Joan Ganz Cooney, relied heavily on research to determine how Head Start educational goals, such as literacy and math, could be entertainingly taught on television. Like Head Start preschools, Sesame Street turned to experts to design curriculum but was also at a loss for how to prepare poor children for school. However, its shift to combining education and entertainment is notable. Sesame Street premiered November 10, 1969, and was successful for a number of reasons. It

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utilized a high end, advertising type format for its educational shorts, capturing and maintaining the attention of young viewers and their parents. Educational concepts like numbers, letters, and even emotions were taught to children through fastpaced engaging formats, almost obscuring the learning. Jim Henson’s Muppets were rainbowcolored and promoted the show’s message of diversity and inclusion. However, Sesame Street was and is not without criticism. Feminist critics note the imbalance of male to female characters and the stereotypical role women play in the show. Learning specialists worried the advertising and entertainment factor primed children for other consumer areas. Engaging the child through fastpaced editing segments is not without risk, perpetuating short attention spans that counteract the requirements of schooling.

From Broadcast to Cable Television By the early 1980s, children’s television programming had successfully achieved stature and created its own genres, which were reflective of societal concerns. However, the 1980s saw the reemergence of licensed shows that basically advertised toys and products directly to children. Cartoons became 30-minute advertisements, stimulating a range of social controls that would try and prevent children from commercialization. By the early 1980s, cartoons developed specifically for television were predominate. Critics of children’s television derided the Saturday morning cartoon alley because it basically promoted, in half-hour segments, licensed children’s merchandise such as He-Man and Strawberry Shortcake toys and goods. In response to these 30-minute commericals, advocacy groups like Action for Children’s Television petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to increase the number of educational hours of children’s television programming and restrict the number of minutes of advertising during children’s programming on broadcast channels. Prior to the enactment of increased educational programming and restrictive advertising minutes, the television industry, including ­children’s television, had been semi-self-regulatory, anticipating and responding positively to complaints of advocacy groups and the Federal Communications Commission. With new laws in place, broadcast

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networks came under close examination for what they offered their child audiences. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise of cable in American homes, though not nearly as ubiquitous as television. Having cable was considered a luxury. Working on the UHF system, cable television networks expanded viewing opportunities with specialized and niche networks for smaller audiences. Within the realm of children’s programming, the expansion of the cable system marks a shift in availability of children’s programming. Whereas UHF channels brought international children’s programming to the United States, an early children’s cable network brought almost 12 hours of children’s programming.  Nickelodeon

On the heels of fallout from increased scrutiny of advertising to children, a new network, originally named Pinwheel, began airing borrowed children’s television programs from Asia and Canada throughout the entire day. Pinwheel focused on prosocial, educational, and entertaining shows solely for children. Pinwheel, later renamed ­Nickelodeon in 1979, became the first network for ­children and as a cable network, Nickelodeon was free to brand itself as it wanted and was not held to the same Federal Communications Commission rules to which broadcast networks adhered. Under the leadership of Geraldine Laybourne, Nickelodeon’s second president, Nickelodeon became the first network for kids, not just in name, but in ratings as well. Nickelodeon offered children both original and purchased content between the hours of 6 am and 8 pm, which was in nature both prosocial and nonviolent. Nickelodeon won favor with parents by offering nonviolent programming, which included not allowing violent toy advertisements during the commercials. Nickelodeon won over children by focusing on and making fun of the adult/child divide and using basic gross humor to which kids respond well. Nickelodeon continues to be at the forefront of children’s television programming. The rise of the Internet enabled direct interaction of child viewers with the networks, a participatory platform drawn upon by shows such as iCarly (2007– 2012). While not new, iCarly successfully engaged the child viewer through multiple media platforms

including television programming, an interactive website, and its potential to have viewer shorts showcased on the television program. The creation of Nickelodeon marked the onset of a new era in children’s television. Nickelodeon strove to create original programming that featured children as well as gained insight into the child experience and perception through focus groups. The introduction of the first network for children should not be underestimated; Nickelodeon proved to the television industry that children as an audience should not be overlooked. The success of Nickelodeon in the mid-1980s, securing its spot with children in the United States, coincided with the new recognition and emphasis on viewing children as active agents in their own world. The 1980s marked the beginning of changing notions about children and childhood, both in practice, as seen by Nickelodeon’s success, and in academic arenas.  The Disney Channel

The Disney Channel began as a premium, subscription-required cable channel in 1983. Whereas Nickelodeon focused on the child viewer, the early years of the Disney channel aimed its programming at the family, which was in alignment with Disney as a whole. In addition to original programming and made-for-television movies, the Disney Channel had the totality of the Disney movie catalog at its disposal for airing. In the early 1990s, Disney began moving the channel from a premium, add-on cable channel to part of basic cable programming, completing the shift to basic cable packages by 2002. Programming offered on the Disney Channel, later renamed Disney, focused on the family as a whole and often presented upper middle-class families. Early original popular programming included Lizzie McGuire (2001–2004), The Famous Jett Jackson (1998–2001), and the Even Stevens (2000–2003), with original, tween-aimed cartoons like Kim Possible (2002–2007). In contrast to Nickelodeon, and later the Cartoon Network, Disney original programming is often glamorous—like Hannah Montana (2006–2011) and Jessie (2011–2015)—with American middleclass values being represented. The success of Disney demonstrates the continual balancing act of focusing directly on children versus the family.

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Cartoon Network

Cartoon Network, established in 1992, was the result of Turner Broadcast purchasing Hanna-­ Barbera animation studios. Originally it was for all ages but began targeted programming to children with shows such as Dexter’s Laboratory (1996–2003), aimed at boys, and Power Puff Girls (1998–2005), aimed at girls. The Internet has driven the development of niche-based shows directly for children and teens and has expanded spaces in which children can interact with one another about shows and enter media spaces beyond adult supervision. A story of shifting media and technologies that continue the legacy of early children’s shows, the history of children’s television demonstrates the success of media interfaces that have developed strategies to address and engage children. In doing so, children’s television has stimulated a youth culture organized around media and cultivated habits of viewership that simultaneously encourage independent interactions with the world outside the home and immediate community. Cynthia Maurer See also Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising; Media, Children and; Sesame Street; Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S.

Further Readings Buckingham, D. (1993). Children talking television: The making of television literacy. London, UK: Falmer. Butsch, R. (2000). The making of American audiences: From stage to television, 1750–1990. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9780511619717 Hendershot, H. (Ed.). (2004). Nickelodeon nation: The history, politics, and economics of America’s only TV channel for kids. New York: New York University Press. Hollis, T. (2001). Hi there, boys and girls! America’s local children’s TV shows. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Lemish, D. (2007). Children and television: A global perspective. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Luke, C. (1990). Constructing the child viewer: A history of the American discourse on television and children, 1950–1980. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Morrow, R. W., & Morrow, R. W. (2006). Sesame street and the reform of children’s television. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Spigel, L. (2001). Welcome to the dreamhouse: Popular media and postwar suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822383178

Christianity Christianity describes the range of beliefs, rituals, and communities whose adherents understand themselves to be following the moral example of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth and/or assert his divinity. Christian theologies have featured ongoing debates regarding children, reflecting or responding against the surrounding culture and its conceptions of childhood. Key themes include the sinfulness or innocence of children and infants and the obligations of children and parents to one another and their community. This entry examines children’s participation in Christian communities, the nature of Children’s Christian theologies, and children’s responsibilities in the Christian faith.

Children’s Participation in Christian Communities In the early Christian era, followers met in domestic settings rather than formal worship spaces. Margaret MacDonald rightly points out that children would have, therefore, pervaded these house churches whether mentioned or unmentioned in early texts. Children in these communities would have included both slave children and free children across gender categories. In the Roman cultural context, children often sang at religious ceremonies so it is possible that the same would have been the case in house churches. They would at the very least have been witnesses if not full participants in the house church. Family life in the Greco-Roman world functioned as an economic and political structure that included but was not limited to biological ties. The frequency of death and divorce, as well as the prevalence of slavery, meant that divisions in families were unavoidable and individuals sometimes took on pseudo-parent and child roles outside of biological relationships. These house churches often replicated family roles, as was the case with other affiliative groups and patronage systems of the day. Further, free children developed strong

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bonds with the adult slaves who raised them. This may have been a key factor in free children’s religious conversion from the pagan practices that were closely intertwined with economic and political success to the countercultural faith practiced in house churches. The texts that arose out of this complex cultural context respond directly to concomitant concerns regarding family obligations and the relationship of the burgeoning religious movement to cultural influences. Shaped by the surrogate family role of the house church, early texts emerging from the religious movement following Jesus of Nazareth also frequently use familial metaphors with particular attention to children, parents, and enslaved child minders. The canonization of these texts has resulted in their shaping Christian conversations around children and childhood to this day. Christianity spread early on to the East and the West of its origins in Roman-occupied Palestine, initially meeting resistance from political structures in both contexts before eventually becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire and gaining both a foothold and an established orthodoxy in the West that spread the tradition throughout Europe. By the Byzantine period, Christian monasteries had been established, including male and female children within their communities. Some children joined these communities with their families. Others came into the monasteries’ care from impoverished families or after having been orphaned. Still, others were promised to monasteries by their parents in thanksgiving for their birth or survival in early childhood. Monastic children would have participated in the rigorous routines of the monastic community including daily prayers and manual labor. Children’s labor within a monastery was likely to include carrying wood and water as well as gardening chores. Although children in monasteries would have received education in literacy and monastic life, they would have acted as servants or slaves to the monks. Like other monastics, they would have been expected to control their bodily desires, but Basil the Great recommended that children have an appropriate sleep and diet regimen for their growth. Children have participated in and witnessed communal worship throughout the history of Christian practice. In the 1780s in England

congregations began forming Sunday schools to provide literacy education infused with Christian theologies for impoverished children working in an industrial context. This missionary effort continued internationally as a form of outreach to those who were not affiliated with a church, including indigenous peoples practicing other religions. After the establishment of public schools took on the responsibility for literacy education in the West, Sunday schools for the religious education of members of Christian congregations with particular attention to children began to develop. North American slave owners initially objected to Christian conversion or religious education of enslaved adults or children on the grounds that it would make slaves their spiritual equals or require their release from slavery. The First and Second Great Awakenings in the United States (1730s–1740s and 1790s–1810s, respectively) brought a charismatic and expressive form of worship that did not require literacy as an access point and reached a wider population including children and the enslaved, some of whom became religious leaders. White clergy attempted to limit the message being preached to Christian theologies that interpreted biblical texts as supporting slavery and excluded texts about the liberation of slaves. They supervised sanctioned worship and education and argued that a religious education in these texts and theologies would make for more docile and obedient slaves. Robert Smalls’s 1863 testimony states that most enslaved young women joined the White-sanctioned church at the age of 15 or 16 but does not describe the age at which young men would have done so or the nature of participation for enslaved children. Independent of the White-sanctioned church, slaves continued to practice unsanctioned worship of Christ as a liberator. Within the Christian theologies expressed in this invisible institution, the rightness of someone’s action was judged by its efficacy in protection, especially of children, from the embodied realities of slavery rather than adherence to an ethical code shaped by the cultural norms of slavery. Emerging from West and West Central African religious traditions as well as harsh realities resulting in high child mortality and pregnancy loss, the Christian theologies of the enslaved maintained fluidity in their language around physical and spiritual life, seeing deceased

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children as living a better life with Jesus than they would in slavery. The extent of children’s participation in slave worship practices is not documented but is implicit in the passing down of these practices from generation to generation. In the 1950s in the West, mainline Protestant denominations began offering Sunday school as religious education for children during rather than before or after worship, designating worship as an adult space and religious education as the primary task for Christian children. Resultantly their presence in worship has come to be perceived as a disruption in the traditions inheriting this practice. Meanwhile, Holiness-Pentecostal churches are more in line with the worship practices of the first and second Great Awakening with their emphasis on the movement of the Holy Spirit, which has a democratizing effect for children’s participation in worship in that context, with the understanding that the Spirit can move anyone to speak with divine authority. The contrast between these approaches persists in children’s experiences of Christian worship in North America today.

The Nature of the Child in Christian Theologies Early Christian theologians recognized multiple life stages and established perspectives on the nature of the child. Like other developmental taxonomies, those of the Greco-Roman context measured the child’s development against goals particular to that culture: In this case, the ability to subsume one’s desires to the power structures that ordered the empire. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), for example, defined infancy as the time from birth to language acquisition and childhood as the phase of increased accountability that comes with being able to comprehend a reprimand, lasting until the onset of puberty. He held the next stage, adolescence, to a yet higher standard due to the perceived emergence of reason and comprehension of expectations for human behavior without explicit instruction. Later, theologians held similar views, seeing major developmental shifts toward reason and physical maturity at 7 and 14 years. Much of the theological argument within ­Western Christianity regarding the nature of infants, children, and adolescents derives from the child’s resistance to his or her assumed submissive role

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within the family and broader culture, often named the will and interpreted as evidence of a sinful nature. Augustine saw infants’ expression of both will and desire as reflecting sinful tendencies, from which he argued that they had inherited original sin passed down through their parents from the disobedience of the first human. However, Augustine specifies that infants’ physical weakness renders them incapable of harming others. He concludes that they are non-innocent in that they are born sinful as evidenced by their expression of will but have not sinned by acting upon it. In this, ­Augustine simultaneously assumed the prevailing Aristotelian perspective that children are innocent and simple minded, awaiting the moral formation that comes with reason, and defined Christian perspective against that perspective. Augustine’s argument for original sin has had a significant impact on Christian theologies to this day. Indeed, most theologies of childhood respond to or against it, especially when discussing the practice of infant baptism. Thomas Aquinas (1224– 1274 CE) affirmed both infant baptism and the doctrine of original sin. He was the first to suggest a neutral final destination (sometimes known as limbo) for unbaptized infants. Martin Luther (1483–1546 CE) also assumed original sin and insisted upon infant baptism as a practice of grace, with the understanding that baptism was incomplete until the child grew in reason to a point at which s/he could affirm that baptism by asserting Christian faith. John Calvin’s (1509–1564 CE) pessimism regarding the human condition did not exempt children and infants from original sin but specified that they do not consciously or willfully provoke God and are worthy of emulation in their simplicity but notably not their innocence. German pietism as seen in in the work of August Hermann Franke (1663–1727 CE) saw the embodiment of original sin in the human self-will and therefore encouraged the breaking of the self-will in children and bring it to obedience to God’s will, interpreted as synonymous with that of adult authority figures. Although Franke asserted that this breaking of the child’s self-will was only possible through grace, his interpreters including Puritans and evangelicals in the 18th century interpreted this theology of the child’s will as evidence of original sin to mean that the child’s will should be broken by

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way of corporal punishment so as to bring the child into obedience to parents, the state, and ultimately to God. Within Methodism, John Wesley (1703–1791) encouraged parents to break their child’s will by the age of 2. Puritans too sought to raise children who would submit to both human and divine authority, assuming that children should respect and obey their parents in mirroring of the obedience they owe to human political leaders and ultimately to God. Although the ideals of the Age of Reason, universal salvation, and the human moral sense were incorporated into European Christian thought, Jonathan Edwards (1753–1758) responded against such ideals by calling these philosophies a dangerous threat to Christianity and reasserting the doctrine of original sin. European missionaries arriving with the colonial occupation of lands and peoples were motivated by and exported their theologies of ­ childhood. These theologies assumed that Christianity was synonymous with European cultural norms and obedience to the imperial social order, leading them to interpret both difference and resistance as sinful. Their constructions of both childhood and Christianity led them to view nonEuropean and non-Christian adults as childlike in their lack of exposure to the European ways of life and religious perspectives that the missionaries called civilization. This perspective went beyond rhetoric in their use of force to render children and adults alike obedient to European Christian authority. Missionaries were often shocked at the resistance they encountered among indigenous parents to the corporal punishment European Christians had long deemed necessary for the discipline of children. Their work toward Christianizing both children and adults whom they had constructed as childlike was synonymous in their perspective with their enculturation as European by way of the same breaking of the will that was habitually applied with European children. Not all Christian theologies have been supportive of the doctrine of original sin in their construction of childhood. Although considered heretical in the early church, both Pelagius (360–418 CE) and John Chrysostom (347–407 CE) understood infants to be made in the divine image and therefore innately innocent and without sin. The move away from original sin became more dominant in

European Christian thought and practice with Anabaptist theologians Huldrych Zwingli’s (1484– 1531 CE) and Menno Simons’s (1496–1561) denial of infant baptism directly related to the assertion of children’s complex innocence that is neither faithful nor sinful and distinguished not by an inherited sinfulness but rather a human predisposition toward the act of sinning. Notable here is the subtle differentiation between sinfulness as human (and children’s) nature (which the Anabaptists understood to be addressed by God’s grace) and discreet actions described as sinful, of which children may be capable once they reach an age of discretion ranging from 7 to 30 years and marked not by a particular number but rather by the ability to understand and sincerely confess the Gospel. The Age of Reason affected further shifts away from Christian theologies asserting the inherent sinfulness of children. As Western culture increasingly adopted a romantic construction of childhood, Universalism, a form of Christianity that asserted universal salvation and denied the existence of hell or the necessity of Jesus’ death spread across Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Previously perceived as a heretical undercurrent in Christian theology, cultural shifts toward a more optimistic perspective on human nature and childhood innocence allowed this theology to gain a foothold if not prominence, especially among middle-class families. Where theologies of original sin had emphasized the importance of divine and parental authority in regard to children, Universalist theologies similarly emphasized parallels between divine and parental love in faith and practice. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is among the most notable theologians to have been influenced by these ideals. In keeping with the emergence of the sentimental bourgeois family and children’s fantasy literature, Schleiermacher viewed children as pure at heart and possessing a spark of divine goodness to be kindled and protected. Further, he saw children as spontaneous in their religious feelings in ways that are in keeping with the Rousseauian cultural ideals of original innocence prevalent in his day. However, he specified that children have the potential for both sin and salvation and continued to emphasize the importance of teaching children obedience and respect for human and divine authority.

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Cultural constructions of childhood innocence further affected missionary efforts, particularly in European missionaries’ practices with their own and others’ children. They considered the climate of the missionary field (both cultural and meteorological) in Africa and Asia unhealthy for their own children and sent them back to Europe to live in boarding schools, mission children’s homes, or with extended family. This move toward protective sentimentalization of children affected their attitudes toward native heathen children quite differently. Around the turn of the 20th century, European missionary writing makes a shift from describing the heathen, sinful tendencies native children exhibit from a young age to emphasizing their innocence and lovability, with particular attention to the emotional effect these children have on the adult missionaries and the ways mutual affection can be used toward the children’s conversion and indeed the children’s future conversion of others in their cultural context. This missionary correspondence sees notably less emphasis on the need to break the child’s will through corporal punishment but a continued view of non-Christian adults as sinful and a resultant desire to separate native children from their parents without regard for local constructions of childhood. The response in North American people of European descent to the shift in cultural constructions of both childhood and Christianity toward sentimentality stands in contrast to this missionary expression of emotion. Enslaved children, legally defined by their mother’s enslaved condition at their birth whether they were the biological children of enslaved men or slave owners, were culturally constructed as slaves rather than as children. As such, they were not viewed as innocent or in need of protection in the ways that White children were by slave-owning Christians. This exemption from both childhood innocence and the compassion and emotionality associated with Christianity in this period was supported by the myth that people of African descent were less capable of emotion or pain and persists in some white American Christianities today. In the modern period, Christian theologies and practices continue to be divided regarding the nature of the child, with differences often falling along cultural divides. Horace Bushnell (1802– 1876) reflected a romantic theology of childhood,

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denouncing the breaking of the child’s will and the practice of teaching children Christianity through fear and shame. Instead, he endorsed the nurture of children’s inherent goodness and their protection from negative cultural influences. Karl Rahner’s (1904–1984) modern Catholic theology takes a different approach in reflecting the shifting constructions of childhood by seeing original sin as taking place in simultaneity with original redemption as opposing forces present within children and all of humanity. Contemporary theologians including David H. Jensen break entirely from the question of children’s sinfulness by naming vulnerability as their primary characteristic, and C ­ hristian ethicist John Wall focuses instead on children’s rights as fully human individuals. Under the influence of varying Christian theologies of childhood concerning the nature of the child, Christian p ­arenting resources communicate implicit theologies of childhood as they emphasize either the breaking of the child’s will in congruence with the doctrine of original sin or the nurturing of the child’s goodness under the theology of universal salvation.

Children and Responsibility in Christian Thought Yet another way in which Christianity has interacted with shifting cultural constructions of childhood is in its varying assertions of the child’s obligation to family or community and the community or family’s obligation to the child. Where most Christianities rooted in Western theology are shaped by individualism and consistently assert the parents’ responsibility to raise children in Christian faith and practice paired with children’s responsibility to accept parental authority, many Christianities shaped by syncretism with nonWestern indigenous religious traditions focus more on the child as a part of the broader community. Although early house churches included extended families whose members were all followers of Jesus of Nazareth, they also included women, children, and slaves who participated in the community despite belonging to a family led by a pagan paterfamilias. Portions of the Pauline epistles address these concerns and the difficulty of balancing one’s dedication to the movement with the cultural valuing of respect for political and familial authority. Later, theologians writing

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in drastically different contexts appeal to these same texts to develop theologies regarding familial obligations to and for children. Many Western theologians emphasize children’s obedience to their parents’ authority, often paralleling it to divine authority as seen in Anabaptist, Pietist, Puritan, and Wesleyan theologies. Luther, although having been notoriously at odds with his own father, asserts that there is no nobler authority than that of parents. Aquinas is one of the first Christian theologians to question children’s obligation and absolute obedience to their parents, reflective of increased cultural valuing of independence in the 13th century. Although parental authority remains a key value in his theology, he suggests that reason may take priority over obedience, especially if the parents’ will is sinful or withdraws the child from God’s service. The cultural shift to the priceless, innocent child protected within the family leads theologians such as Schleiermacher to see children as a gift to the family and the faith community, while still having an obligation to obedience. Barth instead interrupts the parallel between human and divine authority often drawn in Christian theologies of childhood by emphasizing that the child’s first obligation is to God over and above that of parents or the state. Most Christian theologies emphasize the obligation of parents to pass Christian tradition on to their children. Indeed, Chrysostom sees the family as a church-like entity and a space for the rehearsal of Christian life. When infant baptism is practiced, many Christian theologies emphasize parents’ responsibility to baptize their children. Exemplary of this is John Calvin who states that children have a right to baptism. In contrast, Anabaptist theology asserts parents’ obligation to vigilant nurture of Christian faith early in life so that children will sincerely profess their faith at the time of baptism. Pietistic theologies similarly see the breaking of the child’s will as a parental obligation toward the child’s individual conversion and obedience to divine and human authority. Not all theologians have been solely concerned with the religious aspects of parental obligation. Where Calvin emphasized the forming children’s minds as garnering divine favor, Martin Luther notably defended fathers’ performance of the domestic tasks of parenting including washing

diapers as an act of Christian faith. This stands in contrast with the strict gender roles of Schleiermacher’s bourgeois family, in which the mother was believed to be continually emotional and childlike, making her uniquely suited to the tasks of parenting and to seeing the divine spark in her children. Bushnell’s romantic construction of childhood takes this emphasis on motherhood even further by placing the obligation for the preservation of children’s goodness firmly on the moral influence of a godly mother. Womanist and feminist theologians have responded against this by emphasizing a theology of communal responsibility for all children. Some African Christianities including the Chagga Lutherans in Tanzania communicate theologies commensurate with local constructions of the child as a gift to the community rather than emphasizing individualism or familial obligation. Within these theologies, any investment in the child’s education and formation is a benefit to the community and those outside the child’s immediate family participate in instruction and mentoring. Modern American Christian missionary efforts find themselves in tension with local Christian theologies when they seek to provide children with education that will enable them to leave their communities. Each is engaging the understanding that following Jesus means care for the disenfranchised but from contrasting constructions of childhood. Christian belief and practice has both shaped and been shaped by cultural constructions of childhood. The doctrine of original sin in particular spread across the early Church’s geographic context in Roman-occupied Palestine and was then exported globally as one of the motivating factors for the missionaries who arrived with the rise of European imperial domination. Christian theology and practice have continued to shift in conversation with ongoing cultural encounters around children and childhood. Laurel Koepf Taylor See also Childhood in Western Philosophy; Islam; Judaism; Religion and Children; Sunday School

Further Readings Aasgard, R., Horn, C., & Cojocaru, O. M. (Eds.). (2018). Childhood in history: Perceptions of children in the ancient and medieval worlds. London, UK: Routledge.

Citizenship Bakke, O. M. (2005). When children became people: The birth of childhood in early Christianity. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial innocence: Performing childhood from slavery to civil rights. New York: New York University Press. doi:10.1111/jacc.12006_12 Blassingame, J. W. (Ed.). (1977). Slave testimony: Two centuries of letters, speeches, interviews, and autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bunge, M. (Ed.). (2001). The child in Christian thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hopkins, D. N. (2000). Down, up, and over: Slave religion and Black theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. doi:10.1017/s0009640700130616 Laes, C., & Vuolanto, V. (Eds.). (2017). Children and everyday life in the roman and late antique world. London, UK: Routledge. MacDonald, M. Y. (2014). The power of children: The construction of Christian families in the GrecoRoman world. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Mercer, J. A. (2005). Welcoming children: A practical theology of childhood. St Louis, MO: Chalice Press. doi:10.1177/004057360706400316 Nurunziza, D. R. K. (2004). African theology of childhood in relation to child labour. African Ecclesial Review, 46(2), 121–138. Raboteau, A. J. (2004). Slave religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edition. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Ratcliff, D. (2004). Children’s spirituality: Christian perspectives, research, and applications. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Ridgely, S. B (Ed.). (2011). The study of children in religions: A methods handbook. New York: New York University Press. Stamback, A., & Kwayu, A. C. (2013). Take the gift of my child and return something to me: On children, Chagga trust, and a new American Evangelical orphanage on Mount Kilimanjaro. Journal of Religion in Africa, (43), 379–395. doi:10.1163/ 15700666–12341263 Vallgarda, K. A. A. (2015). Imperial childhoods and Christian mission: Education and emotions in south India and Denmark. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wall, J. (2010). Ethics in light of childhood. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Wells, A. S. (2016). The gendered ethics of female enslavement: Searching for southern slave women’s religions in the African Atlantic. Journal of Southern Religion, 18.

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Citizenship Citizenship is a contested concept. Citizenship is a form of membership in a political entity or collectivity, which provides status, rights, responsibilities, and opportunities for participation through which an individual’s relationship to the collectivity is regulated. Citizenship is therefore a legal status and a set of social practices. Defining citizenship as status and practice draws attention to how citizenship is lived and practiced at different scales, not just at the state level and not just in formal political spaces, enabling more inclusive boundaries of membership. This understanding is important for childhood studies because children, like other minoritised groups, are often excluded from full citizenship status and political spaces, yet they experience citizenship practices and hold rights and responsibilities and participate in a wide range of interpersonal, social, and political settings. Citizenship is also a normative concept, in which the range of rights, responsibilities, participation, and conceptions of justice that the status should convey are contested. These expanded and contested definitions of citizenship provide a framework for assessing children’s current citizenship status (which political science professor Elizabeth Cohen describes as semi-citizenship), for acknowledging children’s actual citizenship (as social actors, holders of rights, contributors to social good, and sometimes activists for justice), and for exploring children’s lived experience.

Citizenship Status, Practice, and Lived Experience The status of citizenship, as originally defined, provided for an element of shared self-government, in challenge to civil, political, and social life being dominated by a single ruler or elite. But citizenship now means more than this. Citizenship as a status confers legal entitlements and at the same time imposes a boundary, excluding some people from citizenship status. Citizenship as a set of social practices is the means through which the resources of a collectivity are distributed between persons and social groups. Citizenship as interpersonal practice concerns benefiting from or contributing to social good and perpetuating or contesting established norms

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about the appropriate balance of rights and responsibilities and the distribution of status. At this interpersonal level, citizenship can involve caring for others, the self, or the world; participation in social movements or resistance; and claiming rights. Beyond status or practice, citizenship is therefore also a lived experience that can be understood with reference to how people’s social and material circumstances affect their lives as citizens and the meaning they give to citizenship. Considering citizenship as status, practice, and lived experience draws attention to different spaces in which rights, responsibilities, and relationships to resources are conveyed, fulfilled, or contested. The first space citizenship status was linked with was in a city-state (Athens). Contemporary citizenship status tends to be more associated with nationstate but can also be conferred by substate and supranational political bodies, such as the E ­ uropean Union. The space of citizenship, however, is not necessarily an institution of government. Rights, responsibilities, and social distributions of resources are practiced or lived in (a) civil society and municipal and global polities; (b) smaller collectivities that include locality, family, and community groups; and (c) personal practices of making decisions about one’s private life, body, and family. Acknowledging that citizenship is lived in everyday spaces does not render political bodies unimportant. Citizenship status and practice in this space is central; it influences the distribution of economic, social, and cultural resources that enable fulfilment of entitlements in other spaces. But if citizenship practice is associated with only the ‘public’ spaces of formal politics and legal status, those struggling for recognition and participation in formal political institutions tend to be excluded. Cultural, relational, and lived citizenship approaches therefore focus on multiple social relationships and public cultures, providing an understanding of the different ways citizenship is experienced and practiced by different people, including children, who may not have citizenship status and who may be excluded from formal political space.

Expanding the Rights and Responsibilities Associated With Citizenship The rights associated with citizenship are not fixed. Early notions of citizenship conveyed civil

and political rights: the right to own property, to individual freedom, and progressively, the right to  vote. In 1950, British sociologist Thomas ­Marshall’s rewriting of citizenship expanded this list as he recognised the tendency for inequalities of wealth and income to be exacerbated under capitalism. Marshall contrasted this with the promise of equality of status inherent in citizenship and suggested citizenship should guarantee rights to a basic level of economic welfare and to a level of participation in social heritage and civilised life. Although he drew attention to classbased inequalities, his approach has been criticised for ignoring other aspects of social disadvantage, including exclusion based on age. The rights associated with citizenship have been further expanded. Radical and difference-centred citizenship theorists call for cultural, minority, and identity rights to recognition and to group rights to self-determination. Recognition of diversities in identities and experiences are matched with demands that difference is not construed as less than. Cosmopolitan versions of citizenship draw on broader human rights provisions that stretch between identities, enabling transnational and other excluded communities to make demands using national, European, and global statements of human rights within multiple polities and collectivities. Human rights and demands for recognition are not always written into law, but they influence norms and discourses, and this can be useful for social movements and groups, including children, in which legal membership is contested. The extent of responsibilities associated with citizenship is also contested, with the minimal content usually including respect for private property and laws. Civic responsibilities can include the ability and willingness to criticise political regimes, to engage in public discourse, to listen, and to be reasonable. Some definitions appeal for wider social duties: an obligation to vote, community spiritedness, contribution to public good, and sometimes participating in collective decision making through dialogue and voice. This can be seen in the expectation for individuals to be active citizens, embodying civic virtues and contributing to collectivities through mutual respect, civic friendship, and volunteering. The breadth of possible duties that can be associated with citizenship opens up space for considering the

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citizenship responsibilities of children. But recognizing that responsibilities can flow two ways is also significant for children; the obligations of citizenship can also be seen to extend to polities or collectivities. The duty in this sense, expressed in many international human rights instruments, is for polities and collectivities to respect, protect, promote, and fulfill citizenship entitlements. Participation, a central concept in childhood studies, is both a right and a responsibility associated with citizenship. It is a right to exercise liberty, have some autonomy, and contribute to decision making. As a responsibility it is the duty to participate in community service and the public good (including at times military service). Voicing opinions and contributing their labour to realise the rights or social good agreed on within any collectivity can be described as participating as active citizens, whereas contesting distributions of rights, responsibilities, and status is activist citizenship. As with some adults, some children, in some polities and collectivities, participate in all these ways.

Children’s Potential, Semi-, and Actual Citizenship Children have not historically been accorded full citizenship status in nation-states because of dominant conceptions of childhood incompetence and dependence. Marshall and others describe children as citizens in potentia, in need of the completion of education. In this approach, children need to learn about citizenship, and a threshold age of majority is imposed, at which children are conferred adulthood and automatically become entitled to full citizenship rights. Edge Hill University professor of social science Tom Cockburn suggested, in 1999 and 2013, that this conception of children as not-yet-competent is based on false assumptions. All definitions of citizenship have to acknowledge the realities of social interdependence. Self-sufficiency is not possible in most societies, and there is limited scope for complete autonomy or self-direction. He concludes there are no clear-cut differentiations between childhood and adulthood competence and, therefore, should be no clear-cut differences in their citizenship. To claim citizenship for children, international human rights instruments have been used: The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of

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the Child (UNCRC) recognises children as rights holders, placing obligations on state parties to progressively realise aspects of social, economic, and cultural rights and guaranteeing children access to citizenship through the right to a nationality. Other transnational laws and conventions also place obligations on states to promote children’s rights or on children to fulfill certain duties, such as attending school. Writing in 2005, Cohen contested this claim, arguing that partial inclusion in some aspects of citizenship does not mean that children are citizens and reliance on international instruments provides a weak form of citizenship because these rights are not enforceable. However, since then, the use of the UNCRC in judgments within domestic courts has increased; in some countries, the convention has been enshrined in domestic legislation, and children are increasingly making direct representations to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. These developments may then strengthen the argument for using the UNCRC as a basis for claiming children’s cosmopolitan citizenship. Cohen, however, defined children as semicitizens, and this remains an important perspective. She pointed to children’s exclusion from the basic civil and political freedoms associated with citizenship (such as voting for governments and decision making about one’s own body) and noted that many rights regarding children remain exercised by adults (often parents). Consequently, Cohen argued that children are semi-citizens, using this term because it draws attention to the legal inequalities of children’s status and calls for debate within and outside of childhood studies regarding the question of whether or not children should have full citizenship status. Cohen herself proposed more avenues for children’s direct representation in the political arena, including the extension of some voting rights to minors. But she suggested that children are not ready for the role of independent political actors or full citizens. Her concerns here echo the argument that there are certain responsibilities that accompany citizenship from which children should be protected. However, as already noted, there are many variations in responsibilities associated with citizenship, and it is possible for the status of citizens to be associated with different duties even within one polity at one time: When military

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service is a duty of citizenship, it is rarely extended to all citizens over the age of 18. Writing at a similar time as Cohen, but sidestepping the question of status, researcher Marc Jans suggested an actual lifeworld approach to children’s citizenship. Here, citizenship is defined as social involvement and participation. Jans argued that children are citizens because they engage as active social agents, holding rights, fulfilling responsibilities, and participating in and contributing to social good in spaces that stretch from the ecological centre (home) to the ecological periphery (occasional contacts with authorities). This includes proximal zones (the neighbourhood) and function-specific locations (such as school or swimming pool). Locating children’s citizenship in such spaces echoes radical citizenship theorists who suggest that regardless of status, citizenship is experienced in collectivities and interpersonal relationships, through individual and organisational practices. This radical approach is useful for childhood studies because it moves children’s citizenship from discussions of state–individual or state–civil society interactions to consider more horizontal dimensions of relations within civil society. This is important because children as a social group are systematically excluded from political processes and can access parliaments or council chambers only as guests, dependent on adult permissions. However, an exclusive focus on proximal areas is misplaced. Children do not live in a private world distinct from adult spaces. Global organisations, policies, and practices also influence children’s everyday lives and their experience of rights and responsibilities. Some children may also live citizenship in the ecological periphery at a young age, depending on the opportunities they are offered or the difficulties they encounter—for example, becoming involved as social actors engaged in local, national, and international organisations working for national and global change in the distributions of citizenship rights, status, or responsibilities. It remains important to not construe children who are politically active in formal political arenas as more citizenlike than children who do not access these spaces. Relational and differentiated conceptions of citizenship provide ways of exploring such commonalities and differences, between children and

between adults and children, in how citizenship is lived. Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha, from the School of Social Work at the University of Victoria, advocates a difference-centred approach to children’s citizenship in which children’s differences, real and constructed, should not be understood in terms of ‘less than’ and their status should be as ‘differently equal’ members of the public culture of which they are citizens. In this approach, rather than judging the extent of children’s rights, freedoms, and their experience of citizenship against an adult standard or false universal norms, a focus on recognition and respect is central. Here, participation refers to agency, often in resistance to oppression, as a means of achieving rights rather than as the responsibility for active citizenship. If the focus is on how children live citizenship, it remains important to recognize that the agency of children can include both active citizenship (promoting established norms about the distribution of rights, responsibilities, status, and resources) and activist citizenship (pushing the boundaries of current distributions of rights and responsibilities, often through activities that might be seen as misbehaviour, to claim greater justice and improved status). Combining relational and social understanding of children’s citizenship provides a further means of challenging the status of childhood on children’s behalf. A relational social approach recognizes the significance of everyday practices and macro-socioeconomic mechanisms or structures that shape conceptions of childhood and the contexts of children’s lives. Group rights are advocated alongside ethics of care. Group rights are seen as necessary to redress the structural inequalities affecting children, through social welfare provision and providing spaces in which children as members of an excluded social group can support each other and speak out against discrimination. An ethics of care is called for to acknowledge that children and adults all live in relationships of interdependence, avoiding a deficit model of childhood, to demand attention to the immediate realities and emotional complexities of children’s lives and to promote care as a way of acting towards adults and children in all policy domains. Cath Larkins

Classroom Discipline See also Activism/Social Movements, Children and; Beings and Becomings, Children as; Children as Citizens; Justice; Participation Rights, UNCRC; Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotskij, Lev)

Further Readings Cockburn, T. (1998). Children and citizenship in Britain: A case for an interdependent model of citizenship. Childhood, 5(1), 99–117. Cockburn, T. (2013). Rethinking children’s citizenship. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, E. F. (2005). Neither seen nor heard: Children’s citizenship in contemporary democracies. Citizenship Studies, 9(2), 221–240. Invernizzi, A., & Williams, J. (2008). Children and citizenship. London, United Kingdom: Sage. Jans, M. (2004). Children as citizens: Towards a contemporary notion of child participation. Childhood, 11(1), 27–44. Larkins, C. (2014). Enacting children’s citizenship: Developing understandings of how children enact themselves as citizens through actions and acts of citizenship. Childhood, 21(1), 7–21. Lister, R. (2007). Inclusive citizenship: Realizing the potential. Citizenship Studies, 11(1), 49–61. Marshall, T. H. (1950). Citizenship and social class and other essays. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Moosa-Mitha, M. (2005). A difference-centred alternative to theorization of children’s citizenship rights. Citizenship Studies, 9(4), 369–388.

Classroom Discipline Classroom discipline is predominantly understood as a form of regulation or control that aims to create and maintain order and that is associated with a whole host of strategies and practices. Schools and preschools put great emphasis on keeping order, and teachers also often rank classroom discipline as more important than teaching. Problems with school discipline are frequently seen by the public as the most serious issue confronting schools and are repeatedly portrayed in the media. The importance placed on classroom discipline has far-reaching consequences for children’s identity formation and everyday life in schools. This entry

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examines how classroom discipline is shaped by conceptions of childhood, contemporary forms of classroom discipline, and influences on classroom discipline.

Classroom Discipline and Conceptions of Childhood Classroom discipline is informed by various concepts of childhood, such as children as little devils or angels, and it also shapes the identity formation, activities, autonomy, and rights of children as well as notions of childhood and people’s approaches to children. Children participate in classroom discipline by keeping order, responding differently to disciplinary measures affecting their lives, and forming various views about classroom discipline and about institutions and the adults reinforcing them. Since classroom discipline has wide-ranging effects on every child’s life, and because children spend a large proportion of their time growing up in classrooms, both in Minority and in Majority contexts, classroom discipline is an important issue for childhood and children. Historically, physical punishment was commonly practised on those not meeting school or teachers’ standards of behaviour. It is now illegal in most countries of the Minority world to physically punish students in schools. Control and power, however, remain the central issues in behaviour management. Classroom discipline is strongly entwined with hierarchies of power, including relations between teachers and students as well as age, race, class, and gender relations and historical legacies, such as colonialism. Separating violence and care is difficult in locales that suffer from centuries of violent philosophies on education entwined with the care ethic of ‘it is for your own good’, and violence that is legitimated by traditional values.

Contemporary Classroom Discipline Contemporary classroom discipline approaches (including the whole spectrum from physical punishment to behaviour management and guidance) are produced on a continuum ranging from maximum control to maximum freedom for children. All classroom discipline approaches include some

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theorisation of power that likens behaviour management to something of a tug-of-war over who has power over the other and to what extent. In the ‘laissez-faire’ style of behaviour management, where children can do whatever they please, the student has the greatest personal power and the teacher is relatively weak. At the other end of the spectrum, in autocratic discipline, the teacher is powerful and the students are relatively powerless. Questions that must be raised in relation to this power play are about the ‘right’ to exert such control, the nature and limit of that ‘right’, and what the practices exerting these forms of power mean for children’s citizenship in classrooms. Amid contemporary views of children as powerful agents in their own lives, children have gained more space to participate in classroom discipline, but not always to their own benefit. Children’s participation ranges from creating and maintaining order in the classroom, making rules for themselves, exercising self-discipline to fit in with institutional rules and regulations, and participating in communities of practices to uphold rules of coexistence. Children expect schools to have rules and to a great degree, they accept and have confidence in school rules, whilst also reflecting upon, valuing, and judging school rules and teacher interventions. Children judge their teachers according to disrespectful and unfair treatment, abuse of power, and injustices in the application of rules, such as giving advantages to some students. With the prospects of democracy, social justice, and rights being strongly entrenched in liberal democratic styles of schooling, approaches that endow students with autonomy and freedom are considered more desirable. These approaches foster a sense of ownership in children and encourage them to accept responsibility for their own actions. The question that must be raised in relation to giving children more ownership is whether regulating students based on their own initiatives gives them more freedom from coercion or is simply a case of employing a different form of power in which student self-control is directed.

Influences on Classroom Discipline The apparent importance of classroom discipline is mirrored in the academic literature. This broad

area of research is dominated by the field of educational psychology. The focus of this body of work tends to be on problems with individual students, classroom environments, or ‘whole’ school dynamics. Solutions range from attempting to change students’ behaviour through behaviourist forms of conditioning (be good and get a sticker), to behaviour therapy in its many variations (combining psychotherapy and behaviour analysis), to diagnosis (of conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactive disorder or authority defiance disorder), and the psychological or psychiatric treatment (involving drugs) of individual children, or whole-school approaches whereby techniques of counselling and organisational psychology are applied to address bullying, for example. Developmental thinking also greatly shapes classroom discipline. It utilises ideas of developmental norms to foster the development of competencies as part of discipline approaches. For example, developmental norms portray children in their teens as having hormonal imbalances and a characteristic of defying authority, which legitimises the exercise of stricter control over them. Younger children are assumed to be unable to competently convey their emotions due to their immaturity or lack of linguistic ability, and so problems with peers are often thought to be the cause of classroom disruption. Research in this field is frequently instrumental and somewhat narrow in focus, keeping investigations within the school walls. Perspectives from outside educational psychology, such as sociological analyses, are relatively few and seem less influential in practice. Sociological studies of school discipline concentrate on the different ways in which classroom discipline affects children’s lives and social relations. On entering school, children immediately encounter a whole host of rules, regulations, and norms designed to tailor their actions, bodies, voices, and emotions, and to socialize children into pupils: the formation of an education identity. The exercise of discipline means children soon learn the adult rules that define appropriate and inappropriate behaviour (i.e., what, when, and where they are and are not allowed to do things). For example, they learn that indoor spaces should be quiet and calm so learning can

Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology

take place. This regulates children’s verbal and emotional expressions. Conceptualisations of children as fundamentally malleable and in need of civilising are particularly salient in classroom discipline. The concept of adolescence and the associated unruliness and emotional imbalance makes children in their teens and youth more prone to be labelled disruptive. Behaviour that deviates from norms is more readily identified as disruption and violence in urban Black schools, in working-class neighbourhoods, and in boys. Such identifications can encourage ideologically harsh and narrowly hegemonic definitions of unruliness that extend to students’ negative or deficient morality and character. Ameliorative and corrective services are often utilized in excess in such instances, escalating the consequences and leading to suspension and zero-tolerance policies. These aim to foster obedience, safety, prevention, and self-discipline. Ameliorative and corrective services treat disruptive behaviour as a deficiency of character, mental sickness, or criminal activity. The identification of and solutions to classroom discipline thus follow age-, race-, gender-, and class-based distinctions. With the emphasis on the vulnerability of children, the safety imperative also serves as an important legitimating rationale for classroom discipline and increased surveillance, which is often exacerbated by the competitive and intense regulatory context many schools work within. With the help of new technologies, classroom discipline is generally shifting increasingly into the realm of surveillance. Constant surveillance is delivered through cameras and mobile phone applications. Immediate rewards are also administered by teachers through these applications. Body sensors measuring a child’s heart rate and temperature indicate cheating or lying, mood swings or depression, moving classroom discipline into new biological realms and refocusing children’s self-discipline on their physical life signs. Zsuzsa Millei See also Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); Bullying in Schools; Peer Culture; School Dress Codes

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Further Readings Castañeda, C. (2002). Figurations: Child, bodies, worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leavittt, R. L., & Power, M. B. (1997). Civilizing bodies: Children in day care. In T. Joseph (Ed.), Making place for pleasure in early childhood education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. MacLure, M., Jones, L., Homes, R., & MacRae, C. (2011). Becoming a problem: Behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 38(3), 447–471. doi:10 .1080/01411926.2011.552709 Millei, Z., Griffiths, T. G., & Parkes, R. J. (Eds.). (2010). Re-theorizing discipline in education: Problems, politics, and possibilities. New York, NY: Peter Lang. doi:10.3726/978-1-4539-0020-8 Raby, R. (2012). School rules: Obedience, discipline and elusive democracy. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.

Clinical Psychology Child Psychology

and

Clinical

Clinical psychology uses theory, research, and clinical practice to inform understanding of psychological distress and to work with children and adults who are experiencing psychological difficulties. This entry offers an overview of the development of clinical psychology and clinical child psychology, concentrating on histories, practices, critics, and debates in North America and Europe.

Clinical Psychology Clinical psychology began to develop at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Initially, it was primarily focused on assessment (particularly in respect of children), with less attention paid to the treatment of and therapy for psychological distress. Historically, clinical psychology was therefore associated with the development of psychometrics or psychological measurement and the belief that personality and ability could be objectively measured and assessed. The early development of clinical psychology was also influenced by the mental ­ hygiene movement, which was concerned with

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the improvement of the care of people with mental disorders, particularly those in mental institutions. In addition, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach was concomitantly becoming established as a theory and technique for addressing mental distress through exploring unconscious processes thought to influence mental well-being and behavior. Thus, the need for psychological understanding, assessment, and treatment of mental distress began to be legitimatized as a distinct approach in the early 20th century, with the first clinical psychology association forming in America by the 1920s. However, during World War II, when the need to provide therapy for returning soldiers suffering from shell shock (or posttraumatic stress disorder) became pressing, clinical psychology experienced rapid growth and development. In this context, clinical psychology began to fully integrate the need to engage in treatment interventions as well as in scientific investigation and assessment. Clinical psychology is now a long-established and regulated mental health profession. Although its history and current leadership has been primarily the province of men, alongside other caring professions, clinical psychology has an increasingly feminized workforce. It has been argued that the feminization of clinical psychology may have instigated a reduction in status and salary. Nevertheless, clinical psychologists are highly trained professionals, who exert considerable power within the territory of mental health. Yet they do not consistently reflect the diversity of the population they work with, training being rooted in academic systems that reflect societal inequalities. Most training courses are at postgraduate doctoral, sometimes master’s, level and equip practitioners to understand and work with children and adults experiencing mental distress and learning difficulties. The length of training is comparable to psychiatry, which also aims to provide treatments for mental distress. However, because psychiatrists are also medics, they are largely informed by the medical model, which uses diagnosis to organize treatment regimens that rely on the use of psychotropic medication rather than the use of talking therapies to alleviate mental distress. Although some clinical psychologists (e.g., in North America) are licensed to prescribe, the focus in clinical psychology remains on psychological, rather than

pharmacological, methods for alleviating mental distress. Most clinical psychology courses are informed by the scientist–practitioner model, which brings together the different historical roots of the profession by promoting both scientific enquiry and clinical practice. Hence, clinical psychology training involves academic learning and conducting research, alongside practice placements in key areas, including adult, child, and learning-disabled populations with the option for specialist placements along the way. Because scientific enquiry underpins clinical practice, clinical psychologists are often associated with promoting evidencebased practice interventions. The scientist–­ practitioner model also encourages the use of practice-based knowledge to focus further empirical investigation. The aim is to embed scientific rigor in the development of clinical p ­ sychology research, clinical practice, and underpinning theories, with each recursively informing the others. This approach is not without its critics. A key aspect of clinical psychology is providing psychological assessments to identify psychological, cognitive, and behavioral difficulties and to guide individualized treatment plans and wider service developments. Assessment strategies can be divided into three information domains, triangulated together: (1) direct knowledge (clinical observation, interviews, and psychometric testing); (2) indirect knowledge (written and verbal accounts of relevant others, formal test results); and (3) specialist knowledge (the assessor’s expert knowledge about theory and research on the particular issue and one’s depth of clinically relevant experience). Often, the value (validity and reliability) of psychometric testing is pitted against the value of clinical observation, when the art of assessment is more properly about the ability to triangulate information from all relevant sources. Nevertheless, clinical psychology, like other psy professions, has tended to favor standardized measurement over more individualized clinically based approaches to assessment. Standardized testing has been criticized for not taking into consideration cultural differences and for pathologizing individuals who deviate from the norm by making the assumption that they are fundamentally wrong rather than simply uncommon. Clinical psychologists then are required to use their expert ability to

Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology

decipher problems and design interventions that recuperate abnormal persons back toward the statistical mean. In traditional cognitive behavioral terms, the aim is to correct distorted thinking and to change maladaptive behavior according to fixed standards of thinking and acting based on the socalled normal population. Critiques of the development of all psy professions thus point to the use of statistics and statistical norms as providing a form of government. The techniques and language of science operate to police the normal boundaries of behavior against which each individual is measured and through which societal norms are internalized. The assumption of an objective world that can be empirically measured has been further criticized as leading to a conservative approach to treatment. Within this framework, the search for evidence can be limited to validating current concepts and interventions rather than challenging the foundations on which scientific enquiry is based. It is not whether the problem exists, but how good is this test, this technique at measuring it? This can lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy in which new approaches remain marginalized, while some therapies are repeatedly evaluated and validated, simply because they are already in the current domain and particularly when they are measurable (i.e., standardized). This does not address whether they suit each individual client or whether more individualized approaches are applicable and individualized goals are reached. Critical clinical psychologists have increasingly advocated for the use of qualitative forms of empirical enquiry more suited to providing more detailed and nuanced knowledge about clinical populations than traditional large-scale studies can provide. Central to all iterations of clinical psychology is the practice of using knowledge gained through assessment processes to develop a theoretically based conceptualization, or working hypothesis, of a person’s difficulties, which is termed clinical formulation. Formulation is often viewed as a collaborative enterprise with the client. Formulations provide a framework for understanding and contextualizing the presenting problem—for example, in terms of root causes (past issues and current

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triggers) as well as perpetuating, maintaining, and protective factors. Because formulations are context-driven, intervention strategies remain open. This is in contrast to psychiatric diagnosis, which being categorical, invites patients to recognize themselves as being beyond change and development, with a diagnosis not being context-dependent but, rather, all-encompassing. Formulation, therefore, has more to offer in predicting future behavior. Diagnosis may provide a shorthand for what kind of symptoms or behaviors an individual displays. Formulation does more than this: It seeks to explicate why such behaviors occur, under which circumstances and conditions, and what might mitigate them. This is why formulation is used by clinical psychologists not just to develop treatment plans, but also to inform risk assessments (whether concerning risk to self, risk to others, or risk from others). Yet this type of functional analysis is still problematic when formulation is based on rigid understandings about adaptation and normality. This may be one reason risk is notoriously difficult to predict. In addition, because clinical psychology has an individualistic focus, this can mean that social failures are individualized as personal disabilities or disorders. Nevertheless, a functional analysis may have wider application than a diagnostic approach because it at least invites people’s actions to be viewed within the context of their lives. Critical clinical psychologists also point to the need for transparency and reflexivity about the particular perspectives and purposes psychologists bring to their formulations in order to ward against normative values being reproduced. Clinical psychology has traditionally eschewed this type of critical analysis; rather, it prides itself on being atheoretical. This also means that training is often integrative or eclectic in approach with courses drawing on a range of psychological approaches to therapy. Primary theoretical orientations include cognitive behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy (including attachment theory), systems or family therapy, and humanistic or person-centered therapy (this latter approach being more usually associated with counseling psychology). Increasingly, some clinical psychologists have embraced neuroscience as a means of making sense of mental distress, increasingly referred to as

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Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology

trauma and trauma responses. However, the idea that trauma becomes real only when given the gloss of a neuro-makeover is problematic. Trauma is already evident in the mental distress people demonstrate in their behavior and the impact this has on their relationships and life opportunities. The focus on intrapsychic and interpersonal issues in therapy has led to further criticisms that clinical psychology fails to address how power operates in clinical psychology and therapy relationships. This has led to increasing concern with understanding the social context in which individual mental distress arises and the ways intersections between culture, gender, sex, ability, and economic status operate to help and harm individuals. Training and intervention is bound by equality legislation. A commitment to implementing such laws increases recognition of the wisdom located with experts-by-experience, or service users. Experts-by-experience are now included as partners in research, and their knowledge is understood to be important in helping shape training courses and clinical services to more adequately meet the needs of diverse populations. Because clinical psychologists work with diverse populations, they also implement their therapeutic approaches in a variety of ways. They work with individuals, couples, families, and groups, and although orientated toward talking therapies, they use a range of creative methods, including art, drama, and play with clients. Hence, clinical psychologists are adaptable and can be as eclectic in their therapy methods as they are in their use of therapy models. This has sometimes led to criticism that clinical psychologists assume they can be all things to all people. In practice, clinical psychologists tend to work within defined service settings, including public services and private practice; in the community, hospitals, and other mental health settings; forensic settings such as hospitals, prisons, and young offender institutions; social services and social care residential services; schools; and third-sector organizations, charity services, and nonprofit agencies. Clinical psychologists sometimes work across services as specialists in particular issues such as neglect and abuse. Although training equips clinical psychologists to work with children, adults, and learning-disabled populations, it

is most common for qualified clinical psychologists to work within one of these three fields, developing expertise through training and later specialization. This is the case with clinical child psychologists.

Clinical Child Psychology Child psychology has its roots in the operation of psychologists in child guidance clinics during the earlier part of the 20th century. Child psychologists had responsibility for testing and assessing children who were then treated for their maladjustments and delinquencies in these medically led clinics. Over time, a distinction was made between clinical child psychologists and educational psychologists. Clinical child psychologists are clinical psychologists who have chosen to specialize in working with children and families following their completion of a postgraduate degree and generic training in clinical psychology. As such, clinical child psychologists are trained to work with both children and adults in mental distress as well as with child and adult clients who have learning disabilities. By contrast, educational psychologists are trained specifically to assess and address children’s academic and cognitive needs and social and emotional well-being within an educational context. As such, although there is overlap between the two professions (mental health issues intersect with educational development), clinical child psychologists have a greater training in and focus on mental distress and related therapies across the life span, and educational psychologists have a greater training in child development and school-related difficulties. Competition continues to exist about the proper roles of these different types of child psychologists. This gives rise to confusion in the family courts, for example, where the generic term child psychologist obscures the specific skills and training associated with these different training backgrounds. Clinical child psychologists work in a variety of state, private, and third-sector settings, often in multidisciplinary teams. Clinical child psychologists work within both community and inpatient mental health services, with children subject to social care services (children in need and children in care), children in the family courts and criminal

Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology

justice systems, and in schools and with children with physical health problems and neurological difficulties. Although therapy with children is a significant part of the role of the clinical child psychologist, a large part of clinical intervention is orientated to working with parents, caretakers, and other professionals. Clinical child psychologists often take the lead in formulating clinical difficulties and increasingly provide a consultation model for individuals, groups, teams, and services. Consultation involves providing specialist support and guidance to individuals or organizations about the psychological aspects of their work. This may be in terms of individual clients, service-wide concerns, and strategic development across a whole sector of care. The aim of consultation within services is to devolve knowledge throughout the system and to increase colleagues’ skills and problem-solving capacities. Clinical consultation is also used to ensure continuity and coherence of response across the team and in respect of multiagency work, where relevant. Although such processes appear to enable power sharing (in terms of promoting skills and knowledge development), critics of the consultation model argue that the motivation for implementing consultation models is often to provide cheaper services, whereby qualified staff oversee direct work by unqualified assistants and trainees rather than provide (more expensive) therapy themselves. Clinical psychologists are trained to assess children and adults, and as such, clinical child psychologists have a key role to play as expert witnesses in court proceedings and in respect to children in forensic and criminal justice services. Clinical child psychologists use formulation to provide clinical assessments of children and parents in childcare proceedings, as well as informing presentence reports and risk assessments of children and adolescents who have engaged in criminal activity. Formulation is used to make sense of knowledge gained through assessment about children and parents’ psychological, developmental, and social history and functioning; their mental health difficulties and needs; and their attachment styles, needs, and associated coping strategies. Formulation underpins risk analysis and informs the implementation of multidisciplinary risk

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management programs and therapeutic services that mitigate risk across a range of issues, including suicide and self-harm, criminality, and risk from others—for example, through sexual exploitation. Formulation is therefore used to explicate children’s therapeutic needs. In childcare proceedings, it may also inform decisions about contact with birth family and placement needs, including in terms of overall service design. In respect to service delivery, clinical child psychologists provide a range of therapeutic interventions with children and families, including with birth families, foster families, and residential workers. Although the provision of therapy is central to the role of the clinical child psychologist, financial restraints can limit intervention in the assessment, formulation, and planning stage. Long-term therapy, which is often required for highly traumatized children and their parents, can be expensive. Short-term, problem-based interventions oriented to regulating emotions rather than understanding primary motivations and causes of emotional distress are often favored within child mental health services. These then serve as adjuncts to medical and pharmacological management of mental distress. Although child clinical psychologists use formulation to organize assessment and therapeutic work, most mental health services continue to rely on diagnosis to determine their services. Although there is increasing commitment to developing trauma-informed services, this can mean that many traumatized children and families are denied therapy because they do not meet the relevant diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, because children very clearly exist within a developmental and family context, the risks of internalizing individual difficulties are not as exaggerated as they are in adult work; the relationship systems that contextualize children’s difficulties are tangible, so it is harder to ignore them. Similarly, development is pronounced and noticeable throughout childhood, and it is not possible to work effectively without a clear understanding of it (arguably this is the case across the life span as well). As with adult work, a range of approaches are used, and increasingly, attempts are being made to listen to the voices of children and young people in order to provide socially relevant and culturally competent services. The

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influence of community psychology and contextual safeguarding has led to some services providing greater flexibility about where the service is delivered: clinic, home, community location, online, or some combination of these. Clinical child psychology is an evolving profession. Although access to most child and adolescent mental health services is still based on psychiatric diagnosis, increasing interest in developing trauma-informed services points to a desire for the focus to shift to the psychosocial and perhaps a greater role for clinical psychology, which brings together empirical enquiry, assessment, and psychotherapy, providing a psychosocial understanding of mental distress that challenges more medically based understandings of mental disorder. A move toward the social does not obviate the need for pharmacological interventions but does reconfigure organizing principles for child mental health. Whether this results in more of a social focus for clinical child psychology and an expanded role for neuropsychology remains to be seen. Sam Warner See also Children as Witnesses; Developmental Psychology; Mental Health, Child; Psychoanalysis, the Child in; Trauma-Informed Care

Further Readings Carr, A. (2015). The handbook of child and adolescent clinical psychology: A contextual approach. London, UK: Routledge. Hall, J., Pilgrim, D., & Turpin, G. (2015). Clinical psychology in Britain: Historical perspectives. Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society. Johnstone, L., & Dallos, R. (2013). Formulation in psychology and psychotherapy. London, UK: Routledge. Rose, N., & Abi-Rached, J. M. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warner, S., & Spandler, H. (2012). New strategies for practice based evidence: A focus on self-harm. Journal of Qualitative Research in Psychology, 9(1), 13–26. doi:10.1080/14780887.2012.630631 Watson, J. (2019). Drop the disorder: Challenging the culture of psychiatric diagnosis. Monmouth, UK: PCCS Books.

Clothing, Children’s Clothing for children fulfills several important roles. It protects young bodies from extremes of temperature and hostile environments. It absorbs spillage from bodily functions: nappies and protective pants for toilet training, bibs, or aprons for feeding and so on. It accommodates rapid spurts of growth and changes in body shape, particularly in infancy and in adolescence. Clothing may also be used to train growing bodies in culturally approved shapes and habits—corsets and brassieres for young girls are an obvious example, but tight jackets to prevent slouching, or tight shoes to inhibit rough play, have also been used. Overlaying these pragmatic requirements, and sometimes in conflict with them, are the symbolic requirements of clothing, which express the wearer’s gender, and position them in an age cohort, social, and kinship group. As children lack the economic means to purchase their own clothes, the work of selecting, purchasing, and maintaining them falls on parents or caregivers. Socially marginalised families may use children’s clothing either to assert a distinct identity or as a route for integrating the next generation into the dominant culture. Any critique of a child’s clothing is understood as a critique of the child’s family, making clothing practices highly charged. This entry provides a general overview of British and North American practices and sources for the period 1750 to the present. However, these practices were and are varied by cultural and economic considerations.

Gender and Age Of the issues encoded by clothing, gender is perhaps the most fundamental. Experiments have shown that adult interactions with infants will be determined by the gender expressed by the infant’s clothing. This was also the case in the past but with the important reservation that gender markers were subordinated to considerations of age appropriateness. Before 1900, both male and female infants and toddlers wore identical dresses and petticoats, but with subtle gender markers– broad-brimmed hats, deeply cuffed sleeves, or diagonal ribbon sashes might be added to denote a boy. This was partly pragmatic, as cotton dresses

Clothing, Children’s

were easier to wash than wool trousers in case of toilet accidents, and partly reflective of an understanding of gender as acquired in stages rather than fixed at birth. Before 1920, boys’ transition from infant gowns to trousers and jackets, sometimes called ‘breeching’, took place between the ages of 2 and 6 years. This was a process carried out over months or years and might involve a number of transitional outfits such as toddler dresses with split skirts that allowed boys to play at horse riding, or hip-length smocks and tunics worn over matching trousers. These tunics were often in bright colours and with decorative trimmings thought appropriate for young boys, such as contrasting velvet strips or interlaced braid. Trousers were introduced for young boys in the 1780s, as a change from the knee breeches worn by most men; long trousers were worn by both men and boys until the 1850s. From the 1860s, short trousers or knickerbockers became a major marker of age, often paired with loosely fitted blouses. Putting on short trousers was often aligned with the commencement of school at age 3 or 4. The transition from short to long trousers marked the entrance to the adult world either through commencing paid work after the age of 11 or at puberty around age 14. For girls, the transition from infant gowns to adult dresses was also carried out in stages, the duration and distinctness of which depended on the form of current female fashion. From 1750 to 1780, girls’ dresses were cut like women’s gowns except that they opened at the back rather than the front. In the 1780s, girls started to wear loosely structured ‘chemise’ dresses, later adopted by women as ‘Neoclassical’ fashion. After ‘Neoclassical’ styles ended in the 1820s, the main marker of age in girls’ dresses was the length of the skirt and the tightness of the bodice. As girls approached puberty, they progressed from stiffened support bodices (worn also by infants and young boys) to corsets which defined the waist and bust and from knee-length to ankle-length skirts. Fashions for older girls might include long tight sleeves in the 1840s, draped skirts with bustles in the 1880s, or long tight skirts in 1910, all of which constrained movement. From the 1890s, there was a growing awareness of the need for girls to have more freedom of movement and

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development, so young girls’ dresses were made as loose smocks with shoulder yokes or low-waisted tunics. After 1920, there was an increased emphasis on sports and physical fitness for girls, and more use of active sportswear including shorts or trousers. However, trousers were not accepted for girls’ school wear until the 1970s or later. As trousers and t-shirts have lost their gender specificity, being worn by girls as well as boys, dresses and smocks have become more gendered, and are now seen as female markers, as discussed by Jo Paoletti. Gender coding through garment colour has also become more codified. As Jo Paoletti has shown, in the early 20th century infants and toddlers of both sexes were dressed in pastel colours (including pink), and in mid-­century when both sexes were dressed in currently fashionable colours (bright or muted). However, in the early 21st century, the colour pink became a key marker for the female gender in clothing and accessories from birth or even before (due to the spread of prenatal gender tests).

Growing Bodies and Modesty Codes The relationship between children’s and adult clothing styles is one that is historically contingent. Children’s garments up to the 1960s permitted more bodily exposure than adults’, with shortsleeved dresses, short skirts, and short trousers the norm when adults were covered from neck to ankle. Children’s clothes tended to be cut more loosely to allow for growth and movement, and there were times when this freedom influenced adult clothes. In the 1790s, women adopted the linen chemise dresses, and men the loose trousers, previously worn by children; in the 1920s, droppedwaist dresses were worn first by ‘flappers’ (teenagers) and then by adults; in 1970, the latest women’s fashion was for ‘baby doll’ dresses previously seen on toddlers. These fashions were described at the time as giving adult bodies some of the freedom and innocence of childhood, but they also carried an air of perverse sexuality. Recently, there has been anxiety about the adoption of adult styles such as padded brassieres for prepubescent bodies, as encouraging precocious sexualisation. The issue of age-appropriate modesty is complicated by the gradual lowering of the onset of puberty due to improved standards of nutrition.

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The increasing cultural diversity of western societies has also led to a greater awareness of differing cultural attitudes to modesty. In UK- and U.S.-based schools, uniformed youth movements and sports clubs have adapted their dress codes in order not to exclude children observing religious codes of modesty (e.g., keeping legs, arms and heads covered). This has had the paradoxical effect of increasing the clothing options available; uniform trousers, previously restricted to boys, may now be worn by girls.

character Buster Brown in the 1920s, or Hollywood cowboys like Roy Rogers in the 1940s. Currently, many major children’s movies are accompanied by ranges of dressing-up clothing based on the costumes of the lead characters. As Annebella Pollen has argued, the roles expressed in these costumes (princesses for girls, action heroes for boys) may contribute to forming gender identities.

Commercial Developments

As with adult clothing, early studies of children’s clothes tended to focus on high fashion worn by the social elite and on special occasion clothes. This was partly due to the available sources: Fashion magazines and family portraits (painted or photographic) showed prosperous families in their best clothes, and these clothes were also the ones that tended to be preserved and donated to museum collections. The clothing worn by the majority of the population every day, at school, work, and home, is harder to find. Even autobiographies which discuss the author’s memories of childhood clothing may not be reliable, as they are written decades later, and may shape recollections to fit a narrative. Two types of recently available sources offer much broader information on children’s clothing practices. Mail-order catalogues from British and American retailers from the 1850s onwards are being digitised through the Tradecards and the American Home and John Johnson collections. These offer a wealth of detail on the type, sizing, and cost of the clothes (including undergarments) needed for a child’s wardrobe. Information on the totality of clothing available gives a more representative idea of the clothing worn than the party outfits surviving in museums. Knowing prices allows us to analyse how families on low incomes budgeted for children’s clothing and which outfits were most cost-effective. Knowing size ranges allows us to track shifts in the ideas of age- and gender-appropriate clothing across time. School class photographs in public archives allow us to evaluate how the garments from the catalogues were worn by children of a particular age at a specified time and place. The record photographs taken by some childcare charities and institutions are another valuable source of evidence for

Because children grow so quickly, their wardrobes generally need to be replaced more frequently than adults’ wardrobes, making children’s garments profitable lines for manufacturers. From the 1850s onwards, there were British and American firms that specialised in outfits for small boys (and later, for girls) which were mass-produced and sold through chains of retailers and through mail-order catalogues. Mass-production lowered the price of garments, making it possible for poorer families to dress their children respectably. Mass-produced garments also came in set size ranges, which helped to define the ages at which children progressed from short to long trousers or from short smocks to fitted dresses. Daniel Thomas Cook has shown that from the 1920s major American retailers organised their stores and catalogues in order to differentiate between the tastes and needs of specific age-groups, even though it was parents who were the ultimate customers. Fantasy and play have been important themes in the decoration of children’s clothing for at least 200 years. Toddler boys’ tunics were often given detailing copied from military heroes of the period to differentiate them from girls’ dresses: This took the form of ‘hussar’ braiding in 1800, ‘highland’ kilts in the 1860s, and ‘battledress’ pockets during World War I. As Clare Rose has shown, the sailor suits which formed a prominent part of boys’ (and girls’) wardrobes from ca. 1875–1920 referred both to naval uniforms and to the culture of seaside holidays. Firms mass-producing clothes for children have always been keen to boost sales by references to popular culture, whether the books of Kate Greenaway in the 1890s, the cartoon

Sources for Research

Colonialism and Childhood

practice in poorer families. Both types of photographs can be used to critique the ideal practices recommended in child-rearing guides, and the neat outfits shown in retail catalogues. Thousands of these photographs have been analysed by Clare Rose to show how families used clothing to identify children as siblings (matching outfits) and as members of a specific age-group (young school child, older school child, and young worker). This evidence of actual practice can be used to verify or critique the claims made in autobiographies. Further exploration of historic sources is needed to provide historic context for the work being done on contemporary children’s clothing and to establish which attitudes to clothes are historically contingent and which are deep-rooted in family structures. Clare Rose See also Fashion, Children’s; Gender; Gender Identity; School Uniforms

Further Readings Cook, D. T. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1108/jfmm.2005.9.2.244.1 Marshall, N. (2008). Dictionary of children’s clothes. London, UK: V&A Publications. Paoletti, J. T. (2012). Pink and blue: Telling the boys from the girls in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Paoletti, J. T. (2015). Sex and unisex, fashion, feminism and the sexual revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. doi:10.1111/j.1542–734x .2012.813_5.x Pollen, A. (2011). Performing spectacular girlhood: Mass-produced dressing-up costumes and the commodification of imagination. Textile History, 42,162–180. doi:10.1179/1743295 11x13123634653820 Rose, C. (1989). Children’s clothes since 1750. London, UK: B. T. Batsford. Rose, C. (2010). Making, selling and wearing boys’ clothes in late-Victorian England. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. doi:10.4324/9781315249957 Rose, C. (2013). Maternal consumption: A view from the past. Journal of Consumer Culture, 13(2), 178–198. doi:10.1177/1469540513480164

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Websites The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera. Retrieved from http://johnjohnson .chadwyck.co.uk/geoLocSubscription.do Trade Catalogues and the American Home. Retrieved from http://www.tradecatalogues.amdigital.co.uk/

Colonialism

and

Childhood

Colonialism encompasses a range of practices and policies which support the expansion of a polity’s territory to incorporate other lands and involves various forms and degrees of domination of the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands already. Children and childhood have been affected by colonialism in diverse ways: As a globalising movement that has transformed lives, colonialism has had distinct impacts on children within both colonising and colonised populations but also modern understandings of childhood have been formed in the context of imperialism and were implicated in the rationale for colonialism. The period of great expansion, dispossession, and economic change that marked the Modern era of colonialism serves as the context in which modern concepts of childhood were shaped, alongside understandings of individual liberty and equality, the nation, and humanity’s potential. These ideals worked in tandem to justify, or make sense of, projects of colonisation. Regulative notions of ‘childhood’ that circulate in colonial cultures have informed colonisers’ identity and understanding of their relationship to colonised peoples. Children’s material histories in colonised territories interact with cultural representations of childhood in these milieus; children of both Indigenous and occupier populations are affected by colonisation in distinct ways to adult members of their groups. Indeed, colonising powers concentrated their energies specifically on the administration of children to support their expansion and limit Indigenous populations, through systems that specifically capture children such as education and child protection. Western notions of childhood have also been used to subjugate Indigenous peoples through the characterisation of them as ‘childlike’ relative to colonisers, who

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understand themselves as ‘adult’ (thus as rational, masterful, and authorised to govern). This entry examines the importance of diverse forms of colonialism and their imbrication with concepts of childhood. This entry further examines the specific impacts of colonialism on children, focusing on Australia as a situation of colonialism and horizon for the elaboration of childhood.

Defining Colonialism Colonialism has existed in a number of distinct ways throughout history: For instance, the ancient Romans colonised parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa for the purpose of building empire, amassing armies, and increasing wealth; Romans and ancient Greeks captured slaves (some of whom were children) who formed an underclass within the polis. When one talks about colonialism today, however, one usually refers to the Modern era of colonialism: movements of people from the 15th to the 19th centuries. This era encompasses the trade in slaves from Africa, the enrichment of the British Empire through the exploitation of India, Asia, and the Pacific, and the establishment of settler colonies in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The two most common forms of colonialism are settler colonialism and exploitation colonialism. ‘Settler colonialism’ involves occupying other lands for the purpose of settlement, by establishing satellite dominions connected to the metropole (or centre of empire). The key purpose of  occupation in ‘exploitation colonialism’, conversely, is the extraction of resources and/or people, to service the expansion of Imperial ­ wealth. Where there is migration in the case of exploitation colonialism, this involves a small administrative class rather than ‘settlers’, as well as Indigenous peoples removed from their homelands to work the land of other colonies and to be traded as slaves and indentured workers. Importantly, the role that children and childhood have played for each of these forms differs substantially. Exploitation colonialism removed children from their homelands and families by either incorporating them into a slave economy (in the case of Africans, for instance) or displacing and/or massacring them to make use of their land for the

production of valuable crops (as with children in the Americas and parts of the Pacific). Whilst exploitation colonists deliberately replenished the stock of slaves with children through breeding, the presence within this system of children ‘as such’ was underthought, due perhaps to the dissonance between this practice and modern ideals of childhood. Settler colonialism, conversely, is marked by a particular preoccupation with conceptions of childhood and regulation of children according to that ideal. For each of these instances, colonialism can be understood to be a highly organised, complex system of expansion involving a number of interconnected techniques, technologies, and spheres of life: from military to trade, government, science, and law, agriculture, industry, domesticity, religion, and the arts. Colonialism expands not only the land at an empire’s disposal but also the power and wealth of its government and citizens. It extends imperial cultural and administrative influence, and the capacity to travel unimpeded to collect information. Colonialism enriches the coloniser materially through the acquisition and cultivation of goods such as sugar, tobacco, silver, and gold, and in the case of settler colonialism, also the land on which colonisers establish settlements. Culturally, colonialism increases the power and freedom of one people by diminishing that of another. Colonialism is, for this reason, not only a brute assertion of might but also a psychological and ideological formation that produces colonial subjects: particularly coloniser-occupiers, who believe in their right to colonise. As Edward W. Said teaches, a key mode of increasing colonial power is through the production of an apparently complete system of knowledge that engenders a hierarchical relation, by placing the coloniser in the position of ‘knower’ and the colonised as ‘object of knowledge’. Intersecting narratives, through a variety of media (literature, scientific texts, art, cartography, museums, film, and television), reduce the colonised other to a caricature embodying the reverse image of the coloniser’s own self-representation. The colonised subject is accordingly depicted as ‘irrational’, ‘capricious’, ‘savage’, ‘simple’, and ‘carnal’, in relation to the coloniser’s reason and capacity. Where the colonised other exceeds the coloniser’s

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expectations—or does not fit to their c­ aricatures— colonisers represent them as ‘inscrutable’ and untrustworthy, and thus at fault for not availing themselves of the colonial’s judgement and exploitation. This process of objectification comprises the epistemological dimension of colonial power: Producing the colonised other as ‘that which is known’ is a technique used to maintain control over them.

Infantilisation of Indigenous Peoples Considerations of this epistemological dimension of colonialism aid understanding of the significance of ‘childhood’ within that system. Colonisers conceptualised colonialism according to the modern European family structure, whereby the metropole ‘reproduces’ itself as colonies, which are, in turn, connected administratively to the ‘parental’ homeland. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), for instance, referred to colonies and plantations as ‘children of the Commonwealth’. This figurative reference to colonies as children is indicative both of the status of colonies ‘and’ of children’s status at that time: Children were subordinated to adults just as colonies existed in relations of subjection to the metropole or ‘mother country’. Ideas about the relation of authority between parent and child permeated coloniser understandings of what colonisation meant for all parties. The colony child was a subject state that, with some support, was expected eventually to ‘grow up’ and become independent. Figures such as the ‘wild colonial boy’ represented the status of the colony: as young, unruly, and in need of firm discipline but also—and more affectionately—as adventurous, experimental: a fledgling nation. Indigenous peoples, conversely, were characterised as incorrigibly childlike in the most deprecating of terms. Indigenous peoples have historically been portrayed as incapable of autonomy, irresponsible, foolish, and resistant to education or improvement; this caricature has had profound implications for the ‘administration’ of colonies and ongoing relations between colonised and coloniser peoples. This infantilisation of Indigenous peoples is ideologically consistent with cultural chauvinism and White supremacy, as well as Western assumptions about patriarchal authority

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over children. Toby Rollo has argued that understandings of childhood, as inherently uncivilised and in need of correction, condition the colonial relation by justifying violence. As with contemporaneous discourses regarding the disciplining of children, colonialists’ brutal (often lethal) methods are thereby framed as performing a ‘civilising’ function, thus ultimately for the natives’ own good. Such ideas about childhood and Indigeneity interacted in the colonial management of Indigenous populations. However, projects of colonisation also played out an optimism regarding the idea of human progress that was encapsulated by ‘modern childhood’, conceived of as ‘innocent’. The colonised world was thus populated, in the colonial imagination, by ‘good children’ (colonists) and ‘bad children’ (colonised peoples).

Colonial Children and Childhood Modern era colonialism and ‘childhood’ were forged within the same cultural, historical, and geographical milieus. As Philippe Ariès and other historians of childhood have argued, a heightened attention to childhood as a distinct stage of life— with its own interests, spaces, and objects—is a development of modernity, which emerged in tandem with other artefacts of modernisation: urbanisation, reduction in family size, emergence of the nation-state, improvements to public health and social ‘hygiene’, decrease in infant mortality, regulation of children’s labour, the movement of children into education instead of work, and age segregation within schools. Modern political philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau modelled the proto-citizen on ‘the child’, understood as a ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate) in Locke’s ‘oeuvre’, or, following Rousseau, as humanity at its purest and most virtuous, before corruption by the society of men. This prelapsarian view of ‘the child’ represented a departure from earlier, deficit understandings of childhood. Saint Augustine, for instance, had represented his childhood self in The Confessions (CE 397–400) as sinfulness incarnate and infants’ cries as evidence of their wickedness. The ‘goodness’ the moderns attributed to children signalled a new confidence about human nature; the child—symbolic of human potential—was to

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be protected and educated, rather than (as previously) punished and trained. Importantly, however, this innocent child of modernity was wrought by specific historical opportunities and constraints: Whereas children had previously toiled alongside adults, a budding middle class withdrew their children from labour in favour of education, which was newly seen in an era marked by the emergence of the nationstate as a necessary preparation for citizenship. This led to an investment in children as unproductive assets set aside for the development of human capital. Children became a class of person through whom adults could speculate about what humanity (and the nation) might become. In this time of great optimism, the instruction given to elite and middle-class children thereby reflected the ideals of imperial expansion. Metropolitan educational texts prepared these children to adopt their mantle as colonial master, and children’s literature was steeped in the empire, through the representation of adventurous explorers alongside tableaus of idealised (yet inferior) ‘native life’. Peter Pan, for instance, lays down the coordinates of the child of empire, by situating the idealisation of childhood within a sanguine representation of colonialism, complete with ‘lost boys’, swashbuckling pirates, domestic girls, and ‘Indians’. Modern ideas regarding childhood found fertile soil in the colonies, which were viewed as experimental fields for the cultivation of a new humanity; and settler children were a site through which these ideals were contemplated. Marriage and the establishment of nuclear families were encouraged in the colony, to encourage convicts to settle, and form the basis of a just and stable society. Accordingly, a great deal of significance regarding the establishment of the colony was invested in settlercolonial children, and ambivalence about the colony’s prospects managed through them. The discourses and practices that evidence this ambivalence are diverse and depend on the particular colonial context. For instance, as Peter Pierce demonstrates in Country of Lost Children (1999), Australian literature developed depicting settler children who wander from the homestead, becoming lost to the bush. These stories represent anxiety about the unknown territory beyond that already claimed by settlers. Such stories are often marked by the absence of the Indigenous peoples

who live just beyond the perimeter: the child disappears, mysteriously, never to be seen again. Such representations thus articulate the myth of ‘Terra Nullius’ (that the land belonged to no one). In a minority of stories, Indigenous actors are present, not as antagonists in contest for land, but as mystical helpers who reunite children with their families—as if implicitly to recognise the settlers’ claim to the land. Equivalent literature in the Americas, by contrast, represented conflictual relations with Indigenous peoples. Here, settlercolonial children were represented as vulnerable not to nature, but rather to abduction by Native Americans in the course of frontier wars. These fears had some basis in fact, as capturing women and children was a feature of Native American war craft (just as the massacre of women and children was practiced by colonisers). Settler-colonial children were also, however, invested with hope for the future of the colony. This was expressed through representations of the ‘nativised’ White child. The first generations of free-born children were characterised differently to those who had travelled from the metropole: As grown in rougher soil, sturdier, more adventurous, more at home in the environment their parents found so hostile. Representing an incipient nationhood, this nativised child effectively purified settler-colonials of the darker aspects of colonisation, through identification with the child’s innocence. One such figure was the ‘Little Boy from Manly’: a cartoon first drawn by Livingstone Hopkins in 1885, but adopted and used by other illustrators until ca. 1915, to personify an emerging ‘Australia’ as innocent, plucky, and incorruptible. This ‘nativisation’ also performed an important role culturally in the displacement of Indigenous peoples. Books such as May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918) assimilated settler children to the once-inhospitable bush, depicting them as Australian native flora: the ‘gumnut babies’ Ragged Blossom and Little Obelia. The fairskinned gumnut babies must avoid the evil, darkskinned ‘Banksia men’ who mean to abduct them and are understood to represent Aboriginal men, posing a threat to White innocence. An earlier classic of Australian children’s literature, Ethel C. Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), portrays a lost 5-year-old settler girl who finds she is able to understand the language of wild animals and

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develops a particular friendship with a red Kangaroo guide. Whilst this book ‘nativises’ the settler-colonial child through this relationship with native fauna, the relationship with Aboriginal people is antagonistic and dehumanising. From a distant, hidden vantage, Dot and her Kangaroo witness a corroboree, which is described as savage and the people as ‘terrible’: ‘They did not look like human beings at all, but like dreadful demons, they were so wicked and ugly in appearance’. The effect of this literature was to establish, through the figure of the child, settler-colonial belonging, whilst also suggesting that First Nations people do not belong and should be replaced. Whilst free settler children performed a cleansing innocence for colonisers, working-class and convict children were regarded more ambivalently, according to premodern conceptions of childhood as in need of correction. The establishment of the penal colony of New South Wales was precipitated by conditions of overcrowding, unemployment, and severe poverty in England, and roughly 15% of those transported were children, either with convict parents or as convicts themselves. To address the rise in the metropole of juvenile pauperism and part in the criminal economy (as depicted by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist), charity schools were established. This model was then exported to the colonies, where schools aimed to cultivate sound morals in ‘native-born’ children of convicts, through instruction in religion, basic literacy, and skills that prepared them for domestic service to the free settler class. The Female Orphan School in Sydney Cove, for instance, taught spinning and needlework, and most girls graduated into domestic service for officers’ wives. In America, where Augustinian notions of childhood (as blighted by original sin) still held sway, Puritan schools drew no distinction between religious and secular teaching, and the key purpose of education was to prepare settler children for salvation.

Colonised Children Prior to colonisation, the education First Nations children received did not involve segregation from adults or production but was, rather, integrated in the life of the group. Children learned through involvement, observation, and imitation of adult

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activities and were supported by an extended network of kin rather than being the sole responsibility of parents. With the arrival of Europeans, coloniser understandings of childhood became integral to the techniques of colonisation. Just as working-class and convict children—who could not perform the modern ideal of childhood— became sites of training and improvement, Aboriginal children also became the focus of efforts to ‘civilise’ the Indigene, through education (extermination of culture and language; training for domestic service or labouring) and child protection systems (removal and segregation from kin and country). In Australia, these systems culminated in a eugenic project to whiten the Aboriginal race through managed miscegenation, or a programme of ‘breeding out the colour’. A leading light of this movement, Auber Octavius Neville, was appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 to 1936. Neville recommended that the so-called ‘full-blood’ Aboriginals should be segregated, and—according to the social Darwinism that prevailed at that time—would eventually die out, as they were thought to be evolutionarily unfit. Aboriginal people of mixed descent (disparagingly called ‘half-castes’, ‘quadroons’, and ‘octoroons’) were seen as inconvenient and ambiguous remnants of Indigeneity. Neville identified children of mixed descent as key sites for the termination of the Aboriginal race, through biological and social absorption into the White population. Under the administration of the Aborigines’ Protection Board, these children—now called the ‘Stolen Generations’—were removed by police from their families by force and often deception: For instance, they were often taken without their mothers’ knowledge whilst at school or in hospital. They were removed to harsh and often abusive institutions, to be trained as agricultural labourers and domestic servants, and were prevented from speaking language or being socialised into their own culture. Stolen Generations members were frequently told their parents had died or relinquished them voluntarily. In Canada, too, Indigenous children were removed from their families to Residential Schools, where many were abused and forbidden to practice language and culture. Intergenerational trauma caused by the destruction of familial relationships

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and cultural and social support systems means that First Nations children are still 10 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be taken into foster or out-of-home care in Australia. 2016 Canadian Census data found that 52.2% of children in care were First Nations, though only 7.7% of the child population in Canada is Indigenous.

The ‘Frontier’ of Contemporary Childhood Today, as settler-colonial nations attempt to come to terms with their colonial history, children’s education is a battleground through which ‘history wars’ are fought: An arena for contestation over whether the Stolen Generations exist, or Aboriginal history should be taught. Anxieties about settler-colonial national identity are thereby invested in children. ‘Indigenous childhood’ remains a dense locus through which this anxiety is managed. In Australia, this has taken the form of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (2007), which introduced a raft of welfare reforms and changes to land tenure and alcohol prohibition and was triggered by claims of widespread child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities. This legislation has led to a degree of government control over First Nations peoples not seen since the abolition of the Aboriginal Protection Board in 1969 but has not seen criminal prosecutions that would justify the original claims. Controversies regarding levels of incarceration of Aboriginal children, including the torture by correctional officers of juveniles detained at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory in 2016, are also a legacy of colonialism (~100% of children in North Territory prisons are Aboriginal). In Canada, the disappearance and probable murder of a Saskatchewan Indigenous girl is chronicled in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation podcast, Finding Cleo, which sheds light on the lasting impacts of the Adopt Indian and Métis programme, better known as the ‘Sixties Scoop’. Childhood is a frame through which the non-Indigenous mainstream is better disposed to sympathise with the injustices of colonisation; however, Indigenous children are thereby also more liable to be targets of ongoing colonial intervention and ‘rescue’. Joanne Faulkner

See also Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children; Children and Nationalism; Eugenics; Indigenous Childhoods; Postcolonial Childhoods

Further Readings Faulkner, J. (2016). Young and Free: [Post]colonial ontologies of childhood: Memory and history in Australia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International. King, W. (1991). Stolen childhood: Slave youth in nineteenth-century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. doi:10.1086/ahr/102.2.523 Kociumbas, J. (1997). Australian childhood: A history. St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Kutzer, M. D. (2000). Empire’s children: Empire and imperialism in classic British children’s books. New York, NY: Garland. doi:10.4324/9780203906859 Read, P. (2007). The stolen generations: The removal of Aboriginal children in New South Wales, 1883 to 1969 (6th ed.). Surry Hills, Australia: NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Rollo, T. (2018). Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child. Settler Colonial Studies, 8(1), 60–79. doi:10.1080/22014 73x.2016.1199826 Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Veracini, L. (2010). Settler colonialism: A theoretical overview. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Columbine (High School) Massacre, U.S. On April 20, 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a rampage shooting at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, wounding 24 and killing 12 students and one teacher. It was not the first rampage shooting to take place in a school, but it was the deadliest school shooting in history at the time and the second-most-covered news event of the 1990s, second only to Orenthal James Simpson’s car chase with police and televised murder trial. The scope, brutality, and influence on subsequent shootings made Columbine the noun for lethal school shootings. This entry offers an overview of  the Columbine shooting and explores

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representations of Columbine in the media and popular culture since the event took place.

Background Meticulously designed over 8 months, on the morning of April 20, Harris and Klebold implemented their carefully structured plan to kill as many peers as possible and destroy the school building. By 11:09 in the morning, they planted two homemade bombs timed to detonate at 11:17 in the school cafeteria. The bombs were hidden in large duffle bags among the backpacks of roughly 480 students eating lunch at the time. The backseat of Harris’s car was filled with more explosives set to detonate at 11:47 when the parking lot was expected to be crowded with police and emergency personnel responding to the cafeteria explosions. Harris and Klebold planned to be stationed outside two entrances of the school building to fire upon those fleeing the explosions. With watches synchronized to the bombs’ timers, Harris and Klebold waited in the parking lot for the cafeteria explosions, but the bombs did not explode. Police later determined all the explosives’ detonators were faulty. Realizing the first phase of the attack had failed, Harris and Klebold took their guns (seven assorted rifles, shotguns, and firearms purchased by a friend at a gun show) and launched a commando-style assault. The two first fired upon students that were eating lunch on the lawn, killing Rachel Scott and seriously wounding others. Three students emerged from a side door for a smoke break between classes, were fired upon, and Daniel Rohrbough bled to death from his wounds. Patti Nielson, a teacher on lunch supervision, went outside to investigate the sound of shots and was hit by shrapnel in the shoulder from Harris and Klebold. She ran to the library, warned students, and called the police. The sheriff arrived at approximately 11:24 and shot at Harris and Klebold, who returned fire and fled into the school. The shooters ran through the school throwing pipe bombs and shooting at those they came across. After helping to evacuate students from the cafeteria, teacher Dave Sanders started toward the library to continue evacuations there. En route to the library, Sanders came face-to-face with the

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shooters. Turning and running, Sanders was shot twice from behind by Harris and later died from his wounds in a classroom surrounded by students and teachers trying to save his life. At 11:29, Harris and Klebold came into the library and began their killing in earnest. Fiftytwo students and several teachers hid under desks. The shooters demanded everyone get up, and when no one obeyed one of the gunmen said, “Fine, then I’ll start shooting.” During the shooters’ time in the library Kyle Velasquez, Steven Curnow, Cassie Bernall, ­ ­ Isaiah Shoels, Matthew Kechter, John Tomlin, Kelly Fleming, Lauren Townsend, Corey DePooter, and Daniel Mauser were all killed. Twelve more were wounded from the barrage of gunfire shot under the desks. Harris and Klebold left the library at 11:42 and wandered through the school, throwing more bombs as they went. Just after noon, at 12:02, they re-entered the library, now evacuated except for the dead, and killed themselves with shots to the head. The massacre lasted 45 min. Harris and Klebold left behind detailed records of their lives and plans that fed into speculations and debates regarding the motives for the massacre. Harris created the Trench Coat Mafia website that contained essays detailing his belief systems, hate lists littered with names of Columbine students, and descriptions of the vandalism he and his friends had perpetrated. Also found were ­Harris and Klebold’s private journals, films of themselves testing weapons, a short film in which they portrayed hitmen hired by a bullied student to kill his victimizers, and the basement tapes in which they detailed the reasons for the shooting and said their goodbyes to family and friends. These artifacts were scrounged for answers and clues as to what aggravated the massacre. Evidence suggests the shooters experienced systematic bullying at Columbine, and some argue the massacre functioned as revenge for the humiliations they had suffered. The mental health of the boys has been scrutinized and said to have contributed to their violent actions. Investigators believe Klebold experienced depression, and families of Columbine’s victims sued the pharmaceutical company that manufactured Luvox (an antidepressant found in Klebold’s

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system) alleging the drug had predisposed ­Klebold toward the shooting. Harris was posthumously diagnosed a clinical psychopath who controlled Klebold, though this diagnosis has been criticized as ignoring other factors that may have influenced Harris’s actions and as absolving Klebold’s role.

Representations of Columbine The films, music, and video games Harris and Klebold mention in their recordings and writings were usually violent, leading to arguments that the aggressive media they consumed influenced their own violence. Creators of some of the shooters’ favorite media were unsuccessfully sued by victims’ families, who alleged the creators should have been aware that their products could lad to mirroring violence. That violent media motivated the boys’ actions has largely been debunked, and critics contend that violent media helps to release aggression rather than aggravate it and that the media Harris and Klebold consumed did not cause the massacre but gave it narrative form. Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002) is an early response to the Columbine massacre. In the documentary, Moore argues that the United States has become gripped by a moral panic that is created and sustained by a climate of fear perpetuated by popular culture, which fosters gun violence in individuals’ search for protection. Gus Vant Sant’s film Elephant (2003) is arguably the first of many pieces of fiction to draw directly from Columbine. The film follows a rampage shooting, eerily similar to Columbine, from the perspectives of the two male shooters, the victims, and the survivors. The two shooters are depicted easily ordering assault rifles online. Journalist Dave Cullen, who covered the massacre for several media outlets in 1999, published Columbine (2009) after 10 years of research that includes interviews with Columbine survivors and the parents of the victims and the shooters. Cullen’s account sought to demystify the mythology surrounding the massacre by expanding what aggravated the violence beyond Harris and Klebold having been bullied to wider social (such as gun regulations) and personal factors (such as mental health). While responses such as these shine a light on the role firearms

had on the Columbine massacre, little has changed at the level of national American firearms policies. Harris stated in one of the basement tapes: “We’re going to kick-start a revolution” among the dispossessed and despised students of the world. While a revolution did not occur on the scale the shooters may have hoped for, the majority of successive school shooters named Harris and Klebold as inspirations, a goal to surpass, or thought of their attacks as homages to Columbine. Two of the most obvious imitations were the Red Lake shooting (2005) by Jeffrey Weise, and the Virginia Tech massacre (2007) by Cho Seung-Hui, where evidence was found that both perpetrators had closely studied Columbine. On February 14, 2018, a rampage shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, claimed the lives of 17 students and teachers. Student survivors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas considered themselves as part of the Columbine legacy and found it unacceptable that 19 years following the watershed Columbine massacre little had been done to address what they considered to be the main aggravator of lethal school violence: access to firearms. The student Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivors organized a nationwide protest called March for Our Lives on March 24, 2018, that demanded reformed gun laws, and the youth-led organization continues to demand new legislation. Anah-Jayne Markland See also Children Who Murder; Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S.

Further Readings Brooks, B., & Merritt, R. (2002). No easy answers: The truth behind death at Columbine. New York, NY: Lantern Books. Cullen, D. (2009). Columbine. New York, NY: Twelve. Kass, J. (2009). Columbine: A true crime story, a victim, the killers and the nation’s search for answers. Denver, CO: Ghost Road Press. Larkin, R. W. (2007). Comprehending Columbine. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Webber, J. A. (2017). Beyond Columbine: School violence and the virtual. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Communion, Holy

Communion, Holy Holy communion is a religious ritual that occurs for the first time in childhood in many Christian traditions around the world. Also known by the Greek term eucharist, which means thanksgiving, communion is considered a sacrament, or an event of key spiritual importance, in most Christian Churches. This entry explains why communion is relevant to childhood studies by examining some of the official and unofficial interpretations of the ritual, particularly within the Roman Catholic Church (the most populous Christian church). This entry further addresses the general religious significance of communion, changes in the purposes and meanings of the first communion, and how first communion acts as a symbol of the health of the Catholic Church and informs social status in Catholic communities.

The Significance of Holy Communion The religious significance of communion is that Jesus Christ has a special presence in the ritual. The celebration of the eucharist recalls Christ’s command at the Last Supper to remember his sacrifice for the world. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches view the bread and wine that is consecrated, or specially blessed, during mass as the real body and blood of Christ. Anglican Churches vary on this interpretation. In contemporary Roman Catholicism, children normally receive first communion at the age of seven. However, infant communion and confirmation are often celebrated in Orthodox Churches as part of baptism, where the infant receives a small amount of wine. Furthermore, first communion is often celebrated during adolescence after confirmation in Anglican traditions.

Holy Communion as a Rite of Passage Official and unofficial interpretations of communion tell us something about how the meaning and significance of childhood has changed in different places and times. Roman Catholic first communion has not consistently been focused on as a sacrament of initiation, nor was it sequenced as the second of three sacraments (after baptism

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and before confirmation). As Peter McGrail explains, during the first millennium, infants were individually admitted to the eucharist at baptism, and officially initiated into the Catholic community. However, towards the end of the first millennium, eucharistic theology moved toward viewing the bread and wine as the real body and blood of Christ. This provoked questions regarding the ‘age of reason’ (i.e., when a child was capable of assenting to receive the body of Christ). No formal guidance was given on this age, and it was understood that children develop differently and should receive first communion individually. It is not surprising that such understandings emerged amid a long historical process of structuring childhood as time and space unique from adulthood. Parish-based group religious instruction ultimately laid the foundations for contemporarily collective, age-based ceremonies. The public celebration of the first communion began most notably in France in the late 16th century. Rather than being officially concerned about initiation as such, McGrail argues these collective rituals developed because of a concern to link intellectual development with sacramental theology. Yet, by this stage, the first communion had effectively become a rite of passage into adolescence. The emotive spectacle of gendered, youthful piety affected adults, sustained parish vitality, and sought to underline the importance of the event for the children through their lives. The display of children thus became a key way of expressing piety and belonging to the church.

Holy Communion and the Catholic Doctrine The Vatican’s mission to tighten up its hierarchy and laws in the wake of rising European nationstate power led to a number of reforms over the 19th century. One consequence was the 1910 decision by Pope Pius X to decree the age of first communion to be 7 years. This move reflected the official reframing of first communion as a celebration of childhood innocence. Understanding was now less important than the moral discipline to be inculcated through regular receipt of communion. This change helped deepen popular understandings of communion as a rite of passage. The Second Vatican Council brought back the early

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church’s focus on communion as a sacrament of initiation, with baptism preceding it and confirmation becoming associated with movement into adolescence. But McGrail in the United Kingdom and Susan Ridgley Bales in the United States argue the ritual as it is practiced is not working to its official purpose as a sacrament of Catholic initiation, given the lack of commitment to the eucharist after first communion in these contexts. Instead, it remains significant in the popular Catholic imagination here as a rite of passage and celebration of childhood innocence. Studies of how children experience communion have remained relatively few. Yet they are likely to increase, given the turn toward exploring children’s religiosity and spirituality. Research in Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States has shown that children interpret the religious significance of the event in multiple ways and view the material aspects of first communion (dress, gifts, etc.) as key parts of the ritual that reflect growing up and being celebrated by one’s community. While the significance of these aspects of the ritual for children and families may reflect societal secularization, clerics and laypeople have voiced concerns about non-church-controlled aspects of first communion ceremonies for decades. Concerns over public piety and taste, while often genuine from a religious perspective, can also act to define who has status and who does not within religious communities. It remains important for such communities to negotiate contested interpretations of their teachings, particularly as they relate to childhood and children’s views. Karl Kitching See also Children as Competent Social Actors; Christianity; Religion and Children; Rites of Passage

Further Readings Kitching, K. (2019). Childhood, religion and school injustice. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press. Lodge, A. (1999). First communion in Carnduffy: A religious and secular rite of passage. Irish Educational Studies, 18(1), 210–222. doi:10.1080/ 0332331990180120 McGrail, P. (2007). First communion: Ritual, church and popular religious identity. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. doi:10.4324/9781315582443

Ridgely Bales, S. (2005). When I was a child: Children’s interpretations of first communion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sokrocki, M., & Frias, S. M. (2006). The significance of children’s drawings of their first holy communion in Barcelona, Spain. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 24, 97–108.

Community

of

Learners

The concept of learning has for decades been problematized, discussed, and subjected to different kinds of theoretical developments, especially those aimed at overcoming individualistic, cognitivistic, and abstract ways of conceptualizing learning. In the critique, the figurative representation of the learner as a container absorbing a kind of unambiguous matter through instructions has been emphasized. It has been claimed that the learner, as well as the context of learning and the very process, disappears in this mechanistic picture. Thus, the concept of communities of learners is part of a broad theoretical movement that connects learning to an actor in a social context. Specifically, the concept locates learning as an aspect of subjects’ participation in social practices. The concept of communities of learners is also connected to a contextualization of learning processes and an attempt to understand the social conditions of learning in a concrete way. This, in turn, paves the way for analyses of how participants constitute conditions for each other in learning communities. This entry examines learning as a vital part of social life and further examines some of the critiques and questions raised by research on communities of learners.

Learning as Part of Social Life Discussions about learning are often rooted in historical dichotomies between social life and individual learning. Learning has been conceptualized as a result of teaching, and in relation to optimizing learning, teaching has been separated from everyday life activities. In relation to such conceptual short circuits, Jean Lave has argued for a decentering of our understanding: Instead of focusing on teaching and individual internalization, it

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may be more productive to focus on the structuring processes and social conditions in learning communities. This is a situated approach to learning, which among other things breaks with the teacher/ learner dyad. Focusing on learning situations, one must consider that individuals find many more resources for learning processes than intended instructions and a diverse field of essential actors enters the analyses. This highlights peers’ signification to each other and the social conditions of participation in learning communities. The concept of learning communities is meant to focus on situated interplay, social dynamics, and unequal conditions of participation, as well as societal differentiations, categorizations, and discourses in explorations of learning and learning problems. By ignoring social interplay in communities of learners, learning problems become understood in abstract ways as though they are unrelated to what is occurring in the contexts of learning. Social dilemmas become conceptualized as individual deficits that some learners have, thus suggesting compensatory interventions. The concept of communities of learners is supposed to open up for analyses of learning difficulties with respect to what learners are participating in and to encompassing social coordination and conflicts in an understanding of the difficulties.

Critiques and Further Research Still, involving a concept such as community in a contextualization of learning conditions also entails critique and discussions. The concept of community has been criticized for building on an idea of social life as ruled by abstract values, referring to harmonious, homogeneous, and static entities, and in this way for being ideological and for overlooking social differences, such as how participants are divided by class, gender, and age among other factors. In relation to this critique, a point of departure in community may have individualizing and excluding significations. In contrast to a homogeneous perspective, the concept of community could highlight differences and constitutive processes and has recently become connected with emergence in ongoing encounters, where persons, nature, nonhuman participants,

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and communities affect one another and come into being through their meetings. In this way, doing/becoming a community comes into focus and communities become emergent in ongoing encounters among coexisting multiplicities. Another critique calls for conceptual development anchoring communities of learners in historical and societal practice to be able to analyze the ways persons are connected in structuring interplay and through their different relations to common and contradictory matters. When learners get into trouble—for instance in school—they are not just taking part in accidental relations. They take part in communities dealing with historical contradictions, differentiations, processes of exclusion, and so on. Many parties take part in debates about educational institutions and communities of learners are the object of social conflicts. This calls for connecting the concept to historical contradictions and political conflicts in relation to the education of children in a society. In institutional communities of learners, the participants are met and understood differently according to different kinds of categories related to the very matter of education, such as competences, disciplinary behavior, learning disabilities, and so on. The concept of communities of learners changes the investigation of learning difficulties from individual categorizations to analysis and intervention in relation to how communities deal with internal differences and with the societal contradictions in which they are placed. In relation to learning, attention is changed from individual acquisition of unambiguous knowledge to relating learning to participation in negotiations about how to understand and change local practices of  society. In the professional practices, such changes point to working directly with conditions in ­communities—taking learning difficulties as a cause for the development of a community. Learners learn by taking part in the ongoing changes in social communities, but the communities also develop through different contributions to the common social practice. The concept of communities of learners could inspire caregivers to adopt concrete types of exploration of situations in learners’ lives and provide concepts for being curious about learners’ perspectives on what is at stake in their everyday life. Used in this way, the concept and its attention

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to how communities deal with differences and to situated inequality in relation to taking part could open up for democratic development in the educative practices for children. Charlotte Hojholt See also Home Learning Environment; Intergenerational Learning; Social and Emotional Learning

Further Readings Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hedegaard, M. (2017). Children’s cultural learning in everyday family life exemplified at the dinner setting. In M. Fleer & B. van Oers (Eds.), International handbook of early childhood education. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-94024-0927-7_79 Højholt, C. (2018). Children’s perspectives and learning communites. In I. M. Hedegaard, K. Aronsson, C. Højholt, & O. Skær Ulvik (Eds.), Children, childhood, and everyday life: Children’s perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 93–111). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1999). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9780511815355.003

Concerted Cultivation, Parenting Style The term concerted cultivation refers to the mode of child-rearing that middle-class parents perform in deliberate efforts to foster their children’s development and promote cognitive and social skills. Concerted cultivation is carried out on three levels: (1) child-rearing in the home, (2) interaction with schools, and (3) organized activities for children. All three levels are seen to promote skills in interacting with adults on an equal basis and to further promote a strong sense of entitlement. These skills and sense of entitlement constitute what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes as cultural capital—the know-how and behavior that allows one to achieve in school and make the

social connections necessary to become part of the middle class. Understandings of concerted cultivation grew out of a study by sociologist Annette Lareau on U.S. White and Black middle- and working-class parents. Hence, concerted cultivation must be understood in tandem with the accomplishment of natural growth, the mode of child-rearing characteristic of the working class. The distinction between the two is important for understanding how social class shapes the everyday dynamics of children’s and parents’ lives and how future class advantage is shaped through children’s daily lives. This entry offers an overview of Lareau’s key findings and discusses concerted cultivation as a classbased practice, children’s application of concerted cultivation, and variations of the practice across different cultural contexts.

Annette Lareau’s Research Findings Lareau’s study followed 12 families over the course of about 2 years. Using intensive observation, she and her research team observed the families at home, in the community, and in interaction with schools and other institutions. She found that the way parents raise their children follows a class-based cultural logic or pattern of practices, even as parents are not consciously aware they are doing so. Middle-class parents are concerned to cultivate their individual child’s potential talents, skills, and opinions and act deliberately to do so. They reason with their children, stimulating cognition and the ability to express an opinion. They organize their children’s lives around activities that can stimulate and enrich burgeoning talents and skills and that can foster social interaction skills. They closely monitor what goes on at school and may often intervene on their child’s behalf to ensure s/he is getting the special attention her/his needs and talents demand. By contrast, working-class parents aim for the accomplishment of natural growth; they view children’s development as a natural progression and are concerned to provide children with a safe and comfortable environment in which to develop. They allow their children extensive leisure time in which play is child-initiated and daily interactions with kin are frequent. Still the boundaries between adults and children are clearly demarcated by

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ways of speaking and the division between childfocused leisure and the adult world. This mode of child-rearing fosters child autonomy with respect to time and leisure; strong family ties; and a sense of constraint in interactions with people of authority in institutional positions. These disparate modes of child-rearing have implications for children’s daily lives and for their future class status. Concerted cultivation shapes children’s lives as structured, demanding, and often hectic but also varied and full of resources including professionals focused on them as individuals. This mode of child-rearing is crucial in transferring class advantage to middle-class children. Concerted cultivation exposes middle-class children to the resources of enrichment activities and special treatment at school and equips them with social competence that they themselves can put toward furthering even greater access to advantages as they progress along their educational careers. The skills that middle-class children develop—interacting with adults, advocating for one’s opinion, perseverance on the playing field, demanding what one feels one is entitled to—are skills valued by U.S. American society. So concerted cultivation serves not only to differentiate middle-class from working-class children; this difference is viewed by society as social competence, or by the sociological term cultural capital. Though initially developed in a U.S. context, the concept of concerted cultivation has rung true for middle-class populations across the western world and has received a great deal of scholarly attention. This research has brought into question whether and to what degree concerted cultivation is a classed practice, how children activate the advantages of concerted cultivation, and how concerted cultivation differs over various contexts.

Concerted Cultivation as a Class-based Practice Concerted cultivation was conceptualized to characterize how modes of child-rearing can contribute to the reproduction of class. Further studies sought to test this claim empirically. They were concerned whether only middle-class parents utilize concerted cultivation, whether their use of it correlated with student achievement, and

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whether its use by other parents could have similar results. These studies operationalized concerted ­ cultivation into measurable practices— children’s ­participation in enrichment activities, parents’ participation in parent–teacher meetings, number of books at home—and measured class advantage by student achievements. Such studies found that although concerted cultivation correlates with achievement, it is not the only factor that explains the effects of class on achievement. Furthermore, though concerted cultivation is primarily linked to the middle class, it is often put into use by parents from other groups, particularly among those with available resources such as a higher level of education. Other factors, such as the number of children at home, mother’s employment, and speaking a language other than English, also factor into parents’ modes of childrearing. Still, concerted cultivation practices such as attending parent–teacher conferences or even enrolling children in enrichment activities do not have the same effect on student achievement for students of parents from different ethnic or class groups; the effect of concerted cultivation depends on how one is positioned in the educational institution by class and race.

Children’s Applications of Concerted Cultivation The link between concerted cultivation and the reproduction of class advantage depends on children themselves responding to their parents’ child-rearing efforts and putting to use the social skills that this child-rearing promotes. Only a handful of studies have looked at whether concerted cultivation influences children’s approaches to learning, their use of linguistic skills, and how they interact with teachers or other adults in positions of authority. Despite the dearth of research in this vein, it is worth mentioning Jessi Strieb’s study of preschoolers’ use of linguistic styles in the classroom. This study revealed that young children perform class behavior learned at home, creating class disparities in teachers’ attention, opportunities to practice linguistic and verbal skills, and opportunities to practice negotiation and leadership skills. Another small corpus of studies has focused on how young adults use skills inculcated through concerted cultivation to

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maneuver through higher educational institutions. Middle-class students demonstrate more ability to follow the rules of the game of higher education regarding both application and acceptance and getting through college. Prior to college, they develop social networks and gain work experience through extra-curricular leadership and internships. Once in college, they feel entitled to ask for help in maneuvering bureaucracy, and when problems do arise, seek out people and resources that help them attend to their needs. These studies indicate that concerted cultivation matters not only during childhood but continues to matter vis-à-vis educational institutions as children grow up.

Variation Over Contexts Concerted cultivation is noticeable across many cultural contexts; indeed it is a central feature of a widespread perception of proper middle-class parenting. Concerted cultivation reflects a growing perception that children are at risk in their daily lives, and so it is the responsibility of parents to ensure children are monitored and guided towards positive outcomes in all aspects of their lives. Various studies of middle-class parents in the United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, Israel, and Korea, to name a few, have traced practices that reflect this logic of child-rearing, though the meanings parents attach to these practices vary. Take, for example, the practice of encouraging children’s participation in enrichment activities: U.S. parents encourage activities as a way of preparing children with the competitive edge to get into college; the anxiety over future college admission drives this practice. Italian parents encourage activities as part of the world of children and downplay performance and competition. Among middle-class Israeli mothers, Russian-immigrant mothers encourage participation as a means for developing a multilateral person, central in their Russian view of child-rearing, while native-born mothers emphasized the value of participation for the development of sociability—a value central to Israeli conceptions of the importance of the collective. Concerted cultivation has a basic form across contexts that is largely linked to ideals of middle-class parenting, but its aims, means, and ends can vary

according to a society’s specific institutional context and cultural ideas about proper development. Lauren Erdreich and Deborah Golden See also Cultural Capital; Natural Growth, Parenting Style; Parenting Studies; Parenting Styles, History of

Further Readings Cheadle, J. E., & Amato, P. R. (2011). A quantitative assessment of Lareau’s qualitative conclusions about class, race, and parenting. Journal of Family Issues, 32(5), 679–706. doi:10.1177/0192513x10386305 Irwin, S., & Elley, S. (2011). Concerted cultivation? Parenting values, education and class diversity. Sociology, 45(3), 480–495. doi:10.1177/ 0038038511399618 Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Race, class, and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/ctx.2004.3.1.64 Vincent, C., & Maxwell, C. (2016). Parenting priorities and pressures: Furthering understanding of ‘concerted cultivation’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(2), 269–281. doi:10.1080/01596306 .2015.1014880

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Everyday Life

How do children arrange their everyday life with others across contexts? The concept of the “conduct of everyday life” constitutes an endeavor to conceptualize the unity between the active efforts of subjects to arrange their everyday life, and their societal, historical, and fundamental social conditions for doing so. The concept is related to a broad methodological movement in psychology and child studies that is concerned with overcoming abstract conceptualizations of children and their development. In different theoretical ways, researchers aim to conceptualize children as actors, subjects, and persons acting in concrete societal contexts and in relation to historical conditions, discourses, and politics. This entry examines children and their everyday conduct and further explores some key theoretical and empirical studies that have sought to highlight children’s everyday conduct.

Conduct of Everyday Life

Children and Their Conduct Studies on children’s everyday conduct stem from a critique of investigations of children and their functions that remain isolated from the social life in which children participate or overly dependent on narrow age-based assumptions. Notably, different adults have quite divergent standpoints on children, but these conflicts are rarely part of psychological investigations and neither are children’s contradictory and unequal possibilities for conducting everyday life. Instead, problems in children’s lives are understood by focusing on children’s special needs, deficits, weak family background, intergenerational transmission, and shifting diagnostic categories. In this way, one could say that social problems—and disagreements about them—are displaced by individualized categories. Thus, in order to investigate and strengthen children’s possibilities for participating in their daily life, one needs conceptualizations that capture social conditions, as well as the subjective efforts implied in living everyday life.

Theoretical Foundations The theoretical background for understanding children’s conduct of everyday life is grounded in the German psychologist Klaus Holzkamp’s theories. Holzkamp’s work seeks to establish a subject science or critical psychology, which overcomes the tendencies to enclose persons in isolated psychological special functions and grap the richness and complexity of everyday life, as well as the connectedness between human subjects and the world. Holzkamp introduced the concept in psychology in the mid-1990s. Since then, it has been taken up and elaborated by a multiplicity of researchers across disciplines, often with a focus on collectivity and intersubjectivity, as well as on the intrinsic coordination and conflictuality of everyday life across contexts.

Empirical Research Empirical child studies focused on children’s conduct of everyday life emphasize how children conduct their everyday life together with other children and adults in relation to societal conditions, demands, and contradictions. This is exemplified by

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children’s movements within and across their families, schools, and institutions established for children’s leisure time. Not only do the children adjust to the quite different possibilities and demands they encounter here; they actively relate to their social conditions in a way that arranges their everyday life to make it possible to pursue multiple engagements and matters. This entails selecting between numerous things that occur simultaneously and orientating themselves in a multiplicity of activities, relations, communities, demands, rules, and expectations. Still, children are often characterized as dependent. With the concept of the conduct of everyday life, it is emphasized how children must find their own way of taking part in different places and also organize their movements between contexts themselves. Observations illustrate how, for instance, they talk with friends in the morning, planning what to do in the afternoon, and how they actively push and challenge rules and procedures. This accentuates how their social tasks imply developing personal preferences, priorities, and plans and how children’s dilemmas may be analyzed in relation to their social possibilities for conducting everyday life. Studies cover toddlers as well as youngsters and situations categorized as problematic and as general childhood conditions. In relation to the concept of development, this is part of an endeavor to highlight development, not in the individual or the social environment, but in the ways children are involved in social life, that is, their possibilities for contributing to and influencing their life conditions. The aforementioned attention to the daily activities of subjects has been problematized as representing a self-governing subject and one caught in the individualism that researchers seek to overcome by focusing on conduct on everyday life. In relation to this, conduct of everyday life could be said to represent a way to unite social structures and personal meanings in our understanding, paving the way for exploring structural conditions through the ways subjects relate and ascribe meanings to these in their collective actions. Living one’s life implicitly implies arranging conditions, together with others, revising plans and pursuing perceived interests. Still, the concept goes beyond a voluntaristic perspective of autonomous individuals and points to how individual life is not determined as each person would like but is

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cocreated through the social practice of the societal world. The concept of the conduct of everyday life could be seen as pointing to social conditions in a concrete way, indicating the situated inequality that children encounter in their participation in societal institutions. This has consequences for our understandings of social problems and for our possibilities to intervene in relation to children’s possibilities for taking part in various learning communities. In the exclusion and displacements of problems, differences are understood as isolated and the political conflicts about the societal institutions are covert. As an alternative, difficulties could be related to the possibilities of conducting life—analyzing the inner connection between problems in the personal conduct of everyday life and the social conflicts of which this conduct is a part. Charlotte Hojholt See also Wholeness Approach

Further Readings Dreier, O. (2011). Personality and the conduct of everyday life. Nordic Psychology, 63(2), 423. Højholt, C. (2016). Situated inequality and the conflictuality of children’s conduct of life. In E. Schraube & C. Højholt (Eds.), Psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 145–163). London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315746890-8 Kousholt, D. (2016). Collaborative research with children: Exploring contradictory conditions of conduct of everyday life. In E. Schraube & C. Højholt (Eds.), Psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 241–258). London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315746890 Schraube, E., & Osterkamp, U. (2013). Psychology from the standpoint of the subject: Selected writings of Klaus Holzkamp. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137296436_1

Consent, Children’s, in Research The right to consent to research and the right to withdraw this consent are fundamental rights afforded to research participants. However,

according to legal understandings of the term, children are not deemed capable of giving their consent to research and permission needs to be sought from their parents or legal guardians. This entry explores the topic beyond legal definitions. It focuses on the consent of children as opposed to parents/guardians, examining how changing ideas about children and childhood have precipitated a shift towards negotiating the consent of children to research. As well as outlining some strategies which have been adopted by researchers, this entry examines some difficulties associated with eliciting the consent of children.

Negotiating Consent With Children Increasingly, researchers are attending to how they can actively negotiate consent to research with children in addition to gaining the consent of children’s parents/legal guardians and, potentially, other adults (e.g., teachers) depending on where the research is undertaken. Sometimes this is known as ‘assent’, although assent can mean as little as nonrefusal to participate so the term ‘consent’ is used in this entry. Ideas about children as incapable, less developed, dependent, unsteady in their thinking, and wholly ‘different’ to adults continue to persist, not least owing to the pervasiveness of developmental psychology. However, such views have been subject to sustained critique from writers within the social studies of childhood, who have sought to unsettle binary distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Alongside this shift in conceptualising childhood, the ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in the late 20th century has prompted adults to consider children’s participation rights as well as protection rights in philosophical and more practical terms. The corollary of this is that in research, there has been a drive towards reflecting on and attending to ethical issues such as consent in research involving children. Recent writing on research involving child participants highlights the ways that children are able to consent and dissent to activities. Sometimes writers note how children’s consent or dissent to research may appear different to that of adults and they may highlight how negotiating consent

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with children requires particular skills on the part of the researcher, notably attunement to children. Some researchers have adopted innovative strategies to gain children’s consent whereby children have to demonstrate actively that they are happy to participate, such as putting their photograph in a designated space or taking it away should they prefer not to be part of the study on a permanent or perhaps temporary basis.

Ethical Issues and Power Relations The preceding discussion raises some knotty issues, not least the charge that it reinforces the idea that children, by virtue of their child status, require completely different research methods and ethical procedures to adults. Alan Prout and Pia Christensen’s work has been influential in this respect as they have endeavoured to untangle this issue in their idea of ‘ethical symmetry’. This term denotes how the principles of research should be the same whether the participant is an adult or a child and one such key principle in research is that of informed consent. The idea of ethical symmetry details that in situ, the tactics of research can be adapted to particular people in particular circumstances. In other words, researchers should not start their research with a presumption of children’s incompetence or difference but should accord the same principles—here, consent—in relation to children and adults alike. A practical example of this might include consideration of particular children’s needs and interests in relation to consent forms: If an individual child understands the meaning of print, she or he might appreciate a consent form to sign, outlining what the research is about and what her participation will involve. This may or may not replicate the consent form used with adult gatekeepers such as parents and legal guardians, whose permission also needs to be sought. The consent form may be pictorial or include additional symbols or simplified language, but the point is that the principle of informed consent remains constant. It is how this is realised in situ which might potentially change. The consent of children does raise some tricky issues for researchers. One example relates to the issue of permanence as consent can be viewed as something attained rather than something fragile and changeable. Early childhood researchers have

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led the way in suggesting that consent should be viewed as something ongoing and renegotiable during the course of a research project. Indeed, this is of value for research with human beings of any age, especially, in longer term projects. Another area of difficulty relates to the novelty of creative attempts on the part of the researcher to obtain the consent of children. Innovation of methods in seeking consent does not necessarily equate with ethical dependability as children may be persuaded to engage with an activity if it looks fun or because peers are similarly engaged in the activity, yet little work may have been done on the part of the researcher to explain the research project more thoroughly. Thus, researchers need to be reflexive about ethical issues such as consent throughout the stages of their research projects. Among the most difficult issues in relation to consent are perhaps those associated with the social climate in which research is undertaken and the impact this has on power differentials between children and adults as well as between children and their peers. Power differentials impact on the degree to which individuals and groups feel able to consent. For instance, if the researcher is the child’s own teacher, this may impact on the degree to which the child feels able to withdraw her consent to research. Children’s attendance at school is generally compulsory so if the activity of the research and the activity of the classroom appear to be similar, this raises some difficulties about the possibility of withdrawing consent. To conclude, the consent of children to research is an increasingly deliberated topic and one that raises some tricky ethical issues. These debates can be seen as indicative of shifts in thinking about the status of children, from being the objects of research to being research participants. Such thinking does not override the importance of establishing parental consent for research with their child (or consent from a legal guardian), usually in writing, but does recognise children as able to give and withdraw consent. The notion of ethical symmetry is useful here in encouraging researchers to adhere to the idea that the principles of research are the same for children and adults, but the tactics of research may differ according to particular people in particular contexts. Deborah Albon

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See also Assent, Children’s, in Research; Child-Centered/ Child-Led Research; Power Relations in Research

Further Readings Christensen, P., & Prout, A. (2002). Working with ethical symmetry in social research with children. Childhood, 9(4), 477–497. doi:10.1177/0907568202009004007 Graham, A., Powell, M. A., & Truscott, J. (2016). Exploring the nexus between participatory methods and ethics in early childhood research. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 41(1), 82–89. doi:10.1177/183693911604100111 Woodhead, M., & Faulkner, D. (2008). Subjects, objects or participants? Dilemmas of psychological research with children. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices (pp. 10–39). London, UK: Routledge.

Consent, Sexual Sexual consent refers to a person’s agreement to engage in sexual behavior. Sexual consent is both a legal and a social construct although much of the debate tends to focus on the legal age of consent for sexual behavior. Sexual consent is, and has been for centuries, strongly connected to age. This is because in many countries children cannot legally consent to a range of activities deemed to be the preserve of adults, including signing contracts, taking responsibility for committing crimes, undertaking paid employment, and engaging in sex. This has a long tradition in Western European countries, in particular, where children (and at different times in history other groups such as women and Black people) were seen to lack the reason and judgement to engage in a range of behaviors that carried risk, with sexual behavior just one such example. The idea of consent is thus often associated with liberal legal systems associated with the Enlightenment notion of the rational, individual person. In spite of the consistency across many contexts of the belief that children lack the capacity to consent to sexual behavior, the age at which a person can consent to sex nevertheless varies quite dramatically across time and place. In England, for example, age of consent was  raised in 1875 from 12 to 13 and then in 1885 to 16, where it remains today. In Uganda, by

contrast, the age of consent for girls was 18 until the early 2000s and is currently 17. In Australia, it is currently between 16 and 17 years old depending on the state. Across Africa, it ranges from 12 to 18 years. These differences reflect a range of social norms around the regulation of children’s engagement in sexual behavior. This entry examines anxieties about children and sexual consent, global policies on children and sexual consent, and research on the subject.

Anxieties About Children and Sexual Consent Clearly, the regulation of children’s sexuality causes deep social and moral anxiety and is connected to a range of intersecting social, moral, and rights-based debates. Debates about sexual consent by children cannot, therefore, be disconnected to the very extensive debates both academic and popular about the sexual abuse of children. Sexual abuse is any sexual act against a child where the child cannot or does not give their consent. A child under the legal age of sexual consent cannot give consent to sex. In addition to variations in age, different sexual acts have different ages of consent. For example, in many European countries where same-sex relationships are legalized, the age of consent for gay and lesbian sex has often been higher than for heterosexual sex. This has resulted in extensive campaigning to have the age of consent equalized in several countries. As an additional example, anal sex has a higher age of consent in some contexts than vaginal sex and in other country contexts, it is entirely illegal. The legality of sexual behaviors has an impact on whether it is ever possible for a child to consent to sex. As noted earlier, a child under the legal age of consent cannot give their consent to engage in sexual behavior. However, where a child is above the age of consent, establishing whether abuse (such as rape or molestation) has occurred depends on establishing whether consent was given.

Global Policies on Children and Sexual Consent In recent years, the definition of a child has been increasingly globalized in part due to processes

Consent, Sexual

such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and other policy interventions aimed at protecting the rights of children. This has, at times, caused conflict between different country contexts and cultural groups who have different social norms about the appropriate age for engaging in sex. These debates can be seen, for example, in the activism aimed at preventing child marriage. The age at which a child can consent to marriage varies with 16 years being common in many parts of the world. In many cases, a child can be married before 16, provided the consent of their guardians is given. This is a highly politicized topic for two reasons. Firstly, it has been argued that universalizing the age of marriage and sexual consent implies the moral superiority of some cultures and their associated social norms over others. In addition, it has also been argued that because sex is often deemed to be a private matter the State has no place regulating the marriage decisions made within families. Furthermore, in some contexts, while the age of consent may be relatively high, it may not be consistent with actual practices and values that people within that society hold. In such instances, families might not object to marriage below the legal age even though the law forbids it. An additional variation in sexual consent has been regarding the age of the people who are engaging in sexual behavior. There has tended to be an assumption (although it has often remained implicit) that sex between adults and children is in some way damaging to the child. Indeed, child sexual abuse has shown many long-term psychological and sometimes physical consequences for the child. This speaks to what ­Matthew Waites refers to as the social distribution of consent. In contexts of high rates of HIV infection, the so-called age-disparate relationships have been seen as a risk factor for infection among children with the assumption being that older men frequently desire sex with younger women and girls.

Research on Children and Sexual Consent While the law offers an age-based definition of when consent can be given, much scholarship has pointed to the complexity of consent, particularly

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when it comes to sexuality. It has been well-documented for example that the extent to which consent can be freely given is influenced by the respective power that the parties engaging in sexual behavior hold. For example, much attention has been paid in low-income countries to the ways in which economic disparities between men and women might limit women’s ability to refuse sex. There have been legal efforts to respond to these complexities. For example, sex may be illegal between a child who is above the age of consent if the adult is in a supervisory relationship with the child such as a teacher or a legal guardian. In addition, age of consent has at times been higher for girls than for boys suggesting gendered assumptions about maturity and ability to make sexual decisions as well as assumptions about gendered vulnerability and power in sexual relationships. Thus, consent is based on a range of social factors and not only whether the two parties both agree to have sex. By way of further example, it has often been assumed that sex between a husband and wife is consensual and recognition of marital rape has required extensive lobbying. Sex through economic incitement has also been socially frowned upon as evident from the illegality of sex work in some contexts and the social concern about sugar daddies. Furthermore, there are some acts that are universally illegal (such as sex with a very young child). These moral complexities are equally evident in the nature of the sexual behavior. Different sex acts often have different laws that apply. For example, in some instances, consent for anal sex is at an older age, and consent for masturbation of another person has its own age of consent. This too reflects social sanctioning of some sexual behaviors over others indicating the moral and social values placed on different sexual behaviors. This entry’s overview of debates on sexual consent indicates that giving consent to sex is very clearly connected to the social meaning given to different sexual behaviors as well as who is engaging in them. As much as sexual consent is typically seen as a legal definition, it is complex and giving consent is connected to power and vulnerability. These debates have also been complicated by different cultural norms and practices across the world. The legal definitions that exist highlight the ways in which different groups of people (such as adults or

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children, men or women), as well as different sexual behaviors, carry different assumptions about how and under what circumstances consent can be given. The debates on sexual consent show how they often uphold socially valued models of sex as occurring between heterosexual, married couples of equal age engaging in penetrative sex. Ingrid Palmary See also Age of Consent; Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia; Sexual Exploitation of Children; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Abel, G. G., Becker, J. V., & Cunningham-Rathner, J. (1984). Complications, consent, and cognitions in sex between children and adults. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 7(1), 89–103. doi:10.1016/ 0160-2527(84)90008-6 Eskridge, W. (1995). The many faces of sexual consent. William and Mary Law Review, 37(1), 47–68. Finkelhor, D. (1979). What’s wrong with sex between adults and children? Ethics and the problem of sexual abuse. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 49(4), 692. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1979.tb02654.x Graupner, H. (2000). Sexual consent: The criminal law in Europe and overseas. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 29(5), 415–461. Waites, M. (2005). The age of consent: Young people, sexuality and citizenship. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Weeks, J. (2014). Sex, politics and society: The regulations of sexuality since 1800. New York, NY: Routledge.

Consumer Socialization Consumer socialization is commonly defined as the processes by which children acquire the skills, knowledge, and ways of being that allow them to participate in consumer culture. The term and its definition were first credited to Scott Ward. It is an aspect of children’s lives that first attracted attention from researchers during the 1950s and generated increased research activity during the 1970s. Deborah Roedder

John explains that the emergence of this field of research was informed by concern about the possible detrimental effects of advertising on children. This entry examines the history of children as consumers, factors that influence child consumer practices, and the specific influence of digital media on children’s consumer socialization since the 1990s.

The History of Children as Consumers Children’s participation in consumer activities is only a relatively recent phenomenon. A range of factors in the early 20th century in the United States made it possible for children increasingly to become economic participants. First, child mortality rates decreased and families became smaller and more affluent, meaning that there was more money available per family member. During this period, it also became increasingly common for children to receive gifts that were designed specifically for children. This helped to establish children as a market segment distinct from adults. In his 2004 book, Gary Cross identifies other 20th-century developments that expanded children’s role as consumers, including the increased popularity of comic books, cheaply produced toys, the popularity of movies and television, and eventually the spread of computers. All this promoted a wide range of consumer roles for children. They now purchase goods for themselves and others, influence the purchasing of family members and peers, and develop brand loyalties that influence purchasing in later life. In 2005, James McNeal estimated that children 4–12 years in the United States directly purchased goods valued at approximately US$42 billion, while children aged 2–12 years influenced approximately US$700 trillion worth of purchases.

Factors Influencing Children as Consumers There is a range of factors that are widely cited as playing a role in socializing children as consumers. These include parents, siblings, peers, schools, advertising, and various media. Although there is agreement about what these socializing agents are, researchers differ theoretically in how they believe children engage with these agents.

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Valérie Inés Tartas and Valérie de la Ville classify consumer socialization research into a number of categories. One category draws on developmental theories, particularly those of Jean Piaget, to conceptualize consumer socialization as a genetically driven, staged process. Children undergo a series of leaps characterized by their increasing cognitive capacity to understand the social rules associated with consumer participation. Such research considers preschool children limited in their ability to detect marketers’ messages and motivations. This research considers children in middle childhood more able to distinguish between advertising and other content. In adolescence, they are believed able to detect the intent of advertisers. Another category of research draws on social learning theory and the works of theorists such as Alfred Bandura and Lev Vygotskij. This body of research understands consumer socialization as a social process where children learn consumer behaviors from significant influences in their lives, including parents, siblings, peers, marketers, and media. It is reasoned that children observe and imitate the behaviors they observe, reproducing their patterns of consumer behavior. Deborah Roedder John provides a comprehensive summary of research up until 1999 from these first two categories. The research cited by John is characteristic of modernist approaches to consumer socialization in that it conceptualizes the process as a function of cognitive and social development and, therefore, something that is staged, sequential, and increasingly sophisticated as children age. However, this body of research is not without criticism. Tartas and de la Ville identify a third category of consumer socialization research that draws on post-modern theories. Modernist research is sometimes criticized for its tendency to conceptualize children as vulnerable subjects. Daniel Cook proposes that children’s engagement with consumer cultures is more complex than that proposed in developmental conceptualizations. While children’s engagement with consumerism might change over time, the changes are often not linear, and ongoing rather than finite. This category of research assigns children a more active, complex role in consumer socialization that goes beyond being passive recipients of developmental

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processes and social messages. It proposes that children also have the capacity to influence. Children can influence parents in ways that extend beyond the ability to pester and are capable of complex forms of negotiation that can be underestimated. It is proposed that even prenatal children might have the capacity to influence consumer behaviors. This category of research also tries to account for other social factors like gender, class, and power relationships. Cook argues also that modernist research is underpinned by cultural presumptions that idealize affluent, White, middle-class childhoods, and minimizes factors like class and race. These social complexities are believed to influence the sorts of consumer roles that children are able to adopt and embody. For example, the ways that young working-class girls engage with consumer markets are likely to be different to those taken up by upper and middle-class girls with different financial and social capital. Cultural differences across political and geographical locations are believed to also influence the consumer behaviors that children learn.

The Impact of Digital Media Of increasing interest to contemporary researchers is the emergence of digital media as an agent of consumer socialization. Children’s engagement with digital technologies and the Internet is increasing. Park Thaicon cites 3 years as the average age that children begin accessing the Internet. Children’s engagement with digital media attracts attention because it appears different from their engagement with previous media sources like print and television. Children are believed to have a more direct, reciprocal relationship with digital media. As well as receiving information about consumerist rules and ways of being from digital sources, children are able to direct and control digital content. Thaicon describes how children are increasingly active in the online domain as consumers. This more active relationship with consumer cultures is disruptive in that it challenges dominant perceptions of children as vulnerable and easily influenced. This is a field of research that frequently shifts in line with changes in social and political values,

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family structures, media environments, and theories of childhood. This is exemplified by the sometimes rapid changes in technologies and their influence on the ways that children engage with consumer cultures. Bruce Hurst See also Capitalism and Childhood; Children as Consumers; Socialization; Tween

Further Readings Cook, D. T. (2010). Commercial enculturation: Moving beyond consumer socialization. In D. Buckingham & V. Tingstad (Eds.), Childhood and consumer culture (pp. 63–79). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230281844_5 Cross, G. (2004). The cute and the cool: Wondrous innocence and modern American children’s culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. John, D. R. (1999). Consumer socialization of children: A retrospective look at twenty-five years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 26(3), 183–213. doi:10.1086/209559 McNeal, J. U. (2007). On becoming a consumer: The development of consumer behavior patterns in childhood. Boston, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann. Thaichon, P. (2017). Consumer socialization process: The role of age in children’s online shopping behavior. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 34, 38–47. doi:10.1016/j.jretconser.2016.09.007 Todd, S. J., & Marshall, D. W. (2010). Understanding children as consumers. London, UK: SAGE Publishing. Ward, S. (1974). Consumer socialization. Journal of Consumer Research, 1, 1–14.

Corporal Punishment Conceptions of corporal punishment have evolved since the mid-20th century, reflecting a large body of research findings that have been revealed within the context of global shifts in conceptions of childhood. Today, the United Nations defines corporal punishment as any use of physical force, no matter how light, that causes pain or discomfort intended as punishment. While its most common form is slapping/smacking/spanking with a hand or object,

it can take many forms, including shaking, throwing, pinching, biting, pulling hair or ears, kicking, burning, scalding, or forcing children to ingest noxious substances, hold uncomfortable positions, or kneel on hard objects. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys have revealed that, worldwide, 50% of infants aged 12–23 months and 63% of children aged 2–4 years experience corporal punishment on a regular basis. Global debates concerning the effectiveness, appropriateness, and legality of corporal punishment have intensified as children have increasingly become viewed as active agents and as rights holders. Social scientists have engaged these debates using progressively sophisticated designs, analytic methods, and conceptual frameworks. Gradually, the normative view of corporal punishment has begun to shift from disciplinary technique to a form of violence against children, reflected in the growing number of countries that are prohibiting its use in all settings. This entry examines the impacts of corporal punishment, theorizing on corporate punishment, why it is an important subject to explore in childhood studies, and its legal ramifications.

Research on the Impacts of Corporal Punishment It was once generally assumed that corporal punishment was an effective means of changing children’s behavior. This assumption has come under increasingly intense academic scrutiny. The number of published articles on corporal punishment tripled between 1990 and 2000 and continues to grow. A range of research designs, samples, and measurement instruments have been applied across diverse settings and countries to examine corporal punishment’s impact on children’s development. The findings indicate that corporal punishment predicts exclusively negative long-term outcomes, including higher levels of aggression, antisocial behavior, and mental health problems; lower levels of moral internalization, prosocial behavior, cognitive development, and self-esteem; weaker parent– child relationships; and escalation to increasingly severe violence. The greatest challenge to conducting research on corporal punishment’s impact on children is

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establishing the direction of causality. Causal inferences traditionally require that children be randomly assigned to conditions (corporal punishment or no corporal punishment) with outcomes measured over time. The physical pain inherent in corporal punishment ethically precludes such research designs, so other methods must be implemented to infer causality, such as meta-analyses and prospective longitudinal designs. Meta-Analyses

A meta-analysis pools data from multiple studies conducted by independent researchers. Statistical techniques are applied to determine the consis­tency of findings across studies. Elizabeth Gershoff has conducted two rigorous meta-analyses of corporal punishment studies. The first, published in 2002, examined 88 studies and found that 94% of the reported effect sizes represented undesirable outcomes. The second meta-analysis, conducted by Gershoff and Andrew GroganKaylor and published in 2016, examined 75 studies. Of the 79 statistically significant effect sizes reported in these studies, 99% represented negative outcomes—including higher levels of aggression and antisocial behavior, externalizing and internalizing behavior problems, and mental health problems; and lower levels of cognitive ability, moral internalization, self-esteem, and selfregulation. These associations did not vary depending on study design (e.g., cross-sectional, longitudinal, retrospective), data collection method (e.g., observational, parent report, child report), referent time period (e.g., last month, ever), country, or ages of the children involved (from under age 2 to 15). Normative spanking and harsher corporal punishment had similar relationships to these outcomes in both direction and magnitude. This consistency among associations between corporal punishment and negative outcomes strengthens the foundation for inferring that corporal punishment has a causal relationship with negative developmental outcomes. Prospective Longitudinal Designs

Most corporal punishment studies are crosssectional in design; they collect data at one point in time. For example, parents might be

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asked whether they physically punish their children and measures might be taken of their children’s aggression at the same time. In many such studies, potentially confounding variables— such as parental stress, socioeconomic status, and parental use of reasoning—have been controlled, and still they consistently find associations between corporal punishment and negative outcomes, such as aggression. But it is difficult to establish whether the children’s aggression preceded or followed their experiences of corporal punishment. One way to address this problem is to conduct longitudinal studies, which follow children and their families over time. Prospective longitudinal studies begin with the collection of baseline data when the study begins (at Time 1) and continue collecting data at subsequent time points. One of the first major prospective studies of corporal punishment controlled for 6- to 9-year-old children’s antisocial behavior at Time 1, as well as child sex, family socioeconomic status, parental emotional support, and cognitive stimulation in the home. Corporal punishment predicted increased antisocial behavior among children 2 years later. Subsequent prospective studies have found this relationship even when controlling for parental age, child age, race, family structure, and poverty. No study has found that corporal punishment predicts lower levels of aggression or antisocial behavior. Such findings strengthen the basis for concluding that corporal punishment can increase, but not decrease, such behavior problems in children.

Theorizing Corporal Punishment’s Outcomes The outcomes associated with corporal punishment can be more fully understood when considered in the context of theories of learning and development. Attachment Theory

According to attachment theory, the emotional bonds between children and their parents/caregivers are foundational to human development. If these bonds are secure—if children trust their caregivers to be responsive, predictable, and

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protective—they feel safe to explore their physical and social environments. Children with secure attachments tend to engage more with their caregivers, which expands their opportunities for learning. Attachment also plays an important role in the development of conscience and the internalization of moral values, which are fostered through communication with caregivers who validate their emotions, comfort them when they are distressed, and help them connect their feelings to others’ feelings. When caregivers intentionally inflict pain on children, attachment theorists would predict that this will erode the children’s sense of security and undermine their trust in the caregiver as a secure base from which to explore their environments. Rather than strengthening attachment, corporal punishment would be expected to lead to avoidance and resistance. This hypothesis has been supported by the consistency of research findings demonstrating that corporal punishment predicts weaker parent–child relationships, cognitive development, and moral internalization. Operant Learning Theory

According to operant learning theory, humans and other animals learn through consequences. If the consequence is something that we like, the behavior preceding it is likely to increase (positive reinforcement). If the consequence is something that we dislike, the preceding behavior is likely to decrease (punishment). Operant learning theorists would predict that, because it is disliked by most children, corporal punishment would decrease unwanted child behaviors. However, research findings do not support this hypothesis. Corporal punishment is consistently associated with higher levels of aggression, antisocial behavior, and externalizing behavior problems and lower levels of self-regulation. Corporal punishment has been associated with immediate compliance in a few studies but not strongly or consistently. This is a surprising finding given the aversive nature of corporal punishment, which should make it an effective tool for decreasing unwanted behavior. The explanation may be twofold. First, operant learning theory does not account for the associative learning that occurs when punishment is administered. Second, operant learning theory does not

consider the observational learning that accompanies corporal punishment. Classical Learning Theory

Classical learning theory explains how we learn through association. Pain inherently elicits the physiological and emotional response that we label as fear. This is an automatic, unlearned (i.e., unconditioned) response. When pain is immediately preceded by another stimulus, such as the sight of a caregiver’s face or sound of a caregiver’s voice, the sight and sound of the caregiver becomes associated with pain and comes to evoke fear even when the pain itself is not present. That fear becomes a conditioned response to the conditioned stimulus of the caregiver. The fear of pain can generate withdrawal, avoidance, defensiveness, or retaliation. Thus, children who associate fear of pain with the sight and sound of their caregivers might withdraw, internalizing the fear rather than communicating it; avoid the caregiver, seeking out other sources for guidance and nurturance; respond defensively, striking back physically or verbally; or retaliate directly (against the caregiver) or indirectly (against others) to regain their sense of power and control. Classical learning theory, then, provides a mechanism to explain the associations found consistently between corporal punishment and internalizing behavior problems and mental health issues—and between corporal punishment and externalizing behavior problems and aggression. Social Learning Theory

Social learning theory explains how it is possible for humans to learn without direct reinforcement or punishment. We can learn complex patterns of behavior simply by watching others (i.e., models) perform them. When children observe models helping others, giving comfort, and problem solving, those behaviors enter the child’s behavioral repertoire and guide their future actions. The same process is predicted when children observe models insulting or hitting others. Children are most likely to repeat observed behavior of models they consider powerful and  prestigious. Particularly for young children,

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parents and teachers would fall into this category, so they provide powerful models for children when they use physical force to induce compliance. Social learning theory thus provides an additional explanation for why corporal punishment is consistently associated with increased child aggression. Neuroscience

In recent years, neuroscience has offered new insights into how the human brain processes and manages stress. Briefly, when the brain perceives a threat, it is instantly processed in the limbic system, the brain’s emotional center, which includes the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. The amygdala helps us to detect danger and feel fear; the hippocampus helps us to link our emotions to our memories and to the rest of the body; the hypothalamus triggers the release of cortisol, the stress hormone, which sets off a cascade of responses throughout the body. The digestive and immune systems are suppressed, glucose levels rise, heart rate and muscle tension increase, blood vessels are constricted in some areas and dilated in others, and fatty acids are converted into energy. This response to threat is an adaptive one. It prepares and galvanizes the body to survive the threat through striking out (fighting) or running away (fleeing). However, if the person perceiving the threat is a child and the person conveying the threat is a caregiver, the child’s automatic responses of fighting or fleeing are not adaptive. If the child strikes back or runs away, the caregiver’s own stress response will likely be amplified, and the severity of the punishment will escalate, explaining why children who are physically punished are at heightened risk for injury, and why caregivers who use corporal punishment are at increased risk of inflicting severe violence on children. If the threat or experience of pain continues over time, the child’s anxiety and fear can become chronic. Under these conditions, the child’s amygdala becomes overly activated, creating a constant feeling of dread, and the hypothalamus continues to trigger the release of cortisol, which, over time, can interfere with the stress response system. Evidence is emerging that corporal punishment may also cause alterations in (a) the regions of the brain associated with vulnerability to substance

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abuse, which helps to explain its association with mental health problems and addictions, and (b) the volume of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, which may help to explain its association with slower cognitive development.

Childhood Studies While the literature on corporal punishment is impressive and conducted in increasingly sophisticated ways, it belies a conception of children that remains dominant in much of the world. Except for a few studies, much research on corporal punishment treats children as the passive objects of their parents’ socialization attempts. They are rarely viewed as people with their own experiences or viewpoints or the power to articulate them. Childhood studies provide an alternative lens through which childhood is viewed as an idea that is socially constructed within particular historical and social contexts. Within hierarchical, patriarchal societies, children have been viewed as belonging to their parents, and discipline has been viewed as the domain of adults charged with their education and socialization. From this perspective, discipline generally equates to actions that elicit children’s compliance with adult rules and authority. In such societies, the state is likely to maintain corporal punishment as an adult prerogative or duty—a justifiable, necessary, and even desirable response to children’s noncompliance. As societies move toward less hierarchical, more democratic forms, physical force as a means of gaining others’ compliance becomes increasingly viewed as violence and oppression. The state’s role becomes one of reducing inequality and advancing human rights; the role of parents and other adults becomes one of promoting children’s agency and autonomy. It is within this context that corporal punishment has become the focus of a global human rights debate.

Corporal Punishment and Human Rights In 1989, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted a new treaty—the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; the convention set out human rights standards specifically regarding children that were unanimously

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agreed upon by all UN member states. To date, the Convention on the Rights of the Child has been ratified by all UN member states, except the United States. This treaty sparked a new debate: Is corporal punishment a violation of children’s human rights? Several articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child had bearing on this discussion. Article 3 states that the best interests of the child must be a primary consideration in all actions concerning children taken by public and private institutions, courts, and administrative or legislative authorities. Article 18 affirms that the best interests of the child also must be the basic concern of parents and guardians. Given the research evidence, it has become increasingly difficult to justify corporal punishment as being in children’s best interests. Under Article 28, school discipline must respect children’s human dignity, which has led to strappings and canings being seen as acts of humiliation rather than education. Article 19 states that children must be protected from all forms of physical and mental violence. While corporal punishment has not typically been classified as a form of violence by law or public opinion in most countries, four key developments have eroded this perceived dichotomy. First, researchers have consistently found that physical abuse most often occurs within a context of punishment. Second, it has become clear that physical punishment carries an inherent risk of escalation to increasingly severe violence. Third, researchers began to explore children’s responses to corporal punishment, revealing feelings of humiliation, fear, and resentment. Fourth, the UN issued a General Comment on Article 19 that defined all corporal punishment as violence, regardless of frequency or intensity. Together, these developments contributed to a global shift in conceptions of corporal punishment from a normative educational tool to the most prevalent form of violence against children around the world, and to the most prominent debate concerning corporal punishment—whether it should be legally permissible.

Legality of Corporal Punishment In most countries, the use of physical force against another person is a crime. But most countries also

provide a legal defense for those who use physical force against children as punishment. There is considerable variation across countries in terms of which adults may access the defense, the intensity of the assault that is legally permissible, the parts of the child’s body to which it may be administered, and other details. In an increasing number of countries, the legality of corporal punishment is being challenged on the two bases previously summarized: (1) research findings establishing it as a developmental risk factor and (2) human rights standards. The result of these challenges has been an accelerating number of states enacting laws to prohibit corporal punishment. A 2017 study by Elizabeth T. Gershoff reports that once a common feature of schools around the world, in 128 states, corporal punishment is  now fully prohibited in schools. In some nations, school corporal punishment is partially ­prohibited—that is, in some parts of the country, under certain conditions, or in some types of schools (Australia and the United States are among the outliers). Day care settings are those in which children are cared for by others for a few hours at a time, including nurseries, crèches, kindergartens, preschools, family centers, and after-school childcare. Corporal punishment has been prohibited in day care in 61 nation-states (31% of states). Penal institutions are those which have the care of children in conflict with the law, including prisons, detention centers, approved schools, and training centers. Corporal punishment has been fully prohibited in penal institutions in 141 states (71% of states). Judicial sentencing may be carried out by the state or through customary or religious law. Corporal punishment as a sentence for a crime committed by a juvenile includes whipping, flogging, caning, and amputation. Such sentences have been abolished in 166 states (83% of states). Alternative care settings are those in which children are being cared for by people other than their family. These settings may be institutional or not, public or private. They include foster care; state-provided care; care provided by residential, religious, and/or private organizations; children’s homes and orphanages; shelters and emergency care; and informal care arrangements. Corporal punishment has been fully

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prohibited in alternative care settings in 61 states (31% of states). The most contentious aspect of the legal debate centers on prohibition of corporal punishment in children’s family homes. The first country to prohibit corporal punishment in the home was Sweden in 1979. It did so as the last step in fully prohibiting corporal punishment of children in all settings. As of 2019, 54 states have enacted complete bans (27% of states) and 56 more (28% of states) have committed to doing so. States with full prohibitions are Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Austria, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cabo Verde, Congo, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Romania, San Marino, Slovenia, South Sudan, Spain, Sweden, TFYR Macedonia, Togo, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In most cases, these prohibitions have been added to civil codes and thus do not carry penalties beyond those already in place for assault. The aim is to ensure that children and adults have equal legal protection and to shift attitudes and behavior. Population-level data are available from three countries that have enacted full corporal punishment prohibitions, including in the home— Sweden, Germany, and New Zealand. In Sweden, approval of corporal punishment dropped from 53% in 1965 to 8% by 2011. Prior to the ban, virtually all children in Sweden had been hit; by 2011, this rate had decreased to 15%. Germany prohibited all corporal punishment in 2000. Between 1996 and 2001, the proportion of parents in Germany who reported ever lightly slapping their children decreased from 72% to 59%. During the same period, the proportion of parents who reported spanking their children declined from 33% to 25%. New Zealand prohibited all corporal punishment in 2007. In 1981, 89% of the New ­ Zealand public approved of corporal punishment. By 2013, this proportion had declined to 40%. The proportion of parents who reported physically punishing their children in the previous four weeks was approximately 10% by 2006, decreasing by almost half by 2015.

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Concluding Remarks The past several decades have witnessed a global shift in conceptions of corporal punishment from an educational method to a form of violence against children. This shift has been fueled by growth in the amount and sophistication of social science research on the developmental outcomes associated with corporal punishment and by increasing global attention to children’s human rights. The most visible effect of this shift is the increasing number of countries prohibiting all corporal punishment of children. This new legal paradigm reflects the decline of a conception of children as passive objects of ­ socialization, and the unprecedented rise of a conception of children as active agents and rights-bearers. Joan Durrant See also Children’s Rights; Parenting; Children at Risk; Violence

Further Readings Afifi, T. O., Ford, D., Gershoff, E. T., Merrick, M., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Ports, K. A., . . . Bennett, R. P. (2017). Spanking and adult mental health impairment: The case for the designation of spanking as an adverse childhood experience. Child Abuse & Neglect, 71, 24–31. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.01.014 Donnelly, M., & Straus, M. A. (2005). Corporal punishment of children in theoretical perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Durrant, J. E. (2017). The global movement to end all corporal punishment of children. In G. Lenzer (Ed.), Ending violence against children: Making human rights real (pp. 64–85). New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781351248433–4 Durrant, J. E. (2019). Corporal punishment and the law in global perspective. In J. Dwyer (Ed.), Oxford handbook of children and the law. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780190694395.013.15 Durrant, J. E., & Ensom, R. (2017). Twenty-five years of physical punishment research: What have we learned? Journal of the Korean Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 28, 20–24. doi:10.5765/ jkacap.2017.28.1.20 Gershoff, E. T. (2016). Should parents’ physical punishment of children be considered a source of

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toxic stress that affects brain development? Family Relations, 65, 151–162. doi:10.1037/fam0000191 Gershoff, E. T. (2017). School corporal punishment in global perspective: Prevalence, outcomes, and efforts at intervention. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 22(Suppl. 1), 224–239. doi:10.1080/13548506.2016. 1271955 Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new metaanalyses. Journal of Family Psychology, 30, 453–469. Saunders, B. J., & Goddard, C. (2010). Physical punishment in childhood: The rights of the child. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Straus, M. A., Douglas, E. M., & Medeiros, R. A. (2014). The primordial violence: Spanking children, psychological development, violence, and crime. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203808856 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. (2017). End violence data visualization. Retrieved from https://data.unicef.org/resources/ end-violence-data-visualization/ United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. (1990). Convention on the rights of the child. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/en/ professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx

Counseling Children The term ‘counselling’ has its roots within the field of humanistic psychology and is often linked to the work of Carl Rogers and person-centred therapy. It primarily takes the form of a talking therapy between two individuals (the counsellor and the client) but can also incorporate more creative or expressive elements. Almost universally, counselling emphasises the importance of the relationship between the counsellor and client. It proposes that where a counsellor is accepting, genuine, and empathetic, and that the client perceives these qualities in the counsellor, therapeutic change is likely to occur. Although this view was first described in person-centred theory, an approach that professionals do apply in its purest form, much theory has evolved to integrate other psychological approaches, such as psychodynamic thinking and cognitive behavioural therapy. Within all of these approaches, however, the development of good relationships remains central. This entry examines types of counselling for children, topics

addressed when counselling children, and the effectiveness of counselling children.

Types of Counselling for Children Counselling can take many forms and be offered in different settings. Most often, counsellors are informed by all of the key psychological theories. Further, although there are many commonalities, it is important to note that the term ‘counselling’ is used slightly differently in international settings. For instance, counselling in the United Kingdom is synonymous with the terms ‘therapy’ and ‘psychotherapy’, whereas this is not the case in other countries across Europe and the Americas. Additionally, within some contexts counselling is aligned to disciplines such as careers guidance. Whatever the context, many texts about child counselling emphasise the need to be creative and responsive to the individuals that they meet. Such flexible approaches help to account for issues such as developmental differences between individuals and the power differentials that commonly exist between adults and children in helping relationships. The ethos of trying to create what have been described as ‘youth friendly’ services also extends to the types of environments that counsellors may work. Thus, as well as traditional health care settings, counselling services for children are often located in environments that are familiar to young people such as schools, youth clubs, telephone, and online. In relation to the latter two environments mentioned, individuals are often able to contact services without the knowledge of adult caregivers. Such anonymous support is viewed by some services as vital in developing strong trusting relationships.

Topics Addressed When Counselling Children The children and young people who attend counselling sessions talk about a wide variety of topics. Research highlights issues central to therapeutic work that include difficulties within families, managing/understanding anger, talking about significant bereavements, managing behaviour, addressing issues of self-worth, and those that focus upon relationships in general. As children and young people are learning to understand

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themselves within the larger context of society, many individuals talk about social phenomena such as bullying and issues related to risk taking (e.g., related to the development of a sexual identity, the use of illicit substances, etc.). Given the breadth of issues encountered, and to acknowledge the interaction between the different elements of people’s lives, counsellors who work with younger clients value bio-psycho-social understandings of human development. Further, given the variety of issues discussed, approaches of counselling do not always focus upon the individual. For instance, the families, schools, and communities have an impact upon the psychological wellbeing of children and young people and might be involved in systematic therapeutic work. Counsellors might therefore find themselves working with families or offering support to classes in schools (e.g., running relaxation sessions).

The Impact of Counselling Children The literature reflecting upon whether counselling for young clients is effective is generally quite positive. The reports from children and young people, assessed by both young people themselves and adult observers, commonly indicate that people feel better as a consequence of counselling. This is however a complicated arena, and given the fast-paced changes that occur during children and young people’s lives it may come as no surprise that there is very little evidence to suggest long-term sustained impact of counselling. Some theorists suggest that trying to assess counselling for children and young people using psychometric measures is flawed, however. From this perspective, counselling might be more accurately viewed as a form of broader holistic support (a position in keeping with its initial roots in humanistic psychology), rather than a means of reducing specific psychopathologies. Terry Hanley See also Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology; Psychoanalysis, the Child in

Further Readings Hanley, T., Lennie, C., & Humphrey, N. (2013). Adolescent counselling psychology: Theory, research and practice. London, UK: Routledge.

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Midgley, N., Cooper, M., & Hayes, J. (Eds.). (2017). Essential research findings in child and adolescent counselling and psychotherapy: The facts are friendly. London, UK: Sage. Robson, M., & Pattison, S. (Eds.). (2015). The SAGE handbook for counselling children and young people. London, UK: Sage.

CRC See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Critical Children’s Literature Studies Children’s literature and its criticism are ultimately about finding the right or good books for children. This has been the case since the field was invented in the 18th century as part of the discovery or invention of the child as a category of ­ identity allied to Romantic ideas of the originary, primitive, curious, and wondering and the development of greater access to literacy, schooling, and, eventually, leisure time. However, this definition of children’s literature (criticism) is itself contentious because for most children’s literature authors, publishers, and critics—and the parents, carers, librarians, and teachers who also engage in the production of or discussions around children’s literature—there is no question that children are known and knowable beings, with specific psychological and biological traits. Children’s literature studies refer continuously to what children like to read and why and see this as being part of how children identify with, or relate to, characters in children’s literature. Even when children’s literature criticism has a critical focus primarily on reading the books as literature, ostensibly apart from its reception by (child) readers, the definitions of ‘literature’ and the ideas of how to read literature and why still rely on claims about what children are like, for instance, in the case of child characters within the text or in terms of what assessments are made of the

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language, themes, or stories. There is, however, a different way of thinking about children’s literature and its criticism which has remained controversial from its introduction to the present day. In this entry, this is described as ‘critical children’s literature studies’. This entry examines the origins of this different way of thinking about children’s literature, what it entails, and why it is important. Specifically, this entry examines childhood as a construction, misunderstandings about childhood, and approaches to reading childhood differently.

Childhood as a Construction Many children’s literature critics engage with the idea that children are not simply beings with specific psychological and biological traits that differentiate them from adults but that different cultural and historical contexts have variable ideas about children and childhood. Most children’s literature criticism also supports the idea that children are different to one another in terms of gender, religion, and ethnic identity, for instance. One critic who views these issues in an entirely different way and for different reasons than other children’s literature critics is the British literary theorist Jacqueline Rose, who in 1984 published her seminal critique, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Here, taking J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as her example, Rose famously argued that children’s fiction as a field not only relies on, but actively puts in place ideas of the known and knowable child and the writing that can be produced for it in order to hold the identities ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ in place. Rose draws in her arguments on the philosophy of deconstruction of the French thinkers Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and on the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud as interpreted specifically by Derrida and Lacan. A first key difference to note is between what most children’s literature criticism means by ‘construction’ and what Rose means by ‘(De)construction’: when children’s literature criticism but also many other writers on childhood much more generally in other fields claim that an identity is ‘constructed’ they mean that ‘part’ of the identity of the child comes from historically or culturally variable ideas but that

such variability forms a kind of layer on top of another part of that identity which is a bedrock of universal psychological or biological traits. Rose’s view, however, not only does not accept that there are any such agreed upon psychological or biological traits (even scientifically speaking), but that this is impossible anyway because childhood is only ever produced as a ‘memory’ from the retrospective perspective of adulthood. In other words, following Derrida and Lacan’s interpretations of Freud’s arguments, childhood cannot be spoken as a truth by the child itself, but only by the adult as it remembers and perceives the child and childhood (where perception itself is also always already a memory). No matter how hard anyone tries, then, for Rose not only childhood, but ‘any’ identity is the product of the perspective of ‘another’; that other which makes claims about the identity it perceives as such (even its ‘own’).

Misunderstandings Rose’s arguments critique essentialist and universalist definitions of ‘identity’ inherently. This is almost always misunderstood in children’s literature criticism when it engages with Rose’s work even where critics explicitly state their agreement with Rose’s arguments: Most often, the criticism assumes that Rose is simply saying that children are different from one another, whilst not considering that for Rose’s arguments this claim leaves in place childhood as an identifiable category that encompasses those differences. In other cases, it is often assumed that Rose is just claiming that childhood is ‘constructed’ in the same way other children’s literature claims ‘construction’ as a layer ‘on top of’ the essential and universal traits of the child. Another aspect of this is that Rose is often written about as criticising a focus on ‘idealised’ children, but ‘idealised’ implies that there is after all necessarily also a complementary, knowable, ‘non-ideal’ (or ‘real’ or ‘actual’) child. There have also regularly been much more vehement attacks on Rose’s arguments, with critics claiming either that Rose is a nihilist, who somehow has ‘given up’ on dealing with ‘actual’ children, or that she wants children’s books to be stopped from being produced or discussed, or even further that Rose is attacking childhood by claiming it is

Critical Legal Studies

entirely passive or even somehow invisible or nonexistent. These misunderstandings do not allow for further consequences for ideas about reading that Rose proposes, which is that it can be thought of as not simply about structural aspects such as themes, characters and plots, or stories, but that (all) texts can be read instead in terms of what the claims in the text imply about the perspective that claims such a view or knowledge. In other words, Rose’s key interest is to analyse what kind of adult produces a certain kind of vision of childhood and what is at stake for them in that vision.

Reading Differently Reading differently, for Rose, not only entails relying on critical assumptions about (authorial) intentionality, structural aspects of texts (such as themes, plots, stories, and characters), ideas about ‘representation’, or reader-response, including ideas such as ‘identification’ or ‘empathy’ as ways of reading. For Rose, this also affects critical claims about aesthetics and about genre and ‘style’, for instance, which in turn draw on underpinning assumptions about differences between the real world and language and art, so that her criticism does not assume that there is a ‘simple’ or ‘realistic’ language which is closer to real objects than ‘complex’ or ‘literary’ languages: Instead, all language is read as the Derridean ‘textuality’ that produces the world and objects (and the child) rather than ‘reflecting’ them. This kind of criticism has almost only been produced in this precise sense by what a leading children’s literature critic, the Canadian Perry Nodelman, named the ‘[University of] Reading School of criticism’, which includes mainly the writings of Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Neil Cocks, and Sue Walsh as well as some others. For many children’s literature critics, however, this kind of criticism is by definition not ‘children’s literature criticism’ precisely because it does not pursue the same aims in the same ways. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein See also Children’s Literature; Critical Theory, the Child in; Hidden Adult, in Literature; Psychoanalysis, the Child in

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Further Readings Barker, M. (1989). Comics: Power, ideology, and the critics. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Cocks, N. (2009). Student centred: Education, freedom and the idea of audience. Ashby-de-la-Zouche, UK: Inkermen Press. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1994). Children’s literature: Criticism and the fictional child. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2004). Children’s literature: New approaches. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan or the impossibility of children’s fiction. London, UK: Macmillan. Rudd, D., & Pavlik, A. (Eds.). (2010). The (im)possibility of children’s fiction. The Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35(3), 223–229. Special issue for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The case of Peter Pan. doi: 10.1353/chq.2010.0001 Walsh, S. (2010). Kipling’s children’s literature: Language, identity and constructions of childhood. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.

Critical Legal Studies Critical legal studies (CLS) as a general approach may be said to have emerged out of the same concerns and influences as the critical traditions in psychology and other social sciences and to have emerged on a roughly corresponding schedule. Thus, one can trace the impact of Marxism, critical theory, structuralist and poststructuralist scholarship, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, of psychoanalysis, of relativism and postmodernism, of postcolonial critique, and of critical race studies and feminist theory. The social effects of law in terms of equity of access, discrimination and oppression, the degradation of the environment, and the sustaining of the grip of global capitalism are all concerns that cross disciplinary boundaries. With reference to the fetishizing within mainstream legal studies of the so-called rule of law, a critical attitude has spoken instead of what might be thought of as the ‘divide and rule of law’. This entry examines the development of CLS, how CLS departs from both legal positivism and natural law, and CLS’s specific relevance to children and childhood studies.

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Development of Critical Legal Studies Broadly speaking, one can discern a critical movement within legal scholarship from the 1970s that was influenced by a somewhat diffuse variety of Marxism more than by any other identifiable source, and which subsequently attempted to respond to a variety of trends and pressures. Like critical movements in other disciplines, CLS has given rise to subdisciplines or communities of interpretation within which specific forms of critique become orthodoxies of their own. Critical scholars sometimes find themselves addressing only each other and therefore falling short in their mission. Critical scholarship in law is just as much in need of constant critique as is critical scholarship in psychology, in sociology, or in anthropology: It does not stay done.

Critical Legal Studies, Legal Positivism, and Natural Law It is also important to observe that the CLS of childhood is a field that owes much more to CLS in general than it does to critical studies of childhood emerging in other disciplines such as psychology or sociology. Whilst it has been important and worthwhile that a critical approach to childhood law has not merely imported the critical childhood studies of other disciplines, the consequence has been a certain amount of re-inventing of the wheel. It is thus important to locate the critical movements in legal scholarship within the larger discipline. The various forms of critical legal scholarship have putatively constituted a third way between or beyond the two traditional, centuries-old approaches to legal thinking: legal positivism and natural law. Because this claim to novelty is questionable, a brief overview of these traditional approaches is needed. Legal positivism—sometimes inaccurately referred to as the ‘black letter’ approach to law— needs to be distinguished in some respects from positivism as more generically understood within the social sciences. Within legal scholarship, legal positivism focuses on the ways in which human populations make regulations for themselves such that laws become in effect social facts within a given polity. Granted, the ‘making for themselves’ has often been understood euphemistically in that

the edicts of a sovereign have been taken as the paradigm of law. In the domain of public international law, which is of relevance to childhood studies in a variety of ways, the role of the sovereign has been in some respects even greater. International treaties, sometimes termed covenants or conventions, are in essence written agreements of sovereigns. Also, the understanding of the ‘social construction’ of law embedded in the legal positivist traditions is obscured or compromised, in many instances, by the attention to technical detail on the implementation of law. At times the democratic credentials of legal positivism may appear bogus. In any event and by contrast with the ‘bottom up’ approach of legal positivism, the even older natural law traditions focus on rationality and higher values in the substantive content of law and of laws, so that the lawful is the servant of the good. For example, values generated by religious faith or by humanitarian appeals to the conscience of the world community are both sources of natural law. In the international sphere, principles such as a principle of self-determination of ‘peoples’ owes more to a ‘top-down’ natural law style than to a positivistic style. Consistent with this valuesdriven approach, a natural law orientation therefore encourages flexibility or discretion in the interpretation of legal prescriptions and proscriptions. By contrast, the legal positivist tradition redefines the moral high ground by its emphasis on the integrity of the law-making process and on a rigid separation between legality and morality. To clarify this distinction, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is undoubtedly a positivist document in that it was created by the deliberative agreement of representatives of the executive branch of independent states worldwide. There is an agreed text laying out obligations of states parties, and there are mechanisms for reporting and for scrutiny. Every independent state in the world, save the United States, has become a party to this agreement as of 2017. (One entity that is also a party to UNCRC as if it were an independent state is ‘The Holy See’, which is one of the names under which the quasiindependent Vatican City enters international legal agreements.) Whilst the format and functionality of UNCRC is positivistic in these senses, much of the content of the Convention is derived

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from value systems, exemplary of a natural law approach in that sense. This combination of a Natural Law content with a legal positivist form is typical of human rights treaties more generally. The aspiration to global consensus, indicated by near-total ratification or accession of many such treaties across the states of the world, is itself also an indicator of theoretical or ideological leanings. For human rights, such as the rights of ‘the child’, to be understood as universal is itself a philosophical and a political position. It is entirely consistent with a natural law orientation. Any species of CLS makes the claim that it significantly challenges both legal positivist and natural law approaches to its subject matter and puts forward substantial alternative arguments. This claim is always in need of scrutiny. To take a critical approach to both traditions—the ‘plague on both your houses’ approach—is already to have adopted a critical mood even if a coherent third way is not established. That critical mood may well be of value. But sometimes on investigation critical legal scholarship on childhood and children adds little either to the democratising, bottom-up aspirations of legal positivism, or to the values-driven, liberal-humanist consensualism characteristic of modern-day natural law. What follows is a critical overview of some selected topics and matters of concern where CLS of childhood has made, or might yet make, an important contribution.

Relevance to Childhood Studies To indicate the relevance of these debates to childhood, UNCRC is a good place to start. Whilst recognising that infants and children can be vulnerable, and perhaps in ways different in kind or in degree as compared to older persons, a critical legal standpoint observes such features of UNCRC as the centrality of family life, normatively understood, and the limitations on the autonomy rights of children that are set out therein. The emphasis on ‘the best interests of the child’ (Article 3) is framed as indicating a priority for adult decisionmakers, so that the honouring of this priority depends on myriad interpretive, professional, and institutional factors (who determines what that best interest is, and how, with what checks and balances, with what training, under what limits?).

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A critical legal standpoint might also query the role of the Holy See as a ‘state’ party to UNCRC as previously noted. As well as the questionable, privileged status of that entity ‘vis à vis’ signing international treaties, as compared to the executive leadership of other world faiths, Vatican City is arguably host to the headquarters of a perpetrator institution with respect to offences against children and is certainly an entity governed by robust dogma on children, on family life, on the role of women, and so forth. In the context of global initiatives, the Sustainable Development Goals launched under United Nations auspices in 2015 include a number of objectives relating directly or indirectly to children. Thus, UNICEF has custody of the implementation of programmes related to early mortality, early marriage, genital mutilation, and so on. UNICEF is also closely involved in the agendas of birth registration, with its implications for citizens’ rights and for the delivery of services, and of the improved regulation of child labour. The recruitment of under-age soldiers in areas of conflict is another matter of international concern as is the abduction of children internationally whether by family members or others. International agreements and processes around these areas of concern may be said to be an uneasy amalgamation of somewhat paternalistic protection measures with measures that enable and recognise autonomy in children either as individuals or (rarely) as collectives. The question of children’s needs and legal rights more generally remains challenging. Statutory definitions of entitlements or obli­ gations, such as voting age, age at marriage, and employment-related age prescriptions, illustrate the arbitrary nature of population-wide demarcations. The criminal system presents many relevant examples of what might be thought of as the underlying question: Are children special as compared to adults and if so how? Around the world, many criminal law systems make special concessions, both systematically and ad hoc, to children either as witnesses or as perpetrators. As witnesses children are often protected from the gaze of the accused person and are subjected to significantly moderated forms of cross-examination, if any. As perpetrators whether of minor or of major crimes, children are often examined in a separate institutional setting and their chronological age may

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automatically cancel out criminal liability. If sentenced, children will generally face a different range of options for punishment as compared to adults and if detained will likely be accommodated separately from adult criminals. Much of this special treatment may seem to be straightforwardly the march of progress and enlightenment, yet the problematic underside of such practices is not hard to see. A pointer to these problems is the appeal to youthfulness as a mitigating factor in the sentencing of war crime perpetrators aged at the time of the offences in their early adult years. Youthfulness as mitigation is a moveable feast. In this connection the role of scientific expertise is worth noting. Either directly, in the form of expert testimony, or indirectly in the form of accepted wisdom, claims from contemporary neuroscience and its acolytes concerning the immaturity of the brains of children and of young adults not infrequently play a role in the courts. Here, CLS needs to reach out to critical scholarship in other disciplines. Again, in the medical-legal context, difficult questions arise when children refuse life-saving treatment or when parents refuse such treatment on their behalf. Euthanasia, abortion, and intervention with critically impaired infants may of course all raise complex questions of ethics and of legality in relation to which a critical legal sensitivity may well be relevant if not always welcome. For a critical legal sensitivity must be prepared to ask uncomfortable questions. Does the criminal system have to ‘believe’ everything a child complainant says? If so, why? (It does not ‘believe’ everything an adult complainant or witness says although it does so to say ‘entertain’ it, give it consideration.) To do so—to treat children as special in their honesty, integrity, or disingenuousness—is in effect a return to an ‘innocence’ discourse of childhood. To treat children as an oppressed class is a version of this romanticism. Therefore, the task of a CLS of childhood is not to gratify the expectations of any particular political persuasion whether of the left or of the right. It is, perhaps, to interrupt. And to keep on interrupting. John R. Morss See also Children as Witnesses; Children’s Rights; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Cismas, I. (2016). The child’s best interests and religion: A case study of the Holy See’s best interests obligations and clerical child sexual abuse. In E. S. Elaine & L. A. M. Barnes (Eds.), Implementing Article 3 of the United Nations convention on the rights of the child: Best interests, welfare and well-being (pp. 310–325). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316662977.020 Monk, D. (2009). Childhood and the law: In whose “Best Interests”? In J. K. Mary (Ed.), An introduction to childhood studies (pp. 177–197). London, UK: McGraw Hill/ Open University. Morss, J. R. (2004). But for the barriers: Significant extensions of children’s capacity established. B & B Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 11, 319–322. doi:10.1375/1321871042707232 Morss, J. R. (2004). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are nevertheless dead: The hypothetical adolescence of Prince Hamlet and the contested remorselessness of young offenders. University of New England Law Journal, 1, 187–197.

Critical Pedagogy ‘Critical pedagogy’ refers loosely to a raft of theoretical and practical work, drawing on critical theory, psychology, and philosophy to align pedagogy with learning in struggles against oppression. But it is harder to practise (in today’s society) than to theorise. Advocates for critical pedagogy have argued that an essential element should be the joining of learners with teachers in ‘learningteaching’ in struggle against oppression. The traditional form of pedagogic transmission of the cultural canon (passing on ‘truths’ to the next generation) was challenged by Enlightenment philosophers with more ‘progressive’, learnercentred alternatives involving the agency of next generation in practice. But in the West, perhaps U.S. educator John Dewey (1859–1952) is best known for articulating the new philosophy of education: He noted especially that learners learn what they ‘experience’ in practice, rather than what they are simply told by their presumed betters (the pedagogues). Thus, for Dewey, the curriculum must offer ‘experience’ that is worth

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learning from, whether it be how to engage with the canon critically, or how learners are to develop their own learning projects. Progressive pedagogues drew on such ideas to define a new progressive practical approach, but in fact Dewey argued against the ‘traditional’ versus ‘progressive’ dichotomy: He preferred to see tradition and its cultural canon as an important resource for active learning. In this view, for example, Shakespeare’s work is not important to the curriculum because he was a great historical figure and playwright, but because of the continuing relevance of his work to understanding the human condition today (and in the Dewey tradition, it would probably also be important for children to experience the actual enactment of the work in practice). But to Dewey’s perspective one can also add that of Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) in the field of psychology of learning and ‘development’: Children are not ‘little adults’ but are socialised by a series of developments as they engage in experiences with the world (including with peers and adults). The learner-centredness of this approach reinforces critiques of the traditional pedagogy that sees the world through only adult eyes as the ‘delivery’ of culture to the young ‘savages’. From all this, one gathers that a critical pedagogy must put the lived experience and interests of the learners at the centre of pedagogy. But so far we don’t have a class critique, except by implication that many or most learners’ interests may not be aligned with the middle- and upper-class interests that determine the ‘traditional curriculum/ pedagogy’. Both Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) criticised traditional, institutionalised school education as reproductive of capitalism (whilst Freire emphasises the oppression as colonialism in Latin America, for Bourdieu, it is also the mostly indigenous upper classes in France/the West). The classic work of Bourdieu, with Jean-Claude Passeron in the 1970s, notes that schools offer to children of the oppressed classes everything they need except that which is required for success (i.e., the cultural capital that successful students largely get from their family and community networks): This is functional for the reproduction of the class system, since it

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delivers a stratified workforce that misrecognises the symbolic violence that schooling does to them, typically concluding that school was ‘not for the likes of us’ (i.e., blaming themselves). For Bourdieu then, it is the role of critical sociologists (he does not say ‘pedagogues’) to reveal the truth of this violence in the cultural fields such as education. Freire’s critique is framed more around what he calls the ‘banking’ ideology of education as an accumulation of credits and rewards for the individual student that eventually provides the right record (e.g., curriculum vitae) for a privileged job: This is arguably very close to Bourdieu’s concept of educational and cultural capital. Freire offers against this view of education an ideology summed up in the title of his best known work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where the radical teacher and pedagogue looks for spaces where the oppressed have interests and needs (e.g., literacy for challenging the landlords’ illegal abuses of power) or where they are ‘closed out of opportunities to learn’. Incidentally, Freire echoes Dewey in his rejection of ‘progressive’ laissez-faire notions of pedagogy as withdrawing from teaching, or merely supporting learning (a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage). To the extent that the pedagogue has know-how, expertise, and knowledge, they have a duty to make these assets available to the oppressed. A guide on the side with a ‘map’ had better not hold back—this point also echoes the views of Vygotskyans who see pedagogy in a zone of proximal development, as leading development and learning, and criticise interpretations of Piaget’s notion that what can or should be learnt is determined by the stage of maturation and development of the child. Arguably, this view offers pedagogues more ­ agency; there is a balance of the agency of learners-with-teachers in learning–teaching (the ­ author’s ­ interpretation of Vygotsky’s term for learning, obuchenie). Some of the implications for pedagogic practice are obvious. Such pedagogy would seem clearly to oppose much (perhaps almost everything) that is prevalent in industrialised societies’ education ­systems today: the credit system, testing and selection, judging (and funding) by test results, imposition of uniformity of curriculum and examinations,

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the arbitrary forms of assessment promulgated as ‘equitable’, and so on. Much more difficult is to define the alternatives, and even more so to find spaces for the alternatives to flourish. Often alternatives are found in the corners and at the periphery of mainstream education: after school, in the playground, on the streets, during weekends. Radical projects are often found (and more easily sanctioned) when they work with the marginalised, and on the margins of institutionalised education. One might easily come to the conclusion then that schools might not be the right, or easiest, places to develop critical pedagogy. Julian Williams See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Critical Theory, the Child in; Dewey, John;

Further Readings Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London, UK: Sage. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Touchstone. Freire, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the oppressed (R. Myra, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. (Originally published in Portuguese, 1968)

Critical Race Theory Critical race theory (CRT) is based on the premise that race is a social construct and that race-based belief systems are visible in all parts of our social life. With regard to children and childhood, although there is work that takes up anti-racist and anti-bias approaches to pedagogy, and children’s play for example, very little attention has been paid to CRT by people working in the area of early childhood; however, CRT has been taken up more widely by education scholars and teachers in the field of K–12 (kindergarten through completion of secondary school) education. This entry examines the history of CRT and outlines some key tenets of CRT with an eye to early childhood. Because this theory began in the United States, much of what is discussed in this entry is U.S. based; however, there are CRT scholars

working elsewhere (e.g., in the United Kingdom and Canada).

History CRT began as a race-based critique of American civil rights scholarship. More specifically, CRT grew out of the ideas that emerged in critical legal studies conferences held in the mid- to late 1980s, where legal scholars and law students criticised the way they saw the law used as a tool to benefit the wealthy and powerful whilst ignoring the experiences of people of colour and the existence of racism in U.S. society. Scholars such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Lani Guinier, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw amongst others decried the lack of progression of Blacks in U.S. society and argued that the Civil Rights movement had actually benefited Whites more than Blacks. In the mid-1990s, CRT was taken up as a theoretical framework by scholars working outside of legal studies, and in particular by those within the field of education through the work of education scholars Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate, and later David Gillborn. In this context, CRT examines the ways in which racism is practiced across institutions by looking at the power structures embedded in educational policies and practices and, like those in the legal realm, seeks change. CRT scholars demonstrate how power structures are based on White privilege and further marginalise people of colour. For example, Eurocentric norms, which constitute the dominant culture of whiteness, are usually associated with words such as ‘achievement’ and ‘middle class’. However, Ladson-Billings argues the ideologies that surround being Black still carry negative connotations, such as ‘underachievers’ and ‘lazy’. As noted, CRT has not been widely  taken up by scholars working in early childhood.

Tenets A multifaceted framework, CRT does not include one set of fundamental tenets that all CRT scholars (must) follow, although there are a number of elements underpinned by the idea that there is a need to change and expose racist policies and

Critical Race Theory

practices that may further marginalise certain groups and uphold the status quo. Still, there are fairly consistent features that appear in discussions of CRT and that will be discussed in this entry. These include race, racism as central, intersectionality, White privilege, Whiteness as property, White supremacy, the myth of meritocracy, colour-blindness, interest convergence, storytelling, and counter-storytelling. Race

CRT takes the position that race is a significant factor of social inequity and by employing this premise, this CRT allows researchers to examine racial assumptions that infiltrate our daily lives and can help others to understand these connections. As stated earlier, ‘race’ in this theory is viewed as a social construct, which is often signified by putting the word ‘race’ in single quotes. Racism as Central

According to CRT, acts of race hatred need not be obvious, blatant acts of racism, indeed, CRT takes the position that acts of racism can occur every day in a myriad of ways and that such acts are not unusual, they are in fact the norm. In the context of childhood, racist acts may take the form of more subtle microaggressions that exist in policies (e.g., attempts to control children’s appearance/hair), curriculum, classroom interactions, assessment, school discipline, assumptions regarding children’s abilities, the way children see their parents treated, peer interactions, friendship selection, treatment in stores, and so forth. CRT also makes the case that racist associations and stereotypes are dynamic and can change over time, which is also known as ‘racialization’. The focus in CRT is not only on racial inequality, however, as ‘intersectionality’ is a key component of CRT. Intersectionality

Crenshaw, drawing on radical feminist scholarship, highlighted the importance of the intersections of race, social class, and gender as a way to give Black women more visibility amongst feminist and anti-racist scholars, given that the experiences of Black women were/are often left out of White

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feminist and anti-racist discourse. Thus, CRT offers scholars and practitioners the opportunity to examine and seek to ameliorate multiple intersecting oppressions. Whilst some critics of CRT argue that it focuses too heavily on a Black–White binary, other forms of oppression are brought into discussions of CRT via intersectionality. Some of these include race and sexuality or queer criticism, a focus on other minoritised groups, for example, Latina/o criticism, and Asian criticism, and also on dis/ability criticism. Recently, some early childhood scholars have begun discussing refugee criticism. However, a limitation of CRT, which intersectionality does not address, is the failure to acknowledge intra-group racism due to colourism; the basis of stratification along colour lines. This is defined as the tendency to perceive or behave towards members of a racial category on the lightness or darkness of their skin tone. White Privilege

White privilege reflects the idea that Whites assume their experience to be normative. Although some Whites may understand racial oppression, it does not necessarily mean that they understand the ideology of White privilege. To understand White privilege, those that are part of the dominant group need to understand and critically reflect on their position in society. When this position is acknowledged, it is then that Whites may start to work to be an ally. A well-known essay by Peggy McIntosh first published in 1989, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, identifies some of the daily effects of White privilege for adults, and certainly includes some situations and experiences that children may also notice and experience, if not always for themselves, then vicariously via their White parents/guardians. Sometimes CRT scholars use the term ‘White supremacy’ in a similar manner. Thus, in CRT circles, this terminology does not refer to White supremacist groups, or blatant acts of race hatred, but to the racist forces that permeate society as a whole. Whiteness as Property

Historically, the law ensured that Whiteness was connected to property and although no

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longer as blatant as they were at one time, the law along with the government continues to marginalise particular racialised groups, especially Blacks and Indigenous peoples. Dating back to the 1600s, Blacks were denied ownership of land and seen as chattel slaves, a state which was embedded in U.S. law. In more recent American history, the U.S. government denied loans to Blacks who wanted to purchase in White dominated neighbourhoods. Even more recently, Blacks have been subjected to higher subprime rates and loan fees than their White counterparts. When Blacks do move into White-dominated neighbourhoods, many neighbourhoods experience ‘White flight’, whereby Whites move out of their neighbourhood due to the movement of Blacks into the neighbourhood. What does this mean for children when they live in ‘segregated’ neighbourhoods or attend certain early childhood programmes in their neighbourhood (e.g., a private pre-school vs. a Head Start programme) or ‘segregated’ K–12 schools? In other words, what does this mean for the spaces children play in, whom they have an opportunity to play with, whom they go to school with, or what adults they might see living and/or working in their community? The Myth of Meritocracy

A tenet of liberalism, meritocracy derives from the belief that there is equal opportunity for everyone, for example, the belief that if you just work hard enough you will be rewarded. Unfortunately, meritocracy does not consider the inequitable treatment of people of colour, treatment which may be seen in a variety of ways in various early childhood settings and K–12 settings, for example, regarding who is hired or promoted. CRT scholars believe this liberal belief undermines the progression of people of colour and allows them to be further marginalised in society. Connected to this myth is the notion of ‘colour-blindness’. Colour-Blindness

A colour-blind approach, essentially ignoring race, is critiqued by CRT. Many race scholars assert that it is problematic when White people insist that they do not notice the skin colour of a racial minority. In the context of early childhood,

this occurs when (mostly White) adults insist that children do not see race, or that they themselves do not see the race of children. The refusal to recognise race and racism as part of everyday values, policies, programmes, and practices is what CRT works to counter. Interest Convergence

Rooted in U.S. law and policies, interest convergence is seen as an important tenet of CRT, a belief that the progress of Blacks in society is only made when this progression benefits White elites. Interest convergence, a concept developed by Derrick Bell, makes the case that Whites are seen as the dominant culture and Blacks are seen as subordinate to Whites, which means there is a lack of motivation from Whites to advance the lives of Blacks. Storytelling

CRT scholars emphasise the importance of lived experience and storytelling as a meaningful element of CRT. Storytelling and narratives allow members of marginalised groups to share personal accounts of lived experiences providing an authentic look at their lives. Qualitative researchers who take up CRT employ these stories as empirical evidence. Counter-Storytelling

Critical race theorists also speak about the importance of ‘counter-storytelling’, as they argue there is a need to use counter-storytelling to dispel ‘majoritarian’ storytelling. Majoritarian storytelling is storytelling that upholds White privilege and is often focused on the stories of White men from privileged social classes, which serves to silence non-White communities and centre Whiteness as the norm. To combat majoritarian stories, and racist stories and stories with stereotypical representations, counter-stories, the stories of communities that are not often widely told or listened to, need to be heard. With regard to early childhood, along with making space for children and adults to share counter-stories with each other, particular picture books also hold possibilities for sharing counter-stories with and amongst children. Rachel Carson Berman

Critical Realism See also Intersectionality; Racial Formation; Racial Innocence, Child and (U.S. History); Schooling, Gender, and Race

Further Readings Berman, R., Daniel, B., Butler, A., MacNevin, M., & Royer, N. (2017). Nothing, or almost nothing, to report: Early childhood educators and discursive constructions of colorblindness. International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal, 6(1), 52–65. Brown, S., Souto-Manning, M., & Laman, T. T. (2010). Seeing the strange in the familiar: Unpacking racialized practices in early childhood settings. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 13(4), 513–532. doi:10.108 0/13613324.2010.519957 Crenshaw, K. W., Gotanda, N., Peller, G., & Thomas, K. (Eds.). (1995). Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement. New York, NY: The New Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv39x51k.25 Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York: New York University Press. Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68. Ledesma, M. C., & Calderon, D. (2015). Critical race theory in education: A review of past literature and a look to the future. Qualitative Inquiry, 21, 206–222. doi:10.1177/1077800414557825 Nash, K. T., & Miller, E. T. (2015). Reifying and resisting racism from early childhood to young adulthood. Urban Review, 47(1), 184–208. doi:10.1007/ s11256-014-0314-5 Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-story telling as an analytical framework for education. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. doi:10.1177/107780040200800103 Strekalova-Hughes, E., Nash, K., & Erdemir, E. (2017, October). Toward a refugee critical race theory in education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Reconceptualising Early Childhood Education Conference, Toronto, Canada.

Critical Realism Critical realism (CR) is a philosophy of the social and natural sciences. CR can help to resolve contradictions in social science; promote interdisciplinary

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research; deepen research analysis that connects macro to micro, local to global levels; and examine transformative change over time. The social sciences are divided by disagreements and contradictions, primarily between positivism (a broad term for mainly quantitative, factual, statistical, experimental, and evaluative research) and interpretivism (a broad term for many qualitative, ethnographic, constructionist, and postmodern approaches). Positivists tend to treat even ambiguous complex matters, such as happiness or Scholastic Aptitude Tests, if they are precise, measurable facts about children’s actual happiness or learning. In contrast, many interpretivists treat even solid, universal realities, such as children’s bodies, as if they are contingent, local, social constructions or discourses without their own essential existence. Another disagreement is whether social science is or should be value-free, relativist, or concerned with values. When social scientists cannot agree together in mutual respect, others are unlikely to trust their reports or apply them to policy and practice, and childhood studies so far have little public influence. CR examines how both groups collapse independent reality (ontology), which can be discovered but not invented, into their thinking (epistemology) in their reported facts and statistics or their perceptions and interpretations. CR resolves the contradictions by respecting the partly known independent reality being researched (complex, fluctuating happiness, or learning), the positivist facts and statistics when they reflect reality, and also the interpretive perceptions. CR recognizes three levels of reality, illustrated here with the example of the fire in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower, London, in June 2017, where children escaped or died or were thrown out of windows to safety: (1) our empirical experiences, understandings, images, and memories; (2) the actual things, the burnt building, and the people, events, and relations we observed; and (3) the underlying causal mechanisms, usually only seen in their effects. These include the inflammable potential of the Tower’s fairly new cladding, housing policies guided by cost over safety, and social class and inequality in the local housing provision. Research at the empirical and actual levels can discover correlations but not deeper

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causes, and CR has useful concepts to help to analyze and validate these. Childhood studies are interdisciplinary, studying children not in isolation but in relation to healthcare, climate change, religion, economics, and many other aspects of their lives. CR assists interdisciplinary research by mapping commonalities between the social and natural sciences and humanities (such as the shared levels of empirical, actual, and real). In The Possibility of Naturalism, Roy Bhaskar analyzed the unity, though not uniformity, between the social and natural sciences, and this work informs CR research on a great range of topics. Bhaskar’s concept of the four-planar social being identifies four interacting aspects of being human, and so helps to structure and coordinate research from micro to macro levels. Even small local ethnographic studies greatly gain from being nested and understood within larger concerns that can be researched through literature reviews. The four interacting social planes, illustrated with reference again to Grenfell Tower, are (1) bodies in relation to nature, affected by the fire, poison gases, water, and height; (2) interpersonal relations within families and communities, and with firefighters and local officials; (3) social structures, including local and national housing policies, and how surviving and bereaved residents were or were not supported by state services; and (4) inner being, alienation or flourishing, suffering, and the hope of recovery. Fourplanar social being can help to coordinate research about different though closely related aspects of children’s lives, which need to be understood in relation to one another. Interacting structure and agency are central to the work of critical realism as Margaret Archer and others demonstrate. Social research tends to be static, like one or a series of photos each set in its own time. CR has methods for researching dynamic process and transformative change, through emergence (new generations emerge from older ones) and a fourstage dialectic. With Grenfell Tower this dialectic would examine (1) hidden causes, policies, and absences (of justice and responsible planning and construction) that led to the fire; (2) interventions intended to negate absences and problems (including the Tower’s cladding added for appearance

and insulation) and their effects; (3) larger structures (global urban housing and related subcontracting policies, economies, and law); and (4) critical introspection, moral responsibility, and hope of change. CR contends that all social research involves power, truth, and values. Typically, powerless people, the tenants, want to start at stage 1, the real hidden causes, and work through to stage 4 and real change. Powerful groups (the council and government) want to start and end at stage 2, at fairly superficial interventions, leaving power relations and structures untouched. Priscilla Alderson See also Agency; Childhood in Western Philosophy; Philosophy, the Child in

Further Readings Alderson, P. (2013). Childhoods real and imagined: An introduction to childhood studies and critical realism (Vol. 1). London, UK: Routledge. Alderson, P. (2016). The politics of childhoods real and imagined: Practical application of childhood studies and critical realism (Vol. 2). London, UK: Routledge. Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1998). The possibility of naturalism (3rd ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Porpora, D. (2015). Reconstructing sociology: The critical realist approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values and ethical life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Critical Theory,

the

Child

in

The term ‘critical theory’ denotes both a definition as a specific approach to academic, intellectual, and political thought in Germany from the 1930s onwards (known since the 1960s as the ‘Frankfurt School’ and originating from the work of social theorists Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas), as well as

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a wider definition relating to a diverse and eclectic range of ways and methods of thinking critically and analytically. These definitions remain related in that they encompass a critique of the assumption that thought can operate as an objective, disinterested, fact-finding mission; instead, they understand thinking—including their own—always necessarily to be from specific perspectives, with particular investments and interests. Critical theorists, however, do not see this as resulting in a retreat into mere subjectivity nor as a defeatist or nihilist position, which is often a criticism levelled at them, but instead as offering liberatory and emancipatory methods and practices where claims to objectivity, essentialism, and authority are unmasked as the effects of power, hierarchy, and naturalisation. The study of childhood has perhaps an especially tense relationship with critical theory because childhood is widely assumed to be a natural, essentialist, organic, and universal reality. As much as the study of childhood in various fields—including the humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and the law—has expanded and developed, there is a marked prevalence of claims to discovering universal, innate, biological, or psychological facts or truths about the child. Critical theory of childhood raises questions about both those facts and truths themselves and about the desire to find and claim them, and this is closely comparable to similar critiques made in relation to gender, race, ethnicity and national identity, and sexual identity, for instance. This entry provides an overview of the most important issues and questions critical theory raises in relation to childhood.

History French historian Philippe Ariès’s groundbreaking book Centuries of Childhood (1960) can be taken as one of the foundational texts of the critical theory of childhood in that Ariès there famously articulated the approach that the family is not self-evident or natural as a ‘nuclear’ entity but a product of changing and shifting ideas and therefore can be examined and understood in this light. Proposing family and childhood as ideas subject to historical, cultural, and political shifts has remained a controversial and much-debated issue right up until the present day, with historians and sociologists of childhood lining up either to

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support Ariès or to deride him for suggesting that children somehow did not ‘exist’ in medieval times. At stake here is the question of what constitutes evidence for the existence of childhood and according to whom, where the very issues of both ‘existence’ and ‘evidence’ again rely on the struggle between claiming that there can be ‘objective’, universally recognised facts, realities, or truths; or as in critical theory, the view that such claims themselves are in turn dependent on perspectives that attribute such statuses for particular reasons, whether intentionally or not. Ariès is, accordingly, either accused by other historians of overlooking evidence for the existence of childhood in history, or supported as interpreting medieval art, crafts, or clothing as constituting what are currently defined as children instead as miniature adults. U.S. theorist and historian James Kincaid famously and controversially drew on arguments such as those of Ariès in arguing that childhood was constructed in Victorian times as the innocence which was simultaneously a projection and fulfillment of adult desires. In any case, Ariès’s argument set out the grounds for such views and continues to affect the debate around childhood far more widely than for history alone.

Psychology Whereas history only deals with childhood relatively rarely, developmental psychology (and its affiliated field, education) is one of the few core fields of childhood study and therefore is profoundly affected by critical theory when it engages with it, which is, however, relatively rarely. British sociologist Chris Jenks in 1982 edited a volume of Essential Readings in the Sociology of Childhood, which introduced a further range of critical theory perspectives on childhood, including a chapter from Ariès’s book and work by other eminent French critical theorists, including Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. Subsequently, Jacqueline Rose, a British literary and critical theorist of gender, childhood, and later, national identity, published in 1984 her seminal critique of essentialist views of childhood, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, in which Rose followed both the original Frankfurt School critical theorists and

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the later French deconstructionist critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan in drawing on psychoanalysis in relation to childhood. Noteworthy is that these theorists’ specific reading of psychoanalysis stresses that the unconscious, like childhood, is not a fact or truth to be found, but a production from a perspective which can never be childhood or the unconscious itself; rather, it is always a perspective on it from elsewhere; always a memory on a past self. In this sense, Rose understands psychoanalysis not to be about an unconscious as a part of the brain or an aspect of mind, but an unconscious as that which is the necessary underpinning opposition of all conscious meanings and acts. As such, this kind of understanding of the psychoanalytic unconscious prevents any assumption that our language is under our conscious control or that we can simply ‘address’ others—such as children through children’s ­literature—with a knowledge and control of how that ‘address’ will arrive and be understood. Although Rose’s book ostensibly, then, is about children’s literature, it in fact uses thinking about this area as just one example of the implications of her core argument against any essentialist definitions of childhood (and any other identities). British critical psychologists Valerie Walkerdine and Erica Burman developed arguments such as these in other areas, in the case of Walkerdine for instance making through close classroom observations a critique of assumptions about gender and childhood in her work on girls and mathematics, where she analysed how repeated claims that girls inherently were incapable of excelling at mathematics instead could be traced to both male and female teachers’ unconscious views of what Walkerdine called the ‘just or only phenomenon’. On such views, girls were judged to do mathematics well ‘just or only’ because they worked hard at it, whilst boys who did well at mathematics were judged to have real understanding or insight. Walkerdine’s later work expanded this thinking into wider considerations of gender, childhood, sexuality, education, and culture. Burman specifically analysed how developmental psychology’s reliance on naturalising and universalising what can be seen also reinforces historical assumptions about gender, childhood, and race. In her later writings, she draws out further the ways in which ‘development’ as a trope moves across different

disciplines, not only in relation to childhood in developmental psychology but also politics, economics, and nationhood, as in, for instance, claims about ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ nations.

Vision, Voice, and Agency In questioning childhood as a natural phenomenon, critical theorists as a consequence may also question concepts that are included in such ideas, as Burman does with ‘development’. Further key questions here are, for instance, in relation to learning, perception, consciousness, voice, and agency. Essentialist definitions of childhood often assume that children have an innocent and pure vision, both of art and paintings, and of wider life and society as well. Critical theorists ask what kinds of ideas of seeing underpin such assumptions. Equally, there has in recent decades been a growing interest in the child’s voice and agency, where again voice and agency are taken for granted as understood traits, mostly as a consequence of developments in what is often called the ‘new sociology of childhood’, introduced in Scandinavia and Northern Europe by sociologists such as Jens Qvortrup and Allison James. Central to this idea is the claim that to be an agent or a participant, and to have a voice, is a privilege and prerogative to which children can and should have access. Critical theory, however, continues to explore the question of what ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ ‘are’. Are they, necessarily, the liberation from adult exploitation and oppression that many researchers of childhood assume? And, moreover, what are precisely the ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ ‘of childhood’? What allows them to be seen as such and by whom and why? British critical theorists of childhood and gender, Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, and Valerie Walkerdine explain in their 1985 volume Language, Gender and Childhood that thinking in this way involves understanding under which conditions and in which specific contexts claims to ‘speaking’ and ‘truth’ are made and how those conditions and contexts necessarily regulate and circumscribe what kinds of claims can be made. Using this perspective allows us to ask, for instance, when a child is seen to speak, how and why is it seen to be speaking ‘its own voice’? This issue is fundamental to difficulties surrounding both the study and the care of the child in any context,

Cultural Capital

including in legal, educational, or social welfare situations, where the question is often asked whether the child is not speaking the words it has been told to speak, for instance (that the child is ‘purely mimicking’ or has been ‘indoctrinated’). These ‘ontological questions’ arise both with respect to ‘voice’ and ‘vision’ (‘seeing’) and in the use of ‘agency’ in relation to the child and continue to be central to methodological debates within childhood studies. What is central here is the implication of psychoanalysis in terms of the ‘splitting’ of the rationalist, unitary subject not just in terms of a questioning of assumptions about the ‘content’ of such a rational subject but also in terms of the perspectives of researchers themselves. For according to critical theory, researchers too can no longer assume their own rational, unitary subjectivity in terms of a dualistic split from their object of research. The question of how and why and when researchers ‘see’ or ‘hear’ the child therefore continually come to the forefront in this kind of research.

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Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1998). Childhood and textuality: Culture, history, literature. In K. Lesnik-Oberstein (Ed.), Children in culture: Approaches to childhood (pp. 1–26). London, UK: Palgrave. Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan or the impossibility of children’s fiction. London, UK: Macmillan. Steedman, C., Urwin, C., & Walkerdine, V. (Eds.). (1984). Language, gender, and childhood. London, UK: Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (1989). Counting girls out: Girls and mathematics. London, UK: Routledge. Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt school: Its history, theories and political significance (R. Michael, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

CRT See Critical Race Theory

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein See also Child; Childhood; Childhood Studies; Children’s Literature; Psychoanalysis, the Child in; Sexual Orientation

Further Readings Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life (B. Robert, Trans.). London, UK: Jonathan Cape. (Original work published 1960) Burman, E. (1994). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London, UK: Routledge. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. London, UK: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2016). Of Grammatology (C. S. Gayatri, Trans). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967) Freud, S. (1968). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In S. Freud (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (J. Strachey, General ed.), (Vol. 7, pp. 125–248). London, UK: The Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Jenks, C. (Ed.). (1982). The sociology of childhood: Essential readings. London, UK: Batsford. Kincaid, J. (1992). Child-loving: The erotic child and Victorian culture. New York, NY: Routledge.

Cultural Capital Over decades, educational researchers in the United Kingdom have tried to understand why the educational attainment gap between students from different ethnic, gender, and social class backgrounds has persisted throughout their school years. The concept of cultural capital as a sociological tool has been applied in education as a way of studying this inequality and cultural reproduction of a society in such a way. This entry offers an overview of the definition of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological tool of cultural capital and further examines his conceptualisation of how the education system serves a pivotal role in reproducing class structures and class inequalities.

Defining Cultural Capital Bourdieu’s theory, or his logic of practice, is highly influenced by 19th century social theorists Karl Marx and Max Weber but also has significant differences from them. The difference here lies in how the concept of class is conceived. For

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Marx, class inequalities were rooted in the capitalist mode of production, hence, materialistic in nature. On the other hand, Weber argued that social class and inequalities are (in addition to materialistic possessions) also defined by prestige, which can lead to power (i.e., his or her will to do what they wish through economic wealth). Bourdieu takes forward both viewpoints, but adds a cultural dimension to the concept of power. Power, for Bourdieu, is explored through the dominant power relations between positions within cultural fields occupied by different actors (rather than simply economic relations of production and consumption). For example, in the educational field, these positions are occupied by students and teachers (amongst others). Power relations of dominant/dominated are manifest between fields, that is, between the wider field of power (the political–economic field) and local cultural fields (e.g., school or educational field). Dominant power relations (in the form of social stratification) are then (re)produced through (for example) the students’ accumulation of legitimate capital that confers on them the power to occupy their positions in the field. Capital then presents itself in different forms—for example, economic (material, wealth, etc.), cultural (taste, skills, credentials such as qualifications, etc.), social (networks of connections), and symbolic forms (prestige). Therefore, by focusing on system of capital exchange, one can begin to understand how some students are able to access education (at school or elsewhere) whilst others find this more difficult.

Cultural Capital and Education Evidently, capital (or power) plays a pivotal role in the mode of reproduction of educational inequalities. In education, cultural capital (i.e., knowledge, attitudes, values, taste, abilities, qualifications) perpetuates class privilege and, thereby, class inequalities. As cultural capital is a relational concept (i.e., embedded in its local and social context operationalised through Bourdieu’s other concepts, such as ‘habitus’ and ‘field’), it also then enables the study of subcultures within fields (e.g., peer groups, mediated by ethnicity, gender, and social class) and their role in the cultural reproduction of a class society at a local level. It is

important to emphasise that Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital needs to be understood along with his other sociological tools and grounded in context. According to Bourdieu, capital or habitus is not a separate entity outside of the context of a ‘field’, or fields, that overlap a fraction of social space under investigation (e.g., a classroom) and its role in reproduction of the given field in question. Here habitus relates to a person’s dispositions or tendencies to behave in a certain manner without realising it. For example, for students this may be observed as behaviour tendencies leading to engagement or disengagement in educational tasks. Bourdieu and his colleague Jean Claude Passeron have referred to educational qualifications as a form of cultural capital or ‘power’, which they define as crucial to the cultural reproduction of class divisions in the education system. They directly related the possession of ‘the right kind of’ capital to the degree of success of students in the French education system. They found that these students were differentially selected and positioned in schools, courses, and ability classes according to their possession of power or status, which then had an impact on their achievement outcome (as reflected in the patterns found through statistical analysis), as it either limited or enhanced their access to further capital available in the field.

Related Research Research looking into the forms of cultural capital that gives middle-class students an edge over their counterparts, in education and beyond, have found that parents play a significant role in this. For example, parents encouraging their children to read and write, taking them to tuition for education and/or music, helping them with their learning generally, and so on, are all forms of cultural capital. Arguably this then provides the middle-class children with further skills or knowledge that they can utilise in the educational field (i.e., school, classrooms) to gain further access to cultural capital. Other research has also found that middle-class parents’ own academic qualification (a form of institutionalised cultural capital) gives their children an advantage over workingclass parents, who may be equally trying hard to

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help their children but may not possess the same type of cultural capital (in this case qualifications). Similarly, middle-class parents are more likely to be able to make informed school choices for their children, in a way that would further advance their education. The danger here is to assume automisation (i.e., that working-class students who lack cultural capital will always fail). Indeed, not all working-class students fail. Similarly, not all middle-class students succeed. In an educational context, cultural capital presents itself in three forms: ‘embodied’, ‘objectified’, and ‘institutionalised’. ‘Embodied cultural capital’ can be seen as internalised skills, knowledge, and dispositions (e.g., towards engagement in mathematics tasks, and might include values and beliefs about learning and education more generally). Thus, the habitus (dispositions) and embodied cultural capital are inseparable to the extent that one’s habitus (tendencies to behave in a certain manner) might be seen as a form of embodied cultural capital in itself if there is a suitable fit with the given field (e.g., a classroom). ‘Objectified cultural capital’ represents material resources the students have to bring about their learning in mathematics such as books, calculators, and so on. And ‘institutionalised cultural capital’ refers to educational qualifications. For example, in the United Kingdom, National Curriculum Test grades in mathematics and General Certificate of Secondary Education mathematics grades can be seen as examples of institutionalised cultural capital. Furthermore, different forms of capitals are also interchangeable and transferable in certain conditions. All these forms of capital have exchange value in some sense and, hence, can be converted into each other for the purpose of promoting self-interest. In the book, Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau (2011) shows how middle-class parents pass on cultural capital to their children through sustained, planned, and organised cultural activities mediated by dialogue, whereas working-class parents rely on children learning naturally. They lack the right kind of social networks (social capital) or the resources (cultural capital) to invest in their children’s upbringing although both groups of parents share a desire of educational success for their children.

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Critical Responses Critical perspectives on cultural capital come from mainly two perspectives: (1) other factors are more important; and (2) it is difficult to operationalise in actual data due to its many definitions. Some researchers argue there are other factors that are more significant in explaining inequality in education and social reproduction, for example, social deprivation (i.e., lack of economical capital). Critiques have also pointed out that it is difficult to establish or ground the cultural capital in data in order to analyse the exact effect of cultural capital on educational attainment. They argue it is difficult to ascertain, for example, how much and what kind of cultural capital leads to higher grades. On the other hand, recently Louise Archer and colleagues (in the United Kingdom) have empirically investigated the variations in educational engagement and aspirations in students through operationalising ‘science capital’ (a form of cultural capital) through developing a quantitative measure (i.e., questionnaires) of science capital. Through this measure, they were able to show that the variation in objective possibilities for post 16 education was dependent on whether the students had high, medium, or low science capital. Thus, educational literature that seeks to explain cultural reproduction of society through Bourdieu’s social theory and has now started to ground it in actual data rather than just treating it as theoretical constraint independent of the data. Undoubtedly, the study of cultural capital is a powerful way to seek explanation of why patterns of attainment gaps between certain groups persist over history. Sophina Choudry See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Habitus; Human Capital, Child as

Further Readings Archer, L., Dawson, E., DeWitt, J., Seakins, A., & Wong, B. (2015). “Science capital”: A conceptual, methodological, and empirical argument for extending Bourdieusian notions of capital beyond the arts. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52(7), 922–948. doi:10.1002/tea.21227 Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Bourdieu, P. (1984). Types of capital and forms of power. In B. Pierre (Ed.), Homo Academicus (pp. 73–127). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London, UK: Sage Publications. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sullivan, A. (2001). Cultural capital and educational attainment. Sociology, 35(4), 893–912. doi:10.1177/ 0038038501035004006

Cultural Politics

of

Childhood

The term cultural politics of childhood refers to the ways in which childhood unfolds for children in relation to the theories, politics, policies, and practices that are used to understand, approach, control, and regulate children’s lives. Understanding children’s lives and childhood through the politics of culture was first considered in Sharon Stephens’s book, Children and the Politics of Culture. She argued that toward the end of the 20th century, large-scale global forces started to threaten and redefine the boundaries of national and local cultures. At the same time, the proliferation of subcultures and ethnic groups along with the quest for recognition of diverse groups challenged homogeneous and stable identities and the nature of culture. These transformations warranted consideration, first, of how international and local politics of culture affect children, in other words, how elites and minority populations, for example, represent themselves and protect their culture or cultural identities that shape children’s lives and becoming. Second, how in turn children experience, understand, resist, or reshape these kinds of cultural politics that envelop their lives also gained attention. In discussing these issues Stephens emphasizes that principles such as the best interest of the child, the child’s right to a cultural identity, or struggles over cultural identities can play out in various contexts in ways that could be detrimental to children’s lives.

This entry examines the construction of the cultural politics of childhood and its expansion over time, specifically in a global context.

Constructing the Cultural Politics of Childhood In their book, Constructing Childhood, Alison James and Adrian James outlined a comprehensive framework of the cultural politics of childhood. In their view, there are three key elements that constitute the cultural politics of childhood: first, the cultural determinants of childhood; second, the cultural and political processes through which these determinants and understandings are put into practice in any given time and space; and third, the ways in which children understand the cultural determinants and discourses through which their lives are managed and which contribute to their understanding of themselves. The cultural politics of childhood provides childhood studies with a large subject area and engages with processes that contribute to the cultural (re)production of childhood. The cultural politics of childhood was originally set out in constructivist terms, emphasizing the social construction of childhood and the child as central concepts. The construction of childhood concerns the fact that every society has specific ways of demarcating childhood from adulthood and of providing childcare and socialization and that the modern concept of childhood is historically and socially specific. Only children’s biological immaturity is universal, not how this phase of human life is understood. Exploring different childhoods within shifting cultural frames and geographic locations means having to account for the connectivities and disconnectivities between spaces and times and the global processes that continuously transform them. Specific attention also needs to be paid to at least two historical processes: first, to the imperial and colonial projects that sought to export to the Majority World modern notions of childhood intertwined with constructions of gender, race, individuality, and the nuclear family. Second, it was not just the case that early modern notions of childhood influenced colonial views that others were childlike by placing them on a developmental trajectory, but that notions of development

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have also shaped our current knowledge about childhood and children. This interplay between historically and socially varied constructions of the child and childhood, and children’s experiences of their own childhoods, lies at the heart of the cultural politics of childhood. The social construction of the child is often used to describe a social collectivity, that is, children. This means that one uses principles, such as the best interest of the child or descriptions of the child as a developing being, in constructing the collectivity of real children or as a category of people. These concepts are unproblematically applied to the individual child without considering the fact they are culturally specific and amass notions that do not always apply to individual children and their specific life situations. In this conflation, it seems the child stands for all children and notions relating to all children stand for one particular child. However, the particularities that distinguish one child from another are as important and significant as the commonalities children might share as a group. One question the cultural politics of childhood explores is how children themselves view and manage these conflicting interpretations both as individuals and as a collectivity. Another question is how views of an individual child shape more general ideas about childhood and expectations of what children might do. Expanding these questions, James and James later maintain that explorations undertaken within the frame of the cultural politics of childhood help us to understand how the different temporal and spatial constructions of childhood are the product of the relations that adults and children have, where these relations themselves are shaped by broader political, social, and economic contexts. Studies within the cultural politics of childhood thus explore how children’s daily lives unfold and how children participate in institutions (e.g., work, church, school, preschool, families) that are themselves shaped by these relations. The nature of children’s participation in these spaces in turn shapes the structural relations between childhood and adulthood. In this way, the cultural politics of childhood also accounts for how differences between childhood and adulthood are constructed, and describes and challenges the cultural ideas upon which the differences between childhood

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and adulthood are built. These types of studies are concerned with the general issues of structure, power, and agency in relation to childhood and children, including generational relations.

Expanding the Framework Currently, there are multiple extensions to the original frame of the cultural politics of childhood. One of these takes a more global approach and dialogically integrates studies that explore Majority World childhoods, such as those in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. These often account for children’s lives spent in extreme poverty or on the streets, or as refugees or child soldiers, and situate those lives within the global scale of political and economic forces. The point is not only to learn about these lives and how they are shaped by large-scale processes, but also to think relationally about the two worlds, the Minority and Majority childhoods, and the relations between childhood, children and poverty, migration, war, or work. A relational approach shifts attention away from deficit and binary thinking (majority/minority, rich/poor, donors/ recipients, and so on) to focus it on tracing the concepts, conditions, practices, and relations of inequality, distribution, and justice that constitute these children’s worlds. It brings the two worlds into relations, so one is no longer merely a discrete onlooker, but becomes part of it, deeply enmeshed in the conditions and conceptions of childhood that shape children’s lives in Majority Worlds contexts and vice versa. Geographical approaches extend the cultural politics of childhood by focusing on spatiality, highlighting the difference that place makes. More specifically, for example, they look at the different spaces of everyday life and the spatial imaginary in conceptions of childhood. Spatial approaches emphasize that children’s everyday lives are produced at the intersections of global and local processes, where the global is not an abstract realm or situated on a larger scale containing the local, but where the global and local are enmeshed. For example, how children organize their day is bound up with global processes that do not exist on an abstract level, but are worked out in local places. Geographies offer more thorough spatial understandings of the global and local than perspectives

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that conceive space as a container or according to a scalar view that sees these as separate and located in concentric circles extending away from the child. Moreover, modern childhood cannot be understood without considering the processes of spatial separation that produced particular places for childhood. In turn, it is important to consider how children create their own places and spaces in their encounters with the private and public spheres and in a relational manner, where the relations are necessarily embedded in the ongoing flow of carried-out practices and where space is always in the process of being made. There has been a move to extend the constructivist frame of childhood studies that has repercussions for the cultural politics of childhood. This acknowledges that the social constructivist frame unmasks what is taken as seemingly natural, as contingently constructed, and that has the potential to open up possibilities for intentional personal and social change toward greater justice, freedom, equality, and human fulfillment. However, it also calls for critical engagement with its epistemological underpinnings, questioning studies that see the reality and social facts as being socially constructed rather than just our knowledge of them. This move calls for the very frame of cultural politics of childhood to become a research topic for critical research, so that one can move beyond, for example, the dualisms between the biological and the social, and nature and culture, which reinforce the idea that childhood is a social construction. Another example is found in the emergent biopolitical studies that focus on novel and unpredictable connections among materials and processes, and forces and events that are not cultural or social. Related to this, critics seek to move beyond the ideas of the child as unitary subject, of children’s (independent) agency, and the various ways in which children’s voice and agency may be deemed political. Others also aim to overcome the conceptual separation of the biological and social child as separate concepts. These critics do not propose to start with the human subject at all, but with the idea of more-than-social (biosocial) childhoods that signify the human and nonhuman forces that compose childhoods. They call for recognition of the fact that the material, emotional, affective interactions that humans have with one another

and their nonhuman collaborators so as to enable childhood to be conceived as something far more complex, as more-than-social. This view seeks to extend relational approaches to childhood, and to move beyond individualized notions of the child and the use of sociocultural frames. They propose that human bodies are constantly being composed and decomposed through materials, technologies, emotions, prostheses, and energy, such that it is difficult to tell where the human body begins and ends. Exploring these interactions extends present knowledge about children’s lives and approaches to include, for example, agency and children’s participation as understood in sociocultural realms. By expanding the frame of the cultural politics to a world that occurs before and exceeds the cognitive and representational frames of a knowing (the child as a meaning maker) and independent subject, these critics argue for the use of theories of everydayness, embodiment, temporality, and affect, introducing new frames for examining children’s lives. For example, everydayness brings into view the mundane in children’s lives that often goes unnoticed if only political or institutional frames for understanding the world are used. They stress the importance of the everyday and taken-for-granted things and practices (habits) that matter profoundly to children (rather than focusing on how children make sense of these and through these) and that are worthy of much greater consideration, study, and engagement. Zsuzsa Millei See also Childhood; Childhood Studies; Children and Nationalism; Children’s Geographies; Critical Realism

Further Readings Alanen, L. (2015). Are we all constructionists now? Childhood, 22(2), 149–153. doi:10.1177/ 0907568215580624 Holt, L. (2011). Geographies of children, youth and families: An international perspective. London, UK: Routledge. Hopkins, L., & Sriprakash, A. (2015). Revisioning ‘development’: Towards a relational understanding of the ‘poor child’. In L. Hopkins & A. Sriprakash (Eds.), The ‘poor child’: The cultural politics of

Cyberbullying education, development and childhood. London, UK: Routledge. James, A., & James, A. L. (2004). Constructing childhood: Theory, policy and practice. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Kraftl, P. (2013). Beyond ‘voice’, beyond ‘agency’, beyond ‘politics’? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies. Emotion, Space and Society, 9, 13–23. doi:10.1016/j .emospa.2013.01.004 Lee, N., & Motzkau, J. (2011). Navigating the biopolitics of childhood. Childhood, 18(1), 7–19. Tisdall, E. K. M., & Punch, S. (2012). Not so ‘New’? Looking critically at childhood studies. Children’s Geographies, 10(3), 249–264. doi:10.1080/14733285 .2012.693376

Cyberbullying Cyberbullying is the term used for bullying behavior conducted by or involving electronic communication. Cyberbullying, in many ways, affects children and youth fiercely. Children have access to technologies from an increasingly early age that enable digital communication in the social groups they belong to at school or other childhood institutions. However, this access also reaches beyond the schools and institutions and allows children to communicate digitally with a more comprehensive network of children in and beyond their local communities. This entry examines the development of cyberbullying, research on cyberbullying, how it compares to bullying in the material world, and prevention and intervention strategies.

The Development of Cyberbullying The digital social platforms available to children make it possible to send and share text messages, pictures, and videos and to disseminate rapid responses to each other’s uploads. Technologies constantly develop new opportunities for communication and dissemination, and in so doing, also incite new forms of access to the more or less public expression of reactions to the pictures, messages, and videos of other children. The net furthermore enables anonymous communication of such material and reactions. As a result, practices

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of bullying tend to thrive in ways that entangle digital and analog practices of relating. Cyberbullying may involve humiliating, ridiculing, exposing vulnerabilities, and revealing secrets shared in confidence. Cyberbullying also may involve posing threats, sometimes even death threats or suggestions that the recipient commit suicide. It may involve shaming or insulting other children. When digital communication is involved, the means of bullying expand. Launching hate groups on Facebook, creating fake social profiles, and sending fake messages from targeted children’s accounts are just some of the common means of cyberbullying. These new phenomena challenge existing definitions of bullying, which need to take into account that digital and technological interaction is an intrinsic part of children’s practices of relating, communicating, and community building.

Cyberbullying Research Cyberbullying emerged as a field of research around 2004 and a range of different definitions have since been developed. Many of these definitions are in keeping with the approach to bullying first developed in the 1970s. This tradition emphasizes particular personality traits of individual children, as well as their repetitive patterns of behavior. The focus here is on bullies, victims, and bystanders as relatively stable positions and on the intent of the bully or bullies to hurt others and inflict harm. Robert Tokunaga offers a review of cyberbullying research and of some of the definitions available. Most definitions of cyberbullying retain this traditional approach, merely adding the digital means by which bullying is performed. Peter Smith and colleagues, for example, define cyberbullying as “an aggressive, intentional act carried out by a group or individual, using electronic forms of contact, repeatedly and over time against a victim who cannot easily defend him or herself.” Only the specification of “electronic forms of contact” differentiates cyberbullying from a traditional notion of bullying. In 2014, Robin May Schott and Dorte Marie Søndergaard proposed a new definition of bullying, which emphasizes bullying as an effect of dysfunctional mechanisms in social groups. They

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stated that bullying is an intensification of the processes of marginalization that occur in the context of the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, which shape groups. Bullying happens, they said, when physical, social, or symbolic exclusion becomes extreme, regardless of whether such exclusion is experienced and/or intended. One of the central mechanisms of bullying is social exclusion anxiety, which may be alleviated by the production of contempt, and this contempt for someone or something, they argued, may be expressed by behavior that, for example, humiliates, trivializes, or makes a person feel invisible, involves harm to person or property, abuses social-media profiles, or disseminates humiliating messages via technological communication. In the final part of their definition they emphasized that although some members of the social group may experience these marginalizing processes as positive, robbing an individual of the social recognition that is necessary for dignity can be a form of psychic torture for those who are targeted. This definition suggests how analog and digital activities and ways of relating and communicating become entangled in the everyday lives of children today. The establishment of a sense of belongings and the building of communities among children therefore emerge via such entangled forms of relating, playing, and communicating. However, both the definitions already outlined in this entry ignore some of the important aspects differentiating digital bullying practices from traditional school bullying. Research highlights three such aspects of cyberbullying in particular: (1) anonymity, (2) extended accessibility, and (3) the potentially almost infinite number of people involved. Firstly, research explores the possibility of anonymity in digital communication as a differentiating factor compared to much analog bullying. Victims of cyberbullying may be unaware who or may not even know the person who is doing the bullying, and this lack of knowledge may be perceived as more threatening and intimidating than knowing the perpetrator(s). The uncertainty may even prompt the victim to regard every other child as a potential participant in the bullying. The bullies, for their part, may feel less responsible, hiding behind the anonymity, and go further than they would were their identity known.

Secondly, cyberbullying can happen anywhere and at any time. Whether lying in bed at night, visiting grandparents or on vacation in another country, the victim risks encountering his or her tormentors the moment they glance at their cellphone. The digital communication follows the child everywhere, which, as described by Robin M. Kowalski and her colleagues, may increase the perceived vulnerability. Turning off their cellphone, iPad, or computer does not stop the attacks; it only postpones the targeted child’s knowledge of such attacks. The third aspect on which researchers agree when characterizing cyberbullying has to do with the potentially almost infinite audience. Based on their own studies and a review of research literature, Wanda Cassidy and her colleagues estimated that between 43% and 80% of victims of cyberbullying know who is doing the bullying. Unlike bullying occurring in analog contexts such as the classroom or school playground, it is difficult to ascertain the number of bystanders when bullying takes place via digital media. The victim does not know how many people have read a given message or seen a given image, perhaps sharing and redistributing via closed groups and additional platforms where recipients once again may share and redistribute. As such, the potential audience, or number of bystanders, is almost infinite. Many researchers also emphasize the potential decrease in empathy involved in digital communication. Online, the children involved have no direct face-to-face contact and thereby no access to the immediate reactions of the other child. The digital exchange cuts off eye contact, tone of voice, and other immediate bodily and emotional signals that can be used to adjust social relating. With no ability to witness the immediate impact of one’s behavior, empathy will likely decrease in social relations. Jette Kofoed suggests that what she terms nonsimultaneity complicates communication even further. Non-simultaneity points to the displacement of space and time characteristic of digital communication. It denotes incongruence between the positions of those involved and between varying affects, wishes, wills, and desires articulated in online interaction. In analog communication among children, all such aspects are usually expressed and experienced in a shared time and place, but in digital communication, such things are articulated from different sites and displaced in time, Kofoed argues.

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Bullying Versus Cyberbullying The effects of cyberbullying and of analog bullying have much in common; these effects include depression, low self-esteem, fear, vulnerability, loneliness, psychosomatic symptoms, and in some cases even suicidal ideation, to mention but some of the possible consequences of cyberbullying for targeted children. Some studies find the effects magnified due to the child not being able to escape the bullying without simultaneously cutting him-or herself off from online social communities. The uncertainty about who and how many people are involved in the hostile activities also tends to increase the negative effects. Cyberbullying may, just as analog bullying does, affect children’s academic performance and school-related well-being. Victims can lose concentration and their motivation for schoolwork. They may avoid school and find themselves isolated and alienated in relation to school activities. In the 2016 international Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study, which reported on the health and well-being of 11-, 13-, and 15-yearolds, the young people noted that they were bullied “several times a week” via messaging apps, wall-postings, emails, text messages, or a website. The Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study reported data from 42 countries, and results showed some variation across countries. While between 1% and 8% of children reported incidents of cyberbullying in the majority of countries, in some cases this figure was as high as 12%. The study concludes that there are clear and significant cross-national variations in levels of ­ digital bullying perpetration and victimization, ­ and that the findings suggest that bullying levels are affected by factors such as cultural norms, socioeconomic levels, and the success of intervention and prevention programs in schools.

Prevention and Intervention In terms of prevention and intervention, cyberbullying is a complicated phenomenon because much online activity among children happens in spaces distant from parents, teachers, and other responsible adults. Children experiencing cyberbullying often consider it futile to involve adults due to their lack of insight into the complicated nature of

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this kind of digital communication. Nevertheless, researchers have suggested a range of actions to intervene in cyberbullying. The Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children study, for example, points to holistic school policies addressing cyberbullying and prevention strategies for particular kinds of student computer use and proposes that both students and teachers should receive training to help them understand what constitutes cyberbullying. Cassidy and her colleagues suggest a situated approach to prevention and intervention as a basis for determining appropriate preventative strategies or actions for a particular school. They suggest focusing on improving the school’s climate and social environment and offering professional development opportunities focused on children’s use of digital media to educational professionals. They also emphasize the importance of sharing information among psychology service providers, educators, students, parents, and the community and warn against punitive impulses and instead encourage addressing the roots of what leads to harmful behaviors such as cyberbullying. Rather than viewing problems as individual and personal, the focus should be on the school environment and on how to develop a more caring and respectful environment capable of also facilitating a transfer of an ethic of care across analog and digital communication, social relating, and building of communities. Dorte Marie Søndergaard See also Bullying; Bullying and Parents; Bullying in Schools; Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept

Further Readings Cassidy, W., Faucher, C., & Jackson, M. (2013). Cyberbullying among youth: A comprehensive review of current international research and its implications and application to policy and practice. School Psychology International, 34(6), 575–612. doi:10.1177/0143034313479697 Inchley, J. C., Bruce, C. D., Taryn, Y., Oddrun, S., Torbjørn, T., Lise, A., . . . Vivian, B. (2016). Growing up unequal: Gender and socioeconomic differences in young people’s health and well-being. Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) Study:

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International report from the 2013/2014 survey. WHO Regional Office for Europe. Kofoed, J. (2014). Non-simultaneity in cyberbullying. In R. M. Schott & D. M. Søndergaard (Eds.), School bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9781139226707.010 Kowalski, R. M., Limber, S. P., & Agatston, P. W. (2012). Cyberbullying: Bullying in the digital age. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Li, Q., Cross, D., & Smith, P. K. (2012). Cyberbullying in the global playground: Research from international perspectives. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Schott, R. M., & Søndergaard, D. M. (2014). Introduction: New approaches to school bullying. In R. M. Schott & D. M. Søndergaard (Eds.), School

bullying: New theories in context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ cbo9781139226707 Shariff, S. (2008). Cyberbullying: Issues and solutions for the school, the classroom and the home. New York, NY: Routledge. Smith, P., Mahdavi, J., Carvalho, M., Fisher, S., Russell, S., & Tippett, N. (2008). Cyberbullying: Its nature and impact in secondary school pupils. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 49, 376–385. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7610.2007 .01846.x Tokunaga, R. S. (2010). Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 277–287.

D alternatives of religious fundamentalists, in his time or ours, is only part of the picture. Of more significance for the scholar of childhood was the Darwinian ‘halo effect’ lending an air of scientific authority to the well-established methodologies of child study. Darwin’s arguments were in several ways revolutionary. Darwin treated adaptation as a means rather than as an end. That is to say, adaptation— manifested by variations capable of being transmitted biologically from one generation to the next—alters the survival rates of species or smaller groupings. An argument from design might claim that a particular species has characteristics perfectly matching its needs and its habits. Such description remains commonplace in our own time in educational television and as such is understood to illustrate and even to confirm Darwin’s claims. Yet such perfection is for Darwin absurd. What Darwin did was to take the controlled selection and breeding of domesticated species (what might be called ‘unnatural selection’) as a template for a natural process of selection. Darwin recast the artificial process of selective breeding, of which he had built up an impressive knowledge, as a strategy by which the breeder exploits and adjusts the ongoing natural process, just as the downhill flow of a river may be artificially exploited in order to turn a waterwheel. But he went further. Darwin reverse-engineered the process of natural selection by analysing it as a macro version of the process of deliberate selection. He argued in effect that humans had stumbled on a way of mimicking the natural process in

Darwin, Charles Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated scientists in the modern western consciousness. His contribution to the scientific orthodoxy of the life sciences in the 20th and present centuries is unrivalled. Darwin’s name has been appealed to by many scholars of developmental psychology and educationalists since his theories on descent with modification were first announced in 1859. This entry examines Darwin’s contributions to childhood studies, specifically his theories on competition and growth, as well as some critiques of Darwin’s evolutionary approach. The entry concludes with an examination of Darwin’s specific impact on the field of developmental psychology.

Darwin and Childhood Studies The precise nature of Darwin’s influence on childhood studies, and on systematic research into the development of babies and children, is hard to pin down and still harder to evaluate. For Darwin’s ideas on the evolutionary descent of the human, and on the circumscribed role of adaptation, were poorly understood by his contemporaries both in scientific circles and amongst the wider public. Darwin’s proposals were assimilated into preexisting formulae rather than being allowed to challenge those formulae. Thus, the well-known conflict of Darwin’s proposals with the creationist 589

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order to make changes, which, while small in the scheme of biodiversity, are significant for human populations whether for the purposes of husbandry, of the economy, of leisure, or of aesthetics. In arguing in this manner, Darwin played with explanatory fire because he was drawing for analogical purposes on deliberate design as in a rational creator. Although the role played by religious orthodoxy in the contemporary debates between Darwin’s supporters and critics has been somewhat exaggerated, the image of the deliberate designer or ‘clockmaker’ was and remains a potent alternative explanation. Some comments on competition assist to clarify this issue.

Darwin on Competition Darwin’s account of competition in the natural world was an account of relative success, not an absolute success, still less perfection. Just as the selfcentred lion hunter in the old joke needs only to run faster than his friend, not faster than the lion, competition is always local. Competition is an advantage or an ‘edge’. ‘Fitness’ is meaningful only in a particular habitat and a particular ecosystem (a concept, if not a term, well understood by Darwin). That the fitter survives is little more than tautology, and ‘fittest’ is a meaningless term. Competition for a mate, which for Darwin plays an important role in natural selection, again involves a concrete and localised competition: more The Bachelorette than Grand Designs. Here, it should be noted that Darwin never endorsed Herbert Spencer’s formula of ‘the survival of the fittest’ and only rarely used Spencer’s term ‘evolution’, preferring ‘descent with modification’. It was only later generations of zoologists, especially from the 1930s onwards, who were able to treat descent with modification and selection as the essence of Darwin’s contribution. For Darwin himself, space needed to be found for other mechanisms such as the inheritance of acquired characters, and the balance of the contributions of various mechanisms was a point on which Darwin adjusted his views across the various editions of The Origin of Species.

Darwin on Growth Darwin carried out a variety of quasi-­experimental investigations of plant and animal life, but he did

not have access to the experimental demonstrations of geneticist Gregor Mendel, reported some decades after Darwin’s death, which stimulated the modern understanding of genetics. Mendel’s demonstrations of discrete inheritance of certain features in domesticated plants were later to inspire a synthesis of Darwinian theory and physiology leading to the model proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick, that of proteinbuilding information coded on the chromosomes. Instead, Darwin worked out a rather sophisticated theory of ‘pangenesis’ to explain the physical and physiological continuities from parents to offspring central to his larger theory of descent with modification. It is important to comment further on this often neglected aspect of Darwin’s writings because Darwin’s account of pangenesis was closely connected to his views of individual development. In essays written in the 1840s, in the decade following his voyage to South America and the Galapagos islands on the HMS ‘Beagle’, Darwin noted the theoretical importance of characters which were patently inherited from parents (on the basis of similarities across the generations) but which yet did not emerge until adulthood, such as sexual organs. Like other aspects of adults of a species, as compared with the same individuals at earlier stages of development (whatever that phrase might mean), many heritable features thus seemed to be subject to a controlled temporal schedule, raising the question of how this could be managed. As Darwin realised, a feature could only be the subject of heritable selection if the timing of the (re)appearance of the feature were sufficiently stable. Darwin referred to this as ‘the great principle of inheritance at corresponding periods of life’. With great boldness, Darwin declared that in its essentials the problem of growth in the individual is the same as the problem of inheritance. For the body of an organism to be reproduced across its life span, changing in some respects but remaining the same in many other respects, is formally equivalent to the process of reproduction from one generation to the next. There must be a physiological memory or what would later be referred to as a ‘code’. The repair of minor injuries, and in some species the regrowth of an amputated limb, also suggested to Darwin that an animal’s body contains information on what

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form its body should take—and when. Darwin hypothesised that the mechanism involves tiny particles or ‘gemmules’ being thrown off each body cell, carrying important information about that cell. These gemmules accumulate in particular in the germ cells (gametes). Absent experimental support, the theory is no less plausible than the Watson and Crick model of DNA announced in 1953. One important consequence of Darwin’s theorising on these matters was a bracketing of the orthodox understanding of the identity of an individual organism across its life span. Just as the anatomical structure of a complex organism such as a mammal may be reinterpreted in terms of a polyplike community of ‘individuals’, so may the sequential structure of a series of stages or iterations. Everything is reproduction in a manner in which much remains the same and yet variation may, indeed must, sometimes occur. Darwin’s observations of his own children, such as observations of his firstborn, William, as a baby, are part of a tradition of child study that had emerged in the European elite in the late 18th century. In common with other contributors to that tradition, Darwin’s observations were motivated by theoretically derived questions on matters of perception and of affect, such as (in Darwin’s case) whether the newborn would react to an object looming towards it or recognise a frown: questions posed by Darwin a year before William’s birth. Like his predecessors in child study, Darwin was greatly interested in the facial expression of emotion so that when later writing The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals in 1872, he relied significantly on reported observations of facial expressions in infancy and childhood amongst other evidence, hence contributing to his emerging account of the evolution of humans. At the same time, Darwin’s focus on the emotional life of childhood may be said to have contributed to an orthodoxy by which affect is understood to play an especially important role in early development as compared to maturity. If so then Darwin may be said to have contributed rather directly, as well as indirectly, to the broader version of recapitulation theory that so dominated scientific thinking in the last decades of the 19th century and beyond: the framework account under which children, women, backward nations,

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and the mentally disturbed all struggle to mobilise rationality against a natural inclination to the emotional.

Early Critiques of Darwin’s Theories By and large Darwin’s contemporaries misunderstood his novel contributions to biology. Instead his findings were taken to support the pre-existing notions of recapitulation and of the inheritance of acquired characters. With respect to the latter, Darwin indeed recognised the role of such a mechanism, especially in later rather than earlier editions of The Origin of Species; however, Darwin’s respondents placed much more weight on this mechanism than did Darwin. Most significantly, Darwin’s contemporaries largely assimilated ­Darwin’s claims to a neo-Lamarckian framework of evolutionary theory: neo because a distortion of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s own position or at best a partial appropriation of Lamarck. For Darwin’s contemporaries, learning in the individual child or ‘lower’ animal is to be understood in terms of evolution, and vice versa. Given this context for the reception of Darwin by his contemporaries, including psychologists and educationalists, it can certainly be said that the prominence of Darwin’s contributions gave impetus to the study of learning as an experimental discipline within psychology and also helped to frame that project. With hindsight, this must be thought of as a mixed blessing.

Influence on Developmental Psychology The developmental psychologists of the turn of the 20th century, and many of those of later generations, continued this tradition of admixing early learning, developmental change, and speculative evolutionism. With little exaggeration, it can be said that Darwin’s scientific contributions made little substantive impact on childhood studies or on developmental psychology until the end of the 20th century. By that time, the scientific community had come to accept a version of Darwinism, synthesised with modern genetics, embryology, and neuroscience, according to which behaviour observed in children or adults may confidently be analysed in terms of ancient adaptations.

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Darwin’s understanding of evolutionary change was much more radical than his contemporaries (including his advocates) recognised. Darwin’s vision at least in his earlier writings was of evolution as a kind of Big Bang, with changes heading off in all directions while subject to law-like processes that bestow some temporary stability or the appearance of stability when viewed across short, anthropocentric periods of time. Divergences can be retraced—again the notion of reverse engineering is apt—in order to identify common ancestry, but ancestry is just that: strictly of the past. Any kind of hierarchy amongst currently existing animal types whether as imprecise as ‘higher’ versus ‘lower’ or as precise as a detailed Great Chain of Being is inconsistent with Darwin’s key claims. Of course, if Darwin had ever thought that his work would entirely overthrow these long-lasting ideologies, he would have been deceiving himself. It is true that the conceits of the more precisely delineated recapitulation theories of child development, so influential on G. Stanley Hall and Sigmund Freud amongst many others, have been cast away. But the more pervasive, and more adaptable, presupposition of the development of the infant and child as a process of increasing complexity, of the gaining of higher mental functions, of increasing rationality, still retains its grip. If our contemporary formulations of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience more generally are truly the heirs of Darwinism then it is with those projects that the consequential illumination of childhood is to be anticipated. If they are not, then we are as far away from comprehending the implications of Darwin’s intellectual revolution as were our learned ancestors a century and a half ago. John R. Morss See also Child Study; Freud, Sigmund; Hall, Granville Stanley; Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

Further Readings Bowler, P. (1984). Evolution: The history of an idea. Oakland: University of California Press. Bradley, B. S. (1989). Visions of infancy. Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Morss, J. R. (1990). The biologising of childhood: Darwinian psychology and the Darwinian myth.

Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. doi:10.4324/9781315177687 (Reissued, New York: Routledge, 2017).

Day Care Day care refers to a diverse range of services that provide nonmaternal care for mostly preschoolaged children. Most commonly, day care provides custodial care for children whose parents work or are unable to care for them. However, day care is also increasingly understood as a site of early childhood education. While centre-based care is the dominant mode of day care provision, day care can be provided in other locations such as private homes. This entry addresses a range of topics including the history of day care, day care’s connection to education, and research on day care.

The History and Global Spread of Day Care Day care is practised in many countries. There are examples of organised day care as early as the mid-19th century, but its provision and use increased significantly from the 1970s. This was mostly in response to the increased participation of women in paid employment suggesting that economic factors were an important driver of the need for day care. Consequently, the hours at which most day care operates reflects the common working hours for parents. While the 1970s were important in the spread of day care, in some countries like Germany, Spain, and South Korea, cultural preferences for maternal care mean that increases in participation have been more recent. Approaches to day care are not universal. Varied historical and political influences have resulted in different understandings about its purpose and delivery, some of which are summarised by Michael E. Lamb, Kathleen J. Sternberg, CarlPhilip Hwang, and Anders G. Broberg. For example, in Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden, day care is commonly considered a public good that supports gender equity and the promotion of social values. It is also understood to be a valuable site of young children’s education and development. Day care in these locations is often

Day Care

characterised by public models of provision and high participation levels. Contrastingly, in locations like Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Lamb et al. and Deborah Brennan describe approaches to provision informed more by neoliberal, market philosophies. Rather than a common good, day care is conceptualised as an individual choice and a ‘service’ to be purchased by working parents. These locations have some community provision but have also overseen the development of a day care ‘market’ where private, for-profit operators are considered an effective way of responding to increased demand for care. Private provision has increased greatly in jurisdictions where day care has been marketised. Although these jurisdictions are governed by a belief in the ability of the market to respond to private need, the government can still play a central role by mandating minimum safety and curriculum standards. Market approaches and their possible effects have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers. Lamb et al. describe how the UK day care market has resulted in a dramatic increase in for-profit provision but has also contributed to segregation with the most disadvantaged children concentrated in publicly run facilities. In Australia, Brennan proposes that the market is ineffective in locations where land is scarce and expensive. It can also be difficult for parents to find care for infants because of higher staff-to-child ratios that increase costs for providers. Brennan also questions whether marketised day care can offer genuine choice in locations where care options are scarce.

Day Care and Education An idea that has gained increasing acceptance is that education is the central purpose of day care. The educational purposes assigned to day care vary. Some critical scholars argue that day care acts to socialise young children in ways that are reflective of historical and political contexts. For example, in Nordic countries, day care promotes educating children to become democratic participants, while neoliberal states privilege the development of qualities like autonomy, individuality, and self-governance. According to a 2005 study by Mary McMullen et al., day care in countries

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like Taiwan and China traditionally promotes academic achievement and Confucian ideas. While the belief that day care is a site of education is a dominant view internationally, in some locations, day care fulfils a mostly custodial role and is concerned primarily with safeguarding children. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development detail how care-only models operate in the Czech Republic, Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, and the Slovak Republic. It is likely that custodial models also exist in other locations. Models of day care delivery are not always universal with care-only models operating alongside care and educational models. It is also important to consider that while some day care might be labelled as custodial, it does not preclude the possibility that it also contributes to children’s education. Increased use of day care has prompted consideration of its possible effects on children, although there is no conclusive research. Some research associates high levels of attendance with poor socialisation and problematic behaviour. Other research such as the influential Effective Preschool and Primary Education Project proposes that high-quality day care is predictive of better social, behavioural, and academic outcomes. The Effective Pre-school and Primary Education Project researchers consider high-quality care with highly qualified educators, positive relationships between children and educators, and curriculum that combines education with care.

Research on Day Care Some critical research proposes that preoccupation with the effects of day care is reflective of a broader cultural discourse that favours maternal care and marks other care types as deficient. L. E. Clerkx and Marinus H. van Ijzendoorn in Lamb et al. point to the work of John Bowlby on attachment theory conducted shortly after the Second World War as a significant influence on views of care that privileged traditional family structures. Gaile S. Cannella documents the persistence of a similar discourse in the United States that day care is a necessary replacement for the supposedly inferior maternal care provided by the mothers of the poor. The discourse reinforces class divisions by apportioning blame for inferior parenting mostly

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upon women who are poor, working, culturally different, or of colour. Although contemporary research has drawn attention to the importance of nonparental attachments, social anxieties about nonmaternal care still persist. This includes anxieties about day care as a possible site of child sexual abuse. Mary de Young details one example of how a nationwide moral panic developed in the United States after mostly unsubstantiated reports of ritual abuse in one day care centre. Measures intended to prevent child abuse are now common in day care. These can include background checks on workers, mandatory reporting regimes, child protection training for workers, and the design of buildings that facilitate the surveillance of children and workers. Despite debate about the efficacy of day care, there is broad, historical acceptance that it can be beneficial for disadvantaged children. Some of the earliest forms of day care were provided for less privileged children as an alternative to parenting arrangements that were presumed deficient. The findings from the Effective Pre-school and P ­ rimary Education Project suggest that high-quality day care can mitigate the effects of disadvantage, improving educational outcomes. Neoliberal states have drawn on this and related research to claim that high-quality day care has future economic benefits, therefore justifying greater government investment. Bruce Hurst See also Care, Institutional; Care-Work; Childcare; Education Versus Care

Further Readings Brennan, D. (2014). The business of care: Australia’s experiment with the marketisation of childcare. In C. Miller & L. Orchard (Eds.), Australian public policy: Progressive ideas in the neoliberal ascendency (pp. 151–167). Bristol, UK: Policy Press. doi:10.2307/ j.ctt1ggjk39.15 Cannella, G. S. (2008). Deconstructing early childhood education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. De Young, M. (2004). The day care ritual abuse moral panic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. Lamb, M. E., Broberg, A. G., Hwang, C., & Sternberg, K. J. (2014). Child care in context: Cross-cultural perspectives. New York; London: Psychology Press.

McMullen, M., Elicker, J., Wang, J., Erdiller, Z., Lee, S., Lin, C., & Sun, P. (2005). Comparing beliefs about appropriate practice among early childhood education and care professionals from the U.S., China, Taiwan, Korea and Turkey. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 20, 451–464. doi:10.1016/ j.ecresq.2005.10.005 OECD. (2015). Starting strong IV: Monitoring quality in early childhood education and care. Paris, France: OECD. Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Taggart, B. (2010). Early childhood matters: Evidence from the Effective Pre-School and Primary Education Project. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9780203862063

Death, Children’s Conceptions of Although death is a universal element of human existence, human conceptions of death can be elusive and complex. Local behaviors and beliefs related to death vary considerably across cultural contexts. Necessarily, children’s reasoning about death reflects distinctive practices and beliefs that are normative for their social group. A MexicanAmerican child brought up to believe that the dead return to interact with the living on each Day of the Dead celebration carries different ideas about the fixedness of mortality compared to a middle-class European American child. Early ideas about the afterlife and death among Japanese children are shaped by local religious traditions of Shintoism and Buddhism. Another source of complexity is that individual children vary in whether and how much they have been personally exposed to death. In America during the 19th century, the odds of dying in infancy or childhood were high. Activities that would be unusual today—taking photographs of families alongside deceased siblings or children playing funeral with dolls and toy coffins—were prevalent practices in that era. This entry examines how psychologists have theorized childhood conceptions of death, the Western idea that death is a taboo subject for children, and why some researchers maintain that children ultimately benefit from being able to talk more openly about both dying and death.

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General Theories on Childhood Conceptions of Death Despite such variations, cognitive developmental psychologists have aimed to generalize about children’s conceptions of death through studies applying standardized questionnaires. The cognitive developmental approach presupposes components of understanding involved in concepts of death. Three components recurring in the cognitive developmental tradition include irreversibility, nonfunctionality, and universality. Irreversibility refers to the fact that once someone is dead, they cannot be alive again. Nonfunctionality refers to a dead body’s incapacity to do what a living body can do. Universality is the notion that all living things die, including every person. Cognitive developmental investigation has concluded that children 3 years old generally understand death as a changed state, yet the developmental trajectory of understandings about death is complex and influenced by experiential, cultural, and religious factors.

Dying and Death as a Taboo Subject Adults in Western countries often regard death as unmentionable when it comes to children as if death comprises a topic uncomfortably at odds with the perceived innocence of childhood. Children nevertheless express their feelings about death indirectly, for example, through imaginative play or art. Death was a common theme of children’s play, for example, at a contemporary ­London preschool where children acted out dying and then reenacted a sustained emotional and physical attention to the corpse. Children’s attraction to playing out death is sustained by their own interest, at times privately or surreptitiously. Nondisclosure by adults can cause children to go underground to gather information about mortality, as happened to American children with leukemia studied by Myra Bluebond-Langner. In that study, hospitalized children shared information about their lethal illness with each other, a process that effectively informed them about their prognosis, despite adults’ lack of explanation. A similar situation faced children in Zambia who served as caretakers to their adult guardians suffering from tuberculosis, studied by Jean Hunleth. The adults who were in children’s care preferred

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not to discuss their own mortality, and children went along with this avoidance despite their actual awareness and knowledge of TB’s dangers.

Justifications for Discussing Dying and Death With Children According to professionals who deal with death and grief among children, adults’ habits of guarding children against death pose an obstacle to children’s need for clarity. A child who lost a significant person to death expresses a need to know by asking, “Why did it happen?” “Will it happen to me?” or even “Did I cause it?” Addressing children’s questions acknowledges and validates their struggle to understand not only cognitively but emotionally. Emotional–cognitive interpretations tend to be fluid and conditional upon a child’s situation or social milieu. As Bluebond-Langner observed in her leukemia study, assimilating information about a child’s own prognosis was a process extended across time. First, child patients in the study gathered the information that their condition was serious, and later they gathered information about the treatments they received. Once they understood the purpose and side effects of treatments, they assembled these details and realized that their disease was comprised of a cycle of treatments and remissions. Only then, child patients were able to realize, upon the death of a peer, that their own disease would also be fatal. Bluebond-Langner researched with siblings of children who were diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Well siblings experienced ongoing confusion about their sibling’s status. Often their information was inadequate, many times limited to what they were told when their sibling was initially diagnosed but not updated (due to parental hesitation to discuss further). As parents showed signs of shifting emotions, healthy siblings detected that there was more going on than they were being told. Siblings tended to feel that the extra attention given to the ill sibling was a form of rejection or even betrayal. In the final stages of the disease, however, this resentment was no longer justifiable since the mortally ill sibling grew to need constant treatment. As the sibling’s death became imminent, and especially upon being told that the sibling had died, ambivalence by healthy siblings was pronounced.

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Miller and Rosengren integrate several approaches to death (e.g., cognitive, emotional, and cultural) and conclude that a key cultural meaning about death acquired by children in Western societies is that the subject is taboo. Without open communication, children losing a loved one may have significant trouble fully resolving feelings of grief and confusion. It should be kept in mind, then, that Western children’s understandings of death are contained not strictly by their developmental immaturity but also by the impactful cultural feature of adult avoidance. Cindy Dell Clark See also Childhood, Anthropology of; Childhood Studies

Further Readings Baxter, J. E. (2019). How to die a good death: Teaching children about mortality in nineteenth century America. Childhood in the Past, 12(1), 35–49. doi:10 .1080/17585716.2019.1587913 Bluebond-Langner, M. (1980). The private worlds of dying children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gire, J. (2014). How death imitates life: Cultural influences on conceptions of death and dying. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 6. doi:10.9707/2307–0919.1120 Rosengren, K. S., Miller, P. J., Gutiérrez, I. T., Chow, P. I., Schein, S. S., & Anderson, K. N. (2014). Children’s understanding of death: Toward a contextualized and integrated account. Boston, MA: Wiley. Sagara-Rosenmeyer, M., & Davies, B. (2007). The integration of religious traditions in Japanese children’s view of death and afterlife. Death Studies, 31(3), 223–247. doi:10.1080/07481180601100525 Talwar, V. (2015). Talking to children about death in educational settings. In V. Talwar, P. L. Harris, & M. Schleifer (Eds.), Children’s understandings of death (pp. 98–115). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511852077.006

Death Rates, Children’s, Historical Children’s death rates have fluctuated historically. This entry discusses historical trends in death rates and mortality among children from

the 1700s to the 1900s, emphasizing the calculation of basic rates and the sources of some statistics. Specifically, this entry offers a comparison of mortality rates in Nordic countries and Europe as a whole.

Death Rates Such terms as the crude death rate, age-specific death rate, and infant mortality rate (IMR) are among the terms required to understand the decline of child mortality from the 18th to the 20th century in Europe. These terms also show how raw statistics can be converted into rates that make comparisons over time and space possible. The crude death rate is calculated in terms of deaths/total population at risk. It is expressed in deaths per thousand (0/00). Sometimes age-specific rates are used by which deaths in a certain age range are divided by population at risk. One of the most significant measures is the IMR, which is a measure of deaths per thousand live births in children under the age of 1 year (also expressed per 1000 [0/00]). This measure is used to compare health in various countries as are other age-specific mortality rates. By definition, in the context of historical populations, the cutoff point for children is age 15 years; infants are defined as being between birth and age 1. The historical examples used in this entry are taken primarily not only from the Nordic countries but also from Europe. Some changes presented show how society has tried to improve the health and thus the survival of children. An important focus is the decline of infant and child mortality from the 18th to the 20th century.

Sources of Statistics In Sweden, official interest in population statistics grew in the 18th century. The mercantilist policies pursued by the state sought to maximize the use of its resources, including the population. The Nordic countries were comparatively early in collecting information on infant and child mortality. Sweden and Finland began in 1749, Denmark in 1835, Norway in 1846, and Iceland in 1938.

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Comparing the IMR in Sweden Over Time The collection of census information was placed in the hands of the officials of the state church in Sweden and Finland, beginning in 1749. The results were shocking to the officials of the day. One-fifth of all children born live died before their first birthday (IMR: 1751–1760: 205 0/00). The high rates continued but began a gradual decline in the second decade of the 19th century (IMR: 1811–1820: 183 0/00), but it was not until the last decades of that century that the IMR in Sweden was cut in half (IMR: 1891–1900: 102 0/00). The high IMR in Sweden was one factor that stimulated the growth of midwifery. In Sweden, there were few physicians at the time. Education of midwives first began in the late 1800s, but from 1711, midwives were regulated.

Comparing the Nordic Countries With the Rest of Europe When compared with other areas of Europe, the Nordic IMR rates were low. In an analysis of infant mortality in Europe 1900–1990, Godelieve Masuy-Stroobant distinguished five “clusters of IMR levels and patterns.” While the lowest rates were found in Cluster 1 (the Nordic countries plus the Netherlands and Switzerland), the highest were in Cluster 5 (Yugoslavia, Romania, and Portugal).

Childhood Mortality One exception to the steady decline of mortality in Sweden in the 19th century is found in the age-group above 1 year but under age 15 years. During the period from 1840 to 1870, the declining mortality curve was interrupted. The most marked deviation was for the age-groups between 3 and 15 years during the 1860s. One study of causes of death in the provincial physician’s reports suggested that diphtheria was the cause of this aberration.

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clearly known. The various death rates of different groups can provide a more detailed picture. For example, specifying child deaths by gender, by region or geography (coast or inland, urban or rural), and by whether or not the child was born out of wedlock offer some ability to conjecture about comparative rates and causes. At this time, rural infants often fared better than the urban. The industrial milieu implied poorer hygienic ­conditions, and illegitimate infants, in general, had much higher death rates, although the variation often depended on social conditions in the north. The social differences over time may have been caused by infectious diseases, poverty, poor hygiene, famines and subsistence crises, natural catastrophes, and wars. Nordic Comparative Study

The Nordic comparative study referred to e­ arlier in this entry selected three major points for comparison of IMR: (1) regionality, (2) feeding practices, and (3) illegitimacy. There are variations in the IMR within the same geographic area, and the question is why. One Nordic area of interest is Nordkalotten, the circumpolar region which includes the northernmost parts of Finland, ­Norway, Sweden, and even Russia. In many parts, there were high mortality rates found among infants and children. In other parts, rates were low. Yet, the explanations were difficult to find. Sometimes the urban–rural differential plays a role. The mortality decline was mostly a rural phenomenon, whereas urban mortality remained high. Another factor contributing to the decline of mortality among infants is concerned with infant and child feeding practices, the breastfeeding of infants versus artificial feeding. Not only does breastfeeding play a role. Customs concerning the prechewing of food producing pap could be reflected in the IMR. The rates of illegitimacy influenced the IMR, but so too did the socioeconomic conditions of the mother and the mother’s family.

Beneath the Surface

The Mortality Decline and Debates About Infant and Child Mortality

A large part of the mortality decline was due to a decrease in deaths among infants and children. Single and exact causes of such decline are not

In the mid-1970s, the British physician Thomas McKeown explored the increases in population in the 18th and 20th centuries. The examination of

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numerous factors led him to the conclusion that declining mortality caused this rise, not the growth in birth rates. McKeown even rejected the contribution of some of the fight against disease. He argued that improved nutrition was the key. His  argumentation caused long-standing controversies and stimulated research aimed at proving or disproving his theses. The theory of the demographic transition, developed in the 1840s, describes the changes in population structure from traditional society to modern industrial, urbanized societies. There were three stages: the first saw a balance with high birth and death rates that led to population growth: This was followed by a transition where death rates fell and birth rates remained high; and the final phase displayed both low birth and death rates. The appearance of the transition varied in different countries. A follow-up, the epidemiologic transition, developed by Abdel Omran, places emphasis on mortality during the transition from traditional to modern societies. Pestilence and famine caused high mortality, while birth rates remained low. This period was followed by receding epidemics resulting in a situation whereby degenerative and man-made diseases dominated. The epidemiologic transition favors the young and females. There are numerous basic models that have emerged. Although not given the status of theories, these models have stimulated research in the field of the mortality decline.

Epidemics and Infectious Diseases The 19th and early part of the 20th century saw important steps in the discovery of causes of diseases and sometimes also treatments that finally developed into effective medicines. Various infectious diseases had an effect on mortality, particularly among infants and children, and the rates vary according to the disease. Combatting these epidemics led to the establishment of infectious disease hospitals and, hence, to an overall effort in increasing the health and lives of children. Smallpox

Smallpox was a feared disease in the 18th century. Information about inoculation, the precursor

of vaccination, spread in the 18th century. According to some sources, information about this method of treatment may have reached Sweden via Charles XII, who was said to have paid a Greek doctor to write a report on the method. At any rate, members of the Swedish aristocracy inoculated their children, including the countess Katarina de Geer. The royal family’s children were also inoculated. But in 1801, the newly discovered vaccine from the United Kingdom made its ­appearance and its use spread. Vaccination of infants and children became compulsory in Sweden after 1816, much earlier than in other countries. Infants and children were vaccinated. Although there has been much debate as to the numbers saved, there was a contribution to the mortality decline. Diphtheria

A less well-known infectious disease was diphtheria, also called throat distemper or KlebsLöffler disease, and more descriptively in an older Swedish version, the strangulation disease. This respiratory disease may affect various parts of the throat, the nose, and the air passages. One of the most serious symptoms was the membrane that could block the windpipe and eventually cause suffocation. The disease was first described in the 1820s by the French scholar Pierre ­Bretonneau and a serum was finally developed by Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburo¯ in 1890. This disease showed clearly the workings of the germ theory that had been introduced by Robert Koch in 1882. In the early 20th century in the U.S. deaths from diphtheria were highest among children. Poliomyelitis

Poliomyelitis is a disease caused by a virus and is commonly associated with children and adolescents. Until the 1870s, it was called infantile paralysis or the Heine-Medin disease and is an inflammatory disease that destroys motor neurons. Fever may develop and meningitis, paresis (weakening), or paralysis. There are three types of the virus that have different characteristics. Polio spreads to individuals by various routes. Early in  the 20th century, the

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development of immunization seemed feasible, but it was not until the 1950s when the Salk and later Sabin vaccines became available. Early on polio was chiefly a disease of younger children, but in the 1930s, it developed into a disease of older children and adolescents as well. Polio was early noted in the Nordic countries.

Concluding Thoughts The quantification of death among infants and children helps describe the health conditions in society. Using such measurements makes possible comparison over time and space. Their use is important in trying to analyze the factors involved in the historical development of the decline in mortality. Even today, when discussing health among populations, these terms are central. These measures will be found in the reports of such organizations as the United Nations and the World Bank. Marie Clark Nelson See also Children’s Hospitals; Health; Sea Hospitals

Further Readings Corsini, C. A., & Viazzo, P. P. (Eds.). (1997). The decline of infant and child mortality. The European experience: 1750–1990. The Hague, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Dwork, D. (1987). War is good for babies & other young children: A history of the infant and child welfare movement in England 1898–1918. London, UK: Tavistock. doi:10.1017/s0268416000003829 Fauve-Chamoux, A., Bolovan, I., & Sogner, S. (Eds.). (2016). A global history of historical demography: Half a century of interdisciplinarity. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. doi:10.18261/issn.1504-2944-2017-04-09 Hayes, J. N. (1969). Historisk Statistik för Sverige. Del 1. Befolkning 1720–1967. Andra Upplagan. [Statistics for Sweden. Part 1. Population 1720–1967. 2nd ed.] Stockholm, Sweden: Statistiska Centralbyrån. Hayes, J. N. (1998). The burdens of diseases: Epidemics and human response in human society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kiple, K. (Ed.). (2003). The Cambridge historical dictionary of disease. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1086/423528

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McKeown, T. (1976). The modern rise of population. London, UK: Arnold. Pressat, R., & Wilson, C. (Eds.). (1988). A dictionary of demography. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Reference. Preston, S. H., & Haines, M. R. (1991). Fatal years: Child mortality in late nineteenth century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Riley, J. C. (2001). Rising life expectancy: A global history. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schofield, R., Reher, D., & Bideau, A. (Eds.). (1991). The decline of mortality in Europe. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Schofield, R., Reher, D., & Bideau, A. (Eds.). (2002). This thematic number of this internet journal provides a thorough historical overview of infant mortality in the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Hygiea Internationalis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the History of Public Health, 3. doi:10.3384/ hygiea.1403-8668.0231

Deleuze, Gilles Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a French philosopher whose writings on philosophy included explorations into psychology, psychoanalysis, biology, literature, art, music, critiques of capitalism, and neuroscience. In his own writings and in his work with psychoanalyst and activist Felix Guattari, Deleuze offers us an account of childhood and children that has influenced fields such as early childhood education, education, critical psychology, and child and youth studies, as well as child and youth care. As a philosopher, Deleuze was particularly interested in childhood and children as what he called concepts. The concept for Deleuze is different from the common use of the word. Conventionally, the concept refers to a set of ideas that correspond to a thing or group of things. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze redefines the concept as both historically situated and dynamic. The concept in his formulation refers less to any particular thing as a set of static definitions and more to the transformational capacity of an ecological configuration of events, substances, and relations of force. He proposes that new concepts arise in any given historical period as tools with which to respond to problems that cannot be resolved using

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the contemporary conceptual frameworks. In this sense, new concepts arise at times of social crisis. For Deleuze, the concept of childhood and the designated social category of children are sets of transformational capacities of what he terms in A Thousand Plateaus the becoming child of all ages. Anna Hickey Moody makes this point when she notes that in Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche, Deleuze articulates the child as the force of time itself. The child as temporal force sets all things in motion constantly between being and becoming. Such a child is that force which undoes the conventional coordinates of any given social system and opens up new capacities for social organization. Of course, this is not necessarily any particular child, and this is where it is important to understand that Deleuze is interested in the concept of children and childhood as a way of understanding how we are produced as social subjects and how we as subjects produce the world. Specifically, Deleuze (particularly in his work with Guattari) is invested in exploring the ways in which our living creative force is captured or constrained by the dominant social system of a given historical moment. At the same time, he argues that we always exceed the capacity of any system to fully impose its logic on our lives. The force of the child as a set of capacities not fully inscribed with the logic of the dominant system opens new possibilities for movement through and possibly beyond the limitations of the prevailing logic of contemporary social systems. It should be noted, however, that this is not a romantic reading of the child as innocent or outside the corrupted world of adults. Indeed, as Hickey Moody points out, Deleuze sees the developmental category of the individual child as quite limited by their lack of lived experience and lack of ability to think in complex ways. In this, he is heavily influenced by Baruch Spinoza’s view of children and childhood. But, like Spinoza, he moves away from the body of the child as a separable developmental category and toward ­ a  ­ reading of a body’s capacity as a temporal continuum. Deleuze proposes a non-teleological child in which the force of the becoming child is not bounded by chronological age. Instead, the unfettered creative force of the infant is present in the body across its life span, although configured

differently as the body is transformed through its interactions with the world. It is a question of the ways in which the body is affected and has the ability to affect throughout its duration, rather than a bounded set of developmental criteria set according to chronological age. In an important sense, the binary categories of child and adult are no longer meaningful in any essential way. Instead, they are abstract social categories designed to reduce the revolutionary capacity of the becoming child through social stratification mechanisms such as schooling and developmental psychology. For Deleuze, the child cannot be isolated within the confines of what medicine, psychoanalysis, and psychology have defined as the biological body. Without a doubt, the biological body of the child plays a major role, but it is neither located within stable temporal coordinates nor bounded by the edges of its physical form. As Gunilla Dahlberg points out, childhood is a collective experience. It is a milieu out of which the individual child body is constituted ecologically. For Deleuze, the body is composed through its interactions with the world that open or foreclose capacities for action. These thresholds and connectors constitute an ever shifting and infinite array of major and minor transits in the production of the body. In this sense, the child is not a fixed biological object that can be observed nor a predictable set of normative behavioral coordinates. Instead, for Deleuze the child is a point of transit though which an infinitude of lines of capacity flow in variable patterns of ecological assemblage. The implications for this view of children and childhood reside in seeing the individual child body as decentered from childhood and the child as a social construct. That is not to say that individual child bodies are separable from the forces of social conscription. But, in Deleuze’s work, the force of the becoming child extends well beyond any particular child. Deleuze’s analysis lends itself to political and pedagogical analysis that takes an ethological and ecological understanding of children and childhood. It is a reading that calls for a radical rethinking of developmental approaches and normative taxonomic structures of children and childhood. The child and childhood for Deleuze is the sheer force of unscripted virtual creativity. This force is ecologically formed from all of the elements of every moment, every place,

Depression

and everybody. It is the not-yet capacity of life as the opening to worlds to come and peoples as yet unimagined. Hans Skott-Myhre See also Childhood in Western Philosophy; Developmentality

Further Readings Dahlberg, G. (2009). Policies in early childhood education and care: Potentialities for agency, play and learning. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M. S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 228–237). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2013). Deleuze’s children. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(3), 272–286. Jones, L., & Duncan, J. (2013). Deleuze and early years education: Explorations in theory and lived experiences. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(3), 203–207.

Depression Children can feel overwhelmed by life circumstances—from feeling ostracised and bullied at school or home to media coverage of global events like war and natural catastrophes. The common use of medical metaphor relabels overwhelm as depression. A psychologising gaze understands depression as a disease of the individual, caused by failing within the individual. This entry examines depression across time and cultures and some common approaches to treating depression in children.

Depression Across Time and Cultures The word ‘depression’ does not appear in the lexicon of names for dejection until the early 18th

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century. Samuel Johnson, William Tuke, Philippe Pinel, Jean Esquirol, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Emil Kraepelin, Alfred Meyer, Henry Maudsley, and Sigmund Freud all attempted to categorise and delineate forms of distress variously described as melancholia, involutional melancholia, insanity, and psychoneurosis. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) classified depression as an affective disorder subdivided into bipolar and major depressions and further into cyclothymic, dysthymic, atypical bipolar disorders, and atypical depressions. By the mid-1980s, theories of causation included loss, learned helplessness, separation anxiety, life events, cognitive distortions, genetics, endocrine changes, and depletion or excess of neurotransmitters. In the DSM-IV criteria, in addition to changes in conduct such as avoiding friends or social situations, sleeping or eating patterns, feeling upset, and being self-critical, ‘marked irritability’ is given as the cardinal mood symptom for children and young people. With the publication of DSM-5 in 2013, the melancholia of Aristotle became ‘depressive disorder’. DSM-5 recommends additional assessment of a child’s suicidal intent. The UK Young Minds website states that normal experiences of childhood that may be clustered under the rubric of depression include avoiding friends or social situations, sleeping or eating more or less than normal, feeling lonely, upset, or miserable, being self-critical, or feeling tired. Preschoolers and school-age children may be inscribed as depressed using some of these criteria. Notably, the sociological term ‘inscription’ is preferred over the medical term ‘diagnosis’ to reflect the fact that psychiatric interviews and procedures are social rituals rather than medical or scientific investigations. Like inscriptions on a tombstone, psychiatric labels also last many years. Cross-cultural studies of depression by researchers in the industrialised regions presuppose a dichotomy of mind and body and related theory of emotion. Emotions are, however, not c­ onstituted the same way in different cultures. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz regarded ideas and emotions as cultural artefacts. Anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists argue that affects are inseparable from cultural systems of meaning. Janis H. Jenkins, Arthur Kleinman, and Byron J.

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Good suggest that culturally informed models of depression thus investigate indigenous or ethnopsychological models of dysphoric affects. Themes include factors such as indigenous categories of emotion, the predominance of particular emotions within societies, and ethnophysiological accounts of bodily experience of emotions. Conceptions of emotion are embedded within notions of self, characterised as varying along a continuum between egocentric and sociocentric. Individuals with a more sociocentric sense of self are considered to be more relationally identified with others than are individuals with a more egocentric sense of self, who view themselves as separate persons. The former have often been associated with nonWestern cultural traditions and the latter with more industrialised nations. An understanding of emotions as intrapsychic events, feelings, or introspections of the individual is a specifically Western definition. By contrast, the Ifaluk of Micronesia does not differentiate between cultural categories of thought and emotion. Emotions are not located within persons but in relationships between persons or within events and situations. The Pintupi peoples of Australia have a kin-based conception of self in contrast to people from industrialised areas where self is seen as constituted by individuality. In industrialised regions, it is individual children who are marked as depressed rather than families or communities. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema reported on gender differences in depression in individuals from highincome countries (developed countries) and lowincome countries (developing countries). She found a mean 2:1 female–male ratio of depression in developed nations. Outside the developed nations, there were no differences between young males and females. Acknowledging a limited range of data, she suggests that high-income countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Australia have significant gender differences in depression whereas low-income countries, for example, Nigeria and Uganda, do not.

Agency Responses There are several common responses or treatments for depression in children, including assessment, drug treatments, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Increasingly,

online support groups are also being recognised as an appropriate response. Assessment

As the criteria for an inscription of depression include feelings and conduct common in childhood, estimates of the number of children that might be diagnosed as depressed are unreliable and vary across the industrialised world. Estimates range from 2% of prepubertal children to 8% of adolescents. The difficulty is compounded by different definitions of ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’. Scales such as the Pediatric Symptom Checklist have been suggested as an aid to diagnosis. Since 2005, the Beck Depression Inventory for Youth has been used with children 7–18 years old. Both scales have been criticised for lack of ­construct validity. Drug Treatment

Adverse effects of antidepressants have been recorded since their introduction. Tricyclic antidepressants—for example, imipramine (Tofranil) and amitriptyline (Elavil)—can produce weakness, nervousness, agitation, headaches, and vertigo. Some symptoms may be ascribed to the original complaint—depression. If the drug is seen as the cause, a patient may attempt to stop taking it. Someone reducing their use of tricyclic medication, however, can experience the physical effects of dose reduction, including nausea and vomiting, myalgia, headache, fatigue, and anxiety. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are marketed as superior to the tricyclics. SSRIs have not been clinically proven to be more effective or safer than these older, less expensive antidepressants. Nor do tricyclics pose the risk of agitation and violence seen with SSRIs. Evidence on the effectiveness of SSRIs is limited partly due to methodological problems, for example, high rates of attrition. In young people, there are high placebo response rates. The SSRIs paroxetine (Paxil), sertraline (Zoloft), and (fluoxetine (Prozac) are marketed as antidepressants though their adverse effects closely resemble those of stimulant drugs. These adverse effects include anxiety, sexual dysfunction, and suicidal ­ideation— all concerns that may have led to the original prescription, though positioned as symptoms of

Depression

‘depression’ by the prescriber. In the early 1970s, physicians expressed the suspicion that antidepressants led to chronic depression. GlaxoSmithKline funded studies of its SSRI Paxil, indicating it was no more effective than placebos in the treatment of childhood depression. The same studies also showed an increased occurrence of emotional disturbance in those taking the drug. The likelihood of a suicide attempt was 3 times as great for Paxil users compared with those taking placebos. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals drew the same conclusions about its SSRI, Effexor, sending out a two-page letter to health-care workers stating it may not be safe for paediatric use. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reanalysed data for venlafaxine (Effexor) as well as for several other SSRIs and issued an advisory note citing similar findings for citalopram (Celexa), Effexor, Prozac, and Zoloft. The National Institute of Clinical Excellence in the United Kingdom banned all but one SSRI from use in children due to evidence of suicidality. A drug deemed unsafe while a person is less than 18 years of age is considered ‘safe’ the day after the person’s 18th birthday. Psychotherapy

As a child diagnosed as depressed may be within a family, family therapy and systemic therapy may be recommended. Outcome studies are not conclusive in part because changes in the child can be due to multiple factors. Cognitive behaviour therapy is widely recommended for the treatment of depression in children and adolescents. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, it is considered the first-line treatment for mild depression and an adjunct to medication for moderate to severe depression. There is little evidence of its effectiveness, and in a 2006 U.S. study, adolescents receiving cognitive behaviour therapy did no better than those on placebo. Psychoanalysis has not been shown to be successful with children. One-to-one psychotherapy places the child in a relationship with a powerful other. The therapist is usually an adult socially accredited with expert and legitimate power. Therapists with legal powers of sanction or prescription therefore have the social power of reward. It is estimated that this imbalance of

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power involves assault on up to 10% of childpatients inscribed as depressed. Electroshock

ECT is recommended for adolescents with a diagnosis of persistent major depression. The youngest child to have received electroshock after a diagnosis of major depression was 34 months, and there have been case studies of 8-year-old recipients. The Western Australian Government has banned ECT for children under 12 years. Brazil has prohibited the use of ECT in patients below 16 years of age, unless in exceptional circumstances. In 13 U.S. states, ECT is highly regulated by law, and in Colorado and Texas, it is forbidden for children under 16 years. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, carries out electroshock under the supervision of an anaesthesiologist as well as a psychiatrist and claims effectiveness in treating childhood depression. Consent forms for electroshock are limited to acknowledging headache, nausea, and vomiting, agitation, and confusion as the most common adverse effects. Psychologists, parents, and patient activists have called for electroshock to be banned. The Internet

Diagnoses and associated descriptors also change to incorporate other conduct, losing or gaining associated stigma in the process. ‘Manic depression’, for example, has been replaced by ‘bipolar disorder’. Some diagnosed children use the term if ‘coming out’ online or on YouTube. A formal diagnosis adds to their celebrity and may help an associated charity gain funds. There are numerous Internet chat rooms for children inscribed with depression. These enable the exchange of tips for survival, confronting challenging school or family environments or overdosing on prescribed medication and self-harm.

Critical Conclusion Anthropological studies reveal differences globally concerning the idea of the self, internality of mood states, and in rates of low mood states experienced by males and females. A consequence of relabelling normal childhood experiences as symptoms of a disorder is the

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likelihood of the child being offered treatment. As children are legally minors, it is frequently parents or teachers who request medical or psychological intervention, and consent is given by the parent or guardian. All current treatments have been criticised for only having short-term effects. Children and parents should be informed about the risk of dependence before taking antidepressants though the unique nature of each child’s metabolism makes it impossible to know which adverse effects will be experienced while taking or after stopping the medication. Parent, patient, and professional groups on Facebook and other media speak out about the psychiatric and psychological system’s treatment of children, in particular the inscription of ordinary childhood conduct as disordered and the harmful effects of medical and psychological intervention. Craig Newnes See also Anorexia Nervosa; Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); Childhood Poverty; Digital Media; Klein, Melanie; Medicalization of Childhood; Mental Health, Child

Further Readings Breggin, P. R. (2015). The rights of parents and children in regard to children receiving psychiatric diagnoses and drugs. In C. Newnes (Ed.), Children in society: Politics, policies and interventions (pp. 145–161). Monmouth, UK: PCCS Books. doi:10.1111/ chso.12049 DeGrandpre, R. (2013). The Lilly suicides [Online]. Retrieved November 26, 2016, from http:// prozacspotlight.org/lilly/ Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books. Jackson, S. W. (1986). Melancholia and depression. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jenkins, J., Kleinman, A., & Good, B. (1991). Crosscultural studies of depression. In J. Becker & A. Kleinman (Eds.), Psychosocial aspects of depression (1st ed., pp. 67–100). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. doi:10.1002/depr.3050010210 Newnes, C. (2016). Inscription, diagnosis and deception in the mental health industry: How Psy governs us all. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1192/ bjp.bp.115.178657 Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1990). Sex differences in depression. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Development Development is a word and an idea that is inseparable from the semantics and metaphors of growth, advance, evolution, and progress. Development describes a process through which an organism or object passes on the way to reaching a complete and finished form. It is teleological in that it describes things through recourse to a goal or purpose, and as an idea has come to be applied to everything from children to nations. The word ‘development’ implies a change for the better, an advance along a pathway that leads to a desirable outcome. Discourses of development often relate to childhood in the form of conceptual models and behavioural or cognitive milestones and, as well, often connect to models of economic and international development. Development is relevant to children and childhood studies in multiple ways. In fact, the developmental logic of maturation and growth underpin the very ways that childhood is understood in many parts of the world. As knowledge from developmental psychology is exported globally, this largely European and North American expertise is used to describe and prescribe children’s development and behaviour in diverse contexts all over the world. Developmental logic also structures how one understands economic and human development, and structures the direction of, and point of, intervention for multiple development projects. Whether these development programmes promote children’s rights and school attendance or create and sustain conditions of poverty and displacement, they have real effects on children’s lives all over the world. Of further relevance to the study of childhood, and as will be examined, development and colonialism were contingent on the use of childhood as a metaphor to justify intervention. This entry first offers a definition of development. This entry further examines child development with a specific focus on developmental norms and post-development theories.

What Is Development? Development is often described as a discourse in that it establishes systems of relations between different actors and determines who has the

Development

authority to make judgements about what will count as development (i.e., advancement) and what will not. The idea of development has material effects, specifically in its creation of subjects and objects—the interventions and points of intervention of development. For post-development scholar Gustavo Esteva, nothing can compare to the idea of ‘development’ as a force that guides modern mentality, what some call ‘developmentality’. Yet despite this force, development is ­rendered practically meaningless from over-application into almost all domains of life. Developmental logic assumes that in their lifetime, an individual body will reproduce the same developmental stages as the development of the species body—what is known as cultural recapitulation. Development, understood as maturation akin to natural laws and as almost interchangeable with evolution, has come to be applied and used to understand diverse areas of life—from the growth of a child to the construction of nationstates and from world history to the ways the brain changes over time. Developmental logic then also connects to ideas of improvements and progress linked to the 19thcentury nation-state and to colonialism as a civilizational and economic project. Here, the history of the development of Western countries is imagined as a linear trajectory of progress that all countries must pass through in order to ‘develop’. This posits a shared global developmental telos (of multiple forms of development, from the child to the economy) that positions the ‘West’ as more advanced, with Global South countries constructed as needing to catch up. This is evident in systems of categorising countries’ development, from older uses of ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds, and ‘developing countries’, to current uses of ‘low-’, ‘middle-’, and ‘high’-income countries. The construction of large parts of the world as ‘underdeveloped’ became particularly virulent after U.S. President Harry Truman’s 1949 speech putting forward a global programme that ushered in a new era of development. After this speech, as Esteva discusses, billions of people became ‘underdeveloped’ overnight; their diverse experiences explained, and heterogeneous identities defined, under the banner of development. Thus, after World War II, as many nations fought for and achieved formal decolonisation, the previous

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colonisers found a new way to legitimate their interventions internationally—through the promise of helping countries to develop. This continues today in the promotion and measurement of Human Development, often led by supranational organisations. For example, the World Bank produces yearly World Development Reports ­ detailing aspects of development, including a report on Youth. The United Nations Development Programme has a Human Development Index, a composite measurement used to categorise countries within four ranks of human development. And in 2015, the United Nations produced a series of global Sustainable Development Goals to guide development until 2030. Children and young people often constitute the target of these global development goals, with indicators devised to measure child poverty, malnutrition, school attendance, and more. Many international nongovernmental organizations focus on children (e.g., through child sponsorship campaigns) and some make available child development guidance  to parents of the Global South, as well as using this to inform humanitarian and refugee programmes. Ideas of progress and growth are thus not only key to economic and international development; they also saturate psychological knowledge about children’s development. Indeed, much of the global advice on child-rearing is based on the expertise generated by developmental psychology.

Child Development Developmental psychology is a pervasive form of expertise that has impacted and continues to impact on people’s lives in multiple ways. While these effects may be implicit and hard to perceive, they structure dominant understanding of children in divers settings and well beyond the nursery. Yet the nursery and clinic, as spaces that allowed observation and data collection of a large number of children at different ages and doing different tasks, were central to the making of developmental psychology. Descriptions of what children could, on average, do at particular ages slipped into prescriptions of what they should be able to do, enabling developmental norms to be posited based on standardisation and normalisation. Much of developmental psychology’s early

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work was concerned with measurement and the establishing of statistical norms that, as Erica Burman, in her work on Deconstructing Development Psychology, shows us, correspond poorly to actual children and to children’s lived realities. Despite not corresponding to ‘real’ children, development is made real through its material effects, particularly for those who are constructed as the subjects and objects of development. Developmental stage theories portray child development as a series of distinct stages (sometimes called ‘developmental milestones’) through which a child passes on a linear pathway. Because children are seen as close to nature (having had little time to learn their behaviours), these prescriptions became naturalised, favouring biological explanations of heredity. The evolutionary thrust of child studies is apparent as early as the mid-1800s, in the work of Charles Darwin, and the idea of a standardised developmental journey is exemplified in the work Jean Piaget in the 1950s who put forward the theory that children’s cognitive development develops according to a defined set of stages that children pass through at different ages. This ‘ages and stages’ model of children’s development has been very influential and structures much guidance given to parents about their children globally. For example, the National Health Service in the United Kingdom produces guidance on developmental milestones for children aged 0–5 years through an interactive timeline, which specifies what a child will do as they grow, such as reaching out for objects and sitting up. Because development is linked to progress and imagined as a linear process, those who do not ‘progress’ in specified ways are seen to ‘lag’ behind. In children, this ‘developmental delay’ is identified when a child functions at a level considered to be below the norm for their particular age. Therefore, a diagnosis of developmental delay involves a comparison of a specific child’s ability with that of a statistical norm of children of the same age. Diagnosis here is a socially mediated process linked to cultural expectations of what is ‘normal’ for children at particular ages. Discussing developmental delay, Rebecca Valdivia, in her work on developmental delay as a cultural construction, points out that while developmental checklists may specify normal development as including a child’s ability to

feed themselves by 18 months old, for families with people around to help the child, there is little reason to encourage independent behavior so young. Thus, developmental milestones are dependent on the cultural values from which the criteria were produced, meaning that others may not identify a child’s inability to meet certain criteria as symptoms of a ‘delay’. Developmental Norms

Developmental norms are central to a number of diagnoses given to children, including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. According to the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in order to be given a diagnosis of ­attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, a child must exhibit a number of symptoms (inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity) to an extent that is inconsistent with the child’s developmental level. Thus, the construct of a developmental level sits at the heart of the diagnosis. Developmental logic also structures areas of development that are considered nontypical. When people have a baby in the United Kingdom they are given a copy of a Personal Child Health Record, in which they are encouraged to record their child’s development (and progress), including noting down when (and if) their child meets specific developmental milestones, such as walking. For parents who have children with Down’s syndrome, there is an additional insert to their child’s health record, which provides a checklist through which parents can record the developmental progress of their child. Children with Down’s s­ yndrome are thus seen to have a different developmental pathway than other children, but this pathway is still prescriptive. Research carried out with parents of disabled children by Disability Studies scholars Dan Goodley, Katherine ­Runswick-Cole, and Kirsty Liddiard shows that developmental logic even saturates children’s lives that are considered atypical through creating a ‘normal’ development pathway for Down’s syndrome. Thus, developmental discourse structures even areas of development that are considered nontypical. Despite formulated scripts of developmental stages being critiqued as problematic even in the  countries of the Global North, and more

Development

specifically Europe and the United States, from which they originate, child development is projected globally. Charities such as the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund provide online information and videos about ‘normal’ childhood developmental milestones for use internationally. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund has also initiated projects to ­produce global indicators for early childhood development that would enable comparison across countries in terms of public policy and children’s well-being. Here, child development is explicitly linked to international development through the work of development agencies. Critics of the concept of childhood as universal, such as Olga Nieuwenhuys, state that this incites Global South countries to emulate a Western standard of childhood that is positied as the most ‘developed’. Many critics question the validity of applying theories of developmental psychology outside of the cultural and historical contexts in which they were produced, seeing them as inadequate to explain the lives of the majority of the world’s children and mothers. As well as the material effects of development on children’s lives, development is relevant to children and childhood studies because of the ways that childhood is used as a metaphor for colonialism and development interventions. The work of Burman, and of some postcolonial theorists such as Ashis Nandy, makes visible how developmental logic of both children and nations is contingent on the ideologies of colonialism and modernity that viewed forms of difference as the result of an evolutionary hierarchy that constructed White ablebodied ruling class men as the highest stage of evolution. In contrast, colonised and Indigenous peoples were understood to be child-like (understood as a primitive but transitional state) in need of subjection to European patriarchal domination in the form of the ‘Father’. This metaphor of childhood was thus used to justify colonialism and is now used to justify development interventions, enabling the Global North to act in loco parentis to an infantilized Global South. Post-Development

Critiques of development as hegemonic and colonial coalesce in the ‘post-development’ movement, exemplified in the scholarly and activist

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work of Esteva and Arturo Escobar. For Esteva, development as an idea guiding our thinking and behavior cannot be taken out of the web of ­meanings in which it is embedded. What it is ­possible to think about development depends on the ­ perspective one takes. For those deemed ‘­ underdeveloped’—whether they be individual children of the Global North, or whole populations of the Global South—development stands as a prescriptive standard against which they are seen to be lacking and which is used to ­justify interventions seen as being in their ‘best interests’. Now development has become the terrain of supranational organisations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Health Organization. The mantra of growth is used to justify diverse projects from dam building to genetically modified crops, often leading to mass dislocation and displacement, subjugation of vernacular ways of knowing, and loss of livelihoods. Much of this ‘development’ has been imposed on Global South countries through structural adjustment policies that construct development as painful but necessary and as integral to progress. Former Minister of Iran and post-development scholar Majid Rahnema argues that one needs to search for new possibilities of change, linked to solidarity and relationality, and away from the destructiveness wrought by development. Thus, he calls for the end of development, an idea presaged and echoed by Burman, in order to move away from the assumed universality of developmental norms for children and to instead focus on locally situated ways of knowing children that recognise difference without seeing it as deficiency in need of development. China Mills See also Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); Autism, Child Development, and Theory; Developmental Psychology; Developmentality

Further Readings Burman, E. (1994). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London, UK: Routledge. Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London, UK: Routledge.

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Chakrabarti, A., & Dhar, A. (2009). Dislocation and resettlement in development. New York, NY: Routledge. Escobar, A. (2012). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1995). doi:10.1086/ahr/101.5.1523 Esteva, G. (1992). Development. In W. Sachs (Ed.), The development dictionary: The guide to knowledge as power (2nd ed., pp. 1–24). Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press. Goodley, D., Runswick-Cole, K., & Liddiard, K. (2016). The DisHuman child. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37, 770–784. Nandy, A. (2010). Reconstructing childhood: A critique of the ideology of adulthood. In A. Singh & S. Mohapatra (Eds.), Indian political thought: A reader. London, UK: Routledge. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2009). How the poor develop (in spite of the rich): A commentary. Journal of Health Management, 11(1), 243–250. doi:10.1177/ 097206340901100116 Rahnema, M., & Bawtree, V. (Eds.). (1997). The postdevelopment reader. London, UK: Zed Books. Valdivia, R. (1999). The implications of culture on developmental delay. Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) EC Digest, #E589.

Developmental Psychology This entry discusses key themes, thinkers, and theories within developmental psychology as well as more contemporary developments within the field. A short insight into the conception of the field as well as a brief breakdown of the major contributors is provided. The entry concludes with the current position of the field and visions for the future. An exploration of the field of developmental ­psychology is pertinent to the understandings of ­children and childhood as this field contains much of the inaugural research on children, which illuminates both historical and contemporary views of the progression of childhood studies.

Developmental Psychology Defined Developmental psychology is the scientific study of human development over the course of the human life span. The field emerged in the 19th

century and progressed more in terms of a ‘burst’ rather than evolving chronologically. At the time of its initial conception, developmental psychology commenced with its primary focus upon development in infancy and early childhood; however, it has further expanded to include development into adolescence, adulthood, and older age and often takes on a life span approach (focusing on development throughout the life span). Developmental psychologists are interested in observing how behaviour and cognitive processes change throughout an individual’s life span. As such, developmental psychologists primarily focus on biological, social, emotional, and cognitive processes and largely seek to discover children’s sense of self and theory of mind. The objective of developmental psychology is both descriptive and prescriptive; meaning it seeks to describe and explain human development, while also developing theories and suggested practices for parents, caregivers, and educators when interacting with children. Developmental psychology has historically been known for its divisiveness amongst researchers; however, this is now much less prevalent, as scholars tend to take a more nuanced approach in their research.

Key Themes and Debates There are four key themes and debates that have long dominated developmental psychology discourses. Normative Development Versus Individual Differences

Developmental psychology focuses on both normative development and individual differences. Normative development refers to agerelated stages that all, or most, children are expected to progress through, in order to achieve optimal development. Normative development does not take into account variations between children nor within stages. Researchers interested in cognition and language development are typically in favour of a normative approach to development. On the other hand, some developmental psychologists prefer an approach that recognises individual differences. Typically, research that focuses on the connections between early

Developmental Psychology

experiences and social and environmental dynamics tends to examine individual differences more closely. Continuity Versus Discontinuity

This theme seeks answers as to whether human development occurs in a linear fashion (which typically includes specific stages of development), or whether the trajectory of our development is undefined. The continuity perspective argues that development is gradual and that it does not adhere to a particular timeframe or stage. A child will continuously learn as they become older and older. In contrast, theories of discontinuity state that development is segmented, wherein certain development occurs within specific stages. The child is expected to develop particular traits before they are able to progress to the next stage, and each stage is often thought to build off of its predecessor. Stages are usually determined by a child (or individual’s) age or age-range, and requirements and criteria are typically standard for all children within each stage’s respective age-range. Nativism Versus Empiricism

The nativism versus empiricism debate (also known as the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate) has historically been one of the most common disputes within developmental psychology. The main questions within these debates include whether our behaviours and tendencies are influenced by our biology and genetics, or whether they are more contingent upon our environments and social conditions. Nativists view development as occurring based on a child’s inherent knowledge, skills, and understanding of reality. A child is born with an innate knowledge of the world and its place within it. New information is subsequently gathered by building on these intrinsic foundations. Contrastingly, empiricists believe that knowledge and development progress through our experiences and interactions with others. The environment and social world are seen as pivotal features of human development to empiricists. Contemporary perspectives on this are much more nuanced, with many researchers adopting features of both nativism and empiricism.

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Stability Versus Change

In the stability versus change debate, researchers examine whether individual traits are fixed and stable over time, or, rather, whether they are fluid and receptive to change as one develops. Proponents of the stability perspective assert that development within the early years of one’s life will predict the prospective development of the adult. Traits of development, according to this view, are generally seen as stable and unchanging. Advocates of the change perspective maintain that development can be influenced through experiences, interactions, and life events. As such, development is seen to shift and alternate as a result of the changes that occur between childhood and adulthood.

Key Contributors and Major Theories Within the Field of Developmental Psychology Developmental psychology has been continuously expanding since its initial inception. As such, there are numerous thinkers, philosophers, and psychologists who have profoundly shaped the field and have influenced the way developmental psychology is practiced today. A few very well-renowned thinkers include John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Lev Vygotsky, John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, John B. Watson, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Urie Bronfenbrenner. These theorists are conceived as pioneers in the early stages of developmental psychology and have firmly set the foundation of the field. An overview of the leading thinkers of the field is paramount to understanding precisely what developmental psychology entails. As such, a brief summary of the theories and contributions of the aforementioned individuals is provided in the following sections. John Locke

Locke (1632–1704), a philosopher, was an avid believer in the ‘nurture’ side of child development and did not believe that cognitive traits innately existed within a child’s mind. He used the term ‘tabula rasa’, which translates to ‘blank slate’, to indicate the way in which a child’s mind is ‘blank’ at birth but becomes filled as a result of their

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experiences. Emphasis on the environment (e.g., parents and educators) is particularly important here, as the environment within which a child grows is seen to play a pivotal role in their development. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In contrast to Locke, Rousseau (1712–1778) favoured the ‘nature’ side of development, in that he felt children had individual, biological developmental characteristics upon birth. He was one of the first philosophers to emphasise child development as occurring throughout distinct stages and stated that there was a natural progression of development that children needed to follow for optimal development. Rousseau’s stages of development are as follows: infancy (birth to age 2 years), childhood (ages 2–12 years), adolescence (ages 12–15 years), and young adulthood (ages 15–25 years). Jean Piaget

Piaget (1896–1980) was a developmental psychologist primarily focused on cognitive development in childhood. He is well-known for his theory on cognitive developmental stages. Piaget outlined four developmental stages of cognitive development: (1) sensorimotor (birth to age 2 years) where children experience their world through the senses, (2) preoperational (ages 2–7 years) where children’s play is conceived as pivotal to their development and where they are still learning to perceive things from viewpoints other than their own, (3) concrete operational (ages 7–11 years) where children are able to think logically and able to perceive the world from the viewpoints of others, and (4) formal operational (ages 11–16 years) where children develop abstract reasoning and problem-solving skills. He described these stages as being embedded with a cycle of cognitive development. Piaget is also known for using his own children within his studies. Maria Montessori

Montessori (1870–1952) was a philosopher and proponent of stages of development. She believed in self-directed learning for children and in what is now known as ‘child-centred education’.

According to Montessori, children learn best when they are in control of their learning. As such, she believed that teachers should function as supports and guides as opposed to instructors. Montessori also emphasised that c­ hildren have unique speeds and paces of learning and should only learn new information when they are ‘ready’ to do so. Supporters of this view assert that children should never be placed in competition with their peers and should experience a much more individualised structure to learning. Additionally, children are encouraged to exercise agency and autonomy in their learning and are given opportunities to decide what activities they wish to partake in. Montessori stressed that the first 6 years of a child’s life were the most critical. She referred to this period as the ‘sensitive period’ within which specific stages of development take place in certain windows of opportunity and are most critical at particular ages. The stages of development within the sensitive period are as follows: movement (birth to age 1 years), language (birth to age 6 years), small objects (ages 1–4 years), order (ages 2–4 years), music (ages 2–6 years), grace and courtesy (ages 2–6 years), sensory impressions (ages 2–6 years), writing interest (ages 3–4 years), reading interest (ages 3–5 years), spatial relationships (ages 4–6 years), and mathematics (ages 4–6 years). Accordingly, Montessori concedes that children should be provided with activities that foster these stages of development, while allowing children to navigate these stages with independence. Lev Vygotsky

Like Montessori, Vygotsky (1896–1934) also had a primary focus on child development in relation to education and is best known for his theory on the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The ZPD refers to the range of tasks that a child can complete with the guidance of others but cannot complete independently without assistance. To better illustrate this, it is helpful to think of the ZPD as existing along a spectrum: The far-left end would represent tasks that a child cannot complete independently, the far-right end would represent tasks that the child can complete independently, and the middle would represent tasks that a child can complete with guidance (the ZPD). Vygotsky

Developmental Psychology

attested that every child has a different ZPD and, as a result, will require different supports with tasks. Thus, the importance of appropriate scaffolding (guidance from someone slightly more skilled) was emphasised in relation to the ZPD, as this directly influences how fast and efficiently a child can master a new task. Vygotsky also had a heightened focus on the ways in which development was influenced by language acquisition. He believed that language grounded a child’s perception and self-regulation. Correspondingly, he highlighted three stages of language development: (1) preintellectual social speech (birth to age 3 years), (2) egocentric speech (ages 3–7 years), and (3) inner speech (ages 7 years and onward). Vygotsky was also an avid believer in the role of ‘nature’ and felt that that children should never be thought of as independent of their environments. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth

In the 1930s, Bowlby (1907–1990) and ­ insworth (1913–1999) proposed ‘attachment A theory’ which was aimed towards describing emotional development. Attachment theory identifies three childhood attachment styles: (1) secure, (2) avoidant, and (3) anxious/ambivalent. In short, attachment theory focuses on the bond of a mother and her child beginning in the womb, throughout infancy and into early childhood. The theory proposes that a child’s healthy emotional development and attachment are contingent upon a secure relationship with caregivers (primarily the mother) and that to prosper emotionally, children require a solid bond with their mother. Fundamentally, a child with a trusting and reliable relationship to its mother was typically less fearful and more emotionally secure (secure attachment) than one who did not have such a relationship (avoidant or anxious/ambivalent attachment). These styles of attachment in infancy are believed to influence future relationships with others into one’s adulthood. John B. Watson

Another psychologist interested in emotions was Watson (1878–1958). Watson was also primarily interested in emotional development and posited that not all emotional reactions were innate. Through his research, Watson found that

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only three emotions were intrinsically present at birth: (1) fear, (2) rage, and (3) love. He argued that these three, innate, emotions served as a foundation for subsequent emotions that would develop in later life. Watson also advocated that these emotions could be conditioned into children, beginning at a young age. To test his theory, Watson conducted a controversial study known as ‘the little Albert study’ in which he exposed a 9-month-old infant to a series of stimuli (e.g., a rat, rabbit, dog, monkey) that the child had not previously shown fear of and conditioned him to be afraid of them. Ivan Pavlov

Building on the notion of conditioning, Pavlov (1849–1936) was also a developmental psychologist who focused on conditioned behaviour. ­Pavlov  developed the concept of ‘classical conditioning’, which involves the pairing of one stimulus with another stimulus to create a learned response. The first stimulus initially elicits a natural response, while the second does not; however, after several repetitions of pairing the stimuli together, the second stimulus becomes conditioned and causes the response to occur. To explain this in simpler terms, Pavlov tested this by introducing a stimulus (the sound of a bell) before providing several dogs with food. Initially, the sound of the bell caused no reaction in the dogs; however, after Pavlov repeated this several times, the dogs eventually began to salivate upon the sounding of the bell alone, in the absence of food. He then concluded that by pairing two stimuli together repeatedly, it is possible to induce a learned response. B. F. Skinner

Like Pavlov, Skinner (1904–1990) also studied conditioned behaviour and is best known for his developmental theories on reinforcement. Skinner believed that behaviour is dependent upon learned consequences; if a consequence of an action is negative, the probability of an individual repeating that action is low; however, if the consequence of an action is positive, it is more likely that the individual will repeat the behaviour. He termed this idea ‘operant conditioning’ and developed what is known as the ‘Skinner Box’ to further test this. Skinner inserted a rat into the box, inside which there was a lever, a bowl, and a closed chamber.

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Once the lever is pulled, the chamber opens and dispenses food (which is initially unknown to the rat). The rat inadvertently hits the lever, after which food becomes dispensed from the chamber. After several more unintentional repetitions of this, the rat eventually learns that the lever controls the food within the chamber; this represents positive reinforcement, the addition of a pleasant stimulus. The Skinner Box was also used to test negative reinforcement, the removal of an unpleasant stimulus. In this case, the box contained a lever, a light, and an electric grid which would periodically release an electric shock. The light would be switched on prior to the grid’s release of the current. Once pulled, the lever in the box would stop the grid from emitting the electric current (again, initially unknown to the rat). Similar to the first example, the rat eventually learned that the lever would inhibit the shock. Each time the light was switched on thereafter, the rat learned to press the lever to prevent the electric current. Sigmund Freud

Freud (1856–1939) is one of the most wellknown psychologists of all time. His work spans areas from dreams, to drugs, to religion. He is also recognised for his conceptions of the id, ego, and superego. With regard to developmental psychology, he is best known for his controversial theories on psychosexual development. Freud believed that parents’ interactions with their young children in terms of their sexual desires essentially set the stage for their sexual development into adulthood. Freud proposed five stages of childhood sexual development: (1) oral (involving pleasures associated with the mouth), (2) anal (involving sensations associated with toilet training), (3) phallic (genital stimulation), (4) latency (a period in which sexual urges are temporarily dormant), and (5) genital (the final stage, in which adult sexual urges are present). Freud’s theories are not highly relevant in the field today; however, they are still conceived as foundational and are still rigorously applied in areas of psychoanalysis. Erik Erikson

Erikson (1902–1994) is a developmental psychologist who was also interested in issues related

to psychoanalysis. He was influenced by Freud’s concepts of the id, ego, and superego and further studied this in relation to personality development. Erikson is known for his theory of psychosocial development, through which he developed the following eight stages: (1) trust versus mistrust (birth to 18 months), (2) autonomy versus shame (ages 1–3 years), (3) initiative versus guilt (ages 3–5 years), (4) industry versus inferiority (ages 6–11 years), (5) identity versus role confusion (ages 12–18 years), (6) intimacy versus isolation (ages 18–40 years), (7) generativity versus stagnation (ages 40–65 years), and (8) ego integrity versus despair (ages 65 years onward). Throughout these stages, Erikson proposes that the successful completion of each of these stages will result in healthy and optimal personality development. Inconsistent or unsuccessful progression between stages may result in the hindrance of moving onto a subsequent stage and thus in unhealthy personality development. Lawrence Kohlberg

Focused on morality, Kohlberg (1927–1987) developed three levels of moral development: (1) preconventional (infancy and preschool), (2) conventional (school-age), and (3) postconventional (teenage years and adulthood). These levels were used to describe the processes through which children learn to discern right from wrong. ­Kohlberg explained that each level builds upon the one preceding it. The first level (preconventional) suggests that morality is regulated by perceived consequences. Children try to do ‘right’ to avoid punitive repercussions. In the second level (conventional), morality is regulated by what is perceived to be conducive to creating a healthy and harmonious community. In other words, children seek to do ‘right’ as they feel that they will have better relationships with others, and within their communities. The final level (postconventional) involves a more critical approach to morality. Rather than blindly following rules, individuals now challenge rules whether they are perceived to be incompatible with or contradictory to their own internal values and sense of reasoning. This final stage is of particular importance to the field, as Kohlberg accentuated the agency that children and adults have in relation to their own moral

Developmental Psychology

reasoning; the capability to assess, evaluate, and judge morality is paramount to an individual’s position within their world. Urie Bronfenbrenner

Bronfenbrenner (1917–2005) was a developmental psychologist who was interested in the development and progression of the field of developmental psychology itself. Bronfenbrenner stressed that human development is in large part influenced by one’s environmental context. In other words, the people, institutions, occupations, and social dynamics surrounding a child would directly impact their development in the world. Moreover, he underscored the notion that there are different levels of environmental factors that work towards an individual’s overall development. As such, he conveyed his perceptions of limitations within developmental psychology, suggesting studies on child development in the field are usually conducted in unnatural and inorganic settings, with unfamiliar people, and for an insufficient amount of time. Consequently, Bronfenbrenner developed the ecological systems theory, which discusses the varying levels of environmental, cultural, and social aspects that influence human development. He later revised the theory’s name to the bioecological model to highlight the significance of biological process in development as well. Developmental psychologists seek to understand childhood and child development from various standpoints and tend to represent great diversity in their chosen foci. Various areas of development have been touched upon including emotional, cognitive, linguistic, personality, moral, sexual, behavioural, and educational development. As such, developmental psychology is an extremely extensive field, encompassing a wide range of aspects of child and human development throughout the life span.

Contemporary Views and Critiques of the Field Originally, the field blossomed with major, distinct theories of child and human development. As stated previously, the field currently operates

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with much more nuance, in that there are smaller, overarching theoretical perspectives, which build off of and fuse original major theories. As time has progressed, previous research in the field has been largely reshaped by advanced understandings of child and human development. For example, the combination of both nature and nurture has been found to be a profound advancement within the field; as opposed to strictly siding with one or the other as was done traditionally. Contemporary perspectives in developmental psychology are also increasingly critical. One critique of the field is that normative conceptions of child development serve to marginalise and pathologise those who do not fit into this blueprint of how children ‘should’ typically develop. This is more applicable to the field of developmental psychopathology, as this is where ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ development is often explored. In line with this critique is the criticism that most research done in the field has been based on  Western populations in North America and Europe. As such, individual differences pertaining to cultural, societal, and/or ethnic variation are often overlooked, which may account for some of the categorisations of children as ‘nonnormative’. There has been advocacy for a more intersectional approach to developmental psychology, which takes into account gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and ability (amongst other characteristics), in explaining the diversity of developmental experiences children share. A final major critique of developmental psychology is that it does not take into account children’s subjectivities. In other words, developmental psychology has not focused on understanding children’s personal experiences from their own perspectives; research has primarily been conducted ‘on’ children as opposed to ‘with’ children. As such, the agency and autonomy of children with respect to their ability to govern their own development is often overlooked. Advocates for children’s subjective experiences and autonomy to be recognised in research stress that more research needs to be done which seeks children’s direct perspectives. Irrespective of the critiques of the field, it is evident that developmental psychology has provided some very rich insights into the world of

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childhood and human development, and it continues to do so. Past and present research in this field has provided us with various ways of perceiving, conceiving, and questioning aspects of childhood development. As the world continues to diversify itself, it is trusted that so will the field of developmental psychology. Ameera Ali See also Age; Attachment Theory; Childhood; Development; History of Childhood

Further Readings Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. Butterworth, G., Rutkowska, J., & Scaife, M. (Eds.). (1985). Evolution and developmental psychology. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. Gillibrand, R., Lam, V., & O’Donnell, V. L. (2016). Developmental psychology (2nd ed.). Harlow, UK: Pearson. Kalverboer, A. F., Genta, M. L., & Hopkins, J. B. (Eds.). (1999). Current issues in developmental psychology: Biopsychosocial perspectives. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic. Keil, F. (2014). Developmental psychology: The growth of mind and behaviour. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Miller, P. H. (2016). Theories of developmental psychology (6th ed.). New York, NY: Worth. Pickren, W. E., Dewsbury, D. A., & Wertheimer, M. (2012). Portraits of pioneers in developmental psychology. New York, NY: Psychology Press. Richardson, K. (2000). Developmental psychology: How nature and nurture interact. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Slater, A. M., & Bremner, J. G. (2017). An introduction to developmental psychology (3rd ed.). West Sussex, UK: Wiley. Slater, A. M., & Quinn, P. C. (Eds.). (2012). Developmental psychology: Revisiting the classic studies. London, UK: Sage. Thompson, D., Hogan, J. D., & Clark, P. M. (2012). Developmental psychology: In historical perspective. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Upton, P. (2011). Developmental psychology. London, UK: Sage. Zelazo, P. D. (Ed.). (2013). Oxford handbook of developmental psychology (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Developmentality Developmentality is a neologism that combines development and mentality to express a critique of the normalizing effects of developmental thinking in childhood studies. The term developmentality alludes to Michel Foucault’s neologism governmentality and focuses on the limiting and selfgoverning effects of developmental discourses about children. This entry examines the use of developmentality, its origins, and how it operates as a form of critique.

Use of Developmentality In the 21st century, the term developmentality has been used primarily in discourses of international economic aid as a way to critique assumptions of progress that are generalized from one (usually European) culture to another culture. In discourses of international development, developmentality refers to the tendency of international foundations to assume that the goals and values of one culture are appropriate to apply to other cultures as calibrations of progress. When this happens, a (Western/European) model of progress is imposed on other cultures, which are regarded as underdeveloped or in need of help to advance further in alignment with a particular Western model. Similarly, in education and child studies, the term developmentality refers to the tendency to generalize culturally specific models of growth and impose those models on a diverse array of people and ways of being in the world. Developmentality is usually justified as a scientific or objective assessment of whether a child is thriving; developmentality usually assumes that one relatively narrow model of healthy growth is proper and can be applied universally.

Origins of Developmentality Developmental learning theories in child studies began with the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and were modified by later psychologists including Erik Erickson, Edward Thorndike, and Jean Piaget. Developmental learning theories usually posit that both nature and nurture influence growth. Some developmentalists

Developmentality

(e.g., Piaget) propose more stage-like progressions, whereas others (e.g., Kurt Fischer) propose a continuous development model. Many current learning theories subscribe to the developmental model, namely that childhood learning and growth occur in a predictable sequence that can be identified and predicted in alignment with demographic categories. Developmental learning theories are products of modern Western culture; they are consistent with basic tenets of modernity, namely the beliefs in rational progress, grand theories, and generalizability. Early 20th-century developmental psychology, for example, specified patterns of development that varied depending on race, based on established 19th-century scientific assumptions about racially specific human natures. At one point, indications of developmental stages were measured by phrenology. Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy is also an example of a developmental learning theory. More recent versions of developmental psychology specify growth in terms of what Thomas Teo describes as critical metatheoretical reflection, which refers to children acquiring the reflexive capacity to monitor their own learning. Developmental appropriateness is defined by historically specific understandings of what counts as normal and what counts as growth. All discourses reinscribe power relations. Developmentality inscribes early 20th-century theories of scientific racism, the belief that intelligence was linked to race. Aligned with those beliefs, developmental theories of that time reproduced assumptions of White superiority in measurements of development. In this way, the discourses of developmental appropriateness normalized a particular culture of Whiteness in the models of development. In other words, developmental appropriateness was measured on a standard of Whiteness. These days, the reasoning inscribed in questions of developmental appropriateness assumes that normal pertains to a specific set of qualities that have been established on the basis of culturally specific values and reproduced through standardized testing instruments. Conversely, qualities other than those so specified as normal are regarded as notnormal, and sequences of growth and change that do not match those specified by standard testing instruments are labeled as developmentally delayed or abnormal.

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Developmentality as Critique The concept of developmentality arose as a way to name and criticize the dominance of developmental learning theories in childhood studies. The term developmentality was introduced in the spirit of Foucault’s theorizing to call attention to the limiting and normalizing effects of developmental theories. When educators and educational researchers assume developmental theories and those theories shape what they regard as normal and abnormal for children, the tendency is called developmentality. Developmentally appropriate curricula function as technologies of normalization when they are accepted uncritically and when those assumptions shape what is assumed to be good and healthy. Normalization operates through child studies when the generalizations that stipulate normal development are assumed to be desirable for all children, and any departures from those characteristics are held to be not-normal or deviant. The theoretical generalizations come first, and the lives of individual children are evaluated with reference to that preestablished norm. When that happens, generalizations take precedence over a broad range of diversity. In the process, diversity is pathologized as deviant or abnormal. Developmentality does not operate as sovereign power; that is, laws and institutions do not require that one obey the principles of developmentality; one is not punished if they fail to think in alignment with developmental models. Rather, developmentality (like governmentality) is how one disciplines oneself on the basis of what one believes is good and normal. Developmentality describes a current pattern of power in which the self disciplines the self. Historically, the deployment of psychology in education occurred together with the deployment of efficient (or scientific) management and behaviorism. As a mode of selfgovernance, developmentality is based on psychological approaches that interweave discursive threads of developmental psychology, efficiency, and behaviorism. Technologies of normalization are enacted when discourses converge, for example, when psychological learning theories converge with systemic racism, efficiency, and behavior management. Convergence can happen in a classroom, in a

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policy, in a research design, or in a textbook. Technologies of normalization occur in relations that are usually unintended and often unproblematized. The term developmentality is one attempt to interrupt exercises of power that occur when psychological concepts of developmental appropriateness are assumed without question. Lindsay O’Dell and colleagues, for example, recently have offered critiques of these assumptions in their attention to “non/normative development and transgressive trajectories.” Developmentality does not imply that normalization is inevitable or deterministic. The concept of developmentality does not suggest that institutional demands dominate people. One is not ­controlled by institutions or the rules of developmentality. Rather, educational practices sometimes appear to be exercises of freedom but, on closer examination, turn out to be limiting because they are reproductions of the status quo. As a Foucaultian-inspired concept, developmentality is more of a warning than an indictment or a sentence. If one becomes aware of how one is governing oneself according to principles of scientific knowledge, then the opportunity arises to examine those exercises of power that are limiting one’s ability to see and be in the world. Developmentality, in its language of justification, exercises power and normalization in the construction of a specific regime of truth that operates under the radar in childhood studies. Lynn Fendler See also Development; Developmental Psychology; Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP); Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. New York, NY: Addison Wesley. Deb, D. (2009). Beyond developmentality: Constructing inclusive freedom and sustainability. London, UK: Earthscan. doi:10.4324/9781849770545 Fendler, L. (2001). Educating flexible souls: The construction of subjectivity through developmentality and interaction. In K. Hultqvist & G. Dahlberg (Eds.), Governing the child in the new millennium (pp. 119–142). New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.

Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man (Revised and expanded edition). New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lee, K., & Vagle, M. (Eds.). (2010). Developmentalism in early childhood and middle grades education: Critical conversations on readiness and responsiveness. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/ 9780230107854_1 O’Dell, L., Brownlow, C., & Bertilsdottir-Rosqvist, H. (Eds.). (2018). Different childhoods: Non/normative development and transgressive trajectories. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.1177/0959353518786522 Teo, T. (1997, July/August). Developmental psychology and the relevance of a critical metatheoretical reflection. Human Development, 40(4), 195–210. doi:10.1159/000278723 Thorndike, E. L. (1927). The measurement of intelligence. New York, NY: Columbia Teachers College Press.

Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) The term developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) was introduced into a wide usage in the United States with the 1987 publication of the book Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), an organization concerned with the welfare and schooling of children birth to age 8 years. Since its introduction, the term has been incorporated into wide use in both the United States and in many countries across the globe, and in many early childhood contexts, DAP has become synonymous with quality early childhood programming. The stated goals of the NAEYC handbook were to provide guidance for the accreditation of early childhood centers in the United States and to respond to pushes for more academic preschool experiences. Over time, the concept of DAP has evolved to include more room for teacher-­initiated instruction; however, advocates of DAP have generally argued for child-centered, play-based pedagogies with equal attention to social, emotional, aesthetic, and cognitive development. Following the United States, a number of countries incorporated attention to DAP in their design and

Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP)

evaluation of early childhood programs, either by name or by espousing DAP, such as play and choice. At the same time, almost since the publication of the guidelines, the concept of DAP has been the subject of critique from scholars and practitioners concerned about the ways in which standard developmental trajectories can marginalize children from diverse cultural and linguistic communities and children with identified disabilities. Scholars and practitioners who want to maintain an emphasis on academic skills in early childhood have also critiqued some of the principles and commitments of DAP for not providing sufficient support for children’s learning of early literacy and mathematics. This entry examines definitions of DAP in the United States, the global spread of DAP, and some critiques of the concept.

Definitions of DAP in the United States The notion of DAP is grounded in stage-based theories of development, heavily informed by the work of Jean Piaget and, to a lesser extent, Lev Vygotsky. From this perspective, all children are expected to progress through predictable stages in relation to their social, emotional, and cognitive growth. Piaget emphasized the importance of children’s engagements with the material world as contributors to development. In addition, his theories of learning, which argued that children are capable of constructing understandings for themselves, informed conceptions of DAP because play is seen as a critical context in which children construct these understandings. Vygotsky’s work drew attention to the ways that language and knowledgeable adults can scaffold children’s progress through developmental stages and saw the social world as critical to fostering children’s development. DAP, which is aimed at guiding adults’ interactions with children to foster their development, are grounded in these ideas. From both Piagetian and Vygotskian perspectives, developmental growth is understood to proceed at different rates for different children across various domains, and while development is expected to occur as a natural part of the process of growing older, planned, thoughtful interactions with the material environment and with knowledgeable others are seen as important to

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maximizing children’s development. Although early childhood programs are expected to vary in some ways in order to serve various cultural contexts, the construct of DAP assumes that all highquality early childhood programs will have certain features in common, including providing safe environments for children and offering programming to support children’s development across cognitive, social, emotional, and aesthetic domains. Because predictable periods of optimal growth are expected during childhood, adult interventions are seen as particularly crucial during these times in order to best support children’s development. One of the primary goals NAEYC had in identifying DAP was to push early childhood programs toward practices that the organization saw as contributing to children’s development during these critically important periods. For these reasons, advocates of DAP see it as an important construct for guiding practitioners toward the most effective interventions. NAEYC’s standards for creating developmentally appropriate early childhood programming focus on 10 broad areas, including creating a community of learners, teaching, curriculum, assessment, health, and building relationships with families, and are used in accrediting early childhood programs within the United States. The most comprehensive statement on DAP is NAEYC’s handbook Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs (referred to by many early childhood practitioners as the green bible), which has been revised twice since its original publication in 1987. The stated purpose of the handbook has evolved over time, with the first edition emphasizing the need to encourage early childhood programs from resisting efforts to become more academic, and the later revisions focusing on the need to provide diverse children with high-quality early childhood education experiences. At the time of publication of the first handbook, many early childhood educators were increasingly concerned with movements to make daycare, preschool, and kindergarten more academically oriented. Concerns for kindergarten readiness led some early childhood providers to spend increasing parts of the day on seatwork involving letters and numbers and to spend more time on didactic instruction and less time on play.

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DAP became a term used by some researchers and practitioners to combat this movement. More recently in the United States, academic preparation has become a more commonly accepted goal for early childhood education programs, and the more recent versions of the handbook are more supportive of the use of some teacher-initiated instruction. Each version of the handbook describes the value of attending to development, the cultural context in which that version was produced, specific behavioral expectations for children in three age bands (birth to 36 months, 3–5 years old, and 6–8 years old), and specific guidelines for early childhood practitioners through the use of examples and nonexamples of DAP. In the first two editions of the DAP handbook (1987 and 1997), nonexamples were described as inappropriate practices. However, in the 2009 revision, the language was changed to oppose developmentally appropriate practices with in contrast practices. This change was made in response to criticism about the problems of labeling particular practices as inappropriate for all children in all cultural contexts. Although the construct of DAP has been taken up in a variety of global contexts, the NAEYC handbooks primarily draw on research conducted in the United States and use examples from U.S.-based early childhood centers. Examples of DAP for children provided in the handbooks include ensuring that children have opportunities to speak with each other in a variety of settings, providing time for extended periods of play, and supporting children in planning for and reflecting on their days. Nonexamples of DAP include requiring children to silently complete seatwork, drilling with flash cards, using baby talk to speak to children, and using indiscriminate praise. The ways that some behaviors are described have changed over time, with the first handbook calling instruction that focused on letters and phonics inappropriate and the most recent handbook saying that explorations of letter shapes is appropriate. While the concept of DAP has changed over time, over the last two decades, research has generally found that increased use of DAP in early childhood settings correlates with improved child outcomes in both academic and social domains.

DAP in the Global Context Over the last two decades, early childhood researchers, policy makers, and practitioners have taken up the concept of DAP in such diverse countries as Jordan, China, India, Turkey, and Ireland. Instruments for measuring classroom quality based on DAP have been used across these global contexts, and many researchers have found the tools to be reliable in diverse settings. Some researchers and practitioners have expressed concerns about whether the Western ideas of childhood and education imbedded in notions of DAP are productive for use in nonWestern early childhood contexts. For example, the practice of leading group calisthenics common in many Chinese preschools, which place a cultural value on communal experiences, might be seen as in opposition to ethos of DAP because it emphasizes adult-directed, whole group activity. In many countries, ideas from DAP, such as a valuing of play-based instruction and child choice, have been woven into early childhood teacher preparation programs and national standards, although these recommendations for these practices frequently exist alongside recommendations for practices that grow out of the country’s local traditions, such as the proliferation of both childcentered and academic early childhood programs in Korea.

Critiques of DAP Critiques of the concept of DAP and the way in which it was presented began almost immediately after the publication of the first 1987 NAEYC guidebook. Although encompassing wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and practical concerns, most critiques of DAP have been grounded in objections to the idea of universal stages of development, which assume that children move through similar stages regardless of culture or context and to the notion of appropriate teaching practices that transcend cultural context. Many of the scholars engaged in this critique called themselves reconceptualists because they were attempting to discuss childhood in new ways. A new early childhood organization, Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education, grew out of this movement, and the later versions of the NAEYC handbook

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explicitly thank the reconceptualists for their critique. In particular, scholars have pointed out that much of the research on which the behavioral expectations for children and the specific indicators of DAP were created were based on studies of relatively homogenous groups of children, resulting in a research base that has not adequately conceptualized development across culture and class, even within the United States and other Western countries. For example, much of the research on child development focuses on centerbased contexts, whereas, in many countries and communities, young children are primarily reared in the homes of their families. Thus, universalist claims about development and practice generated in such research are questioned by scholars concerned with diverse contexts. Further, scholars and practitioners from other parts of the globe have expressed concern that their governments’ embrace of DAP will make it more difficult to preserve long-standing cultural traditions in their own early childhood communities, such as a commitment to respecting adult authority and valuing communal decision making. In addition, scholars concerned with the needs of children with identified disabilities have raised questions about whether having clear expectations for what children at various ages should be doing will make it more difficult to serve all children in general education settings because children who vary in significant ways from this trajectory will be seen as unable to benefit from the mainstream classroom environment. More recently, scholars concerned with kindergarten readiness and with demonstrating the impact of monetary investments in early childhood education to policy makers have also critiqued the notion of DAP as not providing enough support for teacher-led activities, particularly those designed to teach early literacy and mathematics skills. Within the United States, these concerns led to the writing of joint position statements with NAEYC and both the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Both of these position statements argue that teacher-designed and teacher-led activities aimed at developing particular skills can be considered as DAP and assert the importance of

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addressing academic content in the early years. Some scholars have said these position statements do not go far enough because rating tools and accreditation documents supported by NAEYC do not require that early childhood programs engage in teacher-led instruction in relation to literacy and mathematics, even though the position statements value such instruction. Although debates around DAP have diminished in recent years, early childhood education scholars and practitioners have not come to broad agreement, either within nations or across the globe, about the extent to which early childhood education should emphasize practices that promote child-centered, play-based environments that focus as much on social and physical development as on cognitive growth and academic skills; or practices aimed at fostering early academic skills that will support the later learning of literacy and mathematics. At the same time, a smaller number of scholars continue to raise questions about whether the effort to define any practices as  appropriate across cultural contexts is productive. Amy Noelle Parks See also Development; Developmental Psychology; Developmentality; Neurocognitive Development; Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Charlesworth, R. (1998). Response to Sally Lubeck’s “Is developmentally appropriate practice for everyone?” Childhood Education, 74(15), 293–298. doi:10.1080/ 00094056.1998.10521953 Copple, C., & Bredekamp, S. (Eds.). (2009). Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth to age 8. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children. doi:10.3102/ 0013189x031001026 Dickinson, D. K. (2002). Shifting images of developmentally appropriate practice as seen through different lenses. Educational Researcher, 31(1), 26–32. Hatch, A., Bowman, B., Jor’Dan, J. R., Morgan, C. L., Hart, C., Soto, L. D., . . . Hyson, M. (2002). Developmentally appropriate practice: Continuing the dialogue. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 3, 439–457. doi:10.2304/ciec.2002.3.3.10

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Kessler, S. A. (1991). Alternative perspectives on early childhood education. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6(1), 183–191. doi:10.1016/ 0885-2006(91)90006-7 Lubeck, S. (1998). Is developmentally appropriate practice for everyone? Childhood Education, 74(5), 283–292. doi:10.1080/00094056.1998.10521952 McMullen, M., Elicker, J., Wang, J., Erdiller, Z., Lee, S., Lin, C., & Sun, P. (2005). Comparing beliefs about appropriate practice among early childhood education and care professionals from the U.S., China, Taiwan, Korea and Turkey. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 20(4), 451–464. doi:10.1016/j.ecresq .2005.10.005 National Association for the Education of Young Children & International Reading Association. (1998). Learning to read and write: Developmentally appropriate practices for young children. Young Children, 53(4), 30–46. National Association for the Education of Young Children & National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2002/2010). Early childhood mathematics promoting good beginnings. Retrieved from https://www.naeyc.org/positionstatements/ mathematics Pence, A., & Hix-Small, H. (2009). Global children in the shadow of the global child. International Critical Childhood Policy Studies, 2(1), 75–91. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child. New York, NY: Basic Books. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dewey, John Best known for his contributions to intellectual thought and progressive education, John Dewey (1859–1952) was an influential American philosopher and educational theorist and practitioner whose ideas were grounded in the fields of pragmatism and democracy. Although his writings and academic work span many fields including art, social doctrine, natural science, language, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, he is most well known and referenced within the field of education. Dewey’s ideas are particularly relevant to the study of childhood as he helped to create a paradigm shift in the field of education and advocated

for the need to embrace the uniqueness and active participation of the child in his or her own learning. This entry explores Dewey’s philosophical and psychological ideas as applied to the conception of the child, teaching and learning, and education overall.

Dewey’s History and Context Dewey’s thinking on education developed during a time when education primarily privileged memorization and the passive intake of information and knowledge. Dewey argued that traditional schooling was fostering students to become docile, passive, dependent, and unreflective individuals instead of encouraging ethical, reflective, and autonomous individuals with the capacity to challenge institutional structures and pursue higher level inquiry and education. In The School and Society, Dewey includes a critique on the traditional classroom environment, stating that the furniture and its arrangement is selected and constructed for the task of listening, and not working. For example, the traditional classroom commonly has the greatest number of desks that the space can hold, with chairs and tables very close to each other, and just enough room to take notes while students silently face the front of the classroom and absorb information delivered to them by the teacher. He states that this structure and way of conceptualizing education does not promote rich learning in students or empower children to engage with knowledge. If students were given space to work in the classroom and encouraged to speak to one another, they may then have room to construct and create knowledge and participate in a learning environment rather than passively existing in it.

Key Tenets of Dewey’s Philosophy Dewey advocated that children should learn to be active participants in their own education in order to become meaningful contributors to society. He believed that it was the interaction that occurs within learning that encourages the development of a critical, reflective, and creative individual. Dewey was known to be an advocate for progressive education and did not agree with conservative teaching methods of traditional educational

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institutions such as lecture-style instruction, standardized tests, or the heavy emphasis on grading and evaluation. He strongly supported collaborative, liberal, and experiential forms of learning, which valued the uniqueness of each learner, and the development of individual interests and skills. He argued that knowledge should be taken up as inquiry rather than a commodity to be acquired and absorbed. Dewey is particularly influential in his field because he was not only an educational theorist but also an educational practitioner. Before pursuing his PhD, he taught at both the high school and elementary levels, and while a professor at the University of Chicago, Dewey established an elementary school grounded on his philosophical ideas in order to put them into practice and observe and record the results. His experimental school was known to prioritize small class sizes, group learning and discussion, and situational learning, and it offered a variety of different types of furniture and classroom layouts. This decision to create an experimental school is precisely the methodological approach which he urged educators to also carry out and foster in the classroom, that is, the idea of experiential and active learning.

Democracy and Education Dewey strongly believed that education must have democracy embedded within its entire structure and composition. Democracy and Education is arguably Dewey’s most popular and influential book on the topic. Dewey discusses his philosophy of education in this work and outlines the dangers of thinking in dichotomies, which he argues create social divisions and impinge on individual freedom of thought and mind in the society. He frequently states that education exists not only for the purpose of knowledge acquisition but rather that schools are also places that teach children how to live and be in the world, as well as how to create social change and reform. He acknowledges in his writings that education allows children to regulate or adjust their words and actions for the purposes of social consciousness and enabling harmony alongside others. Furthermore, Dewey did not believe it was possible to teach moral and social attitudes as abstractions and without

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real-life practical examples in which to experience and model these behaviors; as such, he believed schools should be organized as small-scale communities, in order to allow students to learn attitudes and interpersonal skills. At the core of Dewey’s interpretation of democracy in the classroom lies in the premise that educators must seek to recognize the dignity and value of each child and thus provide every child an opportunity to express his or her own unique characteristics while making learning relevant to the child’s life. Dewey believed both education and democracy exist in society to encourage growth in individuals and enable productive participation in society, which requires them to utilize their intellectual capabilities at their highest potential, and have an equal voice in the learning experience. Furthermore, he argued that this type of intellectual growth and understanding can only be fully developed and achieved through social interaction and learning alongside others and is not a solitary exercise. For Dewey, then, learning occurs in a group or in a social setting. In keeping with his democratic, participatory, and social perspective of education, Dewey was also strongly in favor of action within learning. He believed that new knowledge is created when mental thought is applied through action and experience and that knowledge cannot be obtained without the process of action and practical application.

Role of the Teacher Dewey’s approach to education involved catering learning to the needs and interests of the student; his approach to learning was child-centered and challenged the idea that the teacher’s primary goal is to deliver knowledge to the children. Rather, Dewey believed that the teacher’s role is to facilitate learning through the creation of social groups and a collaborative environment in the classroom. To ­ accomplish this, the teacher learns about the students’ lives and interests, as well as their strengths and challenges, and then strives to create a learning environment that responds to the students, where students would be allowed to discuss and apply their knowledge in an interactive setting. Teachers would then evaluate student learning through a variety of means such as project-based work, presentations, or another mode of knowledge application. The

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evaluation must not concern the acquisition of factual information but instead the student’s progress in ability to respond to problematic situations with intellectual thought and capacity. Although some interpretations of Dewey’s theories place the student completely in charge of his or her own learning and sometimes remove the teacher completely from the learning process, it is important to note that Dewey strongly believed that the teacher does, indeed, have an important role in the classroom to enable the conditions necessary for learning as well as to provide expertise and kno­wl­ edge to students; it is not the case that learning should be completely and excessively focused only on the child’s interests and requests. Instead, a fine balance must be reached so that both teacher and student are able to communicate and respond to the other, stimulating a continuous dialogical exchange. Dewey believed that one of the most important characteristics of a teacher should be his or her passion of knowledge and learning, but a teacher does not necessarily have to be passionate about every subject area he or she is responsible to teach. For Dewey, it was the intellectual curiosity and love of continuous learning, alongside the desire to share the knowledge with others, that was critical to becoming a successful teacher.

Misconceptions Often, many readers of Dewey incorrectly interpreted his approach to education as in opposition to and incompatible with traditional education. However, although his pedagogy and philosophy of education differ from those of traditional institutions of his time, Dewey was very much against binary distinctions and dichotomies which placed his ­ thinking in opposition to conservative educationists; rather, he opted for a dialogical and integrative approach to learning, which he felt was lacking in education at the time. Dewey clarifies his thinking against these binaries in his work Experience and Education, which he wrote to address the misconception that his approach to education was against learning information and subject matter, but rather to articulate the value of the child’s experience within traditional learning. Dewey’s main argument was that classroom learning should be made relevant to the lives of the students but at the expense of curricular learning and skill development. He

expresses this more clearly in his work The Child and the Curriculum, where he cautions progressive educators to avoid allowing complete indulgence and control of learning by the child, and instead, he emphasizes the connection between curriculum and the uniqueness and the interests of the child, creating the conditions favorable to learning. This balance was difficult for some educational stakeholders to envision, which created some challenges in applying Dewey’s theories in the classroom.

Challenges In seeking to interpret and apply Dewey’s theories to school programs, numerous challenges arose, with the majority of those concerning the specific emphasis that should be given to the interests of the child versus the focus on teaching the educational knowledge and skills needed to operate successfully in the society in which the child is to later enter. The child-centered approach was seen by some as anti-intellectual and promoting an overemphasis on improvised learning instead of planned, structured, goal-oriented learning. Also, some policy makers and educational stakeholders found Dewey’s writing ambiguous with respect to just how much focus the curriculum should have upon the child’s interests. The worry was that the curriculum would become too restricted and fail to address the important qualities and informational topics that a well-rounded educational program should deliver. These debates became more complex as educators engaged more deeply with Dewey’s philosophical premises, and stakeholders became concerned that children and teachers may have their own biases if they were to create or even influence the curriculum of the classroom, and this may lead to the lack of consistency across classrooms or schools of the educational material.

Contributions Dewey’s educational philosophies and critique of the traditional educational system have greatly revolutionized modern education, despite the challenges and critiques by some scholars and practi­ tioners. His theories paved the way for the development of the ideas of progressive education and constructivist learning, where children are placed as the center of learning, experience is greatly

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embraced and valued in the learning process, and collaborative learning is often integrated in a teacher’s pedagogy. Dewey’s advice of learning about and knowing each child in the classroom has become widely accepted and acknowledged as important by many primary and secondary educators around the world. Many teacher training programs incorporate Dewey’s theories and philosophies of education in the study of the child and teaching, and his work is still widely available and read in studies of childhood, education, and learning. Farah Virani-Murji See also Child-Centered Design; Education; Pedagogy; Schooling

Further Readings Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. School Journal, 54, 77–80. Dewey, J. (1900). The school and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1902). The child and the curriculum. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1917). Democracy and education. New York, NY: Macmillan. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi. Dykhuizen, G. (1973). The life and mind of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Fairfield, P. (2009). Education after Dewey. London, UK: Continuum. Hook, S. (1950). John Dewey: Philosopher of science and freedom. New York, NY: Dial Press. Mayhew, K. C., & Edwards, A. C. (1936). The Dewey school: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903. New York, NY: AppletonCentury. doi:10.4324/9781315131733 McCall, R. L. (1966). Dewey, Harper, and the University of Chicago. In W. W. Brickman & S. Lehrer (Eds.), John Dewey: Master educator (pp. 31–92). New York, NY: Atherton Press.

Diaspora Childhoods An increasing number of people around the world, including millions of children, identify with different global and transnational diaspora communities

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(i.e., groups of people living outside their home countries). To avoid the neglect of children in research on diaspora communities and cultures and in studies on the social and cultural transformations caused by migration, one must ask what makes diaspora childhood(s) different from what is usually understood and conceptualized as childhood. Diaspora childhood in this entry is approached as a discursive construction and an object of empirical studies on children and childhoods in particular social spaces and conditions that have emerged from transnational migration. Diaspora studies and childhood studies, along with migration studies, research on transnationalism, and research on ethnic and racialized relations are multidisciplinary research areas. They are also considered to be critical fields of research with specific political dimensions. The emphasis in this entry is on how social and cultural transformations related to migration in contemporary societies are acknowledged in research on children and childhoods and how the premises of critical childhood studies and sociology of childhood, especially questions concerning children’s perspectives and their agency, have (or have not) been considered in research on diaspora childhoods.

The Varying Definitions of Diaspora The term diaspora is most often applied to ethnic or religious groups with particular histories of migration and relocation and engagements with the real or imagined country or area of origin (e.g., the Jewish Diaspora, the Irish Diaspora, the Somali Diaspora). However, many diasporas are also political collectivities. A good example of this is the African, or Black, Diaspora, which in many research traditions refers to communities based not only on their African ancestry but also on memories of slavery, on shared experiences of racism and other forms of oppression, and on political struggles toward freedom and anti-racism. Because of the rapid expansion of diaspora studies since the 1990s and the dispersion of the term diaspora to different disciplinary and political spaces, there are no all-embracing definitions for the word. The diversity of diasporas, and of diasporic experiences and identifications, results from the different histories of and reasons behind human mobility. Colonialism and the transatlantic

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slave trade, persecution based on religion, the local and global forces behind present transnational migration, and the circumstances of the places of relocation have created different experiences for diasporas. Diaspora, as a particular condition, is demarcated by migration and migrancy, transnationalism, real and imagined ties to different countries and cultures, and negotiations of belonging with several local and global communities. Increasing numbers of children around the world grow up in social spaces where these different aspects and dimensions of the diaspora condition are important. Because of the variety of diasporas and the articulations and meanings of individuals’ identifications with particular and sometimes several coexisting diasporas, this entry refers to diaspora childhoods in the plural form.

The Neglect of Children in Research on Diasporas Many scholars have noticed the neglect of children in diaspora studies. Likewise, in childhood studies, children’s transnational engagements—or their experiences and positions in ethnic and racialized relations—have gained little attention. In general, children’s and young people’s perspectives are often missing from studies about the implications of migration and transnationalism, as well as from research on ethnic and racialized relations. Academic knowledge production concerning diaspora childhoods, like all knowledge production, is shaped by unequal global power relations. The lack of knowledge about diaspora childhoods is also connected with the diversity of legislation and policies concerning demographic statistics in different countries. Although some childhoods in the so-called Western world are documented by researchers and in official statistics and other data archives, data on child migrants in other parts of the world are incomplete. Very little is known about the millions of children who are on the move, with or without their families, because of wars and political instabilities, poverty, and social and ecological changes in their countries of origin. Some diaspora childhoods also remain undocumented in many Western countries. First, official estimates of the number of undocumented migrant

children are incomplete both at global and regional levels. Second, the production of knowledge about groups based on individuals’ ethnic and racial identifications is challenging in societies where there are no statistics based on ethnicity or race. Moreover, statistics, where they exist, offer information only about adults’ ethnic and racial ­identifications. The emerging field of mixed-race studies and research on some new (identity) ­political movements is a reminder that children’s and young people’s ethnic and racial identifications may be different from their parents’ identifications.

The Multiplicity of Diaspora Childhoods The topics, objectives, and theoretical ­frameworks of individual studies on diasporas vary depending on the researchers’ disciplinary backgrounds. In political sciences and sociological migration studies, the focus is often on political institutions and social structures, questions concerning the global governance of migration flows, and the roles of nation-states and local and i­nternational institutions concerning human rights and the integration of immigrants. Diaspora formations and meanings of ethnicity and nationalism, as well as migrants’ transnational engagements and ­relations between homeland and host land, are being studied by researchers of different disciplinary backgrounds. In cultural studies and in many other multidisciplinary research traditions, the focus has been on, for example, diaspora formations, questions of belonging and ethnic and racialized relations, and identity politics. Studies in the field of education most often deal with the school performance of immigrant and ethnic minority children and youths and teachers’ intercultural competence. In African and (especially) Black Diaspora studies, the common point of departure is racialized relations. Although there are remarkable differences between the old, established diasporas and the new diasporas, the latter referring to recent ­migration, they are constitutive of each other. For example, in their new home countries, migrants from Africa often become racialized subjects who must negotiate their relations to the global Black Diaspora cultures. At the same time, their own

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(“imported”) cultures, shaped, for example, by their religions or by particular urban African youth cultures, bring new influences and transform the local and, as a consequence, also global African and Black Diaspora cultures. This dynamic can be identified in, for example, Marleen de Witte’s studies among Dutch-born Afro-­Caribbean and Ghanaian youths in the Netherlands. Regardless of researchers’ disciplinary backgrounds and their topics and research questions on diasporas and on migration in general, the focus groups are usually defined based on ethnicity. Black Diaspora studies, and some traditions of African Diaspora studies, in which the studied people are defined by race, are an exception here. Ethnicity is usually conceptualized as a collection of boundary-making processes, and the research questions address both negotiations of belonging and cultural differences. These are important aspects of the everyday lives of many children, but the ethnicity paradigm has its limits as a self-­ evident starting point and the main means to describe diasporic subjectivities. First, studies focusing on the implications of migration in the lives of children and young people have made visible how migrancy rather than ethnicity shapes the lives of not only migrant children but also of children born and raised in immigrant families. Second, relying (only) on the ethnicity paradigm easily leads to research designs that overemphasize boundary-making strategies and differences and hide the agency through which children cross ethnic and other boundaries. Studies that have taken children’s own social networks as a starting point show that in the everyday lives of many children, “being categorized as an immigrant” creates not only feelings of exclusion but also solidarities across ethnicities and feelings of belonging with some other “others.” The social spaces constituted by migrancy are in many ways different from the social spaces based on ideas of shared ethnicity or history. In schoolyards, immigrant children, children born and raised in immigrant families, children of mixed parentage, transnational adoptees, and even children who have lived abroad because of their parents’ work may create their own communities based on their shared experiences. The particularity of these (sometimes temporary) ­

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communities is based on some children’s knowledge of migrancy, especially of their shared experiences of being categorized as (im)migrants by other people. This is often but not necessarily intertwined with children’s experiences of racism and other forms of exclusion. Unlike their peers, these children are forced to negotiate and to explain to other people their relations to various countries, cultures, and local and global communities. To do that, they must search for vocabularies adequate to their particularity in ethnicized and racialized social relations. Therefore, the necessity to understand complicated questions concerning majority and minority positions, as well as racism and other practices of inclusion and exclusion, shapes diaspora childhoods no matter what diaspora(s) people identify with. Scholarly discussions on the meanings of individuals’ transnational roots and engagements, especially on children’s and young people’s multiple identities, can remind researchers how fluid and context dependent all identities can be. As shown, for example, by Catherine Besteman’s studies on Somali Bantu refugees in the United States, people who identify with particular ethnic diasporas because of their own or their parents’ backgrounds usually must negotiate their relations with other diasporas based on, for example, racial or religious identifications. Children’s ability and willingness to identify with particular diasporas—to embrace or reject those communities of belonging and difference available for them—depend not only on their parents’ ethnic and racial identifications but also on local discourses concerning different countries, cultures, and communities. Age and time have a lot to do with individuals’ negotiations of their diasporic attachments. People’s transnational engagements change when they grow up, which can likewise happen regarding their identifications with different racialized, or religious, minorities. At certain ages, and in certain circumstances, a stigmatizing difference (of not being from “here,” of belonging to a minority) may turn into something that individuals can embrace and value as “cool,” as political, or as a central dimension of their identities.

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Children’s Agency in Research on Diaspora Childhoods Most studies on diasporic childhood are about particular groups of children and minors considered as vulnerable, such as refugees. This is an important field of research because violations of migrant children’s rights are common, even in Western countries that otherwise have a good reputation regarding child protection. However, it is common that adultist discourses ignore children’s own experiences and perspectives and that children are offered only a passive role with little agency in studies of children as objects of policies aiming at child protection or the protection of refugees and the integration of immigrants. Research on asylum seekers, especially unaccompanied minors, is a good example of how children’s rights and human rights discourses and policies have influenced studies on migrant children. People who in other studies would be categorized as young people because of their age are categorized as children in studies addressing their rights and their well-being as refugees. It is understandable that by categorizing some young people as children, academics can underline their legal rights. However, in research, labeling as children people who talk about themselves as young people or young adults inevitably affects the way their agency and their situation can be discussed and understood. In most studies, refugee children are given a victim position. Unaccompanied minors, especially, are represented as victims not only of the circumstances that forced them to leave their native countries and of the people who may have exploited them but also of international and national legislation, authorities, and politicians who are unable to protect them and guarantee their rights. In addition, some studies on transnational adoptions and earlier research on children of mixed parentage (mixed-race) have been criticized for their stereotypical and pathologizing depictions. In the research literature, attempts to challenge the victim position and to emphasize children’s agency include, for example, discussions on the coping strategies and the resilience of migrant children and youths and research designs in which individuals’ transnational connections and their “multicultural backgrounds” are approached as

cultural capital. Research on young people, unlike most studies focusing on children, includes questions concerning the research subjects’ own social networks in the research designs. The use and the meanings of social media for diaspora communities has become a popular research topic not only in media studies but also, for example, in anthropology and sociology. By using the Internet, even young children, whose agency may seem to be restricted to their local environments, can make and maintain connections with people in distant places and find and identify with transnational and global youth cultures of ethnic and racialized minorities. Indeed, children often lead a family’s “integration” into a host country or community by taking up popular culture and media practices with other children. Anthropological studies have addressed cultural differences related to, for example, parenting and child-rearing practices, parent–child relations, the roles of siblings, and ideas of childhood in general. Discussions on intersectionality (i.e., the intersection of multiple social positions and identities such as race, ethnicity, social class, and gender) remind people that the meanings of age also depend on how the meanings of other social positionalities are understood. Anthropologists have criticized the way researchers rely on Westernized assumptions about childhood, family, gender roles, and other topics in their studies on migrant families. However, the parents’ cultures also change in new circumstances. Furthermore, in research on children and childhood, it is also important to examine and to understand the differences between parents’ and children’s perspectives. Very little is known about the meanings of roots and transnational kin networks, or the lack of them, for children. Children’s views on the advantages and disadvantages of mobility or the best possible strategies for “home making,” or creating new relationships and networks, can be different from their parents’ or teachers’ ideas. Children may also have their own perspectives on the practices through which emotional, economic, political, cultural, and religious ties to their (parents’) homelands and their relatives in diaspora in other countries are sustained. Furthermore, children’s ideas concerning the best possible strategies for coping with racism and other exclusive practices often differ from those of their parents.

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The way different diaspora childhoods become constructed by academics and the way “in the child’s best interest” principle becomes articulated in research seem to depend on policies concerning migration and the integration of immigrants. There is very little research on how these academic and policy categorizations meet children’s own categorizations or on how children themselves see the importance of the questions that are, or that are not, examined in studies of diaspora childhoods. Many studies concerning Black and ethnic minority youths have made visible young people’s attempts to question and challenge the way they are talked about in research. They have especially criticized the way research designs and the concepts used—such as “second-generation ­ immigrant”—can hide and limit their multiple ­ identifications and engagements and their agency as citizens or residents in the societies in which they live. The widespread use of the term second generation as a category of analysis can also hide children’s own worlds beyond family life. The words used in research to refer to people’s identifications with minorities and diaspora communities have political meanings that may vary depending on the context. For many children, immigrant, a term that most researchers use as an unproblematic category, is the pejorative and stigmatizing word that seems to justify their exclusion and reminds them of their “belonging elsewhere” in the eyes of other people. In addition, children’s own conceptualizations of racialized relations are often ignored in studies on them. Phenomena that from children’s points of view should be interpreted as exclusive practices and as racism are interpreted as something else, such as “identity crises” or an inability to cope with cultural differences.

Need for More Discussion and Exploration Because of the diversity of diaspora childhoods and the rapid social and cultural transformations that influence diasporas and the societies in which they live, descriptions of any diaspora childhoods are partial, incomplete, and out of date before the studied children have grown up. Nevertheless, discussion on diaspora childhoods can help researchers explore the mobile and transnational

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nature of children’s lives and the meanings of ethnic and racialized hierarchies for their well-being. Furthermore, an exploration of diaspora childhoods is a reminder of the importance of questioning disciplinary boundaries and combining aspects of different diasporic experiences in studies on children and childhood. Essentialist ideas of cultures and identities do not allow an examination of the diversity of diaspora childhoods or the transformations of local societies and cultures around the world because of diasporas. Despite the many differences, children who identify with different diasporas may share commonalities. Explorations in diaspora childhoods make visible how diasporas change childhood around the world. Children do not ­ necessarily embrace and adopt their parents’ culture(s). Home, which in “Western” discourses has been considered as “the best place for children,” can no longer be imagined as something that can be located in one place only. Neither can researchers rely on old assumptions concerning families and nations. Questions concerning the child’s best interest must also be reconsidered. It is important for many children to have an opportunity to get to know their transnational roots and to embrace and identify with those communities that enable them to feel at home or connected, communities with whom they can share experiences of their particularity as diaspora subjects. Anna Rastas See also Ethnicity; Immigrant Children; Migration; Racial Formation; Racism; Transnational Childhoods

Further Readings Besteman, C. (2016). Making refuge: Somali Bantu refugees and Lewiston, Maine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bryceson, D., & Vuorela, U. (Eds.). (2002). The transnational family: New European frontiers and global networks. Oxford, United Kingdom: Berg. de Block, L., & Buckingham, D. (2007). Global children, global media: Migration, media and childhood. Houndsmills, United Kingdom: Palgrave. de Witte, M. (2014). Heritage, Blackness and Afro-cool: Styling Africanness in Amsterdam. African Diaspora, 7(2), 260–289. https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/ 18725465-00702002

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Dorow, S. K. (2006). Transnational adoption: A cultural economy of race, gender and kinship. New York: New York University Press. Ensor, M. O., & Goz´dziak, E. M. (Eds.). (2010). Children and migration: At the crossroads of resiliency and vulnerability. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Gardner, K. (2012). Transnational migration and the study of children: An introduction. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38(6), 889–912. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London, United Kingdom: Verso. Levitt, P., & Waters, M. C. (Eds.). (2002). The changing face of home: The transnational lives of the second generation. New York, NY: Russel Sage. Ní Laoire, C., Carpena-Méndez, F., Tyrrell, N., & White, A. (2010). Introduction: Childhood and migration— mobilities, homes and belongings. Childhood, 17(2), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568210365463 Rastas, A. (2013). Ethnic identities and transnational subjectivities. In P. Spickard (Ed.), Multiple identities: Migrants, ethnicity, and membership (pp. 41–60). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Seeberg, M. L., & Gozdziak, E. M. (Eds.). (2016). Contested childhoods: Growing up in migrancy— migration, governance, identities. IMISCOE Research Series. New York, NY: Springer. Wells, K. (2015). Childhood in global perspective. London, United Kingdom: Polity. White, A., Ní Laoire, C., Tyrrell, N., & CarpenaMéndez, F. (2011). Children’s roles in transnational migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(8), 1159­–1170. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691 83X.2011.590635

Dickens, Charles There are few happy children in the works of the renowned British novelist Charles Dickens (1812– 1870). From the orphaned Pip in Great Expectations (1860), to lame Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), from starving and exploited Oliver in Oliver Twist (1839), to doomed Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841), Dickensian children form a roll call of social deprivation, parental abandonment, and grinding poverty. This entry examines Dickens’s key works and some of

the signature features of his writing about children and childhood.

A Bleak Childhood Few novels explore the impact of 19th-century urban society on its children to the degree of Dickens’ Bleak House (1852–1853); indeed, far from the problem often seen in criticism of children in fiction—that of the search for the ‘real child’ to give an assumed truth to a fictional child—­ Dickensian children often operate rather as the embodiment of a social issue. Children are orphans (Esther, Jo the crossing-sweeper, Ada, Richard), victims of philanthropic and parental neglect (the Jellybys and Pardiggles), they are destroyed by poverty (Jo, again, plus the brickmakers’ families, and others), they are illegitimate (Esther), and so on. While the same tokenism could be claimed for some adult characters, the children are portrayed as innocent victims of an adult society over which they have little or no control in a seeming construction of an adult/child binary. However, the status of ‘child’ is problematised throughout his works. Esther, when she appears to  attain womanhood by gaining household ­responsibilities, is simultaneously infantilized by Mr. Jarndyce by the imposition of a succession of nursery rhyme nicknames, resulting in the loss of her identity not only as an adult woman but as herself. With names including Little Old Woman, Cobweb, Mrs. Shipton, Mother Hubbard, and especially Dame Durden, Esther soon feels that her own name will become lost among them. Adulthood—particularly female adulthood—is subject to a narrative that troubles both the associated valuing of itself and of the childhood to which it is ostensibly reduced through Esther’s terminology of loss. Esther’s early narrative also reports the advent of Mr. Skimpole, described by Mr. Jarndyce as a childhood that is not in years, but in ‘simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs’. Dickens explores constructions of childhood through the contrast between Skimpole and Charley Neckett, who is a small girl but with the manner of a woman, and who, in assuming a mother’s role, works so hard that she only might have been a child. The

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contrast between the perfect child as judged by Mr. Jarndyce and the might-have-been child of Esther’s narration, although also telling of the characters and judgement of the speakers, constructs an ideal childhood that is never to be found in this novel, a childhood free from overwork and poverty, that belongs to the years that inhabit it, and whose simplicity, freshness, and enthusiasm are never marred by the lack of responsibility and later betrayal that characterise Skimpole.

Narrator and Voice Many Dickensian children struggle for, or are denied, voice in the telling of their stories. In Oliver Twist, the story is principally told through a third-party omniscient narration that denies a voice to title character Oliver; this is troubled further by Oliver’s frequent absences from the text through sleep, fainting, illness, or kidnapping, all of which are in contrast with the constant and verbal presence of the narrator. As Karin Lesnik-Oberstein argues, the narrator delights in language, while paradoxically arguing that verbal language is not to be trusted; yet Oliver is largely silent, using little verbal language at all, with the narrator or other characters often filling in for his voice. Oliver’s speechlessness is placed as a sign of his goodness, in another construction of an ideal but problematically absent Dickensian childhood. Esther’s position in Bleak House is somewhat different: She is not the title character but is positioned as narrator, if only partially. However, a voice that so often negates itself also troubles the reliability of verbal language, beginning as her narration does, with the disclaimer that she has a great deal of difficulty in writing her narration, as she knows she is not clever. She tells her own story, in contrast to Oliver, yet her childhood is told as recollection, and her present narrated under the constant shadow of that childhood’s disgrace, leading to a narrative of self-abnegation that is challenged by the narrator and other characters, not to mention Esther’s own actions. Voice acts here as a sign to something other than itself, and an expression of character that cannot be found in the verbal language of this narrator.

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Not all communication takes places verbally, with many Dickensian children expressing themselves through the body when language fails. Oliver’s body language, for example, includes blushing, tears, and facial expressions, although each of these can only take place in the words of others, querying the status of language further. In Bleak House, too, many children denied voice—particularly by overbearing parents—find other means of expression. While Mrs. Jellyby fixes her fine eyes on Africa, Peepy beats Mr. Guppy frantically with a broom; Caddy—who, at this point, can speak only to repeat her mother’s dictation—bites her feather pen at the visitors; and the other children insinuate any part of their bodies that can fit, chiefly noses and fingers, into Esther’s door for her attention. The five Pardiggle boys, who fare no better under their mother’s philanthropic impulses that fail to extend to her own family, are described by Dickens in terms of a ferocity of discontent at their situation, with the exception of the little member of the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was unendingly miserable. As with Esther, the actions of these children speak far louder than their words. Kristina West See also Child Neglect; Children’s Literature; Critical Children’s Literature Studies; Orphans; Workhouses

Further Readings Coveney, P. (1957). The image of childhood: The individual and society: A study of the theme in English literature. London, UK: Penguin Books. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2001). Oliver Twist: The narrator’s tale. Textual Practice, 15(1), 87–100. doi:10.1080/ 09502360122614 Lougy, R. (2002). Filth, liminality, and abjection in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. ELH, 69(2), 473–500. doi:10.1353/elh.2002.0017 Salatto, E. (1997). Esther Summerson’s secrets: Dickens’ bleak house of representation. Victorian Literature and Culture, 25(2), 333–349. doi:10.1017/s10601503 00004824 Walton, J. (2010). Patriarchal plots and the plots against Oliver. Critical Survey, 22(3), 37–51. doi:10.3167/ cs.2010.220303 Ware, M. (1990). “True legitimacy”: The myth of the foundling in Bleak House. Studies in the Novel, 22(1), 1–9.

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Different Childhoods

Different Childhoods Developmental psychology as a discipline is interested in understanding development through ­ time. In doing so, it has traditionally made assumptions about the child and about development. The traditional view of development is conceptualised as a universal process involving a series of incremental steps, which progress to increasingly sophisticated developmental skills and ability through time. This entry explores how traditional developmental psychology has addressed development as a series of processes which are assumed to apply to all children (although recognising that this will be to varying degrees depending on the individual child). This proposition of universal developmental trajectory positions some children as developing ‘normally’ and views others as developing differently. Critical developmental psychology, and related disciplines, has argued that the proposition of universal developmental skills and trajectory describes particular kinds of children and development, that some children’s development is normalised and others subject to scrutiny. The entry also explores how the notion of normative development and ‘different’ childhoods have come to be understood.

Development as Progression and as ‘Good’ Scholars have suggested that the idea of development as progressive arose at the time when JudeoChristian theology conceptualised humans’ move through time as progressive, rather than earlier iterations of the move through time as cyclical, or a need to guard against a move through time as degeneration. The belief in progress came about at the same time as the advent of the physical sciences, the development of technology, and also the development of psychology as a discipline. This particular view of the world generally, and development specifically, provided the conceptual framework for psychological science. Theorists such as John Morss have argued that this context provided the frame through which development largely came to be understood and be inextricably linked to evolution and biological theory. In so doing, a particular version of developmental

science was privileged, one that was linked to the notion of biological development and hence universal developmental skills and abilities. Phyllis Vandenberg has further argued that this produced a link between the moral order, what is considered good, and developmental theory, to the understandings of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘good’. Nikolas Rose, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, has argued that the establishment of psychometric testing has created norms of development and hence notions of normative development. Developmental norms, produced from observation and testing of large populations of children, have been used to set up practices of surveillance, monitoring, and intervention to ensure that children are developing ‘normally’. Hence, understandings of individual children are gained by comparing them to a population norm.

Developmental Norms, Description as Prescription Developmental benchmarks and the proposition of norms have been theorised to correspond with the typically developing child at particular ages or stages of development. However, theorists such as Erica Burman question the assumed neutrality of developmental norms. She, and others, have argued that developmental description is productive; that it actively produces particular kinds of children as developing normally. Within these developmental descriptions, particular skills, competencies, and behaviours are assumed to indicate appropriate development. For example, the assumption that one grows from dependency to independency, assumed within much developmental theory, can be seen as a product of a particular worldview in which independency is a valued end point of development. Similarly, Valerie Walkerdine has argued that a valued endpoint of development is seen to be rationality, a product of a particular worldview that values rationality over emotionality.

Different Childhoods as Deficient Some theorists, such as Burman and Walkderine, have argued that the proposition of universal child development is produced within a particular cultural context and reflects a European/North American, middle class, able-bodied, traditionally

Digital Mobile Technologies

gendered, and (arguably) White childhood, rendering those who stand outside of this as different, pathological or in some other way deficient and lacking. For example, ‘difference’ can be articulated in terms of moral judgements about what a child should be doing, or most commonly, what they should not be doing. For example, it is assumed that children and the world of childhood should be distinct from the world of work. However, the vast majority of the world’s children are engaged in work to support, or contribute to, their families’ finances. Critical theorists have argued that the assumption of difference is often brought into being where children’s activities, experiences, or abilities (such as being economically active or providing care for a family member) transgress assumptions of childhood.

Normalising ‘Different’ Childhoods Lindsey O’Dell and colleagues have argued that mainstream understandings of development privilege particular kinds of children and position others as ‘different’. For example, developmental theory and research into stages of social engagement and play make assumptions about normative and appropriate social engagement for children at particular ages. From this stance, it is evident that when using this to observe and measure the development of particular kinds of children, for example, autistic children, who may exhibit different forms of social interaction and hence engage socially and play differently, the children are positioned as deficient. In ‘different childhoods’, it is implied that there is a need to design new, inclusive ways of measurement that enable developmental skills such as being social to be understood and experienced broadly, rather than through specified and narrow norms of development. Lindsay O’Dell and Charlotte Brownlow See also Developmental Psychology; Developmentality; Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. O’Dell, L., Brownlow, C., & Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H. (2017). Different childhoods: Normative development

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and transgressive trajectories. London: Routledge. doi:10.1177/0959353518786522 Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self (2nd ed.). London, UK: Free Association Books. Walkderine, V. (1993). Beyond developmentalism. Theory & Psychology, 3(4), 451–468. doi:10.1177/ 0959354393034004

Digital Mobile Technologies The term digital mobile technologies could theoretically incorporate any device that incorporates a microprocessor and is small and light enough to be moved, from simple calculators to full-featured laptop computers. Here, it is taken to refer to Internet-enabled devices specifically designed to enable the use of connected services and applications without compromising portability, including smartphones, tablet computers, and wearable technology. Devices in these categories have become ubiquitous tools in the past decade, with over three-quarters of adults in the Global North and about half in the Global South now owning a mobile device. Teens and young adults have been on the forefront of this trend; their use of mobile devices outpaces that of older adults by a significant margin. For younger children, the picture is more varied. About half of children aged 10 years in the United States and Europe have their own smartphones or tablets, but many more use communal household devices on a regular basis. This entry examines how digital mobile technologies impact children’s and adolescents’ learning and development, health and well-being, social participation, and rights and equalities.

Mobile Devices, Childhood, and Adolescents Mobile devices present a unique complication to the delineation between virtual and real spaces and experiences that had been taken for granted—both in social life and in academic theory—since the idea of cyberspace was conceived in the early 1990s. Mobile devices provide a variety of inputs (everything from traffic data to localized advertising) that shape, in real time, how people move through and interact

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with the physical world. Their portability brings the digital world out of specific dedicated places and into places previously presumed to be disconnected, such as the classroom, bedroom, or dinner table. Even seemingly minor differences in physical form affect how the embodied interactions and relationships surrounding digital devices are constructed. For instance, the fact that mobile devices’ screens are smaller than those of desktop computers, and thus held closer to the user, means they are perceived as more private than desktop computers, which in turn leads to a feeling for many users that they enable certain kinds of privacy in daily life—even, paradoxically, as they simultaneously create new concerns about electronic tracking and monitoring. Children’s and young people’s use of mobile devices has been the subject of significant controversy and debate, similar to those which have surrounded other past major shifts in media use patterns. As with the emergence of novels, radio, television, video games, and the home computer, utopian visions of the educational and democratizing powers of this new kind of technology have clashed with fears about its impact on physical, social, and moral health and development. Research has generally failed to verify any such universal, large-scale effects, either positive or negative. However, both the proliferation of mobile digital technologies themselves and the way cultural ideologies of childhood have framed their use continue to have significant impacts on children’s lived ­experiences—impacts which vary significantly from one individual, community, or context to another, informed by complex interactions between young people, technology, and society.

Learning and Development A broad consensus exists that the prevalence of mobile devices in young people’s lives disrupts conventional pathways, environments, and relationships in both formal learning institutions and broader growth and development. The cultural perception of these trends often invokes fear of unknown outcomes and nostalgia for a past in which childhood development is imagined as more stable and better understood, leading to efforts to curtail mobile devices’ impact by limiting their presence in young people’s lives. Schools

commonly ban mobile devices despite their significant potential for educational use as information access tools, and according to one 2017 study carried out by OnePoll for IntelSecurity, over 90% of parents make some effort to control children’s use of phones and tablets. In truth, research does not support the idea that mobile devices’ disruption of educational and developmental norms is predominantly negative. The primary impact in formal learning seen in research has been the leveling of conventional hierarchies of passive student and expert teacher. In the realm of informal learning, mobile devices have further expanded the opportunities for collective skill- and information-sharing among young people which arose with the growth of the Internet. Adolescents construct mobile devices as tools that amplify learning, not only by expanding access to information but by creating opportunities to take personal responsibility for their education, to actively pursue personal educational goals in collaboration with teachers and peers, and to apply developing knowledge and skills to participate more effectively in the world. This newfound agency is seen clearly as a net benefit by young people who have developed the digital literacy and learning skills to manage it effectively, but those skills are not equally distributed (and there are notable correlations with race, class, and gender), a situation which raises concerns that the education system is not adequately preparing all young people for a mobile-enabled future of learning and working. Research on mobile devices and cognitive and psychosocial development has generated similarly varied findings. Overall, mobile device use is positively correlated with problem-solving, memory skills, and, among young children, fine motor control; it is negatively correlated with emotional resilience. Contradictory findings exist with regard to impact in other domains, including the development of literacy skills and executive function. Mechanisms for all of these impacts are poorly understood, but factors which appear to drive outcomes toward positive or negative for individuals include the design and function of specific apps used and the extent to which adults co-engage with technology with children, along with the same societal inequalities which drive the diversity of impacts on education.

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Health and Well-Being The health and well-being impacts of increasing mobile device use among young people are equally complex. Concerns about screen devices causing an epidemic of physical ill health due to inactivity are largely overstated compared to research findings, as young people’s activity levels have actually increased from a historic low point in the early 2000s. Where stationary digital devices such as home computers had detracted from physical activity, mobile devices create opportunities for digital engagement to happen in motion, and even directly encourage increased physical activity, for example, through health tracking apps and augmented reality games. Public health campaigns have also seen significant success using mobile devices to disseminate information and promote healthy lifestyles. Some physical health impacts do remain a serious concern, however, particularly sleep disruption. Heavy use of mobile phones is correlated with an average of roughly half an hour’s loss of sleep per night, and while this finding is fairly consistent across age-groups, teens are at greater risk of ill effects as they already experience less healthy sleep patterns than adults due to other pressures such as early high school start times. The possible impact of mobile devices on young people’s mental health, meanwhile, has been a popular subject of both research and public debate, as there has been a well-documented decline in young people’s overall mental health in the past two decades. However, it is difficult to place responsibility for this on any specific change, societal or technological. Young people themselves tend to characterize this trend as the result of global social problems like worsening economic prospects, constant war and political upheaval, and looming environmental catastrophe, of which advances in information technology have merely served to make them more aware. Meanwhile, those same technologies create opportunities for connection, exploration, and selfexpression. As a result, feelings on their overall impact are mixed, with young people broadly reporting that living in a world connected by mobile devices simultaneously contributes to stress, anxiety, hopelessness, happiness, confidence, and optimism.

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Whether the mental well-being benefits of mobile device access are seen to outweigh the detrimental impacts varies widely from individual to individual, though there are clear connections to cultural and social context and particularly to dynamics of privilege and marginalization. It is worth clarifying here that it is not always the case that marginalized young people face more detrimental impacts than their more privileged peers. For LGBTQ+ young people, for example, online communities are often key sources of support, providing safe spaces for information seeking, identity exploration, and peer validation which serve as valuable buffers against the well-being impacts of living in a homophobic and transphobic society.

Social Participation The frequency with which teens spend time with friends in person has decreased significantly over the past several decades, in time with the increase in digitally mediated social interaction. Like the relationship with mental health previously outlined, establishing a causal relationship is significantly more difficult. Little research supports the notion that mobile devices or digital technology in general are directly causing a deterioration in social skills or isolating young people from inperson interaction. Research into young people’s perceptions of how they interact with their peers has generally found that in-person interaction is still strongly preferred by most in terms of perceived quality of connections and interactions, while digitally mediated interaction is seen as having advantages in convenience, access, and reach. Since the late 1980s, young people have faced a rapid decline in their access to social time and space, as their lives have been increasingly dominated by structured activities, parents have placed increasing restrictions on their freedom of movement outside the home, and public spaces have increasingly implemented limitations on their admittance. As a result of these trends, young people find it increasingly difficult to socialize in conventional public spaces, and see digital social tools as an alternative that prevents them from being marginalized entirely out of public life. The popularization of mobile devices has added new

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dimensions to this trend: On one hand, young people report that having their own personal devices at home helps them to keep up with friends when they are unable to go out; on the other, they see carrying mobile devices as a way of alleviating the safety concerns parents may otherwise cite as reason to prevent them from going out. Quantitative research has produced results consistent with this narrative, showing, for instance, that young people who lack access to mobile devices speak to their friends 20% less than those who have access rather than replacing the lost digital interaction with in-person interaction. Despite this overall finding that the majority of digital social interaction is seen by young people as a way of strengthening existing offline ties or a convenient replacement for lost interaction with local friends, there is one consistent and significant exception: the use of digital spaces for finding new communities of shared identity and purpose. In addition to the previously noted value of online spaces for young people of marginalized identities who often seek out others with similar identities and experiences online, digital spaces also provide opportunities to explore niche interests and hobbies (e.g., creative or career aspirations) with like-minded peers or to come together with communities of shared values to undertake social or political activism. Research suggests that consistent, regular engagement with these kinds of communities is a nonnormative experience, and the majority of young people use digital tools primarily to engage with local friends with whom they also regularly spend time in person. However, the majority also report that access to the Internet makes them feel more able to access broader networks for specific purposes when they find they have a need to do so, and mobile devices in particular make this access more consistent, private, and seamlessly integrated with everyday life.

Rights and Equalities Connected digital technologies have often been characterized as a democratizing influence, and there is ample evidence that they lower barriers to learning, self-expression, and organizing. Yet they simultaneously have the power to recapitulate

existing inequalities, both by actively favoring the same views and voices privileged by conventional social structures and by creating new divides based on inequalities in areas like quality and consistency of Internet access and opportunities to develop digital literacy skills. Broadly speaking, mobile devices create new opportunities for marginalized children and youth but also pose ­ unique risks that are not felt as strongly by young people in more privileged social positions. While some research has demonstrated ways of maximizing benefits and minimizing risks—for example, providing teacher training to encourage integration of digital literacy skill-building activities into primary school curricula—this is still an area in need of further study. The widespread adoption of mobile devices also continues to impact the rights and status of young people themselves as a social class. As with the specific experiences of minority children and youth, the impact of mobile devices on experiences of ageist social structures is a double-edged sword. On one hand, access to information and channels for self-expression have given young people new opportunities to make their voices heard on issues of significance and fostered the growth of youth-driven social movements such as the ongoing global school strikes against climate change inaction and American youth protests against gun violence. On a smaller scale, young people find mobile devices powerful tools for overcoming restrictions on their access to information and support. On the other hand, the same devices can also be powerful tools for circumventing children’s rights; for example, the ­normalization of mobile devices as tools for surveillance has an amplified impact on young people, whose right to privacy is already tenuous. More seriously, access to mobile devices and services is increasingly obligatory for full participation in society, and young people—despite the cultural perception of postmillennial children and youth as constantly connected digital natives—may often find themselves marginalized from this access. The moral panic surrounding young people’s use of new technologies fosters the continued emergence of restrictions on their access which effectively push them out of spaces and activities that may have been more universally accessible before their shift into digital space. For example, print newspapers

Digital Childhoods

rarely have age-minimum policies on letters to the editor, but web-based news outlets must adhere to laws banning users under 13 years from commenting. As global society increasingly relies on digital technology for even the most mundane interactions, children run the risk of being pushed further out of public life by such restrictions. Julian Burton See also Digital Childhoods; Digital Literacy; Digital Media; Social Inclusion

Further Readings Bennett, W., Freelon, D., & Wells, C. (2010). Changing citizen identity and the rise of a participatory media culture. In L. Sherrod, J. Torney-Purta, & C. Flanagan (Eds.), Handbook of research on civic engagement in youth. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/ 9780470767603.ch15 Boyd, D. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Buckingham, D. (2008). Youth, identity, and digital media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dobson, A. (2015). Postfeminist digital cultures: Femininity, social media, and self-representation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Herodotou, C. (n.d.). Young children and tablets: A systematic review of effects on learning and development. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 34(1), 1–9. Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Cody, R., Herr-Stephenson, B., . . . Tripp, L. (2010). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/8402.001.0001 Jenkins, H., Shresthova, S., Gamber-Thompson, L., Kligler-Vilenchik, N., & Zimmerman, A. (2016). By any media necessary: The new youth activism. New York: NYU Press. doi:10.22394/ 2074-0492-2018-3-210-217 Livingstone, S., & Third, A. (2017). Children and young people’s rights in the digital age: An emerging agenda. New Media & Society. Retrieved from http://eprints .lse.ac.uk/68759/ Martin, C. (2018). 90% of parents put time limit on child use of Internet-connected devices. MediaPost. Retrieved from https://www.mediapost.com/ publications/article/293589/90-of-parents-put-timelimit-on-child-use-of-inte.html

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Squire, K., & Dikkers, S. (2012). Amplifications of learning: Use of mobile media devices among youth. Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 2012(18). doi:10.1177/1354856511429646 Zemmels, D. (2012). Youth and new media: Studying identity and meaning in an evolving media environment. Communication Research Trends, 31(4), 4–22.

Digital Childhoods A profusion of terminology has been coined to link children and youths to digital and information technologies, including net generation, screenagers, and digital natives, to name but a few. In European thinking, from the 19th century onward, representations of child development have been enduringly invested with the preoccupations of modernity and its economic model of development. The mass media played an important part in the earliest advent of such notions, in particular, how technological developments were represented during the emergence of Western consumerism and modernity after World War II. With the shift to consumerism and a greater focus on the accumulation of wealth, there was a need to reimagine these alien machines and technologies, previously associated with destruction and fear, due to their role in the war, as more human and benign entities. In this respect, the child provided a suitable interface, a powerful non-threatening vehicle with which to humanize new technological developments. This entry examines the rise of the digital generation and more specifically, the concepts of the digital native and technochild.

Rise of the Digital Generation In the early 1960s, debates were already raging about the generation gap, in which ideas about media and technology were strongly aligned with representations of childhood and youth. However, it would not be until the 1990s, and the dawn of the information society, that a new generation of the rhetoric of technologized accounts of childhood would emerge. These new abstractions centered on accounts of children that epitomized their

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natural ability to become literate in new media and to grasp new technologies as being a means to channel and express their natural spontaneity, imagination, and youthful rebellion. Contrary to the television generation, the net generation (or N-Geners) were portrayed as hungry for expression, discovery, and their own selfdevelopment. Positioned against all the old criticisms of the television generation, they were savvy, self-reliant, analytical, creative, inquisitive, accepting of diversity, socially conscious, and globally oriented. At the turn of the century, new media critics noted that these early accounts of the technological nature of children fit nicely with conceptualizations of technological change and notions such as democratization, freedom of choice, openness, innovation, and collaboration. Such attributes have been reproduced, almost identically, by more recent attempts to naturalize this union of technology and children, Generation Einstein and digital native being two prototypical examples. Other similar terms that promote positive accounts of technology and childhood include the Millennial Generation, people born approximately between 1981 and 2001, and which encapsulates two other groups: (1) Generation Y (1981–1991) and (2) Generation Z (1991–2001).

Digital Natives In the midst of such a myriad of terms and generations, digital native is clearly the most pervasive, so far. The discourse surrounding this term is constituted in the popular assumptions of a homogenous generation that speaks a different language to their parents and educators (digital immigrants). They learn differently from preceding generations of students, mainly in informal relations and contexts. Experts in the fields of new media and childhood argue that portrayals of digital natives overstate the differences between generations and understate their internal diversity, among other contestable ideas, that are nevertheless prevalent. Evidence from recent ethnographic studies is also at odds with these pervasive representations of digital natives, finding that, for the most part, young people’s use of digital technology is far from innovative. On the contrary, it is dominated by relatively routine forms of communication and information retrieval.

The investments and discourses that inform concepts such as the digital native cannot be abstracted from debates on educational policy and reform, and the profound challenges presented to the role of schooling (i.e., debates on informal learning issues and relations), in particular, the role it plays in the reproduction of social differences and exclusion in an era of transformational society and demands for lifelong learning. Even if the depictions of digital natives (or digital immigrants) occupies a rather hegemonic position in the social imaginary, it does not fully eclipse other voices that reproduce naturalizing views of youth and digital technologies. Although these other representations are less explicit and sensationally pro-technology, terms such as insiders and newcomers also construct ideal types that have been linked to digitally networked teens that simultaneously include and exclude by homogenizing young people into distinct groups. Other abstractions associate youths and technology with typifying teenage behavior through the use of representations such as hanging out, messing round, and geeking out. Nevertheless, the emergence of these less exultant representations of a supposed technological nature of children has coincided with the appearance of discourses and policies that have started to establish a greater balance between the alleged risks and benefits associated with digital applications and environments, exemplified by European Commission–led initiatives such as EUKids III. This development coincides with the way the digital lobby (including multinationals, government, marketing and research agencies, and international organizations) has begun to temper the previous emphasis on the risks associated with new technologies and the vulnerability of children exposed to them and instead has shifted the focus to the opportunities that accompany digital literacies in the new environment of the digital family (and school). Such a change of emphasis has brought with it a constellation of renewed interests and monitoring of the development of children in their relationship to technology (and families) from ever-younger ages, including infants. Coinciding with the great financial crisis in the middle of the previous decade, this underresearched population cohort suddenly became a major focus of the strategic plans of leading marketing and communications companies,

Digital Literacy

and subsequently among government bodies too. One of the most common, and surprising, observations in Europe, related to the results of the EUKids project, was that only teenagers could be considered digital natives, but not younger children. Additionally, the use of technology by children does not increase linearly but rather in increments with clear plateaus.

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policies and resistances to the homogenizing connotations that accompany these metaphors. In this sense, the use of the plural childhoods in the title is an attempt to broaden the debate and recognize the complexity of the subject. Angél Gordo See also Digital Literacy; Digital Media; Digital Mobile Technologies; Literacy/Literacies

The Technochild From this perspective, the overt interest in the technochild at ever-younger ages brings to the foreground, once more, abstractions of childhood as a new agency for the optimization, adaptation, and development of children at the same pace as wider social transformations and politics. It is within this broad and complex convergence of trends that any analysis of discourses of digital childhood should be framed. Notwithstanding the manifold cultural representations that emphasize the long-standing links between children and technology throughout contemporary Western culture, it is also clear, as previously illustrated, that metaphors of digital childhood have recently acquired an increasing centrality. The question to pose here, then, is how to specify to what extent such metaphors are already mediated and compatible with newly emerging digital and transformative regimes and to what extent does the configuration of this overarching metaphor lend itself to new conceptualizations that go beyond established expectations of child/economic development discourse during the current digital turn? Each metaphor of digital childhood is a product of its own time, and each period of time resorts to its own metaphors, which are underscored by their own suppositions and the conditions of possibility that configure the social world. The depictions of the technological nature of childhood reviewed in this entry are as such historically situated but are also informing current abstractions and evolving conditions of possibility. By studying the development of these representations over time and the way they construct a supposed technological nature of childhood, the way they abstract and generalize, ignoring the specificities and diversity of relations, uses, and positions of youth in digital environments, permits us to understand both emerging regulatory

Further Readings Buckingham, D. (2006). Is there a digital generation? In D. Buckingham & R. Willett (Eds.), Digital generations: Children, young people, and new media. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. doi:10.1108/14684520710832379 Buckingham, D. (2011). Foreword. In M. Thomas (Ed.), Deconstructing digital natives: Young people, technology, and the new literacies (pp. ix–xi). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/ 9780203818848 Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. EUKids III. Retrieved from http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@ lse/research/EUKidsOnline/Home.aspx Gordo López, Á. J., & Burman, E. (2004). Emotional capital and information technologies in the changing rhetorics around children and childhoods. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 105, 63–80. doi:10.1002/cd.111 Gordo López, Á. J., Parra, P., & Cassidy, P. (2015). The [not so] new digital family: Disciplinary functions of representations of children and technology. Feminism & Psychology, 25(3), 326–346. doi:10.1177/ 0959353514562805 Livingstone, S., & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The class: Living and learning in the digital age. New York: New York University Press. Sefton-Green, J., Nixon, H., & Erstad, O. (2009). Reviewing approaches and perspectives on “digital literacy.” Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(2), 107–125. doi:10.1080/15544800902741556

Digital Literacy Digital literacy is synonymous with the centrality of digital technologies in everyday life and, more specifically, its implications for learning and media participation. The term encompasses a large

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number of more traditional literacies (such as new literacy, television literacy, and computer literacy) and emerging concepts like social media literacy, multiple literacies, multimodal literacies, and more recently transmedia literacy. Although the term digital literacy has become popular over the last two decades, it is by no means new. On the contrary, it draws on a long-standing tradition of research in the field of critical media literacy. Paying specific attention to children and youth, this entry offers a preliminary definition of digital literacy and discusses how the concept of digital literacy continues to inform policy and practice.

Defining Digital Literacy A common concern among exponents of new or multiple literacies is that emerging new communications media require novel forms of cultural and communicative competence, including participation in collaborative communities on social networks. Clearly, it’s far too superficial to simply equate digital literacy with using digital technologies because the notion of literacy evokes a multiplicity of competencies, skills, and knowledge. Analysts of new media and digital literacy hold that top-down approaches, favored by government policies since the late 20th century, promote the idea that changing forms of functional literacy constitute the kinds of competencies and literacy practices people require in order to participate fully in life. This is especially important for the way children are exposed to digital media and relations as key referents for their media literacy and, in a broader sense, socialization. For instance, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization promotes media and information literacy policies and strategies defined as “the essential competencies (knowledge, skills and attitude) that allow citizens to engage with media and other information providers effectively and develop critical thinking and life-long learning skills for socializing and becoming active citizens.” For its part, the European Commission promotes a rather broader and more inclusive notion of media literacy, which more recently has shifted focus to educational and learning opportunities. The bottom-up perspective, which for the most part draws on ethnographic and sociological studies, focuses on the way digital literacy develops in

social contexts and in concert with other media literacies. This approach also underlies highly complex, emotional, and intellectual engagement with forms of commercial digital culture—from computer games to chat rooms—that take place outside of formal education. Both perspectives have as yet been unable to synthesize the different meanings accorded to formal and informal conceptualizations of digital literacy. In this respect, they emphasize the institutional barriers that are frequently raised when bringing digital literacy from the policy level down to the school level and when trying to use a mandated conception of digital literacy to change educational practice. As digital policy on school curriculums is institutionalized, the divide between formal and informal understandings of digital literacy is widening. Hence, a major challenge for digital literacy research, educational policies, and educators is the widening gap in literacies and participation skills in our media ecology and, in particular, the gap between formal and informal understandings of digital literacy in current technologically mediated education and socialization. Moreover, it is no longer acceptable to define digital literacy simply as an individual competence; nor can it be defined as social skills required for interacting within a larger community. Even if one buys into the neoliberal and individualizing idea of digital literacy as an emerging set of social skills and cultural competencies, it will be difficult to tell which competencies are the most significant in the move from play and informal digitally mediated learning contexts to more institutionalized forms of education and work. Regarding this shift in focus, current digital environments (e.g., social networks, instant messaging applications, etc.) and the relations and exchanges they prompt (e.g., active mediation, peer learning activities, collaborative work, fan communities, serious games, and social challenges) might be considered as part of emerging institutional bases for children’s educational and socialization processes in most Western industrialized regions of the world. To sum up, for the past 20 years, the rhetoric of the digital age has loudly claimed that the recent and rapid take-up of digital technologies is fundamentally reshaping homes, schools, and communities. This rhetoric asserts that society must find a

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way to prepare its youth for jobs that have not yet been invented. But such rhetoric conceals important questions.

Impact of the Concept on Policy and Practice Over the last few decades, digital literacy and associated terms have proven to be useful concepts to bring attention to the socializing and recuperating power of new media. Similarly, digital literacy studies have helped to rethink the fast-changing nature of transformative society. As stated in the position statement of the journal e-Learning and Digital Media, the shift from an industrial to an information and media-based economy brought about rapid changes in knowledge and learning and the development of a learning economy of which the new digital literacies comprise a central aspect of development in a variety of contexts, along with “new principles of social stratification, social mobility, and identity formation.” A full and thorough conceptualization of digital literacy entails moving beyond instrumental and individualizing perspectives. It also necessitates acknowledging that digital technologies are by no means the only source of change in an otherwise stable society. Moreover, it calls for recognition that digital literacies are active assets of current social reproduction and the way in which it is played out between differences in preexisting social, economic, and cultural capitals. So, the processes of inclusion and exclusion at work in terms of digital literacy coexist with other broader social processes through the marketplace of the media industries and in government and educational policies. Angél Gordo See also Digital Childhoods; Digital Media; Digital Mobile Technologies; Literacy/Literacies

Further Readings Buckingham, D. (2010). Defining digital literacy. Digital Kompetanse, 4(1), 263–276. Buckingham, D., Banaji, S., Carr, D., Cranmer, S., & Willett, R. (2005). The media literacy of children and young people: A review of the research literature on behalf of Ofcom. London, UK: Ofcom.

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e-Learning and Digital Media. Retrieved from https:// us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/e-learningand-digital-media European Commission. (2015). Showing films and other audiovisual content in European schools. Obstacles and best practices: Final report. doi:10.2759/038024 Gordo, A., García, A., de Rivera, J., & Díaz-Catalán, C. (2018). Jóvenes en la encrucijada digital. Itinerarios de socialización y desigualdad en los entornos digitales [Young people at the digital crossroads. Itineraries of socialization and inequality in digital environments.]. Madrid, Spain: CrS – fad y Ediciones Morata. Retrieved from http://www.adolescenciay juventud.org/que-hacemos/monografias-y-estudios/ ampliar.php/Id_contenido/126997/ Livingstone, S., & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The class: Living and learning in the digital age. New York: New York University Press. Sefton-Green, J., Nixon, H., & Erstad, O. (2009). Reviewing approaches and perspectives on “digital literacy.” Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(2), 107–125. doi:10.1080/15544800902741556 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. (2013). Media and informational literacy: Policy and strategy guidelines. Paris. Retrieved August 28, 2019, from http://unesdoc. unesco.org/images/0022/002256/225606e.pdf

Digital Media The terms digital media and social media (or more recently new media) are often used interchangeably. However, they are not the same thing, even if the line between them is often difficult to locate. Digital media is an umbrella term for all types of digitizable data, from storage devices to the modes of communications that enable data circulation. Media is considered to be digital when data are communicated via computerized networks, which translate data from analog to digital, as opposed to communication without computerized mediation (analog). Unlike mass media, digital media allows one-to-one communication, one-to-many, and many-tomany in a variety of formats. For its part, social media originally referred to the sites where people share and exchange information in ­ online  communities and networks (e.g., Facebook, ­Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram). With a

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specific focus on children and youth, this entry distinguishes digital media from social media and examines future developments in digital media.

Digital Media Versus Social Media As online social networks evolved, the term social media emerged to encompass a whole swathe of digitally mediated activities across different devices and platforms. Like social media, digital media has also witnessed a profound transformation and increasing ubiquity. To distinguish social media from digital media, it is useful to examine five related concepts: (1) convergence, (2) participatory culture, (3) spreadability, (4) usability, and (5) transmedia. Convergence

Convergence refers to the interconnection of content, digital media devices, networks, and information. It makes it possible, for instance, to use a phone to talk, to text, watch television, access social networks, or collect self-tracking data. Convergence, and the greater usability it brings about, encourages connectivity between users. In this sense, user participation has become a crucial node for digital media and convergence or remix culture. Participatory Culture

For influential media analysts, such as Henry Jenkins, social media is part of the rise of participatory culture that empowers users to create, produce, and circulate their own content, as well as engaging in reciprocal interactions, such as joint editing of an article on Wikipedia or uploading images and videos on social network sites. Jenkins suggests that participatory culture emerged as society absorbed and responded to the explosion of new media technologies that made it possible for content producers to interact with readers and viewers, who also produce content themselves. Thus, the origin of the terms produsers or prosumers means those who produce and consume. Notably, children and youth play an essential role in online participatory cultures (e.g., by producing and sharing fanfictions in online fan communities).

Spreadability and Usability

Another distinctive feature of digital media is spreadability. The term spreadable—akin to the term viral but free of any connotations of contagion and infection—refers to how digital media is technically and culturally spread through participatory culture and sharing on social media and other online networks. Spreadability in digital media occurs through the connectivity of digital devices (i.e., smartphones, tablets, consoles, wearable glasses) and their usability and ergonomics, or to put it more simply, the user-friendliness (or ease-of-use) of digital devices, apps, or network sites. In this respect, notions of usability and accessibility meet and transcend the functional architectural design of digital media. In turn, high usability levels help to increase engagement over time, and therefore, participation. For children and youth, usability has created something ­unprecedented: For the first time in history, young people are able to easily create and share images, films, and texts of their own making with not only friends but also millions of viewers and readers around the world. While the rapid growth of mobile devices (phones, tablets, and laptops) and their increasing usability has greatly transformed digital media, its future direction relies on stretching synergies between the functional elements (key features) of its architecture, as the level of convergence of ­digital media will be soon become pervasive. This is known as ubiquitous computing and refers to the possibility of having multiple devices in a network performing a variety of tasks without the user of the devices being aware. It relies on the capacity of digital devices to be embedded or connected (a major assumption of the Internet of things) and enhances notions of reusability and extensibility. Apart from these technical issues and future avenues of development, some scholars argue that the spreadability of participatory culture, which was enhanced by social media and later appropriated by current digital media, empowers users and audiences in the sense that it makes them active producers of culture. According to this view, online participation contributes to the success and prosperity of both individuals and communities. However, critics of this perspective, such as

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Christian Fuchs and Evgeny Morozov, hold that participatory culture ignores questions about the ownership of platforms/companies, collective decision making, profit, class, and the distribution of material benefits. Additionally, in spite of interaction being a precondition to participation, there is an inverse correlation between interaction and participation when interaction favors entertainment rather than political content. In a similar vein, other media analysts have referred to slacktivism as the tendency to limit individual engagement to political activities that have no impact on real-life political outcomes but only serve to increase the feel-good factor of the participants. From this critical perspective, participatory culture is more harmless than socially and democratically empowering, and just part of the vernacular of contemporary capitalism. Transmedia

Another key feature for understanding digital media is the term transmedia. Originally coined by Jenkins more than a decade ago as transmedia storytelling, it refers to a process where integral elements of fiction get systematically dispersed across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. Jenkins often draws on the example of the Matrix as representative of transmedia storytelling, as its narrative has been told through video games, live-action films, and a collection of comic books. Jenkins points out that transmedia strategies were in place well before the term was coined and defined and certainly well before the rapid rise of digital media. He also notes that some fanproduced content precedes the entertainment industry’s own transmedia creations. Because many aspects of transmedia, including video games and comic books, target young people, transmedia has arguably had a specific impact on children and adolescents. The prevalence of transmedia storytelling has been facilitated by the development of digital media, which has created many platforms through which a story may be told, and as d igital and media convergence, transmedia ­

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experiences are becoming increasingly common. In this regard, there are also some resemblances between media convergence/transmedia and the idea of remediation in so much as it relates to, for instance, Lewis Mumford’s idea of technological syncretism and cultural preparation or Lev Manovich’s concept of transcoding. Based on Marshall McLuhan’s idea that every medium becomes the content of another, remediation was defined by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin in the mid-1990s as a process of appropriation and critique by which digital media reshape or  remediate one another and their analog p redecessors, such as film, television, and ­ photography. As previously noted, the proliferation of digital media is due to both the way it has engendered and appropriated participation whether in the form of participatory culture (or incipient forms of participative democracy), fandom (and transmedia storytelling), or user-generated content (by produsers or prosumers). In this sense, one could say that early social media, and its promotion of participation, has been made possible by the convergence of stakeholders that encompasses the digital lobby, rather than any overarching new communication phenomenon (i.e., prosumers, transmedia), mobile devices, or technological usability and connectivity. Following this line of thought, current digital media ubiquity, its subsuming of participatory culture, which was afforded by early social media, has been made possible by a vast array of industries (entertainment, technology, marketing and advertising, and publishing), social institutions and policies (such as health, education, national intelligence systems, and defense), and products (e.g., from all sorts of  mobile applications, including self-tracking apps,  to ultrasound imaging devices and geolocalization).

Future Prospects In the future, digital media will require the cooperation of a complex digital lobby rather than just a convergence between different devices and modalities of digital communication. It is from the perspective of this other notion of convergence that one can better understand the

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ambiguity that exists between social media and digital media. Hence, hype surrounding digital media is also a discursive device that emerges in response to the convergence of synergies and investments among the different stakeholders and institutions within the digital lobby. In such a complex digital media landscape, entertainment industries, the fandom phenomenon, and prosumer activities are understood as emerging effects or epiphenomena instead of the conditions of possibility of current digital media. Drawing on the way media ecology scholars recognize that any given society at any given time has its own unique media environment, one might further conclude that digital media is becoming the basic form of media, along with its ubiquitous digitizing rhetoric. Angél Gordo See also Digital Childhoods; Digital Literacy; Digital Mobile Technologies; Media, Children and; YouTube

Further Readings Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. A. (1996). Remediation. Configurations, 4(3), 311–358. Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media: A critical introduction. London, UK: Sage. Gordo, A., García, A., de Rivera, J., & Díaz-Catalán, C. (2018). Jóvenes en la encrucijada digital: Itinerarios de socialización y desigualdad en los entornos digitales [Young people at the digital crossroads: Itineraries of socialization and inequality in digital environments.]. Madrid, Spain: CrS—fad y Ediciones Morata. Retrieved from http://www.adolescenciay juventud.org/que-hacemos/monografias-y-estudios/ ampliar.php/Id_contenido/126997/ Hinton, S., & Hjorth, L. (2013). Understanding social media. London, UK: Sage. Irwing, S. O. (2016). Digital media: Human–technology connection. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York: New York University Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262036016.003.0012 Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. doi:10.7146/mediekultur .v30i56.16054

Disabilities Children with disabilities remain in the shadows of disability theory and are also marginalized in childhood studies literature. While children with disabilities are arguably the purview of both fields, discussions of childhood and disability are confined to psychology and children’s literature. This entry offers an overview of dominant, or popular, knowledges of disability that frame how children with disability are socially constructed through language. This entry also offers an overview of major works on childhood and disability.

Medical Knowledges Medical knowledges of disability are the dominant discourse through which parents come to know their child, often before the child is born. This is often problematic, as medical discourses have been developed to describe systems and problems, not to characterize people. The medical model of disability categorizes individuals as healthy or unhealthy by prescribing a model of normativity that compares all bodies against an ideal. For example, a child who is at no risk of experiencing physical pain and discomfort due to their disability is still faced with everyday divisions such as disabled and nondisabled, disabled and healthy, and healthy and unhealthy. Such binaries define the body and mind of a child as normal or abnormal. Children with disabilities grow to know themselves and their role in the family and community through such frames. We can say that medical discourses of disability not only serve as means for clinical definition; they also function as what we might call public pedagogies of disability. That is, media discourses are an everyday, laypersons’ way of learning about disability. They constitute the dominant public discourse of disability and are remade in different ways across numerous forms of public media (e.g., newspapers, television, film, and the Internet) and in an array of social fora. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of disability is, perhaps, the most popular public pedagogy of disability, with their definitions establishing global models for disability service provision. According to the WHO, disability

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is a word that describes the following: (a) impairment, which is defined as a functional or structural problem; (b) activity limitation, which refers to difficulties in performing particular activities and actions; and (c) participation restriction, which refers an individual’s capacity to participate in life. In their definition of disability, the WHO acknowledges the intersection of health-related challenges, environmental barriers, and social barriers faced by people with disabilities. The WHO also makes clear that while all humans share basic health needs (such as immunization), a variety of factors impact the access of people with disabilities to these services. The families of children with disabilities may experience social exclusion and poverty born from dealing with the expenses associated with disabilities. Access to adequate health care and rehabilitation is impacted by these social and economic factors. Additionally, secondary conditions associated with disabilities (such as urinary tract infections) impact the health of children with disabilities. The combination of these factors means that children with disabilities are more likely than nondisabled children to experience health issues not directly related to a particular disability, but as such issues are a formative part of the child’s day-to-day life, they can impact on senses of what is achievable in life. Another powerful set of knowledges about disability can be found in religious and spiritual beliefs about disability. Just as medicine and medical knowledges are a foundational part of how we understand what it means to be human, religion and spirituality define how we see the world and those in it for many people.

Religion and Spirituality Despite their prevalence and social power, medical discourses of disability are relatively new. Biblical and historical trajectories of disability map the lives of people characterized as blind, deaf, lame, or in some way with God. These knowledges far predate Western medical science. Historically, religious organizations delivered welfare and health care to individuals with disabilities, so the church and other religious institutions have long been much needed community disability service providers. While the various challenges of raising a child

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with a disability can place stress on the family unit, research shows that the majority of families positively adapt to life with a child with a disability, loving their children and raising them to be emotionally healthy beings, maintaining successful marriages, and often extending support outside their own family to other families and educators who live or work with children with disabilities. For many, religion can play a significant role as a coping resource. Further, much research suggests that it is religious beliefs, rather than specific religious practices, that offer the most support to families with children with disabilities. While religious and nonreligious families do not differ categorically in their acceptance and adjustment to life with a child with a disability, families who are religious perceive religion as a strong supportive mechanism. For many parents, a transition period may be required where a new relationship with their religion is developed. This may involve a transition from blaming God or asking why they were singled out with a perceived burden, to considering the child as a gift that they were especially equipped to handle. Often parents of children with disabilities also feel that their religion will provide ongoing support as they learn to accept and accommodate their child’s needs. Religion and spirituality provide a source of faith for many that the life of the child with a disability will be successful. Religion and spirituality are also often used as a way to give meaning to the reality of having a child with a disability. If families cannot transition from considering their child an unfair burden, or if they belong to religious communities that are unaccommodating of their child’s needs, religion can constitute a form of stress rather than a support. As noted, many establishments throughout history that catered specifically to people with disabilities were founded by religious institutes or persons, including those from Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Cul­ tural and religious attitudes toward disability have varied greatly across these sites. Many cultures around the world have believed that infants with disabilities were possessed by demons, and either murdered them or abandoned them to die. Others attached religious significance to disability, believed people with disabilities could ward off

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evil, or even believed that their bodies could bring luck, cure disease, or be used for magic. Depictions of disability vary in religious documents. Eastern religious documents often portray disability as a spectacle of freakery and something to fear, with the Mahabharata, for example, featuring a blind king who concedes his crown as he was deemed a poor fit for ruling. The Quran advises accommodation be given to people with disabilities, especially when it comes to civic and social service. The Bible has many mentions of disability, with the Old Testament focusing more on disability as a punishment from God, and the New Testament often presenting disability as something to be healed. These knowledges are significant as they shape the ways children with disabilities are known in history, are understood in families and communities, and how they come to know themselves.

Popular Culture Another very important popular pedagogy of disability is popular culture or entertainment culture. Accessible entertainment material also shapes understandings of children with a disability. For example, nondisabled children who read books featuring characters with disabilities demonstrate an increased acceptance of children with disabilities as friends. Literature plays an important role in children’s education in establishing models of social equality, with research suggesting that children at a young age are able to read beyond literal plots to discern and internalize the cultural and political messages. Even as the stories fade from memory, individual attitudes remain. Fictional or popular culture characters with disabilities undertake the same kind of work in children’s literature as figures with a disability did in mythology and biblical works. For example, Angharad Beckett and four of her colleagues surveyed 100 texts aimed at primary-aged children. The selection was chosen based on recommended books featuring disability-related topics published since 1990. Thirty of the books contained outdated or discriminatory language, 33 presented stories that focused on the tragedy of disability, eight contained unrealistically feel-good endings (such as a miracle cure), seven presented people with disabilities as curiosities or freaks, and eight

presented disability as a lesson in morality or spirituality. On a more positive note, approximately half of the texts portrayed disability as part of diversity, with 15 texts actively challenging social barriers associated with disability. Representations of children with a disability—and, indeed, adults with a disability—in children’s literature are crucial, as they shape how young people come to think about disability. The representation of certain disabilities does not necessarily relate to the prominence of those disabilities in society. World War II brought about an increase in appearances of disability in literature aimed at young readers; however, certain disabilities were far more prominent than others. Writers tended to choose disabilities with obvious physical manifestations, presumably for the simplicity of writing about a disability younger readers could understand. The return of injured veterans from the war at this time meant that physical disability became a noticeable part of post–World War II society. One third of disabilities depicted in juvenile fiction from 1940 to 1975 were orthopedic problems. The second most common disability was vision impairment, which occurred 6 times more frequently in fiction than in reality. The appearance of less visible disabilities became slightly more common in children’s literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and this simultaneously ­created a need for more skilled storytelling, as writers could not rely on cues such as the use of a wheelchair. Historically, visual, literary, live art, and mainstream media representations of disability have featured characters and figures that carry religious messages; disability is often used to teach moral stories. As noted above, disabled characters in European and American literature traditionally represented a punishment from God issued for breaking the moral order of the world. Characters such as Ahab in Moby Dick, Quasimodo in Hunchback of Notre Dame, Clara in Heidi, Captain Hook in Peter Pan, Long John Silver in Treasure Island, and many more, can be, and indeed have been, read as characters that teach readers to stand up for themselves and not allow the powers that be to bully them, to do good and to be good, or face the wrath of God in the form of impending disablement.

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Characters with disabilities also appear in popular culture that is aimed either partially or entirely toward children. Historically, disability in these characters tended to manifest in a handful of distinct ways. Characters such as Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and Pollyanna in Pollyanna are presented as figures of purity and inspiration due to their positive outlook despite their disability. Katy in What Katy Did and Colin in The Secret Garden are bitter about their disability, but with the help of their cousins learn to appreciate life and are eventually cured. People who use wheelchairs, such as Professor Xavier in X-Men and Stevie Kenarban in Malcolm in the Middle, are geniuses; villainous pirates, such as Captain Hook in Peter Pan and Captain Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean, have crude prosthetics where limbs are missing. These representations are unlikely to provide characters whom children with disabilities can identify with because they often limit characters to being inspirational, pitiful, superhuman, or evil. However, in recent years, representation has improved, with high-grossing films like How to Train Your Dragon presenting multiple unique characters with disabilities who are capable and not objects of pity. Toys with disabilities have also been developed over the years, with varying degrees of success. A Mister Magoo Car Toy in the early 1960s was met with protest from disability organizations for stereotyping disability. Down syndrome dolls by Helga Parks were met with mixed reception by the public, with some feeling they helped normalize disability, and others feeling they were a spectacle of freakery for nondisabled consumption. Mattel’s Share A Smile Becky, often known as Wheelchair Barbie, was widely popular but was unable to fit through the doors or elevators in the existing Barbie merchandise and was eventually discontinued. Some toy manufacturers, such as American Girl, now offer assistive accessories for their dolls, including wheelchairs and crutches. More recently, organizations like #ToysLikeMe have begun adapting existing toys to be more inclusive (such as featuring cochlear implants or wheelchairs) and lobbying existing toy companies to do the same.

Academic Perspectives Disability studies began to gain academic attention from Western scholars and researchers in the

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1970s. Since then, the study of disability has made a shift in focus from the applied areas of medicine and social work, to identity studies, following the path of the civil rights movement, Women’s Studies, and race studies. Models of disability are particularly important when working with children with disabilities, as children are often referred to medical professionals by someone else, and therefore their issues are framed by a third party’s interpretation. Understanding various models of disability helps broaden the perspectives of those working with children. As outlined above, the medical model of disability remains prominent in public discourses of disability. As a response to this, a social model was widely adopted in critical disability studies and with disability organizations, beginning in the 1980s. The medical model does not really allow for children to have pride in their disability or, for example, to belong to a social community of people with disabilities. In contrast to this, the social model makes a distinction between impairment of the mind or body, and the social barriers erected by society that stigmatize, pathologize, and prevent access. Most disability scholars agree that the prejudice and oppression faced by people with disabilities is often far more difficult to deal with than its physical aspects. This insistence that disability is socially constructed rather than individually embodied is the hallmark of the social model. Despite making this important contribution to knowledge, the social model has limitations. Primarily, scholars and organizations favoring the social model may be more reluctant to acknowledge hard links between disability and the body, such as when a disability results in experiences of pain and fatigue that are entirely separate from the social expectations and biases placed upon that individual. This is because these experiences are often viewed as detracting from the central message of the social model: that it is society that disables the individual, not impairment. Similarly, environmental factors (whether socially created or otherwise) can pose real challenges to people with physical and mobility needs. The social model has been ­criticized for privileging an ideal disabled subject—someone who is considered happy and healthy in spite of their disability. While this s­ ubject is i­llustrative of the ways in which society disenfranchises people

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with disabilities, it does not represent the experiences of all people with disabilities and can marginalize embodied experiences. There are many children who experience physical and emotional pain, along with secondary health issues, and the social model can be viewed as excluding them. Other models for thinking about disability exist that address some of these weaknesses. The minority model of disability focuses on disability culture, emphasizing that children with disabilities are different from nondisabled children and that difference is a valuable part of their cultural identity. For example, children who are born deaf or hard of hearing may grow up to identify as Deaf (with a capital D). Being culturally Deaf is closely linked to language and is most common to people who are prelingually deaf and hence grow up using sign language as a primary method of communication. The families and friends of children who are deaf and communicate with them through sign language (along with interpreters and those who work with people who are deaf or hard of hearing) may also be considered to be a part of the Deaf community. Another alternative model, coined by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, is the cultural model of disability. The cultural model follows the work of the social model in understanding the social disenfranchisement faced by people with disabilities but also understands that these social ­ challenges may be paired with physical and environmental challenges. Although it acknowledges that disability is often a result of social discrimination, it also recognizes that experiences of  people with disabilities may be unique in ways that are entirely separate from social disablement. Similar to the cultural model is the transactional model, which not only acknowledges the importance of environment in the experiences of children with disabilities but views environment as an interactive structure. For example, an infant who behaves in ways that are perceived as difficult may, in turn, influence the ways in which the parental figures of that child interact with them. If a parent decides to engage less frequently with a child they perceive as exhibiting difficult behavior, it can cause developmental delays in the child as they grow older. Similarly, a child with a physical disability may be less likely to attempt

challenging physical movements in the presence of their nondisabled peers, which over time could result in their developing more restricted movement than they would have if surrounded by children with similar mobility needs. The transactional model shows that environments can have both positive and negative impacts on children with disabilities and that non-supportive environments impact not only how a disability is perceived but how that disability tangibly develops over time. Overall, there is no single correct or ‘best’ way of thinking about children with a disability. Each perspective we discuss above has its uses. The most important thing to remember is that children with a disability join an already existing culture of disability, which celebrates difference and accepts disability. While representations of children with disabilities are still fairly rare in children’s screen media, they are prevalent in children’s literature and are increasingly becoming part of children’s popular culture. Acceptance and recognition of children with disabilities starts with the everyday. Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody and Mia Harrison See also Disability Studies Disability Studies in Education; Special Education

Further Readings Asch, A., & Fine, M. (1988). Women with disabilities: Essays in psychology, culture, and politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Ayala, E. C. (2010). ‘Poor little things’ and ‘Brave little souls’: The portrayal of individuals with disabilities in children’s literature. Literacy Research and Instruction, 39(1), 103–117. doi:10.1080/ 19388079909558314 Baskin, B. H., & Harris, K. H. (1977). Notes from a different drummer: A guide to juvenile literature portraying the handicapped. New York, NY: R. R. Bowker. Beckett, A., Ellison, N., Barrett, S., & Shah, S. (2010). ‘Away with the fairies?’ Disability within primary-age children’s literature. Disability & Society, 25(3), 373–386. doi:10.1080/09687591003701355 Bennet, T., Deluca, D. A., & Allen, R. W. (1995). Religion and children with disabilities. Journal of Religion and Health, 34(4), 301–312.

Disabilities, Children With—Global South Ellis, K. (2016). Disability and popular culture: Focusing passion, creating community and expressing defiance. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315577326 Garland Thompson, R. (1997). Extraordinary bodies: Figuring physical disability in American culture and literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Grue, J. (2011). Discourse analysis and disability: Some topics and issues. Discourse & Society, 22(5), 532–546. doi:10.1177/0957926511405572 Hadley, B. (2015). Disability, public space performance and spectatorship: Unconscious performers. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1080/09 687599.2016.1208987 Hickey-Moody, A. (2009). Unimaginable bodies: Intellectual disability, performance and becomings. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. Irwin, M., & Moeller, R. (2010). Seeing different: Portrayals of disability in young adult graphic novels. School Library Journal, 40(9), 139–142. Llewellyn, A., & Hogan, K. (2000). The use and abuse of models of disability. Disability & Society, 15(1), 157–165. doi:10.1080/09687590025829 Mitchell, D., & Snyder, S. (2010). Cultural locations of disability. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Poston, D. J., & Turnbull, A. P. (2004). Role of spirituality and religion in family quality of life for families of children with disabilities. Education and Training in Developmental Disabilities, 39(2), 95–108. Selway, D., & Ashman, A. F. (1998). Disability, religion and health: A literature review in search of the spiritual dimensions of disability. Disability & Society, 13(3), 429–439. doi:10.1080/09687 599826722 World Health Organization. (2017). Disabilities. Retrieved from http://www.who.int/topics/ disabilities/en/

Disabilities, Children With—Global South This entry explores some common conditions and issues arising for children with disabilities in a Global South context. It considers the role of the sociocultural, political, and historical milieu in shaping existing realities and challenges faced by many children with disabilities. In doing so, the entry examines the complex relationship between the Global North and Global South, including the influence of colonialism, homogenization and

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disability, inclusion, and human rights knowledge/ discourse transference. Notably, in this entry, the Global South refers primarily to those Southern countries that were once controlled by imperial powers and, compared with their Northern counterparts, still remain more likely to face poverty, economic exploitation, and dependence.

Disabilities in the Developing World According to the United Nations, people with ­disabilities account for 15% of the world’s overall population, but the vast majority of people with disabilities (80%) live in the developing world. In addition to being more likely to have a disability, people with disabilities in the developing world are more often than not vulnerable to effects of poverty, educational and employment inequity, health challenges, and societal discrimination; these barriers are heightened within rural areas. Young people with disabilities within these contexts are often perceived as incompetent societal burdens, costing rather than contributing to society. Their families, particularly within rural areas, may struggle in supporting their basic needs due to financial adversity and accompanying unexpected medical expenses. Educational access may also be problematic for many children with disabilities in the South, as such is the case for those in Guyana and Cambodia, often resulting from poverty, living far distances from schools, lack of school capacity (e.g., teacher development, physical and human resources, etc.), and nonprioritization among government national agendas. If these children have opportunities to access schooling, the quality of their education is debatable, and they are most likely placed within contained segregated learning spaces (vs. inclusive). Recognizing education as a fundamental facilitator for ameliorating cycles of poverty, and functioning to enrich the quality of health, life, and overall country economic growth, reprioritization of school access of children with disabilities should be considered.

Cultural Beliefs and Understandings of Disability Within the Global South Societal beliefs about disability impact the freedom of children with disabilities, as these attitudes shape policy, practice, provisions, and levels of

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participation. Frequently, disability attitudes are preserved by either being passed down from one generation to the next and/or societal pressure to conform with traditional cultural ideals. For example, in some Southern countries, religious notions of karmic belief are sometimes associated with disability, in which negative karma is thought to cause disability; disability is seen as a curse. Yet, in other Southern cultures, such as those from Indigenous groups, there is an appreciation and acceptance of disability as a special gift from the spirit world. In addition to religious lenses, there are charity-case and medical lenses that run deep within the societies of the Global South. However, these views are often adopted without critical examination of potential negative effects for children with disabilities (e.g., ostracization, stereotyping, oppression, and segregation—community, culture, school, or social). Within Guyana, for example, these pejorative attitudes emerge as primary barriers to social and educational inclusion for children with disabilities. A common conceptual repertoire maintained by Guyanese educators is that children with disabilities require more time, patience, funding, and resources, and as educators, they are professionally unprepared to support successful learning and teaching. The negative societal undercurrent toward childhood disability within Cambodia and Guyana frequently leads to bullying, child abandonment, and recommendations for child euthanasia. Parents and caregivers within these contexts are also swayed by societal attitudes and pressures often causing them to hide their child due to feelings of shame and consequently limiting community participation and access (e.g., refraining from bringing the child to school, lack of therapeutic participation, etc.). On the other hand, for some Southern families, keeping their child at home may be unrelated to societal stigma, and instead perhaps due to financial costs/strain, particularly among those living in rural and impoverished areas (e.g., transportation to school, lack of time due to employment responsibilities to meet their family’s basic needs). Families living in these contexts often perceive children as individuals who should support the household in some way, either economically or through family responsibilities, and thus supporting a child with a disability is a direct indication of love. In efforts to support

families, parents/caregivers are initiating their own groups at grassroots levels, offering a bottom-up approach to advocating and responding to the evolving circumstances for children with disabilities within the Global South. Cultural beliefs contribute to a society’s understandings of disability and inform meanings of childhood disability. Beyond beliefs, however, technical interpretations related to disability also shape understandings. Within the Global South, international donors and nongovernmental organizations regularly provide professional training, education, and on-site support for children with disabilities and their families, although there is often a disconnect between interpretations of the technical and conceptual disability language and theories employed by these organizations and the South. The dominant disability discourse relayed is primarily from the North, and there is frequently no consideration for the sociocultural and political context undergirding much of these interpretations. Terms such as disability and impairment and theories of disability and inclusion (e.g., medical versus social models) maintain differing ideological understandings within differing countries across the Global South. Nevertheless, the Global North dictates, directs, and defines conceptualizations of such terms and theories. For example, medical models perceive disability in childhood as an internalized medical defect, focusing on interventions to fix/ cure impairment so the child aligns closer to realms of the ideal nondisabled child; this framework rests upon developmental notions of normalcy. Social models advocate disability as a form of oppression resulting from society’s failure to provide services and needs required for maximum societal participation; this framework challenges attitudinal, institutional, and environmental barriers that limit the participation of those with disabilities. Some Global South countries, such as Cambodia, revere medical models for being more modern and aligned to Northern/ Western ideals, despite benefits of social model frames in supporting disability activism. Thus, this brings into question how social models of disability, if at all, suit Cambodian contexts and perhaps suggests embracing a more balanced perspective encompassing both medical and ­ social models. Moreover, dominant theories of

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childhood also originate from the North (e.g., Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky) and therefore may not apply to children in the Global South. Appreciating how this knowledge transference is taking place and how it suits particular current contextual factors within Southern countries is critical for respecting the heterogeneous nature of each country and ensuring applicable alignment in varying circumstances.

Disability, Rights, and Inclusion Ideals: North to South Transfer and the Impact of Colonization Rights-based ideals for those with disabilities are embedded within notions of social inclusion. Yet these ideals stem primarily from Northern contexts, which arguably do not universally apply to the Global South. Concepts of inclusion rest upon democratic values emphasizing inclusion as a right, and these rights are supported through international legislation and conventions. Complexly, human rights discourse is institutionalized, organized, and defined within political doctrines of industrialized nations of the North, particularly in relation to understandings of inclusion (e.g., inclusion connotes individuality). Disability, inclusion, and human rights discourse are incepted, privileged, and uncritically transferred from North to South. Yet, culturally, many countries in the Global South maintain collectivist and elitist societies, which are silenced within disability/inclusion/rights debates and doctrine. Espousing these concepts as universally appropriate is a contested issue, as it implicitly suggests the Global South as culturally uncivilized, unrefined, and primitive in comparison to the North. International donor agencies, development agencies, and nongovernmental organizations, among other agencies from the North, are repeatedly positioned as hero’s rescuing or saving those with disabilities in developing worlds through homogenously providing financial and educational/ training support, moving Southern countries through processes of edification toward civilized understandings of disability and inclusion (e.g., United Nations, World Health Organization, standardized disability conventions). At the same time, however, colonialism and its influence on Northern ideals of disability, inclusion, and

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human rights and how these are interpreted and executed in the Global South cannot be ignored. Tensions surface when reflecting on the historical impact of colonization and capitalism among many Southern countries, as this legacy invoked a matrix of poverty, religious indoctrination, and deficit-based medicalized understandings of disability, just to name a few. Families were often forced to separate and institutionalize their child(ren) with disabilities resulting from the absolute disregard for families’ cultural beliefs and values of community, kinship, and personal views of disability. During colonization, conceptions of the ideal, normal, beautiful, intellectual, and fit bodies were identified through the slave trade. People with disabilities, perceived as defective, unintelligent, and impure, were valued less than ablebodied slaves. Colonization brought about a cleansing of those with disabilities as they were subjugated to ideals of fixing, curing, healing, and saving the Southern disabled body through Northern medical and religious groups. These ideals spawned segregated institutions and charity/missionary organizations to work toward normalizing people with disabilities. Thus, under a guise from its colonial past, international aid organizations and their principles, policies, guidelines, and so on perpetuate historically embedded practices parallel to those of colonialism. In Cambodia, for instance, inclusion, disability, and individual rights as understood and conveyed by international donor agencies pose tensions and misinterpretations within Cambodia’s traditionally collectivist and monastic society. Beliefs of benefitting the individual contradict Cambodia’s historical values of benefitting the whole group rather than the individual. These postcolonial organizations purport ways of supporting children with disabilities that contradict and undervalue cultural ways of community and ­ interdependency within the Global South. As such, it is important to critically examine the relationship between the North and South, questioning how knowledge and discourse surrounding disability and inclusion operate to further privilege, empower, and legitimize Northern dogma on an international level, impacting services and supports for children with disabilities in Southern countries.

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Challenging Northern Privilege of Disability Discourse Northern ideals and knowledge of what it means to be disabled within the Global South become homogenously generalized, propagating stereotypical conceptualizations of those with disabilities without emphasizing realities of social and economic disadvantage. Some examples of homogenization of children with disabilities in the Global South include (a) negative/stigma/ discriminatory attitudes within society rather than showcasing a range of attitudes, (b) ignoring individual characteristics of a child’s context contributing to her/his personal social experiences, and (c) recognizing the complex interrelationship between poverty and disability. Context cannot be ignored when thinking about how Northern philosophies, methodologies, and understandings of human rights apply to children with disabilities in the Global South. For instance, meeting their child’s basic survival needs due to extreme poverty may take precedence for many families, particularly those living in rural areas rather than a focus on school inclusion; this does not imply families’ lack of care about their child or that they have negative attitudes regarding disability and their child’s rights. Such an example suggests reexamining relevancy of how, if at all, Northern discourses align to the Global South when considering existing circumstances and conditions. The North has become the epicenter for disability discourse and knowledge transference, including best practices, goals, and development for what is ideal, normal, and legitimate. Recognizing this Northern privileged narrative, academic arenas must make space for Southern counter-narratives of disability discourse grounded in the lived experiences of children with disability. Conceptualizations and experiences of disability are context dependent. Contextual factors, including culture, communities, economic environment, personal nuances, and so on, contribute to differing interpretations and understandings of what it means to be a child with a disability in the Global South. Additionally, factors associated with colonization maintain lingering residues for children with disabilities in Southern countries, shaping their experiences of exclusionary practices within

systems and society. Despite the binaries existing between the Global North and Global South, there may also be similarities and lessons learned, yet caution must be exercised in generalizing stereotypical notions of disability broadly across the South as this chapter provokes quandaries surrounding applicability and universality of disability, inclusion, and human rights. Appreciating multiple ways of knowing and being and recognizing the complex circumstances for children with disabilities in Southern worlds demands reenvisioning and reestablishing relevance of disability understandings woven among the voices of those embedded in their local context and culture. As uncomfortable as it may be, it is necessary to allow for emerging chaos and critique of the services and supports for children with disabilities in the Global South, problematizing rights-based and inclusion models, and illuminating influences from the historical and political legacies of colonialism and canons of the North. Amanda Ajodhia See also Colonialism and Childhood; Disability Studies; Human Rights

Further Readings Ajodhia-Andrews, A., & Frankel, E. B. (2010). Inclusive education in Guyana: A call for change. International Journal of Special Education, 25(1), 126–144. Grench, S. (2011). Recolonising debates or perpetuated coloniality? Decentering the spaces of disability. Development and community in the Global South. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15(1), 87–100. doi:10.1080/13603116.2010.496198 Grench, S. (2015). Decolonizing Eurocentric disability studies: Why colonialism matters in the disability and Global South debate. Social Identities, 21(1), 6–21. doi:10.1080/13504630.2014.995347 Grench, S. (2015). Disability and poverty in the Global South: Renegotiating development in Guatemala. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kalyanpur, M. (2014). Distortions and dichotomies in inclusive education for children with disabilities in Cambodia in the context of globalisation and international development. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 61(1), 80–94. Meekosha, H. (2011). Decolonising disability: Thinking and acting globally. Disability and Society, 26(6), 667–682. doi:10.1080/09687599.2011.602860

Disability Studies Meekosha, H., & Soldatic, K. (2011). Human rights and the Global South: The case of disability. Third World Quarterly, 32(8), 1383–1397. doi:10.1080/01436597 .2011.614800 Nixon, S. A., Cockburn, L., Acheinegeh, R., Bradley, K., Cameron, D., Mue, P. N., . . . Gibson, B. E. (2015). Using postcolonial perspective to consider rehabilitation with children with disabilities: The Bamenda-Toronto dialogue. Disability and the Global South, 2(2), 570–589. Stienstra, D. (2015). For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the Global South/North. Disability and the Global South, 2(2), 632–648. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2019). Fact sheet on persons with disabilities. doi:10.18356/86f3f701-en

Disability Studies Disability studies is a relatively new field that has emerged, mostly in the West, over the last four decades. Like other major contributions to academic thinking such as feminism and Marxism, the field of disability studies was spurred and highly influenced by the social movements and political activism of people labelled and marginalised as ‘disabled’. Although the models and understandings of disability are different across scholars and countries, the basic argument that they all share is the rejection of the idea that disability is an individual trait, located in the body or mind of a person with disability. Instead, disability studies trace the roots of disability (at least in part) to cultural, political, economic, medical, educational, and social oppression exercised on people identified as impaired. This entry describes the social model of disability and the efforts of persons with disabilities to fully participate in society and control their own lives. It also discusses different approaches for disability studies in academia, the sociology of impairment, and disability and childhood.

The Social Model of Disability and the Persons With Disabilities Movement This critical and political view of disability, which was coined by the British disability rights activist and academic Mike Oliver as ‘the social

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model of disability’, was initially developed in the 1970s by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation in the United Kingdom and the Berkeley Center for Independent Living in the United States. In 1981, which was declared by the United Nations as the International year of Disabled Persons, the first international conference of organisations for persons with disabilities (organisations run by and for persons with disabilities, as opposed to charities and organisations controlled by nondisabled people for the supposed benefit of persons with disabilities) was held in Singapore. There, the distinction between ‘impairment’— the functional limitation caused by physical, mental, or sensory structures within the ­ individual—and ‘disability’—social and environ­ mental barriers to participation—was adopted as the basis for action. For example, people might be disabled by the lack of lifts or ramps when trying to access a building or by the lack of Braille sign­ age rather than by their own bodies. In the following years, persons with disabilities set up many organisations to resist their segregation into institutions or specialised day care settings and to insist that financial, technical, cultural, and educational changes be made to enable them to fully participate in society and achieve the maximum degree of control and self-determination over their lives. The potency of the social model of disability as a tool for changing reality is evident in the rapid growth of the persons with disabilities movement in the 1980s and 1990s. In accordance with the definition of disability as a form of social oppression, the movement has framed its struggle for inclusion within the discourses and practices of the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as feminism, anti-colonialism, and LGBTQ rights. The achievements of the movement’s political struggles include anti-discrimination legislation in many states, the creation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with ­Disabilities in 2006, and the transition from lifelong institutional care towards independent living and community-based residential care along with the move from segregated schooling towards more integrative and inclusive education settings, to name but a few. However, as the originators of the social model have pointed out in numerous discussions about its validity, the model is not a

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comprehensive social theory of disability; it has, nevertheless, contributed significantly to the emergence of the academic discipline of disability studies, which aims at theorising disability as a form of social oppression. Using different theoretical and epistemological frameworks, theorists within the field of disability studies offer explanations, explored in the following sections of the entry, about the methods and circumstances through which disability is produced and maintained. What is unique to disability studies as a field is its explicit commitment to assisting persons with disabilities in their fight for full equality and social inclusion through the critique of law, culture, society, and professional practices that disable rather than enable, which brings with it understandings of research and scholarly activity as politically and socially engaged rather than aspiring for objectivity and neutrality.

Disability Studies in Academia Materialist Approaches

Much of the early development of disability studies in academia was inspired by Marxist analysis, which considered the social production of disability to be tightly connected with economic systems of production and distribution. According to writers such as Vic Finkelstein and Oliver, the social segregation of persons with disabilities is rooted in the transition from feudal to capitalist production. The feudal economy, based on agricultural and small-scale industry, did not preclude the great majority of people with disabilities from taking part in the production process, even if to a lesser degree than their relatives without disabilities. Although persons with disabilities were still regarded as individually unfortunate, they were not segregated from the rest of society. With the transition to industrial production, many more were excluded from the production process due to the speed and discipline required in factory work. However, exclusion from production does not provide a full explanation to the creation of disability as a form of social oppression; modes and values of distribution play a vital part, using disability as a boundary category through which people are allocated either to the work-based or

need-based system of distribution. As Oliver points out, with the rise of capitalism, the institution became a major mechanism for exercising social control and dealing with the rejects of industrial production. The new science of psychology and psychiatry played a key role in the medicalisation of categories of paupers, separating those unwilling from those unable to work. This medicalisation deemed persons with disabilities as the ‘deserving poor’— those eligible for a need-based distribution—by considering them as naturally inferior. Although this made them eligible for state funds, initially via institutionalisation and later through community care, it also tied them to a status of inferiority and incompetence. As Paul Abberley points out, this inferior status is not an accident or negligence by well-intended professionals but a powerful tool for enforcing capitalist social order that depends on the willingness of the majority of people to constantly work while conceding to an unequal distribution of economic surplus. A materialist approach to disability studies, then, aims at severing the causal relationship between impairment and disability. Although impairment may restrict activity, it is not the cause of disability, defined as the ‘externally’ imposed restrictions on social participation. Furthermore, it identifies mechanisms for the production and distribution of wealth as the predominant factors of social organisation and hence as the origins of disability. It is therefore those social structures that researchers should focus on when studying disability, not individual bodies or psyches. Feminist and Subjective Approaches

Although acknowledging disability as a socially created form of oppression, many writers within disability studies have pointed out the limitation of a solely materialist analysis that focuses on economic participation to the exclusion of many other forms of social oppression. Feminist disability scholars such as Jenny Morris, Carol Thomas, and Donna Reeve have highlighted the need to attend to personal and subjective aspects of disability, arguing that focusing only on externally imposed restrictions reifies the public–private dichotomy and leaves many of the ways by which disablist oppression is internalised, embodied, and

Disability Studies

undertheorised and hence outside the scope of social transformation. The main argument of feminist disability scholars is that in the analysis of disability as a form of oppression, it is impossible to neatly separate social structures from personal experience, as subjectivities are constructed through experiences of living out discursive cultural practices from specific social and economic locations. Discrimination and oppression are located in social discourses and practices that work to produce certain subjectivities and thus influence what persons with disabilities can be as well as what they can do. For these reasons, feminist disability scholars call for the inclusion of subjective experiences of disability as a major tool in understanding and challenging disablist oppression. As Eli Clare argues, the body, or more accurately what people believe about their bodies, needs to be at the focus of change, so that they do not become storage sites for the very oppression that one aims to eradicate. Examples of those subjective dimensions of oppression are multiple. Through widely accepted discourses of genetic screening and abortions, people with the label of learning disability are exposed to the message that their lives are not worth living. Such messages often affect their sense of a place in the world and their feeling that they have a right to live; many express the feeling that they slipped into being because amniocentesis had not been booked. Persons with disabilities are exposed to social messages and representations that capture them as ‘ugly’, ‘tragic’, and ‘inferior’, an Other to be avoided. Even if all structural barriers to participation were removed, such strong social messages can clearly affect a person’s emotional well-being. Furthermore, persons with disabilities are exposed to what Michel Foucault calls the ‘normalising gaze’ that seeks to analyse, document, and train many aspects of their lives. Although this is largely done by professionals in medical, psychological, and educational institutions, it is by no means restricted to those settings; persons with disabilities are often exposed to the normalising gaze of passers-by on the street or other public places. These phenomena do not only occur externally, as people develop an awareness of how they are seen through the gaze of another and then modify

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their behaviour via self-surveillance to attempt to make themselves acceptable. Disability, then, does not reside in a particular body or environment but rather is an embodied relationship constructed through experiences of social, cultural, and emotional invalidation that are interconnected and mutually constitutive. A more controversial argument put forward by some feminist disability scholars is the need to include personal experiences of ‘impairment’ and not just of disability as an important part of disability studies. Leaving personal experiences of impairment outside the scope of social theory of disability implicitly conditions social inclusion on the suppression of negative bodily experiences (such as pain or fatigue), a task that many persons with disabilities can’t (and shouldn’t have to) accomplish. Removing disabling barriers means more than installing ramps or Braille sign posting. It also means considering stress, pain, fatigue, or the need for frequent medical treatment when organising work, education, family life, and political activism (amongst other things). It means claiming such experiences as an integral part of human life and supporting people in voicing their difficulties and in seeking ways to accommodate them as well as reducing the added stress of having to ignore such feelings when in public. Furthermore, although discourses of race, gender, class, and disability have their own ontological basis that cannot be reduced to one another, there is no separate concrete meaning in any of these categories; they are mutually constitutive in any specific historical moment. Having a disability is different for one who is middle class or working class, gay or straight, male or female, full citizen or illegal migrant, living in the city or in the country. Ignoring such differences in the attempt to theorise a universal idea of disability marginalises the experiences of and oppressions imposed on people of colour, gay and lesbian individuals, and others, and this serves as reification of those oppressions. Within specific cultural, economic, and historic conditions, people with impairment are being disabled, and these conditions are always gendered and racialized. In addition, disability is not only located in the meanings applied to the individual with impairments by others but also in the

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meanings that the individual assigns to the situations in which he or she negotiates social relations, and these meanings interact and affect each other. A British woman with multiple sclerosis might ascribe her denied immigration visa to her disability; a deaf Somalian denied asylum status in the United Kingdom might ascribe it to her nationality and status in a system of global capitalism. In  other words, what feminist disability scholars argue for is an understanding of disability as a form of identity and lived experience that is  enacted in many specific and changing interactions.

The Sociology of Impairment In focusing on the ways in which disability is socially produced, the social model has been instrumental in shifting debates about disability from biomedical agendas to discourses about politics, oppression, and liberation. However, this original focus was contingent on the binary distinction between ‘disability’, defined as social, and ‘impairment’, defined as natural and biological. Poststructuralist, queer, and recently disability studies scholars object to the perception of the body as naturally whole or broken and remind people that they always think about and experience the body through social norms and discourses. The discursive and social nature of the body is readily exemplified by cases of conjoined twins or organ transplantations, where bodies are surgically cleaved together or cleaved apart to satisfy the modern imperative of a self-sufficient body in the possession of one willing subject. But the distinction between one body and the other is blurred also in more mundane instances such as birth and pregnancy, sex, blood donation, or even touch. Bodies are interconnected not only with one another but also with the world and with machines. The act of walking is not contained within the body, but it is an interaction between different forces and matters—the contraction of the muscles, the elasticity and texture of the surface, and the presence of gravity. Ambulation can occur through the combination of body, surface, and gravity, as in walking, or in a combination of body and machine, such as riding a bicycle or rolling in a wheelchair.

Similarly, seeing is not contained in the eyes but is a combination of eyes, brains, and the presence of light in certain electromagnetic wavelengths. In this sense, blind people who ‘see’ with their hands or cane are not different from soldiers who use infrared binoculars to allow them night vision. What is defined as ‘impaired’ or ‘whole’ is never natural but always constructed by social and cultural perceptions. Persons with disabilities are not unique in their failure to satisfy modern assumptions of stability, separateness, and independence; rather, intercorporeality, vulnerability, and interdependence are characteristics of human existence that are not easily disguised by disciplinary power and self-sovereignty in the case of disability–impairment. Thus, many researchers call for the inclusion of impairment and the body under the scope of disability studies and for engagement with deconstructing disabling perceptions of the body and its functions alongside research into the social exclusion and oppression imposed upon such bodies. The focus of investigation here is the various social processes that lead to the problematisation of difference under certain impairment categories and the mechanisms and discourses employed in solving such identified so-called ‘impairments’. For example, consider how sex reassignment surgery is considered as a curative practice that seeks to restore the fit between body and mind, providing that patients prove that their subjectivity or sense of ‘self’ complies with culturally accepted norms of femininity or masculinity. On the other hand, self-demand amputation surgery is considered an assault on bodily integrity and is therefore delegitimized as a medical practice; the idea that there might be something ‘wrong’ with a fully limbed body contradicts the cultural body logic, or in other words, an inner identity of an amputee is not culturally and discursively available as a fully legitimate self. With the lack of such ‘self’ or identity from cultural norms, the demand to change the body is conceived as irrational and acting to distort rather than restore integrity. What this example shows is that medical practices and discourses, rather than being distinct from culture, are simultaneously shaping and being shaped by cultural and social norms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ bodies and minds.

Disability Studies in Education

Disability and Childhood Children with disabilities are often marginalised in disability studies literature. The discipline’s origin in Marxist theory has led to a significant focus on the exclusion of persons with disabilities from (paid) work and other marks of adult citizenship such as independent living, leaving little room for the lived experiences of children with disabilities. Most research involving these children is carried out from a ‘developmental’ paradigm that focuses on impairment and views their childhood as a deficient, lacking, or distorted version of what a ‘full’ or ‘normal’ childhood should look like. In recent years, there has been growing writing in the emergent field of childhood studies of children with disabilities. See, for example, work published in journals such as Disability & Society, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, and Disability and the Global South. This field shifts the focus away from discussion ‘about’ children with disabilities to an approach to ethics and research design that positions the voice and life experiences of these children. The field aims trouble the hegemony of the ‘norm’ and enable children with disabilities to step outside the ‘normative shadows’ that so often cloud discussions of their lives. This also entails rethinking children’s relationships with parents and caregivers, with family members, and with communities. This relational view is often missing in both the professional discourse that seeks to determine the internal abilities of an ‘individual’ and within disability studies that is sometimes suspicious of families and caregivers, who can be viewed as agents of oppression seeking to cure or normalise children with disabilities. Anat Greenstein See also Autism and Neurodiversity; Autism, Child Development, and Theory; Disabilities; Disabilities, Children With—Global South; Disability Studies in Education; Inclusion in Schools/Inclusive Education; Special Education

Further Readings Abberley, P. (1997). The concept of oppression and the development of a social theory of disability.

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In L. Barton & M. Oliver (Eds.), Disability studies: Past present and future (pp. 160–178). Leeds, UK: The Disability Press. Corker, M., & French, S. (Eds.). (1999). Disability discourse. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Davis, L. J. (Ed.). (2016). The disability studies reader (5th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Finkelstein, V. (1980). Attitudes and disabled people: Issues for discussion. New York, NY: World Rehabilitation Fund. Goodley, D. (2017). Disability studies: An interdisciplinary introduction (2nd ed.). London, UK: Sage. Grech, S., & Soldatic, K. (Eds.). (2016). Disability in the global south: The critical handbook. New York, NY: Springer. Mallett, R., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2014). Approaching disability: Critical issues and perspectives. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Oliver, M., & Barnes, C. (2012). The new politics of disablement. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Runswick-Cole, K., Curran, T., & Liddiard, K. (Eds.). (2018). The Palgrave handbook of disabled children’s childhood studies. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Shakespeare, T. (2013). Disability rights and wrongs revisited. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Swain, J., French, S., Barnes, C., & Thomas, C. (Eds.). (2013). Disabling barriers–enabling environments. London, UK: Sage. Thomas, C. (1999). Female forms: Experiencing and understanding disability. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Disability Studies

in

Education

An interdisciplinary field of inquiry, disability studies in education proposes that disability is socially, culturally, and politically constructed. A subset of disability studies more broadly, disability studies in education critically examines how disability and schooling intersect. Disability studies in education is often critical of special education practices that appropriate medical model views of disability (models that suggest disability is a deficit or tragedy to be overcome). It explores the intersections of education and disability across all grade levels, ranging from preschool to higher education.

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Disability Studies in Education

Following its origins in the 1990s, disability studies in education has continued to grow rapidly and to change the way education, rehabilitation, and children’s rights are understood and approached in learning environments. This entry offers background on the emergence of disability studies in education and its specific perspective and associated methodologies.

Background The first wave of disability studies in education was nebulous and originated prior to or alongside the broader field of disability studies, via critiques in the 1970s of the reliance on labeling within special education. Scholars within, or sometimes outside of, the field of special education challenged the labeling of disabled students in ways that categorized them as outsiders, especially for students labeled with mild mental retardation. These critiques shifted over time toward contesting the very concepts of mental retardation or disabilities themselves, highlighting that such concepts were often socially constructed. The more formal founding of disability studies in education as a field occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Linda Ware established an international conference in New York in 1999, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, which challenged biases within inclusive education. Shortly after, Scot Danforth submitted an application for a panel under the name of Coalition for Open Inquiry in Special Education at a national conference entitled The Association for Severely Handicapped. There, scholars challenged the boundaries of what was considered legitimate writing and research within special education journals. Recognizing that they were on the brink of establishing a new field of inquiry, these scholars considered various names and affiliations; led by Susan Gabel and Ware, they ultimately decided on disability studies in education in order to reinforce affiliations with Disability Studies more generally. A new special interest group within the American Education Research Association was formed, and the first special interest group met in 2000. Since the late 1990s, disability studies in education has evolved from a subdiscipline into a recognized field of educational study. In 2000, a journal was launched entitled Disability, Culture, &

Education, followed by an interdisciplinary journal entitled Journal of Disability Studies in Education. In 2001, an inaugural conference was hosted at National Louis University in Chicago. It emphasized disability studies in education’s attempts to link theorization with praxis. In 2004, a Summer Institute at the University of Chicago was led by Ware, David Mitchell, and Sharon Synder to investigate the tensions between theoretical and practical aspects of disability studies in education. From 2011 to 2014, disability studies in education conferences also encouraged those in the field to be self-reflexive about the field itself and its future. Degrees in higher education that bridge the fields of disability studies and education have grown at a rapid rate. Within the United States, for example, schools like Syracuse University, Temple University, Teachers College, National Louis University, Columbia University, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa have all expanded curriculum to include disability studies in education or have developed entirely new programs that encourage reconsideration of special education. Internationally, the Ontario Institute for Educational Studies, the University of Leeds, Liverpool Hope University, Sheffield Hallam University, Northumbria University, the University of Iceland, and the University of Helsinki also support the growth of disability studies in education.

Perspective and Approach Disability studies in education challenges approaches within special education practices that promote medical model views of disability. This may take the form of advocating within educational systems for the restructuring of curricular materials, the reformation of instructional methods, improvements in teacher training and education, or the interrogation of labels and diagnoses. In this sense, disability studies in education calls for acceptance of a greater multiplicity of disabilityrelated viewpoints and for shifts within narratives associated with disability. For example, disability studies in education has been critical of how special education planning may sometimes adopt the appearance of including families and disabled students in educational planning but privileges the perspectives of perceived experts and professionals over disabled students and their families.

Disability Studies in Education

Wary of medical models of disability, which suggest disability is a problem to be corrected in the individual, disability studies in education argues that social practices, attitudes, and beliefs are in fact what disable individuals. It operates under the assumption that the scientific, medical, and psychological models of disability that dominate theories and interventions in education may contain subtle or overt biases that favor able-bodied interests and assumptions. Such ableism, it argues, works to marginalize disability, when in fact disability is something the majority of individuals will experience at some point in their lives. Ableism can ­operate subtly in images of disability that circulate, through attitudes and beliefs toward disabled individuals, or by educational interventions and ­ practices that are developed with able-bodied or neurotypical perspectives in mind. Because of this, ableism can be an individual choice, but it is also institutionalized in educational or rehabilitative systems as practices over time get normalized. In an attempt to challenge traditional theoretical approaches and praxis-based interventions with the fields of education and rehabilitation services, disability studies in education privileges the voices and concerns of disabled individuals themselves. In this sense, the disability studies in education approach makes audible alternative perspectives that shift and disrupt mainstream assumptions about what disability means. Historically, it has critiqued special education for being disconnected from the lives and experiences of disabled students and their families. Disability studies in education is often linked to inclusive education. However, while inclusion and disability studies in education share many similarities, and while disability studies in education often supports inclusive practices, disability studies in education also occasionally seeks to reconceptualize even the notion of inclusion. Disability studies in education scholars have critiqued ableist assumptions within inclusive education research and praxis (i.e., the way inclusive education discourses sometimes adopt language that conceptualizes disabled students as exceptional or special). Disability studies in education also emphasizes that all students are diverse and require a range of services, resources, and practices. Power relations, therefore, remain a central focus of disability studies in education. The intersectionality of race, gender, class, and so on is

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more carefully considered from a disability studies in education perspective. Disability studies in education extends beyond simply interrogating disability, to exploring various inequities in social systems and how they intersect with disability (such as race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, or ethnicity). For instance, scholars within the field of disability studies in education, or within the subset of disability studies criticism known as DisCrit, have prioritized inquiries focused on the overrepresentation of students of color in special education, the school-to-prison pipeline, and opportunity gaps for disabled students of color that extend beyond primary or secondary school. Scholars have also interrogated the ways that assumptions about gender impact over- or underrepresentation of girls or boys in terms of labeling or diagnosis. In this way, disability studies in education is intersectional and prioritizes social justice, accessibility, and inclusion. It raises questions of agency and voice and emphasizes the civil and human rights of disabled students within education. To accomplish these goals, disability studies in education advocates contend that interdisciplinary research and practice are required in order to create equitable learning environments inclusive of all students. There is no singular theoretical framework used in disability studies in education, and open inquiry is encouraged. Frequently quantitative and qualitative methods are combined or set aside in favor of less objective methodologies that privilege first-person narratives, allowing disabled voices to move from the margins to the center. In addition, disability studies in education practitioners and theorists also concerned themselves with differentiated instruction as well as universal design for learning. Differentiated instruction attempts to promote diversity by encouraging modifications within classrooms. It asks that accommodations be made up or down so that all learners are able to participate and engage in classroom content. However, because it sometimes assumes that there is a baseline from which a normal learner operates, differentiated instruction has been critiqued for promoting subtly ableist biases. In contrast, universal design for learning encourages that abilities and skills be seen across a spectrum and discourages the idea that there is a normal student at all. It proposes consideration of a range of

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embodied differences and seeks to design spaces and tools so that they are accessible to a wide range of diverse abilities and experiences. It posits that benefits arise not just for individual students as a result but for the classroom community as a whole. Universal design for learning encourages preplanning rather than retrofitting, asking that spaces and practices be developed from the very start to appeal to a spectrum of preferences and approaches. Since universal design for learning draws from principles within architecture and engineering, such principles can be easily appropriated to educational classrooms. For example, school spaces can be designed to accommodate a range of body types and abilities (i.e., through choices that are made about how to design drinking fountains, seats and chairs, light switches, restrooms, or hallways). Disability studies in education approaches call for universal design for learning that can be applied to instructional practices, curriculum design, and assessments. A subset of universal design for learning is universal instructional design. Universal instructional design suggests that educational methods should include a diversity of hands-on methods, lectures, projects, and discussion. It advocates that the presentation of classroom materials should occur so that materials are available in electronic as well as print formats, so that images or video include text captions as well and that Internet-based materials are accessible to screen-readers and to auditory as well as visual learners. Assessment also occurs through a variety of modes that may include presentations, portfolios, video projects, or group work. Universal instructional design might involve designing course materials so that information can be conveyed through a variety of learning modalities (i.e., auditory, visual, kinesthetic) or so that teachers might vary pacing and lengths of lectures or assessments. In 2006, the National Universal Design for Learning Taskforce was created, led by individuals working in educational and disability organizations working in the United States. Its goal is to challenge national, state, and local policymaking so that universal design for learning is incorporated in a wider range of educational settings. Eva Lupold See also Autism and Neurodiversity; Children’s Rights; Disabilities; Special Education

Further Readings Baglieri, S., Valle, J. W., Connor, D. J., & Gallagher, D. J. (2011). Disability studies in education: The need for a plurality of perspectives on disability. Remedial and Special Education, 32(4), 267–278. doi:10.1177/ 0741932510362200 Bolt, D. (2018). Cultural disability studies in education: Interdisciplinary navigations of the normative divide. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/ 9781315102894 Connor, D. (2014). The disability studies in education annual conference: Explorations of working within, and against, special education. Disability Studies Quarterly, 34(2). doi:10.18061/dsq.v34i2.4257 Connor, D. J., Gabel, S. L., Gallagher, D. J., & Morton, M. (2008). Disability studies and inclusive education—implications for theory, research, and practice. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 12(5–6), 441–457. doi:10.1080/13603110802377482 Corcoran, T., White, J., & Whitburn, B. (Eds.). (2015). Disability studies: Educating for inclusion. New York, NY: Springer. Danforth, S., & Gabel, S. L. (Eds.). (2006). Vital questions facing disability studies in education (Vol. 2). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Freedman, J. E. (2016). Disability studies in education (DSE) and the epistemology of special education. In A. P. Michael (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 1–7). Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_451-1 Gabel, S. L. (Ed.). (2005). Disability studies in education: Readings in theory and method (Vol. 3). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Gilham, C. M., & Tompkins, J. (2016). Inclusion reconceptualized: Pre-service teacher education and disability studies in education. Canadian Journal of Education, 39(4), 1–25.

Discipline

and

Childhood

Child discipline is one of the most widely sought out, misunderstood, and hotly contested topics in parenting. Most parents and other caregivers have received or sought advice from health-care providers, family members, religious leaders, books, social media, and other sources on the best and most effective strategies to discipline children and respond to parent–child conflict. Approaches to ­ discipline reflect particular theoretical

Discipline and Childhood

perspectives, as well as scientific developments, which have evolved substantially over time. For example, a large and growing body of research demonstrates that physical punishment is detrimental to children’s development and to parent– child relationships. Advancements in the neurosciences and the social sciences, along with increasing global recognition of children’s fundamental human rights, have contributed to new conceptualizations of discipline. Although most contemporary disciplinary approaches reject physical punishment and are described with terms such as positive parenting or nonviolent parenting, many remain rooted in the foundational concept of adult control and enforcement of children’s compliance through rewards and punishments, including incentives that foster external motivation, threats of emotional loss or abandonment, and isolation and shame-based punishments. These top-down concepts of discipline are being replaced by new approaches that recognize children’s agency and the neurodevelopmental processes that underlie their learning. This entry provides a brief overview of key historical concepts of discipline and an overview of the fundamental principles of a contemporary approach based on current knowledge in the field.

Historical Perspectives on Discipline and Childhood Historical records illuminate vastly different views of children and childhood among prominent Western philosophers over time. For example, throughout the Middle Ages, the prevailing Christian notion of original sin held that children are born inherently evil and require beatings to rid them of their demonic tendencies. The Enlightenment era ushered in a different ideology of children and childhood. Philosophers including Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant maintained that children required strict education and discipline to overcome their animalistic instincts and irrational desires. Such beliefs enabled caregivers to beat, flog, leave for dead, or even kill their children with impunity in the name of discipline. Other prominent philosophers of the time, including John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, viewed

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children not as inherently evil but as blank slates—tabula rasa—lacking moral reasoning and capacity and in need of protection from institutions. However, as the property of their parents, they were still required to be subservient to the father and seen as benefitting from constant and firm direction from adults, often delivered as coercion, intimidation, fear, and pain. The turn of the 20th century brought industrialization to the Western world and with it a strong emphasis on individualism, competition, and productivity. The behaviorist movement (which adhered to the tabula rasa concept of children) became highly influential—particularly in North America—as it set out principles by which individual human behavior could be predicted, measured, shaped, and controlled. Operant learning principles were soon applied by employers to motivate workers to produce, by marketers to motivate consumers to buy products, and by teachers, parents, and psychologists to motivate children to behave well. Operant conditioning is based on administration of rewards and punishments contingent on an individual’s behavior. From this perspective, discipline became a matter of instilling obedience in children through positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, extinction, and punishment. Positive reinforcement is the administration of a rewarding consequence following a desirable behavior to motivate the child to increase that behavior. The range of potential reinforcers is vast, but common examples are reward charts, treats, money, and extra play time. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an aversive consequence to increase a desirable behavior. For example, if a child hates broccoli, the parent might say that if she has one bite, the rest can be put away. Extinction is the removal of positive reinforcement to decrease an undesirable behavior. Most commonly, it takes the form of withdrawing attention or ignoring. Punishment is the administration of an aversive consequence following an undesirable behavior to decrease the child’s motivation to perform that behavior. Common examples are social isolation or time-out, taking away things the child values, shaming the child, and hitting the child. An entire field of study grew to identify the most effective contingencies for shaping children’s behavior, and the findings were widely applied in schools and

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homes. As physical punishment began to fall out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s, the principal’s strap was replaced by sticker charts and time-out rooms, and parents sent their children to sit on naughty chairs or took away favorite toys to induce compliance. Although researchers could demonstrate that contingent rewards and punishments can indeed increase or decrease specific behaviors, critics of behaviorism argued that these methods miss the point of discipline—to understand and address the underlying reasons for children’s behavior so that the child’s own understanding can grow. They also argued that punishment, physical or otherwise, threatens children’s inherent need for a safe and secure attachment with a trusted caregiver to gain skills needed to respond to challenging situations. Attribution theory and research cast doubt on the power of rewards to motivate children, as they began to show that external rewards increase extrinsic motivation to obtain the reward—but actually dampen intrinsic motivation to learn. As behaviorism gained ground in North America, prominent European social scientists sought to understand how children’s understanding develops through their ongoing, natural interactions with the environment. Constructivists, such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, explored how children’s explorations and interactions with people and objects propel their learning and development. From this view, rewards are unnecessary to motivate children to learn; children are intrinsically motivated to master new skills and gain an understanding of how the world works. All that is needed is an environment that provides opportunities for safe exploration and interaction along with the support and guidance of a trusted caregiver. From this perspective, children are not misbehaving when they are learning about their environment through experimentation. Their inherent drives to explore, try out new solutions to problems, and master challenges are the basic ingredients in human development, not undesirable behaviors to be punished or extinguished. As constructivism’s influence grew, pedagogy began to shift to provide more freedom for self-­ discovery in early childhood and school settings, and discipline started to be seen as guiding, rather than controlling, children.

Professionals began to advise parents to make their homes safe for exploration rather than punishing children for touching objects. Free play became a valuable part of children’s days, as a time when they could concentrate on challenges that interested them, develop their social skills through imaginary play, and figure things out for themselves. From this perspective, discipline was seen as a bottom-up process of gaining understanding. This approach provided a stark contrast to the structure, rules, and contingency schedules of the behaviorist era. Advances in neurosciences have further enriched contemporary understandings of discipline. In particular, they have shed light on children’s responses to stress and routes to fostering their coping skills (i.e., self-regulation). When a child experiences fear or pain, the limbic system is aroused and the stress response (the “flight, fight or freeze” system) becomes activated. If the child does not have verbal or other means of coping with or regulating the level of arousal, the child becomes dysregulated. That is, the child might scream, yell, hit, bite, or otherwise express arousal through his or her behavior. A child in a dysregulated state is unable to process information and needs support in regaining emotional homeostasis. Driven by the limbic system, crying and screaming are the child’s innate signals for help. For the child to regain a calm emotional state, guidance is needed from a trusted and self-regulated adult. Once the child returns to a regulated emotional state, the higher order brain functions can be reengaged and the child can learn. On the other hand, if a caregiver interprets a child’s emotional upset as misbehavior to be punished, this is likely to increase the child’s stress and amplify the child’s dysregulation. From this perspective, discipline would consist of collaboration between the child and adult, or co-regulation, that helps the child learn self-regulation skills through modeling and practice. Thus, through the 20th century, the growing understanding of how children construct their knowledge and how they learn to deal with stress and frustration has contributed to an evolution of the meaning of discipline. From a behaviorist standpoint, discipline refers to top-down administration of consequences to shape the child’s behavior and has come to connote punishment. In fact,

Discipline and Childhood

modern usage of the word discipline implies control by an authority and obedience by a subordinate. But the word is being taken back to its foundations, better reflecting its original meaning, which is rooted in the Latin discere, meaning to learn. Disciplina means instruction, and discipulus means pupil. Therefore, the original meaning of discipline was learning and understanding by a student, without connotations of punishment. Through constructivist influences, discipline became associated with the innate drive to learn—a bottom-up process of gaining insight, understanding, and problem-solving skills. Neuroscience has recast discipline as a collaboration through which adults co-regulate with the child through stressful moments, fostering development of the neural architecture required for self-regulation. Interpersonal neurobiologists Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson suggest that the overall aim of discipline is not to punish or dole out consequences but rather to think of the child as a disciple, someone who learns through gentle guidance and mentorship. Others integrate a human rights perspective into the concept of discipline, recognizing children’s rights to be cared for by their parents, to participate in their learning, and to be protected from physical and other emotional forms of punishments. All these post-behaviorist perspectives share the idea that the ultimate goal of discipline is for the child to learn from stress and conflict in a way that promotes self-regulation and strengthens mutual trust and respect between children and adults.

Principles of Discipline in a Post-Behaviorist Era Several contemporary parenting approaches aim to promote positive parenting and positive discipline. Although many approaches have similar sounding names, their underlying principles can differ in substantial ways. For example, programs based on the behaviorist approach equate positive discipline with rewarding desirable behaviors and extinguishing or punishing undesirable behaviors. These approaches are sometimes called lite forms of positive discipline; they have generally moved away from physical punishment but remain based on a traditional top-down behaviorist model. The strong form of positive discipline is not top-down but

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collaborative, focused on promoting strong adult– child relationships through communication and reciprocity. Whereas the lite approach is associated with higher levels of child compliance, the strong approach is associated with better emotional adjustment in children. The child rights perspective has brought a new dimension to the concept of discipline. Its focus on children’s agency, participation, and dignity challenges traditional approaches that ignore or punish children. A child rights framework calls for approaches to teaching and guiding children that respect the following: •• The right to protection: To uphold this fundamental right, discipline must not be painful, violent, cruel, humiliating, degrading, or otherwise emotionally harmful. Rather, it must ensure the child’s physical and emotional safety. •• Recognition of children’s evolving capacities: Thus, the child’s level of understanding must be taken into account, and adult actions should scaffold the child’s learning in a way that builds on his or her knowledge. (Scaffolding is a process whereby the adult assesses the child’s current level of understanding and facilitates the next step in mastery through prompting, questioning, and modeling.) •• Respect for the child’s individuality: Children’s temperaments and innate predispositions affect their responses to stress, frustration, and conflict and influence the ways in which they learn. Their individual strengths and challenges require individualized solutions to parent–child conflict. •• The right to participation: Children have inherent personhood and agency and their own perspectives on situations. Rather than viewing the conflict situation only from the adult perspective, one needs to hear and consider the child’s perspective and invite the child’s participation in resolving the conflict. When this occurs, a collaborative solution to the conflict can often be found. Of course, the child’s capacity to participate in conflict resolution evolves over time. But when the process is started early, the child will gradually learn ways of doing this. •• The right to discipline that respects the child’s dignity: Discipline approaches that uphold children’s dignity promote trust, communication, and problem-solving; involve co-regulation; and model respectful relationships.

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Discipline conceived as collaborative and rights based looks very different from discipline conceived as top-down and based on rewards and punishments. It focuses on children’s learning over the long term, understanding and facilitating their neurological and psychological development. Thus, adult actions are based not on providing short-term consequences for behavioral infractions but on a long-term vision that guides them as they scaffold the child’s learning. Collaborative rights-based discipline approaches also prioritize the child’s physical and emotional security, recognizing the counterproductive role of stress and fear in children’s learning. These approaches also distinguish clearly between discipline and punishment, viewing the former as mentorship and the latter as coercion.

Transformation and Change Over the past century, a transformation has occurred in the concept of discipline, from corporal punishment to behaviorist contingency schedules to collaborative, participatory mentorship. Globally, as children are increasingly viewed as rights-bearers, physical and psychological punishments are increasingly viewed as forms of violence. Indeed, a growing number of countries (now 56) have legally abolished such punishments, reflecting the contemporary view of children as agents with capacities and valid perspectives. Discipline based on developmental science and neuroscience and that recognizes children’s fundamental human rights empowers children to learn from stress and conflict in a way that encourages self-regulation and strengthens mutual trust between children and adults. But the deeply entrenched equation of discipline with punishment necessitates the strengthening of caregiver support to deepen the understanding, knowledge, and skills needed to implement contemporary collaborative approaches in everyday interactions with children. Ashley Stewart-Tufescu See also Childhood; Children’s Rights; Corporal Punishment; Neuroscience; Parenting

Further Readings Afifi, T. O., Ford, D., Gershoff, E. T., Merrick, M., Grogan-Kaylor, A., Ports, K. A., . . . Bennett, R. P. (2017). Spanking and adult mental health impairment: The case for the designation of spanking as an adverse childhood experience. Child Abuse & Neglect, 71, 24–31. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.01.014 Butchart, A., Hillis, S., & Burton, A. (2016). INSPIRE: Seven strategies for ending violence against children. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. Durrant, J. E. (2013). Positive discipline in everyday parenting (PDEP). Stockholm, Sweden: Save the Children Sweden. Retrieved from http:// resourcecentre.savethechildren.se/library/ positive-discipline-everyday-parenting-third-edition Durrant, J. E., Plateau, D. P., Ateah, C. A., Holden, G. W., Barker, L. A., Stewart-Tufescu, A., . . . Ahmed, R. (2017). Parents’ views of the relevance of a violence prevention program in high, medium, and low human development contexts. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 41(4), 523–241. doi:10.1177/0165025416687415 Durrant, J. E., Plateau, D. P., Ateah, C. A., StewartTufescu, S., Jones, A., Ly, G., . . . Tapanya, S. (2014). Preventing punitive violence: Preliminary data on the positive discipline in everyday parenting (PDEP) program. Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health, 33, 109–125. doi:10.7870/cjcmh-2014-018 Durrant, J. E., & Stewart-Tufescu, A. (2017). What is “discipline” in the age of children’s rights? International Journal of Children’s Rights, 25(2), 359–379. doi:10.1163/15718182-02502007 Gershoff, E. T., & Grogan-Kaylor, A. (2016). Spanking and child outcomes: Old controversies and new metaanalyses. Journal of Family Psychology, 30, 453–469. doi:10.1037/fam0000191 Gershoff, E. T., Lee, S. J., & Durrant, J. E. (2017). Promising intervention strategies to reduce parents’ use of physical punishment. Child Abuse & Neglect, 71, 9–23. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.01.017 Greene, R. W. (2016). Raising human beings: Creating a collaborative partnership with your child. New York, NY: Scribner. Grogan-Kaylor, A., & Otis, M. D. (2007). The predictors of parental use of corporal punishment. Family Relations, 56(1), 80–91. Lansford, J. E., Cappa, C., Putnick, D. L., Bornstein, M. H., Deater-Deckard, K., & Bradley, R. H. (2017). Change over time in parents’ beliefs about and reported use of corporal punishment in eight

Disney countries with and without legal bans. Child Abuse & Neglect, 71, 44–55. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2016.10.016 Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2014). No-drama discipline: The whole-brain way to calm the chaos and nurture your child’s developing mind (1st ed.). New York, NY: Bantam. United Nations. (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. Geneva, Switzerland: Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. (2017). A familiar face: Violence in the lives of children and adolescents. New York, NY: Author.

Disney Disney refers to the American filmmaker Walter Elias Disney (1901–1966), the studio he founded, the expanding corporate and entertainment entities that grew from the studio, and the commercial and cultural ethos associated with them. Beginning with the studio’s earliest output in the 1920s, Disney and U.S. childhood have partially defined each other. With children presumed to be in Disney’s audience, Disney’s products have informed and participated in the cultural understanding of childhood through films, television, music, theme parks, and other media. The influence of Disney’s representations of childhood, gender, race, and nationality has been debated in popular and scholarly discourse, and the Disney company itself has responded to these debates in its ongoing production practices and marketing strategies. This entry examines the history of Disney, its widespread influence on media, entertainment, childhood, and politics in the United States and beyond, and some scholarly critiques of the Disney franchise.

The History of Disney Disney became the standard for child and family media in the 20th century by positioning itself as good for children, their education, their development, and their socialization in the face of concerns about the negative effects of mass media. The company’s domination in animated shorts and features strengthened the association between animation and childhood, especially after the

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success of its first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). While Disney’s earlier cartoon shorts had been anarchical and irreverent, a turn to more sentimental stories and naturalizing aesthetics beginning in the 1930s contributed to a nostalgic ideal of childhood and its storytelling worlds that dominated the ­American mid-20th century. The classic Disney style in this vein is exemplified by films adapted from fairy tales and children’s literature, such as ­Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Mary ­Poppins (1964).

Disney’s Media and Entertainment Empire The subsequent expansion of the company to television, theme parks, and other media cemented its role in defining childhood in the postwar era and into the 21st century. Disneyland, which opened in 1955, was cross-promoted with television programs like Walt Disney’s Disneyland (1954–1958) and The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–1959). Disney’s ancillary products, including comic books, toys, and the famous Mickey Mouse watch, entered the home and school, forming an integral part of the material culture of childhood. In the 1980s, the Disney Channel was established as a platform on which Disney could release and produce its own content. More recently, blocks of programming aimed at different ages have split off into additional channels such as Disney Junior and Disney XD. The acquisition of franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars was part of an effort to appeal to boy and young-adult audiences, where the traditional features had recently more success with girls and tweens. Songs from animated features and Disney Channel programs, along with recordings of original material, exerted profound influence on the commercial children’s music industry. Most Disney productions included songs, which provided content for Disney’s own recording labels, Disneyland and Buena Vista records. Disney’s acquisition of ABC furthered its reach in the telecommunicative landscape, as did the establishment of Radio Disney in 1996. Crossover

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marketing between television and music using Disney teen stars like Brittney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers allowed Disney to establish a strong presence in the tween music market. Marketing its films and products, educational and otherwise, to schools and the general public, Disney constructed the child consumer in its image and set the contours of children’s consumer culture and culture industries. Through these media structures, Disney propagated its idealized representations of childhood. Walt Disney’s biography and close personal identification with the studio were instrumental in this effort. The middle-American childhood Disney remembered from his own youth in Missouri inspired films like So Dear to My Heart (1949), and theme park attractions like Disneyland’s Main Street USA and Tom Sawyer Island. In psychological accounts of Disney’s life, Disney’s idealized fictive childhoods are a foil for Walt Disney’s complicated relationship with his overbearing and possibly abusive father, an idea recently dramatized in Disney’s own Saving Mr. Banks (2013). The frequent absence of fathers or inclusion of distant ones in Disney films is seen as a legacy of this biographical detail. At the same time, by standing in for this missing father figure, Walt himself became a spokesperson for the national character.

Disney and Childhood Disney and childhood reinforce each other’s claims to innocence. Through images of idyllic American childhood, along with the materials of fairy tale and literary classics, Disney has promoted an American childhood that is innocent and sentimental, at the same time that its children are citizens in the making and consumers at the center of Disney’s capitalist enterprise. Disney’s child is predominantly White and middle class, offered as natural and universal. The prominence of animals and nature in Disney productions, from the live-action nature films like The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954) to the birds and mice that surround Disney princesses, promotes the closeness of Disney and childhood to the natural world and its goodness. Disney promotes the idea of the child inside, the adult child, or the young at heart in its marketing to all ages, and kidults are among Disney’s most ardent fans. Its fairy tale tropes and the promise

that “dreams come true” are aimed largely at adults in search of a lost childhood of magic and wonder. Many parents eagerly pass fandom from Disney to their children, and both Disney films and the theme parks are cross-generational pastimes. Disney constructs its ideal child in a media landscape and built environment evoking the imagined places, spaces, and geographies of childhood. Pinocchio’s “When You Wish Upon a Star” became the signature tune accompanying the Disney studio logo at the beginning of each film, and Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell is the company mascot, reminding us of the fairy magic surrounding the boy who wouldn’t grow up. The worlds of childhood are nowhere more apparent than in the theme parks, where the architecture is oriented toward childhood and nostalgia through its subtly scaled-down proportions. Fantasyland embodies the world of the child’s imagination, while Tomorrowland and Epcot center implicate the child and the nuclear family in their visions of futuristic citizenship. Frontierland brings this futurity and orientation toward the horizon into conversation with a nationalist narrative of territorial expansion.

Disney’s Politics Disney’s child-oriented content may cause it to appear innocent, but this innocence has been challenged by audiences and scholars who critique Disney’s representations of gender, race, and sexuality. Racial stereotypes are evident in the early cartoon shorts’ reliance on minstrel tropes, the patronizing portrayals of African Americans in Dumbo and Song of the South (1946), and the racialized jungle animals in The Jungle Book (1967). The Disney Princess franchise is a source of some criticism for its representation of gender roles. Although these representations have changed over time, debates continue about whether each iteration of the Disney Princess reinforces traditional roles or points toward more liberated ones. The addition of Tiana from The Princess and the Frog (2009) to the princess franchise was considered absolutely important for Black girls but also somewhat belated and insufficient. More recent Disney Princesses such as Moana (2016) and ­Disney-owned Pixar’s Merida (Brave, 2012) were hailed as improvements over the damsels in distress of the past, but the latter’s portrayal in

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redesigned illustrations for her coronation into the Disney Princess Line was criticized for returning to an unrealistic body image. These conversations are all the more urgent because the products closest to the core of the Disney brand are marketed to girls. Despite the company’s predominantly conservative politics and ongoing difficulties with gender and race representations, the queer subtexts of Disney films are widely acknowledged as both the product of queer authorship and an object of queer fandom. While social and religious conservatives criticize the company for any suggestions of sexuality, queer fans embrace the gender nonconformity of certain Disney characters, especially Disney villains, whose ranks include strong women, effete men, and characters with bodies that defy categorization, as Ursula the Sea Witch’s does. Heroes and heroines are coded and read queerly as well. Mulan resonates with feminist and trans experiences as well as cultural practices of cross-dressing. Frozen (2013) was praised and condemned on various sides for the available queer subtext of its story of a misfit queen, while people of many backgrounds identified with its story of difference and power. Disney is a feature of global childhood and its Americanization. Disney’s goodwill projects in Latin America during the 1940s resulted in Donald Duck’s becoming a popular character in the region, despite colonialist overtones in the films Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944). A trip to Disney World is a birthday rite of passage for Brazilian teenagers. The Disney parks, like the films, are an international franchise, with locations in Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai duplicating, with local variations, Anaheim’s Disneyland and Buena Vista’s Walt Disney World. Many international Disney fans and consumers embrace Disney products even while acknowledging, and critiquing, their national and ethnic stereotypes.

Scholarly Critiques of Disney Much scholarly literature on Disney focuses on the relationship between corporate hegemony and consumers’ agency or relative lack thereof. Disneyfication and the Disney version refer to the ways in which Disney’s adaptations of fairy tales and other properties displace the presumably more authentic originals. Some regard Disney as more or less

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irredeemably corrupting, while others have a great deal more faith in the ability of fans and consumers to make their own meanings of Disney texts. Still others take a more nuanced view, describing Disney’s fans, both adults and children, as collaborators in Disney’s construction of its own image and that of childhood. Within these debates, some assessments of Disney are more explicitly concerned with childhood than others. Where children’s agency is emphasized, theories of play have been useful in showing how children make their own uses and interpretations of Disney texts as part of their folklore or creative play culture, even as Disney, to some extent establishes the meaning and parameters of creativity through the influence of its branding machine. Disney itself, especially recently, engages in self-referential play and winking acknowledgment of its own film canon. An ironic stance shared by producers and audiences is evident, for example, in the self-parodying Enchanted (2007). Disney’s self-referencing is perhaps a response to audiences’ growing sophisticated understanding of the company’s corporate practices, appealing to the audience’s affectionate recollections while possibly staving off in advance likely criticisms in an ongoing game of nostalgia and critique between Disney and its audiences. Ryan Bunch See also Childhood Nostalgia; Children’s Culture Industry; Fairy Tales; in the Western Tradition; Innocence; Media, Children and; Theme Parks

Further Readings Bak, M. (2016). Building blocks of the imagination: Children, creativity, and the limits of Disney infinity. The Velvet Light Trap, 78, 53–64. doi:10.7560/ vlt7805 Giroux, H. A., & Pollock, G. (2010). The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Griffin, S. (2000). Tinker belles and evil queens: The Walt Disney company from the inside out. New York: New York University Press. Pugh, T., & Aronstein, S. (Eds.). (2012). The Disney middle ages: A fairy-tale and fantasy past. New York, NY: Springer. Sammond, N. (2005). Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the making of the American child,

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1930–1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822386834 Smoodin, E. L. (Ed.). (1994). Disney discourse: Producing the magic kingdom. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. doi:10.4324/9780203873267 Telotte, J. P. (2010). The mouse machine: Disney and technology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. West, M. I. (Ed.). (2016). Disneyland and culture: Essays on the parks and their influence. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Distributed Violence Distributed violence is a concept that is sensitive to the unequal concentration of the right to, means of, and vulnerability to, violence. It highlights how violence is spread over space, time, and between people and groups. It further maintains that how violence is distributed has implications for how it is perceived, whether as legitimate or illegitimate, normal or exceptional, and acceptable or unacceptable. This entry offers a definition of distributed violence and further explores its impact and manifestations. Specific attention is given to the impact of distributed violence on children and youth.

Understanding Distributed Violence in Context To ask about how violence is distributed is to inquire into who is seen to have the right to violence and conversely who is not. The most obvious exemplar of this is the modern nation-state, which Max Weber famously defines as that human community that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate violence within a defined territory. Having such a monopoly on the legitimate use of force means that the state can also distribute this right to other agencies, associations, or individuals (e.g., law enforcement, military and paramilitary, religious authorities, educational institutions) to the extent that the state itself permits this. At the international level, however, it is clear that the legitimacy of violence is distributed differently between nation-states. In other words, violence permitted or committed by one state—whether structural or direct—may be broadly condemned

by many other states and international bodies, while violence committed by another state may be seen as a legitimate exercise of state sovereignty or national security. One example of this is the various ways that different children are treated when attempting to cross international borders. In certain countries (e.g., Australia), children have been detained for lengthy periods in detention centers for processing and kept separate from family members and prospects of care. In these settings, children have been subjected to physical, sexual, and psychological abuse from guards and other detainees and had the ability to move, play, and remain healthy revoked. In many settings, children being detained in circumstances such as these would not be tolerated, but in contexts of national security and increasingly militarized state borders, the notion of children’s rights can be decimated as part of a governmental agenda.

Violence as Differently Distributed A closely related line of inquiry concerns how the means of violence are differently distributed. If modern nation-states are assumed to be the rightful bearers of legitimate violence, then it is perhaps unsurprising that they are also the predominant bearers of the means of direct violence (e.g., weapons) and structural violence (e.g., institutions). However, they are by no means the only bearers of such means, as is evinced by nonstate or transnational groups who may be responding to a perceived initial violence by the state. The promotion and enactment of violence by disaffected young people in the name of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria against the established order in modern nation-states is one overspectacularised exemplar of this. People and groups in positions of relative dominance within societies may also enact violence. Examples of this include violence against women and girls by men in positions of power and radicalized violence toward minority youth and children in both direct and indirect forms. A consequence of the unequal concentration of the right to violence and its means is the rendering of some people and groups more vulnerable to its effects relative to others. This is especially true of those who occupy relatively subordinate or marginalized positions within particular societies, as

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well as those who live in nations and regions that are peripheral to centers of power. Such violence is often compounded by an injurious invisibility, especially when it occurs in private spaces (e.g., domestic or family violence), is assumed to be normal (e.g., disproportionate incarceration of certain populations), and where violence is spread out over a long period of time (e.g., environmental toxicity). Victoria Rawlings and Remy Low See also Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of; Relational Violence; Violence

Further Readings Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. London, UK: Verso. Low, R. (2016). Making up the Ummah: The rhetoric of ISIS as public pedagogy. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 38(4), 297–316. doi:1 0.1080/10714413.2016.1203679 Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15, 11–40. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press.

Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara Barbara Estelle Dockar-Drysdale (née Gordon; 1912–1999) was a British psychotherapist who treated both adults and children but is best known for her work with children and young people, especially at the Mulberry Bush School, which she founded in 1948 with the support of her husband, and led as coprincipal until 1964; and the Cotswold Community, a therapeutic community for boys for which she was Consultant Psychotherapist and Therapeutic Advisor for 20 years from 1969. She discovered her calling by accident working with refugees and evacuees during the Second World War, and then actively sought professional training among specialists in children’s psychiatry, as well as undergoing a personal analysis. Supported and encouraged by her mentor and friend, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, she transformed her work at the Mulberry

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Bush and the Cotswold Community into rich and accessible concepts which continue to be influential in understanding and managing the consequences of early traumatic experience in children, and the challenges and stresses this places on institutions and adults who live and work with them. DockarDrysdale is particularly identified with the concepts of the frozen and archipelago child, in whom traumatic interruption of primary experience in early infancy leaves the child with unmet fundamental needs and the basic good enough experience required for integration and the formation and discovery of a secure self. The resulting stresses are virtually intolerable for the child itself and for those around it, and almost irresolvable outside a specialist environment through which the child can be therapeutically held and in which appropriate reparative primary experience can be given and received. The Mulberry Bush School, which she founded, continues as an internationally regarded leader in the residential treatment of children with severe and complex social, emotional, and behavioral needs, having added a new 52-week-a-year provision in 2018. Barbara Estelle Gordon was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 17, 1912, the youngest of five daughters in a prominent Anglo-Irish Protestant family. Her father, Thomas Eagleson Gordon, was a senior surgeon at Dublin’s Adelaide Hospital, Professor of Surgery at Trinity College Dublin, and was twice elected president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. Barbara ascribed to her father her intellectual formation and her ability to use her mind, although his conservative principles prevented her, as a woman, from studying medicine. Barbara’s mother, Ellen Marguerite Gordon (born Blake), came from a deeply rooted Irish family. She appeared in Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland as a lineal descendant of Richard Caddell (alias Blake), Sheriff of Connaught in 1306, and in The Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval’s The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal, as a direct descendant of King Edward III. Her adventurous free range childhood on an island in the middle of a lake in rural Connemara created a template for the early regime at the Mulberry Bush, while her lineage gave Barbara a profound sense of foundation. Barbara grew up in a fashionable part of urban Dublin in an aspirational, loving, and secure family. Her private tutoring as a younger child

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included Greek, and as a teenager, she attended Alexandra College for girls, where she prepared for a university education. The world outside was less secure. Her birth in 1912 coincided with the start of the Irish Revolution, and her childhood included World War I, in which her father served in France as a temporary military surgeon in 1917, the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the War of Irish Independence following the war, the  creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, and the Civil War that followed. In 1929, the family’s security was disrupted with the sudden illness and death of her father. Barbara was 16 years, emotionally devastated, and the family in financial distress. University was out of the question, and to prepare her for a professional life, as an international librarian, she was sent to live and learn German with family friends in Vienna. Her hosts, the Herr Wittgensteins, were among the Austrian aristocracy, lived in a castle, and Wittgenstein was a curator of the historical collections of Austria. She returned to Ireland 2 years later fluent in ­German and with lifelong friends. When she came to read Sigmund Freud, it was in the original, encouraged by the refugee Austrian psychotherapist Milan Morgenstern, who helped with the Mulberry Bush School accounts. When Barbara returned to Ireland in 1931 at 18 years, it was to fall in love almost immediately with a visiting Englishman; become engaged; move with her mother to the English village of Blewbury in Berkshire to be near her future husband, while he established himself sufficiently to marry; and set up her first playgroup-cum-­ preschool in the village. The Englishman was Stephen Dockar-Drysdale, son of William Dockar-Drysdale, a successful Berkshire squire, close personal friend of Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald, High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1909, chair of the local magistrate and police courts for over 40 years, and listed in Kelly’s Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes from 1899 until his death in 1952. Stephen was the second youngest in a family of seven children (five survived to adulthood). His mother came from a comfortable and well-­ educated London family and maintained a welcoming Victorian household for the many friends and visitors entertained at Wick Hall, the beautiful and rambling family seat near Oxford. His

childhood was a secure country childhood, and as a member of a prominent family deeply woven into the fabric of the local farming, business, and political community, he and the extended DockarDrysdale family offered Barbara an actively and financially supporting environment of dynamic stability and foundation in which to explore her dreams, skills, and ideas. Stephen completed his education, took on managing farms in the family estate, and married Barbara in 1936. They moved into the estate’s ­ Home Farm and started a family. Sally was born in 1937, William in 1938, Charles in 1943, and Caroline in 1945. The context for Barbara’s work and achievements over the next quarter of a century include pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a family within the therapeutic environments she created, for troubled children with whom her own shared their lives. Barbara started a nursery/preschool at Home Farm for local children, including those of the masters of nearby Radley College, and locally stationed military personnel. The onset of war in 1939 brought evacuees and refugees to the area, and three unaccompanied children lived with the family. Barbara hired a qualified teacher, and children’s ­ nannies helped, but with growing numbers and more children with deeper needs—local professionals began to recognize Barbara’s skills and refer children to her—the little school outgrew the relatively isolated farm site and moved to a large private house in the nearby town of Abingdon. A mulberry tree in the garden, around which the children had their morning milk, symbolized Barbara’s growing awareness of her skills and direction, and “The Mulberry Bush” gave a name for it. When Stephen was called into the Army in 1945, the family had to leave Home Farm, and the family and the school moved together into new premises in the village of Radley, into a large Victorian house in which the school became a residential community: Some 2 dozen people, including mothers with babies, nannies, nursemaids, children, and cooks, lived together under Barbara’s direction. In the long shadow of the war, the country began to rebuild, with new health, social, and education reforms redefining the role of the state in individual and community health and well-being. The National Health Service opened in 1948. Barbara was encouraged by widening circles of professionals to continue her work and by 1947

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was taking formal clinical referrals from local authorities in London. When Stephen demobilized in 1948, they bought a rambling farm in the village of Standlake in Oxfordshire, far from traffic and with fields and trees for the children. This became The Mulberry Bush School and their new family home. It was the focus of Barbara’s work for the next 16 years, after which, in 1969, following a brief time as Therapeutic Consultant to the Mulberry Bush, she began 20 years as Psychotherapeutic Consultant and Advisor with the Cotswold Community, a former failing and abusive Approved School, which began transformation into a therapeutic community for older boys in 1967. Craig Fees See also Mulberry Bush School; Winnicott, Donald W.

Further Readings Beedell, C. (1999). Obituary: Barbara Dockar-Dysdale. The Independent (April 7, 1999). Retrieved March 3, 2018, from https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ obituary-barbara-dockar-drysdale-1085810.html Bridgeland, M. (1971). Barbara Dockar-Drysdale. In M. Bridgeland (Ed.), Pioneer work with maladjusted children: A study of the development of therapeutic education (pp. 273–279). London, UK: Staples Press. Dockar-Drysdale, B. (1968). Therapy in child care. London, UK: Longmans. Dockar-Drysdale, B. (1973). Consultation in child care (Reprinted with Therapy in Child Care as Therapy and Consultation in Child Care, 1993). London, UK: Free Association Books. Dockar-Drysdale, B. (1990). The provision of primary experience: Winnicottian work with children and adolescents. London, UK: Free Association Books. Reeves, C. (2004, September 23). Drysdale, Barbara Estelle Dockar- [née Barbara Estelle Gordon] (1912–1999), psychotherapist. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved March 3, 2018, from http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128e-72159 Whitwell, J. (2018). Preface: The Cotswold community: The story of a pioneering therapeutic community. In C. Bradley & F. Kinchington (Eds.), Revealing the inner world of traumatised children and young people: An attachment-informed model for assessing emotional needs and treatment (pp. 12–27). London, UK: Jessica Kingsley.

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Dolls—a figure of a human used especially as a child’s plaything—have experienced major transformations in appearance and purpose as they have moved from adult worlds to girls’ cultures. The material culture of dolls and their shifting meanings have been shaped by changing constructions of girlhood and womanhood, as well as broad political, economic, social, and cultural forces— from colonialism to industrialization and globalization, the Enlightenment to multiculturalism, civil rights to feminisms, adversity to prosperity, and world wars to the culture wars. This entry examines the early history of dolls in the United States, how both consumer and play cultures impacted their development over time, and the market and role of dolls in the United States since the 1950s.

Dolls in the Pre-Columbian and Colonial Periods The prehistoric Anasazi created figures that look like dolls but along with similar artifacts found elsewhere in North America, these archeological finds reveal little about their place in Native American culture and their purpose in the lives of children during the millennia before European contact. Historians surmise that, like the Hopi Kachina dolls dating back to the 10th century, doll-sized figures served religious and educational functions in the Southwest and elsewhere. Even though girls’ labor was critical to survival, they probably also played with toys. But while Jesuit missionaries observed that 17th-century Native American parents were indulgent and permissive, there is no indication when cornhusk dolls and others formed from materials native to different regions became playthings. Around 1585, John White, an artist and an early pioneer of English settlement, painted a watercolor of a preadolescent Algonquian girl holding the first European doll to land in the New World. The English explorers gave the Native American girl the Bartholomew’s babe according to the first book about the New World published in 1590 that also included a stylized rendering of the original painting. Other Puppets and babes also appeared in

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portraits of European noble girls like Arabella Stuart, considered a possible successor to Queen Elizabeth, after whom Virginia was named. While the wood and wax figures of adult women modeling the latest fashions for the well-heeled and their skillful dressmakers circulated among European courts, they had yet to become girls’ toys. Early European settlements remained inhospitable to dolls, few of which, if any, emigrated along with waves of immigrants to Early America. Seventeenth-century demands of subsistence economies, the slave trade, religious orthodoxy, and other factors curtailed women’s leisure and children’s play from New England to New Spain. A rising migration of dolls occurred as a result of increasing prosperity, international trade, growing secularization, and the expansion of a colonial elite in the 18th century. English and French fashion dolls showcasing the latest couture for women circulated widely—even across enemy lines. Although at war, France and England exempted fashion dolls from import embargos in 1712 and even provided dolls with a cavalry escort. The influence of Enlightenment pedagogues and philosophers who endorsed children’s play generally, and girls’ doll play in particular, led those adults with money and means to import dolls for their daughters. Several decades after William Penn brought Letitia Penn, a Queen Anne doll dressed in Indian silk, from England to a girl in Philadelphia in 1699, a ship’s captain carried a French Pandora home to his daughter, Anstiss, in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1759, George Washington gave his 4-year-old stepdaughter a neatly dressed Wax Baby doll he ordered from an English toymaker, and 2 years later, he bought several more. By the time the proprietor of a millinery shop advertised dressed and undressed Babies in The Virginia Gazette in 1772, an important cultural shift had been already under way. Although French, English, and German-made dolls still looked like elegantly dressed women, the fragile wood and plaster dolls ceased to serve as fashion models for women consumers and instead catered to the well-to-do daughters of colonial elites. In lavish paintings of elite American girls holding European dolls, John Singleton Copley, the leading artist of portraiture in the colonies, and Charles Wilson Peale joined other artists who represented changing notions of girlhood and dollhood.

Dolls and the Rise of the Consumer Class The rapid expansion of the market economy during the early decades of the 19th century linked consumers of the new middle class in the United States to producers of composition (made from sawdust, glue, etc.) and porcelain doll heads in Germany. The hourglass figures of doll bodies, whether imported or homemade, matched engravings of European feminine ideals in the expanding print culture. Eager to foster democratic values, domestic skills, and self-discipline among American girls who were increasingly less inclined to sew than to shop by midcentury, Catharine Beecher and other experts promoted doll making in child-rearing guides and household treatises. Despite the increasing availability of imported glazed china dolls, who appeared with girls in vernacular portraits painted by itinerant painters, the high-priced and highly fragile dolls were less plentiful and popular among girls who often preferred dolls made from scraps of cloth, mattress ticking, and other durable materials. On the Plains, cornhusk, corncob, and pinecone dolls slept in doll beds made out of dried leaves and cooked on stoves made out of hollowed stumps. While some Native American dolls were made out of buckskin and glass beads, Yuma Indians who lived in western Colorado made ceramic dolls. In the Southeast, palmetto leaf dolls donned colorful patchwork clothing. Handmade Topsy Turvy dolls—a Black doll and a White one joined at the waist and named after the enslaved girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—embodied master/slave relations, especially among girls and women in the plantation South. Although American inventors and entrepreneurs like Charles Goodyear and Thomas Edison applied masculine skills and sensibilities to doll invention, neither Black and White rubber dolls made before the U.S. Civil War or talking dolls produced after it could commercially compete with the bisque (unglazed porcelain) dolls that flooded the American toy market with splendor from abroad. From the 1860s to the end of the century, award-winning French dolls’ jointed papier-mâché bodies, stylish wigs, glass eyes, exquisite wardrobes, and array of accessories competed with German dolls, also dressed to the nines, for the attention of affluent Americans

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during the Gilded Age. The redesign of dolls (bébé) as idealized girls by trailblazing French firms, Jumeau, Bru, Huret, and Steiner, ended the reign of romanticized representations of womanhood at the end of the Victorian era. While the German doll industry would emerge as the international exporter of dolls in all sizes and at all prices by the end of the 19th century, growing criticism of the conspicuous consumption and display of material extravagance led to rising resistance among ordinary Americans, especially girls. Memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, and the language of play reveal the persistence of preindustrial preferences for cloth dolls. Black mammy dolls embodied racial subordination and became victims of White girls’ violent scenarios reinforcing dominant notions of White girls’ innocence. When not staging funerals for broken dolls, energetic real girls biked and skated with friends. During the same period, American mothers informed by the rapidly expanding notion of sheltered childhood and the emergent ideology of scientific motherhood sought to reform European doll extravagance by creating soft and sanitary dolls for both boys and girls. Most notably, Martha Jenks Wheaton Chase and the women ­ workers she employed produced White and Black stockinet dolls for play and instruction in the workshop behind her family home in Rhode Island. During an era of rapid urban and industrial transformation that disadvantaged workingclass children, her hospital dolls taught immigrants in baby clinics and nurses in hospitals how to best clean and care for infants and the infirm. Black mothers concerned about the paucity of realisticlooking Black dolls often made their own for their children. Talented young women artists like Rose O’Neill who migrated from small towns to urban centers found a receptive market for their innovative designs in the burgeoning consumer culture. O’Neill’s cupid-like Kewpies first featured in popular magazine comic strips made her into a millionaire when German producers manufactured them as bisque dolls and figurines. Relying on young artists like Grace Drayton for designs of cute children like the round-eyed Campbell Soup kids advertising icons, American producers like Edward Imeson Horsman employed an army of immigrant working-class children and their

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mothers to sew the cloth-bodied dolls and their clothing as industrial homeworkers in New York City’s tenements, as well as male workers to manufacture composition in factories.

Play Culture and Dolls As play became a cornerstone of modern childhood in modernizing America, businessmen seeking to gain a share of the profitable toy economy turned to doll manufacturing. Amberg & Sons and competitors produced baby dolls that had made their first appearance in France a half a century earlier but had had little impact on the doll industry until the early 20th century. Influenced by the European puppen reform artists who sought to represent children’s characters in doll forms, American doll manufacturers produced their own composition character dolls. Steering clear of brooding babies, businessmen marketed smiling Goo Goo–eyed dolls who were more spunky than sad, more saucy than sweet. While the agency of happy girl dolls challenged the customary portrayal of vacuous female passivity, Black pickaninny character dolls caricatured as jolly and ignorant reinforced and reified the Jim Crow racial order pervasive in turn-of-the-century popular culture. Black activists and entrepreneurs committed to combating racial inferiority through advancement produced Black dolls but with limited market success, as was the case with the shortlived National Negro Doll Company that imported Black dolls from Europe. During World War I, American manufacturers who produced biskoline and other materials that imitated European bisque lobbied for harmful protective tariffs and mounted publicity campaigns to discredit foreign competition that stoked anti-­ German sentiments. After successfully ending the domination of German doll exporters in the years following the war and Women’s Suffrage, American businessmen consolidated the domestic market by marginalizing businesswomen and asserting authority over female designers like Grace Putnam, who created the Bye-Lo Baby (1923). As the birth rate declined and the consumer culture expanded, MaMa and little girl dolls that personified femininity, maternity, domesticity, and materialism replaced prewar character dolls. In order to stimulate consumption of mass-produced dolls among girls

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whose interests expanded to include other toys, the doll industry conducted a variety of marketing campaigns like doll parades and parties. But as Americans cut back on unnecessary spending during the Great Depression, the doll industry went into steep decline along with other businesses. The fortunes of the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company rose, however, with Shirley Temple dolls that, like the movie star herself, performed emotional labor by uplifting the spirits of the era’s downcast. Other adorable girls who became symbols of hope and plenty included the Dionne quintuplets, reproduced as composition dolls by Madame Alexander, enabling the storied firm to survive the economic downturn. During World War II, the conservation of materials and the conversion of civilian industries further diminished the industry and depressed doll production.

Dolls in the United States Since the 1950s Postwar prosperity, the baby boom, and the burgeoning of children’s consumer culture fueled the population of hard and soft plastic (e.g., vinyl) dolls in the 1950s and 1960s. Building on the 19th-century male tradition of producing dolls that performed more life-like functions, midcentury dolls included Betsy Wetsy who urinated; Tiny Tears, who cried tears; and Chatty Cathy, who talked—among many others. White Ginny dolls with bent knees and others that were walkers produced by Jennie Graves’ Vogue Co. moved girls to feel maternal and practice housekeeping. Efforts to challenge long-standing racist depictions of Black girls as pickaninnies and women as mammies led civil rights activists to generate new embodiments of blackness and to challenge old ones. In 1948, the Terri Lee company manufactured Patti-Jo, a Black girl and outspoken critic of racial inequality. Patti-Jo sprang from the cartoon series Patti-Jo and Ginger, published by the African American Pittsburgh-Courier (1945– 1956) and created by Jackie Ormes, the first African American cartoonist. After disconcertedly watching two Black girls play with a White doll, Sara Lee Creech designed the 18-inch vinyl Saralee Negro Doll, produced by the Ideal Toy

Company from 1951 to 1953. Kenneth and Mimi Clark’s 1950s legendary study, which revealed the preferences of Black children for White dolls, played a key role in Brown v. Board of Education (1955), ruling unconstitutional the separate, segregated American educational system. Born in the wake of the Watts Riots, Shindana Toys manufactured Black dolls with ­ Black features. Instead of Patti-Jo’s fashionable older sister, Ginger, though, it was Lilli, a sexy German comic strip character, who inspired a new generation of fashion dolls when she was produced in 1955. While other stylishly dressed dolls quickly followed in her high heels (e.g., Cissy, Miss Revlon), Mattel’s appropriation of Lilli led Barbie to become the triumphant industry leader shortly after she debuted in 1959. Initially, her shapely figure, chic wardrobe, and status-symbol accessories made Barbie the personification of postwar materialism, female sexuality, whiteness, and teen culture. But changing fads, fashions, gender ideals, and girlhood discourses also led to ­Barbie’s commodification of feminism and multiculturalism. In the late 1960s, Mattel produced Colored Francie, marketed as Barbie’s MODern cousin, a reference to her Mod clothing style. While Colored Francie had European features, Christie, advertised as Barbie’s Black friend, looked somewhat more realistically A ­ frican American. Anti-commercial responses to the materialistic 1960s, the glitzy 1970s, and the excess of the 1980s found expression in rag dolls, androgynous trolls, and the Cabbage Patch Kids. Gendering childhood innocence for girls of different races, ethnicities, and abilities, the high-end American Girl Dolls rode the wave of girl power from the late 20th to the early 21st century. The dolls, which remained high-priced even after ­Mattel’s acquisition of the catalogue-only Pleasant Co. line in 1998, expanded the marketing of girls’ self-esteem and self-fulfillment through education and agency. Yet, Mattel still promoted adornment, consumerism, and passivity with their Princess Barbie line. In the new millennium, these industry leaders vied with newcomers for girls’ disposable income as they materially addressed many girlhoods in a period of binary-defying globalization. Bratz dolls commodified difference by

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marketing race as cool and making otherness a fashion accessory. In 2010, the Mattel corporation pioneered Monster High dolls, Gothic ghouls that claim to celebrate difference. In addition to representations of racial hybridity and ambiguity, new lines of dolls like Get Real Girls (2001–) have addressed broader concerns about girls’ body image issues and eating disorders. While Barbie has been blamed (and satirized) for modeling unrealistic and unhealthy body ideals for more than half a century, in 2015, Mattel produced a line of dolls with different skin tones, hair colors, body shapes, and sizes. Dissatisfied by the mainstream market in toys—especially in regard to issues of race—newcomers to the industry continue to design, produce, and market dolls of girls with more realistic body proportions, in a range of skin tones and natural hairstyles, and with accessories such as menstruation kits. Miriam Forman-Brunell See also Barbie Doll; Material Culture, Children’s; Racial Innocence, Child and (U.S. History)

Further Readings Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial innocence: Performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights. New York: New York University Press. Brandow-Faller, M. (Ed.). (2018). Childhood by design: Toys and the material culture of childhood, 1700– present. London, UK: Bloomsbury. doi:10.5040/9781501332968 Coleman, D. S., Coleman, E. S., & Coleman, E. J. (Eds.). (1986). The collector’s encyclopedia of dolls (Vols. 2). New York, NY: Crown. Forman-Brunell, M. (1993). Made to play house: Dolls and the commercialization of American girlhood, 1830–1930. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. doi:10.1086/ahr/100.3.942 Forman-Brunell, M., & Whitney, J. W. (Eds.). (2015). Dolls studies: The many meanings of girls’ toys and play. New York, NY: Peter Lang. doi:10.1111/chso.12154 Peers, J. (2014). The fashion doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie. New York, NY: Berg. doi:10.2752/ 136270406778050950 Zaslow, E. D. (2017). Playing with America’s doll: A critical analysis of the American Girl doll collection. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Dolto, Françoise Françoise Dolto (1908–1988) worked as a paediatrician and psychoanalyst in Paris from 1939 until 1978. Her thesis, later published, which qualified her as a doctor, was about psychoanalysis and its application to paediatrics. She became one of the first child psychoanalysts in France, having been taught by Sophie Morgenstern, and later became a colleague and friend of Jacques Lacan. Her overriding ethic as an analyst was to recognise the child from birth as a person in their own right, with their own dignity and capacity to understand their place in the world, a subject with their own desire. She believed that the child’s desire to live their life is there from the moment of conception, energy that becomes embodied, a being who seeks a relationship with other human beings, in the first place their parents, from whom the child seeks eventually to become independent. In her view, the role of a psychoanalyst was not to wish for the patient to become a particular kind of person but that the analyst should enable the child to discover their own desire.

Dolto’s Views on Children and Parenting In her time, the child was not considered to be a full person and often seen as an object of investment, to become someone in the future. At worst, the child was seen as a digestive tube to be fed rations, moving on to be ‘fed’ at school what their parents and society wanted the child to learn for their own ends. Dolto fought for the rights of children and for equality of respect for children alongside adults: She believed that a very young child has the same capacity for symbolic emotional intelligence that makes sense of their world as an adult. In her works, she describes this universal human intelligence as a light that illuminates the world, understood as intuition. Not an advocate of overly liberal parenting, Dolto understood the child as coming into full  being through social interactions, mediated through language, which involves what she termed  ‘castrations’, limits placed on a child’s desire, delivered in a speech by a loving adult, in order to promote growth. They involve a painful

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relinquishing of what had previously been enjoyed in the direct body-to-body relationship with mother: The meeting of essential needs is definitively cut. It is through this process of castration that the unconscious is formed, described by Dolto in l’Image Inconsciente du Corps. It is as a consequence of the castrations, umbilical, oral, anal, and oedipal that a child takes their place in society, castrations accompanied with sympathetic words, which enable a child to separate and to come into a sense of self and their own desire for life.

Establishment of Maisons Vertes Later in her life, in 1978, Dolto set up the first Maison Verte in Paris, a place in the community where young children from birth to 3 years were enabled to go through the painful losses involved in separating from a mother or mother substitute so that they might enter society as a speaking and desiring subject. The Maison Verte was an original idea of Dolto’s which involved taking psychoanalysis informally into the community. She wanted it to be a meeting place for the families and minders of children under the age of 3, pregnant parents, infants, and toddlers, to create a social life from birth, to prevent later emotional problems. It was neither a crèche (daycare for infants), a playgroup, a nursery, nor a drop-in centre, not a potentially dehumanising institution, but a place of welcome for being and becoming which could help all sorts of families and in particular isolated families who had no one to talk to. The child would be helped to communicate by those trained to do so, meaning those trained in psychoanalysis who could be in touch with unconscious communication, alongside parents and carers so that they might learn how to support the driving force in the child’s mind. Dolto believed that the challenge provided by these ubiquitous centres, where play is met by language, would become the best means of countering the effect of controlling dogmatic pedagogy imposed by education and bureaucracy. She was concerned that children should not have to inhabit an emotional desert from their time in the womb onwards. She believed that the foetus is sensitive to the phonemes of language in utero and that from this time their identity is structured by language. Symbolic communication bridges

the gap between foetal life and attachment, without which the child’s body suffers. She believed that if parents would talk about their anguish and family traumas from pregnancy onwards, the child would not become a carrier of emotional turmoil. Dolto talked to babies, and talking to them calmed them. There are now over 150 Maisons Vertes in France and many more all over the world. The Maison Verte, where the mother and child are prepared for fruitful separation, was the culmination of Dolto’s life’s work. Dolto was mistrustful of ‘experts’: One should not idealise the advice of anyone, however, knowledgeable. The child does not need their family to be overprotective but needs to be talked and listened to. The role of the analyst is to awaken the intuition of parents for their children, intuition of the unconscious which is often devalued and for that intuition to be fostered in community spaces outside of the consulting room. Sian Angharad Morgan See also Children’s Rights; Development; Developmental Psychology

Further Readings Bacon, R. (2013). Listening to voices, hearing a person: Françoise Dolto and the language of the subject. London, UK: BJP. Dolto, F. (1984). L’Image inconsciente du corps. Paris, France: Seuil. Dolto, F. (1986). La cause des enfants. Paris, France: L.G.F. Dolto, F. (2013). Psychoanalysis and Paediatrics: Key concepts with sixteen clinical observations of children (F. Hivernel & F. Sinclair, Trans.). London, UK: Karnac. This, B. (2007). La maison verte: Créer les Lieux d’Accueil. Paris, France: Berlin.

Domestic Chores Domestic chores, also referred to as ‘housework’, are socially inclined tasks of social reproduction in or around the home. They include all kinds of works and tasks fulfilled on a regular basis and

Domestic Chores

organise the life in a household. In its 2012 published ‘International Standard Classification of Occupations’, the International Labour Organisation counts a list on various typical domestic chores performed by domestic cleaners and helpers, including (a) washing floors and furniture; (b) washing, ironing, and mending linen; (c) washing dishes; (d) helping with preparation, cooking, and serving of meals and refreshments; (e) purchasing food and various other household supplies; (f) cleaning, disinfecting, and deodorising; and (g) cleaning windows and other glass surfaces. This list, however, does not sufficiently serve as a theoretical definition of domestic chores, as such underlies the practical experience of the person performing them. For instance, depending on the household, taking care of small children or elder family members can be part of domestic chores having to be fulfilled. Hence, the so-called tasks regarded as ‘care work’ are another part of responsibilities which in the scientific debate on ‘domestic work’ are discussed to be part of common domestic chores. This entry offers a definition of domestic chores, examines different types of domestic chores, and how they have historically been gendered.

Defining Domestic Chores Childhood studies scholars call for a multiperspectival and ethnographic approach in defining domestic chores. Following this approach, child domestic workers include various individual tasks the child has to perform in the household of his or her employer. Such tasks might also comprise collecting and transporting water in regions without tap water in the households, or participating in farm work with household or family members who might be engaged in agricultural activities. Including multiple and child-centred perspectives enables one to portray the heterogeneous field of domestic chores, which vary with regard to households and geographical region. Domestic chores have often also represented employment opportunities for migrant workers. During the modern age in Europe, Africa, and Northern-American as well as Asian-Pacific countries, young men and women used to migrate within their countries or internationally, from their paternal homes to foreign households, to

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perform domestic chores as the so-called ‘housemaids’ or ‘houseboys’. Notably, work in foreign households equipped them with the necessary competences to leading a household of their own as an adult.

Types of Chores Today, domestic chores can be performed in various domains by different groups of workers, as economic wage labour, by domestic helpers, domestic cleaners or domestic housekeepers, hotel cleaners, or for instance care-workers (e.g., workers in domestic geriatric care). Domestic chores might also be accomplished by the family members themselves or ‘outsourced’ to unpaid workers, illegal migrant domestic workers, minor child domestic workers, who are groups of workers in risky precarious dependent conditions of work. The volume of time and load of work might as well depend on the (legal) work status of the domestic worker and depends on whether the employee is officially employed or is working under unofficial conditions as empirical studies in particular on child domestic workers as well as immigrant adult domestic workers prove. The working hours—for instance of child domestic workers—can vary between approximately 9 and 16 hours and, according to the nature of domestic chores, might not always enable sufficient time for rest and recreation.

Gender Some gender-specific differences can be identified in view of the performance of domestic chores. In general, domestic chores are duties commonly performed by women or girls, whereas boys tend to be involved more in gardening, and perform duties concerning outside the home, in contrast to girls, who predominantly are involved in duties in the house. Likewise, adult men are generally less involved in performing domestic chores compared to adult women. However, recent surveys outline a correlation between countries with a low birth rate and an increase of men participating in domestic chores, compared to countries with a high rate of births. In low birth-rate countries, or in countries where women are empowered, the gender gap is shrinking, and the amount of time men spend in

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performing housework is increasing. Yet, a gender gap is still visible, as in patriarchal societies, however, women are still the main or only ones responsible for the performance of domestic chores and even if they are nowadays increasingly part of the labour market, they are the ones who are responsible for their replacement in the household. Until recently, domestic chores were regarded almost exclusively as ‘feminine’ tasks and, as such, raise the debate on gender issues. This scholarly debate, which is mostly promoted by neo-Marxist feminist economists and social scientists, is not finalised. From their perspective, domestic chores and the household, in general, are analysed from an economic perspective. Yet, domestic chores remain culturally and socially undervalued, as they do not render direct and visible economic surplus value—though they are vital for the reproduction of human culture and society. Without their daily reproduction, workers and their families cannot be maintained. Ina Gankam Tambo See also Child Domestic Work; Children as Workers; Restavek

Further Readings Anderson, B. (2000). Doing the dirty work? The global politics of domestic labour. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Dotti Sani, G. M. (2014). Men’s employment hours and time on domestic chores in European countries. Journal of Family Issues, 35(8), 1023–1047. Gankam Tambo, I. (2014). Child domestic work in Nigeria: Conditions of socialisation and measures of intervention. Münster, Germany: Waxmann Verlag. Lutz, H. (2006). Vom weltmarkt in den Privathaushalt. Die neuen Dienstmädchen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung [From the world market to the private household: The new maids in the age of globalization.]. Berlin, Germany: Verlag Barbara Budrich. International Labour Organisation. (2012). International standard classification of occupations: Structure, group definitions and correspondence tables. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Pasleau, S., Schopp, I., & Sarti, R. (Eds.). (2005). Proceedings of the servant project. Actes du servant project. Liège, Belgium: University of Liège ULg.

Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of Domestic violence is typically defined as ‘violence experienced’ in the context of an intimate partnership. Partners may be cohabiting, not cohabiting, or separated. The contemporary theorisation of domestic violence not only stresses the element of physical violence but also the more psychological, social, and psychospatial aspects of coercion and control. While children are often not understood under the law to be direct victims of domestic violence, they do nonetheless experience significant harm when violence occurs in their families. This entry examines research on children’s experiences of domestic violence. Specifically, this entry tracks the shift from a tendency to view children as passive witnesses or damaged victims to agents who can experience harm and be resilient.

Domestic Violence Research Domestic violence research developed in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, associated with the rise of the women’s movement. Initially, this work focused on the experiences primarily of adult women as victims. However, from the late 1980s onwards, there was an explosion of interest in the impact of domestic violence on ‘child witnesses’. This research explored how children who were exposed to domestic violence were likely to experience negative psychological, social, and educational outcomes as a consequence. This research suggested that children who witnessed domestic violence were at significantly greater risk than other children of developing posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and conduct difficulties. Later research also suggested that exposure to domestic violence was associated with the development of ‘borderline personality disorder’, psychosis, and other personality disorders. Also, research suggested that children who witnessed domestic violence were more likely to have difficulties at school, including problems concentrating, difficulties succeeding at school, school absence and truancy, and educational drop out. Young people who were exposed to domestic violence were more likely to become involved in bullying (both as bully and bullied), and more likely to get

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involved in violent dating relationships and violent adult relationships. They were also described as more vulnerable to other forms of abuse like child sexual exploitation. It was suggested too that children in violent families were not coached in emotion recognition and labelling and did not develop the ability to self-sooth or to regulate their emotions. The late 2000s saw the introduction of a new way to theorise this damage as neuroscientists began to suggest that children who were exposed to domestic violence experienced unusually high levels of cortisol, resulting in longterm neural damage. This, it was suggested, explained why children had difficulties with education, why they were more likely to experience attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder, and why they could not regulate their emotional responses.

Children and Domestic Violence The literature on children who experience domestic violence generally is based on families where men are described as the main perpetrator, and women are the victims. It is, therefore, particularly interesting that the main predictor of pathological outcomes for children is the mental health and behaviour of their mothers. Children who have mothers who use substances or who have previolent mental health difficulties are seen as being more at risk of the range of negative outcomes previously outlined. Similarly, poor maternal coping and poor maternal parenting skills are seen as a major risk factor for the development of conduct disorder and various mental health difficulties for this group of children. Using various forms of statistical modelling, this research identifies the father’s violence as almost incidental to the harm that children experience, instead of framing it as a product of poor and dysfunctional mothering. There is a limited literature that explores children’s resilience. In addition to the usual predictors of resilience in children (staying in school, having a hobby, engaging in sport, etc.), children are more likely to have better outcomes if they have a positive relationship with someone outside the home. Some research goes so far as to suggest that a single supportive relationship is sufficient to help children maintain a sense of resilience. However, most research on children’s resilience has focused, again, on mother–child relationships. Mothers who are

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responsive, warm, and who are coping themselves are more likely to have resilient children. Of course, what is concerning about both the pathologising and the resiliency focused literature in this area is the way that it effectively blames mothers for ‘not coping effectively with domestic violence’ and positions them as solely responsible for their children’s outcomes—positive or negative. In a social research sleight of hand, male perpetrated violence is rendered unproblemmatic—the real problem is positioned as the women who cope or do not cope with that violence.

Research on Children and Domestic Violence The kind of literature described thus far has largely used quantitative measures. Typically, this research is based on either maternal or clinician self-report or on observations of (usually younger) children. What is remarkably absent is any kind of representation from the children and young people themselves; their voice is remarkably silent. In the quantitative research, they rarely get to even fill in questionnaires about themselves, and there is very little qualitative literature. This did start to change in the late 1990s and through the 2000s, as a small number of (predominantly European) authors began to explore children’s own accounts of their experiences. What emerged was a clear sense that, rather than passive witnesses to domestic abuse, children experienced the violence in their homes just as directly as the adult victims did. Even when not direct targets of physical assaults, they were affected by the familial dynamics, by the threats, by manipulation, and by the fear that characterises families where domestic violence occurs. Further, it was clear that children were not merely ‘exposed’ to this violence—they were able to understand it, make sense of it, and find ways to cope with it and resist it. Children who experience domestic violence are best understood not as passive recipients or witnesses, but as conscious, meaning-making agents, who experience domestic violence just as adult victims do. Still remarkably absent in the literature on children’s experiences of domestic violence is research exploring families either where males are the primary victims or where violence is relatively symmetrical. Further, research on the impact of fathers/

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stepfathers who are violent and relationships between children and their perpetrating fathers is also quite limited, largely restricted to research on problems experienced with post-separation contact. Jane Callaghan See also Bullying; Neuroscience; Relational Violence

Further Readings Callaghan, J. E. M., Alexander, J. H., Sixsmith, J., & Fellin, L. C. (2016). Beyond “witnessing”: Children’s experiences of coercive control in domestic violence and abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. doi:10.1177/0886260515618946 Callaghan, J. E. M., Fellin, L. C., Alexander, J., Papathanassiou, M., & Mavrou, S. (2016). Children’s emotions in domestic violence: Relational, contextual and embodied. Psychology of Violence, 7, 333–342. doi:10.1037/vio0000108 Evang, A., & Øverlien, C. (2014). “If you look, you have to leave”: Young children regulating research interviews about experiences of domestic violence. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 13. doi:10.1177/1476718X14538595 Mullender, A., Hague, G., Imam, U. F., Kelly, L., Malos, E., & Regan, L. (2003). Children’s perspectives on domestic violence. London, UK: Sage. doi:10.1093/ bjsw/33.6.845 Øverlien, C. (2014). “He didn’t mean to hit mom, I think’: Positioning, agency and point in adolescents’ narratives about domestic violence. Child & Family Social Work, 19(2), 156–164. doi:10.1111/ j.1365–2206.2012.00886.x Øverlien, C., & Hyden, M. (2009). Children’s actions when experiencing domestic violence. Childhood, 16(4), 479–496. doi:10.1177/0907568209343757

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Child domestic workers are female and male minors who perform domestic duties, such as cleaning, taking care of small children, going on errands, or cooking in private households, either for their kin or in households of nonkin. Their work may be paid or unpaid or remunerated in kind. Most of these children can be regarded as

mobile working children, as they voluntarily decide to migrate from their rural homes to live and work in an urban household. In doing so, they hope to be able to have better conditions for their school education and their personal development. In many cases, these children can also be relocated from their homes by an intermediary who attains financial benefits for recruiting (minor) domestic workers. This entry examines the geographic distribution and history of child domestic workers, their motivations, and the risks they face. The entry offers a global perspective on child domestic workers and presents reasons and interventions to protect them.

Location of Child Domestic Workers Most working children live in African, Asian, Latin-American, and Caribbean as well as Pacific regions. Comparatively few of these children are employed as domestic workers in Europe. Currently, no reliable statistics on their numbers can be given, but estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) count amongst 152 million working children worldwide about 54 million who are engaged in the service sector; these include about 11.2 million children working in the domestic sector. In general, these workers are girls aged between 12 and 14 years. Yet, these numbers should be approached critically since the data collection on child domestic work continues to confront many obstacles.

Risks Facing Child Domestic Workers The workplace of child domestic workers is behind closed doors. This bears the risk of exposing these children to various forms of child rights violations, their exposure to exploitation and various forms of abuse, and hazardous work conditions. Consequently, child domestic workers constitute a highly vulnerable group of working children, which necessitates nuanced, child-centred approaches to their investigation. Thereby, idealised and universalised concepts of childhood have to be critically discussed against the background of the plurality of childhoods and ideologies of the lives of children and the multiple varieties and forms of upbringing. Hence, child domestic workers pose an example of childhood in the context of

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globalisation and internationalisation. Interdisciplinary approaches to their investigation, which might include the historical embeddedness of this phenomenon, next to legal, anthropological, sociological, and pedagogical approaches can ­ be  employed against the background of cross-­ cultural research on this form of child work. Childhood studies offers differentiated childcentred approaches to analyse the work and living conditions of child domestic workers, as the perspectives of the children concerned are examined by subject-oriented methodological approaches. Thereby, multi-perspective examinations of structural implications of their living contexts need to be disentangled to deduct corresponding measures of intervention, which can enhance the quality of work and living conditions of the children concerned. In doing so, child-centred approaches enable one to focus on the perspectives and voices of a socially marginalised group of children, whose nature of work makes most of these workers practically invisible and difficult to access.

International Discourse on Child Domestic Work A differentiated assessment of the child domestic workers’ work and living situation is required for the planning of programmes for the improvement of their living and working conditions. However, the discourse on child domestic work often fails to comprise the plurality of their forms of work and their cultural background. For instance, the ILO definitions appear to be inexact since they tend to be biased by Eurocentric policies on child-related issues. Their focus is mostly limited to children above the legal minimum age of 15 years and includes those employed in paid forms of domestic work. Thereby, they neglect wide parts of child domestic workers, who are paid in kind as well as unpaid working or children working in (wider) family networks. This controversy in the discourse on domestic work in general and child domestic work, in particular, was strongly debated in the feminist discourse on ‘domestic work’, which was led in the 1970s, mainly in the minority world. Neo-Marxist feminist debates were led on unpaid and paid domestic work and the gender-based relationship between capitalist spheres of the labour economy

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and unpaid reproductive forms of work, which were mostly performed by women. This phenomenon is described by the metaphor of ‘housewifisation’, which describes the unpaid domestic work performed by women within the spheres of the capitalist labour economy. Yet, until today, these forms of domestic work or care work remain widely undervalued and until today, feminist debates claim for its acknowledgement as an economic activity. Likewise, these debates accord for forms of domestic work performed by children. Apart from this, the dynamics of globalisation, internationalisation, and transnationalisation processes have their impacts on the sociocultural practise in societies of the majority world. For instance, colonialism and imperialism by E ­ uropean forces, next to the global capitalist economical structures exert impacts on the changes of childhood and forms of kinship and forms of child fostering in vast regions of the world. Due to global economic changes, the demand for workers in, for instance, the agricultural sector increased and this has led to an increase of child relocation. Insofar, studies have shown, in how far in many regions of the majority world, the need to recruit foster children to provide for this manpower has risen. Foster parents, however, tend to treat their own children privileged and send them to school, while the fostered children are exposed to long hours of work and thus are hardly given the chance to go to school. These changes in discriminating practices of child fostering led to a refusal of parents in sending their children away. Moreover, the spread of the universal declaration of child rights by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child sensitises parents to their children’s rights which likewise reinforces their reservation in sending their children to foster parents. Distinctions between fostered children and child domestic workers often appear to be blurred, and a fostered child may be obliged to perform domestic duties. Domestic workers may have to undertake work outside the home of their surrogate parents, apart from the domestic duties they are assigned to do. Hence, child domestic work has a link function in constructing forms of parentage and supporting kinship patterns in vast regions of the Global South. However, to this day child domestic work necessarily serves as a social

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security measure in following indigenous patterns of child fostering. In fact, this form of child work is reserved for poor, underprivileged children who economically depend on this form of work, while on the other hand, these children might constitute a source of prestige for their employers.

The History of Child Domestic Work Historically, the practice of child domestic work can be regarded as a modified pattern of socialisation and parenting. It includes the practice of children living and working in other people’s households, which has been practiced all over the world until the early 1900s. Worldwide, parents were commonly sending out their children to work and live in well-to-do households, when the family was poor or the child orphaned. Either the child was sent to members of the extended family network or nonkins. Studies about domestic workers during the modern age in Europe, the United States, and Canada report about girls who worked as ‘maids’ in urban spaces. This type of work was clearly dominated by young unmarried females, mostly younger than 15 years. Boys, too, were engaged in this kind of work, as references, for example, about France before the year 1650 illustrate. These young boys were defined as ‘apprentice’ and lived with their master for whom they performed work in accordance with a contract fixed between their fathers and masters. In West African regions, for instance, child domestic work can be regarded as a modified form of child work whose origins can be traced back to the indigenous form of child fostering (i.e., to institutionalised forms of parenthood). These forms of parenthood include kinship ­fostering which is practiced as the relocation or transfer of children amongst families. The relocation of children amongst the extended family network can be based on different motives, as for example, due to economic or family crisis (crisis fostering) or to strengthen political or economic ties. Moreover, children can also be relocated for educational purposes so as to learn a trade or to be in the position to attend a school which might not be in the vicinity of the home of a child’s biological parents. However, when sending away their children, parents do also delegate their

parental rights to the foster parents or share or replicate them with the latter. Hence, when sharing parental rights and obligations, this might also entail, next to the care and education for the fostered child, the right to demand certain forms of work, as for instance the support in domestic work of the foster parents.

Motives and Reasons for Child Domestic Work In the 21st century, however, these indigenous forms of parenting can offer strategical benefits for marginalised and deprived children. Their underprivileged conditions of living motivate them to migrate to urban regions and to live and work in households of financially better situated employers. Hence, these children regard this form of work as a path to an improved future and a source of development of various competences and skills and thus hope for a better future this work might lead them to. Although domestic work requires several skills as for instance planning, organising, and physical abilities, as well as skills to care for children, until today in most societies it remains undervalued symbolically as well as in terms of monetary gratification. Yet, all these tasks are often done by unskilled personnel. In African, Asian, and LatinAmerican regions mostly children are the ones to carry out all these tasks. Moreover, it is not uncommon that employers take advantage of the deprived social position of their domestic workers, which in many cases are migrants or depending on the wage or the job and thus degrade them. In many cases, this leads to conflicting situations with the rights of children, as these children suffer under long working hours and are exposed to physical and psychological forms of violence. Further rights violations also entail child domestic workers being trafficked or brought into a household by a middleperson against their will. With regard to their multiple motives for child mobility, child domestic workers constitute a heterogeneous group of working children. The diverse motives for choosing this kind of occupation as well as the reasons of an employer to employ a child domestic worker change due to international, sociocultural, political, and economic

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influences in societies. The reasons of employers to employ a child domestic worker are also modified due to international, sociocultural, political, and economic influences in societies. Since international mass education initiatives in the 1960s, the numbers of women in the formal labour market have strongly increased. Hence, women in employment depend on their replacement in the home, for the maintenance of the reproductive house chores since many regions in the majority world are dominated by a patriarchal culture, in which men do not participate in household chores. Thus, the demand for mostly female young, domestic workers rises.

Interventional Measures in Child Domestic Work Interventional measures and controls aiming at the abidance of laws can barely reach these children, and the practical implementation of laws often fails due to constraints of budget, personnel, and political will. Since child domestic workers are practically invisible, the ILO’s Convention number 182 (1999) categorises their work as one of the ‘worst forms of child labour’. Furthermore, the ILO Convention 138 (1973) prohibits children under the age of 15 years to execute all kinds of work. With its special task organisation, the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, the ILO have published several key documents, in particular, Convention 189 (2011) together with Recommendation 201 on Domestic Work (2011), as guidelines on the comprehensive care of child domestic workers and as direct action against this form of work. Unfortunately, the overall aim of its total elimination and the respective bans exclude child domestic workers de facto from protective measures at their workplace. By contrast, alternative interventional measures aim to improve the working and living conditions of child domestic workers since they value this form of work as a necessary source of income or strategy to personal development these children depend on, so as to finance their school education and to support their families. As this form of work is also rooted in many indigenous cultures of societies, local NGOs, and working children’s movements—as for instance the Latin-American and

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Caribbean Movement of Working Children and Adolescents, or the African Movement of Working Children and Youth—struggle for dignified working and living conditions according to their cultures. Female child domestic workers were protagonists at the foundation of the African Movement in the 1990s and are always its most active leaders. They act in correspondence with international children’s rights, as for instance the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and likewise stress the nonexploitative nature of child work in general as well as the particular form of domestic work. Thus, members of working children’s movements try to support and protect child domestic workers from the violation of their rights. In situations of conflict with an employer, solutions to solve these conflicts are tried to be found and to make the employers aware of the needs and rights child domestic workers possess, instead of blankly prohibiting this form of work and in doing so, worsening the precarious situation of these children. Ina Gankam Tambo and Manfred Liebel See also Child Labor; Children as Workers; Children’s Work

Further Readings Alber, E., Martin, J., & Notermans, C. (Eds.). (2013). Child fostering in West Africa: New perspectives on theory and practices. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Black, M. (2002). Child domestic workers finding a voice: A handbook on advocacy [Online]. Retrieved October 9, 2017, from http://www.antislavery.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/01/advocacyhandbookeng.pdf Black, M. (2005). Child domestic workers: A handbook on good practice in programme interventions. In ­AntiSlavery International (Ed.), Anti-Slavery International’s Child Labour Series, 17 [Online]. Retrieved October 9, 2017, from http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell .edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3906&context= globaldocs Bourdillon, M. (2006). Child domestic workers in Zimbabwe. Harare, Zimbabwe: Weaver Press. Gankam Tambo, I. (2014). Child domestic work in Nigeria: Conditions of socialisation and measures of intervention. New York, NY: Waxmann. doi:10.1017/ s0001972016001121

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International Labour Organisation. (2013). Marking progress against child labour—Global estimates and trends 2000–2012. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. International Labour Organisation. (2017). Global estimates of child labour: Results and trends, 2012–2016. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Jacquemin, M. (2004). Children’s domestic work in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire: The petites bonnes have the floor. Childhood, 11(3), 383–397.

Jacquemin, M. (2006). Can the language of rights get hold of the complex realities of child domestic work? The case of young domestic workers in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Childhood, 13(3), 389–406. Lutz, H. (Ed.). (2016). Migration and domestic work: A European perspective on a global theme. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.7767/lhomme.2007.18.1.137 Pasleau, S., Schopp, I., & Sarti, R. (Eds.). (2005). Proceedings of the servant project: Actes du servant project. Liège, Belgium: Université de Liège.

E kindergarten in Germany in 1837. Froebel recognized that young children were capable of learning, and he favored the use of objects in that process. His 10 gifts were meant to prompt the child’s intuitive understanding of first principles. This attention to hands-on, child-centered learning has endured in early childhood programming. The consequent need to provide teacher training for early childhood education led to the development of laboratory schools; the first was established in Boston in 1868, and schools for African American kindergarten teachers developed soon after. Another critical influence on early childhood education was the Montessori Method first used in 1898. Originally developed to aid the development of children who relied on sensory experience, Maria Montessori adapted this work to emphasize hands-on play and respect for the child in a broader early education program. The impact of the Montessori Method on growing nationalist sentiment in the colonies was illustrated by the productive exchange between Maria Montessori and Rabindranath Tagore, who advocated for education in native languages as a means to protect local cultural values. The relationship between nationalism, culture, and early childhood had been at the heart of Froebel’s work in response to German Romanticism. It was during this early florescence in education for the very young that G. Stanley Hall and the child study movement of the 1880s in the United States combined evolutionism with developmental science to shape early education in terms of its

Early Childhood Education Early childhood education has been consistently linked to interventions designed to achieve developmental goals, not only of individual children but also of nations and even the world. The history of early childhood education in the West traces its beginning in philosophical and moral thinking on the goals of pedagogy and the character of the human from Jean-Jeacques Rousseau’s romanticism to John Locke’s emphasis on the environment. Over time, these concerns were replaced by those of the developmental sciences of biology and psychology, which remain a persistent thread in early childhood education. Another thread associated with social reform and childcentered programming emerged in the early 20thcentury North Atlantic with particular national and international effects. Now at the turn of the 21st century, early childhood education has become central to reform centering the child again even as the developmental sciences guide national and international intervention. This entry examines the history of early childhood education, early childhood education in the 20th century, and its expanding global impact.

The History of Early Childhood Education The first attempt to carry out educational programs for young children is typically associated with Friedrich Froebel and the appearance of 683

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psychological implications. Hall’s recapitulation theory used the modern developmental sciences of biology and psychology to link education with progress through a naturalized sequence of stages that was taken to represent the evolution of societies as well. Stages of development, elaborated by Jean Piaget, Lev Vyogtsky, and Erik Erikson, continue to shape education in the early years. Developmentally Appropriate Practice, developed more recently by the Washington-based National Association for the Education of Young Children to guide early childhood programs, derives from this developmental approach. While Hall shaped early education through the sciences of development, beginning at the turn of the 20th century, John Dewey’s humanistic approach became influential. As with the German Romanticism of the previous century, Dewey’s pragmatism was informed by philosophical approaches to justice and the nature of humanism associated with Transcendentalism. Social reform and education for social justice that is both childcentered and experiential were central to this work. The central role of early education in social reform likewise was clear in the establishment of the McMillan Nursery School, opened in Britain in the same era. Inspired by sisters Margaret and Rachel McMillan, the schools were established to deal with the social and health problems arising for women and children as a result of industrialization. Like the work of Dewey, these early childhood programs identify yet another continuing thread in these interventions: improved health and welfare outcomes for both children and their families.

Early Childhood Education the 20th Century By the mid-20th century, intervention in early childhood had become a standard part of national and international policy regimes. Head Start was begun in 1964 as part of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The program was designed to increase school readiness by offering health screenings, nutrition, social enrichment, and play and kindergarten-type activities. Targeted populations included inner-city African Americans and rural Native Americans. Head

Start was revitalized in 2015 by U.S. President Barack Obama, illustrating the durability of this approach to social reform through early childhood education. By the end of the 20th century, theoretical breaks with modernity and a changing global political economy prompted both a reconsideration of the definition of the child and a reinvigoration of early childhood education programming. As theoretical challenges to normative childhoods and the construction of the child gained strength in child and youth studies in the 1990s, so too did global attention to the rights of childhood and the role of early childhood in improving development outcomes, physical, mental, and international.

Early Childhood Education in a Global World Early childhood education and development has been promoted by the World Bank and UNESCO since the early 2000s as an integrated approach to health and education in the Global South. These programs go by different terms in different contexts: “early childhood development,” “early childhood education and care” (UNESCO’s term), and “early childhood care and development.” Whatever the acronym, these programs demonstrate all the threads described thus far. They depend on a normative view of psychological and biological development now twinned with social and emotional development. And they include not only the delivery of educational enrichment but also the delivery of other forms of social welfare. Many of these programs emphasize play-based approaches, demonstrating the enduring appeal of the approaches pioneered by Froebel and Montessori. The emphasis on play-based early ­ childhood education also manifests the growth in brain sciences and the goal of optimizing brain development through early intervention. Globalized early childhood education programs explicitly link brain development to international development, and now early childhood education programs extend beyond improving school readiness among children 0–8 years of age to the in utero development of the fetus. These programs have been extended as well through attention to parental education and informal education of youth. An expanding package of developmental

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inputs is now anchored through early childhood education and care services. The emphasis on early childhood by intergovernmental organizations has emerged alongside an increase in privatized and corporate daycare and preschool in the Global South. This rising global interest in the early years reflects not only the growing recognition of child rights to education but also changing work lives, especially for women. The multiple competing demands for early childhood education to improve children’s educational success have been tied to changing labor force needs which are experienced differently in the Global South than in the developed North Atlantic. The role of education in social reproduction for the middle classes in the developed world has meant the intensification of m ­ iddle-class women’s care labor. And yet the need to provide care labor to deliver early childhood education programs poses a different sort of burden for poor women in the Global South. The differentiated burdens of early childhood education for mothers in the form of care labor are mirrored in the lags in professionalization and adequate pay for the mostly female workers in early childhood education. These contradictions highlight the continuing link between children and women in the delivery of early childhood education. One approach to understanding the recent return to early childhood education has been to identify its relationship to neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality. The emphasis on social investment and quality practices in early childhood education are taken to be small-state solutions to the delivery of these human capital investments. The relationship between the intensification of early childhood programming as states roll back social welfare, both in the developed North Atlantic and the Global South, illustrates that early childhood education continues to be about social reform and governance, as it was from its earliest manifestations. The reconsideration of how the child and childhood are conceptualized beginning in the 1990s has had an effect on early childhood education as well. Michel Foucault’s approach to pedagogy has inspired a literature on the constitution of subjects through educational practices. This work resonates with that of postcolonial scholars who have challenged the subjectification of children through

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global early childhood education as a continuation of colonial domination. Jan Newberry See also Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP); Froebel, Friedrich; Montessori, Maria; Montessori Schools

Further Readings Bloch, M. N., Kennedy, D., Lightfoot, T., & Weyenberg, D. (2006). The child in the world/the world in the child. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230601666 Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Child, image, nation. London, UK: Routledge. Cannella, G. S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization: Power, education, and contemporary practice. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Penn, H. (2002). The world bank’s view of childhood. Childhood, 9(1), 118–132. doi:10.1177/ 0907568202009001239

Early Marriage Child marriage refers to the formal or informal marriage of a person under the age of 18 years. Early marriage is also the union of a spouse who is under the age of 18 years but is interpreted to encompass cases regardless of whether or not they have attained the age of majority in their local jurisdiction. Early marriage is a broader umbrella term, then, that is not linked to a culturally specific notion of childhood or to a local legal definition. Colloquially, early marriage is even more flexible and may include marriage in early adulthood. People often use the terms early marriage and child marriage interchangeably or together as child, early, and forced marriage. This entry examines the age of marriage, its legal regulation, and contemporary controversies.

Initial Anti-Child Marriage Campaigning and Lawmaking Early age of marriage has been the object of research, social concern, and law reform for well over 100 years. Before the contemporary human

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rights system, early marriage was addressed as a topic of debate by traditional leaders, missionaries, antislavery activists, colonial administrators, and women’s rights and child welfare reformers. Historically, the age of marriage was set in many common law jurisdictions and religious codes as the age of puberty and roughly translated to 12 years for girls and 14 years for boys. Some 19thcentury marriage statutes included the requirement of a minimum age of marriage; the Special Marriage Act of 1872 set 14 years for brides and 18 years for grooms for nonreligious marriages in Britain. The Special Marriage Act of 1872 was applied in British colonies. The difference in minimum age requirements between men and women persists in some jurisdictions today. The first codified child marriage law dates back to the 1920s, with the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 in India, which passed in the same period as the Child Marriage Law in Britain. The Child Marriage Restraint Act set the marriageable age at 14 years for Hindu and Muslim brides in India. This was a major initiative of women’s organizations in religiously and legally plural India, but it did not produce many prosecutions nor widespread social reform of the de facto age of marriage in colonial India. As Brett Shadle’s work shows, local leaders and colonial administrators in colonial Kenya debated with concern both child marriage and the bridewealth which many British observers thought as akin to buying the rights in a person. Italian and French colonial officials also saw child marriage as a practice in need of reform in the first half of the 20th century but were more concerned with the stability of available labor and economic systems (in their colonies). Child marriage was also a topic for discussion at the Hague Conference of 1904 on conflicts of law in Europe; the 1905 Effects of Marriage Convention makes no mention of the minimum age at marriage, however, and underscores that marriage is regulated by national laws. The League of Nations also took up the topic when drafting the Slavery Convention of 1926. The Convention defined slavery as the “exercise of the powers attaching to ownership” over another person. Some commentators at the League of Nations argued that child marriage met the definition of slavery, in particular in contexts where bridewealth was paid to her kin; others were concerned about disrupting local economies of labor and kinship.

Native marriage was not included in the 1926 Slavery Convention. The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery of 1956 does include a prohibition on servile marriage and, in particular, the transfer of a bride for consideration. The 1956 Convention also states that the transfer of a child for sexual exploitation is an institution or practice similar to slavery.

Human Rights and Reproductive Health Concerns As different social expectations of childhood changed along with modes of production and reproduction, so too did conceptions of readiness for marriage. The United Nations (UN) took up the issue with the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriage (the Marriage Convention 1962) that called for the minimum age for marriage to be set by states at 15 years or older (indeed only 1 year older than the Special Marriage Act of 1872). As scholars such as Minzee Kim et al. have noted, however, the Marriage Convention was not widely ratified by states and the international efforts to address marriage age are characterized by a deference to national jurisdictions and their local legal and religious codes. Within national jurisdictions with religiously diverse communities, you see a parallel deference to religious family codes. The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1975) calls on states to establish marriage age laws as well as marriage registries, however, without imposing a uniform minimum marriage age. Rather, Article 16(2) states that “the betrothal and the marriage of a child shall have no legal effect.” The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which defines a child as anyone below the age of 18 years, prohibits sexual exploitation of children but does not contain a provision that deals with child marriage. By contrast, Ruth Gaffney-Rhys notes that Article 21 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990) mandates that parties enact legislation entrenching 18 as the minimum marriage age while Article 7(b) of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (on the Rights of Women in Africa, 2003) clearly states that the minimum marriage age for both men and

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women should be 18 years. In its Recommendation #19 (1994), Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women stated that the minimum age of marriage should be 18 years for women and men. Recently, this recommendation has been updated. Now the joint Recommendation #31/ General Comment #18 (2014), the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Committee and the Committee on the Rights of the Child state that, in order to respect the child’s evolving capacities and autonomy in making decisions that affect her or his life, a child of at least 16 years of age may exceptionally be allowed to marry. Along with a legal approach linked to the capacity to consent to marry, the World Health Organization and medical professionals raised concerns about the reproductive health consequences of early marriage and childbearing. The World Health Organization included child marriage in its list of harmful traditional practices in the 1970s. The reproductive health consequences of early marriage remain one of the most important issues in this area since women are most vulnerable at the beginning of their reproductive lives especially when coupled with malnutrition, stunted growth, and lack of access to adequate prenatal and emergency medical care. One example of this phenomenon is the incidence of vesicovaginal fistulae among young mothers in areas of low socio-economic development.

Research Into Causes and Consequences of Early Marriage Early marriage through the 20th century was framed as a matter of antislavery, reproductive health, harmful traditional practices, and human rights. There is a body of research, which has sought to examine the main causes of driving high incidence of early marriage and the consequences. This literature has found that poverty—at various levels from family to the state—is a major factor in parents’ decision to marry their children young. Thus, low levels of socio-economic development in a country or a region often (but not always) correlate with high levels of early marriage. In countries with very low gross domestic product, for example, the marriage age is also very low. Thus, while in North Africa, there has been an increase in the age of first marriage, Judith-Ann

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Walker’s work demonstrates that sub-Saharan Africa has not kept pace. Research has consistently found the main causal factors in parents marrying their daughters early include the overlapping issues of poverty; the social stigma attached to pre-marital sex and pregnancy out of wedlock; inaccessible or poor-quality education; social, religious, and familial norms; communities under stress including conflict situations and gender inequalities. The consequences of marrying young for girls, in particular, studies find, can include interrupted education, early pregnancy, risk of reproductive ill-health, risk of domestic violence, and depression. There have been important policy interventions to try and address these causes and consequences such as direct payment transfers to support girls’ education, vocational, and skills training; popular education campaigns; empowerment programs; marriage and birth registration; engaging traditional and religious leaders; and economic development programs including access to land rights. The contemporary policy landscape has shifted substantially with the work of Girls Not Brides. Girls Not Brides is a global nonprofit organization which partners with over 1000 local civil society stakeholders to combat child and early marriage internationally. Girls Not Brides is uniquely positioned as a global network connecting smaller community-based organizations in 95 countries and lending weight at the national level to work toward the eradication of child and early marriage globally. Despite the increased attention and extensive research on early marriage, some important gaps in knowledge remain. There is a need for more nuanced and disaggregated data from the perspective of youth and their parents and on the basis of region, ethnicity, religion, and class. To date, there is still limited research on teenage girls who choose to marry young as an exit strategy. Likewise, only recently has research started to emerge on nontraditionally gendered youth and their vulnerability to early and forced marriage. Finally, little research exists that is truly driven by the local research agenda and communities. Anne Bunting See also Age of Consent; Adolescent Pregnancy Consent, Sexual; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

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Further Readings Bartels, S. A., Michael, S., Roupetz, S., Garbern, S., Kilzar, L., Bergquist, H., . . . Bunting, A. (2018). Making sense of child, early and forced marriage among Syrian refugee girls: A mixed methods study in Lebanon. BMJ Global Health, 3(1). doi:10.1136/ bmjgh-2017-000509 Bunting, A. (2005). Stages of development: Marriage of girls and teens as an international human rights issue. Social and Legal Studies, 14(1), 17–38. doi:10.1177/0964663905049524 Bunting, A., Lawrance, B. N., & Roberts, R. L. (2016). Marriage by force? Contestation over consent and coercion in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. doi:10.3138/cjwl.29.2.431 Gaffney-Rhys, R. (2011). International law as an instrument to combat child marriage. The International Journal of Human Rights, 15(3), 359–373. doi:10.1080/13642980903315398 Girls Not Brides. (2017). Research in 2017: What did we learn about child marriage? Retrieved from https://www .girlsnotbrides.org/research-2017-learn-child-marriage/ Hodgkinson, K. (2016). Understanding and addressing child marriage: A scoping study of available academic and programmatic literature for the HER CHOICE Alliance. Amsterdam Institute for Social Research. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2GMgEgZ Kim, M., Longhofer, W., Boyle, E. H., & Nyseth, H. (2013). When do laws matter? National minimumage-of-marriage laws, child rights, and adolescent fertility, 1989–2007. Law & Society Review, 47(3), 589–619. doi:10.1111/lasr.12033 Shadle, B. (2006). “Girl Cases”: Marriage and colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970. Portsmouth, UK: Heinemann. Walker, J. A. (2013). Mapping child marriage in West Africa. New York, NY: Ford Foundation.

Ecological Approaches See Bronfenbrenner, Urie

Ecology and Environmental Education Environmental education encompasses a wide umbrella of teaching and learning practices with ethical, historical, and political dimensions.

Children are disproportionately affected by social and ecological problems while at the same time, children’s access to decision-making processes is obstructed by political barriers. This raises the critical ethical point that children are integral to enduring struggles for justice. The collective agency of children and youth has quickly built a contemporary global movement for action against climate change, sparked by the student strike of Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. Critical to this discussion is the role of education in building children’s and intergenerational awareness of social and natural environments and acquiring knowledge that can trace blueprints for action. Key concepts in environmental education include sustainability, biodiversity, ecology, environmental justice, and intergenerational equity. Environmental issues in educational systems have been framed within disciplinary boxes, particularly within science curricula. Many educational systems compartmentalize the learning that takes place in elementary and secondary schools into discipline-specific classes, and the integration of environmental education into core subject areas has been prioritized inconsistently by education ministers and legislators. There is a significant global public consensus regarding planetary degradation and the environmental problems of shifting weather patterns, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, chemical pollution, and biodiversity loss, which suggests the necessity for children’s environmental knowledge. These pressing environmental issues affect the basic needs of food, energy, and water for humans and other species. Contradictory stances regarding the environmental implications of consumption and affluence have also affected theoretical and practical approaches to environmental education. There are contested views on the concept of sustainability within conflicting paradigms of economic growth and environmental ethics. Neoliberal values of individualism, competition, and personal responsibility deflect attention from policy patterns that compound environmental degradation. The themes of social justice, place, community, care, and culture can be identified in the cross-­curricular implementation of environmental education in schooling contexts. Interdisciplinary approaches in schooling contexts and other sites of learning encompass knowledge about human-induced

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environmental problems and the relationships between concepts and systems.

Ecology Environmental thought and action builds on ecological principles. Biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology in 1866 from the Greek words for household (oikos) and study (logos). The science of ecology focuses on patterns and processes that affect biodiversity, organisms, and ecosystems. Phosphorous, nitrogen, and freshwater cycles sustain life, and ecological imbalances worldwide are pressing concerns in terms of the significance of ecosystem health and the risk of ecosystem destruction. Ecology and bioregional knowledge offer models to see patterns, systems, and cycles, and the scientific concept of scale. Teaching children about environmental tipping points may facilitate an understanding of the scale of environmental problems. The concept of community in the context of ecology science includes more than one species, and relationships of biodiversity accent the concept of interdependence in nature. Ecological resources and relationships are integral to community resilience. The critical importance of children’s exposure to nature is conveyed in biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia, which is a love of nature, extending the possibilities for care and love for the environment. This concept invokes the notion that children’s affinity with nature is a reference point for expanding children’s environmental knowledge. A related problem is that access to green spaces can be more challenging within cities and many children have limited or no engagement with the wilderness. Other urban environmental issues include indoor air quality and exposure to environmental toxins. Points of intersection between social and ecological justice can be better understood by thinking of systems as ecological rather than economic. The paradigm of an economic system views resources as unlimited and to be converted into commodities. The paradigm of an ecological system acknowledges that resources are finite and advances the conviction that the ability of future generations to sustain life matters. Ecological concepts of mutualism and parasitism as well as cooperation and reciprocal altruism can also facilitate an understanding of what sustains social

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and environmental problems. Ecological connections between nature’s patterns, cycles, and systems can imprint on children in the classroom and inspire action-oriented education for ecosystem restoration.

Historical Aspects of Environmental Education Contemporary environmental education originated in the field of ecology and conservation science and was influenced by the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While environmental learning has historically been associated with science education, ecopedagogy emphasizes interdisciplinarity and connects with Indigenous knowledge systems and sustainable relationships with the land. Historical and contemporary injustices such as land dispossession point to the importance of decolonizing approaches to environmental education and mapping collective action with attention to Indigenous land education. International economic and political forums in Belgrade (1975), Tbilisi (1977), Rio de Janeiro (1992), Johannesburg (1996), and Ahmedabad (2007) developed environmental education into policy. The concept of sustainability has been a defining feature of environmental education at the international policy level. Sustainability can be understood as taking care of habitats and resources for future generations and related to the concept of intergenerational justice. Neoliberal approaches to sustainability are hinged on an extractive economy and contribute to a tension between economic development and education for sustainable development. Current environmental problems which are implicitly endorsed by government policies include the environmental implications of tar sand mining, fracking, and oil pipelines.

Political and Ethical Aspects of Environmental Education Another source of influence on environmental education has been the environmental justice movement, which incites thinking about disparate exposures to environmental pollution; exposures that have often had the consequence of grave health inequities. Since the 1960s, research

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documenting the ways in which racialized communities and communities living with poverty have been impacted by inequitable and discriminatory environmental practices have sparked protests and built a powerful social movement. Key to these struggles has been the concept of social justice encompassing distributive justice (the fair distribution of social goods and harms) and procedural justice (access to decision making). Examples of social goods include safe housing and adequate food, and social harms refer to hazardous waste sites and contaminated soil, water, and air. Rethinking the parameters of environmental education to include the broader social context raises important questions about systemic injustice and the need for a collective agency. Theories of environmental justice can inspire in children the ethical conviction that patterns of power and environmental inequities be understood and contested. Initiatives to map this theory into practical applications with children can be seen in community pedagogy and community projects such as citizen science exposing industrial pollution, campaigns for equitable access to fresh food and green spaces, as well as collective action through protests and volunteering. The activist dimensions of educating for environmental justice connect with theoretical and practical knowledge.

Environmental Education Programs in School and Community Contexts Environmental education takes place through many pedagogical strategies and curriculum frameworks in formal educational institutions. In Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Taipei, city policies have mandated the inclusion of environmental education in the school curriculum. In South Africa, Fundisa for Change is a national program that works on training teacher educators and teachers through curriculum development. Examples of environmental education in schooling contexts around the world include green roofs, food gardens, and inquiry-based and structured learning experiences on topics such as biodiversity, ­climate change, and energy conservation. Forest schools and mobile preschools offer young children access to green spaces while cultivating learning goals, for example, with explorations of wildlife habitat and butterfly

gardens. Encompassing and honoring Indigenous knowledge systems is critical to environmental thought and action. Seed banks built within schools and seed exchanges with community members are some examples of the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge. School gardens have also been cultivated in early childhood education centers, for example, at Casa Cuna in Puebla, Mexico, and in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as other urban contexts, responding to disparities in access to food. Many formerly colonized countries in the Global South are approaching environmental education from a decolonial standpoint. Power disparities and resource distribution inequities continue to be struggled against in interrelated global movements for climate justice, food security, and biodiversity. Theory building has set the direction for enacting democratic practices through systems and institutions that are participatory. Community empowerment in learning contexts takes shape when skills and knowledge connect meaningfully to the lives of participants. Children play a role as researchers in real-world problem-solving through monitoring water quality, the mapping of air pollution, the restoration of local ecosystems, and other environmental action projects. Drawing on popular education and social movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America points to possibilities for environmental education as concrete and collective action. Participatory Action Research projects include youth mobilizing against power plants, incinerators, and landfill sites in their communities or participating in community organizing for food justice through youth-led educational workshops and urban agriculture. Murals, storytelling, and theater also have the potential to introduce environmental concepts and concerns and to invoke empathy. For example, a social theater project by the Artist Collective for Environmental and Social Theater in Madrid, Spain, explores the issue of the privatization of water and water shortages. Children’s hypotheses and wishes for the future provide political and ethical possibilities for environmental education. Ongoing struggles for distributive and procedural justice within the context of neoliberal global capitalism require the committed political and ethical work of social movements. Environmental decision making can be strengthened by drawing on the political

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imagination of children, but this calls for a reframing of relationships to address the power imbalances between adults and children as well as the conditions that reproduce social and environmental inequities. Lara Bober See also Capitalism and Childhood; Child and Youth Activism; Childhood and Nature; Food Studies and Children

Further Readings Cairns, K. (2018). Beyond magic carrots: Garden pedagogies and the rhetoric of effects. Harvard Educational Review, 88(4), 516–537. Haluza-DeLay, R. (2013). Educating for environmental justice. In M. Brody, J. Dillon, R. Stevenson, & A. Wals (Eds.), International handbook of environmental education research (pp. 394–402). London, UK: Routledge. Hursh, D., Henderson, J., & Greenwood, D. (2015). Environmental education in a neoliberal climate (Special Issue). Environmental Education Research, 21(3), 299–318. Krasny, M. E., & Russ, A. (Eds.). (2017). Urban environmental education review. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shiva, V. (1989). Staying alive: Women, ecology and development. London, UK: Zed Books. Stephens, S. (1996). Reflections on environmental justice: Children as victims and actors. Social Justice, 23(4), 62–86. Tripp, P., & Muzzin, L. (2005). Teaching as activism: Equity meets environmentalism. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 1–23. Wilson, E. O. (1992). The diversity of life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Education Children spend a considerable proportion of their childhood in school—a phenomenon that is relatively recent historically but which is now taken

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for granted as a ‘normal’ part of modern childhood(s). This tells us something about the significance of education not only for children but also for the wider society. For this reason, the role of education in children’s lives will be explored through a sociological lens, outlining key elements of the education system that shape children’s childhoods, influencing their experience, not only in their present lives as children but also in their future lives as adults. The entry foregrounds issues related to power and equality in children’s school lives, as well as the factors that influence their engagement with and achievement in school.

Thinking About Children, Childhoods, and Schooling A key focus within the sociologies of childhood is considering the very specific nature of children’s position as a social group in society and how this varies both in time and place. One area of focus is the minority status of children relative to adults and that much of what happens in their lives is determined by the adults who surround them. This intergenerational focus is especially apt with respect to the study of education, as schools are a key site of intervention by adults in children’s lives. Children rarely have the choice as to whether or not they will attend school. In most countries, they are required by law to do so, although the compulsory age range may vary from one society to another. Given the amount of time children spend in education, it has profound implications for the experience of their childhoods, their rights, and their well-being. Indeed, the right to education is stipulated by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Two provisions are especially important with respect to education: (1) Article 28 defines the right to education and (2) Article 29 defines the purpose of education. This latter embraces holistic concepts that include recognition of culture, identity, and the development of the child’s personality in a spirit of peace, tolerance, and equality. Of equal importance are more general principles expressed in Articles 2, 3, and 12 that underpin all other articles. These relate to nondiscrimination with respect to different groups of children (birth, race, colour, sex, language, religion, politics, birth, or other status), as well as the right for children to

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have a say in matters directly affecting them and the right to have decisions made in their best interests. Having a right to education is not, however, the same thing as experiencing rights in education, which can vary considerably from one context to another and from one child to another. International reviews highlight persistent differences among children in their progression and completion rates through education both within countries and between them. Substantive differences arise for example between the Global North and Global South, with key differences in availability and transfer across education sectors—from preschool, primary, and through to secondary education. Significant gender differences arise also, especially with respect to the education of girls. But differences also arise within countries in the Global North that are clearly related to social class, gender, and ethnic/migrant background. As educational levels in society rise, expectations for progression of children through to higher levels become the norm. Conversely, not to progress through the education system has long-term consequences for quality of life, health, and wellbeing not only for the individual child and her family but also for the wider society. This is why UNICEF takes education as one of the key indicators for measuring country progress in their international reviews of child well-being. In this sense, one can speak of school and education as part of a structuring experience in childhood, determined by adult expectations of what is appropriate and expected as ‘normal’ for a ‘good’ childhood. However, what is viewed as a ‘good’ childhood and a ‘good’ education varies by cultural and social context. It is through the education system that a society conveys its priorities related to social, economic, and political development. Indeed, the very idea of an education ‘system’ available to all children is a relatively recent one. In Western societies, it coincides with changing ideas not only of the developmental ‘needs’ of children but also of the potential usefulness of children. Traditionally viewed as sources of cheap labour in factories and on farms, as well as future carers for their elderly parents, from the 19th century, children were viewed as essential to the creation of a skilled adult labour pool for emerging industrial societies. The establishment of school as

an essential part of childhood freed children from often exploitative labour practices redirecting their ‘work’ towards longer term goals. However, like other forms of unpaid work, this wider contribution children make through their time in school to the betterment of society is mostly invisible in public policy discourse. Yet, in highly competitive education systems, children may spend more time on their schoolwork than the average adult working day, when homework and exam study are taken into account. In this perspective, children are thus construed as a form of human capital, with investment in the present through a state system of education, perceived to bring longterm benefits to children themselves, their families, and the society as a whole through economic development. The more economically advanced the society, the longer the period of time children spend in formal education. Education is also a central mechanism for conveying key messages about nationhood, national identity, and the wider values the society wishes to convey. This connects with aspirations also towards economic development, but the priorities that are set for children’s learning are intertwined with the cultural values and social norms that predominate in each society at a particular time. This is the transmission element of education, defining and shaping the kind of knowledge, understanding, views, and perspectives that adults governing the education system deem appropriate.

Children, Power, and Schooling Schools then are powerful places for children, providing key opportunities for personal, social, and cognitive development that are strongly influenced by changing ideas and discourses of children’s place in the world. Child developmental psychology, popularised in schools from the 1960s, heralded a new focus on the individual needs of each child, feeding directly into ‘child centred’ pedagogies and the more active involvement of children in their learning. This challenged more authoritarian ‘subject centred’ approaches, with a greater focus on the needs of children to be protected and nurtured and an emphasis on play and discovery in children’s learning. At a wider societal level, these ideas coincided with an economic

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emphasis on the development of individual talent that, with the prevalence of neoliberal policies from the 1980s, has led to a more competitive and market-based approach to children’s education. One sees this operating at multiple levels: (a) globally, through the work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the international rankings of state education systems in their performance in maths, science, and literacy, through studies such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA); (b) within countries, as evident in league ranking of schools in their performance in state examinations and/or national inspectorate systems; and (c) at the local level, in competition for entry to the ‘best’ schools. This competitive neoliberal approach (and with it the contraction of welfare support) can also be woven into state funding for schools, underscored by a reduction in funding for schools that fail to perform, and legitimised on the basis of ‘failing teachers’ and ‘dysfunctional’ parenting. School curricula and assessment become defined and shaped in line with the needs of the economy and a narrowing of learning to core and easily assessible ‘skills’. The focus is upon economic interests and development rather than wider educational pedagogies based on shared values, community, and the type of society (rather than just economy) the system wishes to create. These developments are reaching into children’s lives from an increasingly early age, as pre-schools and early years settings move through a process of ‘schoolification’. This is reflected in an emphasis on learning in core ‘school based’ skills (usually in literacy and maths), rather than play. Schools are also social spaces in which children interact with one another. Indeed, when asked what they most like about school, children say it is being with friends. Friends provide an important respite not only from the demands of formal learning within the often confined space of the classroom but also a space within which children can learn to know about themselves and others. Often referred to as ‘child cultures’ or ‘peer cultures’, these are central to the creation of autonomous child spaces, where children are more firmly in control. In the ongoing flow of school life, children have fun as they jostle and compete with one another for status, affiliation, and belonging, positioning themselves with peers on the basis of

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their resistance to and/or affiliation with school norms around the ‘ideal’ pupil. This requires a complex degree of negotiation with both peers and teachers and is strongly influenced by children’s gender, social class, sexuality, ‘race’, ­ethnicity, and levels of ability and disability.

Equality and Schooling These dynamics within and across schools are central to sociological analyses of education. Of interest and concern is the embedding of these dynamics across generations. Common sense tells us that schooling is always a good thing. Yet, when one looks at patterns of social and cultural reproduction (how children end up in a similar position to their parents) within the education system, questions can be raised about how effective education systems are in tackling wider inequalities in the society. In other words, does education contribute to the very reproduction of these patterns of inequality and difference, exacerbate and define them, or does it work to provide all children with equal chances to succeed? Theorising Education and Inequality

Responses to this question derive from what one can broadly call ‘deficit’ or ‘difference’ perspectives in theorising why some children fail and some succeed at school. These perspectives range along a continuum of equality including equality of access, equality of participation, equality of outcome, and equality of condition. In the first two, a more minimal liberal approach to equality is sought that focuses on the removal of any legal barriers to children’s access to and participation in education. Liberal approaches encourage the development of policies to support inclusive practices in schools but these are viewed as compensating for inadequacies or ‘deficits’ in the child’s family background. Education is perceived as a relatively private/individual affair, operating on a meritocratic system of fairness. Those who have the ability and work hard will be rewarded with the deserved educational credentials. According to the pioneering sociologists Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, the function of education is to sort and select children according to their innate talents and abilities, allocating them to the

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various roles which society needs them to perform. The role of education is not to equalise outcomes among children but rather to ensure that every opportunity to avail of education is provided for those who wish to make the most of it. This view has become especially prominent with the rise of neoliberalism, viewing education as a competitive market place (for educational qualifications) centred on survival of the fittest. Recent critiques by Thomas Picketty, for example, of this ‘meritocratic’ thesis highlight the negative impact on overall distribution of wealth and concentration of opportunity among elites in society. A second major strand of sociological analysis locates differences in achievement firmly in the context of economic structures of power and privilege in society. These more critical and radical perspectives highlight how education is used by powerful elites to further their own interests. Consistently research indicates that how children do in schools is significantly related to wider inequalities in the society. International comparative research confirms the direct connection between levels of income inequality in societies and levels of educational inequality. Where societies are characterised by high degrees of wealth inequality (e.g., such as South Africa, Brazil, the United K ­ ingdom, and the United States), this is reproduced in a more segregated and unequal education system. Where societies have higher degrees of social solidarity and a priority on values of equality (e.g., Scandinavian countries), this permeates into an education system where differences on the basis of social class, race, ethnicity, and gender are significantly less pronounced. Radical/critical approaches focus on addressing equality of outcome and advocate for direct intervention with specific groups of children, establish targets, and hold systems to account where inequalities persist. Taking a step further, critical approaches also argue that equality of outcome is inter-connected to equality of condition, involving a redistribution of wealth in the wider society. Difference theorists (of whom there are many variations) argue that children learn from a relatively early age the extent to which they ‘belong’, are valued and recognised in terms of their cultural and social background. International comparative studies highlight not only differences in outcomes between countries but also within countries, depending on

the kind of schools children attend, and levels of social segregation that exist within and between them. This suggests that the learning environment and culture of schools can create very different opportunities for children to fail and/or excel. Social Class

Social class is an especially important predictor of educational achievement. It includes within it factors related not only to income but also parental educational levels and the knowledge and understanding of how to progress through the education system. At a macro level, the influence of social class is evident not only in decisions about what children are to learn (the curriculum) but also how they are to learn (pedagogy) and indeed how their learning is to be evaluated (testing and assessment systems). Basil Bernstein’s work is especially relevant here for outlining the middle-class bias of the education system, with negative consequences for the recognition and valuing of the experiences of those children who come from social and cultural backgrounds different from the norm. For Pierre Bourdieu also, this lack of recognition of those who differ from the norm is perceived as a form of symbolic violence perpetrated by elites, whose interests dominate in education. Questions arise as to the kinds of supports provided to children and their teachers working in challenging circumstances including levels of expectation and skills to work with difference. Rather than perceiving education as a relatively ‘neutral’ space which always acts in children’s best interests, it is perceived as working to the advantage of those who are already privileged, making it difficult for those who are at the margins to catch up. Bourdieu’s work is especially important here as he highlights the economic, social, and cultural resources that are needed for educational success. He views these resources as forms of capital, access to which underpins success in education. Both Bourdieu and Diane Reay, among others, argue that the education system is skewed in favour of children from middle-class backgrounds, through forms of speech, demeanour, and cultural expressions—‘habitus’—that is, firmly embedded in middle-class ways of thinking, doing and ‘being’ in the world. Feelings of shame and an embodied sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ can leave children on the

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margins of society feeling like outsiders, unable to access or penetrate the real knowing and understanding that is required to ‘get on’ in school. Over time this gives rise to a sense of disconnection between the child’s life at home/local community and that of the school, culminating in its extreme in school absenteeism and early school drop-out. Where there is a clustering of children in a local community or school with similar challenges, the impact tends to be most profound. It can create a negative cycle of disconnection and a learning environment in school characterised by lower expectations and teacher burnout. Combined with national polices of league ranking of schools in terms of their test scores, the phenomenon of ‘failing’ schools/‘ghetto’ schools results in a cycle of despair and marginalisation. In contrast, a middle-class advantage is compounded by knowing how the education system works (cultural capital) and being able to tap into connections and contacts (social capital) about the best schools, the real requirements of doing well in exams, as well as paying for the additional supports that may be needed to ensure success. The capacity to build and extend children’s formal learning through extra-curricular activities that add to their cultural capital is another example of how social class advantage can play out in the education system. In contemporary society, this tends to be reinforced through the scheduling and ‘hot housing’ of children’s lives. Annette Lareau’s work in the United States epitomises this in her descriptions of the concerted cultivation by middle-class parents of their children in contrast to what she terms the ‘natural growth’ model favoured by working-class families, less knowledgeable about how the education system works. Bourdieu equates these processes of cultural and social reproduction in the education system as akin to a game. Those with the valued tokens (i.e., those who possess the skills and values that are the ‘norm’ in education) have an advantage in playing the game. Bourdieu was especially interested in inequalities centred on social class, but his work has also been used to explore gendered and racial inequalities. Gender and Sexualities

Social class intersects with other aspects of children’s social identities related, for example, to

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their gender, ethnicity, and dis/ability. This identity work is a core element of children’s agency in schools yet it is intricately bound to wider structures within the society and the norms children are exposed to in their daily lives. One can ask what are the messages in relation to gender conveyed through what and how children learn? How are these reflected in the organisational and pedagogical practices of schools (e.g., gender segregation for subjects, role models in textbooks)? International comparators of reading and mathematics performance (conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) point to the consistent underperformance of girls in mathematics and of boys in literacy. They also highlight the general underper­­ formance of working-class boys across all subject areas. A considerable challenge for boys relates to dominant (macho) constructions of masculinity that can make being ‘good’ at school a source of derision within male peer cultures. Role modelling, societal changes in gender roles, and family patterns all impact on how boys and girls learn to be and ‘do’ ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ with differing consequences for their attitudes towards and achievement in school. Additional issues that arise are stereotypes that influence teacher (and parent) expectations over what boys or girls can achieve. This, in turn, influences the positive and negative dispositions boys and girls have for different kinds of subject areas, influencing what they study and do well in, and ultimately the kind of careers they may follow in later life. So gendered patterns and experiences in school become reproduced in gender differences in the wider society. Sexualities and the expression of diverse gendered identities are increasingly to the fore in research with children in schools, as wider societal norms change. An increasing area of concern here is the prevalence of homophobic bullying in school and how/if schools recognise the range of diversities or promote heterosexual norms with respect to the gendered ‘work’ and positioning of young people. Race, Ethnicity, and Migration

Ethnicity is another important marker for the construction of childhood in school, both in terms of patterns of achievement and recognition and inclusion of minority ethnic groups in the

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education system. It was concerns over racial inequalities and segregation in the school system in the United States in the 1960s that spearheaded much of the international policy focus in later years on education and inequality. Since that time, studies have extended to include the full range of ethnic diversities, highlighting how children from minority ethnicities often struggle to be appropriately recognised and valued for their cultural difference in education systems geared to the majority ethnic norm. There are clear parallels here with respect to social class inequalities in terms of challenges related to negative stereotyping, lower teacher expectations, and cultural bias in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment systems. Equally important is how social class itself intersects with ethnicity, ensuring that it is poorer, minority ethnic children who often fare worst in education. Dynamics of inclusion/exclusion based on ethnicity in children’s peer cultures in school are also significant. Research here highlights not only the awareness of even very young children of ethnic markers but also the cultural work children engage in to manage those differences. School and classroom cultures are key, as is the need for teachers to be continually mindful of unconscious bias that underplays the significance of racism and racist practices in schools. With globalisation, there is now increasing focus on migration and its impact on both migrants and settlement societies. The role of education in facilitating the transition of migrant families and their children to the society is especially foregrounded. Research with migrant children documents the very active role they play in mobilising family cultural and linguistic capitals, bridging the relationship between their parents and the local community through the social networks and friendships they develop at school. Research, however, also highlights the challenges that ensue in both accommodating to new cultures and systems and the ‘belonging’ work that children of immigrant families must do in order to succeed. The tendency for migrant children to be clustered in schools in poorer communities, coupled with the challenges of learning a new language, all impact on the transition process. Also noted is the tendency for attitudes towards migrant children to be conditional on the extent to which they assimilate into the culture of the

settlement society. For migrant children who have parents invested with strong economic, social, and cultural capital the transition process is smoother, albeit still creating challenges the migrant child must overcome. While migrant children are continually playing ‘catch up’ with their native-born peers, it is those who have access to resources of care, wealth, and particular forms of dominant cultural knowledge who are most likely to succeed. In the absence of opportunities for success and sustained investment in supporting their additional learning and familial needs, a cycle of intergenerational poverty and exclusion can result. The intersectional influences of class, ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on children’s experience of school reflect complex dynamics of power that operate in and through education systems. Michel Foucault’s work is useful here given his focus not on who has power (although this is important) but on how it is exercised in modern societies. He characterises these as ‘disciplinary societies’ governed not by overt domination as in the past, but by more subtle forms of power and control that influence how people come to know and understand themselves. As a system of control, education is especially effective in this respect. Schooling enables children to be compared, ranked, and classified against other children in a system of persistent surveillance and scrutiny. The power of such control is not necessarily overtly exercised through (physical) punishment (although this may still happen) but, rather, through everyday practices of shaping and encouraging children to conform to certain societal norms. These norms may vary for different groups of children. This entry suggests that ethnicity and gender, as well as social class, play a role in the kinds of education available to children, and increasingly privatisation of schooling and a more ‘marketised’ approach to learning in many parts of the world reinscribe the reproduction of class differences. This is not to suggest that children are cultural ‘dupes’ to be moulded as adults require. The very act of learning requires some level of negotiation. Time that adults and children spend together in school also influences adults through the myriad of responses and complexities children themselves bring to the schooling process.

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Concluding Thoughts The UNCRC defines children’s rights to education, but this must be broadened to a consideration of their rights in education to a just and meaningful experience. In other words, experiencing education as personal and meaningful is where empowerment and change occurs. A focus on dispositions in learning is crucial which necessitates sensitivity to the everyday of children’s lived experience, at home, in their community as well as in school. ‘Disposition’ here refers to the amalgam of perceptions, experiences, and behaviours— what Bourdieu defines as the habitus—that influences how children perceive and receive, react, and respond to their school experience. It is an amalgam of the totality of their experience that provides the logic for how they interpret interactions around them. This is important with respect to equalities in education because the dispositions children hold (and that others, e.g., teachers, hold of them) influence the possibilities they view for themselves as learners. In this sense, pedagogy positions children and does so with respect to their social class, gender, ‘race’, and ethnicity. Education policy and practice has a profound impact on the power and positioning of children in the wider society. Global policy makers such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development increasingly shape who and what matters in education and how children’s learning, being, and ‘doing’ is being directed in particular ways. Key questions are raised about who and what is valued—how children are valued, what is valued in children’s learning, and as Dympna Devine’s work notes, if children are differently valued in schools. Such questions are bound with the framing of children’s identities, how school practice shapes children’s experience of who they are, as well as what they will become. The neoliberal sweep that currently permeates education systems globally creates particular challenges for children and their families. With the contraction of welfare states, a more competitive and individualistic approach to education takes hold. Children become increasingly reliant on the webs of care and family supports that influence their capacity to engage with the education system. In the absence of sustained investment by the State in a careful and nurturing education, being valued differently leads

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to cyclical patterns of underachievement for children. These become naturalised in global and local policy discourses as deficiencies in children’s ­family cultures, ‘parenting’, and ethnic identities. As Foucault reminds us, however, change, and the power to drive it, does not operate in a linear fashion but is circular and often embraces contradictory tensions and trends. Coincident, for example, with the neoliberal thrust of education is the recognition globally of the need to value children (and childhood) in and of themselves, alongside the need to embrace a more holistic and rightscentred approach to all aspects of children’s lives. The UNCRC has been pivotal in this changing discourse, providing a template for working towards, albeit minimum, standards of rights for all children, including provisions directly related to education. In this respect a ‘careful’ education is one which must challenge and extend children to be the best they can be, especially for those most at the margins. Framing these dynamics in the context of children’s rights in the UNCRC provides a generative mechanism within which to hold governments to account for the impact of investment of resources and support for children’s education, especially in challenging contexts. It also challenges adult stakeholders in education (teachers, school leaders, and policy makers) to reflect on their own positioning with respect to children’s rights both intergenerationally in terms of voice and participation, but also pedagogically in terms of serving the best interests of children through equal opportunities to learn. Dympna Devine See also Bernstein, Basil; Bourdieu, Pierre; Ethnicity; Gender; Racial Formations

Further Readings Alexander, R. (Ed.). (2010). Children, their world, their education: Final report and recommendations of the Cambridge primary review. London, UK: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

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Devine, D. (2002). Children’s citizenship and the structuring of adult/child relations in the primary school. Childhood, 9(3), 303–321. doi:10.1177/ 0907568202009003044 Devine, D. (2003). Children power and schooling—how childhood is structured in the primary school. Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham. Devine, D. (2013). ‘Value’ing children differently?— Migrant children in education. Children & Society, 27(4), 241–245. doi:10.1111/chso.12034 Devine, D., & Cockburn, T. (2018). Theorizing children’s citizenship—New welfare states and inter-generational justice? Childhood, 25(2), 142–157. doi:10.1177/ 0907568218759787 Devine, D., & McGillicuddy, D. (2016). Positioning pedagogy—a matter of children’s rights? Oxford Review of Education, 42(4), 424–443. doi:10.1080/0 3054985.2016.1197111 Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley: University Press of California. McGillicuddy, D., & Devine, D. (2018). ‘Turned off or ready to fly?’ Ability grouping as an act of symbolic violence in primary school. Teaching and Teacher Education, 70, 88–99. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2017.11.008 Pinson, H., Arnot, M., & Candappa, M. (2010). Education, asylum and the ‘non-citizen’ child: The politics of compassion and belonging. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230276505_3 Reay, D. (2005). Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class. Sociology, 39(5), 911–928. doi:10.1177/0038038505058372 Reay, D. (2006). ‘I’m not seen as one of the clever children’: Consulting primary school pupils about the social conditions of learning. Education Review, 58(2), 171–181.

Education, Child-Centered Child-centred education can be defined as education which is oriented around the child as an active constructor of its own learning and development. Pedagogy must align itself with the child rather than the child aligning with pedagogy. The dominant pedagogy in child-centred ideology is learning through play, as this enables children to actively make sense of their world. This entry offers an overview of child-centred learning, its application, and its key features.

Evolution of Child-Centred Education The idea of child-centred education began with the early years’ pioneers. The 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and early ­ 19th-century German educationalist Friedrich Froebel saw children as innately good. This was in contrast to the main religious dogma of the time, which viewed children as tarnished by original sin. Rousseau suggested that children should be allowed to play and learn through nature, as this would enable their natural goodness to emerge. Froebel saw education as enabling children to connect with God. He claimed that through play, children made links between their inner being and the outside world, which was a manifestation of God. During the early 20th century, progressive education emerged. Kindergarten educators rejected the idea that education should prepare children for work and moved towards a more child-centred approach. The aim of education was seen as the preparation of children for life, rather than the world of employment. Influenced by Charles Darwin, the scientific study of children gave rise to the belief that given the right opportunities, the child would develop naturally. This ideology gave rise to curricula which were based on the activities and interests of the child, with an emphasis on the learning environment and the teacher as facilitator. This was taken up in Anglo-American education during the post–World War II era, when a new progressivism emerged. This approach to primary education promoted democracy and freedom in its non-coercive pedagogy and can be seen as a reaction against the perceived social regulation of the Nazi regime. In the United Kingdom, a report into primary education in 1967, the Plowden Report, celebrated and validated childcentred education. Key features of this report were active learning, choice, play, readiness, and an emphasis on developmentalism. Central to the progressive movement was a relationship between child-centred ideology and developmental psychology. This is particularly seen in the way the theories of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget were used to support ideas about active learning and child development. Piaget theorised that children developed their mental structures to adapt to the environment. He called

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these structures ‘schemas’ and described the processes by which children assimilated new information into their schemas or accommodated them to solve problems. This cognitive theory was used to support active learning through play. Piaget also suggested that children develop through predetermined, age-related stages. This was used to support the idea of readiness, with children observed and measured to determine their readiness to move on to the next stage of learning. Since the 1960s, when child-centred education reached the peak of its popularity, changes in the political landscape have led to a move away from this approach in the primary phase. The emergence of neoliberal policy since the 1970s has led to a consumerist view of education, in which performance is valued over competence. Progressive education was criticised for not teaching the ‘basic skills’ of literacy and numeracy. Increasingly, curricula are skills-based, requiring the child to attune to pedagogy, rather than pedagogy attuning to the child. The increase in accountability measures has also led to an emphasis on attainment, with even very young children being assessed against learning goals.

Key Features Despite the move away from child-centred education in the primary phase, a child-centred approach is still an aspect, to a greater or lesser degree, of many national early years’ curricula. It is worth exploring some of the key features of this approach. Literature on the subject suggests that central to child-centred education are concepts of active learning, play, the holistic child, freedom, the use of developmental psychology, and the role of teacher as facilitator. Child-centred education can be seen as a branch of constructivist theory. As such, children construct knowledge through their interaction with the world. They are active learners who experiment, interact, and seek out knowledge themselves. Knowledge is seen to reside within the child. Given the right environment, this knowledge will naturally emerge. To enable children to become active learners, the educator must provide opportunities for play, self-initiated tasks, critical thinking, experimentation, and creativity. In addition to this, the physical environment must enable

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the child to develop their bodies in terms of both gross and fine motor skills. The main mode for active learning is play. Childcentred play is child-initiated and child-directed. It is not planned and directed by the teacher for a particular learning objective. Free play, in which the adult has minimal input, is particularly valued as it enables the child to actively make sense of the world on its own terms. The role of the adult is to provide opportunities for free play. The purpose of education in this approach is the holistic development of the child. Cognitive development is not privileged over physical, social, or emotional development as each is seen as equally important. The role of the adult is to provide opportunities for children to develop in all areas. A childcentred curriculum will thus ensure that all children can develop physically, emotionally, socially, and cognitively through the provision of developmentally appropriate resources and activities. Freedom is a central concept in child-centred education. In this ideology, children should not be coerced into participating in activities which they have not chosen. Their freedom to choose and to develop at their own rate is a key feature of childcentred education. Linked to this is the concept of readiness, which asserts that a child cannot develop a new skill until ready. To coerce a child into a developmental stage for which they are not ready is seen as inappropriate. Thus, teacherdirected activities and lessons are seen as coercive and therefore not child-centred. The child must steer its own educational course without the interference or disruption of adults. Child-centred education is underpinned by developmentalism, in particular developmental psychology. Educators must know each individual child in order to facilitate their learning. They must know when the child is ready to move on to a new area of development and must plan accordingly. Assessment, therefore, is key, as it allows the educator to know where the child is in relation to developmental norms and where they might be expected to go next. A sound knowledge of child development is therefore an essential attribute of the practitioner. In each of these features of child-centred education, the educator takes the role of facilitator. They must provide a learning environment which facilitates active learning, enabling the child to develop in all areas, and must possess a thorough

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knowledge of child development in order to assess each child to determine readiness and plan for next steps.

Criticism There are elements of this approach to learning in many early years curricula worldwide. There are, however, criticisms of child-centred learning, which mainly focus on the role of the adult. As a facilitator, the teacher is powerless to intervene when children display undesirable behaviour, which can be interpreted as deprofessionalising. The system can be seen as inefficient, as direct teaching can achieve results in a shorter timeframe. This is particularly relevant to the teaching of literacy and numeracy, which may take much longer to emerge in non-coercive pedagogies. Finally, sociocultural learning is largely absent from child-centred approaches as the focus is on the individual, rather than the social. The importance of social learning from both peers and adults is overlooked, with the environment taking a more significant role. Current curricula take elements of childcentred education and combine them with other approaches such as sociocultural and teacherdirected play. This leads to an uneasy coexistence of approaches and confusion amongst practitioners. Research indicates that although many curricula claim to be child-centred, these policies are not borne out in practice. The demands of accountability and the need for efficiency make congruence between child-centred theory and practice problematic. Mandy Pierlejewski See also Carework; Developmental Psychology; Froebel, Friedrich; Piaget, Jean; Play, Theories of

Further Readings Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (3rd ed.). Oxon, UK: Routledge. Plowden Report. (1967). Children and their primary schools: A report of the central advisory council for education. London, UK: HMSO. Shunah, C., & Walsh, D. J. (2000). Unpacking childcentredness: A history of meanings. Journal of

Curriculum Studies, 32(2), 215–234. doi:10.1080/ 002202700182727 Walkerdine, V. (1998). Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy: The insertion of Piaget into early education. In J. Henriques, W. Holloway, C. Unwin, C. Venn, & V. Walkerdine (Eds.), Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.2307/2069579

Education, Co-operative Education has always been central to the global aims of the co-operative movement. For Robert Owen (1771–1858), a key figure in the emergence of the co-operative movement, education was critical to his project for the reform of society. As a utopian socialist influenced by the sciences of his day, he saw human nature, and more particularly the poor, as open to being shaped by their environment and thus capable of being formed in rational people that the state finds useful and effective. The 28 Rochdale Pioneers—whose business, established in 1844, became the model for the world movement—set up schools throughout the 19th century, many of which were later brought into the mainstream of state schooling so that by the 1980s they were no longer in fashion. It was not until 2008 that the first Co-operative Trust school at Reddish Vale, Stockport, was set up and subsequently led to a movement now estimated to include between 350 and 600 schools. This makes the co-operative schools movement one of the largest association of schools in the United Kingdom, after the Church of England and the Catholic Church faith schools. The legislation that enabled the growth of the movement in the United Kingdom was the 2006 Education and Inspections Act under Tony Blair’s premiership. This act was seized on by the then Principal of the Co-operative College in Manchester, Mervyn Wilson, as a way of bringing the values and organisational practices of the co-operative movement back into education. The development of cooperative schools was not, however, the purpose of the legislation. Its intention was to ­ encourage the involvement of the private sector since it was assumed that business efficiency and

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innovation would raise standards and ensure that education was fit for the future needs of the economy. Significantly, however, the co-operative movement provides an alternative to what many have seen as the privatisation of schools through legislation that has enabled entrepreneurs to see a business opportunity in the legislation enabling the development of academies. What distinguishes co-operative schools from mainstream schools generally is the engagement of stakeholder groups in the governance of the schools. These include parents/carers, staff, students, and the community through their membership in the ­co-operative movement. By being part of a movement, the schools are able to benefit from collective action. Indeed, there is a national co-operative schools network which encourages mutual support. The values of the co-operative privilege selfhelp, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. These criteria, potentially at least, enable each member, whether staff, student, parent, or member of the wider community to evaluate the practice of a given school. Early research into the emergent UK co-operative school movement suggests a variety of practice as staff, school culture, and organisational legacies have often struggled to engage with the key co-­operative values. The cultures of schools and communities that have long been hierarchically organised do not change overnight into democracies where each participant has an equal voice in decision making. In order to do so requires professional development for staff, significant changes to the organisation of a school and its relations to young people, their parents, and carers as well as to their wider communities. Rather than exclusion according to class, ability, and religious faith, the principle is inclusion. As pointed out by George Jacob Holyoake in his 1858 history of the Rochdale Pioneers, this does not mean that the co-operative principle of equality assumes harmonious agreement, nor homogeneity; indeed, he saw it as a moral miracle that the co-operatives of Rochdale had enough sense to differ in their views without disagreeing. They might dissent from each other but did not separate. They could also hate but still keep together. Learning how to ‘hold together’ is the key co-operative value of solidarity. It is through its principles that behaviour is changed in the

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day-to-day practice leading to organisational change and in the long run perhaps, social change. In this, John Dewey’s philosophy of education expressed in his school as a social laboratory for the development of democratic practices through education shares much in common with the co-operative movement. Typically, democratic ­ schools and progressive, child-centred forms of education have been on the margins of the educational mainstream and often short-lived. However, given the overlap in values and practices, their legacies can be drawn into the co-operative schools movement that potentially amplifies their impact by being part of a greater social, economic, political, and cultural movement. Rather than democratic schools largely being outside of the mainstream, the power of the co-operative movement offers the potential to challenge and become the mainstream. However, more than this it is capable of prefiguring a different kind of society, locally, nationally, and globally. The practices and forms of education that are developed by societies are dependent upon the kind of society within which they operate. Mainstream education in Western countries has been predominantly conditioned by social class and competition. The ­co-operative model with its values of democracy, equality, and equity has the power to reform and change societies. An indication of this can be found in for example the Trentino model in Northern Italy, an autonomous region, where co-operatives are integrated to form a system ­ where alongside producer, retail, and service provider co-operatives are social co-operatives, including educational services and in the Emilia Romagna region the town of Regio Emilia is particularly known internationally for its approach to early childhood education. The Co-operative College is active internationally to address social issues in promoting research and development in co-operative education to empower communities and in particular young people. John Schostak See also Dewey, John; Education, Inclusive; Social Inclusion

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Further Readings Davidge, G. (2017). Rethinking education through critical psychology: Cooperative schools, social justice and voice. London, UK: Routledge. Fielding, M., & Moss, P. (2011). Radical democratic education & the common school. London, UK: Routledge. Holyoake, G. J. (1858). Self-help by the people: The history of the Rochdale pioneers. London, UK: John Watts. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from https:// www.rochdalepioneersmuseum.coop/wp-content/ uploads/2012/03/self-helpPartOne.pdf Mayhew, K. C., & Edwards, A. C. (1936). The Dewey school: The laboratory school of the University of Chicago 1896–1903. Introduction by John Dewey. New York, NY: Appleton-Century. OECD. (2014). The co-operative model in Trentino (Italy). A case study. Report. Retrieved January 13, 2018, from https://www.oecd.org/cfe/ leed/150202%20The%20cooperative%20 model%20in%20Trentino_FINAL%20with%20 covers.pdf Owen, R. (1816). A new view of society or: Essays on the principle of the formation of the human character, and the application of the principle to practice, political economy reference archive. Retrieved August 23, 2019, from http://www.marxists.org/reference/ subject/economics/owen/index.htm Schostak, J. F. (2014). Supersurveillance, democracy and cooperation: The challenge for teachers. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 42(4), 324–336.

Websites Co-operative College website. Retrieved August 28, 2019, from https://www.co-op.ac.uk Emilia Romagna website. Retrieved August 28, 2019, from https://www.legacoopemiliaromagna.coop/cosafacciamo/estero/welcome_coop/

Education, Inclusive Inclusion is a model of education that advocates that all students benefit from learning environments that take into consideration a range of abilities and differences. Unlike mainstreaming, and segregated special education, inclusive education emphasizes that children with disabilities have a right to full participation in their

educational environments and that disabled students should be placed with their nondisabled peers to the greatest extent possible. Inclusive education movements gained momentum in the late 1980s, but debates about the usefulness of this model continue to dominate contemporary discourses and discussions in fields such as education, children’s rights, and disability studies. This entry offers an expanded definition of inclusive education and explains the differences between inclusive education, mainstreaming, and segregated special education. The section that follows presents an overview of the history of inclusion in the United States, and the entry concludes with an exploration of the debates surrounding the perceived benefits or disadvantages of inclusive education.

Defining Inclusive Education Inclusive education is in many ways a process that argues for the restructuring of traditional education. It views difference positively and sees general education classrooms as the preferred location for students. In inclusive education models, distinctions between special education and general education are discouraged, and learners with disabilities are encouraged to spend most of their time with nondisabled peers. Inclusion supports the revision of curriculum, instruction, interventions, and supports, so that each of these is more universally designed, taking into consideration a range of differences. Inclusive models, it is advocated, benefit nondisabled learners as well as those with disabilities as well as students of various ethnicities, genders, and sexualities. More often than not, inclusive models work in conjunction with rights-based approaches, which see children as having the right to quality education and as able to learn from each other in spite of their differences.

Differences Between Inclusive Education, Mainstreaming, and Segregated Special Education Inclusive education should not be confused with segregated special education; it is also distinct from mainstreaming. For example, segregated special education tends to promote more isolated

Education, Inclusive

classroom experiences for students with disabilities, since most instructional time is spent in classrooms away from nondisabled peers. Inclusion posits that students with disabilities should leave their general education classrooms for short periods of time, if at all. In addition, unlike mainstreaming, inclusive education sometimes requires disabled students to demonstrate they have the skills necessary to join a general education classroom. Mainstreaming—also referred to as ­ integration—educates disabled students with nondisabled peers for specific time-periods, sometimes for half of a school day, unlike inclusive education, in which learners with disabilities leave general education classrooms as infrequently as possible. Moreover, mainstreaming is also primarily concerned with disabled students, whereas inclusive education typically considers racial, national, gendered, and ethnic differences as well as differences in abilities. Within inclusive education models, distinctions are made between partial inclusion and full inclusion. Fully inclusive models of education are rare, since they may require redistribution of financial resources and considerable administrative and instructional alterations. Partial inclusion models are more common.

History of Inclusion in the United States As disability studies scholar Jan Doolittle Wilson points out, the push for inclusive education arose in the late 1980s. Momentum for this movement continued to grow in the 1990s throughout the United States, largely due to the efforts of parent groups and education reforms driven by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Passed in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act legislation required that schools provide a “Free Appropriate Public Education,” designed according to every student’s specific needs. In addition, each child with a disability was entitled to an Individualized Education Plan, developed in partnership among parents and schools. Individualized Education Plans specify the range of services required and how frequently they are to be provided, while also detailing each student’s performance. Furthermore, after the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the law mandated that learners had to be educated in

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the Least Restrictive Environment. Advocates arguing that children with disabilities need to be placed in learning environments alongside their nondisabled peers used the Least Restrictive Environment as support for their push toward inclusion.

Debates Surrounding the Perceived Benefits or Disadvantages of Inclusive Education Proponents of inclusive education frequently argue that inclusion has a positive impact on nondisabled learners as well. These include heightened empathy, improvement in attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, better social skills or communication competencies, and increased respect for human differences generally (of ethnicity, gender, and so on). In addition, some argue that serving as a coach or tutor for a peer helps nondisabled students improve their own academic performance. Moreover, teachers may take into consideration a wide range of modalities when developing curriculum for classrooms that include disabled learners, which may have positive benefits for nondisabled students (since some nondisabled learners may also prefer auditory, visual, or kinetic modalities). Advocates for the inclusive model also point out that separating students with disabilities into segregated classrooms can diminish self-esteem, expose them to less rigorous curriculum, and decrease social competencies and skills. Inclusive approaches to education have faced frequent backlash, however. For instance, parents of nondisabled children have worried that the standards of educational attainment for these youth may suffer in inclusive classrooms. Likewise, parents of children with disabilities have expressed concerns that inclusive education is impractical, since placement in classrooms is not sufficient without appropriate supports. Such parents highlight that their disabled children may face more ridicule in inclusive classrooms or may not receive appropriate life skills training. Moreover, critics point out that, while youth with mild or moderate disabilities may benefit from inclusive education models, inclusive approaches for students with severe disabilities continue to present challenges if such students have significant

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sensory disabilities, severe emotional/behavioral disabilities, or trouble concentrating. Cost and ­ funding are additional concerns. Eva Lupold See also Autism and Neurodiversity; Children’s Rights; Disabilities; Disability Studies in Education; Special Education

Further Readings Clark, C., Dyson, A., & Millward, A. (2018). Towards inclusive schools? New York, NY: Routledge. Haug, P. (2017). Understanding inclusive education: Ideals and reality. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 19(3), 206–217. Norwich, B., & Koutsouris, G. (2017). Addressing dilemmas and tensions in inclusive education. In Oxford research encyclopedia of education. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ acrefore/9780190264093.013.154 Tomlinson, S. (2017). A sociology of special and inclusive education: Exploring the manufacture of inability. New York, NY: Routledge. Wilson, J. D. (2017). Reimagining disability and inclusive education through universal design for learning. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(2). doi:10.18061/dsq.v37i2

Education and Nationalism Late Imperial China

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Modern Chinese nationalism emerged and developed in the final decades of late Qing China, being closely linked to the threat of Western imperialism. The Opium War of the 1840s gave rise to the Self-Strengthening Movement in the late 19th century and initiated a reform process in which modern nationalist ideas began to form. The defeat of China by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 inspired calls for further reforms. It is generally understood that the war played a significant role in the early history of modern Chinese nationalism. The war activated nationalistic sentiments that had gradually taken form since the Opium War. Yan Fu’s (1854–1921) translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics

spread the social Darwinism message and added fuel to the awakening call. The Chinese elite regarded education as the key for awakening the Chinese people. In their view, education was crucial to the survival of the nation and to the creation of a new China. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the founding father of the Republic of China, initiated his revolutionary attempt to overthrow the Manchu government. This entry examines the rise of nationalism in China, the growing demand for Chinese interpreters and interpreter training schools in the mid19th century, subsequent modern reforms, and the role missionaries, government officials, and scholars played in the establishment of China’s national education system.

The Rise of Nationalism in China In this formative stage of modern Chinese nationalism, the Chinese elite by and large abandoned the traditional dogma of China as the center of the world (tianxia) and Chinese culture as a set of universal values. Instead, they adopted the philosophy of a modern nation-state system and espoused the concepts of territorial sovereignty and national equality in order to oppose the aggression of Western powers. Equipped with such principles of nationalism, both reformers and revolutionary advocates formed a common nationalist quest for China’s regeneration, calling for an end to the humiliation imposed upon China by Western Powers. Nevertheless, they differed significantly in the means by which this nationalistic goal should be achieved. The elite reformers attempted to realize their dream of fuguo qiangbing (enrich the state and strengthen its military power) by implementing a series of reform measures via the Guangxu emperor (1871–1908), while the revolutionaries held firmly to their anti-Manchu stance (paiman). Despite competing ideologies and nationalistic programs, anti-imperialism and the search for national salvation characterized nationalism during this early period. Liang Qichao (1873–1929), one of the most influential thinkers of the time, understood that nationalism was the driving force of the modern imperial power which utilized the strength of its citizens to expand its boundaries to other nations by means of military power, commerce, industry, or religion. In his view,

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nationalistic imperialism represented the expansion of a whole nation instead of a certain emperor and would, therefore, have a long-lasting effect on the world. The writings of other reform advocates, sharing similar views with Liang Qichao, cited Western civilizations and colonial history to illustrate their interpretation of social Darwinism and race theory, through which they conveyed the message that weak nations would be eliminated if they did not act assertively to develop their own nationalism. They urged the Chinese people to awaken to the reality of imperialism; otherwise China as a nation would be ruined. In this argument, education was emphasized as having a key role in the development of Chinese nationalism. Historically education had always been considered important. However, traditional Chinese education focused only on the ancient Chinese classics and encouraged the literati to devote their energy to climbing the examination ladder in order to enter officialdom. The narrow focus on Confucian study failed to provide young talent with the incentives to pursue broad and practical knowledge. Many reformers believed this was largely responsible for China’s backwardness in the development of technology, military prowess, and industrialization. The crisis China faced called for changes and reforms in education.

Schools for Interpreters In the wake of the Opium War, the Qing government opened schools for the training of interpreters necessitated by the sudden increase in foreign interaction. Notably, Beijing Tongwen guan was established in 1862; then in 1866, it was elevated to a college with a new scientific department. Later Shanghai and Canton followed suit and set up similar colleges. Under government auspices, various types of technical and professional schools were established as part of the self-strengthening program. Meanwhile, the time-honored examination system also underwent some changes in order to align with the newly modified curricula. Mathematics was viewed as the foundation of all practical learning and thus was added to the content of the civil service examinations in 1869. The SinoFrench War of 1883–1885 over Vietnam revealed the inadequacy of China’s modernization efforts,

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resulting in the limited introduction of natural sciences into the examination system in 1887.

Modern Reforms While the period from 1895 to 1905 marked the rise of modern nationalism in China, it also accelerated the pace of reform. Prior to the 1898 Reform Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), one of the most famous government officials in the late Qing government, published his famous Quan xue pian (An Exhortation to Learning) outlining a complete school system with purported curricula from primary grades to university courses, embracing a mixture of Chinese classics and the modern learning of the West. He advocated the abolishment of the eight-legged essay and suggested converting Buddhist and Taoist temples into modern schools. Zhang’s proposed reforms in education to some extent were agreeable with the reform measures proposed by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and Liang Qichao, the two leaders of the 1898 Reform. The Guangxu emperor at the time issued a series of decrees, attempting to implement all the reform measures advocated by both official reformers such as Zhang Zhidong, and scholar-reformers such as Kang and Liang. Despite this support, the 1898 Reform only lasted for 100 days. Although the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835– 1908) had fiercely opposed the changes proposed in the 1898 Reform, in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, she was forced to continue the reforms and decree reform measures that were even more comprehensive than those of 1898. In 1902, the first draft of the new regulations on education envisaged a modern Chinese school system; later, Zhang Zhidong was summoned to revise the draft. In 1904, the regulations were proclaimed, and in the following year, the civil service examination system was officially abolished. The two events marked the end of traditional Chinese education and the birth of a modern school system. The transition from traditional to modern education originated in the wake of the Opium War and ended with the abolition of the time-honored civil examination system in 1905. During this period, key historical events, such as the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, the 1898 Reform, and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, contributed critically to the emergence and development of the nationalist

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programs in which educational reform was a significant component. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 further accentuated the progress of the reforms. The survival of the fittest as a key message of the Chinese version of social Darwinism helped promote educational reforms which were seen as a critical component to the survival of China. Within 18 months of the end of the ­Sino-Japanese War, demand for the new learning became so great that modern schools, regardless of whether they were under government or mission auspices or private control, emerged to accommodate eager students. Many elite/literati traveled to Japan attempting to discover the secrets behind the Japanese success. Many educated Chinese believed that China could and would achieve what Japan had accomplished. In the period from 1905 to 1911, China’s modern educational system was constructed with some success. Nevertheless, the 1911 Revolution took place and brought down the Qing dynasty in response to dissatisfaction with a perceived slow pace of government change toward modernizing China.

Missionaries, Government Officials, and Scholars Missionaries were the pioneers of modern education in China and their schools were essentially unrivaled compared to late Qing government efforts. Although the achievement of Protestant missionaries in the promotion of secular education in China was not acknowledged in the 1904 regulations, missionary school curricula had exerted considerable influence on Chinese educational reforms, and their textbooks in science subjects were directly adopted as part of official teaching manuals for new schools. Both government and scholar reformers promoted a new educational system with a focus on the expansion of modern primary schooling. This policy was in the first place determined to address the low literacy rates among the Chinese population. Universal education was viewed by the Chinese elite as a strong factor behind the successes of Western countries and key to the formation of a modern nation. Furthermore, they sincerely believed that mass education was critical to the awakening of Chinese people and essential to the survival of the Chinese nation. In his book Xinmin shuo (The

New Citizen), Liang Qichao said that modern national powers were derived from the energies of individuals and societies; in order to build a modern nation, the Chinese needed to renew themselves through education. In a social Darwinian world, he argued, the adoption of new armies, technology, and political institutions was not enough to ensure the survival of China; the failure of the selfstrengthening program had already proved this point. A new kind of Chinese populace was a fundamental requirement for China to move into modernization. He believed that this could only be accomplished through modernizing educational programs which, in turn, would help renew the Chinese mass to become qualified citizens of a new China. With a focus on the expansion of primary education, the Chinese elites linked the education of children to the fate of China. Children as a youthful hope for a modern nation were recognized as a critical aspect of the nationalistic program that encouraged children to be aware of China’s crisis and urged them to take responsibility and save China from being colonized by Western powers and Japan. Many history, geography, and Chinese language textbooks produced during this period were designed as the vehicles to save China from perishing and were infused with a Chinese patriotism and nationalism that combined race theory and social Darwinism. Utilizing nationalistic ideas, the textbook writers and educators aimed to inspire young students to undertake the task of erasing China’s humiliation imposed by imperialism and to create a new China. From this perspective, the intention of universal education was to nurture a young generation who would become the builders of a modern nation. Limin Bai See also Darwin, Charles; Education; Spencer, Herbert

Further Readings Bai, L. (2008). Children as the youthful hope of an old empire: Race, nationalism, and elementary education in China, 1895–1915. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1(2), 210–231. doi:10.1353/ hcy.0.0012 Bastid, M. (1987). Servitude or liberation? The introduction of foreign educational practices and

Education for All (EFA) systems to China from 1840 to the present. In R. Hayhoe & M. Bastid (Eds.), China’s education and the industrialized world: Studies in cultural transfer (pp. 3–20). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. doi:10.1017/ s0305741000018695 Curran, T. D. (2005). Educational reform in Republican China: The failure of educators to create a modern nation (pp. 83–122). New York, NY: Lewiston, Queenston & Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. Fairbank, J. K., & Liu, K. C. (Eds.). (1980). The Cambridge history of China: Vol. 11. Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.3138/cjh.15.2.294 Zhao, S. (2004). A nation-state by construction: Dynamics of modern Chinese nationalism (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Education

for

All (EFA)

Education for All (EFA) represents a constellation of development initiatives that brings together a range of issues from education to health, poverty, and gender and institutions from the United Nations and the World Bank to local community service organizations. It represents the expansion of education as a developmental goal that is broadly construed to include not only the development of educational opportunities but also the development of the child, of healthy societies, of social service delivery, and international development more generally. The goals, delivery, and evaluation of EFA mirror changing global governance and political–economic regimes. This entry examines the EFA’s history and EFA initiatives since 2014.

History of the Education for All Initiative The origins of EFA lie with the World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990. The original conveners were UNESCO, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, and the UN Population Fund. This conference marked a move beyond improved access to primary education as the goal of education development internationally to the basic learning needs of all children, youth, and adults. The timing of this conference is significant in part

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because of the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes the right to education, the year before. Ten years later, the groundwork laid at Jomtien was realized at the World Education Forum in Senegal. The resulting Dakar Framework was based upon the findings of the EFA 2000 assessment. This first-ever assessment of education across 170 countries showed a widespread lack of access. The Dakar framework was a blueprint for development by 2015 of education systems around the world. It included six specific goals: 1. Expand early childhood care and education. 2. Provide free and compulsory primary EFA. 3. Promote learning and life skills for young people and adults. 4. Increase adult literacy by 50%. 5. Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015. 6. Improve the quality of education.

The shift toward early childhood, gender parity, lifelong learning, and quality are particularly noteworthy. Improved architecture for assessment and evaluation also marked the Dakar ­Framework. UNESCO was mandated to coordinate with national and local nongovernmental and civil society organizations, multilateral and bilateral agencies, and the private sector in cooperation with the four other original conveners of the Dakar Forum (UN Development Programme, UN Population Fund, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, and the World Bank). Key funding comes from the G8, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian ­ Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization. The year 2000 also marked the Millennium Summit, which produced the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The close mesh between EFA and the MDGs is demonstrated in MDG 2 on universal primary education and MDG 3 on gender equality in education. The general emphasis in the MDGs on human capital, infrastructure, and human rights is echoed in EFA initiatives. The work by Amartya Sen on human capability was a

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marker of this era that highlighted the importance of human social capital and gender. Education has been one avenue for the development of human capital. The succeeding Sustainable Development Goals for the period 2015–2030 again include specific attention to education. The Education for All Development Index was developed initially to track progress on the four measurable goals of EFA: (1) universal primary education, (2) adult literacy, (3) quality of education, and (4) gender. The EFA Global Monitoring Report was produced annually from 2002 to 2015 when it was replaced with the Global Education Monitoring Report. The 2015 review showed that only one-third of the countries had reached all the goals with measurable targets. The last decade of the 20th century saw significant shifts in global political economy aligned with new waves of democratization as well as economic crisis. These changes have been suggested to mark a growing global neoliberalism that has meant a greater reliance on private and civil society organizations to deliver social welfare programming and a concomitant move toward intensified assessment and auditing to provide trans­­ parency and accountability. These changes are evident in the move to tie EFA funding to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan and structural adjustment programs, especially under the EFA Fast Track Initiative. This move and the intensified emphasis on accountability and transparency in EFA have been the subject of critique.

EFA Since 2014 Further developments of EFA have included the Muscat Meeting in Oman in 2014 that laid the foundation for the 2015 World Education Forum meeting in Incheon, Korea, and the development of seven new targets to ensure “equitable and inclusive quality education and lifelong learning for all by 2030.” These targets include free and compulsory pre-primary education, literacy, and numeracy for youth and adults to allow full participation in society, preparation for decent work, vocational and technical education and training, education for global citizenship and sustainable development, and the need for qualified, professionally trained, motivated, and well-supported teachers. The Incheon 2030 document also calls for all countries

to contribute 4–6% of their gross domestic product or at least 15–20% of their public expenditure to education. Gender equality and access for the most marginalized are emphasized throughout. The trajectory of EFA continues to demonstrate its close relationship to shifting global developmental mandates defined at the intergovernmental level and its reflection of global political and economic constraints. The expansion of EFA to include informal and nonformal education, health education, and lifelong learning and adult education reflects not only the expansion of what constitutes education but also the expansion of modalities for the delivery of EFA beyond the classroom. For example, EFA-inspired health education may draw upon national funds, local community organizations, and private agencies to offer education to parents, youth, and children in clinics and family homes. Jan Newberry See also Early Childhood Education; Education; Inclusive Education

Further Readings Osttveit, S. (2017). The Jomtien conference was a game changer for education. Retrieved July 21, 2017, from https://gemreportunesco.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/ the-jomtien-conference-in-1990-was-a-game-changerfor-education/ Sen, A. (2005). Human rights and capabilities. Journal of Human Development, 6(2), 151–166. Tamatea, L. (2005). The Dakar framework: Constructing and deconstructing the global neo-liberal matrix. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 3(3), 311–334. doi:10.1080/14767720500166993 UNESCO. (2015). Education for all 2000–2015: Achievements and challenges. EFA global monitoring Report. Paris, France: Author. doi:10.17165/ tp.2016.1-2.18

Education Versus Care Education and care both refer to the provision of services for children, particularly those under the age of compulsory schooling. Care can be defined

Education Versus Care

as attending to the child’s needs and is primarily seen as a nurturing role. Education can be defined as supporting the learning and development of the child. Care focuses on attending to the child’s physical, emotional, and social needs in terms of their well-being. It is concerned with maintaining the well-being of the child, whereas education is more concerned with transforming the child. This entry examines the purpose and development of the education and care of young children. It also explores the status of education versus care from historical and international perspectives.

Education, Care, and Children’s Rights The prevailing international discourse asserts that early childhood education and care give children the best start in life. This is defined as a set of developmental expectations which will support the child to become a successful adult. The purpose of education in this discourse is based on Theodore Shultz’s theory of human capital. This asserts that education serves to improve the quality of human capital, which is linked to economic growth. Put simply, children who receive a good education will go on to have better jobs, which will serve the economy. This has led to education being valued more highly than care in many countries. Linked to the purpose of education are the rights of the child. In the Western world, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 28, outlines children’s rights to education, which it defines as being from birth. Children’s welfare rights are also outlined, presenting a view of the child as a vulnerable individual, in need of care and education. The rights of the child in the non-Western world, however, are seen in a different light, with the child’s responsibilities to their family and community taking a more significant role.

Historical Perspectives Historically, education and care have been seen as distinct areas of provision. Education of preschool children began with the work of early pioneers Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and German educationalist Friedrich Froebel. Their work led to the development of preschool provision, which was viewed as beneficial to children. During the 20th century, preschool education

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became regulated and was mainly governed by departments for education. Care, on the other hand, originally took place mainly in the home and was delivered by family members. The increase in female employment during the 20th century led to a growing demand for childcare. This was seen as an adjunct to the labour market and was mainly governed by social and welfare sectors.

The Integration of Care and Education Recently, care and education have become more integrated with an increasing number of countries now including both care and education under the governance of departments for education. There is a broad range of provision within the banner of education and care ranging from informal familybased arrangements to centre-based, state-run settings. There is a mixture of funding arrangements, with many settings requiring some funding from parents, while others are fully funded by the state. Even within countries, there is often a great diversity of early childhood education and care provision, split between private and public spheres. In recent years, provision for children under school age has become more closely regulated with many countries operating monitoring and regulatory processes. This has led to a more unified approach and higher standards in many cases. Where services are not regulated, there can be very diverse approaches to pedagogy which make the transition to school more challenging for children. Unregulated private provision, for example, is subject to the pressures of parental expectations which can lead to a move towards more formal learning in some countries. The impact of increased regulation, however, can also lead to education becoming a more technical process in which pedagogy does not take account of the cultural context of the child. When this regulation involves accountability through child outcomes, the pressure to meet targets can lead to teacher-directed, formal learning. The integration of care and education has brought care under the regulatory gaze of the education system. Many integrated systems have a national curriculum for preschool-aged children which often prioritises education over care. Care is subsumed under the category of education,

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requiring carers to become educators. Research indicates that this assimilation of care into education devalues the caring role. The meaning of care has thus changed as it must, as an aspect of education, lead to learning and development. The role of care in birth to school-age provision can be seen as a part of the educational model. Some studies, however, find that care is being marginalised in favour of education, with child welfare being sacrificed for educational outcomes. The status of education and care differ, with childcare seen as a lower status profession, employing staff with fewer qualifications at a lower rate of pay. The move towards more integrated systems and professionalisation of the workforce has raised the status of care in some countries. The regulation of early childhood education and care has been found to raise standards of provision and is a recommendation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As care is more regulated, staff qualifications come under scrutiny, which has led to a drive in many countries to improve the training and qualifications of childcare staff. In Nordic countries, education and care are fully integrated. The purpose of provision for children under school-age is more holistic, with education, upbringing, and care being valued equally. In this approach, the purpose of education is seen as preparing the child for life, rather than creating human capital in terms of economically productive citizens. Pedagogy is child-centred and h ­ olistic. The child’s current stage of development is the focus of teaching rather than their future development. Goals in this approach relate to dispositions rather than knowledge and skills. This leads to a focus on the well-being of the child, their e­ motions, social relationships, thought processes, and ­attitudes rather than their ability to meet certain standards. In much of the world, however, this is not the dominant approach. Early childhood provision is viewed as predominantly a preparation for school, particularly in classes catering to children nearing school age. In many countries, school-readiness is measured just before entering school, which puts additional pressure on practitioners to ensure that children have acquired the relevant skills and knowledge required by the assessment. In this paradigm, pedagogy shifts towards a more teacher-centred

approach, as children must meet particular goals and standards. Studies indicate that young children’s natural learning strategies may not be utilised, resulting in some aspects of child development such as social interaction and self-regulation being under-developed. The welfare of children, their care, and emotional needs can be marginalised in favour of their educational needs, which can impact negatively on their well-being. Related to school-readiness approaches is the impact of accountability on pedagogy. Research indicates that where accountability is linked to child outcomes, pedagogy can become more teacher-centred. Rather than participating in active learning, children are subject to more formal teaching and preparation for tests. This is identified by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as a danger as this pedagogy is seen as unsuitable for young children. An additional risk of this approach is the labeling of children as failures at the beginning of their education. Studies indicate that this can negatively impact on child well-being and self-esteem. Although policies in many countries are now integrating education and care under the umbrella of early education, studies from within the field indicate that for practitioners, the ethics of care is important. Staff who work with young children see their role as a caring one and continue to fulfill this role despite its inferior positioning in the policy. Jayne Osgood’s work on the professional identities of early years workers identifies emotional capital as a key aspect of this identity. This caregiving self is fundamental to the identity of the practitioner and an essential aspect of their professionalism. Mandy Pierlejewski See also Early Childhood Education; Education, Child-Centered; School Readiness

Further Readings Alcock, S., & Haggarty, M. (2013). Recent policy documents and the “Schoolification” of early childhood care and education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Early Childhood Folio, 17(2), 21–26. Georgeson, J., & Payler, J. (2013). International perspectives on early childhood education and care. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.

Emerging Adulthood Nutkins, S., McDonald, C., & Stephen, M. (2013). Early childhood education and care: An introduction. London, UK: Sage. doi:10.4135/9781526402301 OECD. (2006). Starting strong II: Early childhood education and care. Paris, France: Author. Osgood, J. (2012). Narratives from the nursery: Negotiating professional identities in early childhood. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203143063

Emerging Adulthood Emerging adulthood is the period of life between adolescence and young adulthood, ranging from age 18 years through the third decade of life. The psychologist Jeffrey Arnett first introduced the concept of emerging adulthood in a seminal theoretical article published in American Psychologist in 2000. He defined emerging adulthood as ages 18–25 years, although more recently, both ages 25 and 29 years have been used as endpoints. Before Arnett’s 2000 article, researchers had not formally recognized emerging adulthood as a distinct developmental period of life. Rather, researchers expected that individuals transitioned directly from adolescence to young adulthood. Arnett observed, however, that societal changes in developed nations had changed how young people experienced the transition to adulthood. The shift to a technology- and service-based economy created jobs that demanded higher levels of education, and therefore more time in school. Increased birth control options and greater acceptance of premarital sex allowed for greater sexual freedom. Challenging economic circumstances prevented young people from becoming fully financially independent and created increased reliance on parents. Taken together, these social trends have pushed the ages of marriage and parenthood into the later 20s and early 30s, and given rise to an extended transition to adulthood. This entry describes the features of emerging adulthood and reviews some of the debates surrounding this concept.

Features Individuals in their late teens and 20s differ in meaningful ways from both adolescents and young adults. Many adolescents live with parents or

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caregivers and attend high school. Many young adults are married, have their own children, and have settled into a job or career. Emerging adults’ life experiences fall somewhere in between. They are not fully dependent on parents, yet have not made the full leap into adult roles. The term emerging adulthood best captures young people’s status as emerging into adult roles. To distinguish emerging adults’ unique life experiences, Arnett articulated five key features of emerging adulthood: (1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) feeling in between, (4) selffocus, and (5) the age of possibilities. Identity exploration involves answering questions of who am I in the areas of love, work, and views of the world. For example, a college student may have several romantic relationships, explore psychology and business as majors, and attend a new religious service with a friend. Instability means that emerging adults’ lives are marked by change, such as change in residence, relationships, and vocation. It is not uncommon for emerging adults to transition through multiple living arrangements including with parents, on their own, with roommates, or a significant other. Feeling in between is the sense that emerging adults are not adolescents, but not real adults either. For example, they may pay their phone and car insurance bills but live in their parents’ home. Self-focus means that emerging adults are focused on their own interests in a healthy, productive way (as opposed to adolescents who tend to have an egocentric self-focus). As compared to other periods of life, emerging adults have more freedom and opportunity to figure out who they are and what they want from life—whether that means traveling the world or establishing a career in finance. The age of possibilities describes the feeling of optimism many emerging adults have about their future. Emerging adulthood can be a time for a fresh start after a troubled adolescence, as well as a time to envision a future where the ideal romantic partner or job may eventually come along. Although emerging adulthood is marked by high levels of optimism, it is also a peak time for mental disorders and some risky behaviors. Mental disorders with an onset in childhood and/or adolescence can carry over or begin in emerging adulthood. Most mental health problems will

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occur by the 20s, suggesting that emerging adults may be grappling with a chronic or new mental disorder while also beginning to navigate adult responsibilities and spend more time away from their nuclear families. Substance use and risky sexual behavior are also common during this time period. Increased freedom from parents may promote exploration with substances, particularly alcohol. Emerging adults may also be interested in exploring new sexual partners and/or sexual behaviors. Substance use and casual sex may co-occur and increase the risk for injury, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancy.

Debates A significant issue of contention among developmentalists pertains to the universality of emerging adulthood. Is emerging adulthood a luxury experienced only by those who can afford its self-focused freedoms? National data suggest many similarities across low, middle, and high social classes of emerging adults, including no significant differences in how they experience the five features of emerging adulthood. Looking more broadly across nations, is this developmental period descriptive of the experiences of young people outside of the United States? Evidence suggests that it is present in other developed nations (e.g., Western Europe, Japan), and among middle-class young people from urban areas in developing countries. A second debate relates to perceptions of emerging adults as selfish and lazy. Although some psychologists have suggested that emerging adults exhibit an unhealthy degree of narcissism and narrow social awareness, the evidence to support this claim is limited. Emerging adults are generally optimistic and confident, yet these are strengths that can help them navigate challenges and establish their adult lives.

Final Thoughts Emerging adulthood is a challenging, exciting, and dynamic period of life. It is marked by unique features that distinguish it from adolescence and young adulthood. Sociocultural and economic forces shape the length and experiences of emerging adulthood and are constantly in flux, making

this developmental period ever-evolving and worthy of future investigation. Meghan M. Gillen and Charlotte H. Markey See also Development; Miniature Adulthood; Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55, 469–480. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469 Arnett, J. J. (2014). Presidential address: The emergence of emerging adulthood: A personal history. Emerging Adulthood, 2, 155–162. doi:10.1177/ 2167696814541096 Arnett, J. J. (2015a). The cultural psychology of emerging adulthood. In L. A. Jensen (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of human development and culture: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 487–501). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199948550.013.30 Arnett, J. J. (2015b). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199929382.003.0007

Emotion Regulation (Children) Emotion regulation is a process that involves influence over the existence, experience, and expression of emotions. Since the late 1980s, there has been a burgeoning interest in exploring control over emotions. This interest is rooted in the conception that emotions, which some consider distinct from thoughts and behaviors, are essential features of adaptive human functioning. Although there is disagreement about this distinction and the relationship between these parts, emotions can be treated as essential determinants of behavior and outcomes. Thus, from this way of thinking, control over emotions is essential for strategically managing one’s life. Emotion regulation is treated as an adaptive process that supports academic success, the development of positive relationships, hard work, and positive attitudes. For these reasons, researchers

Emotion Regulation (Children)

are committed to certain lines of inquiry that conceptualize the processes involved in emotion regulation and support teachers’ and caregivers’ efforts in facilitating its development. However, any effort to conceptualize and apply emotion regulation to the study of and interactions with children should be informed by the critical analysis. Emotion regulation is entangled in complex philosophical, ideological, and ethical contexts. This entry examines research on emotional regulation and surveys several key critical concerns related to emotion regulation research.

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to the trigger. The idea is that emotions start with a response to a trigger but the response is dependent on the attention to and the meaning of that trigger. For example, if a test is perceived as high stakes and one’s self-efficacy is low, anxiety might debilitate performance by decreasing motivation and eliciting a flight response. Change the perception of the test or oneself, and a different emotion and set of behaviors might be elicited. There are different points in an experience at which emotions can be regulated. Pedagogy and Interventions

Lines of Inquiry Researchers of emotion regulation tend to focus on three distinct areas of concern: (1) the factors, forces, and conditions that impact emotion regulation; (2) emotional control centers; and ­ (3) effective interventions. Developmental Trends

Some researchers suggest that emotion regulation is a natural human disposition, as evidenced by infants sucking their thumb as a technique for self-soothing. However, this type of regulation does not signify metacognitive control. Emotion regulation skills are thought to develop over the course of infancy and childhood and continue to mature during adolescence. Researchers attribute this development to factors such as personality, neurophysiology, style of caregiving, familial structure, and attachments. They conclude that certain types of experiences give form to the neural structures that make emotion regulation possible. Although early experiences are treated as key for development, researchers also believe that children can learn emotion regulation at any point in their lives through specific types of training and interventions. Point of Regulation

Another line of inquiry involves articulating the point of control. Consider that an emotion can be viewed as a passive experience that results from some sort of trigger. One way to regulate emotions is to regulate the trigger so that the emotion is not experienced or the intensity is modulated. Another way is to regulate the perception of and attention

There are several ways to support the development of emotion regulation. One approach involves cognitive training that reconditions children to perceive environments in particular ways and attend to those things that will elicit particular emotions. Another approach involves setting limits on children so that they can practice emotion regulation. The idea is to create conflicts between impulses and a social order so that children can practice to suppress potentially maladaptive emotions. Other researchers believe that the best way to support emotion regulation is by allowing children opportunities to express emotions and ensure those emotions are validated. The line of thinking is that if children expect their emotions to be heard, they are less likely to see them as urgent. The urgency of the emotion is linked to problems with impulse control and insistency of one’s demands.

Critical Concerns While research on emotional regulation is widely accepted, it is not beyond critique. Some critics point out that defining adaptive and maladaptive behavior is itself a highly subjective practice and others have noted that both the concepts of adaptability and responsibility need to be called into question. Historical and Cultural Contingency

One line of critique is to challenge assumptions about what counts as adaptive and maladaptive. The expression and behavioral manifestation of some emotions might be problematic in some

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cultures but necessary and valued in others. Another line of critical inquiry involves an examination of the historical conditions that make possible certain evaluations of persons as adaptive at emotion regulation. For example, consider the example of sucking a thumb to self-soothe. The need for a child to self-soothe becomes a requirement in a context in which children are conditioned to be independent by being left alone. In some cultures, infants spend 95% of their time latched onto their mothers. These infants may not need self-soothing strategies and they may not be measured, calibrated, and reformed in terms of their emotion regulation. The idea is that historical and cultural context shapes requirements for emotion regulation and, thus, evaluations of those who are adaptive. Adaptability as a Problem

Although seen as a positive human quality, regulating emotions to adapt to a context can conceal the operation of power and limit the usefulness of emotions as sources of knowledge for liberatory activity. Consider that one has to regulate an emotion if there is a discrepancy between that emotion and its expression with what is permissible in a particular context. If there were no discrepancy, then there would be no need for regulation. The burden is on the child to modulate the emotion and its behavioral manifestation to count as adaptable. The inability to perform acceptable emotions and be adaptive can be treated as psychological and behavioral pathology. A concern is that some contexts can be dehumanizing, oppressive, unjust, and unequal. Maladaptive emotions and their associated behaviors can be a source to reflect on the problems with the context, not the child’s inability to adapt to it. Efforts to develop emotion regulation can be ways to support amenability and conformity to problematic contexts. Responsibilized Individuals

The discourse of emotion regulation is one of many ways to constitute persons as responsibilized. In modern discourse, persons are constituted as responsible for their life outcomes by virtue of their actions, thoughts, attitudes, and choices. Emotion regulation, just like grit, self-regulated

learning, growth mind-set, and metacognition, is entangled in efforts to constitute individuals as responsible for their life outcomes. There are many issues with this type of responsibilization. One in particular is that it contributes to an individualistic blame culture and deficit-based thinking. If children are not successful it is their fault or the fault of their parents for not forming the right kinds of attachments and generating the right kinds of experiences associated with the development of adaptive emotion regulation. Individual blame goes hand in hand with deficit-based thinking. Children or parents are treated as lacking and in need of some intervention. Stephen Vassallo See also Cultural Politics of Childhood; Emotional Intelligence; Governmentality; Normativity; Parenting

Further Readings Gross, J. J. (2013a). Emotion regulation: Taking stock and moving forward. Emotion, 13, 359–365. doi:10.1037/a0032135 Gross, J. J. (Ed.). (2013b). Handbook of emotion regulation. New York, NY: Guilford. Schore, A. N. (2015). Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. New York, NY: Routledge.

Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence (EI) is an umbrella term that is used to describe a whole range of things that may well be qualitatively different: emotional awareness, personal competence, social skills, but it signifies something that is slightly separate from mental health. It is a fuzzy concept that since its appearance in the early 1990s has caught the attention of the mainstream media whilst remaining somewhat problematic within academic circles. Generally, EI is understood to signify an individual’s ability to understand, manage, and apply their emotions positively in a range of situations as well as recognise and support the emotions of others. In connecting the term ‘intelligence’ to emotions, we can also determine that the

Emotional Intelligence

emotions are distinct, performable, and measurable. This entry presents an overview of the EI concept, identifying where it came from, what it is, practice models, critical responses, and current use. The concept of EI came to public attention in 1995 through Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence. Goleman defined the concept as an individual’s ability to recognise and regulate their own emotions and those of others. The EI model incorporated five core constructs: self-awareness, motivation, social skills, empathy, and managing feelings. In publishing his EI framework, Goleman made a series of powerful connections that captured the mood and concerns of American society. Firstly, poor or deficient EI was linked to increases in antisocial behaviour. Secondly, there was a strong correlation between good EI and prosocial behaviour, including school achievement. Thirdly, EI was claimed to be more powerful than IQ in predicting future (economic) success. Emotional Intelligence became an instant best seller and dominated the mainstream U.S. news media and public discourse. This coverage gave both a sense of legitimacy and consensus to Goleman’s concept. Behind the book’s publication, one can identify a series of forces that set the foundations in place for this work to capture the public ear. Firstly, Goleman was in fact reframing, through a journalistic lens, academic research published by John Mayer and Peter Salovey in 1990. This overlooked academic paper presented EI as the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions. Essentially, EI was seen as a progressive ­function— one that could be taught and learnt. Moreover, the aftermath of the 1990s intelligence debates, symbolised by the controversy regarding the 1994 publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve, led to EI becoming the progressive social alternative to the traditional fixed notions of intelligence. Post-publication, three critiques of EI were immediately evident and continue to be hotly contested within the academic community. First, it was unclear what exactly EI was. Many considered it poorly defined, particularly if one followed Goleman’s belief that EI was everything apart

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from IQ. Second, the model offered little empirical evidence to support the claims it made. Finally, the accusation was made that EI was simply presenting a new name for familiar constructs and knowledge that were already understood across many disciplines; old wine in new bottles. However, set against these criticisms, programmes and tests built on the EI concept grew at an incredible rate. By the late 1990s, the concept, whether ­scientifically valid or not, was firmly in the public arena with millions of children in schools across the United States and the United Kingdom participating in EI programmes. Since the mid-1990s, two specific schools of EI have grown: the ability school and the trait school. Although each one has built a distinct body of literature, programmes, and tests, it is evident that although there is still no agreed definition of EI, there are a series of characteristics that ­consistently appear within most programmes. These include self-esteem, motivation, assertiveness, relationship skills, social competence, empathy, ­ emotional expression, emotional management, conflict resolution, happiness, and optimism. The ability school considers that EI is a cognitive aptitude that can be taught and measured much in the same way as reading is. The dominant tool of ability measurement is the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. This model asserts that there are objective criteria, right answers, for measuring EI, and one can therefore identify a fixed operational position. The criticisms attached to this model are that emotions are subjective and cannot be operationalised in such a manner, that it takes little notice of cultural and ethnic differentiations or societal norms and attempts to capture something that is essentially fluid. Alternatively, the trait EI school contends that emotions are more subjective and the only person capable of measuring EI is the individual themselves through critical reflection of their emotional world. This approach is linked to personality and self-perception rather than cognition. The dominant measurement tool is the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire built on a series of self-report questionnaires and rating scales. This also has its criticisms including concerns that participants can fake their responses, responses only capture the individual’s emotional state at the time of assessment, and if

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Enabling Education Network (EENET)

one has poor EI, then how can one begin to apply these characteristics. One can see from the literature that how one measures EI is at the heart of perpetuating the discourse that it is not a valid construct, particularly as different measurement approaches tend to produce different results. Although the field has moved over the past decade away from a single normative account of EI, problems still abound in so far as there are approaches with well-evidenced scientific programmes based on academic trials and peer-reviewed papers set alongside popular public programmes promising a wide range of cursory benefits and life changes that have no evidence to support such claims. Over the past decade, these conceptual confusions, evidential arguments, and a backlash to the turn-of-the-century vogue of EI have seen a decline of the term in academic and educational spheres. The EI concept now tends to act as an organising idea within the field of school-based social and emotional learning programmes, with the principles of EI and its associated language shaping and informing current school ­interventions such as the Penn Resiliency Programme and the PATHS Programme for Schools. ­However, in the public sphere, EI is still commonly used and has gained widespread acceptance in the world of business and organisational management. Carl Emery See also Self-Esteem; Social and Emotional Learning; Well-being, Children’s

Further Readings Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Von Stumm, S., & Furnham, A. (Eds.). (2015). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of individual differences (Vol. 3). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Cherniss, C. (2010). Emotional intelligence: Toward clarification of a concept. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 3(2), 110–126. Goleman, D., (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Goleman, D. (2011). The brain and emotional intelligence: New insights (Enhanced ed.). More Than Sound Publishers. ISBN 13: 9781934441152 Humphrey, N., Curran, A., Morris, E., Farrell, P., & Woods, K. (2007). Emotional intelligence and

education: A critical review. Educational Psychology, 27(2), 235–254. Matthews, G., Zeidner, M., & Roberts, R. D. (Eds.). (2007). The science of emotional intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Murphy, K. R. (2014). A critique of emotional intelligence: What are the problems and how can they be fixed? New York, NY: Psychology Press (Taylor & Francis). Roberts, R. D. (2002). The handbook of emotional intelligence: Theory, development, assessment, and application at home, school, and in the workplace. In R. Bar-On & J. D. A. Parker (Eds). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.

Enabling Education Network (EENET) The right to inclusive education is central to children learning to become self-sufficient adults, regardless of (dis)ability, ethnicity, gender, financial situation, and so on. Inclusive education, however, ‘is broader than [access to] formal schooling: it includes the home, the community, non-formal and informal systems’ (as defined during the 1998 Agra Seminar). It moves us beyond traditional models of top-down teaching—in which teachers stand before rows of desks—and encompasses diverse teaching and learning pedagogies and ­ practice. Innovation is at the heart of inclusive education, as is collaboration and knowledge exchange. EENET exists to share information about innovative, ­inclusive practices from schools and communities around the world, with the aim of informing practice elsewhere, influencing policy, and improving education systems so they no longer deny millions of children their right to education.

A Network Is Established EENET was established in 1997 in response to Save the Children UK’s projects to promote communitybased services, including education, with and for disabled people. Staff observed that practitioners in resource-poor contexts were successful at developing

Enabling Education Network (EENET)

community-based answers to inclusion and ensuring children’s right to education, but they faced limited access to contextually relevant information. Most inclusive education information was written for wealthy country contexts by ‘experts’ working in those contexts. There was also a growing impetus to support other learners in vulnerable situations since inclusive education in its broadest sense is not just a disability-related issue, but again there was a lack of relevant information for teachers, parents, and decision makers about how to challenge and change exclusive education systems. EENET was established to address the information gap and become an information-sharing platform on quality, inclusive, enabling education. It continues with this mandate today, supporting education stakeholders at the grassroots level to document and share their experiences of inclusive education. The network particularly focuses on those who are least heard, ensuring their experiences and ideas are given exposure. And it prioritises those who have least access to information, often because they cannot afford the cost of access or because information is not written with the needs and interests of grassroots readers in mind. EENET encourages everyone to engage in its information-sharing activities, including teachers, parents, students, nongovernmental organisations, policy makers, teacher trainers, government officials, and more.

The Network, Evolved Twenty years since EENET began, international legislation has now given inclusive education a central position in policy arenas: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities includes Article 24, the right to inclusive education; and Sustainable Development Goal 4 specifically aims to ensure ‘inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’. These international instruments, alongside globalisation and ever more affordable access to information via the Internet, have to some extent changed the nature of the challenges EENET needs to address. EENET’s role is less about explaining what inclusive education is and why it should be implemented and more about how to do it and helping stakeholders to locate or choose relevant resources from what has become an information overload.

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This is especially important for stakeholders in areas with limited connectivity, who cannot spend a long time browsing through hundreds of online resources.

Working for Change EENET has a genuine claim to a unique way of working. It is an independent network, operationally small at the core, run mostly by dedicated volunteers and consultants. In response to the effects of the global economic crisis on donor funding, EENET began offering consultancy services in 2009, with the specific aim not just to generate vital income but to ‘do consultancies differently’. What is different about EENET’s consultancy work? The consultancy team maintains a strong focus on participation and listening to grassroots voices, building the capacity of South-based consultants, and finding ways to connect short-term consultancy assignments with longer term information sharing, learning, and networking. The hands-on opportunities offered by consultancy assignments have contributed greatly to the expansion and diversity of the network’s information-sharing work. Face-to-face engage­ ment enables EENET to better support stakeholders to critically reflect on and document their experiences in a way that was much harder to do only from a distance, via email, letters, and the Internet. The wealth of information held in EENET ensures its consultants are well informed, and the consultancy work helps to keep EENET’s information resources up-to-date and dynamic. Using a unique mix of learning through both networking activities and consultancies, EENET is able to identify and address key inclusive education information gaps and needs. A key example of this is EENET’s free video-based training resource, An Inclusive Day. The resource seeks to address many of the fundamental problems with inclusive education teacher training that EENET has observed over the years. Drawing on two decades of experience, EENET’s new Theory of Change analyses how the various aspects of its work are interconnected and helps ensure that all its networking, information-sharing, partnerships, and consultancy work contribute towards the same overall desired change for ‘a

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world in which more girls, boys, women and men actively participate in quality inclusive education and learning opportunities throughout their lives’. This is clearly a global change that EENET and others can continuously contribute towards, rather than achieve alone. Ingrid Lewis has located EENET’s contributions within three key domains: •• Exchange: enabling opportunities for education stakeholders to create, access, and share relevant resources that nurture critical thinking and innovation •• Influence: enabling stakeholders to more effectively advocate for relevant education policy, programming, and practice •• Collaboration: encouraging stakeholders to work together to design, implement, and reflect on inclusive education initiatives

EENET’s history provides a long track record of innovative ways of working: from the development of action research guidance for school communities and the use of photography and film to facilitate children’s voices; to projects supporting teacher education stakeholders to design their own relevant, effective, action research-tested training programmes rather than having courses written and handed over by external ‘experts’. EENET has also played an important role in advocating for inclusive education globally. Working collaboratively with the International Disability and Development Consortium, EENET contributed to research into disability-responsive education financing, leading to a 2017 global call to action for governments to invest in disability inclusive education. Throughout, EENET aims to facilitate grassroots-led improvements in inclusive practice and to encourage knowledge exchange among all stakeholders, especially those least heard—contributing to ensuring children’s right to inclusive education. Su Corcoran See also Disability Studies; Disability Studies in Education; Education, Inclusive

from https://www.eenet.org.uk/inclusive-educationteacher-training-video-resource/ IDDC. (2016). #CostingEquity. The case for disabilityresponsive education financing. Brussels, Belgium: International Disability and Development Consortium Inclusive Education Task Group and Light for the World. Retrieved from https://iddcconsortium.net/ sites/default/files/resources-tools/files/costingequity_ full_report.pdf Lewis, I. (2017). Creating a theory of change for EENET, Enabling Education Review. Enabling Education Network, 5, 32–33. Lewis, I., & Little, D. (2018). Young voices in inclusive education: A guide to help young researchers conduct action research with peers and younger children. Enabling Education Network. Retrieved from https:// www.eenet.org.uk/resources/docs/Young_voices_in_ action_research_Final2.pdf

Enlightenment

and the

Child

Enlightenment occupies a central place in the understanding of Western modernity, especially understood as the reign of criticism, occurring in the second half of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. It can be considered a major intellectual renewal leading to political, cultural, and social changes in a wide range of domains, including philosophy, religion, sciences, and politics. It marks also the beginning of the first claims for equality by modern women. In the history of childhood, the Enlightenment also represents a major revolution in the concepts of education and children, as well as a shift of the representations of adult–child relations. This entry describes these political, moral, epistemological, and anthropological transformations in relation to the ideas of two of the main philosophers of the era: (1) Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and (2) Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804), who also advocated for the political freedom of the modern age.

The Enlightenment Further Readings EENET. (2017). An inclusive day. Enabling Education Network. Videos and training manuals. Retrieved

What Is Enlightenment? asks the title of one of Kant’s most famous essays (1784). In response, he claims that it represented man’s emergence

Enlightenment and the Child

from his self-imposed youth—a new desire to know and have the courage to use one’s understanding. In few words, Enlightenment means here the necessary reign of reason: Everyone must be able to use reason to contest traditions, the doctrines, and the routines inherited from the past or from the established authorities. For advocating mankind’s emancipation from old powers and ideologies, Kant used the example of leading strings, objects that adults traditionally put around children’s bodies in order to help them to learn to walk without falling. This image of children’s leading strings illustrates that adults themselves are like cattle, dominated by traditions and unable to rid themselves of habits acquired in their youth. As they are discouraged to take the risk of falling, they stay dependent, shy, and unable to move by themselves. Thus, children’s leading strings symbolize in Kant’s discourse not only the lack of freedom but also the habits of dependencies that prevent the will to emancipation and the courage of moving on from conventions and prejudices.

Rousseau’s Émile From the second part of the 18th century in Europe, the criticism of leading strings and all kinds of material devices aimed to help young children learn to walk participates in a larger movement against traditional care and education. In Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762), Rousseau developed his own criticism against head pads, go-carts, and leading strings. Instead, he prefers to allow the young to exercise alone outdoors each day. In a meadow, his pupil Émile will be set free to use his own abilities, to struggle and fall again and again, and in doing so he will learn all the sooner to pick himself up. Even if he gets many bruises, the child will enjoy the delights of liberty. Rousseau’s pupil will always be merry, unlike other pupils who will receive fewer injuries but still remain thwarted, constrained, and sad. Thus, Rousseau deploys in Émile a radical criticism of adults’ care and education of children. The issues at stake here are not the traditional children’s weakness and the needs for health, safety, and discipline, as was the case previously. It is not enough to preserve one’s child, says Rousseau. Even if adults intend to

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improve children’s existence and growing-up at a time when the infant mortality rate was very high, their help may be faulty or perverse because they increase children’s dependency. Thus, the core question of Rousseau criticism is the children’s freedom to use their own strengths, instead of being helped and, at the same time, constrained by the adults, becoming dependent on an external authority. Instead of the power of reason that Kant emphasizes later, Rousseau also argues for the importance of sensibility and practical actions in the world. Rousseau’s criticism is also directed at some adults’ behavior that he claims to be childish: for example, when they see a child falling, they shout or run, communicating by this way their fear to the child instead of keeping their self-control. In spite of the fact that Émile has often been considered as a pedagogical book and that several of Rousseau’s ideas were translated into practice, at first by the intellectual elites of that time and then by privileged parents, Rousseau himself considered his ideas inapplicable (there is also evidence he cared little for his own children). But perhaps his concerns were broader. After all, Rousseau was also the author of the Social Contract (1762). After Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Charles Louis de Montesquieu, among many other modern political philosophers, he is concerned with the constitution of society and government, starting from its very beginning—a state of nature as a presocial state.

Children and Nature Nature had very different meanings during the Enlightenment than it does now, which is important to bear in mind. Firstly, nature is linked to the anthropological discovery and valuing of the savage’s natural or wild way of life. Nature, in this sense, provides the critiques of human degeneration due to the urban European civilization. Childhood becomes the romantic symbol of the genuine innocence of those who have not been yet weakened and polluted by artificial social conventions. This romantic valorization of innocence as the main characteristic of childhood opens the perspective of a nostalgic remembrance linking adults to the children they once were, as Rousseau

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did in his posthumous autobiographical Confessions (1782–1789). Secondly, nature refers to the progress of natural sciences against customs and prejudices in children’s care and education. In this sense, the nature of the child can be scientifically studied in the same way as all-natural processes. Later, rational knowledge and the epistemological approach grounded on scientific facts will make room for increasing knowledge and expertise of children’s behavior and development as well as for medical progress. Finally, the third meaning of nature is rooted in political philosophy’s traditions describing the natural condition of mankind before entering society. For Rousseau, the challenge of the social contract is to preserve humans’ native freedom. Considering childhood, the problem is how to respect the native liberty of the child against the power of adults. What kind of authority may be respectful of their freedom?

Children and Culture Thus, for Rousseau, education can only be negative regarding children’s will and determination, which they show, for example, when they learn to walk by themselves. Instead of considering children as not-yet-adults, Rousseau argues that one has to ­ consider children as living fully in the present. The usual image of children’s failures or weakness is due to their projection into the future by adults: They are always looking for the man in the child, he explains. Of course, the philosopher knows well that adults’ domination cannot disappear, but he argues for its limitation after the first few years of the child’s life, and he proposes to mediate it by the power of things in the world they have to deal with. For Rousseau, children, like adults, are born equal and free, and both share the ability to improve themselves, the faculty to perfect oneself, which is the main attribute of their humanity. That is why he claims that children must be kept free from adults’ power as soon as they are able to take care of their own self-­preservation. In sum, throughout Émile, Enlightenment leads to a new conception of the child as a political subject and to the discovery of the modern problematic of children’s freedom. More than the lessening of constraints upon them, children’s freedom involves their dignity as free human beings, which they share with adults even if they are different.

Contemporary childhood studies have worked to overcome the division between nature and culture inherited from the Enlightenment era. Researchers have also criticized the romantic vision of the child and increasingly recognized children’s voices. But the moral and political question of children’s freedom and adults’ domination remains largely open, so it is still an object of dispute in everyday life as well as in scientific research. It reminds us that one always has to think that child and adult are relational political categories. Pascale Garnier See also Childhood in Western Philosophy; Philosophy, the Child in; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Further Readings Calvert, K. (1992). Children in the house: The material culture of early childhood 1600–1900. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. doi:10.1086/ahr/99.3.959 Garnier, P. (1995). Ce dont les enfants sont capables [What children are capable of]. Paris, France: Métailié. Garnier, P. (2014). Childhood as a question of critiques and justifications: Insight into Boltanski’s sociology. Childhood, 21(4), 447–460. doi:10.1177/ 0907568213491770 Kant, E. (1784). What is enlightenment? In M. C. Smith. Retrieved from http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/ CCREAD/etscc/kant.html Koselleck, R. (1988). Critique and crisis: Enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rousseau, J. J. (1762). Émile, ou de l’éducation [Emile, or, on education] (New ed., 1969). Paris, France: La Pleiade. Turmel, A. (2008). A historical sociology of childhood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, L. (2013). Childhood and the enlightenment: The complications of innocence. In P. S. Fass (Ed.), The Routledge history of childhood in the western world (pp. 78–99). London, UK: Routledge.

Ennew, Judith Judith Ennew’s (1944–2013) involvement in childhood studies covers nearly four decades. Her work encompasses a number of topics, often

Ennew, Judith

considering different perspectives, and has been particularly influential in the field of children’s human rights and in methodology of research ‘with children’ rather than research ‘about’ or ‘on’ children. Born in the United Kingdom, Judith Ennew trained as a teacher before moving on to postgraduate studies in social anthropology. Her doctoral work at Cambridge University was an ethnographic research project on the impact of the oil industry in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, published in 1980. She subsequently moved on to child research and children’s rights. She pioneered notions taken for granted in childhood studies today, such as childhood being a social construction and a legally defined position in society rather than a naturally or biologically set experience. She likewise pioneered the paradigm that views children as social, political, and economic agents. Within her work, rather than made of abstract principles, human rights are associated with a pragmatic and child-focused approach that searches for creative and practical solutions to children’s real problems. Her work has been based in both academic institutions (particularly Cambridge) and civil society organisations. Her publications can therefore be found in leading scientific journals or edited books as well as—despite the seminal nature of her work—in grey literature with limited distribution. In the early 1980s, she carried out research on children’s work in Jamaica and Peru and then moved on to child sexual exploitation as well as children living and working in the street. Subsequently, she was strongly involved in the field of children’s rights. Already in the early 1980s, Judith Ennew cautioned against narrow understandings of children’s exploitation. Although exploitation through work cannot be condoned, she warned against use of the Western idealised image of childhood made of innocence, leisure, and protection. That image, she wrote in ‘La Niñez Como Bien Commercial [Childhood as a Commodity]’ in 1982, ‘functions as an ideological commercial commodity between classes as well as between nations’ (p. 20). She argued that as a result, the poorest groups (and the poorest nations), regardless of what they do, are inevitably deemed as failing to care for their children.

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Power and power relations have been an important aspect of her analysis. As a result, her work represents a constant effort to stretch research to include thorough examination of prevalent definitions of children’s problems—for instance, in policy and through empirical research, gathering relevant and rigorous information to account for children’s own experiences and the constraints under which they live. The same problems, and connected solutions, should thus be firmly situated in their specific social, economic, and political realities. One finds such elements of analysis in publications on children’s work, sexual exploitation, and lives on the street as well as in more recent work in relation to child spiritual abuse. In 1990, with Brian Milne, she published The Next Generation: Lives of Third World Children, the first attempt to produce a national situation analysis of children’s rights. During the 1990s, she co-coordinated a Childwatch International project on indicators for monitoring children’s rights. Her later publications on children’s rights present overviews of the (limited) progress made in generating sound and relevant data to monitor children’s rights, thus in gaining the very much needed knowledge for policy making and programming. This led her to conclude in her 2011 chapter ‘Has Research Improved the Human Rights of Children?’ that not knowing enough and not caring to know more about the lives of children is ‘the greatest violation’ of their rights. Alternative ways of theorising childhood and doing research with children is a chief contribution of her work both with theoretical contributions and practical and methodological approaches. During the 1980s, she organised workshops on the ethnography of childhood in Cambridge (1986 and 1988), Camrose (1987), and Victoria Falls (1989) and, later, in Singapore (2006). The material of the 1988 Cambridge workshop provided some of the basis for Allison James and Alan Prout’s edited book Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she contributed to the project Childhood as a Social Phenomenon, a 16-country study codirected by Jens Qvotrup and Helmut Wintersberger. According to Milne, her interest in child participation also arose very early in her career, significantly inspired in the early 1980s by working

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with children’s movements in Lima, Peru, and Bangalore in India. With Jo Boyden she published Children in Focus in 1997, the first manual on child-focused and participatory research. With that, she started her career with ethnographic methods, subsequently introducing a variety of research tools and clarifying that the participatory nature of research was not in methods but in its methodology and ethics. In 2006, she founded the nongovernmental organisation Knowing Children (based in Thailand and later in Malaysia) focusing on improving the very much needed information on children to design policy and programs. As underlined by Milne, Judith embraced both a principled approach and pragmatic eye. Henk van Beers and colleagues in their chapter ‘Judith Ennew and the Knowing Children Project’ write that with Knowing Children she took on the challenge of producing relevant and rigorous data with mixed methods whilst retaining a central focus on children and their rights. Judith Ennew’s ‘right to be properly researched’ approach projected conceptualisation of the human rights–based research with children that she developed over her career. She maintained that research has to genuinely respect children as partners and be meaningful on their terms (rather than researchers’) while placing ethics at the heart of the process. It has to be scientifically valid and include rigorous analysis that can confidently be used for policymaking and programming. It is based on interpretation of Articles 3, 12, 13, and 36 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and detailed in 10 booklet manuals published by Knowing Children in 2009 as well as in articles coauthored with Harriot Beazley, Sharon Bessel, and Roxana Waterson published in 2009 and 2011. Tributes to Judith Ennew, including bibliographic information, have been published by Virginia Morrow as well as Beazley, Bessel, and Waterson. A compilation dedicated to her work and life was published in 2017 under the title ‘Children Out of Place’ and Human Rights: In memory of Judith Ennew. Antonella Invernizzi See also Human Rights; Participatory Research Methods; Sexual Exploitation of Children; Street Children; Working Children

Further Readings Beazley, H., Bessell, S., & Waterson, R. (2014). Sustaining the energy: A celebration of the life of Judith Ennew. Children’s Geographies, 12(1), 118– 125. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.870371 Beers, H. van, Lim, J., & Waterson, R. (2017). Judith Ennew and the Knowing Children project. In A. Invernizzi, M. Liebel, B. Milne, & R. Budde (Eds.), ‘Children out of place’ and human rights: In memory of Judith Ennew (pp. 171–195). New York, NY: Springer. Boyden, J., & Ennew, J. (1997). Children in focus: A manual for participatory research with children. Stockholm, Sweden: Radda Barnen. Ennew, J. (1982, June 7–10). La Niñez como bien commercial [Childhood as a commodity]. Documentos del Congresso de Investigacion acerca de la Mujer en la Region Andina (Proceedings from the Research Congress on the Women From the Andean Region). Lima: Peru Mujer, Universidad Catolica del Peru. Ennew, J. (2011). Has research improved the human rights of children? Or have the information needs of the CRC improved data about children? In A. Invernizzi & J. Williams (Eds.), The human rights of children: From visions to implementation (pp. 133– 158). Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate. Ennew, J., & Milne, B. (1990). The next generation: Lives of Third World children. Philadelphia, PA: New Society. Invernizzi, A., Liebel, M., Budde, R., & Milne, B. (Eds.). (2016). ‘Children out of place’ and human rights: In memory of Judith Ennew. New York, NY: Springer. James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (2015). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Milne, B. (2017). The 3Ps of Judith Ennew: Person, philosophy and pragmatism. In A. Invernizzi, M. Liebel, B. Milne, & R. Budde (Eds.), ‘Children out of place’ and human rights: In memory of Judith Ennew (pp. 9–22). New York, NY: Springer. Morrow, V. (2014). Judith Ennew: A personal tribute. Childhood, 21(2), 151–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0907568214523370

Erikson, Erik Erik Erikson (1902–1994) was a developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, known for his theory of psychosocial development. He is credited

Erikson, Erik

with the idea of an identity crisis, in which a person must resolve a conflict (or face a crisis) in order to develop psychological traits important to that stage of life. Erikson’s theory has been critical to an understanding of childhood as a significant factor in identity development throughout the life span. This entry examines Erikson’s early life and career, his theory of psychosocial development, and surveys some critiques of this theory.

Early Life and Professional Career Erikson was born Erik Salomonsen on June 15, 1902, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, to Karla Abrahamsen, who was married to, but estranged from, Valdemar Isidor Salomonsen. Abrahamsen married Theodor Homburger in 1905 and changed Erikson’s name to Erik Homburger (Homburger adopted him in 1911). Erikson grew up believing Homberger was his real father until late childhood, which many close to him assume laid the foundation for Erikson’s own fascination with—and struggle with—identity. Notably, as an adult, Erikson also adopted his own family name. Following high school, Erikson pursued his interest in art in Florence, ultimately becoming an art teacher at the Burlingham-Rosenfeld School, founded by Sigmund Freud’s daughter, psychoanalyst Anna Freud. Through his work at this school, he became interested in both psychoanalysis and the development of children. With Freud’s encouragement, he trained at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, and simultaneously gained his certification in Montessori education. In 1930, Erikson married Joan Mowat Serson, a dance ethnographer, artist, and play-advocate who became one of his most important editors and collaborators. In 1933, Erikson and Serson emigrated to Boston in the United States due to Hitler’s rise in power in Germany. It was at this time that he changed his name to Erik H. Erikson, marking a departure from his troubled youth to a self-authoring adult. In Boston, Erikson served on the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital, worked with the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and maintained a distinguished private psychoanalysis practice. In 1936, Erikson took a position at the Institute of Social Relations at Yale and taught at Yale Medical School (despite never achieving an undergraduate degree).

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In 1938, Erikson began a study of the Sioux tribe in South Dakota, followed by a study of the Yurok tribe in California (the latter with anthropologist Alfred Kroeber). The differences he saw in these populations inspired his thinking on the effects of childhood events and societal conventions/conditions on the development of identity. He was working at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Child Welfare when he published his most famous work, Childhood and Society (1950). He left the University of California that same year, due to his refusal to sign an oath disavowing radical beliefs, mandated by the newly passed Levering Act. Following posts at the Austin Riggs Center and at the University of Pittsburgh, he returned to Harvard as a professor of human development. In 1969, Erikson’s book on Mahatma Gandhi won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and in 1973, he was selected for the Jefferson lecture, the United States’ highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

Psychosocial Theory Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, for which he is best known, identifies eight stages of development in which stages of development are associated with a crisis to be resolved and a basic virtue one can achieve as a consequence of successful resolution. In a departure from Freud, Erikson posited that the ego was more powerful than the id, and that people can and do adapt to their contexts and situations.

Arguments Against Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory Erikson acknowledged that his theory was more a descriptive overview of human development and stressed that his work was a “tool to think with rather than a factual analysis.” Still, Erikson’s theory has been critiqued for being difficult to validate in research because of the many complex factors at play in psychosocial identity, none of which Erikson clearly identifies. Erikson’s ­preferred method for exploring his theory was biographical case study, using famous men (e.g., Martin Luther King

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Ethics

Stage

Virtue

Age

Description

Trust vs. mistrust

Hope

0–1½

Having one’s needs met allows one to feel trust and develop a sense of hope

Autonomy vs. shame

Will

1½–3

Gaining a sense of independence allows one to develop will

Initiative vs. guilt

Purpose

3–5

Being able to take on acts of one’s own will helps one achieve a sense of purpose

Industry vs. inferiority

Competency

5–12

Meaningful work helps one develop personal pride, leading to a sense of competence

Identity vs. role confusion

Fidelity

12–18

Creating an authentic identity helps develop a sense of fidelity

Intimacy vs. isolation

Love

18–40

Forging healthy relationships with others leads one to develop a sense of being loved

Generativity vs. stagnation

Care

40–65

The feeling that one has left their mark on the world (often through work or family) leads one to develop a sense of care

Ego integrity vs. despair

Wisdom

65+

Being able to see one’s contributions as greater than one’s regrets develops a sense of wisdom

Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi) as exemplars of resolving crises at actual stages of their development. Some suggest that Erikson’s theory was built from research among boys, and thus, has less applicability to girls. Others critique Erikson for agreeing with Freud’s belief that differences between boys and girls are biologically based. Amy Henry See also Adolescence; Adolescence, History of; Development; Freud, Sigmund; Identity; Psychosocial Studies

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York, NY: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1969). Gandhi’s truth: On the origins of militant nonviolence. New York, NY: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1975). Life history and the historical moment. New York, NY: Norton. Stevens, R. (2008). Erik H. Erikson: Explorer of identity and the life cycle. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallerstein, R. S., & Leo, G. (Eds.). (1998). Ideas and identities: The life and work of Erik Erikson. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. doi:10 .1177/00030651000480031502

Further Readings Burston, D. (2007). Erik Erikson and the American psyche: Ego, ethics, and evolution. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. doi:10.3366/e1460823508000214 Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York, NY: Norton. Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and responsibility. New York, NY: Norton.

Ethics Ethics affects all human relationships, the more so when there are inequalities such as between adults and children. Ethics, in terms of formal codes and professional ethics, is sometimes seen

Ethics

as distinct from broader morality, but many authors use the words ethics and morality interchangeably. After reviewing key themes in the history of ethics, this entry questions whether or not ethics should be an explicit topic in childhood research. The role of ethics in the methods of research with children is then considered, along with standards for researchers and ethics reviewers to observe in helping promote efficient and ethical research.

Key Themes in the History of Ethics Alasdair MacIntyre’s very readable short history of ethics covers the main moral debates in philosophy. Unlike many philosophers, MacIntyre believes there are no final, common, neutral, moral standards on which all can agree through rational analysis. This is partly because ethics involves values and principles, such as truth and avoiding harm, which are incommensurable. That is, they cannot be measured and therefore cannot be compared or put in an order of priority: Should people always tell the truth even if it betrays others’ privacy or wounds their self-respect? Yet MacIntyre did not think morality should be led simply by either feelings (emotivism) or social contexts and customs (relativism). He favoured teleology (valuing people and things as worthwhile ends in themselves), and he thought that Aristotle’s work on the virtuous person offers the best guide to the moral life, when good judgment follows having good habits and character. MacIntyre believed that during moral disputes people should draw on their rich history of ideas, types of debating, shared understandings, and imaginative empathy to question and test opposing views for their validity and moral worth. MacIntyre’s approach of virtue ethics is similar to the deontological tradition (meaning guided by duties). Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) developed Aristotle’s teleology into the duty that the rational Man should be treated as an end in himself and not as a means to anyone else’s ends. He should not be forced into doing anything against his will, consent, or self-determination. In 1776, the Americans declared similar respect for freedom in their Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with

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certain inalienable rights, and that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. One problem with Kant’s concept of the ‘rational Man’ is that, like the Declaration of Independence and its ‘all men’, Kant set aside women, ethnic minorities, indigenous people, slaves, and children. Gradually, the rights of these groups have been enshrined through a series of United Nations conventions. Yet respect and rights for children are still often withheld on the grounds that children lack reason. A second problem is that Kant prized reason separated from emotions such as empathy and pity. And Kant’s great ideas were open to be distorted into rational Man’s cold, self-interested calculations and into classing certain groups as not rational and therefore not persons. MacIntyre believed these distortions led to the Holocaust when, starting with disabled children and followed by Jews, gays, and gypsies, the Nazis believed it was right to exterminate these ‘nonpersons’. Ethics based on virtue, duties, or rights looks back to great moral texts through history about respecting and valuing people. Another main form of ethics, utilitarianism, looks forward to the outcome of any moral decisions, which are made by weighing the risks against the hoped-for benefits. This is now the leading version of research ethics, and increasingly, risks and benefits are measured in terms of financial costs.

Should Ethics Be Explicitly Analysed as a Topic in Childhood Research? Social science holds two broadly contrasting approaches to ethics. First, in critical research, ethics is part of the subject matter, for example, when examining problems that oppressed groups such as street children experience and how these might be altered and remedied to promote social justice. Alternatively, ‘value-free’ researchers take being objective to include avoiding ethical analyses. This approach can fit with utilitarianism when a supposedly neutral, self-evident ethics of cost-benefit efficiency avoids moral questions about inequality and injustice. Value freedom also fits with much ethnography and with social anthropology that in Max Weber’s tradition aims to describe and understand different

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Ethics

local moral systems but not to question them critically. Harsh childcare may be excused as indigenous people’s traditions, something liberal White researchers should not judge. Various versions of social constructionism and postmodernism, from actor-network theory to postcolonialism, also tend to be neutral or relativist with regard to ethics. However, seemingly neutral descriptions can raise moral questions. When Weber (1922/1978) described bureaucracy, he inadvertently foresaw the Holocaust: ‘Precision, speed . . . knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict ­subordination, reduction of friction and . . . costs, the “objective” discharge of business according to calculable rules and “without regard for p ­ ersons”— or for personal initiative’ (p. 214). Should researchers be critical of the immoral ‘without ­ regard for persons’ when this is observed? C ­ hildren are often dismissively treated as if they are not yet real persons. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman mistrusted modern bureaucratic civilisation and saw the Holocaust as its product, not an accident. Like another sociologist, Alvin Gouldner, Bauman associated morality with the rare courage to resist and protest against unjust and cruel majority views, in compassion and solidarity with oppressed people. The ethnographer Martyn Hammersley believes that although everyone holds personal values, they should be excluded from research, although the word should denotes the kind of moral judgement he aims to avoid. The critical realist Andrew Sayer, however, contends that values and the ethical life are unavoidably present in all social research and that researchers have to recognise these as major explicit themes. Attempts to avoid or conceal values can leave unexamined values to exert a deeper influence on researchers’ work. Childhood studies has revealed the hidden values in the often oppressive underestimation of children in much adult-centric research, just as feminist research revealed the formerly all-pervasive but scarcely noticed sexism. Another form of ethical research is to examine children’s own views about ethics and morality. There is the active political advocacy in British children’s support for their asylum-seeking friends studied by Halleli Pinson and colleagues, in Bronwyn Hayward’s work with New Zealand ­ children protesting and preventing damage to

their natural environment, and in young people in the United States leading protests against guns. The critical realist, Douglas Porpora, proposes key ethical commitments for all social scientists. These include (a) recognition that each individual agent (and childhood studies emphasises that this includes children) is an embodied centre of conscious experiences, intentions, and motives; (b) respect for the objective human relations or social structures that connect people, such as class, competition, power, and inequality; (c) explicit critical analysis of the philosophical theories and tacit assumptions that underlie all social research; (d) recognition of truth in its differing forms; and (with Sayer) (e) recognition of the inherent values in social facts. Objectivity is taken to mean being fair, open, and impartial, but not morally neutral, because attempts to withhold judgment on the abuses of power inadvertently support the powerful. Children are seldom mentioned in all these adult-centric debates on ethics, although the debates are of unique relevance to them. Not only do children belong to most of the disadvantaged groups, which explicitly ethical research aims to support, but children are also the social group least likely to have the funding and opportunity to conduct and report professional research on their own behalf. Adults are therefore especially responsible for considering the place of the ethics and inequalities in their research with children and for questioning overt and covert prejudices against children in adult-centric ethics.

Ethics in Research Methods Agreed international standards for research ethics and also for human rights grew out of the Nuremberg trials. The trials revealed the immense dangers of conducting harmful and useless medical research on prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. There was a great shift from the Kantian ethics of protecting independent people’s liberties towards also realising the crucial need to protect vulnerable people from abuse. Phillipe Sands recorded the international horror at the extreme cruelty of the Holocaust and the determination to prevent it from recurring, which informed the two documents: (1) the 1949 Nuremberg Code on medical research and (2) in 1948 the broader United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Ethics

Both documents promote ethical principles, which were later summarised by U.S. bioethicists Tom Beauchamp and James Childress as justice, equal respect for everyone and their views, to avoid doing harm, and beneficence or doing good to others. One aim of the Nuremberg Code was to stop ‘over-research’ in terms of useless or harmful medical experiments. Nuremberg banned all research on healthy children, although research into treatments for sick children was allowed. However, by 1962 the problems of ‘underresearch’ became very clear, when many babies were born with deformed limbs after their mothers had taken Thalidomide during their pregnancy. The drug had not been tested for this danger before being widely prescribed. The World Medical Authority agreed to detailed ethical guidelines in the Declaration of Helsinki (first adopted in 1964 and last amended in 2013), which attempts to balance the dangers of under-research and overresearch. By the 1980s, the new discipline of bioethics was emerging, with new journals, academic courses, and conferences. Given the high risks of medical research that could injure and kill research participants, the need to set ethical standards and controls looks obvious. Social research does not involve these direct physical harms or the potentially life-giving benefits against which they are assessed. Does social research, then, need formal ethical standards and research ethics committees and institutional review boards? The social sciences developed their professional codes of ethics (all displayed on their associations’ and societies’ webpages) much later than the medical guidelines. Social researchers often complain, ‘We had to apply to the research ethics committee or institutional review board but it was a waste of time. They asked pointless questions about petty rules. Some members thought it’s unethical to do research interviews with children at all. And they caused months of delay to our project’. There are problems when reviewers know little about social research, feel they must protect children from the risks of research, and doubt that children have anything worthwhile to say in interviews. These common responses indicate that childhood researchers need to explain their important work more widely amongst academics in other disciplines as well as to the general public.

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Yet social research can do harm on both small and large levels. For instance, as a neutral warmup question, a research interviewer might ask, ‘Who lives with you at home?’ If, for example, a boy’s father had recently moved in with his new partner and her children and the boy lived with them on weekends but did not want anyone to know and was uncertain about which counted as his real home, he could feel upset and embarrassed. On a much larger scale, suppose researchers wanted to evaluate a ‘Get-Fit!’ programme, to help 40 obese children change to a healthier lifestyle. If it worked well, the social research programme could potentially help countless children. It might transform their lifelong health, relationships, confidence, and opportunities as much as medical treatments might. Yet the risks of ‘GetFit!’ include possibly increasing the children’s sense of stigma and of failure if they could not manage to change their daily habits. In a third example, one of the ‘Get-Fit!’ researchers might be so convinced that the programme is effective that she would persuade children to take part, promising them they would benefit and should not refuse. However, the point of research is to assess the so far unknown benefits and possible problems of the programme. If ‘Get-Fit!’ was already of proven benefit, then it could be unnecessary and unethical to do the evaluation. Research involves collecting, analysing, and reporting data, which cannot give direct benefits. The research might benefit children in the future if the findings and recommendations are reported and implemented or otherwise influence knowledge, policy, or practice, although this rarely happens. Ethics reviews alert researchers to potential problems such as these when they cannot be certain that the research will directly benefit and not harm the children who take part. Unlike teachers, nurses, and others who provide services for children, researchers collect data from them. The children are the donors who benefit the researchers; this very different relationship with potential risks of intrusion and exploitation requires extra ethical protections. Education and other services can harm children, but the intention and duty of the professionals to benefit children and their relationships with the children differ from the

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intentions and duties of researchers. Not only should researchers understand these differences and uncertainties; they must also help the children and adults they work with understand them too. ‘We know our methods/services/treatments do good and not harm’ is a common reason given to oppose plans for research and evaluation. However, in the 1980s, doctors who started to test common treatments, at first routine clinical preparations before childbirth, found to their surprise that many were either useless or were actually harmful. This gradually led to setting up the international Cochrane Collaboration (http://www .cochrane.org/) for health research and the Campbell Collaboration (https://campbellcollaboration .org/) for social research. They aim to test interventions rigorously, ideally through randomised controlled trials. Randomised controlled trials might seem to raise at least two major ethical problems. How can researchers conduct trials when they feel already convinced which of the interventions being compared is the best one? And how can researchers, as some families see it, casually, even callously, randomise children by chance into the group that has the treatment they believe is successful or equally into the one that is not? From a moral perspective, it is ethical to test every intervention to be certain which ones can be promoted as beneficial and which should be altered or withdrawn. Researchers may feel certain, for example, about which of four math teaching methods is the best one. Yet they can still have equipoise, meaning they accept that their own view, however strongly held, might be mistaken and that only a randomised controlled trial can provide strong evidence and a higher level of proof about what works best. Researchers are therefore willing to test their own beliefs and to treat each method as equally valid as far as is known. Research raises complicated problems that may not have clear solutions, and the role and purpose of ethics in research is not to provide simple answers. Instead, as MacIntyre concluded, the study of ethics encourages everyone concerned to be much more aware of the questions, problems, values, standards, and ways of working towards finding the least harmful standards of doing research. A few of these standards are reviewed next.

Ethical Standards for All Concerned With Research At the heart of ethical research is the participants’ right to give consent or to refuse and withhold consent or to withdraw at any time. This can include pausing during interviews or preferring not to answer certain questions. Consent depends on three criteria: that it is voluntary, informed, and given by someone with legal authority. The Nuremberg Code begins, ‘The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely ­essential. . . . The person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion’. Researchers should avoid any kind of pressure when asking children to help them with their research and should inform children about their rights. About information, it is often assumed that children cannot give informed consent because they cannot understand complex information. Yet many young children have a great capacity to understand, especially in matters related to their own direct experiences, as Priscilla Alderson and colleagues found when interviewing children who have diabetes. Children’s ignorance often results from a lack of information given by adults rather than from children’s inabilities. Researchers need to spend time designing and testing the information they give to potential research participants. The information should include (a) clear details about the aims, nature, and timing of the research; (b) the main research questions; (c) any harms and risks and the hopedfor benefits; (d) what participants will be asked to do; (e) how their data will be used; (f) their right to consent, to refuse, or withdraw; (g) their right to confidentiality; and (h) details about contacting the researchers. On the third criterion, the legal authority to consent, English law in the 1985 Gillick case ruled that children aged under the age of 16 years can give legally valid consent to medical treatment if they are competent to make an informed and wise decision in their best interests. No lower age limit was given on consent to treatment, although there is no clear law on minors’

Ethnicity

consent to research, meaning that researchers tend to involve parents. These standards are considered in a handbook on the ethics of research with children and young people by Priscilla Alderson and Virginia Morrow that divides research projects into 10 stages from first plans to final dissemination. The many ethical questions that arise at each stage are reviewed in detail in the handbook to help researchers work out their own answers. Priscilla Alderson See also Age of Consent; Assent, Children’s, in Research; Children’s Rights; Consent, Children’s, in Research; Health Care

Further Readings Alderson, P., & Morrow, V. (2011). The ethics of research with children and young people: A practical handbook. London, UK: Sage. Retrieved from https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/318441094_Ten _Topics_in_Ethical_Research Alderson, P., Sutcliffe, K., & Curtis, K. (2006). Children’s consent to medical treatment. Hastings Centre Report, 36(6), 25–34. doi:10.1353/hcr.2006.0000 Bauman, Z. (2005). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Beauchamp, T., & Childress, J. (2013). Principles of biomedical ethics (7th ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Gouldner, A. (1971). The coming crisis of Western sociology. London, UK: Heinemann. Hammersley, M. (1995). The politics of social research. London, UK: Sage. Hayward, B. (2012). Children, citizenship and environment: Nurturing a democratic imagination in a changing world. London, UK: Routledge. MacIntyre, A. (1998). A short history of ethics: A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century (2nd ed.). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Pinson, H., Arnot, M., & Candappa, M. (2010). Education, asylum and the “non-citizen” child: The politics of compassion and belonging. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Porpora, D. (2015). Reconstructing sociology: The critical realist approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sands, P. (2017). East-West street. London, UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values and ethical life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society. Berkley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1922)

Ethnicity The concept of race as a biological reality has to a large extent been banished from social sciences as it refers to mostly physical characteristics, which are considered as not reliably measurable or biologically relevant and, de facto, socially constructed. On the contrary, ethnicity is used in various academic (science of religion, anthropology, sociology, and political sciences) and nonacademic contexts (media, novels, politics, and administration). Ethnicity refers to individuals’ claim to a shared history, culture, religion, language, ancestry, descent, institutions, and political project, all features which may be recognized by other groups. According to the historical and political contexts, ethnicity may refer to majority (e.g., Yoruba in Nigeria) or minority groups (e.g., Aka Pygmies in Central Africa); in some s­ ettings, it may refer to indigenous peoples (e.g., Kanaks, Quechua) or immigrants (e.g., Malaysian Chinese, British Bangladeshi, Irish Americans). The extensive literature on ethnicity carries diverging notions of ethnicity: While some consider ethnicity as a given reality, others highlight the fact that ethnic identities rely on boundaries which are constructed, imposed, and negotiated. As a result, the latter studies analyze processes of differentiation and possible discrimination between groups; they focus on interethnic relations, ethnic differentiation, competition, and conflicts and underline ethnic loyalties and solidarity. In multiethnic societies, ethnic affiliation can be a source of stigmatization or privilege; in contexts where ethnic categories are used in bureaucratic settings (and may be associated with positive discrimination in the fields of education and employment), ethnic affiliation determines the recognition/ denial of individuals’ political, economic, and social rights. The reference to ethnicity is

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contextual, fluid, and can be tactical: According to the setting, individuals may stress or downplay their ethnic affiliation to promote other social characteristics. This entry discusses studies centered on children in multiethnic and multicultural societies. The entry further reviews work exploring the way children and ethnicity intersect in institutional and noninstitutional contexts. Finally, this entry discusses iconic figures of children whose daily lives are impacted by ethnic affiliations.

Children in Multiethnic and Multicultural Societies Mainstream publications on ethnicity tend to be adult biased and overlook the fact that children are social actors in their own right who act upon their environment. Filling a gap, a growing number of publications reflect on the way ethnicity and childhood inform each other. The analysis of the intersection between ethnicity and children has benefited from the paradigm of intersectionality according to which ethnicity is one social variable among many which impacts individual life and power relations in combination with class, gender, and generation. Intersectionality paved the way for the adoption of a generational perspective and child-centered ethnography, which contribute to questioning children’s experience as well as to analyzing the extent of their agency against the backdrop of social norms and structural constraints. Various studies have devoted attention to the way children experience affiliation, inclusion, and exclusion in multicultural or multiethnic societies, in which ethnicity is a major political issue. Some focus specifically on conflict-ridden societies including divided societies (e.g., Northern Ireland, Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Rwanda) where ethnic ­ affiliations fuel civil conflicts and have a negative impact on children’s daily life as well as their longterm prospects. Since children and youth are actively implicated in processes of reproduction, questioning, and reworking of ethnic boundaries, they are considered as major partners in the implementation of politics aimed at avoiding future ethnic conflicts and fostering national unity. In Uganda, for instance, Kristin Cheney underlines that children are actively encouraged

by the state—in the schooling environment in particular—to underplay their ethnic affiliation, ­ disqualified as a source of past and potential conflicts, and to emphasize their citizenship and shared attachment to the nation.

Children and Ethnicity in Institutional and Noninstitutional Contexts Researchers of children and ethnicity have focused on two different settings: institutional and noninstitutional settings. The former focus primarily on the schooling environment: Quantitative studies analyze the ethnic makeup of schools and examine academic achievement as well as victimization in relation to the students’ ethnic and economic background; qualitative studies, based on ethnographic methods, reflect on the way schooling reinforces intraethnic relations and/or fosters peer relations across ethnic lines. Because of their specific position in society, children are able to develop alternative sociabilities that subvert the existing political categories and order. For example, in her ethnographic study of children’s life inside and outside the classroom, Maria Kromidas highlights the numerous ways children interact in institutional and informal settings, deal with administrative norms, and build or break friendship ties across ethnic boundaries. Taking into consideration the variable of gender, some studies analyze how children negotiate gender and ethnic affiliation in their day-to-day lives, according to the contexts in which they are located. Special attention has been devoted to the impact of sporting activities within and outside the academic sphere, examining their capacity to promote border-crossing. Dympa Devine and Mary Kelly underline, for instance, that among boys, sporting activities and academic ability, coupled with the inclination for games played in large groups, favor the entry of minority ethnic boys into peer groups across ethnic lines. Other studies explore noninstitutional settings and take into account the fact that children navigate daily between different contexts (e.g., public/ bureaucratic/institutional settings as well as private and informal ones) and places (e.g., home, parks and playground, youth clubs, neighborhoods). This mobility between different normative contexts fosters understanding of how children

Ethnicity

experience and handle ethnicity in everyday life and make sense of identity construction as a fluid and dynamic process involving both structural constraints and children’s agency. Some research aimed at understanding ethnicity in children’s daily life focuses on multiethnic neighborhoods and to a lesser extent on homes. It demonstrates that ethnicity may or may not be a salient social variable always and everywhere. For instance, Livia Jimenez Sedano notes that in multiethnic neighborhoods, during periods of time dedicated to play, children may consider ethnic and religious affiliations as less relevant than other social ties built on social skills, recent/long-standing belonging to the neighborhood, and friendship. In reference to the domestic realm, historical studies have demonstrated that homes have, in some contexts, been spaces where children were brought into daily contact with people from other ethnic, national, or religious backgrounds. Some parents deliberately entrusted their children to domestic employees of specific ethnic and national origin to allow the young generation to acquire from the earliest age language skills, cultural knowledge, and habits (for instance, Greek nurses in ancient Rome or English nannies during colonial times). Focused on the contemporary stratified global division of repro­ ductive labor, socioanthropological research underlines that some parents entrust their children to domestic workers of migrant origin, thus deliberately or w ­ illingly bringing their offspring into daily contact with women of other ethnic and national backgrounds.

Ethnicity Through the Lens of Iconic Child Figures A diversified set of publications examines the intersection of children and ethnicity through the lens of specific childhood figures who navigate daily in social and political contexts where ethnicity matters. Among these figures, the most salient ones are the colonial child, the second generation, the child soldier, third culture kids, and transnational adoptees. Colonial Children

A recent and limited number of studies focus on children in former colonies and reveal that they

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were considered by colonial powers as a major political concern. For instance, Ann Laura Stoler explains, in reference to late 19th and early 20th century Indonesia, that the Dutch colonial authorities considered children of mixed ethnic/racial origin (with one indigenous parent) as a threat to the colonial project and political order, based on the distinction and hierarchy between races/ethnic groups and nations. The colonial administration tried to control the education of children of colonial agents, notably in the domestic realm. To consolidate the colonial order, it emphasized colonial mothers’ responsibilities in their children’s upbringing and thus in the maintenance of ethnic and racial boundaries. It discouraged mothers from entrusting the care of children to indigenous domestics for fear that this delegation would breed a culturally hybrid generation and lead to the assimilation of local values as well as the development of strong affective attachment to indigenous women, which would interfere with the children’s loyalty as citizens of the colonial power. Second Generation

In contrast to the colonial child which has only received limited attention, second generation children (whose parents are so-called primary migrants) have been the focus of an extensive body of literature which has looked at their experience in their daily environments (adaptation to, participation in, assimilation in, and exclusion from various communities and networks). These studies have also look at the manner in which members of the second generation combine their affiliation to the country in which they grew up with concrete actions to maintain social ties, norms, and values related to their parents’ country of origin. Child Soldier

The child soldier is another well-known childhood figure implicating ethnicity. The existing body of literature, grounded in children’s rights studies, social work, and political anthropology, concentrates on children involved in various armed, civil war conflicts, frequently having an ethnic dimension. As they enroll, according to the context, willingly or under constraints, these children, boys

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and girls alike, fight or provide services in a context promoting ethnic patriotism or ethnic grievance. Transnational Adoptees

A number of transnational studies addressing the question of ethnicity focus on “the transnational adopted child” who is often adopted by parents belonging to ethnic groups or nations different from those of the child; they examine the adoptees’ integration in their new families which can be accompanied by a will to show respect for these children’s ethnic and national origin. Referring to the specific context of Norway, Signe Howell uncovers children’s perspective on identity and ethnicity. By exploring the process of kinning, she shows that children consider themselves as full members of their adoptive families and define themselves as Norwegians. Their specific outlook contrasts with the psychotechnocratic discourse focused on children’s place of birth and ethnic/national origin. Third Culture Kids

A new corpus of studies deals with third culture kids. This expression refers to children who followed parents pursuing international careers (executives of transnational firms, military personnel, diplomatic staff, and missionaries) and have grown up in cultural environments different from those of their parents. As a consequence of their successive relocations and their cosmopolitan life experiences, children develop community ties which transcend the ethnic and national affiliation shared with their parents. Through specific sites and magazines, members share their daily and long-term concerns and gain a sense of community belonging, based on their specific common life path experiences. These various figures underline the fact that children across time and space can be placed in a position where they have to handle ethnic affiliation and boundaries from the youngest age. The changing historical and political contexts in which they grow up, the various normative institutional and informal settings they navigate, and the shifting social variables they experience in daily life, as well as their changing outlooks and expectations for the future, compel

children to develop thoughts and concrete actions about ethnicity. The expanded fields of childhood experiences—whose horizon is all too often perceived as confined to school and family—give children a major role in the reproduction and reworking of ethnic affiliation and boundaries in today’s world, thus building new realities which come under the scrutiny of an emerging literature. Véronique Pache Huber See also Transnational Adoption; Care-Work; Child Soldiers; Migration; Transnational

Further Readings Boyden, J., & de Berry, J. (Eds.). (2004). Children and youth on the front line: Ethnography, armed conflict and displacement. New York, NY: Berghahn. Cheney, K. (2007). Pillars of the nation: Child citizens and Ugandan national development. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.3366/ afr.2010.0018 Devine, D., & Kelly, M. (2006). ‘I just don’t want to get picked on by anybody’: Dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in a newly multi-ethnic Irish primary school. Children & Society, 20(2), 128–139. doi:10.1111/j.1099–0860.2006.00020.x Howell, S. (2006). The kinning of foreigners: Transnational adoption in a global perspective. New York, NY: Berghahn. doi:10.1177/ 0907568209104406 Kromidas, M. (2016). City kids transforming racial baggage. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. McKnight, M., Leonard, M., & Spyrou, S. (Eds.). (2011). Special issue: Growing up in divided societies. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 31, 9–10. doi:10.1108/01443331111164115 Pache Huber, V., & Spyrou, S. (Eds.). (2012). ‘Introduction’: Children’s interethnic relations in everyday life—Beyond institutional context. Special issue: Children’s interethnic relations in everyday life—Beyond institutional context. Childhood, 19, 291–301. doi:10.1177/0907568212445933 Sedano, L. J. (2012). On the irrelevance of ethnicity in children’s organization of their social world. Childhood, 19, 375–388. doi:10.1177/0907568212445226 Stoler, A. L. (2010). Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ethnography

Ethnography ‘Ethnography’ is the in-depth study of collective life and is concerned with the interpretation and representation of social and material practices, traditionally referred to as culture. Originating in the discipline of anthropology in the early part of the 20th century, it was used to refer to the descriptive and comparative accounts of so-called primitive peoples. Subsequently, it has moved beyond disciplinary boundaries, across the humanities and social sciences, and away from the traditional concerns of anthropology: moving first away from small-scale indigenous societies and groups, to take in ‘advanced’ societies, which is often the researcher’s ‘home’ society, moving into smaller groups and sub-cultures, and latterly, moving away from the dominance of ‘the human’ within ethnographic accounts, to instead emphasise the role of materials, objects, technologies, and environments. Along with these moves, the term itself has come to stand for many different things; described as a descriptive account, a method or set of methods, a combination of theory and method, a general orientation, or, more forcefully, a specific politico-ethical standpoint. To draw out the different elements associated with the term ‘ethnography’, the following description begins with a simple distinction between ethnography as theory and as method. However, this distinction cannot be maintained in practice. This is because ethnography as theory is concerned with the interpretation and representation of collective life, and ethnography as method is concerned with the empirical work (fieldwork) through which these interpretations and representations are generated. Ethnography has a tense philosophical relationship with power and politics—due in large part to its historical association with imperialism and colonisation. This tension can be read in the substantial debate that has occurred within anthropology as to the nature of the term ‘ethnography’, whether it should be used at all, and if so, exactly what it might refer to. Those anthropologists who accept the term often distinguish it from ‘anthropology’, by referring to the former as the particular and situated study of collective

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practice, and the latter as the development of general laws of collective human behaviour. However, critiques of ethnography, in particular the postmodern critique that emerged from politicophilosophical writings in the latter half of the 20th century, argue that such a simple dualism between ethnography (method) and anthropology (theory) permitted a de-politicised notion of ethnography as an accumulation of facts, which eclipsed the extent to which those ‘facts’ were the product of an imbalance of power between researcher and researched.

Ethnography as Method As a method, ethnography is a descriptive account of social life, conventionally derived from the prolonged immersion of the researcher in the day-today lives of others. The technique most commonly associated with this activity is participant observation, in which the researcher participates in the everyday activities of the particular society or group she or he is studying, whilst also observing and recording these activities. Recordings of observations are known as ‘fieldnotes’, which traditionally involves writing as much information down as the circumstances allow, out of which are produced fuller accounts when the opportunity arises. Although pictures, photographs, and other kinds of visual representation have always been present in ethnographic practices, more recent technological advances have made such methods much more commonplace. Participant observation can be undertaken in many different ways and according to many different styles and combinations of the two constituent elements of participation and observation. Traditionally, participation imagined a researcher in a society completely remote and ‘exotic’ in comparison to his or her own. Participation then did not imagine that a ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ role could be found for the researcher to enact, but rather, the relation of ‘strangeness’ that existed between researcher and researched was an inherent feature of the method. The inherently comparative notion of ethnography meant that this strangeness was to be made familiar to the reader, implying that ‘our own’ categories, practices, and distinctions could become better known by comparison with these

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‘others’. As ethnography has moved close to the ‘home’ society of the researcher, the comparative nature of ethnography has often been ignored or lost from the study, and the relation of the strange and familiar has been inverted, such that the objective is now to ‘make the familiar strange’—that is, to attempt to retain a sense of critical distance or detachment from an environment with which many cultural tropes and distinctions are shared between researcher and researched. In either case, participation imagines the researcher studying situated practices by assuming some kind of practitioner role within that situation. Between the participation and observation elements of participant observation, there are numerous ways in which individuals have gone about the work of ethnography, from full participation in which the researcher might assume a role that is quite normal within a particular environment (e.g., assuming the role of a teaching assistant in order to study classroom dynamics) to much more detached observation. This leaves a great deal of variation in the likely ‘effects’ that the researcher might produce within her or his field of study, which become a sustained object of enquiry in themselves. Beyond this, there is something profoundly personal about the habits that ethnographers form over time within and across fieldwork encounters, as well as the relationships they form with those they encounter. This is an important part of the particularity of ethnography, and it begins to signal the ‘theory’ side, as it requires a radical rethinking of conventional academic standards of validity and reliability.

Ethnography as Theory Validity, or what might instead be thought of as credibility in ethnographic data, is dependent on the researcher’s ability to put the reader in the situation, through a ‘thick’ contextualised account, which is able to render descriptively the complex and contingent character of everyday life. Reliability, or what might instead be called transparency, depends on the researcher making clear the path they have taken through their research. This does not necessarily mean a mechanical step-bystep guide through the research process, but rather an attempt by the researcher to make clear the

evolution of their thought, through the specific circumstances which gave rise to particular ways of seeing and thinking. This requires reflexive engagement on the part of the researcher—that is, reflection on the moment-to-moment interaction of thought and action and a close attention to the researcher’s own place in the field; what guides their choices regarding who, what, and how to observe, with what devices (technical, theoretical, and linguistic) they frame the research encounter, and with what effect. This is also an important part of the concept of ethnography as a political standpoint, which is based on the idea that all ethnographic knowledge is situated according to the ontological and normative ordering of field encounters. What this means is that what ethnographers ‘know’, therefore, is situated by what they ‘see’ in the field, which in turn is situated by what they ‘look’ for and/or are given ‘access’ to. The nature and meaning of this situatedness has prompted substantial critical enquiry within and beyond anthropology. Questions have been posed of the most basic of ethnographic terms; ‘representation’ and ‘culture’, driven by the insight that ethnographic accounts arise not only out of the facts accumulated during fieldwork, but out of prolonged reflection and speculation upon the meaning of these facts, when the researcher may be far removed in time and place from the circumstances of their accumulation.

Ethnography and Childhood Unsurprisingly, given the centrality of the concepts of family and kinship to the discipline of anthropology, at least in the British tradition, the ethnographic study of children and childhood is associated with a substantial literature dating back to the very earliest proponents of ethnographic fieldwork. This work is of foundational importance for an encultured understanding of many central concepts within the study of children and childhood, such as socialisation, emotional, behavioural, and linguistic development, storytelling and play, parenting practices and attachment, and social reproduction. However, the dominance of psychological perspectives within this area, and the somewhat ambivalent relationship between anthropology and psychology, mean that these

Ethnography

perspectives have on the whole remained marginal to the orthodox understanding of children and childhood. One area where ethnographic accounts of childhood have gained some traction is in critical accounts of schooling, in particular, in relation to debates about social class and educational inequalities from the 1970s onwards, in which ethnographic work has been of foundational importance for the development of theories of social and cultural reproduction, the ‘hidden curriculum’ of schooling, and the production and maintenance of classed subcultures of schooling. In turn, these theories have inspired a diverse field of ethnographic inquiry into difference and diversity, social inclusion and exclusion, and citizenship and participation.

Contemporary Perspectives on Ethnography All of these theories share a common set of assumptions, implied by the idea of a hidden curriculum, and that is that the observable surface of day-to-day interaction in any given field of practice carries with it many different ideas and assumptions, which may not ordinarily be visible to those who inhabit those fields. This is fundamental to the idea and promise but also the complexity and partiality of ethnography; that through prolonged immersion in the lives of others, the researcher might learn something about those others of which they might have only been dimly aware, or the existence and function of which they had not questioned. In spite of decades of critique which questions the ‘revelatory’ or ‘discoverable’ within ethnographic methods, there is a sense in which the desire to conduct ethnographic research is still driven by the desire to paint a different picture of the chosen field than is commonly depicted. Since the mid-1980s, post-humanist ideas have had an important impact on ethnography in broadening the array of phenomena which ethnography can attempt to activate—through a renewed focus on the description of non-human cultures (e.g., objects, technologies, animals, and environments). Post-humanism also fundamentally challenges the conventional methodological and theoretical path of the ethnographer, who can no longer rely only on people and their stories, but

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rather must try and give voice to the seemingly inanimate by taking a more ecological perspective, and asking what kinds of life are made possible by a particular set of relations between people and things. This challenge has particular importance for the study of childhood, as children have historically been amongst those things defined as not fully human within the social and human sciences. The assumption that the child is ‘less than’ something towards which it ought to work and towards which others ought to direct it is one of the most culturally salient within contemporary Western practices of children and childhood. Post-humanism requires a complete reconfiguration of this idea in order to ‘decolonise’ children from the assumption of deficit and to bring about an alternative picture of children in relation to (non) human others. Whilst post-human approaches are beginning to gain traction within the varied and interdisciplinary field of ethnographic studies, their importance for the ethnographic study of childhood has not yet been fully examined. Simon Bailey See also Posthumanism and Childhood; Reflexivity; Schooling, Gender, and Race; Socialization; Sutton-Smith, Brian

Further Readings Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fine, M. (1991). Framing dropouts. Albany: State University of New York Press. LeVine, R., & New, R. (2008). Anthropology and child development: A cross-cultural reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Marcus, G. (1998). Ethnography through thick and thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Whitehead, N., & Wesch, M. (2012). Human no more: Digital subjectivities, unhuman subjects, and the end of anthropology. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. doi:10.5876/9781607321705.c00 Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Wolcott, H. (2005). The art of fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.

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Eugenics

Eugenics Eugenics movements emerged at the turn of the 20th century in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Eugenics encouraged the improvement of the gene pool through a variety of methods: encouraging those with good genetics to breed, discouraging those with bad genetics from breeding, outlawing marriage between those with bad genes, and even forced sterilization. While early eugenicists may have had noble goals, in practice eugenics allowed those in society with power (e.g., White people and upper-class people) to feel superior. Eugenicists allowed people to believe that many social ills were due to bad genetics; there was much less focus on the social environment in which people lived. Whether its intention or not, eugenics allowed for the development of scientific racism. This entry examines the history of eugenics in the United States and Germany in the early 20th century and examines more recent manifestations of eugenics.

overturned in the 1940s, the Buck v. Bell (1927) case added legal legitimacy to the eugenic practices put in place by state legislators and medical professionals. Social reformers, such as John Kellogg, developed the “Race Betterment Foundation” and published Needed—A New Human Race (1914), and the Eugenics Registry (1915). Kellogg believed, more than some other eugenicists, that environment played a role in human development. Still, his work promoted the idea that bad heredity needed to be corrected. In addition to scholarly reports and legal decisions, eugenics was disseminated to the general population in films such as The Black Stork (1917), which played in movie theaters for 10 years. In this movie, a physician refuses treatment for a baby born with deformities. The audience is told, “There are times when saving a life is a greater crime than taking one.” In allowing the baby to die, the physician is seen as morally superior. About 60,000 forced sterilizations took place in the United States before the 1960s.

Eugenics in Germany Eugenics in the United States Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, promoted eugenics, sometimes referred to as social Darwinism. In 1883, in his book Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development, Galton coined the term eugenics while discussing the measurement of various human traits including intelligence, emotions, bodily makeup, and race. The eugenics movement was supported by a wide range of professionals: social reformers, academicians, physicians, and lawyers and judges. In 1896, Connecticut developed a law that made it illegal for people with epilepsy and those who were feeble-minded to marry. Between 1907 and 1931, 29 U.S. states enacted laws that allowed for the forced sterilization of people who were deemed to have negative traits. The Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas on immigrants from various countries based on eugenics and a belief that certain immigrants had inferior traits. In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated that “three generations of imbeciles is enough” in the Buck v. Bell case. The case involved Carrie Buck, a Virginian, who was thought to have negative traits. Although this case would be

Adolf Hitler was aware of the eugenics movement in America when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1933. Hitler, along with German academic and medical personnel, was aware of the eugenics research being conducted by Charles Davenport at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory in New York. Charles Davenport was in charge of the Eugenics Record Office and had published a book entitled The Trait Book, in which he discussed the heritability of several birth defects. At one point in the 1930s, German doctors were sterilizing more than 5,000 people a month. Ultimately, however, Hitler would have people killed who were considered to have undesirable traits. After World War II and the extermination of more than 6 million people, discussion of eugenics fell out of favor.

Eugenics Since the 1980s By the 1980s, eugenics would assume its current form: genetic testing before birth. With modern technology, many genetic tests can be performed on the unborn child. The first of these tests, specifically amniocentesis and chorionic villus

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

sampling, gained prominence in the 1980s with the development of more effective fertility treatments that often resulted in multiple gestations (e.g., twins, triplets). In the event of multiple gestations, selective reduction could be performed to terminate one or more fetus to reduce the risk of complications in the pregnancy, particularly if one or more fetus tested positive for certain disorders in these diagnostic tests. Due to the invasive nature and risks associated with these diagnostic genetic tests, a new method of genetic screening was developed: non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT). NIPT screening was first used in 2011. NIPT screenings are performed by taking a blood sample from the mother and evaluating the placental DNA found therein for chromosomal abnormalities. The test was initially developed to assist with early screening for trisomy 21, also known as Down syndrome. It was offered to women as an alternative to the riskier traditional diagnostic tests. Though the initial aim of the test was not intended to eliminate people with trisomy 21 from the population, it has been used as a tool to determine not only the viability of pregnancies but also opened the door to terminations for a multitude of conditions. According to a 2018 study by Sarah Klucznik and Holly Slepian, in countries such as Iceland where upward of 85% of pregnant women opt to have these genetic screenings performed, 99% of women whose screenings are positive for trisomy 21 decide to terminate. By contrast, a 2011 study by Jaime Natoli and colleagues found that in the United States, only 67% of cases of detected trisomy 21 are terminated. While these tests have become increasingly popular, according to Gautam N. Allahbadia, they still hold a 0.02% false positive rate for trisomy 21, which is the condition for which these tests were originally developed. Since NIPT screening can be performed earlier in pregnancy than diagnostic tests, this opens the door to people being able to terminate pregnancies within the first trimester when it is generally legally admissible. Concerns have been raised regarding the use of these tests to eliminate people with certain conditions and disabilities, such as trisomy 21. Daniel W. Phillips and Chloe Joslin See also Disabilities; In Vitro Fertilization (IVF); Nature Versus Nurture; Racism

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Further Readings Allahbadia, G. N. (2015). Has noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) come of age? Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology of India, 65, 141–145. doi:10.1007/ s13224-015-0718-5 Black, E. (2012). War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race, expanded edition. Washington, DC: Dialog Press. Durst, D. (2017). Eugenics and protestant social reform: Hereditary science and religion in America, 1860–1940. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. doi:10.1353/ soh.2018.0201 Klucznik, S., & Slepian, H. (2018). Iceland’s abortion policy concerning children with Down syndrome: An ethical analysis. Journal of Healthcare Ethics & Administration, 4(1), 45–48. doi:10.22461/ jhea.10.7164 Lau, T. K., Chan, M. K., Lo, P. S., Chan, H. Y., Chan, W. S., Koo, T. Y., . . . Pooh, R. K. (2012). Clinical utility of noninvasive fetal trisomy (NIFTY) test: Early experience. Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, 25, 1856–1859. doi:10.3109/14767058.201 2.678442 Natoli, J. L., Ackerman, D. L., McDermott, S., & Edwards, J. G. (2012). Prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome: A systematic review of termination rates (1995–2011). Prenatal Diagnosis, 32, 142–153. doi:10.1002/pd.2910 What is noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) and what disorders can it screen for?—Genetics Home Reference—NIH. (2019, May 28). Retrieved March 2019 from https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/testing/nipt

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology Evolutionary developmental psychology is a theoretical approach that explains children’s and youths’ psychological traits, or adaptations, as having evolved across many generations in order to effectively pass one’s genes on to future generations. Evolution thus works forward in time so that today’s environments select tomorrow’s genetics. This entry examines how evolutionary theory can help us understand children’s psychology. Beginning with a synopsis of the history of evolutionary psychology, the entry then discusses how evolutionary psychology might be applied to child studies by

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offering two case studies—one focused on bullying and one focused on attachment.

The History of Evolutionary Psychology Historically, most of the research in evolutionary psychology has focused on adults. However, given that individuals must survive infancy and childhood in order to become reproductive adults, the need to study adaptive mental functions in children became evident. In the 1960s, Philippe Ariès suggested that historically, childhood had not been viewed as distinct from adulthood. However, more recent analyses suggest that the concept of childhood is not simply a recent construct, but it is in fact rather ancient and ubiquitous. For example, ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian children not only had toys specific for children, but they also had different toys for boys and girls, as well as unique burials, laws, rituals, and expectations for children. Archaeological and anthropological evidence from hunter-gatherer societies suggests that they recognized varying mental stages and/or capacities in children.

Children and Evolutionary Psychology Interestingly, the historically high rates of child mortality suggest that childhood was a stage of life that was subject to exceptionally strong evolutionary pressures until very recently (i.e., the advent of modern medicine and sanitation). This in turn means that children almost certainly evolved to not just be adults in training, but to be independent agents who maximized their immediate survival and success during childhood via specific and general psychological adaptations. These same pressures mean that in many cases, children behave surprisingly similar across vast periods of time, widely disparate geographies, and between very different cultures. For example, almost all young children frequently overestimate their own successes and ability to complete a difficult task, especially compared to adults. While this propensity to inaccurately gauge reality may seem maladaptive or functionally immature psychological ability, it may actually allow children to persist in situations where they would otherwise quit due to self-­ perceived failures; resulting in increased learning and ultimately survival. This cognitive immaturity can help

them master difficult tasks that adults often quit, such as learning to speak a new language. Further, these mental adaptations are facultative, meaning that how they are expressed is dependent on the environment that they are in. For instance, children almost certainly have a genetically based psychological adaptation for acquiring complex language skills, but the specific skills depend on the environment. For example, if a child who can hear is raised in an environment where they are solely exposed to sign language, they will become fluent in only sign language. The genetic predisposition is important as it allows for the possibility of an adaptation to be expressed (e.g., via a series of psychological rules concerning the acquisition of language), but it is the interaction with the environment which dictates what this expression looks like. While evolution appears to have imposed certain restraints (e.g., it is easier for children to learn fear of snakes than cars or to learn to speak than to write), it is generally fair to say that more than any other species, human childhood features both the psychological need to learn from their environment and the mental drive to do so via an almost insatiable curiosity of the world around them. This learning process relates to two common misconceptions that hinder the adoption of evolutionary psychology in the study of childhood: (1) the deterministic fallacy and (2) the naturalistic fallacy. The deterministic fallacy implies that anything that is genetically influenced is insensitive to the environment. However, this is simply not true. Consider the following example. If an individual is making cookies, they need both a recipe with ingredients (i.e., genetics) and an oven (i.e., the environment). Putting the cookie dough in the freezer will not result in cookies, in the same way that failing to provide any emotional love for a child will result in that child developing stunted emotional attachment and expression. Human childhood is the result of the interaction between human genes and the complex environmental (i.e., physical, social, and cultural) factors in which they are situated. To illustrate, it is useful to consider the case of identical twins. Identical twins remain more similar than any other general pairing of people even when they are adopted and raised by different families. Yet, identical twins are not truly identical—genes can

Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

moderate, but not eliminate, environmental influences on behavior. The naturalistic fallacy, on the other hand, is the belief that anything that is a result of biology/genetics is also morally desirable or superior. For instance, evolutionary theory strongly supports the evidence that older adolescent boys are typically much more muscular and physically aggressive than older adolescent girls are. The naturalistic fallacy suggests that due to boys’ physical advantage, it is acceptable for them to use their fists to solve problems more than girls because they are built that way (e.g., Deborah Denno has analyzed the role of these explanations in legal defenses). To the degree that this is true (e.g., girls are slightly more relationally aggressive than boys in Western cultures), nature provides no basis for making moral incentives. Evolution can offer great beauty (e.g., a child’s smile) or terrible plagues (e.g., childhood diseases), but as a general principle of nature, it offers no guide to morality. One might wish to encourage children’s propensities for smiling (an initially instinctive behavior expressed even by young blind infants) and discourage children’s propensities for eating large quantities of sugar.

Applying Evolutionary Psychology to the Study of Childhood Having now explained some of the misconceptions of what evolutionary psychology can offer childhood, the final section offers two examples of how evolutionary psychology can be applied to studying childhood: (1) bullying and (2) attachment. Bullying is a form of aggression that is defined as a power imbalance where a stronger individual repeatedly and intentionally causes harm to a weaker individual. Bullying is traditionally thought of as a maladaptive behavior that results from negative environmental factors corrupting a child’s behavior. However, research has since found that bullying usually has only a weak correlation to many environmental variables such as socioeconomic status, income inequality, parenting, and school culture. Furthermore, bullying is ubiquitous across modern cultures and historical records. This leads us to ask why bullying has persisted if it is solely the result of negative environments. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that perhaps bullying is not maladaptive.

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Perhaps it is influenced by heritable factors because it offers benefits to its practitioners that have allowed it to persist across time and cultures. Indeed, bullying (but not victimization) is associated with very few costs and numerous benefits, including increased somatic resources (e.g., material resources), increased access to sexual partners, and increased social resources (i.e., dominance and status). Furthermore, bullying is in fact both highly heritable and related to traits believed to have genetic components (e.g., temperament or personality). This suggests that this negative aspect of modern childhood may be, at least in part, due to a genetic adaptation that was advantageous in past environmental situations where bullying, perhaps even more so than today, significantly increased an individual’s likelihood of not only surviving, but also producing viable offspring. This view of bullying (and bullies) suggests that children have some agency over their actions, that they are not simply at the mercy of their environment, and that one cannot consider childhood as a monolithic cultural experience but rather a combination of broader factors mixed with individual contexts, attributes, and attributions. This view also helps shape intervention efforts as it allows us to consider “what’s in it for the child who bullies?” rather than simply asking “what’s wrong with that child?” Evolutionary theory can also shed light on positive aspects of behavior, such as John Bowlby’s suggestion that in order to survive, early childhood typically involves a strong motivation for securing parental care and love. Researchers have found that this bonding experience, called attachment, is present across cultures, develops in a predictable sequence, and reliably predicts similar behaviors during early childhood. It offers a reason for why simple learning theories fail to predict children’s growing independence. Classic behavioral psychologists logically reasoned that if you want to have a child grow up to become a secure, independent adult, one should treat them as if they were a secure, independent adult. It is now generally believed that this advice operates strongly against children’s innate (and socially reinforced) desires to be close to parents or caregivers, that by promoting social dependence, one can help encourage personal independence. Similar to bullying, one can also recognize that a child who fails to develop

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Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

an attachment to an abusive caregiver is not simply failing a life stage, they are adapting themselves to function in a social context that is largely devoid of love and security by closing themselves off from other people. Tragically, examples from prison camps and impoverished refugee camps suggest that such victims can indeed develop selfish behaviors that encourage their personal survival at the expense of prosocial behaviors. Again, this is not to say that such behaviors are irreversible or morally good, but rather to highlight that they reflect childhood as a period of personal agency in which children adaptively attempt to maximize their psychological wellbeing and growth. In summary, over the past several decades, evolutionary theory has increasingly been applied to the study of children’s psychology. Evolutionary theory recognizes and reinforces the important potential influence of social, cultural, political, historical, economic, and geographic factors on childhood. It does so by examining how they interact with the biological realities of childhood and individual children to produce children’s thoughts and behaviors. It is known that even decades of learning and teaching will not allow a chimpanzee, parrot, or dolphin to use language as easily as an average 4-year-old human can because they lack the biological capacity to do so. Children may be born to learn, but what they learn, how they learn it, and why they learn it may be critically informed by evolutionary theory. Far from deterministic, evolutionary developmental psychology highlights how a range of adaptations can influence individual child development in concert with a host of environmental factors (e.g., modern epigenetics). This entry encourages scholars who study the sociocultural aspects of childhood to consider how their vital social and cultural factors may interface with children’s biological adaptations to produce human childhood. Heather Jaksic and Anthony A. Volk See also Bowlby, John; Bullying; Developmental Psychology; History of Childhood

Further Readings Bjorklund, D. F., & Ellis, B. J. (2014). Children, childhood, and development in evolutionary perspective. Developmental Review, 34(3), 225–264. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2014.05.005 Del Giudice, M. (2014). Middle childhood: An evolutionary-developmental synthesis. Child Development Perspectives, 8(4), 193–200. doi:10.1111/cdep.12084 Denno, D. W. (1994). Gender, crime, and the criminal law defenses. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 85, 80–180. doi:10.2307/1144115 Ellis, B. J., Del Giudice, M., Dishion, T. J., Figueredo, A. J., Gray, P., Griskevicius, V., . . . Wilson, D. S. (2012). The evolutionary basis of risky adolescent behavior: Implications for science, policy, and practice. Developmental Psychology, 48(3), 598. doi:10.1037/ a0026220 Ferguson, C. J. (2010). Genetic contributions to antisocial personality and behavior: A meta-analytic review from an evolutionary perspective. The Journal of Social Psychology, 150(2), 160–180. doi:10.1080/00224540903366503 Geary, D. C., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2000). Evolutionary developmental psychology. Child Development, 71(1), 57–65. Maestripieri, D., & Roney, J. R. (2006). Evolutionary developmental psychology: Contributions from comparative research with nonhuman primates. Developmental Review, 26(2), 120–137. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2006.02.006 Volk, A. (2011). The evolution of childhood. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 4(3), 470–494. Volk, A. A., & Atkinson, J. A. (2013). Infant and child death in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(3), 182–192. doi:10.1016/j .evolhumbehav.2012.11.007 Volk, A. A., Camilleri, J. A., Dane, A. V., & Marini, Z. A. (2012). Is adolescent bullying an evolutionary adaptation? Aggressive Behavior, 38(3), 222–238. doi:10.1002/ab.21418 Wilson, D. S., Dietrich, E., & Clark, A. B. (2003). On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology. Biology and Philosophy, 18(5), 669–681. doi:10.1023/a:1026380825208

F Fairy Tales Tradition

in the

Origins and Interpretations

Western

Received wisdom says that fairy tales developed among the common folk at some unspecified time in history; the stories were oral in nature told by raconteurs wherever people gathered. Thus, they were revised regularly in order to appeal to a particular audience at a particular telling. Some innovations were repeated; other aspects of tales fell away over time. The audience would have been a mixture of adults and children. Alongside this received history are other notable ideas concerning fairy tales’ origins. They have been theorized to be myths in miniature—a reduced version of mythology that features humankind rather than gods. Perhaps this is most evident in the connections between Beauty and the Beast and the myth Cupid and Psyche. Jungian Marie-Louise von Franz explores the idea that similar concerns and concepts will appear in fairy tales regardless of culture or place of origin in her 1970 publication, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales. In the 2009 Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, Jack Zipes theorizes that fairy tales are cultural memes (culturally replicated units of information). A relatively recent controversy about the origins of fairy tales has arisen with the publication of Ruth Bottigheimer’s Fairy Tales: A New History. Bottigheimer argues that fairy tales have always been a literary phenomenon that began during the Italian Renaissance with the authors Giovan Francesco Straparola’s The Pleasant Nights (1550/53) and Giambattista Basile’s The Story of Stories (1634–36). While the protagonists

In common use, a fairy tale is any short tale usually thought to have its origin in the folk of a historical time; used this way, the category may include many different genres like folk tales, animal tales, and legends. A narrower definition of fairy tale is a short work set in a world where magic and the supernatural go without comment. The story will often have transformational moments, helper, and archetypical characters, and, perhaps most importantly to the modern mind, a Happily Ever After. This last characteristic gives rise to fairy-tale being used as an adjective to describe a particularly happy but unlikely event. Oddly, fairy tales need not contain fairies and might more usefully be called wonder tales. The phrase fairy tale comes from a translation of Madame D’Aulnoy’s Contes de fées, which was published in 1697. Literary fairy tales (Kunstmärchen), those written to echo older tales, began in earnest at the same time. Today, there are two separate strains of fairy tales available: one for child audiences and one for adults. First, the entry examines the origins of and methods for interpreting western fairy tales and explores how and why fairy tales came to be associated with childhood and the controversies that arise from this association. Second, this entry reviews contemporary developments and issues related to fairy tales in a Western context. 741

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Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition

may be youthful, both collections feature adult characters telling stories that feature overt scatological humor and sexuality to other adults. Children in these collections are commodities—to be bought, sold, desired, and/or destroyed. The interpretation of fairy tales is primarily focused on how fairy tales interact with a reader’s psyche and what ideological work a tale does. The approaches can be roughly grouped into two categories—those that focus on the individual and those that focus on the social. Fairy tales are thought to be imbued with folk wisdom that has remained relevant to audiences down through the years. At the narrowest, this means tales become cautionary tales with specific lessons to be learned by the audience—for instance, “Little Red Riding Hood” becomes a cautionary story about listening to a parent’s instructions. This tradition is not new; Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 The Beauty and the Beast features very clear statements about what sorts of characteristics are desirable in both a husband and a young woman. In his 1939 lecture, Andrew Lang argues that fairy tales provide the reader a way to view their world through the lens of a different world provided by the tale. He calls this recovery. He also suggests that fairy tales can offer an individual moral and/or emotional consolation. Bruno Bettelheim published The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales in 1975. A devotee of Freudian theory, he argues that fairy tales provide a child the means to work through developmental issues. Each story carries messages to the various levels of the mind and suggests positive outcomes for their current dilemma. Much like Freud, Bettelheim’s readings are not now thought to be correct in particulars (for instance, Cinderella’s shoe equating to a vagina), and they can be reductionist, moralistic, repressive, and sexist and show no knowledge of the history or variations of the tales he chose. Zipes criticizes Bettelheim’s method in “On the Use and Abuse of Fairy Tales With Children: Bruno Bettelheim’s Moralistic Magic Wand.” However, many others have gone on to connect fairy tales to an individual’s psychology, such as Sheldon Cashdan’s The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives. Jungian theorists, most notably von Franz, see fairy tales as representing the collective psyche

of humankind, and their archetypical nature can be used to provide psychological insight for the individual. This approach can be seen in collections like Mirror, Mirror: Forty Folktales for Mothers and Daughters to Share (Jane Yolen and Heidi E.Y. Stemple) and Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (Clarissa Pinkola Estés). Interestingly, J. R. R. Tolkien falls into both the individual and social categories. He wrestles with the concept of audience—specifically with the idea that fairy tales are only for children. He suggests that fairy tales have become associated with childhood as furniture might be consigned to a nursery when it is no longer thought fit for the drawing room. As a culture, there is an unwillingness to give up fairy tales but also an unwillingness to accept them as appropriate for the contemporary, worldly adult. Zipes, the most prolific fairy tale scholar of the 20th century, views fairy tales as providing cultural information to their audience, perhaps giving voice to a utopian spirit, perhaps relaying more subversive messages about those in power and how they can be overcome. Each new version of a story demonstrates something about the culture that produced it. Other scholars, such as Kay Stone and Marina Warner, have focused particularly on the gendered nature of fairy tales both in historical and contemporary versions. Under this theory, stories contain folk wisdom and were a method for older women to secretly communicate with younger women, especially regarding men and marriage. Marina Warner explores the feminine nature and messages of canonical stories. She believes the fairy tales that were most commonly reproduced were those that replicated an ideology of a persecuting older female and feminine goodness equating to passivity, in other words, those that pleased the male editors and collectors. What both of these interpretive types have in common is that they suppose stories have some instructional value—either covert or overt; however, there are other ways to look at fairy tales, including the formalist or structuralist approach typified by Vladmir Propp’s The Morphology of the Folk Tale and cross-cultural analysis. Finally, one can simply look at the tales as pieces of art and examine them from a purely aesthetic or ­literary point of view.

Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition

Association With Childhood In western literary tradition, fairy tales have been associated with childhood at least since Charles Perrault’s 1697 publication of Stories of Times Past With Morals, subtitled Tales of Mother Goose. Charles Perrault was a member of the salon culture which also featured aristocratic, educated women gathering together to amuse one another with contes de fées (or tales of the fairies) at the court of Louis XIV. Other writers included Mme d’Aulnoy, Mme de Murat, and Mme d’Auneuil. The book’s putative author was Perrault’s son, Pierre, although children were not the intended audience and did not become the primary consumers of fairy tales until the first part of the 19th century. The stories supposedly originated with a peasant teller, Mother Goose. There is and never was such a person; the narrative device provides authenticity for the tales. Each tale was followed by a moral that supposedly told the reader what they should take from the tale, although they were often arch and/or disingenuous and clearly aimed at a worldly adult audience. The collection contains recognizable titles and characters such Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty that later authors made more child-friendly. The earliest edition of the Grimm brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales (1812–15) was a scholarly work with an ideological goal of unearthing a German national character. In 1812, there were 86 stories; 70 more had been added by 1815. Each included footnotes and a scholarly preface. The earliest edition contained diverse stories from multiple regions that made some effort to re-create the voice of the teller. Many of the tales were spare and direct. Almost immediately, the brothers began to edit the tales, altering, combining, and deleting. In 1825, the Kleine Ausgabe was issued, containing just 50 tales and designed for the children of the bourgeois family. Wilhelm Grimm had a heavier hand in editing, making several notable changes explicitly for a child audience: Biological mothers were changed to stepmothers, Christian references and descriptive passages were added, dialect and references to sexuality were removed, and retributive violence was increased. The final edition of Children’s and Household Tales appeared in 1857; it was the sixth edition of the book and contained 210 stories.

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The Grimm brothers inspired other collectors to work on national collections in order to preserve some idealized past of a people and/or to advance nationalistic causes. Other national collectors included Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (Norwegian Folk Tales, 1845); ­Alexander Afanasev (Russian Fairy Tales, 1855– 1863); and Joseph Jacobs (English Fairy Tales, 1890). National identity was so tied to the fairy tale that Frank L. Baum created his first Oz book in 1900 as a fairy tale for a new nation. The academic study of Folklore developed as an international scholarly field in the mid- to late 19th century. The Finn Antti Aarne created a massive index of plots and motifs in 1910 that Stith Thompson, an American, revised and expanded in 1928. This index organizes tale types by AT number. It was updated in 2004 by Hans-Jörg Uther, a German, as The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, so tales now have an ATU number. Additionally, some of the earliest literary fairy tales (Kunstmärchen) were written in the 19th century; Hans Christian Andersen, for example, published primarily in the 1830s and 1840s. Many of his stories like The Little Mermaid so successfully echo older, traditional tales that they are believed to be among them. Other notable authors include the German Romantic writers Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffman; Robert Southey authored the first version of Goldilocks, called The Story of the Three Bears and featuring an old woman as protagonist; and Oscar Wilde, whose fairy tales lack the cynicism and ­superciliousness that is common to his work for adults. While some of these authors saw themselves as writing for all audiences, others were self-­consciously writing stories for children. Many thinkers and cultural commentators saw fairy tales as a cultural legacy and important to the development of children, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Ruskin, and Charles Dickens, who once declared he would have known perfect happiness if only he could have married Little Red Riding Hood. Many believed in the theory of Recapitulation which states that every child goes through the same stages of development that cultures do, evolving from animalistic to magical thinking to enlightened, civilized, and modern.

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Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition

By the late 19th century, fairy tales were firmly children’s fare. Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang began publishing his colored Fairy Tale books in 1889 with The Blue Fairy Book. The series ended in 1910 with The Lilac Fairy Book. There are 13 of these colored collections. They exhibit the more modern use of Fairy Tale in that they contain a variety of stories, both ancient and modern. Additionally, they featured illustrations. Illustrations in books had long been thought to be attractive to child readers and changes in technology made them less expensive to produce, thus increasingly common. George Cruickshank, Edward Burne-Jones, and Gustav Dore are among the most notable 19th-century illustrators. Artists from the first few decades of the 20th century include Walter Crane, Maxfield Parrish, Kay Nielsen, and Arthur Rackham. Fairy Tale artwork continues to be important to this day with some artists, like K.Y. Craft, producing multiple, l­ avishly illustrated picture books and others producing texts that feature the artist’s name prior even to the title of the story. In the 19th century, the fairy tale canon developed. A canon is the commonly acknowledged stories that define the genre in most minds. Many of today’s best known tales feature the Innocent Persecuted Heroine (e.g., Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty). Other sorts of stories fell out of favor, particularly those featuring tricksters and active female protagonists. Other stories, such as Bluebeard, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber ­Bridegroom, all of which feature a murderous husband, stopped appearing in collections for children. Additionally, explicit morals were added to many tales and violence lessened to make the stories suitable for the changing beliefs about childhood. Setting aside those who would eliminate all fantasy and magic in materials for children on the presumption that these perpetuate occult belief, for the most part, criticisms arise because fairy tales were created at a time when standards and morals were different, but they continue to legitimize ideas that are no longer in synch with contemporary ideas about childhood. The first complaint is that the older stories not only contain a great deal of violence but actually celebrate it. In Roots of German Nationalism, Louis Snyder suggests fairy tales helped to shape national character

and allowed the rise of the Nazi party. In her book, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar makes a study of how the violence is presented and used in older versions of the stories. A second common complaint is that many stories reward poor behavior; for instance, the Brave Little Tailor and the Miller’s Son aided by Puss in Boots both get to marry princesses after they have deceived Kings. This complaint is common to much of children’s literature. Generally, adults don’t like to see themselves (or their fairy tale stand-ins, giants and royalty) defeated and/or made to look ridiculous. Finally, another common complaint about traditional stories is that they replicate outdated ideas concerning gender and behavior. Females are passive and their primary identifying characteristics are their goodness and beauty, while male characters are active. Those who love and/or study fairy tales and childhood have addressed these problems in a number of ways. Following a particular interpretive school, an author might justify something potentially objectionable by pointing out its psychological value. For instance, the Cinderella story has a greater sense of justice if the wicked stepsisters are punished as they are in the Grimm version. Similarly, some contemporary tale-tellers rely on the sophistication of modern children and have reintroduced older versions of a story to reconcile oddities in the tale. Rapunzel in early versions found herself pregnant from the Prince’s visits, but this was eliminated, so some of the story’s logic was lost. The idea behind these retellings is that there is value in reproducing these traditional tales, even with potentially problematic bits, as modern children are sophisticated and capable of critical thinking. There has also been a move toward reclamation—that is, unearthing and publishing old tales that have not been part of the canon. For instance, Tatterhood and Other Tales, edited by Ethel Johnston Phelps, is a 1978 collection of traditional stories that feature active and courageous girl characters. There also exist a significant number of tale revisions that eliminate problematic ideas or that take older tales as a starting place to create new, postmodern tales. In the 1987 novel Prince Cinders by Babette Cole, the hero is skinny and mocked by his two macho, hairy brothers, but his wish to become like them goes awry and the princess finds his new version

Family

monstrous and falls in love with the original. The brothers are punished by being transformed into fairies who do all the housework. Ella, from the 1997 novel Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, is a spunky heroine whose obedience and passivity are explained by a fairy’s curse—one she spends all her time trying to break. Finally, artists, both writers and filmmakers, create new literary fairy tales, like the film Brave (2012).

Fairy Tales in the Contemporary World Old versions of a story exist side by side with newer ones, and the contemporary world of fairy tales for children exists side by side with one for adults. In some ways, this has always been the case as the 19th century featured fairy tale ballets, operas, and paintings. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have several anthologies of fairy tales for adult audiences; there are stand-alone novels and collections of old stories themed for adults that focus on the sexuality or violence (e.g., Grimm’s Grimmest—1997—edited by Maria Tatar). There are even films for adult audiences that turn on fairy tale themes like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The world of fairy tales for children is even more flourishing. There are texts for all ages and preferences, including picture books for early readers, board books for pre-readers (Les Petits Fairy Tales series), and middle grade and young adult novels. Of course, film is probably the primary conveyer of fairy tales, particularly the Disney Company. Zipes tackles the subject of Disney  movies in more than one of his books. While the way a film presents the story is different than it would if the story was read or heard from a teller (another field that is having a resurgence), all concepts concerning the story as a fairy tale remain the same regardless of medium. Despite their association with a nostalgic past (or maybe because of it), fairy tales continue to be relevant to contemporary childhood and can be found everywhere from character education curriculum to juice boxes. Rhonda Brock-Servais See also Critical Children’s Literature Studies; Disney; Folklore, Children’s; Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm); History of Childhood; Narratives, Children’s

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Further Readings Bacchilega, C. (1997). Postmodern fairy tales: Gender and narrative strategies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. doi:10.9783/9780812200638 Bettelheim, B. (1976). The uses of enchantment. New York, NY: Vintage. Bottigheimer, R. (2009). Fairy tales: A new history. Albany: State University Press of New York. doi:10.1353/mon.0.0237 Lüthi, M. (1976). Once upon a time: On the nature of fairy tales. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Propp, V. (1973). Morphology of the folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stone, K. (2008). Someday your witch will come. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Tatar, M. (1992). Off with their heads! Fairy tales and the culture of childhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tatar, M. (2002). The annotated classic fairy tales. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Tolkien, J. R. R. (2014). On faerie stories. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Warner, M. (1996). From the beast to the blonde: On fairy tales and their tellers. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. doi:10.1525/jung.1.1996.15.3.27 Zipes, J. (1979). Breaking the magic spell: Radical theories of folk and fairy tales. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. doi:10.2307/1499668 Zipes, J. (1997). Happily ever after: Fairy tales, children, and the culture industry. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203949153

Family The family is a historically and geographically diverse social institution which, in principle, designates a social group of people connected by blood, marriage, or adoption. This group of people is characterised by having a common residence, cooperating economically, and overseeing the reproduction and care of its descendants. In spite of the fact that there is no academic consensus on the universal nature of the family, different ­disciplines—from anthropology to history, by way of sociology, psychology, and demography—have accounted for its importance, stating that the family is the basic social institution or element which forms the backbone of social organisation.

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Family

George Peter Murdock pointed out that the family carries out certain functions which no other social institution does: the regulation and control of sexuality and procreation, socialisation, and economic cooperation. Nevertheless, these vary significantly through time and amongst cultures and, for example, it is difficult to ­maintain that in contemporary Western societies families possess exclusivity in these areas. Thus, insofar as socialisation is concerned, the role of educational institutions, the media, and social networks has grown. Still, the family continues to be a central element in the psychosocial development of girls and boys. Furthermore, the study of the family offers important clues to understanding the relationship between the public and the private, the institutional and the personal as well as significant information on everyday life and the social reality. This entry first defines family and then discusses types of families, marriage versus blood relations, how definitions of family have changed over time, and the role of families in the socialisation and education of children.

Definition There is no consensus when it comes to defining what the family is. One way of addressing any explanation is to refer to the functions that it carries out. However, as has been pointed out, these vary substantially through time and space as well as in regards to different analytical categories, for example, social class or the particular moment in the life cycle. Likewise, the different disciplines that have taken on the task of studying the family have emphasised different aspects. Western empirical analyses are often based on the understanding that a family is made up of those people who live together in a home. One of the reasons underlying this choice is that homes are easy analytical units to define and delimit, and moreover, there is a huge amount of information about them. Such definitions privilege a statistical and quantifiable perspective, excluding from the analysis family and/or social networks which are very important, for example, when it comes to organising childcare. It is a question, therefore, of an excessively reductionist interpretation and, following the previous example,

would imply understanding the family relationships of girls and boys as limited to those they maintain with their parents or other people who live in the same home. Moreover, on too many occasions, a consequence of this is considering the family as a homogenous unit, without turning to the existing inequalities amongst its members. Considering it as a group with common interests has been ­questioned widely from feminism, amongst other positions. These critical positions have emphasised that people with different activities and interests, which are often conflicting, come together within families. For instance, in family statistics, children are not the unit of observation in the production of statistics, something which produces omissions and distortions. From a very different field, international law, the United Nations pointed out in 1994 that the family is the basic unit of society and that, therefore, it deserves protection and assistance. They add that such an approach should encompass and bear in mind the needs of all types of families. This definition includes the idea that the family is a social institution which takes on very diverse forms.

Classification and Types Different classifications have been derived from this diversity of family forms. Here, three taxonomies are presented which have been used widely: (1) according to rules of residency, (2) number of parties involved, and (3) the distribution of power. All of these are based on the idea of Claude LéviStrauss that the family originates in marriage; currently, there would have to be an extensive ­ classification of consensual unions. •• Taxonomy 1: According to the rules of residency, families can be patrilocal, matrilocal, or neolocal. When newlyweds are going to reside with the husband’s parents, one speaks in terms of patrilocal families; when they do so with those of the wife, matrilocal; and in the event that they move to an independent residence, they are termed ‘neolocal’. •• Taxonomy 2: According to the number of parties or people who make up a union, families

Family

can be monogamous or polygamous. The former case refers to marriages or unions made up of two people (traditionally, a woman and a man; currently, of any sex) and the latter to unions made up of more than two people. Moreover, within polygamy, one distinguishes between polygyny (one man and several women) and polyandry (one woman and several men). •• Taxonomy 3: According to the power relations between spouses, families are termed ‘patriarchal’, ‘matriarchal’, or ‘equal’. The first of these would be those in which for the most part the husband dominates, while in the second, the wife would hold greater levels of power, and in the last such power would be shared between both, in a more or less equal manner. Evidently, the nature of power relations does not just affect the spouses, but it is also applicable to the remaining members of the family.

Whatever the case, and insofar as Western societies are concerned, these types of classifications are being abandoned. Now, the use of family typologies based on their structures is more common. Once more, there is no single argument, but most of the existing ones incorporate the idea of the nuclear family. This idea rests on a modern conception of the family limited to narrower kinship links, paternal/maternal and filial relationships. According to Eurostat—the statistical office of the European Union—only people who reside in nuclei can be considered families. However, other European statistics institutes include amongst families one-person and composite homes. The former are those in which one single person resides and the latter are made up of two or more people, who may or may not be related. As explained in the section concerning new family models, both forms of coexistence are increasingly common in Europe. Amongst nuclear families, as well as those already cited (couples with or without offspring and monoparental ones), there are extended and polynuclear families. The former refer to a family nucleus of any type with whom live one or several relations. As regards the latter, they are those made up of two or more family nuclei. Lastly, one should point out that any kind of classification is a construct, a fiction that,

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nonetheless, contributes to defining what a family is and what it is not. In this sense, on occasion ways of living together and meeting basic needs do not fit established definitions; they do not coincide with social imagining of the family.

Married Couples and Blood Relations The married couple is one of the bases around which families have been organised historically. This is a very old institution, which consecrates the union between two people and establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as relations between what were previously two distinct families. This is regulated through legal, customary, moral, and/or religious norms and also sanctioned through community, institutional, and/ or religious rituals. In some countries, the possibility of contracting marriage between people of the same sex has been introduced. Currently, marriage is understood in many cultures as a union stemming from the love between two people, an individual choice. However, its historical function was to oversee broader interests, both of the direct families and communities. The organisation of marriage between two young people was, frequently, arranged by parents who, through these unions, defined collaborative or commercial links between different nuclei or towns. There are numerous and diverse norms that govern marriage in different cultures and at different historical moments, but the incest prohibition is always present. Meanwhile, as has been mentioned, in many cultures, marriage is the space in which people, especially women, have to limit their sexuality. Moreover, in much of the West and still into the 20th century, on marrying women went from being under the guardianship of their parents (or original families) to those of their husbands. Insofar as offspring are concerned, until they ­ reach the age of majority they are considered to be under the guardianship and responsibility of their parents.

Changes in Families The changes that have taken place in Western family structures since 1950 have been interpreted in contradictory ways. What for some sociologists and

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Family

historians of the family implied a crisis insofar as it involved a basic institution of society, for others was a demonstration of the capacity of the family institution to be flexible, resistant, and adaptable. Whatever the case, the idea of a crisis of the family is nothing new; it was a recurring theme through the 19th century. In effect, it is argued that industrialisation had destructive effects on families, including, amongst other things, greater uprooting, abandonment, illegitimacy, and delinquency. As opposed to this, the bourgeoisie argued for a (nuclear) family model which functioned as a moralising agent for the proletariat, in which women were presented as the ‘angel in the house’. Later, sociology of the family presented the nuclear family as the family model which best adapted to industrial society, given that it was the only such model that did not challenge the requirements of the economy. In this sense, Talcott Parsons defends the notion that the sexual division of labour is one of the fundamental elements in the family, as it guarantees marital stability and a suitable emotional development of children. The defence of the nuclear family as an ideal model was central in the social sciences up to the 1960s, a time in which discussion shifted to the crisis of the family. As has already been pointed out, functionalist positions with regards to the family, that is, understanding the family as a unit at the heart of which there is no conflict of interests, have been widely criticised. Whatever the case, the family as a basic social institution appears to still be quite healthy; it has overcome the impact of revolutionary economic transformations and has shown itself to be an institution with a great capacity for adaptation and adjustment. In effect, during the years of crisis in the 21st century, once again families have functioned as a social cushion, softening the effects of the shrinking welfare state in a context of cuts and austerity. In this context, many social responsibilities have been delegated to families, which are considered an important source of social capital. However, as Rosalind Edwards points out, the classical definitions of social capital have ignored power relations at the heart of families and communities, thereby appearing blind to gender dynamics. This critique could be extended to the organisation of care both of girls and boys and the elderly, an activity that principally falls to women.

Second Demographic Transition and New Family Models A great deal of the changes that took place in the second half of the 20th century were described and explained through the concept of the second demographic transition, suggested in 1988 by Dirk van de Kaa and Ron Lesthaeghe. According to these authors, a series of changes in family formation processes have taken place in Europe, transformations which happened in three phases. 1. Phase 1: The divorce rate increased and, consequently, the length of marriages decreased. The Baby Boom (growing birth rate) ended, fertility rates amongst all ages decreased, and the falling marriage age was halted. 2. Phase 2: It was characterised by increasing premarital cohabitation starting in the Nordic countries and spreading to the rest of Europe, by a growing fertility rate outside of marriage and a falling fertility rate in general. This latter tendency continued in countries in which it had started earlier and but also started in Mediterranean countries. 3. Phase 3: Divorce rates levelled off, premarital cohabitation and living apart together (i.e., couples who share a life project but not a home) increased, while the fertility rate began to increase amongst women over 30 years.

This process was related closely to sociocultural changes and to individualisation, as well as to growing life expectancy. Insofar as relationships between members of couples were concerned, there was talk of a transition between models: from the complementary couple to the equal couple. Clearly, these changes also affected the rest of the family members and, in principle, family relationships became more democratic. Now in the 21st century, special attention is being paid to questions such as monopaternity and reconstructed families, non-conjugal and non-­ conventional relationship forms (besides living apart together, the idea of families by choice and affinity groups emerged as well as social institutions which took over the functions of traditional families and transnational families), homoparental and coparental families, and the impact of new reproductive technologies on family configurations.

Family Photography

Obviously, these changes impact children’s family life. On the one hand, the number of children from single mother families is growing and, considering that women tend to earn less than men do, the probability of children living under the poverty line is rising. On the other hand, the proportion of children commuting between two homes is increasing.

The Family as an Agent of Socialisation and Education It has already been pointed out that one of the historical functions of the family was to educate its offspring. In effect, the family was for a long time the space in which primary socialisation was managed, and in many parts of the world, it continues to be one of the principal agents in doing so. In many cultures, mothers have been in charge of child-rearing and responsible for transmitting cultural and social values, that is, for guaranteeing the success of the socialisation process. From industrialisation onwards, educational institutions were created that were open to increasingly broader sections of the population. From that time on, schools have acquired a progressively more important role in childhood education, although, on many occasions, moral education remains within the power of the family. In this sense, one of the current debates is that regarding the educational capacity of families. In fact, people do not normally receive any specific training that prepares them to develop educational abilities as parents. Many voices argue for the need to shepherd families in their educative duty in order to guarantee their capacity as parents. Finally, it has already been some years since educationalists began insisting on the importance of collaboration amongst families, formal educational institutions, and even communities. However, this relationship is not always easy, ­ with one of the main problems being which of the two areas, the institutional or the familial, has ­decision-making power over each of the components making up educational content. Marta Luxán Serrano and Barbara Biglia See also Early Marriage; Extended Family; Kinship; Mothers/Motherhood; Parenthood; Socialization

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Further Readings Cheal, D. (1997). Family and the state of theory. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Cheal, D. (2003). Family: Critical concepts in sociology. London, UK: Routledge. David, M. (1980). The state, the family and education. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan. Edwars, R. (2004). Present and absent in troubling ways: Families and social capital debates. The Sociological Review, 52(1), 1–21. doi:10.1111/j.1467-954x .2004.00439.x Hakim, C. (2003). Models of the family in modern societies. Oxford, UK: Ashgate. Jensen, A. M., & McKee, L. (2003). Children and the changing family: Between transformation and negotiation. London, UK: Routledge. Martin, S. (1986). Historical anthropology of the family. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. White, J. M., Martin, T. F., & Adamson, K. (2019). Family theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Family Photography This entry discusses the sociocultural and political implications of family photographs, particularly in terms of their contributions to the constructions of children and childhoods. Rather than centering the prototypical White, middle-class families featured in Western and European photographs across history, this essay aims to center the experiences and images of photographers, families, and children from marginalized communities. To highlight the shifting subjectivities of children and of families, the entry concludes with a discussion of children’s renditions of family photos. As Pierre Bourdieu noted in his 1965 book Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, the “family photograph is a ritual of the domestic cult in which the family is both subject and object” (p. 19), and perhaps no one is more the object and subject than the child within family photos. Operating at the intersection of the private (personal memories, family events, and everyday life) and the public (histories of social and cultural formation), family photography (also referred to as domestic photography) provides dynamic insights into childhoods constructed by adults. Childhoods are produced through family photographs taken

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Family Photography

and cared for by caregivers, and just as families are shaped by larger sociopolitical forces and state power, pictures of families are influenced by contemporary conventions of photography and public discourses around class, race, gender, ability, citizenship, and so on. Family photographs reflect trends such as the polished, professional photos that gained popularity at the turn of the 21st century and for which some middle-class American families pay to have taken in their sparkling, curated homes and well-kept backyards and in public spaces like parks or iconic places. In these kinds of images, members of the family often wear matching or complementary clothing, perform a posed spontaneity, and project a normative sort of middle-class joy into the future. In traditional family photos like these, the child is the centerpiece, either as the object that provokes that joy or as the gendered, able-bodied subject, as an example. Girls may be depicted in beautiful dresses; boys in bountiful action. These images situate families within social and cultural histories and reflect photographic conventions of class, gender, race, and religion. Family photographs, beyond objects, are cultural practices in and of themselves. The cultural critic and novelist Susan Sontag claimed that it hardly mattered what families photographed for their domestic albums as long as there existed pictures to locate the family unit in space and time. While this may be the case, it does seem to matter that pictures transmit the proper affects. Frequently staged and heavily edited, mainstream domestic pictures tend to present families as coherent, leaving their more dysfunctional or challenging moments out of the frame. Moments in which these pictures are produced also operate within relations of power in which adults have traditionally had power to construct children’s images in and through photographs. Parents encourage, or coerce, particular forms of engagement from children with the camera as they direct children to “smile for the camera” or tease them for not doing so. At times, the camera is in constant operation, in the hands of adults who are in pursuit of the right image that adds to the perfectly curated life. This staging of images lends power to the photo to exemplify the ideal family, whether it be the family that is quite ordinary or the one that proudly asserts its extraordinariness.

This idealized image is unrelenting, in spite of the visibility of the staging, production, and performance of the family. While we are all well aware of the high production value (via high-quality cameras and photo editing equipment and skills) of particular photos, it is the affective force, paired with the normalizing function, of images that nonetheless works to produce the aesthetics of the family. At the heart of this ideal is the child who completes the notion of a family. The absence of photographs of young children in a family can be read as parental negligence to engage in the typical cultural practices of domesticity and therefore a departure from the sentimental conventions of domestic photography. Domestic photographs have been used to examine the multiple dimensions of family spaces, and feminist geographers have taken interest in sentimentalized versions of the family photo to understand the relationships among motherhood, familial images, and domesticity. Gillian Rose, a sociologist studying family photographs since the early 21st century, brought to light the family photo as a point of pride for the mothers who appear in her work on these vernacular kinds of images. The pictures taken by the maternal figures in the households were referential, pointing to which people were present and their positions within the family. Family photos mark membership, as well as periods of stability and the inverse, turmoil. Those missing from images across particular time frames can indicate familial unrest, and those frequently photographed may hold central positions within the family. On that note, sociologists of childhood can look to family photo albums to examine the positions children hold within their familial networks and thus to illustrate the contours of childhood. In the case of children, family photos mark growth and development. They are irrefutable and referential markers of aging, much like the makeshift height charts that are inscribed on walls at home. So importantly, the pictures mark the development of children, as in the case of photographs of firsts outlined by Rose: first baths, visitors, outings, smiles, solid food, tooth, shoes, swim, flight, and so forth. These firsts, additionally, are nearly always in relation to the mother figure. The pictures are scientific inscriptions of development and simultaneously inscribe the mother and her

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work by stretching out domestic space so that any viewers looking at the images are brought into relation with the family.

The Politics of Family Photographs Family photos are more than a private matter. They have critical and ideological significance and, therefore, have been studied across multiple fields including cultural studies, history, education, and public health. Not only have photographs had a role in the construction of idealized versions of families, but these renditions have also been firmly tied to a particular type of family. The literature on family photographs is overwhelmingly focused on images of heteronormative, ­middle-class, White families. Shawn Michelle Smith, in theorizing the family photograph album as a site where cultural identities are contested and negotiated, points out a historical aspect of family albums not to be overlooked: These ancestral relics served as evidentiary documentation during the height of the eugenics movement in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Family albums were part of a social institution in and through which heredity was tracked and charted. Inevitably, the family unit was a focal point around which discourses of race and ability were produced. Children, therefore, were inscribed within desired orders. Historian and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted, for example, that eugenicist Henry Goddard doctored photographs of the Kallikaks, a family Goddard described as feeble-minded. Gould’s claims that Goddard retouched images in order to create more threatening looks from the Kallikak children have been refuted by others, but the fact remains that these family photos were deployed in the interest of the eugenics movement. Similarly, Smith draws out baby pictures, in particular, as the medium through which middle-class White familial networks would be normalized and institutionalized. The family, as a public-facing social unit, would be held to the standards of the kinds of European, middle-class, abled families that were insistently targeted for sales by the Eastman Kodak Company (founded in 1888). That said, contemporary photographers and scholars have offered disruptions to the prevailing myths and ideologies reflected in stereotyped ­family photographs. Domestic pictures potentially

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deconstruct and respond to hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity within our shared social order. Photographers like Sally Mann, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, Carrie Mae Weems, Dorothea Lange, Mary Berridge, and Albert Chong, among others, have played with the genre to re-present families in their projects. Mann’s images of her daughters posing in ways that trouble traditional notions of childhood, Tsinhnahjinnie’s retoolings of historical indigenous portraits, Weems’s exploration of ­domesticity through the Kitchen Table series and archetype of a Black mother, Lange’s focus on migrant families and Japanese internment communities, Berridge’s depictions of the lives of autistic individuals and HIV-positive mothers, and Chong’s integration of portraits with government documents; all ostensibly rework the otherwise banal archives of family photographs. Meanwhile, scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Tina Campt, Gary Okihiro, Deborah Willis, and the Family Camera Network have exhibited and/or studied family photos of minoritized communities in order to highlight ­ photographs’ positions as sites of resistance and refusals of White supremacy. These are images simultaneously of cultural formation and of desired ­futurities: both how we came to be and how we want to be seen. Tina Campt’s Image Matters, in its examination of 20th-century Black European subjects through family photographs, emphasizes African Americans’ negotiations of cultural identity and feelings of belonging to the state. Du Bois’s 1900 exhibit in the American Negro Exhibit offered intractable visual evidence to challenge extended histories of racial, and racist, taxonomy. The 363 photographs Du Bois presented (that would win him the gold medal in the Paris Exposition that year) were a direct response to the use of family photographs by eugenicists to determine racial hierarchies. The Family Camera Network collects domestic photos, extending their definition of family beyond typical biological structures of the familial to larger networks. For minoritized populations—including transnational individuals, refugees, immigrants, people of color, queer folks, and others—family extends to communal care networks, revealing much about cultural dislocations and contemporary patterns of migration. Photographs in the Family Camera

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Network’s counterarchives are deliberately positioned as a political tool. They contest misreadings and offer alternative narratives to expand notions of normal (White, middle-class) families. These scholars’ (and others’) analyses of images account for social, cultural, historical, and political shifts, in combination with families’ lived experiences. The estrangements from the stereotypical, heteronormative, White, and/or middle-class families represented in dominant canons are conscious attempts to present powerful counternarratives and counterimages.

Children’s Depictions of Family Finally, while adult scholars and researchers like Valerie Walkerdine and Jo Spence have used their own family photos to examine their perspectives of self and family later as adults, children and youth have also had a hand in reconstructing images of the family via research and art endeavors. Wendy Ewald’s collaborative photo projects, across four decades starting from the 1980s, with children and families around the world—­primarily minoritized populations such as indigenous communities in Canada and Latin America—merge photography with education and activism. Through photographs that children and family members take and manipulate (writing directly on images, e.g.), Ewald and her participants emphasize the complexity underneath superficial ­photographic accounts of children and families. Children’s and families’ subjectivities are ­presented plainly through the manipulation of photographs, as well as captions developed by the children themselves. Ewald’s recognition in children’s capacities to represent their own positions within their sociocultural spaces, including within their families, made space for new ways of seeing children and families. Similarly, Jim Hubbard’s organization Shooting Back sought to give children and youth advanced photographic skills and a platform to tell us more about their lives. He worked in the late 20th century specifically with homeless children and youth in Chicago, as well as First Nations youth on reservations. In both projects, the children and youth took candid photographs of their families; these images supplant and surpass typically deficit-framed photographs that may otherwise surface of these populations.

Within critical childhood and youth studies, sociologist Wendy Luttrell has worked with working-class and immigrant children to take ­ photographs across a 12-year longitudinal study in the earliest years of the 21st century. The children (who would later become the youth) photographed their homes, neighborhoods, and schools. In contrast to Gillian Rose’s study of middle-class White mothers in the United Kingdom, the immigrant mothers and mothers of color in Luttrell’s work were subjects, framed by the children and oftentimes imaged in the kitchen as part of the children’s larger narratives around mothers’ care work. As part of her collaborative seeing approach, the children also talked about their images, and along with the photos, the interviews revealed the centrality of familial care in the children’s everyday lives. Luttrell’s larger point, in a forthcoming book, has to do with the invisible and undervalued choreographies of care and relationships of interdependence that animate children’s everyday lives. While families from minoritized communities are often thought of as lacking care, particularly for their children’s educational success, the  photographs and narratives presented by the children-turned-youth in Luttrell’s work indicate otherwise. Tran Nguyen Templeton See also Children as Photographers; Photovoice, Research Method of

Further Readings Campt, T. (2012). Image matters: Archive, photography, and the African diaspora in Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Luttrell, W. (in press). Title to be determined. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Phu, T., Brown, E. H., & Dewan, D. (2017). The family camera network. Photography and Culture, 10(2), 147–163. Rose, G. (2016). Doing family photography: The domestic, the public and the politics of sentiment. London, UK: Routledge. Smith, S. M. (2004). Photography on the color line: WEB Du Bois, race, and visual culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Fashion, Children’s Spence, J., & Holland, J. (1991). Family snaps: The meanings of domestic photography. London, UK: Virago. Willis, D. (Ed.). (1994). Picturing us: African American identity in photography. New York, NY: The New Press. Winddance Twine, F. (2006). Visual ethnography and racial theory: Family photographs as archives of interracial intimacies. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(3), 487–511.

Fashion, Children’s The birth of a specific style for children in the modern West is often associated with the ideas of the Enlightenment-era philosopher John Locke and, after him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, children’s fashion may also be identified more generally as a way to dress up individuals who are still in a state of physical and social dependency upon adults. Children’s fashion can also be understood as the social interaction of the stakeholders involved in the production of specific wardrobes, dependent on the historical context in which children are brought up. Despite its position as one of the more dynamic ready-to-wear segments of the global fashion market, children’s fashion is frequently overlooked in fashion studies, except as a reflection of adult style. However, through the historical analysis of children’s apparel, its variety of styles, and technical developments, this entry focuses on the particularities of a manufacturing industry designed to answer the needs of young users. This entry examines the features of children’s wear lines, the children’s fashion industry, designing for children, and children as designers.

Children’s Apparel: Dressing Up Specific Needs Growing fast during the first months of their life, children need to be constantly re-equipped or dressed with outfits that take this growth into account. The manufacturer has to anticipate these body changes and the comfort and hygiene requirements of children. The design of garments that grow with the body—utilised, for example, in the revolutionary Babygrow merchandise from Walter

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Artz in the 1960s or in the current Japanese toddler’s fashion—is an answer to parents’ need for cost-effective clothing. Before the democratisation of fashion in the second half of the 20th century, the use of stretchy embroideries, flat pleats easy to release, and large bottom hems helped with the adaptability of the garment. The collaboration necessary to dress children unable to put on and tuck in their own clothes has also had an impact on the design of children’s garments over time. This is illustrated by various examples such as romper suits fastened at the back, the large neckline of American baby vests, and the technical tips provided by the brand Vert Baudet in their current collections that aim to promote greater autonomy for children in the way they dress. Sustainable by definition, children’s fashion recycles the garments worn during a short period of time mostly via the transmission to the other members of the family or community. The dismantlement of children’s outfits and upcycling of adult garments to create baby clothes or doll’s dresses is common in the studied context: The usual recycling of mother’s wedding dresses into Christening gowns is the rule in rural early 20thcentury France. In parallel to the ‘hand me downs’ inside the family, the second-hand market is particularly vibrant in children’s fashion. Contemporarily, an organised network of specialist retail and online shops on Internet provide entire wardrobes to all the levels of society. Recent initiatives offer the opportunity to rent baby clothes and maternity kits, contributing to the sustainability of an evergrowing market.

The Children’s Fashion Industry Alongside a children’s fashion industry in constant development since the middle of the 19th century, the production of children’s clothes in the family was the ideal way to adapt the clothes to the children and to fit with the educational principles and social rules. In her ethnographic investigation on the role of women in a French rural area in the 1960s, Yvonne Verdier mentions the importance of mothers in the perpetuation of traditional techniques in the making of children’s clothes ­ through the education of the girls in needlework and sewing. From the middle of the 19th century, the democratisation of family magazines and

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newspapers accessible to all levels of society helped the diffusion of new trends and designs for the renewal of a widely accessible children’s fashion. In wealthy families, neighbourhood dressmakers produced occasional clothes and Sunday dresses and helped maintain the children’s wardrobes according to the social standards of their customers. A sign of the birth of a standardised manufacture more cost-effective for children, the everyday clothes such as jersey jumpers, overalls, and playsuits are mentioned as ‘tout faits’ in the catalogues of La Belle Jardinière as early as in the 1860s and sold in counters dedicated to the children’s wardrobes in these big stores. Although present in most cities through branches, Le Bon Marché, The Army and Navy Store (United Kingdom), or Sears and Roebuck (United States) mailed orders to the families in the country or settled in former colonies thanks to their sale books and therefore provided a standardised style to entire generations. Echoing the development of a luxury market for children from the beginning of the 19th century, designers such as Jeanne Lanvin from 1909 or Paul Poiret from 1907 developed specific children’s ranges along with their adult collections. Lanvin sits as a pioneer of current designers’ experiences as, inspired by her motherhood, she started designing for her daughter before she created female dresses, following the same inspiration as advertised in fashion magazines such as Les Modes. The creation of Baby Dior in 1967 is another example of the interest of Haute Couture for children’s fashion which has never stopped growing until today. During the second half of the 20th century, the standardisation of production led towards the specialisation of a market modelled on the adult’s manufacture and retail, but specific to their customers. Following the United States and the United Kingdom, in the 1960s, French children’s manufacturing was structured as a sustainable industry where designers and makers contributed to the creation of collections that reflected the cultural environment of children. In France, the first trade fairs were held in Paris in 1966, immediately followed by the first trend books published in 1969. ‘Small Couture’ became a recognised industrial sector similar to the female and male fashion industries and using the same production

and retail strategies. However, designers and makers specialise according to the specifics of the market and retail such as age segmentation and genre. As a knock-on effect of the structure of the apparel, the definition of age-groups in childhood was reinforced.

Designing for Children The design of children’s clothes is specific and adapted to the particularity of a child in the process of the acquisition of social awareness and technical skills. Along with the school uniforms related to the role of the scholars more than their childhood status, children’s fashion is freely inspired by an infinity of styles. The current lack of professional training in children’s fashion invites the designers to produce according to their parenthood and therefore to reiterate durable creative patterns across the generations. They specialise in exotic, nostalgic, or playful styles, inspired by other environments or by adult wardrobes, telling various stories in fancy collections designed for a wearer free of any social role and style and invited to explore all eras of fashion history. Thus, designers get their identity from their inspiration area. Created in 1972, the French brand Catimini is defined by an exotic style; the Parisian Jacadi firm creates classic collections inspired by past fashion; the contemporary Spanish brand Iporque designs playful and futuristic garments. Meanwhile, through colours, textures, and the addition of playful accessories, children’s fashion aims to stimulate the senses of the youth. From the whistles added to sailor suits in the late 19th century to the animal shapes of contemporary romper suits such as the ones designed by the fashionable brand Trotinette in the 1980s, multiple examples through time evidence the way children’s garments reflect their material culture and condition their tastes. In parallel through the last centuries and particularly in contemporary fashion, designers can be inspired by the adult style and create mini-adult collections, rubbing out the boundaries between the generations in a uniform style. Gender is a recurring debate in children’s fashion. When sexualised outfits also tend to transform children into small adults, gender-neutral collections, whether

Fashion, Children’s

inspired by male or female styles, reflect educational trends and contribute to the gathering of boys and girls into the same childhood status. In a standardised industry, where fashion communication sets the rules of consumption, children’s fashion relies on the clichés and codified representation of children through currently burgeoning specialist and inspirational ­magazines. These publications act genuinely as relays of the creation of luxury fashion to ready-to-wear. The specifics of children’s fashion, as noted earlier, require the adaptation of the apparel and the production management. Adjusting the patterns to the morphology of the different stages of childhood, working on the fit of the garments, while complying to the security norms are the major tasks of the makers in the very constrained children’s fashion industry. The importance of compliance with legislation designed to (over) protect children in our society as well as the current delocalisation of the production—far from the points of conception, control, and use—­ transforms the technical jobs of the makers into quality controllers and lawyers.

Children as Designers Despite the child’s central position in the use and consumption of garments, children are hardly ever part of the design process. In 2012, the American brand Mini and Maximus invited children to create the prints for its T-shirts. However, it is very rare that the child acts as a designer in the standardised ready-to-wear process. It is generally through the choice of their garments in specialised outlets that they express their tastes and preferences. Yet the children’s influence remains conditioned by the choice of the parents who are the first in the selection of a brand adapted to their lifestyle and social status and are always in charge of the act of purchase. However, when it is time to select matching garments according to the activities and the weather, children may express their desires and tastes, albeit through negotiations with adults.

Concluding Thoughts Further research on children’s fashion would benefit from a deeper exploration of children’s

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fashion in different historical contexts. What is clear is that fashion shapes children’s representation of their environment and society, supports their acquisition of technical skills, educates their tastes, and stimulates negotiated desires. The study of ‘small couture’ through the prism of children’s physical and educational needs and their position in society highlights the way children are educated as future adults by the conception of a particular wardrobe. In addition, it helps to consider a different history of children’s fashion, which reveals the specifics of children’s clothes as part of their unique material culture. Aude Le Guennec See also Clothing, Children’s; Gender; Material Culture, Children’s; School Dress Codes

Further Readings Cook, D. T. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1108/jfmm.2005.9.2.244.1 Join-Diéterle, C., & Tétart-Vittu, F. (2001). La mode et l’enfant, 1780–2000 [Fashion and the child, 1780–2000]. Paris, France: Paris-musées. Le Guennec, A. (2010). Some thoughts concerning children’s fashion. In Peloponesian Folklore Foundation (Ed.), Endesthai (to dress): Historical, sociological and methodological approaches (pp. 94–98). Athens, Greece: Benaki Museum. Le Guennec, A., & Boucher, S. (2011). Sport et mode enfantine, jeux de vestiaire [Sport and children’s fashion, cloakroom games]. Calais, France: Cité internationale de la dentelle et de la mode. Pasold, E. (1977). Ladybird, ladybird: A story of private enterprise. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Quentel, J.-C. (1997). L’enfant, problèmes de genèse et d’histoire [The child, problems of genesis and history]. Paris, France: Raisonnances. Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). Émile, ou de l’éducation [Emile, or On Education]. La Haye, the Netherlands: J. Néaulme. Salmon, F. (2013). Catimini, ma vie. Témoignage d’un entrepreneur. Cholet, France: L’apart. Thomas, S. (2017). Fashion ethics. London, UK: Routledge. Veillon, D. (2003). Nous les enfants. Paris, France: Hachette.

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Fatherhood

Fatherhood In the traditional family structure, mothers are responsible for childcare and fathers are the primary breadwinners as heads of the family. In modern society, however, fathers are expected to be more involved in parenting since women have joined the labor force. Thus, both parents are expected to be responsible for childcare and the financial well-being of the family. Work is connected to parenting for men, so fatherhood is negatively affected by financial strain and other work-related stressors. In particular, low-income fathers feel more pressure and often face challenging conditions in the workforce due to their responsibility. These circumstances may negatively impact the parental as well as the couple’s relationship. This entry examines types of fathers, the role of fathers in a child’s life, father–child interactions, interparental relationships, absent fathers, and intergenerational influences on fatherhood.

Types of Fathers According to Gayle Kaufman, there are three different types of fathers based on the work–family balance. The old dads prioritize their work as providers and do not change their schedules to become more involved. The second category is new dads, the group able to make slight changes in their work schedules to spend more time with their children. They have a hard time balancing work and home life even though they want to be more involved in their children’s lives. Finally, superdads represent the most involved fathers who simultaneously respect their partners’ careers, so they accomplish a good balance of work and family life. They also prioritize their family’s needs and often make complete changes in their work decisions. Past research has shown that the father’s involvement and the couple’s relationship satisfaction are positively related, which means that when a father has a good relationship with his partner, he is inclined to be more involved in his child’s life. In short, his improved relationship with his family increases the couple’s relationship satisfaction. Over the course of a lifetime, the sociocultural expectations of fathers change, and fatherhood is impacted by different factors. Based on multiple

cultures around the world, fathers are still the primary economic providers and heads of the family, with decreasing responsibility in a child’s life. However, the place and importance of fathers in the life of a child have been emphasized more in recent studies, with today’s changing social and economic conditions having a crucial effect on how we see fatherhood. Although the role of fathers may change over time and between cultures, being a father is the most fundamental and important role in a man’s life. For instance, how fathers raise their children is not only influenced by gender role ideology and the concept of parenthood but also by events originating in the past and one’s culture. However, little is known about cross-cultural variations in fathering, and it decreases the breadth of these studies in regard to other cultural and ethnic groups. Much of the past research on fatherhood mainly focused on heterosexual, two-parent, Western families. Although recent studies about fatherhood pay more attention to the role of single fathers, gay fathers, or stepfathers in child development, this perspective is still underrepresented. Even though comparatively little is known about gay fathers, recent studies have been attracting increasing attention to this population. There are a few options for gay men to become fathers now, so the understanding of fatherhood and the exchanging of parenting roles among gay parents is essential. Even though same-sex relationships have become more socially accepted, gay parents still face constraints. Gay fathers enjoy a new form of fatherhood and masculinity but still must overcome traditional beliefs. They struggle to create gender-neutral parenting roles and relationships with their partners. Additionally, many gay men experience discrimination and are characterized as disgraceful by their parents, friends, and other community members; but they are less likely to seek social support after becoming a parent. On the other hand, gay fathers tend to be more involved and have equal responsibility as parents compared to heterosexual fathers. In sum, fathers are much more than simply breadwinners and role models. Fathers are more involved with their children, and their interactions with their children impact many aspects of child development. Although extensive literature on the effects of maternal behavior on child development

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exists, considerably less attention has been paid to the role of fathers in the development of the child and the father–child relationship. Moreover, the studies about fatherhood are quite new, and more research is needed to understand better the variations of fathering in the sociocultural context.

The Role of a Father in a Child’s Life A father’s role is crucial in a child’s development from birth through adulthood. In the past, the father’s primary role was viewed as that of the breadwinner. Although this role does not involve direct interaction between fathers and children, a financial provider is an indirect but essential way for fathers to influence and shape their children’s development. As for the children, the father is regarded as a source of authority and financial assurance; beyond that, there is little emphasis on their perspectives and understanding. Of course, as values and practices change over time, the expectations and perceptions of fathers also differ according to the cultural context all over the world. Diverse family types, sociocultural expectations, and caregiving burdens reshape fathers’ roles, family processes, and child development. Hence, fathers play different roles in various subcultures, with opposing views of what a good father is. For instance, although providing financial support is the primary and most important role of a father in some cultures, providing childcare and emotional support might be considered the most valuable role of a father in another. The growth of women’s participation in the workforce, single parenthood, the father’s absence, and cultural diversity in developed countries are the major social trends in child development based on the fundamentally changed family structure in the social–cultural context. These trends have changed the nature of family life and degree of father involvement, which in turn has led to a further restructuring of the role of fathers. In this new image of the involved father, the impact of the father on the child and the family has come to mean much more than simply being the role model and breadwinner. Today’s children will have new sociocultural expectations about fathers’ and mothers’ roles as they become the parents of tomorrow. Hence,

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women in the labor force, responsible parenting and childcare, and father involvement will probably continue to be the critical issues during the 21st century. As sociocultural expectations and opinions regarding accepted parental roles have changed in the last decades, fathers have taken on a broader range of responsibilities in their children’s lives. Therefore, we cannot identify the role of a father in a child’s life with one single factor or definition because there is no absolutely correct and universal role for a father.

Father Involvement According to rising scientific evidence, the father’s involvement has a significant and positive impact on a child’s life. However, expectations about what fathers should do and their impact on their children should be examined in the context of family, culture, society, and history. Over the life course, paternal behavior is influenced by psychological factors (e.g., skills, self-confidence, and motivation), individual characteristics of the child (e.g., gender and temperament), communal and cultural effects (e.g., cultural beliefs and financial opportunities), social support (e.g., relationships with partners and extensive family associates), and public policies (e.g., support for welfare and child support enforcement). Furthermore, demographic information such as a father’s relationship with his spouse; having a working partner; the fathers’ age, educational level, and socioeconomic status; the number of children; and the child’s age are all factors that impact fathers’ involvement. Additionally, fatherhood is defined by different stages, depending on the child’s age, because needs change according to the developmental period. According to John Bowlby, regular parent–child interaction helps the development of secure relationships between parents and children in the early stages of life. When fathers are not very involved and do not have good communication with their children at a young age, they have difficulty understanding them at a later stage, or sometimes they may never understand their children at all. Additionally, Michael E. Lamb found that the father’s involvement in the early stage of life positively impacts the level of paternal involvement in later childhood.

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Lamb and his colleagues have developed categories to characterize the different forms of father involvement:

such as family science, sociology, psychology, and education all present a broad picture emphasizing the father’s important and irreplaceable role in child development, including mental health, social 1. Engagement: This type of involvement consists interactions, and educational achievement. of the time a father spends in individual A poor or troubled relationship between a interaction, such as feeding a child, helping with father and child provides the groundwork for a homework, or playing together. process that can negatively affect further development throughout the life span; to the contrary, a 2. Availability: The second type of involvement healthy relationship provides many significant encompasses indirect father–child engagement, advantages. For example, previous research has such as cooking or cleaning when a child is indicated that children with engaged fathers are playing or in another room. There is no direct more likely to develop secure relationships with father–child interaction, but this type includes their fathers, leading them to be more self-confibeing physically and psychologically accessible dent and able to express themselves more comto the child. fortably in adulthood. These children tend to have 3. Responsibility: The third category shows how healthier relationships with others and are less parents share responsibilities for the welfare and likely to have physical or psychological problems. care of their children. Responsibility includes A father’s love and a child’s trust of the father knowing when a child needs to go to a makes the child psychologically stronger, helping pediatrician, making appointments, making him or her better cope with the stressors eventuarrangements for childcare, and so on. ally encountered in life. A good relationship with the father is a complementary and protective facA father’s voice, smell, touch, clothing, and tor for children’s mental health and decreases the reactions are different from those of a mother, so chances of distress in both childhood and adultbabies learn that their parents are two different hood. Furthermore, a healthy father–child relapeople. When babies are only with the mother or tionship is critical to the prevention of less the father, they still feel comfortable because they desirable behaviors such as substance use, antisoknow they have more than one source of love. For cial behavior, or violent acts. the child, the father is a mirror offering a different When a father is in the caregiver role, he can be view of the world from that of the mother, so more efficient in supporting his child’s learning understanding the father’s perspective is just as and developing intelligence. A father’s interest in vital for enlarging a child’s horizon as is underhis child’s education is one of the vital factors in standing the mother’s perspective. the child’s academic achievement in part because the positive relationship between a father and a child is related to the child’s cognitive skills and Father–Child Interaction academic success. Hence, children’s interaction Mothers and fathers interact with their children in with their fathers and the fathers’ active school qualitatively different ways. For instance, father– involvement may lead to learning and academic child interaction is more likely to consist of play success as well as an increased rate of school activities, while mother–child interaction is more attendance. In other words, a good father–child likely to include nurturing or caregiving activities. relationship promotes academic achievement, Studies indicate that fathers tend to promote indeopens opportunities in higher education, and pendence in their children more than mothers do, increases the chance of success in the child’s future and this parenting behavior has a positive effect vocation. on the child’s personality development. An increasAlthough fathers are more involved now with ing body of research in recent years confirms that their children than before, they still spend less fathers are increasingly more active in child-­ time with their children than mothers do. Being a rearing than were fathers of past generations. father is a unique experience for a man, so it is Significant contributions from different disciplines sometimes difficult for him to interact with his

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child and play an active role in child-rearing. Although fathers have an increasing awareness of child psychology, many of them possess limited information and education about child development and, therefore, struggle to develop effective interaction with their children. Similarly, some fathers show a lack of active communication with their children due to a lack of knowledge about child development or strategies for a successful father–child relationship.

mothers and fathers. For example, when mothers have a more authoritarian parenting style than fathers, mothers report less marital conflict, and when a father has a more authoritarian parenting style than the mother in the family, children have more behavior problems. Although differences in parenting beliefs may cause a problem between parents, the parents’ negotiation and integration of their unique parenting skills and styles may help enhance family relationships.

Interparental Relationship

The Absence of the Father

Responsible parenting and healthy family relationships are vital factors for a better and happier childhood. The interparental relationship, a significant component of a healthy family life, is one of the indirect factors that impact child development. The interparental relationship may have considerable influence on family life because it also affects the parent–child relationship as much as parental behavior does. Parents who enjoy a happy relationship and support each other tend to be more sensitive to the needs of their children and may develop more positive relationships with them. The father’s support and confirmation of a mother’s parenting decisions promote a positive couple relationship between the mother and father, which represents another significant indirect impact of fathers on child development. On the other hand, marital conflict can lead to parenting problems. A study about the impact of both the mother’s and father’s parenting styles and the influence of marital conflict on behavior outcomes in children between 3 and 9 years old revealed how different parenting styles can cause marital conflict and that this conflict might have a powerful effect on childhood behavior. For instance, parents with troubled relationships or marital conflict are less likely to be sensitive to the needs of their children, due to the tension and stress these issues cause. If fathers are more permissive than their spouses, and there is less marital conflict, the children likely will have fewer behavior problems. Although authoritarian and permissive parenting are related to higher rates of internalizing and externalizing behavior problems in children, the authoritative parenting style is related to the best child behavior outcomes; but the effects of this type of parenting differ between

Although men enter fatherhood after having a child, fatherhood is not a word used to describe only a biological relationship. Fatherhood is a term implying lifelong responsibility and the fulfillment of the needs of a child from one who is there both physically and psychologically. However, the rising divorce rate and increasing rate of children born to unmarried parents have led to the father’s absence in the child’s life. Therefore, in this century, the growing body of knowledge increasingly focuses on the negative effects of a father’s absence on a child’s well-being. The absence of the father affects the child’s psychological conditions, but these conditions might change depending on the father’s role in the family, the child’s age, the state of verbal communication with the child, the mother’s role, the child’s relationship with other family members, and the period of separation. For example, in the case of a father’s long absences, a child might display more aggressive and antisocial behavior, irritability, moodiness, and low school success. Sara McLanahan and her colleagues have found that the father’s absence has a negative impact on children’s social–emotional development, including high rates of externalizing behavior, while it also increases risky behaviors in adolescents such as early childbearing or smoking and decreased rates of high school graduation and cognitive ability. Children who experience a father’s absence during early childhood may experience psychological and mental health issues throughout their lives. Additionally, the type of absence might differ: For example, parental divorce and parental death are two different causes of a father’s absence; and according to previous studies, a father’s absence more

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significantly impacts children with divorced parents than those whose father is deceased. ­Furthermore, if both parents are not living in the household, discussing visiting arrangements and spending quality time together are important factors that positively impact a child’s development. So even if parents separate or divorce, fathers who maintain a close connection with their children as well as their mothers may continue to contribute positively to their children’s development. The inclusion of the father as a third ­person in the family helps children understand the family structure better. For example, the child learns to share his mother with father as the first example of sharing.

Intergenerational Influences of Fatherhood A study about fathering roles and the intergenerational impact of a father’s absence in low-income families shows that experiences with their fathers’ traditional gender role including being a role model, provider, protector, authority, teacher, and socializer shape their views about fatherhood. According to many, being a good father means being a provider and economically responsible for their children. Even if some fathers agree to be a provider, they still must overcome deficiencies in giving and receiving affection, something they may not have experienced from their fathers. Due to past experiences, some fathers may also think that they need to protect their children from dangerous and risky situations because the protection of the child is a vital part of ensuring their health and happiness. These fathers’ childhood experiences with their own fathers’ presence or absence greatly influence their interaction with their own children. Evidence is seen when the father decides to join the same activities as the child, such as camping, ball playing, or fishing. In short, the relationship between the father’s quality time and his father impacts his involvement in the activities of his child. Families need to be aware of the father’s importance for the child’s emotional and economic well-being. In particular, young men may not know the value of being in the child’s life as a father; for this reason, information and ­education provided to them might help in understanding their roles better. Men who are encouraged and educated about the significance and

importance of being in their children’s lives will positively impact future generations. Furthermore, a father’s relationship with the other parent (e.g., being married, cohabitation, or being single), the family’s cultural views about fathering and the role of men in families, both parents’ health condition, and the division of childcare tasks inside the family are essential components in understanding fatherhood. In recent years, a healthy father relationship has become more and more critical because of the changes in the family structure, such as the increased rate of divorce and greater participation of mothers in the workforce. Due to these sociohistorical changes, fathers’ behaviors and attitudes are also changing, so today’s fathers are expected to be more egalitarian and involved. Fathers who show increased involvement in the home environment may increase the gender equality of future generations, so their sons may have more egalitarian gender role attitudes and show more involvement in their own relationships as well. Although fathers were once regarded as secondary caregivers compared to mothers, this stereotypical thinking has turned into a new cultural standard according to which fathers are often expected to be equal co-parents. Mothers’ and fathers’ changed responsibilities have led to new attitudes, expectations, and beliefs about their new roles in the family context. Co-parents share both responsibilities and tasks equally without traditional gender role expectations, such that the expected nurturing role of women has decreased. This intergenerational change in co-parenting has greatly changed expectations. The intergenerational transmission of the role of fatherhood, such as the nurturing experience with their fathers through living with them, ­creates different expectations about sharing parenting duties with partners. Most of the children of the current generation have full-time working mothers outside the home and fathers who are involved in household tasks. As a result, children’s experiences with their parents shape expectations of their future parental roles. Yasemin Cava-Tadik See also Family; Fathers/Fathering; Mothers/ Motherhood; Parenthood; Parenting; Parenting Styles, History of

Fathers/Fathering

Further Readings Barnett, R. C., & Rivers, C. (1996). She works/he works: How two-income families are happy, healthy, and thriving. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Attachment (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Basic Books. Brannen, J. (2015). Fathers and sons: Generations, families and migration. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Cabrera, N., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Bradley, R. H., Hofferth, S., & Lamb, M. E. (2000). Fatherhood in the twenty-first century. Child Development, 71(1), 127–136. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00126 Green, T. T. (2014). A fatherless child: Autobiographical perspectives of African American men. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Kaufman, G. (2013). Superdads: How fathers balance work and family in the 21st century. New York: New York University Press. doi:10.18574/ nyu/9780814749159.001.0001 Lamb, M. E. (2000). The history of research on father involvement: An overview. Marriage & Family Review, 29(2–3), 23–42. Lamb, M. E. (Ed.). (2004). The role of the father in child development. New York, NY: Wiley. McLanahan, S., Tach, L., & Schneider, D. (2013). The causal effects of father absence. Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 399–427. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc071312-145704 Tavassolie, T., Dudding, S., Madigan, A. L., Thorvardarson, E., & Winsler, A. (2016). Differences in perceived parenting style between mothers and fathers: Implications for child outcomes and marital conflict. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 25(6), 2055–2068. doi:10.1007/s10826-016-0376-y

Fathers/Fathering The term ‘father’ is often used to describe a takenfor-granted biological relationship between a man and his child/children. However, the growing body of research on the topic of fathers and fatherhood shows that an assortment of father ‘types’ and relationships exist. These include ‘biological’ and ‘social’, ‘non-resident’, ‘absent’, ‘gay’, ‘adoptive’, ‘teenage’, and ‘stepfather’, each of whom may or may not reside with (their/other) children in a range of family configurations. The term ‘father’

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implies a relationship (even though there may not be one), whereas fathering denotes an activity. The term ‘fatherhood’ is a socially constructed category, which, like motherhood, is shaped by and through a mixture of political, social, cultural, and historical antecedents and contemporary concerns. But it is also the case that ideals of contemporary fatherhood are less distinctly drawn than those which are associated with motherhood. Nonetheless, in Western societies, men are now more ‘visibly’ involved in child-related, caring activities than in previous generations. This entry offers an overview of some key aspects of research on fathers and fatherhood, which has proliferated over the past 30 years. It highlights the developments and debates which have ensued, particularly in relation to father involvement in caring activities, changes in understandings of gendered practices, and fatherhood discourses. These are considered against the shifting backdrop of gender equality, paid work, and familial employment and policy responses to these shifts. It is worth noting at the outset that when compared to research and other forms of metrics collected on mothers and experiences of motherhood, there is a lack of similar data available on fathers and their experiences of fatherhood. Even so, the available and growing body of literature on fathers underscores the complex and contradictory landscape of contemporary fatherhood and the variability in how it is (able to be) practised.

The Expanding Role of Fathers in Childcare Research shows that in many Western countries, men who are fathers now engage in a wider range of childcare practices, in ways that are significantly different from their own fathers’ behaviours. This so-called ‘de-traditionalisation’ of fatherhood is emphasised in the language of the ‘involved father’, which implies a father who is more involved in nurturing and sharing (some) responsibilities for hands-on, more emotionally and intimately attuned caring for his children. This shift in how practices of fathering and ­societal understandings of fatherhood are understood has occurred against a broader backdrop of p ­olitical changes. These include increased concern with parenting behaviours and child development and greater recognition of the

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rights and responsibilities of fathers as important actors in their children’s lives, especially during the early years and recognition too that involvement can improve a father’s own well-being. Concern with these areas has resulted in various policy responses and initiatives becoming evident across Europe and more widely, sometimes explicitly introduced as a commitment to gender equality agendas, as in the Nordic countries. Even so, research continues to show that in dual-earner households, fathers are still more likely to take a secondary or supportive role in caring responsibilities rather than a primary carer role and spend fewer hours on domestic chores in the home compared to women. This has led some researchers to focus in particular on the part that gender plays in shaping the domain of caring and nurturing and to ask questions about men’s caring capabilities in societal landscapes where caring for children has been a largely undervalued and invisible activity, historically assumed of and associated with women. The focus on gender and its intersections including with social class, ‘race’, sexuality, and age has led to significant scholarly contributions in more recent research on fathers and fatherhood, including the work of Canadian sociologist Andrea Doucet, who has posed the fundamental question: Do men mother?

Research on Fathers and Fathering In research on fatherhood undertaken in the 1980s, there was a preoccupation with identifying the ‘new man’ and measuring the time that fathers spent with their children. This research focus then shifted away from quantity of time to a concern with the quality of men’s involvement. In broad terms, the workplace, particular models of welfare, personal biography, and family dynamics including learnt models of fathering have all been reported in research as significant determining factors in father availability and the quality of their involvement. But capturing all the facets of men’s involvement is a hard task, in part because the term ‘involvement’ is ambiguous and its meaning can be (re)interpreted in contrasting situations and over time. This becomes clear if one considers how the ideals and cultural expectations of the ‘good’ father have changed through time and may also be shaped according to other factors, such as the age of the

father. For example, in some cultures, becoming a father when also a teenager is now identified as a ‘problem’ but in earlier generations would have been much more commonplace and normative. In other literature, father involvement has been described as ‘multidimensional’ with ‘direct engagement’ found to be important at various developmental stages in a child’s life. Men’s ‘positive’ involvement in family lives has similarly been associated with healthy outcomes in their children, with involvement reported to change men’s attitudes about previously segregated parental roles. While the quality of some men’s involvement and the time spent with their children has in real terms changed and/or increased, there seems to be relatively little change in fathers’ ‘responsibility’ for their children, which it has been argued ‘remains limited’. This highlights a current research concern which questions how far a primary caring responsibility can be shared and the part that ‘maternal gatekeeping’ ‘and’ paternal gatekeeping shape involvement practices. More recently, the growing interest in studies of fathers and fatherhood has examined how caring involvement is shaped by the ‘choices’ and constraints in which gendered lives are lived. This more nuanced focus has been helped by the development in theorisations of gender and in particular in understandings of ‘masculinity’. Scholars have unpacked taken-for-granted ideas of masculinity as a single, fixed, and narrowly defined, unitary way of being a man and drawn attention to the multiple forms of masculinity available in contemporary society. The concept of masculinities encompasses a range of possible ways of being a man (simultaneously), including ‘caring masculinities’, which recognises men’s capacities to engage in nurturing, emotionally attuned caring behaviours. This shift in how masculinity has become theorised has been accompanied by a corresponding shift in the broader, societal discourses which shape expectations in many Western societies, for example, the ‘involved father’. At the individual level, this has led to changed discursive possibilities for fathers who can invoke elements of these broader societal discourses into their everyday understandings and fatherhood practices and claims. For example, the language of ‘bonding’ with a baby/child had, until recently, been much more associated with mothers than fathers, and expressions of love and emotional

Fathers/Fathering

attachment and ‘being there’ as a physical presence were similarly associated. However, in more recent times, men openly describing a loving relationship and sense of an emotional bond and connection to their child would be regarded as evidence of the ‘good’ involved father—even, as one author called it, becoming a kind of culture hero figure of the ‘Superdad’. Yet in many societies, the ‘good’ father, where ‘being there’ as a physical and emotional presence has become a marker of involvement, is also expected to provide economically.

Fathers and Paid Work Outside the Home For many men as fathers, the question of where, how, and what caring constitutes in relation to their children is significantly influenced by paid work outside the home. Even though, looking back across generations, it is possible to note the variations in expressions and possibilities of how fathers have been able to care—or express that care—for their children, a dominant aspect of fatherhood has been to provide economically for a family, as a ‘breadwinner’. This means that contemporary ideals of the involved father and expectations of caring masculinities can be experienced (by fathers, mothers, employers, etc.) as being ‘at odds’ with economic demands, especially in cultures where the role of paid work continues to represent a prized aspect of being a ‘successful’ adult male. The association of fathers with the world of paid work and mothers with caring responsibilities and the domestic sphere continues to be challenged by feminist researchers and others. Even though gender equality initiatives (in policy and the workplace) have sought to make mothers and fathers working and caring choices and arrangements more equitable, some aspects of gendered histories remain more entrenched than others. This is important to acknowledge because while it is possible to evidence increased fathers’ involvement with their children and mothers’ significant activity (and breadwinning) in the workplace, the extent of these is still impeded by work and home ‘histories’. These have resulted in a gender pay gap and ‘motherhood penalty’ leaving mothers in many western societies as the parent more likely to ‘balance’ or ‘reconcile’ their paid work and childcare. Efforts to address these inequities have involved the introduction of policy mechanisms, such as

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shared parental leave, which were first introduced in the Nordic countries. Currently, the United Kingdom lags behind these northern European countries in relation to such policies, but it is ahead of other industrialised countries, included the United States, where breadwinning and caring continue to be more differentiated. In the United Kingdom, qualifying fathers are entitled to 2 weeks paid paternity leave, under legislation introduced in 2003, while the United States is one of only four countries that does not have a federal parental (maternal and paternal) leave policy. The Nordic countries have led the way in relation to policy mechanisms to promote gender equality opportunities in parental caring. This includes the introduction of leave policies that now give exclusive rights to fathers in order to encourage fathers’ participation in care. Sweden is often held up as an exemplary case, introducing legislation to enable shared parental leave in 1974. But the introduction of this legislation also points to the gap between policy intentions and entrenched gendered behaviours. Even though the policy intention was to encourage fathers to take parental leave following the birth of a baby, an amendment to the legislation which introduced the ‘daddy month’ (allocated to fathers and nontransferable) was implemented in 1995 because fathers were not taking up the leave. By 2006, each parent in Sweden had 2 non-transferable leave months following the birth of a baby and 9 additional months to be shared. This has recently been increased to 3 non-transferable leave months for each parent. Interestingly, during the debate which accompanied the original policy amendment in 1995, the Swedish government spoke of a determination to change work cultures so that both men and women could ‘dare to take parental leave without a feeling of jeopardising their career or development opportunities at work’. It is clear that the introduction of policy can signal change but not make it happen unless other conditions exist. Findings from leave policy reviews have found that for paternity leave and shared parental leave policies to be successful, they should include non-transferable ‘use it or lose it’ forms of leave and have high levels of income replacement during periods of leave. A review of the research indicates that political commitments to gender equality and policy

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initiatives, which promote involved fatherhood and more egalitarian caring and working relationships, can ‘slowly’ change cultural norms and gendered practices and discursive possibilities. But structural and cultural constraints and gendered histories should not be underestimated. Even so, it is interesting to note recent research findings from Sweden, which has found that the workplace could provide fathers with daily opportunities to talk about both the joys and concerns of their parenthood. While this may not (yet) be commonplace in other countries, this cultural shift may reflect Sweden’s longer history of efforts to promote gender equality. But it indicates that cultural change in how fatherhood is understood and practised is achievable. Research findings indicate that father’s caring may not be exactly the same as mothering, or mothering the same as fathering, but it is clear that fathers can care effectively too. Tina, Miller See also Fatherhood; Parenthood; Parenting; Parenting Children

Further Readings Cabrera, N., & Tamis-Lemonda, C. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of father involvement: Multidisciplinary perspectives (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Taylor and Francis. Kaufamn, G. (2013). Superdads: How fathers balance work and family in the 21st century. New York: New York University Press. doi:10.18574/ nyu/9780814749159.003.0002 Miller, T. (2017). Making sense of parenthood: Caring, gender and family lives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316219270 O’Brien, M., & Wall, K. (Eds.). (2016). Comparative perspectives on work-life balance and gender equality. New York, NY: Springer. doi:10.1007/ 978-3-319-42970-0

Federal Indian Boarding Schools, U.S. Architecture

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The architecture of federal Indian boarding schools (FIBS) in the United States can be defined as the construction, spatial layout, and built

environment of school buildings and campuses established by the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to educate, train, and assimilate Native American children. This entry offers an overview of the styles and characteristics of the architecture of FIBS, highlighting the role of race and gender in the structuring of space in the building designs and campus layouts of these schools.

History of FIBS The OIA (renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1947) established boarding schools to educate, train, and Americanize Native American children following the successful model of the Carlisle Indian School, in the state of Pennsylvania, the first federally funded off-reservation Indian boarding school founded in 1879. Prior to Carlisle, such schools were typically church-run and established on reservations by predominantly Christian missionaries to educate and evangelize Native youths with otherwise no access to formal Euro-­American education. The Carlisle model adopted by the OIA, however, favored schools built off-­reservation that would remove children from their families and homes by sending them to institutions in often distant locales. The Carlisle school’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, believed that the reservation system must eventually be abolished and the Indigenous residents absorbed into White society. A series of Commissioners of Indian Affairs supported this belief by founding off-reservation schools on the basis of Pratt’s Indian School at Carlisle, building day and boarding schools across the country, some on- though most off-­reservation, for the sole purpose of removing students from their languages, cultural practices, and beliefs to assimilationist ends. With relatively little financial or public support, many of the first FIBS were repurposed from military forts and barracks, orphanages and schoolhouses, or refurbished farm and industrial buildings. As time progressed, some schools began to be built to order according to the OIA’s ideological priorities and trends of the time and specific region. Often built using the free labor of the Native students themselves in the guise of technical training, there is thus no consistent or singular style to which FIBS adhered. Generally, in the

Federal Indian Boarding Schools, U.S. Architecture of

Eastern and Midwestern United States, aspects of the neoclassical and Federalist styles popular with government buildings such as libraries, hospitals, and courthouses tended to recur. In the West, a more varied series of regional styles, such as the Mission Revival style in California, saw more architectural variety in the FIBS constructed there at the turn of the century. Predominantly, however, the schools and their outbuildings were austere and sparsely decorated, reflecting institutional standards, the sparse availability of resources for most of the schools, and the utilitarian ideology that guided their missions.

Architecture and Ideology Government- and church-founded educational institutions in the 19th century used architecture and space to transmit ideologies. Inside EuroAmerican orphanages and schools, children were sorted by age, sex, and race within the defined rectangular fields of the school buildings. Large gendered dormitories, dining halls, and schoolrooms were organized to meld the individual into the mass in order to assert authority and embody discipline. Although architectural doctrines regarding the nature of institutional spaces changed over time, FIBS were almost exclusively designed to order and use space as an apparatus of assimilation. Interiors were organized into individualized rectangular rooms with classrooms and dormitories filled with straight rows of desks and beds. This was in utter contrast to the organic and informally organized treatment of space that many Native children grew up with. School interiors were compartmentalized into individual rooms and units, each with a specific function such as school learning, woodworking, or sleeping. The concentration on the individual, a hallmark of modern American society, is vastly contradictory to many Indigenous conceptions of space and architecture that emphasize community, cooperation, and inclusiveness through communal spaces and interconnected structures. This focus on the individual and its manifestation in specialized spaces of learning and trade in Indian school design has its origins in the historic development of the schoolhouse in America, where by the mid19th century the division of schoolhouses into separate, self-contained classrooms was rapidly

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spreading throughout the country. Such a layout was intended to make the closer supervision of students and a greater specialization of instruction possible, turning the chaos of the classroom into an ordered environment suitable for the 19th century’s newfound focus on youth and education. By the turn of the century, school architecture in the United States was fairly centralized and standardized, and FIBS buildings typically reflect this standardization as factories constructed to churn newly civilized Americans out of native material. Exterior space was likewise highly structured along racial and gendered lines. At the Carlisle school, built out of a former military barracks, school officials spatially segregated the campus by separating the White part of campus, administrative buildings, from the dormitories occupied by Native students. Even though the school’s goal was to bring assimilated Native children into the fold of White society, the campus systematically inscribed the separation of Whites and Indians, the latter of whom were put on display to the White public as a living showcase of assimilation through band performances and marches in spaces of display, such as the marching ground and grand bandstand at the center of the campus. These spaces of display were doubled as apparatuses of surveillance and control; the bandstand, from which Pratt would survey his students, was used by the school administration to manipulate the children by the invention of an omnipotent figure known as the Man-on-the-bandstand who was said to always be watching. Heavily sentried gates likewise separated the students from the wider White world coming to view their paraded performance of assimilation and guaranteed the confinement, control, and surveillance of students.

The Effects of FIBS Architecture Studies of boarding school campuses reinforce that the built environment tended to further segregate the movement and activity of Native students by gender in order to shape their perceptions of masculine and feminine spheres in ways that ­supported the domestic colonial ideals of assimilationist education. The Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, the only FIBS in Michigan, founded in 1893, quite explicitly structured its campus along gendered grounds. The segregated nature of the

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male and female spaces, seen in the separation of gendered dormitories and workshops like the paint shop and woodshop in the boys’ vocational buildings on the north side of campus and the laundry and domestic science buildings in the girls’ buildings on the south side, reinforced the colonial ideals of domestic gender roles at the school. Manual training had been the primary means of educating students of all races in becoming ­American since the mid-century, and notions of appropriate kinds of labor were entwined with race, gender, and class at FIBS. The Mount Pleasant campus buildings, with their neoclassical facades that evoked Enlightenment values, spatialized the narrow definition of vocational training for Native students along gender norms that trained girls and boys for subservience, making them amenable to domestic and manual labor. Such tasks as cooking, sewing, housekeeping, woodworking, laboring, and farming were considered to be among the only achievable kind of civilized employment for subordinate w ­ orkers of color, and most FIBS had specialized outbuildings and workshops for training in such work. While the structures of FIBS were largely consistent, in the western United States some institutions deviated from the norm. The Phoenix Indian School’s first campus structure, for example, built in 1892, was designed with an elaborate ornamental facade, wrapping columned balconies, and a large central courtyard. The school in Phoenix was part of the OIA’s campaign to expand the Bureau’s presence in the West; however, its superintendent, Wellington Rich, broke from the OIA’s policies by advocating for his pupils to return to their people and assist in their civilization, rather than being fully assimilated into the local American populace. This position clashed with the offreservation method developed by Pratt and the Carlisle school that sought to completely isolate schools from reservations and families. Its central courtyard is not unlike the plazitas of Mission Revival Style buildings that were becoming particularly popular in California around the same time, including among boarding schools, as in the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. The Sherman Institute’s precursor, the Perris Indian School, was established in 1892 as the first offreservation Indian Boarding School in California but was renamed and relocated to Riverside in 1903. The Sherman Institute’s Mission Revival

Style, with adobe brick walls, Romanesque arches, and clay roof tiles, had emerged as the regional style of Southern California and was based in a romantic image of the California mission system that relied on imagined and largely inaccurate architectural elements from the Spanish colonial era. At the turn of the century, the OIA was using architectural exhibits at World’s Fairs to promote its assimilationist message to and garner support for its mission with the American public. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, the OIA built a model Indian school exhibit on the fairgrounds that was a functioning industrial school. Groups of students traveled to Chicago from FIBS around the country and lived in and performed at the model school for weeks at a time, performing their daily lessons and routines for the curious fairgoers. The school exhibit was juxtaposed with nearby ethnographic village exhibits that purported to show the uncivilized Indian so as to emphasize the civilized work of the boarding school students. The architecture of the model school, with exhibition rooms, workshops, and schoolrooms aligned at the front of an otherwise generic and humbly unadorned institutional building design, demonstrated how central the performance and display of assimilation was to the OIA’s goal. The fairgoers, however, were much more interested in the exoticisms of the ethnographic villages than the purportedly civilized students. By the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the OIA would embrace this and built another model Indian school exhibit at a much grander scale in order to combine ethnographic villages, model classrooms and workshops, band and sports performances, and live displays of Indian manufacture such as basket making and blanket weaving under one roof. Christopher T. Green See also Boarding Schools; Native American Children, Religion and Spirituality; Schooling, Gender, and Race

Further Readings Fear-Segal, J. (2007). White man’s club: Schools, race, and the struggle of Indian acculturation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. doi:10.1111/ j.1748-5959.2009.00246.x

Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Green, C. T. (2017). A stage set for assimilation: The model Indian school at the Chicago world’s exposition. Winterthur Portfolio, 51(2/3), 1–39. doi:10.1086/694225 McCoy, R. R. (2012). Mission architecture and Sherman Institute. In C. E. Trafzer, M. S. Gilbert, & L. Sisquoc (Eds.), The Indian school on Magnolia Avenue: Voices and images from Sherman Institute (pp. 35–64). Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. doi:10.1525/ phr.2014.83.1.150 Surface-Evans, S. L. (2016). A landscape of assimilation and resistance: The Mount Pleasant Indian industrial boarding school. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20(3), 574–588. doi:10.1007/ s10761-016-0362-5 Swentzell, R. (1997). Conflicting landscape values: The Santa Clara Pueblo and Day School. In P. Groth & T. W. Bressi (Eds.), Understanding ordinary landscapes (pp. 56–66). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Female Genital Mutilation/ Cutting According to United Nations International Children’s Fund, as of 2017, approximately 200 million girls and women have experienced female genital mutilation/cutting (FGMC). These practices are mostly carried out in 24 countries in Africa but also occur in other parts of the globe. The World Health Organization identifies four types of FGMC. Type 1, termed clitoridectomy, is the removal of the clitoris or its hood. Type 2, excision, is clitoridectomy along with the total or partial removal of the labia minora. The most extreme form of FGMC—infibulation or Type 3—creates a covering seal over a portion of the vaginal opening by cutting and appositioning the labia. Estimates suggest that approximately 10% of cut women have experienced Type 3 FGMC; nearly all of these women live in (or have migrated from) the Horn of Africa. Types of FGMC that do not fit into the first three categories are termed Type 4. Type 4 FGMC typically involves surface cuts or scratches to a girl’s genitals. FGMC has been assigned different labels by different actors. United Nations subdivisions currently use the term female genital mutilation/cutting to signify the importance of the practices as a social

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problem while simultaneously providing a less judgmental term for practicing communities. This entry considers the health consequences of FGMC, why it continues to be practiced in some regions of the world, and FGMC prevention programs.

Health Consequences FGMC can result in negative health consequences including severe bleeding, cysts, infections, and infertility. While all forms of FGMC are ­consequential, Type 3 FGMC is associated with the most severe health outcomes, including an increased risk of an infant dying during childbirth. African and international feminist activists have long advocated for the elimination of the practices, contributing to declarations by the World Health Organization and the United Nations that FGMC is a violation of girls’ and women’s human rights. Current development agendas, reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals, explicitly target FGMC abandonment as a key benchmark for achieving gender equality. There is evidence that the occurrence of the practice has decreased notably in most communities where it was once common. Although this is a promising development, rates of FGMC are currently still high in many parts of the world.

The Perpetuation of FGMC FGMC is locally supported by a combination of social and economic logics. Research points to an institutionalized pattern of perpetuation in which individual, familial, and community characteristics assign more value to girls who are cut. In practicing communities, FGMC may be perceived as a marker of female purity, faithfulness, cleanliness, and sexual inaccessibility. Families cut their daughters to prevent promiscuity and premarital sex, and potential husbands select wives who are cut to ensure the paternity of offspring. This is true despite studies showing uncut women are no less chaste than cut women. A complementary perception, which research also refutes, is that cut women are more fertile and have better e­ xperiences with childbirth. In some communities, families associate FGMC with Islam and see cutting as a

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pious act. This is true despite the fact that most Muslims do not practice FGMC, and many Islamic leaders have denied any connection to the Qur’an. FGMC may also serve as a rite of passage into adulthood. In some communities, a cohort of girls are cut together, at the same time as, but segregated from, a cohort of boys. Because male and female circumcision are coordinated, community members tend to see them as equivalent. FGMC in this manifestation is a sign of maturity, including the ability to endure pain without complaint. Temporary isolation of the girls often accompanies FGMC, with education on intimacy and other topics provided by female elders in the community. For example, among the Sosso in Guinea, most girls received instruction for 1–3 months following FGMC. FGMC may be a community event, prompting celebration. Extended families assign responsibility to mothers for ensuring that their daughters are cut. For many mothers, decisions revolve around when and how to have a daughter cut rather than whether to do so. Even if women would personally prefer not to have their daughters cut, if they live in a region with a high percentage of FGMC, they may experience intense pressure to perpetuate the practice. They may fear approbation from family members and their daughters’ social ostracism if they forgo the practice. Daughters’ marriageability is a key concern for mothers in resource-poor communities where economic opportunities for women are low. Families will forgo the practice only if they know that men are willing to marry uncut brides.

FGMC interventions increasingly prioritize women’s economic autonomy as a strategy to eliminate the practice.

Prevention Programs

Feminism is both a scholarly perspective and a site of political activism regarding children. Feminism’s political activism stems in part from work in areas such as the education, safety, and wellbeing of girls; children’s rights; and the political context of societal representations of childhood. This entry examines feminist approaches to childhood and development. This entry also examines feminist critiques of theories that assert fixed and stable notions of gender identity acquisition and feminist critiques of the family. Finally, this entry examines feminist models of childhood and development and how development theory is rooted in gender-based assumptions.

The most effective anti-FGMC programs, such as the Tostan program in Senegal, integrate antiFGMC campaigns with other community development projects that meet the specific needs of participating villages. Rather than focusing on women and parents, these programs change the normative framework that perpetuated FGMC by also engaging village leaders, men, and youth. This more inclusive approach facilitated hundreds of communities publicly declaring FGMC abandonment, providing a more conducive environment for women to forgo the practice. Many

Elizabeth Heger Boyle See also Child Marriage; Early Marriage; Girls; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Boyle, E. H., & Corl, A. C. (2010). Law and culture in a global context: Interventions to eradicate female genital cutting. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 6, 195–215. doi:10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci102209-152822 Mackie, G., & LeJeune, J. (2009). Social dynamics of abandonment of harmful practices: A new look at the theory (Special Series on Social Norms and Harmful Practices, Innocenti Working Paper No. 6). UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. doi:10.18356/ 9813d82b-en Population Reference Bureau. (2017). Female genital mutilation/cutting: Data and trends. New York, NY: Population Reference Bureau. Retrieved from https:// www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/FGMC_ Poster_2017-1.pdf Yoder, P. S., Wang, S., & Johansen, E. (2013). Estimates of female genital mutilation/cutting in 27 African countries and Yemen. Studies in Family Planning, 44(2), 189–204. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4465 .2013.00352.x

Feminism

Feminism

Feminist Approaches to Childhood and Development Feminist approaches use gender as a lens to detect biases in a discipline, including developmental psychology. Developmental psychologists attempt to describe and account for changes in traits, behaviors, and skills across the life course, especially childhood. Feminist critiques argue against this agenda when it depicts a stereotype: An abstract, universal child who acquires a set of invariant, well-defined traits or behaviors (e.g., gender ­identity) in a predetermined sequence of changes, regardless of social contexts in which gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, and nationality are relevant. Such an agenda is not politically neutral. The child who develops is usually a middle-class boy living in a Western industrial society, so the description of development entails hidden values and maintains the social structure and beliefs that assign more power and choices to some individuals than to others. Specifically, the agenda works to devalue women, restricts girls’ development, and narrows our view of children and the changes they undergo during their life course. Feminist critical analyses address this picture of the child at three increasingly broad levels—(1) specific areas of development, (2) the role of social structures in development, and (3) the overall depiction of development. First, taking gender as an example, feminist critiques challenge accounts of the nature of gender categories, the process of acquiring gender identities, and gender differences. Second, feminist critiques are often more expansive as they implicate the diverse nature of the social structures and cultural traditions in which children acquire not just gender but a wide range of skills and concepts. In particular, gender, race, ethnicity, country of origin, social class, and sexuality help construct the childhoods of individuals. Third, some feminists argue that the very structure of the language, concepts, and measures that are used to depict development in general is colored by gender and social biases. The tendency to use male behavior and patterns of development as the norm by which to depict development limits models of development.

Feminist Critiques of Gender Identity Acquisition Feminist critiques of childhood and development have targeted many aspects of development. Some

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of the most powerful critiques, however, focus on gender identity. Feminists usually frame the acquisition of a gender identity within a social psychological perspective. Thus, they ask why gender is such a salient facet of identity and how that salience produces attitudes and behaviors that create a gender identity. They point to the way our language draws attention to gender by marking it explicitly in third person pronoun usage (he or she) or gendered nouns such as postman or actress. Children are also treated differently according to their perceived gender. These experiences foster the initial formation of the categories of male and female. While the members of these groups are usually quite diverse and their characteristics and behaviors usually differ across the life span, young children, who are still relatively novice categorizers, simplify their experiences to produce stereotypes (gender schemas) of male and female. Those stereotypes become filters for incoming information, such that children are likely to fail to process information counter to the stereotypes. They also use these newly formed binary categories to label themselves and other members of these groups. Once they are selflabeled, they regard themselves as members of an in-group, which is to be defended against outsiders. Thus, they exaggerate the differences between groups and favor their own group against the opposite sex. Experimental research demonstrates that children with stronger stereotypes are more likely to filter counter-stereotypical gender data. However, the research also shows that it is possible to teach children how to counter stereotypes to some extent. Feminists also address the content of the stereotypes through critical analyses of sex differences and their emergence in childhood. They claim that analyses of sex differences rest on questionable assumptions. They doubt that gender is a dichotomy dictated by genetic and anatomical differences or that biology defines gender identity (see, e.g., transgender individuals). Feminists argue that there are in fact several genders, or gender may be a continuum. Moreover, within any gender group behaviors and traits are highly variable. There are girls who are gifted in math and boys who flunk science courses. Moreover, any particular individual will vary in the expression of traits and behaviors depending on the situation and on opportunities to acquire and

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express the behaviors. Consequently, feminists contest the validity of an often used milestone to study children’s acquisition of gender concepts, gender constancy. Gender constancy is the embodiment of achieving the stereotype, for example, “I am a girl, no matter what I wear.” Instead, feminists claim gender identity is dynamic. For feminists, acknowledgment of the looseness of categories and the context sensitivity of traits and behaviors is central to acquiring and understanding gender. Thus, they put gender into a social context. In short, feminist analyses show that society’s emphasis on gender and its depiction of children as boys or girls distorts definitions of the nature of childhood by marginalizing children who do not easily fit into prototypic binary categories of male and female or are gender fluid. The diversity within gender categories due to variations in race, ethnicity, and class also are downplayed.

Feminist Critiques of Depictions of The Family Gender is part of a social structure which seeks to preserve its hierarchical power structure and favors certain roles while disfavoring others. Those disfavored roles are often associated with the family. Feminists note the bias in depictions of the family. Many accounts of child development, such as John Bowlby’s and Sigmund Freud’s, claim that a child’s development is shaped by early interactions with the mother. The mother is thought to shape the course and pace of development through sensitively responding to her child’s needs and providing tutelage and support in the coping skills that will enable a child to go out and conquer the world. Thus, the mother’s identity is tied to her role in child-rearing and her importance fades from view as the child gains autonomy. The child development literature is full of instances of mother-blaming for instances of children’s failure to establish a bond with their mother or to make a smooth transition to independence. There may be cultural and economic barriers preventing mothers from living up to the idealized assigned roles and those same barriers may create different mother–child interaction patterns than those of the Western middle-class family which is the foundation of some depictions of early child

development. For example, the expectation that mothers should immediately engage infants as conversational partners is not universal. Expectations for parenting and child behavior also differ across eras. In the 1920s, children’s feeding was expected to conform to schedules, and discipline was strict. The advent of Freudian concepts led to more permissiveness. Beliefs about discipline (e.g., spanking) and other aspects of child-rearing differ among families who differ in, for example, urban versus rural settings, economic status, racial identity, or cultural background, although textbooks in child psychology still depict the idealized interactions of the Western, White, middle-class child denizen of a nuclear family. Because the depiction of mother–child interaction is idealized, often insufficient attention is paid to the material and political conditions in which child-rearing takes place. The availability of contraception, medical care, stable political structures, and family friendly political structures affect parent and child. They limit the opportunities afforded children and their families. Feminists particularly emphasize the status of women. If the end goal of parenting is to raise a self-confident child with a strong sense of autonomy, it is ironic that the woman who rears that child is herself not granted autonomy and status and that her own legal and social independence is often limited. Even the depiction of that idealized family is incomplete. Other members of the family such as fathers and siblings influence a child as well as make demands on the mother’s time. The family structure may vary and influence who interacts with the child and the role each plays. A home environment with single working mothers or with large families or multigenerational families creates a different pattern of interaction with infants than one in which a stay-at-home mother with ample material and social support interacts with a single child. Thus, the depiction of the abstract universal child (embedded in a mother dyad the child must shed) omits the social structure in which the mother, child, and dyadic relationship develops. It seriously distorts the nature of children and developmental processes by making it seem as if the particulars of that social structure are irrelevant to what and how and when a child develops and how a child is viewed. Feminists assert that

Feminism

the social structure is masculine and the child who develops is male. So is the picture of development. Social changes such as more opportunities for women and girls and increased awareness of gender and racial biases, gender diversity, and cultural variations have had some impact on research and theorizing on childhood and development. Still, psychological researchers continue to develop normative models of an abstract, decontextualized developing child. This is reflected in the naming of the discipline of research on children. In the early days of the field, research was the outgrowth of interdisciplinary child study. The name changed to child psychology, then developmental psychology. The current rubric is developmental science, to reflect the quest for far-reaching generalizations about children and for biological explanations of developmental change. The models of development and the choices of topics to study have reflected the search for objective truths and rigorous methods of study that are typical of the physical sciences, disciplines that continue to be dominated by males.

Feminist Models of Childhood and Development Feminist critiques have led to new questions and new models of children and their development. Critiques of gender development are leading to more fluid, flexible, and diverse models of gender development. For example, one new question is “Do individual children vary in how much they identify with stereotypic male interests and activities and stereotypic female ones, and does this ratio change developmentally?” Critiques of limited, biased depictions of the family have led to more attention to family structures and values (e.g., respect for parents and elderly, meaning of parental control) that differ across cultures. Coparenting and contributions of fathers to childrearing are topics of research. Other examples are models of cognitive development, and even development more generally, that move away from depictions based on male values and interests. Dominant cognitive theories characterize cognitive development as a march toward rational, logical, objective thinking by autonomous individual thinkers—all hallmarks of the ideal

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Western White male scientist. This view focuses on mastery and competition for resources and takes physical objects as the targets of thinking. Both Jean Piaget’s theory and information-­ processing approaches, which use computers as an analogy for thinking, have furthered this model of cognitive development. In contrast, feminist approaches emphasize connections and collaborations. Examples are understanding connections among people, objects, or events; constructing meaning with other people; and developing cognitive skills that are adaptive in one’s cultural environment, which may differ across racial and socioeconomic groups. More value is placed on connections and cooperation than on separation, autonomy, and competition. The way the social and physical world looks to children and the available resources for cognitive development depend partly on where a child is situated in a society organized by gender, race, and class. Thus, feminist perspectives provide balance to traditional views of development. Feminist scholarship also provides alternative metaphors to the prevailing metaphors of development more generally. The typical characterization of the goal of development as logical, rational thought achieved by an independent thinker lends itself to stereotypically masculine metaphors. Development is an argument or evolutionary survival of the fittest in a battle between immature and more mature ideas and strategies. The direction of development and the push for change are described through the metaphor of an arrow or a tall building that children may construct or climb. This contrasts with metaphors suggested by feminist theory rooted in social interaction. Growing up in a society is challenging, and children must search for meaning and direction. Childhood is an apprenticeship in which the novice learns through conversation and friendships how to interact with and negotiate the child’s environment. The goal of development is to learn how to make sense of the world. The study of development is the study of people’s histories including the obstacles and byways they encounter as they deal with historical change and diversity. Development as a narrative always includes a setting which provides opportunities as well as a protagonist who holds a particular social position in a dynamic social structure.

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How Development Theory Is Structured by Gender Feminism offers perspectives that broaden our understanding of children, childhood, and development. It also provides a cautionary tale, for any discipline, that scientists and citizens must constantly be vigilant for cultural biases that limit the understanding of experience and restrict the development of future citizens. Such biases emerge in the choice of what to study (in research) or fund (e.g., in social services), how to depict children and families, and what social policies to develop. Of special concern are normative descriptions that reinforce the existing power differentials of gender, race, and social class.

Feral Children ‘Feral children’ (or wild children) is the term used to designate children believed to have spent a long period of time in isolation from other human beings. Although the motif of children raised by animals or isolated from human contact has featured prominently in myth and literature since antiquity—Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan being among the best known examples— the number of reported cases of ‘real’ feral children is very small. This entry examines the history of accounts on feral children and debates about feral children and why the idea of feral children has long fascinated child studies scholars.

Ellin K. Scholnick and Patricia H. Miller See also Developmental Psychology; Developmentality; Family; Mothers/Motherhood

Further Readings Barker, M. J., & Richards, E. (2015). Further genders. In C. Richards & M. J. Barker (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of the psychology of sexuality and gender (pp. 166–182). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137345899_11 Burman, E. (2008a). Deconstructing developmental psychology (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Burman, E. (2008b). Developments: Child, image, nation. New York, NY: Routledge. Lloyd, G. (1984). The man of reason: ‘Male’ and ‘female’ in Western philosophy. London, UK: Methuen. Martin, C. L., Andrews, N. C. Z., England, D., Zosuls, K., & Ruble, D. N. (2017). A dual identity approach for conceptualizing and measuring children’s gender identity. Child Development, 88(1), 167–182. doi:10.1111/cdev.12568 Miller, P. H., & Scholnick, E. K. (Eds.). (2000). Toward a feminist developmental psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. Scholnick, E. K., & Miller, P. H. (in press). Categories, gender, and development: A feminist perspective. In N. K. Dess, J. Marecek, & L. C. Bell (Eds.), Gender, sex, and sexualities: Psychological perspectives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ oso/9780190658540.001.0001 Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London, UK: Routledge.

The History of Accounts on Feral Children In the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, published in 1758, the Swedish naturalist and taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus introduced the category ‘Homo ferus’ (wild man) as a quadruped, mute, and hairy variety of the species ‘Homo sapiens’, and he listed the six cases of feral children known at the time, including the wolf boy of Hesse and the bear boy of Lithuania. In 1964, the French social psychologist Lucien Malson listed 53 cases in his book Les enfants sauvages: Mythe et réalité [translated into English as Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature], and by the early 21st century, the website FeralChildren.com, which is no longer extant, listed slightly more than 100 throughout the world, most of them from the last 2 centuries. Despite the small number of cases, the concept of feral children and a few famous feral children in particular, such as Victor of Aveyron and Genie of Los Angeles, have played a significant part in the history of the developmental and social sciences and continue to be routinely mentioned in psychology and sociology textbooks today. The earliest European accounts, dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, refer to children found living among wild animals or alone in the wilderness. In the 20th century, the category was expanded to include children who, like Kaspar Hauser and Genie, were isolated through confinement in a dungeon, basement, room, or house. The most recent cases are either children who suffered lengthy confinement and abuse in the

Feral Children

developed West or children found with animals in non-Western locations ravaged by war, poverty, famine, or natural disaster. All the feral children exhibited atypical behaviour and many of them were severely delayed. Since the 17th century, the discovery of a new feral child, and surviving accounts of past feral children, have aroused intense interest and provoked heated debates among philosophers, naturalists, and scientists.

Debates About Feral Children Debates about feral children have revolved around three questions: (1) To what extent were the accounts reliable or unreliable? (2) How could the children’s strange behaviour or developmental delays be explained, and what caused them? (3) What could be learned, through the study of feral children, about human nature, childhood, normal and abnormal development, and learning? For those who accepted the accounts as fact, the children’s condition and symptoms—unusual locomotion and food preferences, lack of speech, animal-like habits, desire to escape—were the effects of prolonged isolation. Isolation was thought to have caused striking changes in the children’s appearance, behaviour, and development that in most cases proved irreversible. What the feral children’s miserable condition showed was that without contact with others a child does not become fully human. Many scholars challenged the authenticity and reliability of the evidence, however, claiming that the accounts of the circumstances in which the children were found were often based on hearsay or secondhand testimony and that the extent and length of their isolation could not be definitively established, especially as the children themselves did not speak or had no distinct memories of their earlier lives. According to this view, the condition of the (so-called) feral children was due to a congenital defect, not isolation, in other words, to (defective) nature rather than (lack of) nurture. To this day, none of the cases has been confirmed as a universally accepted, incontrovertible feral child.

Feral Children as a ‘Forbidden Experiment’ Throughout the history of the human sciences, feral children remained fascinating because they

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seemed to offer a natural and thus guiltless occurrence of what Roger Shattuck has called the ‘forbidden experiment’: the idea that, if a child were to be raised in complete isolation, it would be possible to discern the true nature of ‘man’ and understand the precise contribution that nature and society make to human development. Enlightenment philosophes like Julien Offray de La ­Mettrie, the abbé de Condillac, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the known examples of feral children to prove or disprove the existence of innate ideas, probe the natural state of man, and speculate on the origin of human diversity and humanity’s progress from ‘savagery’ to civilisation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, with the rise of medical, social, and developmental sciences, what came to the fore was the attempt to civilise, educate, or rehabilitate the feral child. At the beginning of the 19th century, Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard devoted several years to the treatment and education of Victor of Aveyron, which resulted in a new, medico-pedagogical method partly inspired by the sign-language education of the deaf. When Itard’s efforts failed to lead to Victor’s full recovery, the conclusion seemed to be that the cause of his, and by extension other feral children’s, condition was congenital defect, not isolation. The feral child was not wild but abnormal. Still, Victor’s progress, however limited, was taken as proof that ‘idiocy’ (the term used at the time to indicate intellectual disability) could be treated, and Itard’s method influenced the history of special education and, through Maria Montessori, a great admirer of his work, of child-centred and progressive education. More recently, feral children’s abnormality was reinterpreted not as intellectual disability but as autism. This explanation, first proposed by the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim in 1959, is now widespread in the autism field, even though Bettelheim’s views on autism have been for the most part rejected. But scientists who held on to the theory that isolation was the cause of the feral child’s condition argued that what Itard’s failure to teach Victor showed was simply that the ability to learn decreases or disappears after a certain age. In the early 1970s, Susan Curtiss reached this conclusion after observing and testing Genie’s linguistic development. The notion of critical periods for the acquisition of certain skills (like language) was advanced to explain

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why the effects of isolation and deprivation in childhood could be irreversible. Feral children form a controversial category. The feral child has been variously perceived, at different times and by different people, as a wondrous phenomenon, a natural experiment, a valuable case, or an example from which we can learn something important about ourselves as humans or make generalisations about childhood and development, an emblem of freedom and closeness to nature, a victim of violence or neglect, a sad reminder of our inability to care for vulnerable children, or just a figment of our imagination. Adriana S. Benzaquen See also Child as Other/Stranger; Nature Versus Nurture; Special Education

Further Readings Benzaquén, A. S. (2006). Encounters with wild children: Temptation and disappointment in the study of human nature. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. doi:10.1086/599639 Newton, M. (2002). Savage girls and wild boys: A history of feral children. London, UK: Faber and Faber. Shattuck, R. (1980). The forbidden experiment: The story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux. doi:10.1002/1520-6696 (198404)20:23.0.co;2-h

Fetal Personhood A fetus may be defined, in biomedical terms, as an unborn vertebrate from the embryo stage until birth. Any attempt to define the fetus has, however, been a contentious point of debate over the last several decades. These debates have often centered on the question of when life begins and what constitutes a child. There remains little consensus among those who believe that personhood, and therefore childhood, begins at fertilization, conception, some point during pregnancy, or at birth. This entry offers an overview of legal, political, medical, ethical, and social debates regarding fetal personhood and examines shifting ideas about fetuses in the late 20th and early 21st

centuries. This entry further examines both feminist and childhood studies perspectives on fetal personhood. This entry begins by highlighting the particular impact imaging technologies have had on understandings of and debates on fetal personhood.

Imaging Technologies and Representations of the Fetus Interest in, or fascination with, the fetus has escalated in both public discourse and private experience since the 1970s. A proliferation of fetal images in medical journals, popular magazines, advertisements, movies, and family photograph albums attests to this popular turn toward the fetus. Before then, however, the fetus was largely inaccessible to the public and knowable almost exclusively through the oral accounts of pregnant women. Several new imaging technologies were invented in the second half of the 20th century that made fetuses visible. Imaged by these technologies, the fetus became, for the first time, a clinical entity and an object of the medical gaze. In acquiring a visible public presence, the fetus was reimagined. The invention and diffusion of ultrasound technology, in particular, contributed to the profusion of fetal images in medical practice and the public domain. Ultrasounds use high-frequency sound waves to create images of internal body structures. In medical practice, ultrasound is often used as a prenatal diagnostic technology. Outside of clinical settings, ultrasound images have been circulated by expectant parents as baby pictures and employed by advertisers to channel adult concern about children toward consumption. Ultrasound imagery of the fetus has also been taken up by antiabortion advocates as evidence that the fetus is a person (and that abortion is therefore murder). Much sociological and anthropological research on the fetus has thus focused on ultrasound technology as artifacts of profound cultural significance. In recent decades, visual renderings of the fetus have become highly politicized. In 1965, a series of fetal and embryonic images by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson was published in Life magazine. Nilsson’s photographs gave a large audience a window into the womb for the very first time. In the years since Nilsson’s

Fetal Personhood

photographs were published, they have been widely disseminated (often without his permission). Antiabortion activists in particular have used them to advance their cause and to move their argument for fetal personhood from the courts to the cultural realm. The effect of Nilsson’s work, recent research suggests, was to animate the fetus through biomedically mediated visual representation. This technological or seemingly scientific presentation of fetal images via sonography was readily adapted to advance political agendas. Researchers have thus charged that ultrasound technology has allowed for the enduring politicization of the fetus in the United States.

The Legal, Political, and Social Status of Fetuses Debates about fetuses and their legal, political, and social status have also proliferated in tandem with new modes of visualization. Within a span of roughly 70 years, legal definitions of when personhood begins went from birth in the 1880s, to viability in the 1940s, to conception in the 1950s. Today, personhood laws attempt to position fetuses as the youngest citizens and grant them full constitutional rights, including the right to life. Similarly, fetal pain laws make claims about fetal personhood by suggesting that fetuses are capable of feeling pain. For decades, states have been proliferating fetal homicide statutes, and in 2004, the federal government passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Like its state analogs, this act makes it a crime to kill or injure a fetus in utero. On the other hand, when the passage of Roe v. Wade (1973) legalized abortion in the United States, part of the Supreme Court’s reasoning was based on the finding that the fetus was not a person for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and was therefore not guaranteed a right to life. Researchers have found that changing legal statuses of the fetus have been reflected in the popular domain. While embryonic and fetal specimens were once proudly exhibited at world’s fairs, this practice has not only fallen out of favor in recent decades but prompted criminal charges. While states construct fetal citizens through laws and judicial rulings, parents have turned to

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the family photo album to reimagine the fetus as a child or potential child. Sonography has become a common ritual of obstetric practice, and the commercial availability of ultrasound technology has created an even wider market for keepsake fetal images. These technologies present an opportunity for the public to acquire fetal ultrasound images at their own expense, outside the purview of medical authority. This has aroused some concern that fetuses are being reduced to the status of commodities. Newer three- and four-dimensional ultrasound devices are also marketed as capable of generating highly realistic fetal images. While examining the relationship between fetal imagery and consumer desire, some scholars have also found an increase in the use of fetal imagery in print advertisements where the term baby has often been employed as a proxy for fetus.

Feminist Analysis Feminist scholars have asserted that the topic of ultrasound imaging and prenatal testing calls for women-centered analyses. In fact, there has been a profusion of feminist scholarship on the way in which fetal imagery has served to frame the fetus as a singular individual entity that is functionally separate from a woman’s body. Studies find that this separation most often results in the erasure of the mother’s subjectivity in favor of the fetus’s. The emergence of fetal surgery as a new medical specialty also sits within this thorny debate about the fraught relationship between fetal subjects and women’s subjectivity. Fetal surgeons treat birth defects by opening a woman’s uterus to operate on the fetus or via fetoscopic or percutaneous fetal therapy. For some, fetal surgery is highly problematic as it privileges medical treatment of the fetus over the health of the pregnant woman in which surgery is performed. In most feminist scholarship, sonographic images thus work in tandem with fetal surgery to mute women’s subjectivities. Feminist researchers have also considered the role of fetal imagery in imagining and regulating disabling conditions and arbitrating normality. This research has thus positioned disability rights and fetal discourses as linked feminist issues. Some of the newest areas of medical research

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focus on devising noninvasive tests to check the fetus for genetic disorders, improving ways to test the fetus for developmental disabilities, refining the ability to build the genetic profile of the fetus, and studying the effect of substances on the health and development of the fetus. In addition to ultrasound technology and sonography, medical technologies such as amniocentesis, intrauterine transfusions, and chorionic villus sampling have allowed greater access to fetuses and greater control over the regulation of fetal abnormalities. Growing concerns about exposure to environmental threats such as drugs, alcohol, chemicals, and radiation have also spurred public interest in fetal health since the mid-20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, the drug thalidomide, marketed and widely used for the treatment of nausea in pregnant women, was found to cause severe birth defects. In 1973, fetal alcohol syndrome was identified and within only a few years of being named attained medical and governmental credibility via the issuance of a surgeon general’s warning against drinking while pregnant. The much publicized fervor around thalidomide and fetal alcohol syndrome led to an increased interest in fetal vulnerability while equating the image of the fetus with children in need of parental and governmental protection.

Fetal Personhood and Childhood Studies Childhood studies approaches childhood as a social construction rather than a biological or material reality. In this way, the outer upper limits imposed on notions of childhood, such as 18 or 21 years, are understood as contested and arbitrary markers that become rife with meaning over time. The means by which Americans impose chronological boundaries upon the process of aging out of childhood thus offers a paradigmatic example of how cultural meaning and social hierarchy are constructed. While conflicts exist about the upper limits of childhood and who counts as a child, notions of fetal personhood stretch the contours of these debates even further to consider the lower limits. This makes fetal debates ripe for study by scholars of childhood. Indeed, one popular theme of current research in childhood studies is to historicize and politicize cultural notions of the fetus. Heather Reel

See also Abortion; Baby, Social Construction of; Disabilities; Family Photography; Pregnancy

Further Readings Casper, M. J. (1998). The making of the unborn patient. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Dubow, S. (2010). Ourselves unborn: A history of the fetus in modern America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Golden, J. L. (2009). Message in a bottle: The making of fetal alcohol syndrome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morgan, L. M. (2009). Icons of life: A cultural history of human embryos. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morgan, L. M., & Michaels, M. W. (Eds.). (1999). Fetal subjects, feminist positions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Newman, K. (1996). Fetal positions: Individualism, science, visuality. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Nicolson, M., & Fleming, J. E. (2013). Imaging and imagining the fetus: The development of obstetric ultrasound. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. doi:10.3138/cbmh.31.2.253 Petchesky, R. P. (1987). Fetal images: The power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction. Feminist Studies, 13(2), 263–292. doi:10.2307/3177802 Rapp, R. (1999). Testing women, testing the fetus: The social impact of amniocentesis in America. New York, NY: Routledge. Rothschild, J. (2005). The dream of the perfect child. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Taylor, J. S. (2008). The public life of the fetal sonogram: Technology, consumption, and the politics of reproduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. van Dijck, J. V. (2011). Ultrasound and the visible fetus. In J. V. van Dijck (Ed.), The transparent body: A cultural analysis of medical imaging (pp. 100–117). Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Film,

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From the very beginning of cinema, the child has been a favored subject. When Louis and Auguste Lumière premiered their 10 short films at the first ever paid public screening of films on December

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28, 1895, two films featured children. Repas de Bébé (also known as Baby’s Dinner and Feeding the Baby) is a brief black and white actuality or documentary in which Auguste Lumière and his wife take turns feeding their baby daughter while sitting at an outside table. L’Arroseuer Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled, also known as The Waterer Watered), widely considered to be the first fictional film and first film comedy, shows a gardener using a hose to water flowers when a boy about 10 years old sneaks up to stand on the hose and block its flow of water; when the gardener looks to check the hose, the boy releases the hose, the hose squirts the gardener, and the gardener chases the boy and spanks him. These two films underscore the centrality of the image of the child to the cinema. They not only launch a broad tradition of using children as subjects for film but also represent the twin poles of child representation in film, between the innocence of the baby and the menace of the prankster, between the idea of the child as priceless and the child imagined as a problem. Sometimes a figure of innocence, and sometime menace, the child in film is rarely shown as trouble free, or as untouched by life, but as a social being grappling with the world around him or her. The figure of the child is central to the history of cinema. Representations of the child and childlike characters were central to silent cinema in the child impersonations of adult actresses such as Mary Pickford who starred in adaptations of The Little Princess and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (both 1917) or Lillian Gish who acted as a girl in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Jackie Coogan became the first child star in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921). Many cinematic movements, at the moment of their emergence, turn to the image of the child. The French New Wave, Italian neorealism, New Hollywood, and the Australian New Wave all begin with key childcentered films; and genres such as the musical comedy, melodrama, horror, and war films often feature children. Certain directors such as F ­ rancois Truffaut, Vittorio De Sica, Yasujirō Ozu, and ­Steven Spielberg are particularly associated with child films. The child in film needs to be distinguished from the children’s film as genre. Where the latter characterizes films aimed at child spectators,

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the former captures the broad span of representations of children in film of all kinds, not necessarily limited to or even appropriate for child viewers. This entry focuses on the figure of the child in live-action films, to differentiate between drawn or computer-generated images of children and the filmed representation of child actors. The child appears in films where she or he ranges from a minor player or background character to the star. This entry focuses on films in which children and conceptions of childhood are central to the film. Far from a comprehensive survey, this entry highlights just a few important landmarks and trends in representations of the child in film.

The Child in Depression Era Hollywood Films The Depression was the era of the child star. Figures such as Shirley Temple, Jackie Cooper, Freddie Bartholomew, Dickie Moore, Virginia Weidler, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Jane Withers, and the ensemble actors of the Jones Family, Dead End Kids, and Our Gang film series saturated the screen. In a sense, child films provided a palliative counter to the miseries of the Great Depression. Rather than deflect or ignore the traumatic effects of the Depression in a purely escapist mode, however, images of childhood in the 1930s serve to acknowledge and work through many of the anxieties of the Depression. In the 1930s, the displacement of children from home, loss of parents, and loss of income created a sense of crisis around childhood, with fears about child homelessness, runaways, truancy, and risk, all potentially leading to child endangerment and the loss of innocence. At the same time, as Viviana Zelizer explains, from the late 19th century through the 1930s, perceptions of childhood shifted, from viewing children as economically worthwhile participants in public and family life to being economically worthless, but emotionally priceless. The child star thus worked to reassert the pricelessness and innocence of childhood at a time when the status of the child—his or her worth, and his or her innocence—was up for grabs. The child star, of course, embodied contradictorily both the image of the priceless child and the image

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of extreme wealth and success under capitalism, as a figure whose labor was simultaneously celebrated and obscured. Many viewers and commentators today assume nostalgically that the child star era was an age of innocence. However, children in Depression-era texts are very often orphaned or displaced or even homeless; shown as trapped in poverty, or falling out of the middle or upper class into poverty. Often, they are workers, or petty criminals, subject to the economy, not outside it. Films focused on children in this period situate the child in an urban milieu structured by economic status and often outside traditional family structures. There is sweetness and sentiment in these films, to be sure, and moral virtue, but never lack of knowledge or complete insulation from harsh realities. The films of the Dead End Kids, for example— played by the actors Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabe Dell, Bernard Punsley, and Bobby Jordan—show a group of lower class boys in New York who exist as a gang, outside familial norms. For most of the boys, parents are absent or off-screen: a mother yelling for her son to come home or a boy’s casual description of his father drunkenly beating the boy’s mother in Dead End (1937). The Dead End Kids are generally associated with low-level criminality. The films usually involve run-ins with the police. The kids use slang expressions and malapropisms rather than correct English. Their postures are simultaneously slouchy and antagonistic: They slump on stoops, perch on top of tables, walk aggressively, and move quickly from a state of repose to a fighting stance. They do not follow the rules of society in terms of manners or law. They are frequently seen spitting, shoving people, committing petty crimes, colonizing spaces, and antagonizing both grown-ups and other kids. The Dead End Kids adhere to a strictly coded law of the streets that demands loyalty to the group and no squealing. In the film Dead End, for example, Tommy (Halop) attempts to carve “the mark of the squealer” onto the forehead of his friend Spit (Gorcey) when he discovers that Spit has named him to police. The gang also operates by a system of exclusion that denies membership to girls, effeminate boys, and others. Dead End shows membership as a privilege accorded the new kid on the block, Milty (Punsley), only after he has passed a series of tests, including being

cockalized, which consists of his being thrown to the ground, his pants pulled down, dirt rubbed onto his genitals, and then spit upon. While the Dead End Kids fit into the idea of the child as problem, Shirley Temple’s films align more readily with the idea of the child as priceless. Temple’s cuteness and sweetness is clearly part of her appeal. Nonetheless, her films show her as knowing and street-smart, not cloistered from the world. Temple’s 1930s films repeatedly enact an economic fall, echoing the stock market crash that brought on the Depression, in which she is unmoored from home and family. In Just Around the Corner (1938), her fall occurs when her single father loses his position as an architect who designs skyscrapers. Temple, as Penny, is moved away from her private school and back to the exclusive Riverview hotel where her father lives; but, where previously they had the penthouse, now they live in the basement, beneath street grates that show people walking above. This shift in status also moves her out of the private play area inside the hotel and into the alley nearby which is filled with tough street urchins. Temple’s films navigate the uncertainty of family in the Depression by offering a model of family based on contingency and love rather than blood. Temple’s fall from wealth to poverty in these films makes her mobile. Her mobility leads her to have contact with strangers. Instead of risk, however, this contact transforms strangers into family. In numerous films, Temple meets and charms a bachelor who, through her influence, transforms from a man-child or an unproductive member of society—gambler in Little Miss Marker (1934), con man in Now and Forever (1934), rich playboy in Stowaway (1936), aviator without a home in Bright Eyes (1934)—into a man ready for marriage. The woman is drawn partially to Temple and partially to the new more mature man—a man she has previously found unmarriageable. The newly formed family takes the instability of families in the Depression and renders it less of a problem.

The Child in Art and Auteurist Cinema While the child is central to Depression Era ­Hollywood films, the child is also prominent in art cinema movements and among the work of

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certain film auteurs. The child is central to the French New Wave in films such as The Red Balloon (1956) and in Truffaut’s oeuvre, in particular, with such films as Les Mistons (1957), The 400 Blows (1959), Wild Child (1970), and Small Change (1976). These films not only showcase the French New Wave style in their use of location shooting, freeze frames, ambiguous endings, and camera mobility but also in their emphasis on film as personal expression of the auteur. In Truffaut’s films, the child sometimes functions as a stand-in for the director in semiautobiographical tales. In The 400 Blows, for example, the experiences of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) echo many of Truffaut’s own childhood experiences, such as his early rearing by a grandmother, his felt sense of being unloved by his parents, and the director’s refuge in books and movies. At the same time, these films embrace the romantic view that the child’s undisciplined nature may indicate his artistic capabilities and not just his delinquency. The child is equally prominent in Italian Neorealism and especially De Sica’s films, such as The Children Are Watching Us (1944), Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thief (1948), and Heart and Soul (1948). In these films, the child is less a vehicle for the director’s personal expression than pictured as an innocent victim of social forces beyond his or her control whose experience underscores the contingency and frailty of life for everyday people. De Sica shows characters subject to forces of modernity and urbanization, experiencing poverty, homelessness, crime, unemployment, and abuses of power. In Shoeshine, for example, Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) and Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) are duped into participating in a burglary, then jailed in a brutal boys prison, where they experience overcrowding, institutional indifference, violence, and betrayal, leading to the dissolution of their friendship and one boy’s death. In Bicycle Thief, young Bruno (Enzo Staiola) witnesses his poor unemployed father’s dissolution into crime as he seeks to locate a stolen bicycle that is his only ticket to employment in a context of deep poverty and lack of opportunity.

The Child as Symbol Perhaps no director is more associated with the figure of the child than Spielberg. In films such as

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982), Poltergeist (as writer 1982), Empire of the Sun (1987), Hook (1991), and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Spielberg has imbued childhood with a sense of wonder. Nostalgic and sentimental, Spielberg’s representations of children invite audiences to identify with the child as a lost part of ourselves, in a prelapsarian fantasy of being uncorrupted by experience. The child in Spielberg’s films is the one who can welcome the alien and love unconditionally and whose travails can move audiences to tears.

Child Subgenres: Horror and War Films One of the most surprising aspects of the child in cinema is how often the child is represented as being in peril or as being himself dangerous. Two subgenres of child-focused films particularly focus on the child as potentially in danger or dangerous, often at the same time. In child horror films, the child is often both antagonist and victim. In The Bad Seed (1956), adorable pigtailed Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) blithely murders ­ classmate Claude Daigle, seemingly to obtain his penmanship medal. In this film, Rhoda’s malfeasance is attributed to bad blood, as one discovers that she is the adopted child of a serial killer. In The Other (1972), one meets two twins, Niles and Holland Perry (played by twins Chris and Martin Udvarnoky). Initially led to believe that Holland is the bad boy who leads Niles to misbehave, one comes to realize that Holland is dead, his presence only imagined by Niles, and that Niles murdered both him and his father, to obtain a family ring that he perceives as a crucial heirloom. Here, the child’s evil seems to have a psychological explanation, as a transference in which Niles takes on the persona of Bruno Hauptman. The Japanese film Dark Water (2002) shows the child Ikuko (Rio Kanno) tormented and threatened by a ghostly child whose mother abandoned her and who drowned after wandering home from school alone. In this film, the ghost child forces the live child to leave the home so she can have the girl’s mother as her own. Along with horror films, child soldier films also show the child as both victim and antagonist, usually by having the child become a victim forced to become a murderous soldier. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s

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Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Ivan is orphaned during World War II, as his mother and sister are murdered. He becomes a scout for the Russian army behind enemy lines. Although three adult male soldiers attempt to protect Ivan, their efforts are futile in the context of war and Ivan is captured and executed by German soldiers. War Witch (2012) focuses on the life of Komona (Rachel Mwanza) in sub-Saharan Africa as she is forced to murder her parents and become a child soldier at age 12 years. As she is repeatedly raped, Komona unsuccessfully attempts to abort her baby, then escapes, and becomes a mother at age 14 years, on the run in a dangerous and uncertain world. Beasts of No Nation (2015) similarly shows Agu (Abraham Attah) forced to join a group of soldiers in an unnamed African country. Like Komona, Agu is raped and brutalized, subject to the whims of the Commandant (Idris Elba) and ultimately traumatized so that even as he is rescued his ability to become a child again is uncertain.

Conclusion Central to film history, the child in film can be innocent or menacing, victim or villain. An ­examination of the child in film provides a lens through which one can examine not only changing conceptions of childhood but also film authorship, movements, and motifs. Pamela Robertson Wojcik See also Child; Child Actors in Film and Television; Priceless Child; Temple, Shirley; Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S.

Further Readings Getz, L. (2006). From Broadway to the Bowery: A history and filmography of the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and Bowery Boys films with cast biographies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hatch, K. (2015). Shirley Temple and the performance of girlhood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Howe, A., & Yarbrough, W. (Eds.). (2015). Kidding around: The child in film and media. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Lebeau, V. (2008). Childhood and cinema. London, UK: Reaktion Books.

Lury, K. (2010). The child in film: Tears, fears, and fairytales. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Studlar, G. (2013). Precocious charms: Stars performing girlhood in classical Hollywood cinema. Berkeley: University of Californian Press. doi:10.5860/choice .50-5495 Wojcik, P. (2016). Fantasies of neglect: Imagining the urban child in American film and fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wojcik-Andrews, I. (2000). Children’s films: History, ideology, pedagogy, theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Zelizer, V. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Folklore, Children’s Folklore is the term for the everyday, informal, sometimes artistic communication in small groups. Folk groups can be as small as two people or as large as a group can be and still provide for frequent face-to-face communication. Even the ­ face-to-face element can be adjusted to account for the folk cultures that emerge in electronic communication on the Internet and in social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, SnapChat). ­Folklorists generally look at three large categories of communication in folk groups—oral culture (e.g., stories, jokes, proverbs, insults), material culture (things made by people or machine-made things appropriated by people for their own use in the folk groups), and customary culture (e.g., pranks, foodways, celebrations, initiations). Folklore can be instrumental (i.e., useful, func­ tional for the individual and the group) and expressive, a human pleasure for its own sake. Folklorists consider folklore communication to be an important resource for people to make sense of their experiences, as individuals and in groups. Folklore provides people with traditional ways to deal with social and psychological anxieties they experience in everyday life. Those who study children’s folklore often include the folklore of adolescents, seeing great continuity between childhood and adolescence in societies with enough wealth that adolescence can

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be a relatively separate stage in the life cycle. While some societies cannot afford for children to remain outside of the work economy for very long, in most Western societies, childhood is extended and adulthood delayed. In some prosperous societies, adolescence extends into the 20s, which is why children’s folklorists study university student cultures and their continuities with adolescent cultures. Thus, children’s folklorists tend to study young people ranging from about age 3 or 4 to 23 years. This entry draws mainly upon research in the folklore of children and adolescents in the United States, but there is a considerable body of children’s folklore collection and analysis in other countries, including Brian Sutton-Smith (1924– 2015) on the children of New Zealand, Iona (1923–) and Peter Opie (1918–1982) on children in the United Kingdom, Dorothy Howard (1902– 1996) on the children of Australia, and various monographs on societies ranging from Northern Ireland to Japan. After briefly discussing early folklore studies on children and adult attitudes about youth cultures, this entry examines play as a fundamental element of children’s folklore and describes children’s folk groups. Two themes that pervade the folklore of young people—the body and power—are also examined. Finally, this entry examines the role of popular culture and, specifically, emerging digital cultures in children’s everyday lives.

Early Folklore Studies and Children In the late 19th century, anthropologists and sociologists began studying living groups in addition to the history of human groups, and some saw children as one of the groups whose folk customs would disappear with the onslaught of modernity. Just as anthropologists engaged in salvage ethnography, recording and preserving the customs and traditions of Native American and other primitive groups before they disappeared, so some anthropologists studied children’s games, songs, and other folklore of the urban streets as a similar exercise in salvage ethnography. Stewart Culin collected and described the street games of children as early as 1871. For many decades, folklorists studying the informal cultures of children in small groups stressed collection, often through

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fieldwork but also sometimes interviewing adults about the games and play of their childhoods. The ultimate goal is to interpret the uses and meanings of the folklore in order to understand their instrumental and expressive value as resources for managing everyday life. Children are everywhere, and childhood varies across time and space. At the same time, scholars of children’s cultures find remarkable similarities and continuities, fueled in large part by the biology of human development. Thus, while adolescents everywhere feel the same impulses driven by their hormones, different societies have different ways to deal with the biological changes.

Adult Attitudes and Children’s Folklore Those who study children’s folklore encounter in adults several attitudes that warp or impede the understanding of the everyday lives of children and adolescents. First, every adult was a child once and tends to project her or his own childhood experiences onto all children. Cleary this is an error, as so many human particularities— including gender, ethnicity, geographical settings, sexual orientation, religion, and nationality—help shape how a child experiences the world. This assumption about the universality of childhood and, therefore, of children’s folklore is related to another adult assumption in Western societies. The Romantic era in Western Civilization (late 18th century well into the 19th century) had its impact on adult attitudes about children, and the Romantic view casts children as innocents whose natures are kind and good. One consequence of this Romantic view of childhood is the belief that children can be victims of corruptible influences and must be protected by adults. Historians point to what they call moral panics, when parents, teachers, and public officials identify a threat to children and create institutional responses to the perceived threat. Still another adult attitude impeding understanding of the cultures of children and youth is what Sutton-Smith called the triviality barrier to the study of children’s play and folklore. On this view, children’s cultures—especially the autonomous children’s cultures folklorists so often find— are trivial, not important, and therefore not worthy of serious study. The phrase child’s play

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captures the easy dismissal of children’s cultures by adults. Still another adult attitude about children has made it increasingly difficult for adults to have access to the natural settings (e.g., street corners, playgrounds, empty lots) where one finds children’s informal and even formal folk groups. Beginning in the 1980s, adults expressed a moral panic about the sexual abuse of children. As sociologist Joel Best and others pointed out, this moral panic was far out of proportion to the actual abuse and reflected other cultural anxieties and conflicts, but the net effect of the panic was to cut off folklorists’ access to children not their own. This means that fewer and fewer scholars have been able to study the folk cultures of children in those natural settings.

Aside from the basic paradox of play, folklorists have noted another paradox of children’s play, what Gary Alan Fine calls Newell’s Paradox, named after William Wells Newell, whose 1883 collection of Games and Songs of American Children founded the field. Newell’s Paradox, stated simply, is that children’s folklore is simultaneously very conservative and very creative. Children’s jokes and parodies, for example, can be very conservative and stable over time and space, but the formula of a knock-knock joke is an open vessel for children to insert their most recent experiences and concerns. The same is true of parodies of adult sacred traditions, like the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance and the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Children’s Play and Folklore

Children’s friendship groups form early, in neighborhoods, at parks, and on the school playground. Scholars who have studied children on school playgrounds (mainly in the United States) observe that through the early grades the children seem to segregate by gender and age. For a long time, folklorists thought that boys in the United States tended to engage in more physical, aggressive, and competitive play, while girls tended to be less aggressive and less competitive, playing cooperative games. Ethnographic (fieldwork) studies of girls’ play from the 1980s to the present have shown that girls are very competitive, but until the 1980s they exerted power in play indirectly, which they intuited and observed in contemplating how females could take power in a patriarchal society. Over time, the play of girls has come to resemble more and more the play of boys. In the United States, scholars have attributed that change to Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments (1972), which guarantees young women access to the team sports in schools, access equal to the men. Thus, the movement for the equality of women has had its influences on the play of children and adolescents. Beyond the informal culture of the friendship group, children and adolescents also form folk cultures in more formal organizations, including youth groups (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and religious youth groups) and sports teams. Often in these organizations, the children and adolescents have enough freedom to create, sustain, and even

The study of children’s play and games is a wellestablished field on its own and contributes greatly to the study of children’s folklore. The most important characteristic of play, a characteristic anthropologist Gregory Bateson called the paradox of play, is that everything within the play frame is understood by the players to be not real. The subjunctive, what if? nature of play means that youth can explore, within the time and space of the play frame, identities and activities and emotions that may not be available to them in everyday life. Psychologists see children’s play as instrumental in the development of physical and mental skills in children. Sutton-Smith, trained as a developmental psychologist, was also a folklorist and championed the study of children’s play and games in live settings—on the playground, on the street corner, at summer camps, and in other settings for children’s culture beyond the classroom and beyond the child development laboratory. Sutton-Smith and his colleagues used children’s understanding of stories and jokes to measure the developing cognitive abilities of children, but he and his colleagues also understood the social dimensions of the play and games. Folklorists think of folklore as a resource for living, as a resource for making everyday lives more meaningful. Children, like adults, have psychological anxieties (e.g., fear of the dark) and social anxieties (e.g., maintaining a friendship).

Children and Their Folk Groups

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repair their own folk cultures while still under the surveillance of the adults.

Themes in Children’s Folklore Body

Children’s bodies change, and when they pass through puberty into adolescence, their bodies change even more dramatically. Folklore provides ways to express their anxieties about their bodies. In the United States, younger children’s folklore very often features content referring to two great mysteries to the young—birth and death. Most young children, certainly those in Western societies, carry erroneous understandings about pregnancy and childbirth. A well-known example of these beliefs in folklore is the jump rope rhyme, “Cinderella, dressed in yellow,” a rhyme that refers to kissing and a resulting bellyache. Children’s folklore also reveals their thinking about death. Folklorists read the children’s song and game “Ring Around the Rosie” as commentary on childhood epidemics and deaths (“Ashes, ashes, all fall down”), and in the United States, children circulated a cycle of dead baby jokes in the 1980s, which analysts associated with adult discourse about abortions. Adolescents circulate legends regarding the dead and even organize legend trips to purportedly haunted sites like houses and cemeteries. Beyond birth and death, other themes in the folklore of children and adolescents feature the bodily systems that adults try to socialize when children are young—eating, urinating, and defecating. During the socialization of these bodily systems, young children come to understand that their bodies can be the sites of control in the face of adult wishes. Folklorists favoring psychoanalytic interpretations note that the struggle to control eating, urinating, and defecating creates fixations that appear later in children’s and adolescents’ folklore as symptoms—folk speech, folk customs, and even folk material culture. It is not necessary to employ psychoanalytic understanding, however, to recognize how much folklore in youth cultures focuses on food, drink, urinating, and defecating. An important principle in folklore and anthropology is that the human body is a

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perfect symbol of a society, and an important aspect of that observation is that materials that cross the bodily boundaries—among them food, drink, air, urine, feces, blood, milk, semen, tears, and saliva—are considered dangerous (crossing the boundary between inside and outside) and most are subject to cultural taboos and other symbolic treatment. Children use the energy of that danger in their folklore. For example, children play with food and develop traditional forms of this play. The oral folklore of children and adolescents also is filled with folk speech, jokes, riddles, and other genres featuring food, urine, and feces. Jay Mechling discovered this in the folk speech, games, and campfire skits at the California Boy Scout troop encampment; he studied a pattern linking food and feces. Bodily mutilation in the folklore of young people also expresses their anxieties about their changing bodies. For a while, American young children told grosser than gross jokes and a cycle of cruel jokes and riddles about bodily mutilation. Most children like dirty play—they are profane, obscene. Adolescent anxiety about bodies also enters the more elaborate genres of folklore. For example, the famous legend of The Hooked Hand features a romantic adolescent couple in a car parked in a dark place and a murderous man with a hook for a hand. Folklorists have seen many themes and many meanings in this legend, some open and some hidden. One theme is the danger of adolescent sexuality, represented both by the couple and by the hooked hand (a symbolic penis). The legend builds tension and fear around sexuality and then ends with the couple being safe but knowing they avoided a terrible experience (they find the hooked hand on the door handle). Adolescents are an eager audience for oral folklore that could be considered horror stories, that is, ghost stories and contemporary legends, these days told most often around campfires and in college residence halls. The body also plays a central role in the folk custom of hazing and initiations. Although one normally associates hazing with university fraternities and athletic teams, adolescents younger than college age—usually male—often engage in hazing new members into the folk group, quite often a youth sports team. Hazing, which is illegal in some states in the United States and which is

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against the rules of formal organizations, represents the darker side of human play. The male groups that haze usually require the initiates to be naked and subject them to ritual humiliation, involving genital play and eating or drinking disgusting materials. Power

Children know very well that they have little real power in the informal institutions (e.g., family) and formal institutions (e.g., school, organized sports, youth organizations) they move through in their everyday lives. From early childhood, play provides a what if? frame for children’s exploring power they do not experience in the frame of everyday life. Imaginary play opens up roles for children, whether they are playing house and experimenting with pretending to be mothers and fathers, or scripting their play borrowing from television and films (superheroes). Some childhood games provide a safe frame for experimenting with power. Central person games, such as it games (e.g., tag, kick-thecan), let children experience for the limited time and space of the play frame a role of power over other players. When dealing with the adults who have them under surveillance so many hours a day, children find folklore a resource for resisting that power. Children parody adult norms and values. Children’s parodies often embrace nonsense as the antidote to the sense adults impose, and children’s folklore often pits disorder against adult order. Folklore is a valuable resource for resistance against adult control because of its indirection; that is, jokes and other oral lore can be used instead of direct aggression and resistance. Even adults in less powerful positions value this indirection. Children and adolescents also find folklore a useful resource when negotiating power within their folk groups. Friendship groups always experience a tension between hierarchy and equality, and children use their folklore to manage their friendships. Tease and taunts, for example, are gentle ways to spar in a friendship group, so long as the members can maintain a play frame (or its relative, the joke frame). Friendship groups can even manage verbal (ritual insults) and physical play fighting within the play frame.

The fact that girls’ play in the United States is more and more like boys’ play means that girls seem more comfortable employing what had been traditional male folklore to manage friendships. Decades ago, folklorists would say that girls managed their friendship groups with less aggressive folklore genres like secrets, but the increasing confidence of girls and young women and their experiences in traditionally all-male settings has all but erased most gender difference in the management of friendships. Girls’ sports teams increasingly haze new members in much the same way boys’ teams and fraternities haze new members, and testimony from women in the military shows how well women are adopting the folklore that used to be seen only in male groups.

Children’s Folklore and Popular Culture Popular culture, also called mass-mediated culture or commercial culture, plays a large role in the lives of children in many industrialized societies, especially the United States. By the early 20th century, businesses found children and adolescents as a market for toys and games, but after World War II and the rise of television, children emerged as a market with disposable income for consuming the shows and the products advertised in the shows. Eventually, video gaming and computer gaming rivaled television for children’s commercial attention, and in the 21st century, many children around the world have handheld devices for viewing television shows and movies and for playing games. Children’s folklore actually enters popular culture narratives, such as the Bloody Mary children’s game that appears in the film Candyman (1992), and The Hooked Hand legend that enters several horror films. This makes good business sense, appropriating the genres and themes of children’s folk cultures and selling them back to the children. Folklorists are most interested in the ways children appropriate popular culture in their folklore, an element demonstrating Newell’s Paradox. Many adults, from parents and teachers to public policy makers, believe that consuming popular culture is harmful to children and adolescents. A common argument in this particular moral panic about threats to children is that popular culture

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destroys children’s creativity and imagination. Folklorists generally take a different view, seeing children and adolescents as creative, active agents rather than passive consumers of popular culture. Children and adolescents quite often appropriate ideas, themes, and narratives from popular culture into their folklore, especially their play. Mechling saw many examples of this in the summer Boy Scout encampment he studied for two decades, and Sutton-Smith and others have found children incorporating television and videogame characters and scenarios into their live play. Jay Mechling See also Adolescence; Boys; Girls; Peer Culture; Youth Culture

Further Readings Beresin, A. R. (2011). Recess battles: Playing, fighting, and storytelling. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi. doi:10.14325/mississippi/9781604737394 .003.0003 Bronner, S. J. (Ed.). (1988). American children’s folklore. Little Rock, AR: August House. Bronner, S. J. (2012). Campus traditions: folklore from the old-time college to the modern mega-university. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. doi:10.14325/ mississippi/9781617036163.001.0001 Burn, A., & Richardson, C. (Eds.). (2014). Children’s games in the New Media Age: Childlore, media, and the playground. Burlington, NJ: Ashgate. doi:10.4324/ 9781315571591 Fine, G. A. (1987). With the boys: Little League baseball and preadolescent culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226223544 .001.0001 Goodwin, M. H. (2006). The hidden life of girls: Games of stance, status, and exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell. doi:10.1558/genl.v4i1.165 Mechling, J. (1986). Children’s folklore. In E. Oring (Ed.), Folk groups and folklore genres: An introduction (pp. 91–120). Logan: Utah State University Press. Mechling, J. (2001). On my honor: Boy Scouts and the making of American youth. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. doi:10.1525/ctx.2002.1.2.58 Opie, I., & Opie, P. (1959). The lore and language of school children. Oxford, UK: The University of Oxford Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (1959). The games of New Zealand children. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Sutton-Smith, B., Mechling, J., Johnson, T. W., & McMahon, F. R. (Eds.). (1995). Children’s folklore: A source book. New York, NY: Garland. doi:10.2307/j .ctt46nskz Tucker, E. (2008). Children’s folklore: A handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Food Studies

and

Children

Food studies is an interdisciplinary field of research that uses the study of food to investigate diverse sociocultural processes. Because eating is both a biological necessity and a cultural practice, studies of food are particularly well situated to examine the interplay of material and symbolic dimensions of social life. Until recently, food studies scholarship paid little attention to children, except as recipients of care within the family. The 2009 publication of Children, Food and Identity in Everyday Life marked an important shift in this regard, as editors Allison James, Anne Kjorholt, and Vebjorg Tingstad framed the volume as the first to bridge the fields of food studies and childhood studies. Children relate to food in multidimensional ways: as growing bodies in need of nourishment, as young consumers within capitalist markets, and as members of peer cultures negotiating identities. Thus, studies of food and children contribute to key areas of interest for childhood studies scholars, including family, health, identity, and inequality. This entry examines the real and symbolic value of food, food preparation, and eating in children’s lives and further examines how children are impacted by food policies and marketing campaigns. This entry concludes by examining the critical role ­children play in ensuring food justice and food security now and in the future.

The Real and Symbolic Value of Food The work of feeding children is integral to the production of the family. In addition to meeting children’s nutritional needs, family food provision includes a range of sociocultural commitments such as instilling ethnic traditions, teaching appropriate manners, promoting healthy habits, and fostering good taste. Scholars have explored how

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contemporary concerns about a perceived decline of the family meal reveal broader anxieties about shifts in family life. In their book, Food, Families, and Work, British scholars Rebecca O’Connell and Julia Brannen critique the way in which such claims position working mothers as a threat to contemporary childhood. Their research shows that even when participating in the paid labor force, women continue to perform the majority of family food provisioning. As women’s feeding labor is both idealized and scrutinized, a child’s diet comes to be seen as a measure of good or bad mothering—evaluations that are often infused with race and class stereotypes. Childhood studies scholars note that food is not simply transferred from parent to child; children play an active role in shaping family food dynamics. Contrary to idyllic portrayals of the family meal, everyday food routines are frequently characterized by struggles over authority and control. American anthropologists Amy Paugh and Carolina Izquierdo have shown how food disagreements between parents and children are infused with ideas of morality. Food is commonly perceived as a realm in which adults know best and must teach children to govern their desires; yet, in responding to the food they are served, young children experience one of the earliest opportunities to express preferences of their own. In their research with Danish families, Malene Gram and Alice Gronhoj found that families worked to develop clear food rules, but these rules were flexibly adapted in the negotiation of everyday life. Yet even rules that are broken hold symbolic significance. Collective definitions of what constitutes children’s food not only shape the eating experiences of individual young people but also contribute to the cultural construction of childhood. Children are often defined in terms of their potential, and food is considered essential to the development of a healthy childhood. Recent research with Canadian mothers reveals new pressures to protect children from the apparent risks of an industrial food system, where chemical additives are said to threaten children’s development. In this context, the provision of safe, pure food has come to be seen as an essential component of middle-class mothering, creating the gendered and classed ideal of the organic child. This pressure to

protect children through careful consumption emerges within a neoliberal context in which health is framed as an individual responsibility. Beyond specific concerns regarding children’s exposure to food chemicals, increasing rates of childhood obesity have been framed as a threat to future population health. Food studies scholars have approached the issue of childhood obesity from a range of perspectives. Some investigate the shifting nutritional practices and political economic factors that have contributed to an increase in children’s average body size, while others critically examine the construction of childhood obesity as a social problem. The latter approach is taken by Kristina Gibson and Sarah Dempsey in their analysis of chef Jamie Oliver’s television show, Food Revolution. These scholars argue that the narrow framing of childhood obesity as a problem of individual children’s poor food choices obscures the political economic processes shaping school meals, as well as the economic and racial inequalities structuring the food options available to children. In an Australian context, Tanya Zivkovic and colleagues demonstrate how print media discursively construct the obese child as a product of failed mothering. Still others investigate children’s experiences growing up in a fatphobic culture that defines obesity as a new category of risk. Here, food studies have contributed to the scholarly literature on embodiment, with particular focus on the gendered pressures girls face in relation to diet and body size.

Food Policies and Food Marketing Campaigns Debates surrounding child obesity raise critical questions about who bears responsibility for children’s well-being: from parents and families, to advertisers and corporations, to public institutions and governments, to young people themselves. Thus, studies of food and children can provide insight into the overlapping realms of public and private life, including the interplay of governments, families, markets, and institutions. For example, Susan Levine’s book on the history of U.S. school food reveals a complex constellation of historical factors that have shaped students’ midday meal, including Progressive era efforts to assimilate immigrant children, Depression era

Food Studies and Children

policies subsidizing American agriculture, and civil rights campaigns to combat hunger. Through this complicated history, shifting approaches to feeding children shed light on broader political, economic, and sociocultural dynamics. Similarly, Amy Bentley’s study of the development of commercial baby food exposes historical shifts in nutritional guidelines, child-rearing advice, and conceptions of good taste. Throughout this history, we see that from the earliest phases of life, childhood is deeply embedded within market relations—a key insight put forward by consumption scholars like Dan Cook and Viviana Zelizer. While analyses of food policy and marketing ­campaigns provide insight into shifting childhood ideals, ethnographic research illuminates the complexities of children’s everyday food lives. Such studies reveal food to be an important resource in the formation and maintenance of peer relationships and identities. Misako Nukaga’s ethnographic study of students’ lunchtime rituals in Los Angeles found that children used practices of food sharing to perform ethnicity. Similarly, Amy Best explores the high school cafeteria as a youth space in which identities are enacted through a racialized geography of peer groupings as well as ­gendered scripts of food exchange. Jo Pike shows how spatial relations of surveillance and discipline cultivate particular student subjectivities in the English school dining room, while Eyal Ben-Ari demonstrates how food is used to cultivate a sense of group belonging and collective responsibility in the Japanese preschool. Other scholars have explored the multiple and sometimes conflicting understandings of school food that coexist within this space. Stine Hansen and Niels Kristensen examine contrasting perspectives on eating in a Danish kindergarten: one focusing on the sensory experience of food pleasure and the other focusing on the rational prescription of nutrition. Engaging with scholarship on materiality and corporeality, their work offers a rare analysis of children’s embodied experiences of eating in a context that is so often dominated by developmental notions of health. While food can provide an important resource for identity, children’s access to food is shaped by broader systems of inequality. The concept of food insecurity refers to a lack of consistent and reliable access to nutritious, culturally appropriate

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food, which is a common experience for many children living in poverty. While research on household food security tends to rely upon parents’ assessments of child hunger, social work scholar Maryah Fram has shown that children are often aware of their family’s food struggles and may take steps to manage these pressures, such as downplaying their hunger or eating at friends’ houses. Others have explored youth’s strategies for managing the stigma associated with hunger and the receipt of government food assistance, such as food stamps or free school meals. In addition to studies of food and poverty, scholars have drawn attention to the institutionalized racism perpetuated through the design of urban food environments; poor communities of color are much more likely to be designated as food deserts that lack supermarkets or grocery stores. Thus, a young person’s food options are not only shaped by the kinds of foods available within their homes and schools but also the landscape of their local community. While public health scholars highlight the nutritional dangers of a corporate food environment filled with unhealthy options, youth scholars have shown how commercial food spaces are often highly valued sites of youth culture. The work of Wendy Wills and colleagues in Scotland suggests youth may be drawn to commercial food establishments not only because of the items on the menu but also because they experience a sense of respect in these spaces that is not afforded to them in the school cafeteria. Thus, even in studies of the urban foodscape, material and symbolic dynamics intertwine.

Children and Food Justice and Security Finally, a growing literature explores children’s role in various movements that position food as an important resource in struggles for change. These projects vary in form (e.g., community gardens, farm-to-school programs) and pursue diverse kinds of goals (e.g., nutritional, environmental) but share the fundamental belief that young people’s relationship to food holds critical ­ implications for collective futures. Communica­ tions scholar Garrett Broad warns against an individualizing and romanticized narrative of magic carrots, which suggests that teaching children to grow vegetables will immediately solve systemic

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food problems. Instead, he argues that projects like school gardens are most effective when they are embedded in broader movements to promote community health. The term food justice refers to movements that explicitly challenge exploitation and oppression within the food system. Food ­justice projects provide youth with opportunities to collectively address issues like institutional racism and food security within their communities. Nevertheless, Broad’s research reveals that even within youth-centered food justice movements, struggles may arise around generational power relations, as movements negotiate young people’s influence in setting priorities and determining strategies for action. In this way, research on youth’s involvement within food movements can contribute to broader debates about young people’s political participation. Bringing interdisciplinary perspectives to questions of care, well-being, identity, and inequality, food studies offers a lens onto the interplay of material and cultural dimensions of childhood. While the literature on food and children has expanded significantly in the past decade, this research remains largely dominated by studies in America, Canada, Europe, and Australia. As the field continues to grow, hopefully researchers will address this limitation by engaging more closely with children’s food lives in the global South. Kate Cairns See also Gender; Obesity; Youth Culture

Further Readings Bentley, A. (2014). Inventing baby food: Taste, health and the industrialization of the American diet. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/ 9780520959149 Best, A. (2017). Fast-food kids: French fries, lunch lines and social ties. New York: New York University Press. doi:10.18574/nyu/9781479842704.001.0001 Brembeck, H., Johansson, B., Bergstrom, K., Engelbrektsson, P., Hillen, S., Jonsson, L., . . . Shanahn, H. (2013). Exploring children’s foodscapes. Children’s Geographies, 11(1), 74–88. doi:10.1080/14 733285.2013.743282 Broad, G. (2016). More than just food: Food justice and community change. Berkeley: University of California

Press. doi:10.1525/california/9780520287440 .001.0001 Gibson, K. E., & Dempsey, S. E. (2015). Make good choices, kid: Biopolitics of children’s bodies and school lunch reform. Children’s Geographies, 13(1), 44–58. doi:10.1080/14733285.2013.827875 James, A., Kjørholt, A. T., & Tingstad, V. (Eds.). (2009). Children, food and identity in everyday life. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/ 9780230244979_1 Levine, S. (2008). School lunch politics: The surprising history of America’s favorite welfare program. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1525/ gfc.2009.9.4.104 Nukago, M. (2008). The underlife of kids’ school lunchtime: Negotiating ethnic boundaries and identity in school lunch exchange. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 37(3), 342–380. doi:10.1177/ 0891241607309770 Paugh, A., & Izquierdo, C. (2009). Why is this a battle every night? Negotiating food and eating in American dinnertime interaction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 19(2), 185–204. doi:10.1111/ j.1548-1395.2009.01030.x Pike, J., & Kelly, P. (2014). The moral geographies of children, young people and food: Beyond Jamie’s school dinners. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781137312310_8

Foster Care, U.S. Foster care typically refers to care for children provided in a state-authorized system of licensed homes or other out-of-family environments. The term may be used as equivalent to foster family care or temporary care in family homes by licensed foster care providers who are probably not related to the child. However, kinship care arrangements that are authorized, supervised, and usually subsidized by the state (sometimes only through food stamps and access to Medicaid) are also a very common form of foster care today, as are group home environments. At times collectively referred to as dependent children, to distinguish them from delinquent children (a distinction that has historically been racialized in the U.S. context), foster children today have often been forcibly removed from their biological parents by state agents based on a court order for separation due to an

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assessment of abuse, abandonment, and/or neglect. However, occasionally parents or kin themselves request state intervention and help—especially during times of widespread economic distress, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. With a specific focus on the United States, this entry examines the early history of foster care, the forms it has taken across cultures over time, and the status of foster care in the late 20th to early 21st century.

destructive force of enslavement, under which some elderly or disabled enslaved women were forcibly enlisted into providing care for young children while their parents were forced to labor, frequently at a distance. Yet at the same time, Black, Indigenous, and new immigrants have routinely been excluded from government or charitable services for children, including the foster care system or being seen as reliable providers of foster care services.

The History of Foster Care in the United States

Culturally Contingent Models of Foster Care

In the United States, foster care is one of the few forms of the public assistance available to struggling families and children. As a system, it has long been quite fragmented, decentralized, and primarily operated by local organizations. Today many care providers contract with private agencies (for-profit or not-for-profit) with state-level oversight, in contrast to more federalized post– World War II European models. This level of localization and privatization makes providing equal services to all of these most vulnerable citizens extremely challenging, if not effectively impossible. National child welfare organizations have sought throughout the 20th century to the present to provide guidelines and best practices for social workers and care providers, and U.S. Federal funding protocols have especially shaped foster care since the 1960s, which has provided some consistency of practice. Under the auspices of largely unregulated capitalism in a settler colonial context, children have often been separated from their parents and kin, whether the parents’ primary presenting factor is a serious illness or a disability; inadequate access to resources or paid work; unrecognized, legal rights to the care and custody of their children; an attempt to cope with a need to move in order to get a job; other forms of forced migration; abusive behaviors or living conditions deemed unsafe for children, and so on. Communities of color, recent immigrants, and the poor generally have been most vulnerable to the forcible separation of their families—most overtly under conditions of enslavement or in the boarding school movement for Native peoples. A majority of Black families prior to the Civil War were subject to the

It should be noted that every culture that sustains itself over generations develops systems for caring for children who are separated from their initial parent(s). Indeed, many traditional cultures do not organize themselves around the isolated, twoparent household model, and so would say that they do not have orphans and therefore lack a concept of foster care. For example, large, matrilineal Iroquoian clan groups in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada lived together in large long houses, with maternal relatives playing important roles in child-rearing. Black, Indigenous, and the large variety of U.S. immigrant cultures all developed family cultural norms that were adapted to their situations, but those that differed from White American middleclass norms were often not recognized as healthy by 19th-century child savers or, later, by social workers, who then readily advocated child removal from these families. Thus, many in marginalized communities view foster care as a means of destroying strong families rather than as a support for struggling families. Black and Indigenous people’s experiences in relation to the foster system have roots in the models of child welfare and custody arrangements that were imported to the United States by European settler colonialists, with English models and precedents having particular prominence. The patriarchal legal models of these immigrants tended to judge children’s worthiness of receiving care and resources based on (a) their legitimacy (i.e., whether they were born to a legally married couple and claimable by the father as a legal inheritor of his property) and (b) their value as laborers—with fathers having an exclusive right to control their

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children’s movements and to own the profits from the children’s work. Fathers could, and did, indenture their own children to live and work in other people’s homes. In the absence of a legally recognized father, orphaned or illegitimate children could be involuntarily indentured by local government officials to live and work in other homes for little or no pay. Often there were at least limited educational requirements that the masters of these homes were also legally expected to provide to their fostered or indentured children, but enforcement was difficult. Sometimes very young children, who could not work, were sold to the lowest ­bidder—the person who would provide care most cheaply—or sent to baby farms. Historically, the term foster care has been used quite loosely, routinely encompassing a variety of institutions in the United States, such as orphanages, boarding homes, informal adoptions, work homes, and indentureships. Notably, most of these arrangements involved no governmental assistance or involvement. For much of U.S. history prior to the mid-20th century, for instance, a child might be left temporarily in a charitably funded orphanage—which were typically segregated by race and religion and very few offered services to non-White children—while parents recovered from illness or sought work elsewhere, often with an intention of retrieving them later. Or, if parents had a little more money, they might pay another family to take care of a child during times of distress, a protoform of foster care usually called boarding out. The orphan trains arose in the mid1800s as a charity-based model of placing out, whereby mostly White, immigrant children (the majority not fully orphans) were sent from Eastern cities to the Midwestern countryside, where agricultural and domestic laborers were scarce and in great demand. Evidence suggests some impoverished youth and families in urban zones chose this program as the child’s best opportunity for a better life. The founders of this approach often argued that life in a family home was a better alternative for most such children than either their troubled families or the more regimented life imposed on children in orphanages. From these roots, foster care arose in the 1930s in the United States as a public child-welfare system, although still largely handled at the local level. Since the late 1800s, reformers had argued that

families should not have to be split up simply due to poverty. Many of those who advocated for and crafted the 1935 Social Security Act in the throes of the Great Depression hoped to offer a variety of family-preservation programs in addition to Aid to Dependent Children, which offered cash-based assistance to some poor families. A key goal of providing financial support was to make out-of-home care much less frequently called for. Some hoped to make foster care a specialized service available to families of all income levels in times of crisis or while dealing with ongoing special challenges.

Foster Care in the Late 20th to 21st Centuries Despite these ideals, foster care has remained largely a program associated with poor families— both in terms of those providing care and the families whose children are pulled into care. Foster care has a social stigma, as a result, that is particularly challenging for children growing up in the system who are often framed as damaged. Foster children are, like all teens, resilient and resourceful. They have also experienced specific traumas, including the violence of separation from kin or caregivers (even from abusive family members), the general uncertainty of their lives, and any number of other systemic failures outside of their control. Thus, they suffer high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder and other physical, mental, and emotional conditions, which most child welfare professionals today understand as requiring trauma-informed care. This concept, which became mainstream in the late 20th to early 21st centuries, requires an excellent public health infrastructure available to impoverished and vulnerable populations and training for foster care providers. Meanwhile, concerns about foster care drift, children getting lost in the system through multiple changes of foster homes, and a strong political interest in cutting funding to welfare programs led to the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997. The Adoption and Safe Families Act focused on more quickly terminating the rights of families whose children have been placed into foster care, with a stated goal of moving those children into adoptive placements rather than focusing most efforts on family reunification or on providing for a more robust public care infrastructure. Many

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children today continue to age out of this imperfect system without access to either consistent family or a strong social safety net. Lori J. Askeland See also Adoption, History of; Baby Farms; Child Savers/ Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History; Foster Parenting; Institutionalization of Childhood; Orphans and Orphanages as Childcare in the United States

Further Readings Askeland, L. (2006). Children and youth in adoption, orphanages, and foster care: A historical handbook and guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Billingsley, A., & Giovannoni, J. (1972). Children of the storm: Black children and American child welfare. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. doi:10.1093/sw/20.3.252 Birk, M. (2015). Fostering on the farm: Child placement in the rural Midwest. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. doi:10.5406/illinois/9780252039249.001.0001 Briggs, L. (2012). Somebody’s children: The politics of transracial and transnational adoption. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822394952 Jacobs, M. (2014). A generation removed: The fostering and adoption of Indigenous children in the postwar world. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Roberts, D. (2002). Shattered bonds: The color of child welfare. New York, NY: Basic Books. Rymph, C. (2017). Raising government children: A history of foster care and the American welfare state. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. doi:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469635644.001.0001

Foster Parenting Foster parenting refers to the care of children and young people who have, typically, become wards of the state when biological parents are deemed unable to care for them. This entry focuses primarily on foster parenting as it is conceptualized in Western industrialized nations where there are well-developed childcare services. The entry provides a basic introduction to the subject of foster parenting, including information on how foster care is organized, connections between fostering and adoption, why children are taken into the care

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of the state, and outcomes for children and young people in care.

The Structure of Foster Parenting Foster parenting is a response developed in a context where the model of the nuclear family predominates, and this was developed in Western industrialized nations as a positive alternative to institutional care toward the end of the 19th century. Foster parents are assessed by the state in order to judge if they are suitable to serve the role of caring for children and young people and are provided with training and support by the state. Foster parenting is distinct from adoption in as much as the state continues to be in loco parentis of the children, with the foster parents providing day-to-day care. Foster parenting may be short or long term, with many foster carers specializing in either short- or long-term care. Some foster parents are trained to provide specialist care or treatment care when a child or young person has significant social, emotional, and/or medical needs. Some foster parents have their own biological children living with them. Some foster parents care for only one child; some foster parents care for multiple children and young people. Residential care homes for children and young people still exist. However, they tend to be used in relation to admission to state care, short-term stays, breakdowns in placements, and specialist forms of care. Children in foster care often have direct contact with their birth parents, and it may be that they return to live with them after a period of foster care. Typically, direct contact between adopted children and their biological parents is much more unusual; some contact may be maintained through letters passed through a third person (typically social service providers). Social workers also stay in regular contact with children who are fostered and their foster parents. Social workers do not, typically, stay in contact with adopted children/ young people and their adoptive parents. This is because adoption is regarded—in an ideal world— as a substitute for a biological family. Fostering is the joint responsibility of the state and foster parents, and foster parents are expected to follow rules laid down by the state and to facilitate contact with biological parents. This contact is

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typically supervised by a social worker. Foster parents, in turn, cannot oppose the removal of children who have been in their care. In a number of Western industrialized nations, a significant number of young people are placed with foster parents in the expectation that they will care for those children or young people until formal adulthood. In many cases, these young people are regarded as unlikely to be adopted due to their age or because of the special care they require. Some of these young people are asylum seekers who have traveled without their parents. Younger children (under 5 years of age) are, typically, placed with those who provide short-term care, with a view to those children either returning to their biological parents or being adopted. These younger children typically spend a few months to 1 year in care before being adopted.

Foster Care and the State Foster parents receive payment from the state for the services they provide. Typically, adoption does not involve payment by the state, although in the case of particularly hard to place children and young people the state may provide financial assistance to adoptive parents. Once the young person formally reaches adulthood, the state no longer reimburses foster parents for their care. Nevertheless, some foster parents and children form long-term commitments to one another and in some cases children or young people are formally adopted by their foster parents. Yet as emphasized in Sir Martin Narey and Mark Owers’s 2018 study, Foster Care in England: A Review for the Department of Education, what happens to young people when they leave foster care continues to be a major concern. A small number of children and young people are given over to the care of the state by their biological parents, who are unable to manage their care or difficult behavior. More typically, children and young people are taken into the care of the state when their biological parents are seen as unable to adequately care for them. The most common reasons given for this are neglect, abuse, and/or addictions. Some children experience multiple foster care placements due to a number of factors which include but are not limited to problems associated with settling with carers, children

moving between biological parents and foster parents on a number of occasions, and failed adoptive placements. It is quite commonplace for relatives of the biological family to care for a child or children when biological parents cannot. This may be grandparents, aunts, uncles, or other birth relatives. This is known as kinship care. In some cases, this care is formalized through the foster care system, and these carers receive payment for the care they provide. It is generally regarded that kinship care is preferable to other forms of care, respecting as it does existing ties and relationships. The number of children being taken into the care of the state in developed countries varies across those countries and across time. Governmental policies reflect different positions in relation to the perceived appropriateness of state intervention in family life. Religious beliefs, rate of births outside marriage, the strength of the extended family tradition, and poverty levels of inequality all play a part in rates of children in the care system. In the United Kingdom, for example, there has been a growth in the number of children being taken into care after a series of highly publicized instances of child abuse and murder. It is posited that social workers have become more likely to recommend a child be taken into care where there are increased child protection concerns. Conversely, beliefs about the harmful effects of being taken into care also affect the numbers in care. This means that there are various push and pull factors that affect the numbers being taken into care.

Outcomes of Children Placed in Foster Care A number of studies highlight very poor outcomes for children and young people who have been in the care of the state. This includes poor educational attainment, rates of homelessness, involvement in the criminal justice system, drug use, and suicide rates. However, the picture is complex in relation to the population concerned who may have encountered similar difficulties if they had remained with their biological parents. It is also the case that figures on outcomes are sometimes misinterpreted and exaggerated. An issue of continuing concern relates to the lack of ongoing support from caring adults after a young person reaches legal adulthood.

Frank, Anne

Attachment theory is widely felt to describe children and young people’s difficulties when being cared for by foster or adoptive parents. The International Foster Care Network is a voluntary organization that supports initiatives in foster care in developing countries, particularly work that encourages family-based approaches as an alternative to institutional care. The model of foster care described in this entry is relatively unusual in developing countries. Children in these countries are more likely to be cared for in an institution if they are not cared for by parents or other family members. Jo Frankham See also Attachment Theory; Child Welfare; Homes, Institutional

Further Readings Baginsky, M., Gorin, S., & Sands, C. (2017). The fostering system in England: Evidence review. Department for Education. Retrieved from http://cdn .basw.co.uk/upload/basw_103027-4.pdf Berger, L. M., Cancian, M., Han, E., Noyes, J., & Rios-Salas, V. (2015, January). Children’s academic achievement and foster care. Pediatrics, 135(1), 109–116. doi:10.1542/peds.2014-2448 Bullock, R., Courtney, M., Parker, R., Sinclair, I., & Thoburn, J. (2006). Can the corporate state parent? Children and Youth Services Review, 28(11), 1344–1358. doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2006.02.004 International Foster Care Network. Retrieved from www.ifco.info Narey, M., & Owers, M. (2018). Foster care in England: A review for the department of education. Adoption & Fostering, 42(2), 206–208. Schofield, G., & Simmonds, J. (2009). The child placement handbook: Research, policy and practice. London, UK: Coram BAAF Adoption and Fostering Academy. Sinclair, I. (2005). Fostering now: Messages from research. London, UK: Jessica Kingsley.

Frank, Anne In the spring of 1925, Otto Frank, the son of Michael Frank and Alice Betty Stern, married Edith Holländer, daughter of Abraham Holländer

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and Rosa Stern. The Frank family was an assimilated Jewish family and the Jewish Holländer ­family was still religious. Otto and Edith lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and on February 16, 1926, their first child, Margot Betti, was born. Three years later, on June 12, 1929, a second daughter was born: Anneliese Marie, called Anne. Their parents strongly believed in a liberal education to raise independent children. In March 1933, the Nazis took power in Frankfurt, and after Easter, Jewish children were segregated at school. With no future in Germany, the Franks left for the Netherlands. This entry discusses the Franks’ decision to move to the Netherlands and subsequent decision to go into hiding, the eventual discovery and publication of Anne Frank’s diary, and Anne Frank’s complex legacy.

The Decision to Move to the Netherlands The Netherlands seemed like a good choice because Otto had been working as a banker in Amsterdam 10 years earlier. Also, the country had been neutral in World War I, and if Hitler wanted to start a war, it was generally believed that the Netherlands would stay neutral again. Edith initially went to stay with her mother in Aachen, near the Dutch border, with Margot and Anne before Otto went to Amsterdam. There, he started the Dutch branch of Opekta, a firm specialized in pectin, which was used in jam making. Compared with Frankfurt, Amsterdam had a more provincial atmosphere and was home to many German refugees, mostly Jewish, who longed for the old Germany. Since the 16th century, freedom of religion had been important in Dutch society and, although there was prejudice against Jews, antisemitism occurred at a relatively low level. The Franks initially stayed close to the German-Jewish community in Amsterdam, but ­ Otto had non-Jewish colleagues, and some of them became close friends. Indeed, Margot and Anne went to Dutch schools. “I started right away at the Montessori nursery school,” Anne wrote in her famous diary (June 20, 1942). Edith was active in the liberal Jewish congregation. After the so-called Reichskristallnacht in Germany on November 9, 1938, the two brothers of Otto succeeded in emigrating to the United States, and

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Edith’s mother came to stay with Otto and his immediate family in Amsterdam. Anne and Margot had a circle of friends, Jews and non-Jews, at school and in their neighborhood. Otto was also a keen photographer and in the four photo books that survived the war, one can see their circle of friends. With their choice of the Montessori school system, Otto and Edith showed themselves to be progressive parents who preferred to place their girls in a classroom with chairs, tables, and children scattered about than one with rows of desks and obedient children. Anne noted her pleasure with this freedom and the way the teachers tried to argue with her instead of disciplining her. In an entry dated June 21, 1942, she reflects on her time at the school by noting, “According to me, a quarter of the class should stay where they are, there are some absolute cuckoos, but teachers are the greatest freaks on earth. . . .” Margot was obviously the brighter of the two girls, or the most hardworking, and Anne hated to be compared with her clever older sister.

Going Into Hiding After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, the Frank family, like all other Jews, were trapped. Otto did not wait and see but did his best to get emigration papers to go to Cuba or the United States. The United States was not interested in the Frank family and did not issue visas to them. In the Netherlands, anti-Jewish measures were growing day by day; for example, Margot and Anne had to transfer to a Jews-only school after the summer holiday of 1941. Otto had decided with his wife that going into hiding was the best solution. Otto’s colleagues agreed to become helpers, and a hiding place was prepared at the back of the office and warehouse of Otto on Prinsengracht 263 in the center of Amsterdam. On July 5, 1942, Margot got a callup to go to Germany for work—clearly, a way to entrap the family into captivity. The next day, the family went into hiding, followed by the family Van Daan and the dentist Pfeffer. It seemed strange to hide in the center of a city full of Germans, but there was a strong sense that the war would soon be over. Their hiding was well organized with dedicated helpers, but it was, of course, a small

miracle they stayed in hiding as long as they did. On August 4, 1944, German police helped by Dutch collaborators or just traitors for money tried to hunt down as many Jews in hiding as possible. What is known about the Franks’ time in hiding has primarily been recovered from Anne’s now famous diary, which she started a few days before the family went into hiding. A critical diarist, Anne is remarkably frank about everything that happened in the attic on Prinsengracht 263. She is not only critical of the other inhabitants but also of herself. It is interesting to see how the subject of a proper upbringing pops up very often. It is mostly Mrs. Van Daan who is very upset about the upbringing of the Frank girls, mostly Anne. Compared with a traditional Dutch family in the 1940s, where children were thought better to be seen and not heard, Anne appears defiant and deviant. From her journal remarks, however, it appears that her parents were supportive of her and her behavior. On July 29, 1943, Anne reflects, “They [Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan] believe that good child-rearing includes trying to pit me against my parents, since that’s all they ever do.” Anne is very clear when she writes: “All the conflicts about our upbringing, about not pampering children, about the food—about everything, absolutely everything—might have taken a different turn if we’d remained open and on friendly terms instead of always seeing the worst side”(January 22, 1944). Anne delivers the strong message that being locked up together and being afraid of being betrayed any moment is not the best environment to behave well with each other.

After the War The Franks, the Van Daan family, and the dentist were arrested in August 1944. Otto was the only survivor. It is still an open question if they were betrayed and if so by whom; since 2017, a ­so-called cold case team has been trying to solve the mystery. When Otto returned from the Nazi camp, Miep Gies handed him the diaries of his daughter—a socalled first dairy and a rewritten one, which she started around March 1944. Otto’s greatest wish was to publish the diary of his daughter to show the world her feelings and to create a better world.

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Although Anne had intended her rewritten version for publication after the war, her father soon realized that Anne had not finished that version, so he decided to supplement it with parts of her first version. The publication became a mix of her rewritten diary, extended with great parts of her first diary. Anne had chosen nicknames in her second version and Otto used them for his edition. Those nicknames were innocent, with one exception: the dentist, Pfeffer, became Dussel, the ­German word for dullard—a kind of literary revenge from beyond the grave of the person she disliked most while in hiding. It took some time before a Dutch publishing house dared to publish the diary of a complete unknown girl, but in June 1947, Het Achterhuis came on the market. Worldwide it is known as The Diary of Anne Frank, although the Afrikaner translation is Die Agterhuis.

The Diary and Its Dramatization The diary was not an immediate success. This changed when it was published in English after a U.S. and British publishing house teamed up to share the translation costs. The headline of the positive review in the June 15, 1952, edition of the New York Times read, “Anne Frank’s voice becomes the voice of 6 million vanished souls.” It was written by the American journalist and novelist Meyer Levin, who wanted to d ramatize the dairy, which was becoming ­ increasingly popular. Levin’s dramatized version was rejected by Otto, but Frances Goodrich, with her husband Albert Hackett, eventually succeeded in bringing Anne onto the stage in 1955. This stage-Anne was no longer a Jewish German girl trapped by the Nazis and waiting for a terrible fate. Anne had become almost an American teenager, who had some difficult time in hiding and who seemed to possess an optimistic outlook on humanity, despite her circumstances. Indeed, in the final scene of the play, Otto is alone on stage, with Anne’s voice saying, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” The play became a classic and was staged by American high school actors for many years to come. Until the end of the 20th century, this positive view about Anne prevailed. With the growing interest in the Holocaust, however, people eventually realized that the

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play from the 1950s no longer offered an accurate picture of Anne’s legacy. The play was officially altered to become more Jewish and focus more on the Holocaust. Teachers, especially in the United States, also started to use Anne’s diary in history lessons on the Holocaust. Today, it is often the first text students read about the Nazi atrocities, even though the text stops before the horrors of Auschwitz.

Anne Frank’s Legacy and the Challenges Today In the 1960s, an International Youth Center was founded by Otto, with summer conferences in the Anne Frank House. They were working together for a better world but that was not radical enough for the staff of the Anne Frank House. The Youth Center disappeared, and Anne’s message is often used for many different purposes. Positively, it was used to warn against apartheid in South Africa, against the Chilean dictator Pinochet, against house shortage in the Netherlands, and against reviving fascism and racism everywhere. The fact that Anne and her family and her friends were murdered because they were Jews often seemed to be forgotten in these contexts until recent decades. Currently, the history of Anne Frank, of Nazism and the Holocaust, is a central theme in the Anne Frank House—the surviving structure in Amsterdam where she and others survived and lived. It is, however, interesting that the Anne Frank Center in New York changed its name to Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect and, in the United Kingdom, a similar organization is called the “Anne Frank Trust United Kingdom” with emphasis on educational matters. We know a great deal about Anne Frank, but questions remain. Is her diary a girl’s book or literature, for instance? And how will the image of Anne develop in the 21th century? Will she remain a moral guide, long after Auschwitz and Hiroshima? Today, an increasing number of people connect Anne with their own story. In many contexts, her legacy continues to be evoked to speak more broadly about the plight of young refugees everywhere. After all, Anne was a refugee, welcomed in the Netherlands but refused entry to the United States. In the 21st century, many people may place

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less faith in the inner goodness of people than in the 1950s or 1960s. Nevertheless, Anne’s optimistic and lively side will likely continue to attract new readers in the future. David Barnouw See also Refugees; War and War-Affected Children

Further Readings Barnouw, D. (2018). The phenomenon of Anne Frank. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. doi:10.1177/ 030639689603800211 Barnouw, D., & Van der Stroom, G. (Eds.). (1989). The diary of Anne Frank: The critical edition. London, UK: Viking Penguin. Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B., & Shandler, J. (Eds.). (2012). Anne Frank unbound. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kramer, R. (1976). Maria Montessori. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vice, S. (2004). Children writing the Holocaust. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Werner, E. E. (2000). Through the eyes of innocents: Children witness World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Freire, Paulo Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was one of the most important and influential writers on the theory and practice of critical education in the 20th century and remains extremely influential today. He first became internationally known as an adult educator because of the literacy programs he developed and out of which came his core ideas about critical education. Ultimately, his critical approach extended well beyond the area of adult education. His focus on the role of education in the struggles of oppressed people was characterized by a rare combination: His political commitments and radical perspectives were combined with personal humbleness, a powerful ethical outlook, and an impressive intellectual coherence. After first briefly describing Freire’s background, this entry discusses his influential arguments about an emancipatory educational theory and practice.

Background Freire was born in Recife in northeastern Brazil on September 19, 1921. Freire was involved with social movements and adult education, in particular, movements linked with popular culture and base community movements within the Catholic Church. Working at first with peasants and workers mainly in the impoverished areas of northeastern Brazil, it was here where he first developed his influential methods for dealing with the problem of illiteracy. After these experiences and after organizing several well-known adult literacy programs, Freire was invited by the Brazilian Ministry of Education to organize a national literacy program. In spite of its success, his work was interrupted by a military dictatorship in 1964. Freire was arrested and exiled to Chile. During his time in exile, Freire engaged in literacy struggles and other educational programs in a considerable number of places. As his influence grew throughout the world, he was invited to take a position at Harvard University. After Brazil declared an amnesty in 1979, those people who had been exiled were able to return to Brazil. Freire too returned and accepted a position to teach at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the University of Campinas. The years in exile had not dimmed his political and educational passion. Freire immediately became a member of the Workers’ Party and quickly became a central figure in its policies over literacy and culture. After the Workers’ Party won the municipal elections in São Paulo in 1989, Freire was appointed Secretary of Education. Under his administration, many progressive programs in adult education, curricular restructuring, community participation, and an ambitious set of policies for democratizing schools were implemented. After leaving his position as Secretary of Education, he spent the last 6 years of his life devoting himself to writing and speaking both nationally and internationally. This was a time of considerable intellectual ferment for him. He wrote a number of provocative and even more personal books that had an extremely wide readership throughout the world. In these books and his many interviews and articles, he sought to raise questions about his and others’ work that demanded attention. It was almost as if he knew that he had little time to live.

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He died in 1997, but his legacy and his thought remain alive throughout the world.

Education as a Political Act The reason for the continuing power of Freire’s work has much to do with the cogency of his ideas. Perhaps his most generative idea is that education is always a political act. For him, education always involves social relations and, hence, necessarily involves political choices. Freire insists that questions like what?, why?, how?, to what end?, and for whom? are central to any educational activity. Hence, not only is it impossible to remain neutral in education, but one has to constantly realize that all educational policies and practices have social implications. They either perpetuate exclusion and injustice or they assist us in constructing the conditions for social transformation. For Freire, most social relations in capitalist societies—including those involved in education— are based on relations of oppression. In the Brazilian context where Freire developed his theory and practice, the reality was one of massive political, social, and economic inequalities in which millions of people were excluded from economic, social, and educational capital. This oppression and the relationships between oppressor and oppressed were compelling for Freire. They motivated much of his work with impoverished people both in ­Brazil and later on in many other countries. Even in his earliest writings, he realized that the dominant ideas in education would not reverse the reproduction of the forms of exclusion that so deeply characterized these societies. Because of this, Freire insisted on the need for a new conception of education, one that would derive from both a radically different standpoint and worldview and would require a radically different epistemological approach. Hence, an essential grounding of Freire’s conception of education and of the methodology he developed is the fact that he chose to foreground the culture, knowledge, and conditions of the disadvantaged, the excluded, and the oppressed. This is powerfully demonstrated in his most influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in English in 1970. The conception of education offered by Freire did not stop inside the classroom. While he understood the importance of classroom activity to both

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the reproduction of existing inequalities as well as the potential transformation of these realities, he went further to insist that new educational techniques alone will not create a radically new school or society. Education can help us to understand the world and can make one better prepared to transform it, but only if one deeply connects education to the larger realities in which people live and to struggles to alter those realities. In response to this, he proposed a new epistemological approach. Emancipatory education for Freire is never a simple transmission of knowledge. Knowing is not accumulating facts or information, what he called banking. Rather, knowing is constructing oneself as a subject in the world, one who is able both to rewrite what one reads and to act in the world to radically alter it. Thus, Freire’s idea of literacy went well beyond the subject’s capacity to read words. Rather, the act of reading must be about the ability to read the world.

Education for Emancipation Underneath Freire’s proposals for an emancipatory education was a crucial anthropological claim. He believed that men and women are producers of culture and, therefore, producers of history. Human beings are uncompleted beings and have an ontological vocation to become more fully human. Teachers and students as well are unfinished human beings and both have much to learn from each other in the educational process. This does not mean that the teacher should deny her or his role as the one who conducts the process of learning. But the process must be based on critical dialogue and mutual knowledge creation. Freire emphasized the role of teachers as critical cultural workers. Teachers should struggle with the dominant cultural values that are present both in society and inside themselves in order to understand their cultural and political function. This dual struggle could lead teachers to work in reflexive and transformative ways. And, once again, such transformative work would necessarily go beyond the classroom. The ethical and political meanings behind this are clear. If it is true that dialogical education presupposes a political understanding of what I

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already know as a teacher, it is also true that it demands a profound respect for the students and their knowledge. What students already know may be different, but the critical educator must not assume that this knowledge is inferior. Yet the school is one of the major institutions that embody such ideologies of inferiority. The school takes dominant knowledge and dehistoricizes and naturalizes it. It makes such dominant knowledge into the only visible and socially acceptable knowledge. For Freire, this is simply wrong. He insisted that knowledge is historical. According to him, there is no knowledge that is not historically and socially produced, within political, cultural, and economic relations. This relational understanding is very important to his argument that the different, what is called popular knowledge, is not valued and is not considered legitimate for dominant conservative models of education. Emancipatory education must not reproduce the kind of practice that is so very common in traditional schools. In opposition to this, a Freirean model of education for liberation considers the knowledge of the students to be fully legitimate, values it, and historicizes it. But it does not stop there. Freire’s approach uses the knowledge already possessed by students to give them the power to reappropriate dominant knowledge for their own emancipation. For instance, in this perspective, students may learn what is socially defined as the norm in language usage. But a truly critical education must go beyond this. In learning the norm, students use it as a tool in the struggle to reinvent the world. Given his commitment to a dialectical relation between practice and theory, Freire always based his practices on cogent theoretical ideas, which in turn were profoundly connected with his practical actions. Thus, he spent his entire life pursuing a pedagogical praxis, one without a priori definitions of contents, textbooks, or pedagogical techniques. Instead, his intention was to build a pedagogical process, what he called conscientization, that was grounded in the cultural and social realities of teachers and students. From these realities, the thematic elements, the contents, the pedagogical decisions—in other words, the curriculum and the teaching—would come. This joining together of theory and practice contributed to the power and influence of Freire’s ideas.

In concrete terms, his method of conscientization with adults in literacy programs was basically constituted by a process of coding/decoding linguistic and social meanings, organized through a number of steps. First, generative themes are developed. They emerge from informal and personal contacts with communities and are then discussed in culture circles using a dialogical procedure. From these discussions, a thematic universe is generated and from it, the teachers extract a vocabulary universe, constituted by several words socially and culturally relevant for those communities. From this vocabulary universe, a minimum vocabulary universe is obtained, constituted by 17 or 18 generative words that are phonemically rich and ordered in increasing phonetic difficulty. Finally, specific steps are taken to achieve the process of reading, which consists of a process of decoding written words taken from a coded existential situation. This connection to the real existential situation is a crucial step and is one of the keys to enabling students from oppressed groups to use their newly gained knowledge to reconstruct their lives. Because of the fact that the use of this approach with oppressed people spread throughout the world, Freire was always worried that his ideas would become simply a method, a recipe to be followed uncritically. Thus, Freire was aware of the dangers associated with the essentialization of theories. He knew that the origins of his critical educational theories and practices—the decision to intervene in the world, in a very unjust Brazilian reality—must never be forgotten. This is in keeping with the main thrust of his theory, the constant reminder that what seems as the mere learning of the alphabet or mathematics is, in fact, a complex political relation. For him, the very fact that education is usually not seen as political is part of the problem and the transformation of this situation is in itself part of a specific political project. To reduce his theory to a simple methodology to be replicated is to negate the nature of Freire’s enormous contribution to education. Michael W. Apple, Luís Armando Gandin, and Álvaro Moreira Hypolito See also Children as Political Subjects; Critical Pedagogy

Freud, Anna

Further Readings Apple, M. W., Au, W., & Gandin, L. A. (Eds.). (2009). The Routledge international handbook of critical education. New York, NY: Routledge. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1978). Pedagogy in process: The letters to GuineaBissau. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Westview. doi:10.14221/ajte.1998v23n1.10

Freud, Anna Anna Freud (1895–1982) was a pioneer in shaping the field of child and adolescent psychoanalysis; her influence can be found in the fields of law, education, medicine, and social work. Her early psychoanalytic practice in Vienna, including the founding of the Matchbox nursery school in Vienna, contributed to experiments in after-school care and the development of the toddler group model. The Ego and Its Mechanisms of Defense is her best known book and remains the clearest account of the fate of anxiety in ego processes and functions. In 1938, the Freud family went into exile from Vienna to London; shortly after arrival, she was organizing new homes for Jewish European psychoanalysts fleeing National Socialism. Along with Dorothy Burlingham, she established the Hampstead War Nurseries, which served refugee children, parents, and war orphans and became her clinical research laboratory for direct observation and clinical training. Anna Freud coined the measure “in the best interests of the child” used in divorce law custody cases. Her developmentalist approach to and studies of psychoanalysis for children and adolescents resulted in diagnostic tools for assessment and treatment, and her theories of lines of development continue to influence the training of psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, and teachers. This entry provides an overview of Anna Freud’s main contributions to the field of childhood studies and development.

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Anna Freud’s background as a teacher of young children surely affected her lifelong attention to the education of teachers and children and, in later life, psychoanalytic applications to other fields along with the training of psychoanalysts. Her sharp definition of education as all types of interference opened new understandings of education and anxiety, pointing out neurotic conflicts between teachers and students. Her Vienna lectures to parents and teachers took the side of the child’s emotional logic that behavior often masks. While she did not expect teachers to be psychoanalysts, she did argue that the import of any pedagogical exchange should lead to the teacher’s gains of psychological knowledge of the depths and destiny of child development. Unlike the child analyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), Anna Freud saw a role for education in child analysis with the focus on children’s actual relationships with parents and family. Like Klein, Anna Freud emphasized the emotional situations that constitute development as relationality. In simple language and with a keen eye to resistance to psychoanalysis, Anna Freud had the talent of conveying the complications, conflicts, and anxieties of normal and pathological development, terms that bookmarked her understanding of symptoms of suffering tied to wishes for autonomy. Most notable, given her interest in the wider world of childhood, is her emphasis on why psychoanalytic treatment can be helpful in alleviating psychical symptoms of distress and why, for the ego to have its developmental chances, it was best for adults to create social conditions to support autonomy and dependency. Adults were urged to change disheartening and pathological reality. The Ego and Its Mechanisms of Defense began with the idea that the ego is the seat of observation and anxiety. Mediating between the unconscious and the superego as well as the demands of the world, the ego’s tasks are perception, reality testing, judgment, and creating compromises between the demands of the inner and outer worlds. The ego is closest to the world of others, and the key danger or anxiety is loss of love. Depending upon the perception of where danger occurs, the ego has special means of defense to avoid unpleasure and restrict anxiety. Defenses are the means to handle affect and, as basic scaffolds for character, are ever present in all

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relationships and at play in structures of institutional life. Anna Freud identified 12 defenses. Of these, the most well-known are projection, introjection, denial, repression, identification with the aggressor, altruistic surrender, and in adolescence, intellectualization that seeks objectification through the defense of ideas as pure, accompanied by asceticism that imposes prohibitions and strict rules on perception and behavior. Yet the defenses are not entirely beholden to ego processes; they are partly unconscious, partly an outcome of superego or moral anxiety, and partly cultural. She studied how defenses reduce curiosity, delay interest in the views of others, and rigidify perceptions of reality. Anna Freud’s postwar theories of psychical life focused on the span of infancy to adolescence that for her proposed the foundation of adult life. Until Anna Freud, adolescence was mainly treated as the stepchild of psychoanalysis, given that the power of sexuality in adolescence, including adolescent revolt, tends to be avoided by both the analyst and the patient. She remedied such absence with her theory of lines of development and used to assess young children and adolescent openness to new ideas contingent on styles of coping with

life’s conflicts, disappointments, and challenges. Lines of development address the emotional minutiae of bodily life with attention to fantasies, anxieties, defenses, and aggressions. This assessment provides a picture of fixations and regressions as well as the flux of self-attitudes toward the changing body and the relational world. Generally, development includes dependency, emotional selfreliance, and adult relationships. The milestones are toilet training, object constancy, eating, companionship, and the move to the world of work. Anna Freud’s main concern was with the conditions needed for the welfare of children and with what adults should know for their best interests. She is thought of as both a conservator of her father Sigmund Freud’s theories and a radical innovator in child studies and educational structures. On the conservative side, Anna Freud’s views of normality are biased toward heteronormativity and adaptation to sociosexual convention. On the radical side, her views on ego development are dedicated to the complexities of emotional growth and stress the need for social change and responsive social practices. Her flexible side is most evident in her many interventions in pediatrics, education, and law; in her work in bringing psychoanalysis to education; and in her specifications for the tenders of the child’s world. In this sense, her work falls between the lines of change and adaptation, perhaps what she understood as the ego’s potential and plight. Deborah P. Britzman See also Freud, Sigmund; Klein, Melanie; Winnicott, Donald W.

Further Readings

Figure 1  Anna Freud in Paris, 1957 Source: Dutch National Archives, The Hague. Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1956–1989.

Freud, A. (1966). The writings of Anna Freud: The ego and its mechanisms of defense 1936 (Rev. ed., Vol. 2). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Freud, A. (1992). The Harvard lectures (edited and annotated by J. Sandler). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Malberg, N., & Raphael-Leff, J. (Eds.). (2012). The Anna Freud tradition: Lines of development, evolution of theory and practice over the decades. London, UK: Karnac. Young-Bruehl, E. (1988). Anna Freud: A biography. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.

Freud, Sigmund

Freud, Sigmund Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), creator of what is now known as Freudian psychoanalysis, developed clinical practices, special vocabulary, and methods of interpretation that form the backdrop theories for the study of depth psychology. His influence is found in studies of children’s sexuality, in the field and topics of children’s literature, with the interpretation of fairy tales and, to some extent, in educators’ pedagogy and approaches to interpreting life in the nursery. Freud’s depth psychology refers to the workings of the mind in contiguity with the unconscious history of impressions from early life joined with the accidents, experiences, and cultural dispositions thought to compose the course of character. His wide-ranging theories of neurosis centered sexuality, infantile life, and family relations as forces of human problems of love, separation, and loss and as reflections of the intricacies and entanglements of the psychological mind. His studies of love focused on fantasies, wishes, anxieties, and defenses that drive perceptions, thoughts, and actions. The purposes of this entry are to overview Freud’s approach to sexuality, childhood, and family life, define his key vocabulary, and describe why the interpretation of early childhood is at the heart of psychoanalysis.

The Unconscious Realm of Infantilism Freud’s theories of human development have as their basis the speculative movement between biology and psychology, built upon the soft impressionable foundations of infancy and childhood. Infantilism or infantile sexuality is perhaps Freud’s most significant and contested contribution to the knowledge of children’s lives. The complex of infantilism and infantile theories of sexuality that emerge from it refers both to the chronology between birth and age 4 years, a span of time thought to be the most receptive to impressions of internal stimulations, and to nascent mental presentations of instinctual tensions. Infantile sexuality refers to the pleasurable stimulations of autoerotic bodily activity, the first experience of satisfaction, and the mental presentations that follow from bodily sensations of pleasure and pain. This area of life is repressed, and Freud turned to

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the interpretation of the unconscious, a dimension of the mind that is unknown yet nonetheless influences the nature of perceptions, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and aggression. His main principle was that the earliest years of life are the most impressionable and receptive and that young children are astute observers of family life and already exhibit profound emotions and passions such as jealousy, joy, sadness, and feelings of love and hate. His early research challenged the prevailing cultural ideas of childhood, child-rearing, parental relations, sexuality, and education. Freud’s psychoanalysis countered culturally dominant ideas such as infancy as a blank slate, hunger and need as only a matter of biology, young children as asexual and uninterested in their origin, and sexuality as only appearing in puberty. He saw, in the life of the child, momentous destiny in what is often brushed aside as nonsense, meaningless crying, bad behavior, repetitive questioning, and the child’s wishful thinking. And he considered the earliest life from the significance and destiny of its profound mix of helplessness, dependency, and erotic instinctual life, all qualities that become the stage for psychological dramas expressed with the emotive gradations of hate, grief, anger, jealously, longing, love, pity, and guilt. Freud interpreted these complex emotional ties as derivatives of sexuality. His main argument was that sexual drives, as originally autoerotic, emanate from within the body and so begin as independent from external stimulation. Sexual drives mainly involve the search for satisfaction as the release of tension. Sexual activity, as exhibited in the instinct to master knowledge, reaches its first peak in childhood between the ages of 5–6 years.

Psychical Reality and Material Reality To grasp Freud’s views of sexuality, one must begin with the idea that the child’s world is subject to two kinds of conflictive realities: (1) psychical reality is concerned with thought perceptions oriented to the search for satisfaction made from omnipotent wishes, magical thinking, fantasies, dreams, and sexuality. (2) Material reality involves the child in the world of others and introduces new conflicts in thinking, judgment, and delay. Material reality also refers to the child’s encounter

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with authority, cultural prohibitions, parental laws, and obligations to others. Both realities are associated with feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. Paradoxically, psychical life is the intertwining and condensation of these conflicts within the developing mental agencies of the ego, the id, and the superego. It is as if the mind is made from a competition of ideation, affects, and drives. Freud proposed the awakening of psychical life occurs in tandem with the mother’s loving care. This earliest relation is the basic element for the infant’s move from biology constituted by needs to psychology created from hallucination, frustration, anticipation, perception, wishes, bodily actions, and thinking. Such lines of development are also the stakes for early childhood precocity and the drive to know, where there is no delay in loving or hating. Freud’s theories heralded the workings of the mind as simultaneous with the search for the first experience of satisfaction. He then treats this primary search for the lost object of satisfaction, originally the breast, as the key dynamic for the emotional developments of narcissism, perceptions, memory, styles of loving, sexual curiosity, choice of the object, and fantasies, defenses, and anxiety. Psychical life is thus constitutive of the mental translations of bodily impressions of touch, smell, sound, and hunger into wishes for satisfaction; as impressions, sensate life serves as pathways for thought association, anticipation, and a burgeoning sense of time. These earliest developments eventually weigh in as unconscious features of subjective history. Indeed, almost every one of Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts can be traced back to human beginnings or what he called ontogenesis. Freud thus posed the key conflict of human thought perception though the dynamic unconscious, defined as timeless, without negation, devoid of contradictions, and composed from the logistics of the repressed, wishes, and drives.

The After-Effects of Early Childhood Impressions Long after the event of his childhood, Freud would analyze constructions of his childhood memories, Oedipal longings, neurosis, and dreams. His view of childhood, constructed retroactively, is as an adult looking back to link the currency of

neurosis to the forgotten years of early life. Early childhood thus serves as the human’s soft spot, containing the potential of illness and health. While he did not see children in his formal psychoanalytic practice, he, too, was once a child and used his exploration of obstacles to memory as the material for self-analysis. Freud’s first analysis of his own childhood, which he performed at the turn of the 19th century, appears in his letters to his friend the physician Wilhelm Fliess, where he linked his current feelings of uselessness and malaise to an infantile neurosis called the Oedipal complex. Self-analysis was thus Freud’s means for exploring the congealed meanings of his own life. His approach created the special fact that all psychoanalytic concepts are mirrors to the researcher’s mind. Freud’s most intensive writing on theories of childhood spans the first 10 years of psychoanalytic theory. He dated his most important concepts, such as sexuality, the Oedipal complex, and the mental closures of shame, disgust, and moral anxiety with childhood. His method, however, was closer to archeology, whereby remnants of childhood impressions are alive in the adult’s unconscious and present as neurosis and compulsions to repeat what could not be accomplished or was doomed to fail. Memories, then, were to be constructed from ruins made by forgetting. This posed the central dilemma for understanding the experience of early life. Freud’s solution is found in his concept of infantile amnesia. The first few years of life are essentially repressed as affects unavailable for conscious apprehension while remaining active in the unconscious and so influencing mental presentations of objects. Freud expanded his concept of repression to the operations of culture with the argument that the adult’s own infantile amnesia is responsible for the belief that children are asexual and innocent. Infantile amnesia is neither a cognitive concept nor a function of immaturity. Rather, infantile amnesia, or the forgetting of the first years of life, is due to the mental mechanism of repression, an active defense in psychical and material reality. What remains, owing to the unconscious, are the timeless appeals of wishes for satisfaction that Freud supposed as the foundational act of psychical reality. In this sense, Freud gave to memory its depth, deceptions, and dynamic

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interplay with material reality, historical reality, and psychical reality. Traces of childhood impressions, called fantasies, are woven throughout his 1900 inaugural volume of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams. By 1908, Freud would compare creative writers to the child at play; he found in the ­regular occurrence of daydreams the idea that childhood illusions and fantasies are the basis for creativity. In his study of the creative writer, Freud identified the writer’s arrangement of three currents of time: (1) a current impression that leans on wishes, (2) an earlier memory from childhood, and (3) a view of a future where wishes come true. He approached childhood fantasies as ever-present wishes for immediate ­ satisfaction and as bestowing an egotistic continuity among the past, present, and future.

The Beginnings of Child Analysis Freud was the father of six children, including his youngest, Anna Freud, who brought the early field of child analysis into the psychoanalytic movement. Although it was typical for psychoanalysts to study childhood and even analyze their own children or the friends of children, by the 1920s, such practices were abandoned as the findings from the newly developed field of child psychoanalysts were used to refine Freudian constructions. Sigmund Freud, however, wrote the first case of child analysis in 1909, titled “Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy,” known as Little Hans. Hans suffered from a horse phobia that developed just after his mother gave birth to a baby girl. It is at this point that Hans becomes preoccupied with his baby sister’s body and the question of whether his mother’s body was the same as his. The case, written from Hans’s father’s reports to Freud on the progress of father-and-son discussions, closely follows Hans’s infantile theories of sexuality. The discussions, led by Hans, included his theories on the difference between boys and girls, his view of marital affairs, family life, and other children, and his wishes to marry his mother and do away with his father. The extraordinary dialogue between father and son demonstrated the child as capable of narrating the Eros of reasoning, peppered as it is with worries over loss and separation.

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Freud’s Theories of Sexuality The material from the Hans case brought Freud to expand his Three Essays on Sexuality, first published in 1905. Over the next 20 years, his Three Essays would be taken through four editions, with new footnotes and revisions of early claims. His main purpose was to extend the idea of sexuality into psychology and understand its dynamic force with conflicts of love. These essays opened a radical view of sexual curiosity, original bisexuality, and the quality of polymorphous perversity that permits the sexualizing of any object and the dispersal of sexuality through sublimation. Given the vicissitudes and transformations of sexuality, Freud rejected the cultural idealization of normal sexuality. He often commented on how the strictures of cultural morals, the collapse of sexuality with heterosexual reproduction, and the prohibitions on certain sexual practices create a narrowminded view of self and other and, consequently, fuel cultural unhappiness. In his early work, he often wondered if parents and teachers could engage children in discussions dedicated to sexual enlightenment. Didactic instruction was later set aside with his view that there is something about sexuality that resists satisfaction. He then turned to analyzing problems of love and anxieties over loss as found in childhood and as flourishing in adolescent and adult neurosis.

Drives, Oedipal Conflicts, and Family Life While the contemporary field of psychoanalysis contains many schools of thought, Freud’s prolific writings between the years of 1883 and 1939, found in the 23 volumes known in English as The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, remain a touchstone for both argument and agreement on the nature, qualities, and destiny of mental life. Childhood as experience and inheritance is Freud’s central pathway to the development of his theories of the two poles of the mind—the pleasure principle and the reality principle—and then, for the conflicts among the psychical agencies named as the unconscious, ego, and superego. He found in childhood the etiology of neurosis and anxiety and the awakening of group feelings, sibling rivalry, and the need for education.

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It is, however, the force and disillusionment of the pleasure principle that orients Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex as nuclear neurosis. His model drew from Sophocles’ Theban tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannos, and the child’s impossible desire for one parent’s love while perceiving the other parent as a hostile rival. Freud found that the child, around the age of 5 or 6 years, is involved in a triangle and wishes to be one member of a couple. While the universal value of the Oedipal complex—as Freud maintained—remains highly disputed, one key dilemma for children emerges with their preoccupation with the mysterious adult world from which they are generally excluded. Key questions are then asked: Am I a boy or a girl? What do parents do without me? And, how was I born? Their answers, though destined to fail, constitute what Freud called infantile theories of sexuality. Freud’s second essay on sexuality is titled Infantile Sexuality. There, he first named the child a little sex researcher driven by passionate curiosity toward her/his bodily pleasures and those of others. Indeed, Freud supposed human sexuality as the basis for curiosity and the drive to know or the drive to mastery that is riddled with elements of cruelty and aggression. While the child’s research could only create fantastic theories destined to fail since they are mainly omnipotent in magical thinking and follow the pleasure principle, they also represent a step toward independence and alienation from the grown-up world. Sexuality, then, does not begin with genital exchange, and Freud’s theories unhinged sexuality from biology. His understanding of the currents of sexuality then extends from excitations of bodily erotic zones and infant care through to passions for others, the love of ideas, and as motive force for anxiety, aggression, and creative life.

Phases of Libido The body’s erotic zones and the internal excitations of oral, anal, phallic, and genital experiences animate infantile sexuality as a pathway for the destiny of fantasies and sublimations. Freud understood the earliest bodily pleasure as autoerotic, in that the body is taken as its own object. His key example was the pleasure of thumb sucking. He termed this early pleasure as pregenital

and as the basis for phases of libido or energyseeking release. Each phase has a particular valence. For the oral, having to do with incorporation, there are the processes of taking in, sucking, and biting. Freud considered the oral phase as the beginning of identifications. Anal phases have two currents: (1) active and passive and (2) retention and explosion. The sadistic aspect of the anal phase brings into sexuality its element of cruelty and involves spoiling, destroying, and expelling. The anal phase may be thought of a precursor to projection. It is equated not only with fantasies of creating gifts and babies but also the beginning of feelings of shame, bodily mastery, and obsessionality with the orders of the rituals of putting things into their proper place. The genital phase is a late development and brings to the fore sexual difference and sharper splitting between masculinity and femininity. From these libidinal bodily sensations, the child creates theories of sexuality and imagines the destiny of her or his own body with the unknown qualities of sexual difference. Such theories are also the fantasies and wishes that give way to styles of loving, the family romance, and the internalization of the parental and cultural authority, leading to a superego and the capacity for guilt. One can say that the child, always in relation to bodily actions and the adult world, is the basis for psychoanalytic techniques and evidence of psychical reality. The shadow of childhood provides the psychoanalytic method with its intricacies and its limits.

Childhood as the Raw Material for Adult Memories Freud’s consideration of childhood mainly is from the backward look of the adult’s recollection of the past, whereby memory could be constructed. This distance or repression is also a model for memory as retroactive and created from the perspective of current concerns. So, the child is a figure of curiosity in two conflictive senses: (1) the child’s curiosity leans upon fantasies of the adult world of sexuality and (2) the child as after effect for adult estrangement from childhood. The claim of memory as construction and often as a screen covering over deeper repressed psychical processes is most significant for childhood studies,

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particularly given the fact that psychoanalytic researchers in the field were also once children. Even if the earliest situations are forgotten, Freud supposed that remnants of childhood remain an active force in the convictions, fixations, and anxieties of adults. A central tenet of Freud’s psychoanalytic technique concerns the relationship between the analyst and the patient. Both are urged to listen for what is not known, an approach that mirrors the child’s unconscious life and infantile theories of sexuality. His method of psychoanalysis was archeology: From the ruins of childhood, the adult was urged to remember, repeat, and work through forgotten conflicts that take the form of current convictions and beliefs. But these are all constructions in analysis, and Freud made the claim that there were no memories in childhood, only memories of childhood. As for the actual lives of children, Freud leaves us with two observations on the meanings, passions, and complexities of the child’s world. First, his theories demonstrate the import of childhood conflicts between the wish for greater freedom of sexual expression and dependency on cultural inhibitions and repressions that lean upon shame, guilt, and moral anxiety. Second, sexuality and mental life go hand in hand, though the key difficulty belongs to whether both can be represented and enjoyed. Deborah P. Britzman See also Freud, Anna; Klein, Melanie; Lacan, Jacques; Psychoanalysis, the Child in; Sex Education, Psychoanalysis in

Further Readings Britzman, D. (2011). Freud and education. New York, NY: Routledge. Freud, S. (1968a). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy (1909). In S. Freud (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 10., pp. 3–152). London, UK: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1968b). Three essays on sexuality (1905). In S. Freud (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7., pp. 125–243). London, UK: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1968c). The interpretation of dreams (1900). In J. Strachey. In collaboration with A. Freud. Assisted by A. Strachey & A. Tyson (Trans.), The standard edition

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of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vols. 2 & 3). London, UK: Hogarth Press. Kofman, S. (1988). The childhood of art: An interpretation of Freud’s aesthetics (W. Winifred, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Surprenant, C. (2008). Freud: A guide for the perplexed. London, UK: Continuum.

Froebel, Friedrich Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852) was a key figure in the development of early childhood education in the 19th century. He is noted for the invention of the concept of the kindergarten, literally ‘child garden’, sometimes translated as ‘nursery’ in English, suggesting a nurturing environment for natural, organic growth. He also introduced training for early childhood educators. His work was, and continues to be, influential, far beyond his native Prussia. In his writings, he developed a view of the nature and development of children, informed by philosophical ideas, and rooted in his religious beliefs. He stressed the importance of play, creative self-expression, and child-initiated activity in an environment that offered exposure to nature, social interaction, and instructive materials (his ‘gifts and occupations’, resources designed to support children’s selfguided exploration). Froebel was influenced by the work of early childhood pioneer Johann Pestalozzi and his commitment to children’s self-activity. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s positive image of the child as innately good and of education based on nurturing rather than punishment also informed Froebel’s approach. In turn, the influence of his work can be seen in the work of others, manifested in different ways. For example, John Dewey’s commitment to education that fostered children’s individual interests, Maria Montessori’s design of learning materials, and Jean Piaget’s constructivist theories of learning each reflect aspects of Froebel’s work. Thus, Froebel’s influence is discernible in the practices of many child-centred approaches to early childhood education across the world. This entry examines Froebel’s background and early life, his education, his philosophy and practice, and their reception in the complicated

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political context in which he lived. This entry also considers his legacy as a pioneer of early childhood education and the significance of key aspects of his approach to early childhood practices today.

Background and Early Life Froebel was born in 1782, in Oberweissbach in Prussia, near the Thuringian Forest. His father was a Lutheran pastor; his mother died when Froebel was only 9 months old. Before he was 5 years, his father remarried. His stepmother was, at best, disinterested in him and his upbringing, and his father was a distant figure focused on his work. However, between the ages of 11 and 15 years, he was sent to live with his maternal uncle, and here, he experienced a much warmer and more involved approach to parenting. Key features of his work and philosophy (the religious perspective which informed his practice and his focus on the pivotal role of the mother or female teacher in the nurturing and development of the child) are perhaps rooted in these earliest experiences. Froebel’s route to becoming a teacher was not straightforward, and between the ages of 15 and 34 years, he held various jobs and had a range of educational experiences. At 15 years, he was apprenticed to a forester. This experience gave him deeper knowledge of the natural world and practical experience of working with nature. His appreciation of the interconnectedness of nature and the unfolding development of different forms of life, informed by this experience, had a clear impact on his eventual educational philosophy. Froebel attended university twice in his life. The first was the University of Jena where, aged 17 years, he went to study science and mathematics. After a gap of several years, he attended the University of Gottingen at the age of 29 years, studying natural sciences and mineralogy. During the intervening years between his university studies, Froebel discovered his love of teaching. First, he was employed as a teacher in Anton Gruener’s Model School in 1805. Then, as private tutor to the children of a German nobleman, he lived and worked in ­Switzerland at Pestalozzi’s school at Yverdon from 1808 to 1810. These experiences made him determined to become not only a teacher but an educational reformer keen to challenge and modernise

traditional classroom practices. His university studies had impressed upon him the scientific principles of the quest for universal laws governing the workings of nature. This would inform his philosophy of education and his quest for a system of education based on universal laws of human development.

Career as an Educational Reformer In 1816, Froebel embarked on his mission as an educational reformer. Over the next 36 years, he worked in, and also established, a number of schools, in Germany and Switzerland. He combined this with writing (books, pamphlets, magazine and journal articles), campaigning, curriculum design, and the development of educational materials. In doing so, he created an educational movement that drew interest from around the world. Froebel’s most important schools were at Keilhau, Blankenburg, and Liebenstein (which was also a training institute for teachers). The Universal German Educational Institute at Keilhau was ­ established in 1816 in Griesheim but relocated to Keilhau in 1817. There he first developed and wrote about his educational philosophy, in a series of pamphlets and in his most famous book, The Education of Man, published in 1826. In 1837, now focusing his attention on understanding the development of very young children, and reforming educational provision for them, he established an institute at Blankenburg. In 1840, this became the first institution to be named a ‘kindergarten’. In 1849, Froebel established the first training institute for kindergarten teachers at Liebenstein.

Froebel’s Philosophy of Early Childhood Education In examining Froebel’s philosophy of education, it is necessary to consider his view of children, his view of the nature of children’s development, and his view of the purpose of early childhood education. Like Rousseau before him, Froebel rejected earlier religious conceptualisations of children as inherently tainted by evil and in need of salvation from it via correction and punishment. Instead, he saw children as inherently good and in need of an environment that recognised and cultivated that

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goodness. Influenced by Rousseau, Froebel saw children as being close to nature. This was not a dark nature to be feared but an idealised version, where the child symbolised the capacity of humanity to live in harmony with, and as part of, nature. Influenced by the philosophical ideas of German Idealism, Froebel saw this unity of humanity with nature as the expression of the work of God. Froebel also viewed children not as the ‘empty slates’ of John Locke but as beings with their own needs, interests, and motivations to engage with the world, using all of their senses. Froebel saw play as fulfilling an instinctive need in children that drove their natural, individual progress through a series of stages of development from infancy to adulthood. Play was the mechanism through which children connected their own inner worlds with the outer world around them. Thus, it was the duty of parents to facilitate play as the natural expression of the child’s unfolding physical, cognitive, and spiritual growth. Children had what would now be called ‘agency’ and an innate drive to interact with the world around them in ways that were productive and creative. Froebel felt that rather than training these tendencies out of them, educational practice needed to recognise these traits as valuable tools for learning. His motto ‘Come, let us live with our children!’ encapsulates a fundamental shift from a societal expectation that children adapt themselves to the adult world, to one where adults can be expected to attempt to understand children’s own perspectives. This was further developed in Froebel’s stress on self-activity and freedom as the best means for children to learn. Froebel rejected the mode of education he had himself experienced, with children as passive recipients of the traditional, adult-dominated educational processes of rote learning in uninspiring, formal classrooms. Instead, he advocated that children engage in play-based, experiential activities, arising from their own interests and in step with their individual rates of development. Through these, they could construct their own understanding. The first role of the teacher was to observe this self-activity closely, to inform both how to support it, and how to develop the environment and resources to allow the child to build upon it. For Froebel, the learning environment was of key importance to the development of the child.

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Like Pestalozzi, Froebel believed that young children learned best through activity. His concept of the kindergarten emphasised active experience of nature study and gardening and creative expression via music, song, dance, and art. Over a period of years, Froebel devised and refined his ‘gifts and occupations’, as the basis for both his curriculum and educational method, to be used in kindergartens by trained teachers and by mothers educating the children at home. The 16 gifts were designed to allow children to explore basic forms from the natural world, moving from the simple form of the ball to more complex three-dimensional and two-dimensional geometric shapes, to materials for exploring lines, points, and patterns. They were made from natural materials and intended for children to interact within their play. They were designed to reflect, and allow children to come to understand and connect with spiritually, the important forms found in nature. The occupations provided malleable materials such as clay and drawing materials that would help children to develop their fine motor skills and appreciate their ability to control and manipulate materials. As with all of Froebel’s work, he also saw the gifts and occupations as supporting children’s developing soul, holistically alongside their cognitive and physical development. Froebel also published, in 1843, the book Mother Play and Nursery Songs. The book included detailed instructions for using the songs to interact with children from their earliest infancy, to support their unfolding cognitive and moral development. Froebel saw children’s development as a journey towards becoming conscious, thinking, moral, and spiritual individuals. The purpose of early childhood education was to support this journey by working with their natural, creative, individual impulses and desires in a way that allowed each child to develop holistically. He placed mothers at the heart of this process in the earliest years of infancy and childhood with the female teacher supporting this further in the extended social opportunities for play in the kindergarten.

Froebel’s Legacy as a Pioneer of Early Childhood Education Like his route to becoming an educational reformer, Froebel’s career was not straightforward. Froebel

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was not independently wealthy; his work depended on patronage and funding from those with money or political influence. Some of these colleagues and friends became involved in writing about and disseminating Froebel’s ideas, during and after his lifetime. As he lived during the politically turbulent times of the Napoleonic wars, he often found his work impacted by changes in the political landscape. Despite the success of his work at Keilhau, for political reasons, the school came under government scrutiny in 1824, causing a sudden loss of students and accompanying financial problems. More devastatingly in 1851, a year before his death, kindergartens were proscribed by the Prussian government, under suspicion of formenting potential unrest (though this was actually the improbable result of an official mistaking Friedrich for his socialist nephew Karl). Although these circumstances made Froebel’s work extremely ­ ­difficult, they also contributed to its wider international influence as those inspired by his work took it out of Prussia, across Europe and beyond. His widow, friends, and colleagues continued, and wrote about, his work. Visitors from around the world took his ideas back with them, putting them into practice and, inevitably, adapting them to their local contexts. German emigrants took his ideas with them to other countries, notably the United States. For example, Froebel’s friend Baroness Von Marenholtz-Buelow established a school and ­ teacher training institute in Italy in 1871. In the United States, the first kindergarten was established in Chicago in 1856 by Margarethe Schurz (a German immigrant). Kindergarten and ­Froebel’s approach to early childhood education

was championed and adapted by reformers such as Elizabeth Peabody and Susan Blow, becoming an established feature of U.S. education. This was important in relation to child psychology and educational theory in the United States during the 20th and 21st centuries, establishing early childhood has a distinct area of study, and kindergarten practice as play-based as opposed to the more didactic practice of elementary schools. Froebel’s influence can be seen today in the endurance of the term ‘kindergarten’ and in ­child-centred approaches to early childhood education, with their emphasis on the social aspects of ­learning, holistic development, and children’s self-­ initiated activity. However, his belief that children should be allowed to develop at their own individual pace is at odds with current, increasingly widespread, neoliberal practices in education, particularly their emphasis on standardisation and testing against prescribed goals. Yinka Olusoga See also Innocence; Development; Education, ChildCentered; Montessori, Maria; Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich; Piaget, Jean; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Further Readings Lascarides, V. C., & Hinitz, B. F. (2011). History of early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge. Lilley, I. (1967). Frederick Froebel: A selection from his writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Strauch-Nelson, W. (2012). Transplanting Froebel into the present. International Journal of Education Through Art, 8(1), 59–72. doi:10.1386/eta.8.1.59_1

G Gay

and

Legal Recognition and Acceptance

Lesbian Parenting

The terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ and the notion of sexual orientation are not universal but connected to contemporary historic time and industrialised regions of the world. It is only in some regions that LG parenting is visible as a certain arrangement. Some European countries, Canada, a few states in the United States, and a few countries in South America have legalised same-sex marriage including regulating parental status if there are children in the household. Some countries have introduced gender neutral marriage acts (e.g., the Scandinavian countries), where married persons have the same rights regardless of gender—for example, to apply for adoption. Legalisation of same-sex marriage may constitute a base for official approval of LG parenting which again may provide supportive contexts for LG parenting. Many of the world’s regions and countries, such as Africa (except South Africa), China, Southeast Asia (e.g., India, Pakistan, Indonesia), the Middle East, and East European countries (e.g., Russia, Ukraine, Poland), do not approve of LG parenting, and some countries do not even recognise lesbian and gay persons. Even in countries that have legalised LG parenting, the overall picture is a climate of suspicion and stigma towards these families. A unique challenge for LG families is to deal with a constant threat of being exposed to stereotyping and unwanted attention around matters relating to health care, schooling, and leisure activities. When a child is born, and sometimes even before a child is born, LG parents are aware of the risks of being

‘Lesbian and gay parenting’ (LG parenting) refers to a variety of families where the mother or father openly identifies as lesbian or gay. These families are now more visible and widespread than in the past, with more countries, primarily in the Americas and Europe, having legalised LG parenting. This entry discusses the unique experiences of LG families since sexual orientation is a contested issue in most countries and the challenges faced by children and parents in dealing with their vulnerable position. Research comparing LG families and heterosexualheaded families shows minimal differences in parental behaviours and no differences in developmental outcomes for the children. Notably, while LG parenting as a research field has been characterised by essentialist notions of gender and sexual orientation, at times it has sought to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions within developmental psychology. Perhaps the most visible LG families today are families headed by two lesbian women, but LG families may consist of a single lesbian mother and her children, two gay fathers and their children, or a single gay father and his children. Many LG parents have earlier lived in a heterosexual relationship, but in some countries, an increasing number of LG parents establish their parenthood as openly LG persons. Notably, parents identifying outside of binary gender notions (i.e., transgender persons) may or may not identify as lesbian or gay, and these families are not specifically discussed in this entry. 809

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negatively perceived and judged by others due to their LG family arrangement. The risk of stigmatisation also exists when LG parents become part of preschool, school, and leisure activities, during which they may need to disclose their family arrangement to teachers or to parents of the child’s classmates. Hiding one’s LG status requires attention and energy, and an atmosphere of concealment may influence each family member negatively. Thus, a general need for LG parenting families is to establish a social climate with no negativity towards LG parenting. This is, however, a concern for policy makers at various levels, ranging from local municipalities to governments and is generally out of the hands of LG parents. Two important groups that directly or indirectly influence the lives of LG parenting families are health-care providers and teachers. They may create an atmosphere of explicit support because of their experience and expertise in meeting children and families with all sorts of challenges. One important step for these professionals would be to develop neutral and productive ways of talking with LG parents and being aware of the delicate balance between taking special care versus adding to stigmatising the same persons. Another step for these professionals would be to raise the issue of homo-negativity in internal meetings, which could add to a general awareness of specific needs of LG parenting families. Most LG parents prepare their children for possible harassment and stigmatisation due to their family arrangement, and research indicates that there are several measures for them to take if the circumstances allow them to. For example, if the parents are open from the start with health-care providers, teachers, and neighbours about the family being a LG family, disclosure concerns will likely not be a burden for the child in the years to come. LG parents are often aware that children in LG families can be targeted and teased for having LG parents, and it is possible to prepare the child for this, for example, by providing age-adequate viewpoints and sentences for the child to utilise in upcoming situations. As years go by, the developing children of LG parents will at some point realise the rareness of being raised by LG parents, and they may be challenged regarding their own stance to the issue of LG parenting. For the

offspring, this may not necessarily be a straightforward process, and their parents may facilitate the process with age-adequate reasoning about family diversities and the values of respect and equality. These issues are often concerns for other families at risk of being stigmatised, including ethnic minority families and families with mental illness.

Research Lesbian and Gay Parental Practices

The body of research comparing LG parenting practices with others is still small, especially regarding gay fathers, and it contains a number of sampling and assessment challenges. For example, how should one establish representative samples of lesbian-headed families, and which outcomes are important to study with what kinds of operationalisations. Nevertheless, as a whole, the studies have not found that LG parental practices differ negatively from those of others on well-known beneficial family factors. LG and heterosexual families both focus on providing emotional security and physical safety and wellbeing to their children. On the contrary, when differences are identified, LG parents seem to do better. One reason could be that LG parents on average go to greater lengths to become parents, and this may increase the chances of these families being more conscious of child-rearing practices and having the means to provide secure upbringings for their offspring. Children in Lesbian and Gay Parenting Families

Since the late 1970s, researchers have compared children with LG parents to other children (see, e.g., research by Susan Golombok, Fiana Tasker, and Charlotte Patterson). Overwhelmingly, the conclusion from these studies is that parental sexual orientation does not negatively affect child development. The children’s outcomes that have been most studied are children’s well-being, quality of parent-and-child relationship, school performance, peer relations, behavioural problems, gender conformity, and sexual orientation. These studies stem primarily from the United States and a few European countries. The research design of these studies often includes substantial variation across sample size and sample type, comparison

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groups (e.g., population norms or matching on family structure so that children with single lesbian mothers are compared to children with single heterosexual mothers), data sources (e.g., offspring, parents, teachers), data selection methods (e.g., observation, standardised tests, interviews), and blinding procedures (e.g., whether blinded to participants, to data collectors, or to data interpreters). The main pitfall posed by this variation is that it is difficult to draw generalisations. It is a challenge in this research field to develop more longitudinal studies, studies of LG families living in rural areas, and to establish large enough samples to avoid the risk of not detecting group differences that might exist in the populations.

Essentialist and Normative Research Versus Diversity and User-Oriented Research There are normative aspects of the LG parenting research. First, most empirical studies have relied on essentialist views where one treats—and thus reinforces—gender and sexual orientation as binary phenomena, downplaying gender and sexual orientation diversity. However, during the first decade of the 21st century, non-essentialist and intersectionality inspired approaches have acquired prominent positions in the field. Second, one may see traces of an ideal universal nuclear family as the standard against which one has evaluated parental behaviours and the outcomes for children in LG parenting families. For example, offspring have often been assessed regarding their fit with norms of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender conforming behaviours. Those adhering to non-essentialist and social constructionist perspectives will not agree that such outcomes are the most relevant to address, since violating such norms is not seen as a problem or something to be prevented (see, e.g., the works by Laura Benkov). Utilising the nuclear family as the desired standard tends to marginalise those who cannot or do not wish to live in a nuclear family, and they constitute significant proportions of the world’s families. Studies on children and childhood in LG parenting families inform legal processes, and one may argue that findings from the comparison tradition have been a necessary step towards

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recognising and legalising LG parenting arrangements. Importantly, findings from research about LG parenting families have also challenged normative assumptions that underlie developmental psychology such as the notion that children need to grow up with a mother and a father in the family. There are indications that user-oriented research is becoming more common, as there is a growing recognition of the need to document the needs and challenges faced by LG parenting families (see, e.g., Abbie E. Goldberg and Katherine R. Allen’s 2013 edited collection). Here, rather than identify the universal nature of LG parenting, researchers seek to understand the challenges, opportunities, and diversities of LG parenting as situated in a range of contexts. Norman Anderssen See also Family; Parenting; Parenting Studies; Same-Sex Parenting

Further Readings Adams, J., & Light, R. (2015). Scientific consensus, the law, and same sex parenting outcomes. Social Science Research, 53, 300–310. Brewer, P. R. (2014). Public opinion about gay rights and gay marriage. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 26(3), 279–282. doi:10.1093/ijpor/edu029 Fedewa, A. L., Black, W. W., & Ahn, S. (2014). Children and adolescents with same-gender parents: A metaanalytic approach in assessing outcomes. Journal of GLBT Family Studies. doi:10.1080/15504 28x.2013.869486 Goldberg, A. E., & Allen, K. R. (Eds.). (2013). LGBTparent families: Innovations in research and implications for practice. London, UK: Springer. Golombok, S., Mellish, L., Jennings, S., Casey, P., Tasker, F., & Lamb, M. E. (2014). Adoptive gay father families: Parent–child relationships and children’s psychological adjustment. Child Development, 85, 456–468. doi:10.1111/cdev.12155 Patterson, C. J. (2009). Children of lesbian and gay parents: Psychology, law, and policy. American Psychologist, 64(8), 727–736. Repetti, R. L., Taylor, S. E., & Seeman, T. E. (2002). Risky families: Family social environments and the mental and physical health of offspring. Psychological Bulletin, 128(2), 330–366. doi:10.1037/ 0033-2909.128.2.230

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Gender

Gender The term gender is commonly used to describe the socially constructed roles that men and women inhabit in society. Gender is an important lens for understanding children’s identities and experiences in everyday life, with implications for what it means to be a girl or be a boy. Conceptualizations of gender have changed over time, and different theoretical frameworks define and construct its meaning in different ways. The way in which gender is defined and conceptualized is not neutral but contributes to constructing, normalizing, and investing with values different ways of thinking about gender. Gender is important not only for considering the gendering of children but childhood itself can be thought of as gendered too (e.g., if children are seen as dependent and intertwined with women’s lives). It is also important to consider that academic discipline and practice fields can be gendered too, with implications for the production of knowledge about children and childhoods, and the experiences of children in various spaces and places of childhood such as families, schools, and communities. This gendering has very real implications for children’s lives, such as the gendered and intersectional nature of inequalities and realization of children’s rights. In this entry, biological, developmental, social, relational, and feminist poststructuralist conceptualizations of gender are considered. This entry concludes by examining gender and sexuality, how childhood is gendered, and intersectional perspectives on childhood and gender.

Biological, Psychological, and Developmental Perspectives on Gender Historically, research on children and gender has been framed through psychological and developmental lenses. The works of Jean Piaget and ­Lawrence Kohlberg were particularly influential. They based their theories on a biological understanding of gender, assuming that gender differences are rooted in different biological sexes and therefore are genetic, unchangeable, and inevitable. Such perspectives assumed gender to be an essential category, reached through universal

stages of development. Within this framework, children are thought to notice gender differences at certain ages, understand their own gender label, and behave accordingly. Critical writers from within and beyond the field of developmental psychology have challenged these dominant discourses. They have pointed out that biological and developmental perspectives fail to explain cultural variations of how gender is lived in different places and at different times and highlighted the heterogeneity of same-sex groups. In particular, the work of Erica Burman showed that disciplines themselves, such as the discipline of psychology, are not neutral and objective but are situated within powerful discourses of imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy. For example, historically, the discipline of psychology (as other academic disciplines) was dominated by White male theorists, and this contributed to reproducing oppressive discourses in relation to gender and race in unquestioned, powerful ways. Many influential studies within psychology were also based on samples of predominantly White, male, or middle-class children and therefore have been criticized for not reflecting a wider diversity of genders and cultures.

Gender as Social and Relational In contrast to biological perspectives on gender, socialization theories have emerged as a way of emphasizing the importance of children’s relationships and environment. Such views assume that children learn gender through imitation and modeling. In this framework, adults are therefore seen as particularly influential. For example, parents or teachers may reward children for what is culturally considered as sex-appropriate behavior (e.g., girls may be praised for being quiet). However, socialization theories have also been critiqued because they perpetuate a powerful male–female binary (i.e., the view that there are only two opposing sexes). This view is heavily engrained in most Western cultures and rooted in many social practices and even the structures of many languages. Writers such as Glenda MacNaughton have also pointed out that socialization theories leave little room for children’s own views and agency when it comes to their gender identity development.

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An alternative view of children’s gender identities and development is contained in gender relational theories. Viewing gender as relational means to recognize children’s active involvement in constructing its meaning and to regard gender as fluid rather than fixed. Children do not just interact with those around them but also contribute to the construction of those relationships and environments.

Feminist Poststructuralist Perspectives on Gender Feminist poststructuralist writers suggest that children’s gender (and other) identities are constituted through discursive practices in an ongoing process. The work of Judith Butler, and in particular her concept of performativity, is often described as a key element of poststructuralist thought. Butler’s notion of performativity emphasizes the instability and contradictions of a person’s identity. It describes gender identity as an effect (rather than a cause) of practices, institutions, and discourses, continually produced and reproduced in the ways in which people perform their gender (and other) identities. Butler suggests that people do not have a stable gender identity that is expressed in their actions but that these very actions come to constitute gender identities. However, she does not claim that the ways in which people perform gender are willful acts but rather suggests that they are shaped through discourse. A post-structuralist, performative approach to gender recognizes that gender is both an individual, embodied identity as well as at the same time transcending those individual bodies and continuously reproduced within discourse and structures. Considering gender as both an individual, embodied and simultaneously discursive and structural aspect is crucial to understanding children’s gendered experiences and the wider social and material relations to which they are connected. Raewyn Connell provides another useful perspective on how dominant discourses shape notions of masculinity and femininity. In her writing, she coined the concept of hegemonic masculinity which describes those forms of masculinity that are dominant and accepted in a certain cultural environment. Elements of hegemonic masculinity in cultures of the Minority World include an emphasis

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on men’s superiority over women, rationality, physical strength, and competitiveness. It is a relational concept, complemented by the notion of emphasized femininity. The latter suggests compliance and empathy as dominant female attributes and serves to reinforce ideas of hegemonic masculinity. While the concept of hegemonic masculinity is helpful for theorizing gender relations and practices, Connell and other writers have cautioned against using it in an overgeneralizing way. Hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity may take on many different forms, which emerge in particular cultural and historical contexts. A key contribution from feminist poststructuralist thinking is the idea that gender is not something that children have, but something that they do, or perform, within powerful discursive structures that may enable or constrain children’s various gender identities. These discourses make available various gender (and other) identity positions to children within the relationships, institutions, and environments they inhabit. It follows that such an understanding of gender moves beyond the binary of male and female, girls and boys.

Gender and Sexuality: Heteronormativity and Queer Childhoods Children are often seen as too innocent to be concerned by or knowledgeable about sexuality and positioned as in need of protection from such knowledge. However, through her research with children, Emma Renold has highlighted that discussions of gender and sexuality are embedded in children’s everyday interactions and experiences and that children are both sexual beings as well as becomings. When thinking about the broader discursive contexts and structures that shape gender understandings, Butler’s concept heteronormativity provides another useful lens for conceptualizing the links between gender and sexuality. She suggests that gender is routinely defined through a heterosexual matrix which assumes the identities of girls or boys to be inextricably tied to dominant notions of heterosexuality. From this perspective, children’s gender constructions are seen as embedded in expressions of masculinity or femininity within a hierarchical and supposedly

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heterosexual frame. To be a real boy or girl means to desire the opposite sex, and deviating from normative masculinities or femininities also throws the heterosexual hegemony into doubt. Heteronormativity is a powerful discourse that normalizes cisgender identities (the idea that a person’s identity and experiences align with the sex they were assigned at birth) and heterosexual desire. For children, the compulsory nature of heteronormative discourses therefore comes with implications of what counts as acceptable behavior (i.e., gendered expectations that normalize hegemonic masculine or feminine expressions of identity). An alternative way of thinking is expressed in writings about queer childhoods. Queer theory provides a lens that questions normative ways of thinking about gender and the gender binary and problematizes assumptions that link biology and  sexuality in naturalizing ways. For children and childhoods, queer theory provides a useful lens that questions normative ways of thinking about gender and gender development models. It also contests the powerful dichotomy of girls and boys and its gendered way of thinking about individuals and groups of children. Furthermore, it challenges homophobic discourses that position children who do not conform to gender hegemonic ideas as outside the norm. It is important to note that while gender theories have evolved historically, this is by no means a linear process. Earlier theories on gender and childhoods, such as biological and developmental perspectives, continue to shape powerful discourses and practices that affect children’s lives.

Childhood as Gendered Another way of thinking about children and gender is to consider the ways in which childhood as a social construct is gendered in itself. The lives of children and women are often considered to be closely intertwined. For example, in many societies, childhood is traditionally associated with motherhood and womanhood and therefore relegated to “the female domain.” There are affective and material links between women and children’s lives and complex dependencies and interdependencies. Women and

children also share some similar structural dynamics of oppression, for example, in terms of a relative lack of influence, power, and the realization of their rights. As a consequence, children (and children’s rights) have sometimes been seen as an appendix to women’s issues and women’s striving for equality (e.g., in terms of access to services, the labor market, political representation, and social security). Traditionally, both children’s and women’s lives have been associated with the private (or domestic) domain, although such a view becomes increasingly problematic with a recognition that the dichotomy private/public is fluid, permeable, and mutually constitutive. More recent discourses have also seen children’s lives entering more visibly into the public domain—for example, if children are positioned as future citizens and become objects of early intervention and investment for the state. The assumed links between women and children’s lives are tied to particular ideological constructions of family expressed in dominant ideas of the nuclear, heterosexual couple family. In some societies, cultural and legislative changes have started to deconstruct this idea of family and recognize alternative family and relationship models, such as LGBTQ+ families, single parent/carer families, or foster families and alternative care relations. However, the impact of ideological constructions of the heteronormative family is still powerful for children and women’s lives. Such debates have increasingly problematized the often assumed links between childhood and motherhood/womanhood. In addition, it is important to remember that both children and women are very diverse groups, and there is a multitude of experiences within them. For childhood studies, challenging assumptions that link children to women/families also raises broader questions about the complex inter- and intragenerational relationships that shape children’s lives—for example, whether children should be studied as a group in itself or as always situated within intergenerational relationships. Both perspectives have merits and challenges, and it is important to remember that the relationships between women and children (and men and children) are complex and sometimes contradictory.

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Children’s Rights, Intersectionality, and Anti-Discriminatory Approaches As outlined earlier, gender as a concept has relevance for children’s identities and childhood as a whole. Gender also plays an important role in children’s lives as an axis of social inequality, resulting in particular gendered experiences, opportunities, and outcomes. One area in which these inequalities become pronounced is the field of children’s rights. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is underpinned by the general principle that every child has rights, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, religion, language, abilities, or any other status. Yet in practice, gender inequality and discriminatory gender norms can result in children’s rights violations. This can take the form, for example, of limiting girls’ access to basic rights such as education or health services or restrictions on having their views heard and participation in family and society. Boys may be expected to conform to restricted ideas of hegemonic masculinity which promote the oppression of emotions and may encourage violent behaviors. Discriminatory gender attitudes can affect children’s lives before birth and across the life course, resulting for example in experiences of gender-based violence or unequal pay for equal work. This illustrates that gender norms and inequalities carry very real implications for children, and these emerge in different forms and are shaped by their complex intersectional locations (i.e., their gendered, classed, and racialized positions within particular cultural and historical contexts). This means that gender and gendered forms of discrimination such as sexism and homophobia need to be considered in intersection with other aspects of inequalities, to be able to fully recognize and challenge the broad spectrum of gender inequalities that children experience. For example, like heteronormativity, whiteness is another dominant lens through which childhood is often filtered in public and academic discourses in the Global North. Intersectionality (a concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Combahee River ­ ­Collective) thus is an important framework for understanding the complexity of gender and other systemic inequalities in children’s lives. An intersectional lens is also important for childhood studies scholars in order to avoid

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epistemic injustices (i.e., to view children and childhoods through normative, exclusive lenses and thus to misrecognize the experiences of some children). Similarly, many academic and practice fields related to childhood have been dominated by women, such as early childhood education and care, and primary and secondary education. In the Global North, this is sometimes associated with a proclaimed crisis through the feminization of education. Concerns about this relate to the (under-) performance of boys in education and the absence of men in childhood practice and teaching. While the diversification of scholarship and professional workforces is certainly important, it is also crucial that those working in these fields are aware of gender (and other) biases and take proactive, antidiscriminatory stances when it comes to researching with, or working with, children. By challenging the gendered spaces of childhood and making available alternative discourses about gender, race, and class among other factors, practitioners can contribute to allowing children to express their identities and develop their potentials to the fullest. Marlies Kustatscher See also Gender Identity; Gender Independent Children; Queer Childhoods; Transgender Children

Further Readings Blaise, M., & Taylor, A. (2012). Using queer theory to rethink gender equity in early childhood education. YC Young Children, 67(1), 88. Burman, E. (2016). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London, UK: Routledge. Butler, J. (2002). Gender trouble. London, UK: Routledge. Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Crenshaw, K. W., Ocen, P., & Nanda, J. (2014). Black girls matter: Pushed out, overpoliced and underprotected. New York, NY: African American Policy Forum and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. doi:10.1163/2210-7975_ hrd-9978-2015002 De Graeve, K. (2015). Children’s rights from a gender studies perspective: Gender, intersectionality and ethics of care. In W. Vandenhole, E. Desmet, D. Reynaert, & S. Lembrechts (Eds.), The Routledge

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international handbook of children’s rights studies (pp. 147–163). London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315769530 MacNaughton, G. (2000). Rethinking gender in early childhood education. London, UK: Sage. Mirza, H. S., & Meetoo, V. (2018). Empowering Muslim girls? Post-feminism, multiculturalism and the production of the ‘model’ Muslim female student in British schools. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(2), 227–241. doi:10.1080/01425692.2 017.1406336 Oakley, A. (2002). Women and children first and last: Parallels and differences between children’s and women’s studies. In B. Mayall (Ed.), Children’s childhoods (pp. 19–38). London, UK: Routledge. Renold, E. (2004). Girls, boys and junior sexualities: Exploring childrens’ gender and sexual relations in the primary school. London, UK: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203561584 Rosen, R., & Twamley, K. (Eds.). (2018). Feminism and the politics of childhood: Friends or foes? UCL Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt21c4t9k

Gender Identity Gender identity in childhood can be conceptualized within many differing epistemological perspectives but broadly can be defined as a child’s internal sense of gender identification based on their sense of being either within or outside of the gender binary (i.e., “male/female”). Gender identity is usually utilized in relationship with one’s personal identity, but gender, as a construct, is commonly applied to many differing facets of life (i.e., emotions, toys, colors). Many facets of the self can contribute to a child’s sense of gender identity, including apparel, embodiment, personal interests, and/or social and peer groups. Many children are beginning to identify outside of the male/female binary (developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft terms these children “gender creative children”). Whether identifying within the male/female gender binary, or outside, children gain a sense of gendered self-hood and identity at a young age, and thus, conversations of gender identity are extremely pertinent to the field of childhood studies. Still, there are different conceptual frameworks for understanding childhood gender identity as well as debates regarding the

best means to support the development of gender identity in young children. Thus, this entry engages with some basic definitions for gender identity. This entry begins by discussing past perspectives on gender identity and more psychological frameworks for conceptualizing gender identity, debates between “born this way” perspectives and queer/ poststructural perspectives on identity, challenges to the medical model of gender identity, and literature regarding supporting transgender children’s gender identity development. Ultimately, this entry offers insight into nuanced conversations regarding gender identity in childhood.

Social Scientific Study of Gender Identity The social scientific study of gender identity gained prominence in the 20th century through research regarding sex roles, or behaviors, attire, attitudes, and emotions, which are generally associated with a specific sex. Mid-to-late 20th century social scientists, such as Talcott Parsons, John Money, and Sandra Bem, began studying sex roles (and eventually gender roles) as well as gender schema theory. While often used interchangeably, the study of sex roles is associated with a more biologically essentialist viewpoint which associates certain traits and characteristics with a binarized conception of the biological sexes, while the study of gender roles provides a more social perspective on how certain traits, attitudes, behaviors, and perspectives become associated with either male or female gender roles within societies. While gender role theory provided a means to consider how societally gendered expectations and roles become embodied and enacted by individuals, it still failed to account for an individual’s internal sense of gendered identification and how they consider their own gender identity. In 1981, Bem proposed gender schema theory to understand developmentally how children come to understand and organize gendered meanings and structures. Part of this theory involves comprehending the ways in which children come to identify with a specific side of the gender binary (male or female) and how schemas, or how common conceptions and understandings of gendered practices and behaviors, are formulated. In essence, gender schema theory is interested in how children evaluate incoming information pertaining to

Gender Identity

gender in relationship with existing schematic representations for gender (i.e., evaluating how an individual dresses based on gendered assumptions for their gender). Bem proposed that children eventually come to identify as a certain gender after learning about the schemas associated with each gender. Still, Bem’s theorizations have been criticized for equating assigned sex with gender and for being biologically essentialist. Throughout the late 20th century, social constructivist perspectives on gender gained prominence, particularly through the work of Candace West and Don Zimmerman in 1987. West and Zimmerman theorized how instead of being naturally occurring in an essential fashion, gender is a doing that is enacted through behaviors, norms, and everyday interactions. Such a focus provides an avenue to consider how children do gender through learning the socially accepted frameworks which make male/female gender identities intelligible. By learning the societally acceptable frameworks and codes that categorize individuals into a binarized gendered identity, children begin to regulate their behaviors and interactions in order to become intelligible as a specific gender identity (i.e., choosing certain colors, such as blue for boys or pink for girls, or holding certain interests, such as dolls for girls and superheroes for boys). Thus, for children who do not conform to expected gendered behaviors and conventions, such as choosing specific interests, colors, or clothing, they are often heavily policed at school for their failure to enact seemingly naturalized norms for gender.

Gender Performativity and “Born This Way” Narratives In 1990, American feminist philosopher Judith Butler released Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, critiquing the feminist pursuit of a universalized gendered subject and instead viewing gender as performative—meaning gendered acts and behaviors themselves constitute gender instead of merely expressing it. With this, Butler challenged the notion of an I behind gendered behaviors and urged readers to leave identities and categories open for resignification and reinterpretation. Similar to many French poststructuralists of the 20th century, Butler’s work

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challenged the notion that one is born a certain gender (just as Michel Foucault discusses the social construction of the category homosexual) and challenged ideas of an internal I or sense of self which a gender identity represents. Thus, instead of there being a true self or true gender, gender is reiterated and confirmed through social actions and behaviors of which gender is an effect. As described, while children enact gendered norms and behaviors continually, applying Butler’s theories to understand childhood gender norms would take the focus away from individual gender identities into considering how gender is reiterated through performances. While Butler’s work has proved highly influential in feminist theories, it has received some criticism from feminist scholars who believe Butler to be eliminating the gendered subject and the impacts this might hold for struggles for social change. The elimination of identity as an internal sense of self and notions of a true self hold great ramifications for gender nonconforming, nonbinary, gender queer, and transgender individuals, who have often spent much of their life working to actualize a sense of gendered authenticity and selfhood. Thus, with Butler’s account of gender performativity, gender identity’s foundations came into question. Commonly, in mainstream LGBTQ activism, the phrase “born this way” is used (which is also a Lady Gaga single) to describe the experience of being born a certain sexual or gender identity and the notion that one is biologically born into their sexual or gender identity. With Butler challenging an internal sense of gender identity in her work, notions of essentialism in gender identity are problematized. Thus, the question becomes “Is one born this way?” Queer theory and poststructural approaches, which view identity as shifting and socially constituted, are often in opposition to transgender theorizations of identity and subjectivity, or the self. Questions of whether one is born transgender or if one has known their entire life that they might identify with a specific gender identity are commonly featured in popular media narratives about transgender children and youth, such as that of TLC star and adolescent transgender activist Jazz Jennings. The common trope of being “born in the wrong body” is used to describe the experience of knowing from birth

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that one does not identify with their assigned sex at birth. Thus, notions of authenticity and selffulfillment are discussed in relationship with the experience of transitioning and changing gender identity. Still, queer theorizations, mostly inspired by the postmodern and poststructural works of Butler and Foucault, come into conflict with notions of authenticity and a stable and consistent self, while also viewing identity itself as a construction that can be oppressive. With there being no stable self that is consistent throughout one’s lifetime in postmodern and poststructural theories, this calls into question narratives of continuity in transgender children and youth, who claim that they have consistently known that they would identify in a certain manner.

Queer and Trans Theoretical Perspectives on Gender Identity For childhood and youth scholars, it is necessary to understand these tensions between queer theorizations of gender identity and trans scholars. Trans is commonly deployed as an umbrella term—one which includes transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, two-spirit, and gender nonconforming individuals. It must be noted ­ how these different identities take up differing meanings—one who identifies as transsexual and partakes in medical transitions might not identify with genderqueer and nonconforming politics, which commonly seek to dismantle the gender binary. Moreover, as noted, queer theorizations that seek to unhinge identity from essentialist notions of the self might come into conflict with some trans theorizations of gender identity. With self-fulfillment and authenticity being beacons of some transsexual narratives of gender identity, much queer theorization regards trans individuals who remain within the gender binary as reinforcing binarized and essentialist notions of gender identity. Feminist philosopher Lauren Bialystok described how for many transsexual individuals, narratives of consistency, self-actualization, and self-knowledge are important ways of countering discourses which question transsexual individuals’ ability to selfidentify and know themselves. Moreover, Bialystok articulated how self-essentialism is ­ important for many transindividuals’ ability to

self-actualize, making the “born this way” narrative important to prove one’s ability to stay “true to themselves” despite societal critiques and pressures. Notably, trans theorist Viviane Namaste critiqued Butler’s theories for her usage of transgender people as academic objects through Butler’s analysis of drag queens and the 1991 drag film Paris Is Burning, in Gender Trouble. Namaste articulated how drag queens and transgender individuals are used to prove that gender is socially constructed while not examining the material conditions of gay bars in terms of prominent misogyny and transphobia expressed in gay men’s spaces. Moreover, Namaste has forwarded important arguments about how queer theory erases the material conditions of transsexual and transgender individuals and their everyday living conditions. For Namaste, queer and poststructural theories treat trans subjects as theoretical abstractions and do not consider their material realities with gender and individual journeys with gender identification. This critique is important for childhood studies scholars to consider when discussing gender identity within their respective works through a queer or poststructural lens, which can often deny trans individuals their embodied and material reality, while erasing the specific epistemologies and knowledges of trans individuals themselves. Childhood studies still requires further work to bring forward conversations regarding gender identity as gender identity remains an often silenced and unintelligible conversation in the field. Similarly, transsexual biologist and writer Julia Serano critiqued notions that gender is completely a social construct and holds no biological influences. Serano distinguished between social constructionism, whereby the socioculturally constructed nature of gender is acknowledged; gender determinism, where gender identity is considered solely determined by biology in an essentialist fashion; and gender artifactualism, where any discussion of biological influences on gender identification and development is dismissed and rebuked. In her work Whipping Girl, Serano forwarded a social constructionist perspective of gender that is balanced in considering how biology, society, culture, and the individual interact in one’s choice to identify with a specific gender.

Gender Identity

Gender Identity Disorder (GID) However, bringing biological influence into conversations of gender identity, particularly as it pertains to children, is a difficult conversation for many due to the common pathologization and medicalization of gender identity in childhood. Until 2013, the successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychiatric Association listed GID as a diagnosis until the DSM-5 was released, and the term was changed to gender dysphoria. GID was defined by persistent feelings by an individual that their gender identity does not align with their assigned sex at birth. Moreover, GID was classified based on continued psychological distress, desires to change one’s primary and secondary sex characteristics, as well as a discomfort with the gender roles traditionally associated with one’s assigned sex. Many trans scholars and activists have criticized the diagnosis of GID and its medical usage, particularly the work associated with Kenneth Zucker, who used to be associated with the Gender Identity Clinic for Children of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. Zucker’s work has been heavily criticized for pathologizing gender variant and nonconforming boys, or sissy boys. Concerns with Zucker’s work also include claims that his work encourages gender conversion and does not listen to the voices of transgender children themselves. Similar concerns have been echoed by research which claims to investigate transgender desistance or the rate at which transgender children will ultimately not identify as transgender in later childhood. These studies have been critiqued as well for not including children who wish to change their gender identity, for conflating gender identity and sexual orientation, and for equating gender variant behavior with choosing to identify as a gender different than assigned sex at birth.

Considerations of Gender Identity for Childhood Studies For childhood studies scholars, considering the tensions between social constructionist and biological explanations for gender identity and how both arguments can be used for and against trans children is important. While the “born this way” argument holds political utility for ensuring that

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trans children are acknowledged and respected in their individual gender identities, this argument can also open children up for reparative therapies and notions that gender identity lies within the individual and thus can be altered through medical intervention. In terms of clinical care for transgender children, Diane Ehrensaft, a clinical psychologist, formulated a gender affirmative model of childcare. Such a model affirms the respective gender identities of transgender children and youth and moves away from locating pathology and deviance within the child or individual. Moreover, such an approach does not consider notions of desistance and listens to and affirms transgender children in how they see themselves and their respective gender identities. Notably, affirmative therapy moves away from seeing being transgender as a clinical or medical diagnosis; that is, it moves into a supportive position which does not medicalize gender. More and more children are identifying outside the gender binary at a young age, with gender nonbinary, gender queer, and gender nonconforming identities emerging, as well as the increasing usage of they and them as gender nonbinary pronouns. Through the increased awareness for gender nonbinary, gender queer, and gender nonconforming identification in childhood, children are choosing to identify outside of traditional male or female roles. These lead scholars to question the future of gender itself and whether the gender binary will continue, or if new generations will eschew the binary in totality. For childhood studies scholars, understanding the differing ways in which gender is conceptualized within psychological, sociological, and gender studies literature is necessary for positioning one epistemologically within relevant research literature. Considering how children are constructed as active agents in their social worlds within the frameworks of the sociology of children and childhood studies, understanding critiques of individualistic, medicalized, and psychological frameworks for understanding gender identity is important for new scholars to gender studies. By considering how gender identity is a deeply personal and individual construct which is positioned within highly social and cultural frameworks, scholars can see how children navigate structures

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which often limit their potential gender identities, as well as the agency of children and youth to challenge hegemonic structures. Adam William John Davies See also Gender; Gender Independent Children; Girlhood; Postmodern Childhoods; Queer Childhoods; Queer Studies; Transgender Children

Further Readings Bialystok, L. (2013). Authenticity and trans identity. In S. Scott (Ed.), Let’s talk about sex: A multidisciplinary discussion (pp. 122–145). Sydney, Canada: Cape Breton University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Ehrensaft, D. (2011). Gender born, gender made: Raising healthy gender-nonconforming children. New York, NY: Workman. Herthel, J., & Jennings, J. (2014). I am Jazz. New York, NY: Dial/Penguin. Kuhl, D., & Martino, W. (2018). ‘Sissy’ boys and the pathologization of gender non-conformity. In S. Talburt (Ed.), Youth sexualities: Public feelings and contemporary cultural politics (Vol. 1, pp. 31–60). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Pyne, J. (2016). Queer and trans collisions in the classroom: A call to throw open theoretical doors. In S. Hillock & N. J. Mule (Eds.), Queering social work education (pp. 54–72). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Serano, J. (2016). Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Hachette, UK. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001 .2009.01052_1.x Winters, K., Temple Newhook, J., Pyne, J., Feder, S., Jamieson, A., Holmes, C., . . . Tosh, J. (2018). Learning to listen to trans and gender diverse children: A response to Zucker (2018) and Steensma and Cohen-Kettenis (2018). International Journal of Transgenderism, 19(2), 246–250. doi:10.1080/155327 39.2018.1471767

Gender Independent Children Gender independence is an important concept in the field of childhood studies, as inquiry into gender and childhood has historically treated the

male/female gender binary as its foundational premise. In the spirit of generating scholarship that affirms children’s personhood and fundamental right to self-determination, a wider understanding of gender diversity and difference in childhood is essential. Children and adults describe the experience of gender difference using a variety of terminology including but not limited to words like transgender, genderqueer, gender nonbinary, gender fluid, gender creative, gender nonconforming, two-spirit, gender variant, and many more. One way of speaking inclusively about this group as a whole is to use the term gender independent. While not every child or adult might be comfortable with this term, and terminology in the LGBTQ+ communities is always changing, it is nonetheless one widely accepted way of referring to any person who affirms their right to gender self-determination in this way. At its most basic, a gender independent child is any child who identifies with or expresses a gender identity beyond or different from those assigned at birth. Some specific examples of gender independence could include the following: (a) a child who was identified female at birth but is a transgender male; (b) a child who affirms that they are neither male nor female, but instead gender-fluid or nonbinary, and requests the use of they/them pronouns; (c) a child who is a cisgender male, but whose gender expression is feminine; and (d) a child who affirms that their gender identity and/or sex are in a state of flux. This entry examines expressions of gender independence; how it manifests across cultures, legal, and medical considerations; and gender independence and children’s agency.

Expressions of Gender Independence These are only a few of many diverse expressions of gender independence and identity. Gender independence is a normal form of human diversity seen throughout history and in every culture. It is not pathological nor should it be understood through a disease and treatment model but rather through affirmation and alignment. Sex, gender, gender identity, and gender expression are complex and independent yet interconnected things. For example, sex can refer to biological sex and is usually identified at birth (based on a cursory though not always accurate or

Gender Independent Children

appropriate visual inspection of the child’s genitals) as male, female, or other/intersex. Meanwhile, there may be masculine, feminine, or other genders. Genders, gender identities, or gender expressions are culturally informed and socially normed and have historically been associated with a particular sex. In many cultural contexts, it has long been expected that people who are male would automatically express a corresponding masculine gender identity, and people who are female would similarly express a corresponding feminine gender identity. Social gender policing regimes enforced the normative nature of these correspondences, and people who did not identify or express accordingly would frequently face negative and even violent social repercussions. For children, gender expression expectations and policing began at home and were reinforced in early schooling through language, curricular materials, and daily routines. Environments like these present significant hardship to the gender independent child, and schools continue to be locations for some of the highest levels of trauma for gender independent children and youth, especially in social and political contexts where levels of tolerance for difference is low, and where rigid gender binaries and homophobic, hegemonic interpretations of gender are the norm. Gender independent children in these environments are more likely to experience trauma, abuse, low levels of academic achievement, and negative mental health outcomes.

Gender Independence Across Cultures While the majority of scholarship on gender independence is located in a Western context, it is important to note that an array of gender diversities are present and inclusive progress is being made in other cultural and national contexts as well. For example, in recent years, the Hijra in India have seen radical progress in the form of expanded rights, visibility, and legal standing as a third gender. As of 2018, transgender Costa Ricans have a right to state documentation in the affirmed identity, legal name, and gender change and state-sponsored hormone therapies. Botswana affirms that legal gender change is a constitutional right. The Fijian constitution includes specific protections for gender diverse people. These are just a

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few cases where the arc of progress is substantial, though slow. While there are many contexts that are accepting of, and even actively supporting transgender and gender diverse people, there are certainly those who fall short of the mark. Notably, transgender people were recently denied driver’s licenses in Russia on the grounds that being transgender was a mental illness, and there are no legal protections for transgender or gender diverse people of any kind. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia and much of the African continent, gender diversity—and all other LGBTQ+ identities—is ­ illegal and punishable in an array of brutal ways.

Legal Recognition In most Western contexts, transgender people have generally more legal affirmation and social accommodation and support. The early 2000s brought greater acceptance and institutional accommodation for gender independent children. Some schools have adopted gender inclusive practices that have been shown to benefit children of all genders and gender expressions. Parents may receive support and guidance from pediatricians and others to help them find ways to support their child. Professionals have developed their own guidelines for providing gender-affirming support for gender independent children and youth. These guidelines focused on crucial areas of support for the gender independent child, including but not limited to helping children and families with social transition and medical treatment. When a child undergoes a social transition, this means that they start to express their gender differently from how it was assigned at birth. This might include asking the people around them to use different pronouns, a new name, and to be helpful and flexible with clothing, hair, and other expression so they can live in their affirmed gender. Children who are in school should be supported to use the restrooms and changing rooms of their choice and be called by the name they choose. Many schools make a unisex or all genders restroom or individual locker/changing room available to all students to facilitate this process. Teachers and other school personnel can assist by providing support for the transitioning child’s peers to provide them with the language and space they need to talk about their own feelings during this time. Sometimes parents and caregivers may seek

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Gender Independent Children

support from a gender-affirming mental health professional to help with parenting, family, or even the child’s ongoing mental health support during a social transition. Even very young children may socially transition.

Gender Independence and Children’s Agency Many gender independent people never undergo any medical intervention. Still others feel that surgical or pharmacological assistance can help them feel more comfortable by aligning their physical bodies with their internal sense of gender identity. For many gender independent people, this alignment is essential for their continued mental health. Children do not typically undergo either surgical or pharmacological intervention but focus on social transition. However, many gender independent children see pediatric endocrinologists who monitor them for signs of adrenarche, and as the children grow, they might administer hormoneblocking medications to slow the onset of puberty. This gives those children time to explore their gender identity further without having to undergo the stressful and often traumatizing experience of developing unwanted secondary sex characteristics. Cross hormone therapies are available for older teens, should this be recommended by a qualified endocrinologist, and surgical solutions are possible after the child reaches the age of 18 years. Hormone-blocking medications are safe and fully reversible and widely used, even in very young children who may not be gender independent but who are being treated for other endocrinological issues such as precocious puberty. The concept of gender independence is itself aligned with a belief in children’s agency and this right to gender self-determination. Because children have historically been treated as objects both in their everyday human interactions and also as research participants, they have rarely been seen as independent or capable in most areas of their own lives. Adults are the rule and decision makers in most cultural contexts, and this includes children’s own determination of sex and gender identities and expressions. Parents and other caregivers/ guardians are also the people who perpetuate gender norms and police gender expressions, restricting children’s gender expression within a

narrow band of activity aligned with the prevailing social norms of how a boy or girl should behave. While parents and other adults in some cultural contexts are increasingly more open to allowing and even encouraging children’s gender independence, few are completely comfortable with fully affirming children’s right to gender and sex self-determination. This may not be a function of general social and cultural discomfort with gender nonconformity and transgender rights and freedoms but rather a fundamental belief in the boundaries of children’s rights and personhood. Despite the fact that children as young as 18 months old may begin to express gender differences, parents, caregivers, and other adults may be less likely to support children’s gender independence than they would be an adult’s. This could be a function of the adultism that pervades many cultures, and the concomitant beliefs in children’s developmental incompleteness and subsequent decisional incompetence, even about something as fundamental as their own gender expression and gender identity. Children whose gender independence is affirmed and supported have overall better behavioral, academic, and physical and mental health outcomes compared with gender independent children who are unsupported or pressured to conform. Sally Ann Campbell Galman See also Queer Childhoods; Queer Children, Representations of; Queer Studies; Transgender Children

Further Readings Ehrensaft, D., & Spack, N. (2016). The gender creative child: Pathways for nurturing and supporting children who live outside gender boxes. New York, NY: The Experiment. doi:10.1080/1550428x.2017.1282282 Galman, S. C. (2018). The story of Peter Both-in-One: Using visual storytelling methods to understand risk and resilience among transgender and gendernonconforming young children in rural North American contexts. In A. Mandrona & C. Mitchell (Eds.), Visual encounters in the study of rural childhoods. Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1vw0rv2.16 Murchison, G., Adkins, D., Conard, L. A., Ehrensaft, D., Elliott, T., Hawkins, L. A., . . . Wolf-Gould, C. (2016).

Generation Gap Supporting and caring for transgender children. American Academy of Pediatrics. Retrieved from https://assets2.hrc.org/files/documents/Supporting CaringforTransChildren.pdf?_ga=2.39185383 .554809490.1521742967-138951529.1521742967

Generation Gap The concept of a generation gap addresses an alleged divergence in convictions and behavior between different generations. It gained relevance against the backdrop of questions such as: Can good order in society be preserved in the face of having to pass down norms, values, and knowledge from generation to generation? And may such a succession of generations even be conceived of as a necessary base of desirable renewal? The succession of generations undoubtedly evokes fear and hope, and in this way, it has been addressed by the classics of sociology as an issue. This entry examines discourses on the generation gap and further considers whether generation gaps persist in the 21st century.

Discourses on the Generation Gap For Émile Durkheim, society’s order is based on a collective consciousness: values and beliefs shared by all members of society. Accordingly, a generation gap may generate a chaotic development within society. This is what Durkheim writes in his lectures at the turn to the 20th century. In 1928, Karl Mannheim published The Problem of Generations, in which he outlined a different view: the sequential rhythm of generations as a hope for cultural change. Mannheim believed social events in a given historical moment were crucial influences on young people. Under the condition that a consciousness of generational unity would develop, such influences might liberate the young generation to develop a new approach to society while prevailing ways of experiencing the world would lose relevance. Similarly, Ortega y Gasset spoke of special missions each generation had. It was ­Shmuel N. Eisenstadt who corrected such overly fearful or hopeful visions in regard to the succession of generations, by taking a closer look at what was going on in juvenile peer groups of the

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1950s and 1960s. To him, these groups constituted a link between the spheres of family and institutionalized society. Rules and rites of juvenile peer groups, being at least partially deviant from the ones of the adult world, nevertheless proved to be functional in their consequences; they offered the possibility of acquiring role dispositions, which young people would need later in life. Public discourses on a generation gap boosted in the 1960s when the behavior and value orientations of young people and the visibility of youth subcultures provoked reactions of moral panic. There were many reasons for a growing divide between young people and the older generation. A massive and worldwide educational expansion prolonged youth as a moratorium, made interactions in homogeneous age-groups more important, and created social distance between parents and their upwardly mobile children. In addition, favorable economic conditions in many Western countries fueled a market of music and fashion targeting young people and claiming successfully to represent their own culture. In 1977, Ronald Inglehart published his influential book, The Silent Revolution. He found an intergenerational shift in values in industrialized societies: nonmaterial qualities of life had higher importance for the generation born after World War II, while the older generation gave priority to physical and material security. To him, this change was caused by the economically favorable conditions the younger generation had been profiting from while coming of age. The term generation has multiple meanings. The oldest is the one of kinship descent, either in the sense of parent–child relations or larger kinship relations. In public discourses and social sciences, the term has additional meanings: It refers to cohorts (individuals being born or confronted with important events in the same time interval), life stages, and historical periods. Social scientists have often used the term to refer to various meanings simultaneously. While Durkheim refers mostly to the cohort meaning, Eisenstadt refers to both life stages and descents; for Mannheim, it has a genealogical meaning but mainly the one of cohort. David I. Kertzer identified the diversity of meanings attributed to the term and admonished that this multivocality, which was a virtue in popular discourse, became a liability in science.

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Generational Approach

Accordingly, the notion of a gap between generations varies as well, from a rather macrosociological problem of institutional change to an element of social and private interactions.

The Generation Gap in the 21st Century It is questionable if a generation gap still exists and whether the focus is on private interactions or social macro-phenomena. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, many researchers noted that the notion of a generation gap confounded cohort and lifecourse effects and overestimated the agreement within the youth cohort. Pollsters deploy portraits of differing generations such as Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. However, there is considerable evidence that differences among cohorts are diminishing. For example, comparing the results of the General Social Survey 1973, 1975, and 1985 with regard to attitudes toward issues such as abortion, civil liberties, and finances, one finds a decreased gap between generations over time. If one considers private interactions, there is also sound evidence that there has been constant improvement since the 1950s. The “Shell Youth Studies” are representative studies of young people in Germany, regularly repeated since 1953; their results show a continuous decline of everyday conflicts within families between young people and their parents. Another group interested in generational differences are human resource experts, since three generations come together at work. The evidence for generational differences is, however, not convincing. All in all, in the 21st century, concerns about the generation gap have diminished in the West, but during this period, there is evidence that the generation gap has become a growing concern in other countries, including India and China. Doris Bühler-Niederberger See also Age; Generational Conflict; Generationing; Youth

Further Readings Kertzer, D. I. (1983). Generation as a sociological problem. Annual Review of Sociology, 9, 12–149. Lyon, S., & Kuron, L. (2014). Generational differences in the workplace: A review of the evidence and

directions for future research. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35, 139–157. doi:10.1002/ job.1913 Smith, T. W. (2005). Generation gaps in attitudes and values from the 1970s to the 1990s. In R. A. Settersten, F. F. Furstenberg, & R. G. Rumbaut (Eds.), On the frontier of adulthood (pp. 177–221). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Strauss, W. H., & Howe, N. (2000). Millennials rising: The next great generation. New York, NY: Vintage.

Generational Approach Some childhood theorists suggest that generation is a crucial element of social structure bound to other structural variables such as class, gender, and ethnicity, and while sociology has paid significant attention to these latter variables, a focus on the generational order demands further attention. By positioning childhood as part of a wider structural order, generation illuminates the nature of that order and sheds light on the social relationships that comprise it. This entry outlines the work of core thinkers on generation and illuminates how their work positions children as a group influenced by durable power relations based on generation.

Generation Defined ‘Generation’ is a term utilised to describe a group of individuals born and living during the same time who may be considered to share a set of experiences. By living through the same time period, individuals can be connected to broader events. Hence, we sometimes talk about the postwar generation, the baby boomers, the austerity generation, generation X, and so on. This approach to generation linking individuals to sociohistorical events was put forward by Karl Mannheim in his seminal essay ‘The Problem of Generations’, which was first published in 1923. While he cautioned that not every generation will develop a distinctive consciousness, nonetheless, he highlighted the period of youth as a particularly influential stage of life during which the experiencing of major historical events may have lifelong significance. Generational cohorts based

Generational Approach

on age may share and experience a common history. Although living through the same historical period, cohorts may develop similar attitudes and engage in shared experiences. While Mannheim had little to say about children, some childhood theorists have drawn on his work to suggest that generation is an appropriate concept for understanding the location of children and adults within the wider generational positioning of childhood and adulthood. These positions have historical, legal, cultural, economic, and social manifestations and lead to children and adults being defined in relation to one another and to wider societal structures. The roles and expectations associated with these structural elements are based on and divided by generation. A number of childhood theorists have been at the forefront in emphasising the importance of generation to promoting enhanced understanding of children and childhood. The entry now turns to evaluating their contributions.

Contributions of Core Theorists Jens Qvortrup argues that generation is crucial for illuminating childhood as a structural category and for enhancing understanding of how wider macro changes impact on childhood. His work illuminates how macrosocietal transformations impacted on childhood. He pays particular attention to outlining how the changes in the mode of production that accompanied the industrial revolution influenced and shaped childhood. He argues that the industrial revolution changed the nature of both childhood and adulthood. Age became the basis of social distinctions encouraging specific types of economic inequalities particularly transforming the young into dependents on older generational groups. Children, for example, were removed from the workforce and placed in educational establishments that enhanced their economic dependency on adults. This encouraged a focus on their future potential while their contributions to society in the here and now were accorded less value. Qvortrup argues that children’s exclusion from the labour market and their placement in schools ushered in new conceptions of childhood as a distinct phase of life separate from adulthood. These changes fundamentally altered relationships between adults and children.

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His work demonstrates how the shifting distribution of resources allocated to children compared to other such groups such as the elderly led to children being more likely to experience poverty compared to other social groups. A number of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development studies demonstrate the consistency of this unequal distribution of resources and its impact on children who by and large are on the receiving end of growing income inequality. This is underpinned by generation which gradually emerged as a structuring device firmly establishing childhood as a distinct phase of life separate from adulthood. Social, economic, and cultural resources and their distribution become linked to these sets of relationships which are for the most part distributed unequally. Leena Alanen also argues that generation is essential to understanding childhood and its relationship to adulthood. She argues that generation should be given the same theoretical status as other variables such as gender, class, or ethnicity. To support a generational approach, she draws on feminism as a theoretical framework and uses this to argue for a sociology of childhood that understands childhood from the standpoint of children. She argues that childhood theorists could learn from the rise of academic feminism in the 1970s, which critiqued sociological theory for seeing the world largely through a male lens. In a similar vein, childhood theorists should seek to reposition childhood studies so that sociological theory moves from its implicit notions of a social world that is largely adult based. This involves placing children’s everyday lives firmly onto the sociological agenda and exploring previously neglected aspects of how childhood is accomplished and practiced. This in turn necessitates paying attention to the relational features of childhood vis-à-vis adulthood. Within these relationships based on generation, children and adults construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct both what it means to be an adult and what it means to be a child. These relational processes are underpinned by power necessitating sociological theory to pay attention to the myriad ways in which this is practiced both within and across generations. Generation fundamentally impacts on how children practice agency. Madeleine Leonard coined the term ‘generagency’ to highlight and illuminate the mutually reinforcing

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and interdependent relationship between generation and agency. The hierarchal relationships between adults and children based on generation structure and influence the environment within which both adults and children express agency. She argues that while children hold and practice agency, they do so within this wider structural framework. Generagency sheds light on its intergenerational components and encourages childhood researchers to acknowledge the wider generational framework within which agency is practiced. However, while the power and pervasiveness of generation in structuring children’s everyday lives is considerable, nonetheless within generational relationships children have considerable room for manoeuvre. Berry Mayall’s work, for example, demonstrates how children see intergenerational relationships as series of negotiations and define these relationships in terms of obligation, reciprocity, trust, and care. Her core point though is to highlight how the structural and relational components of generation fundamentally influence how children perceive and experience their everyday lives. Some childhood theorists suggest that the term ‘life phase’ is more appropriate than ‘generation’ as it links children with social groups in different life phases rather than reducing social relations to a simple binary between childhood and adulthood. Anna-Lisa Narvanen and Elisabet Nasman criticise childhood researchers who prioritise generation for being conceptually vague in terms of how generation is defined. For example, the period of childhood as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as up to 18 years of age covers a range of life stages from birth to toddler to teen and so on, and it seems inappropriate to incorporate all these stages into one overall category defined as generation. They also question the applicability of Mannheim’s work to childhood studies pointing out that age by itself is not enough to qualify as a generation in relation to his theorising of the concept. He saw generations in terms of the capacity of a group of people born during the same period to consider their shared experiences in order to reflect critically on their taken for granted status and to use this to implement social change. Simply being born during the same time period is not enough for a generation to exist in Mannheim’s terms. A generation is only meaningful if its

members draw on their common experiences to form a collectivity. It seems somewhat naïve to locate all the world’s children as part of an overarching generational group. Cultural differences within and between countries are too vast with children’s associated experiences much too variable to enable them to respond in an integrated way to what are widely varying social forces. This makes the critical reflection on one’s position and the ensuing collective solidarity that is central to Mannheim’s arguments difficult to apply to childhood as an overarching generational position. Other criticisms such as those put forward by Alan Prout argue that modern childhood is characterised by the weakening of boundaries between childhood and adulthood. He puts forward actor network theory as a more promising approach than generation because while it draws attention to the potential stability of social orderings, it equally illuminates the consistently shifting, competing and conflict elements of these orderings. In this vein, seemingly durable structures are rendered partial and fragile. Actor network theory enables space to be opened up for new structures to emerge that may coexist, incorporate, or transform existing structures producing constantly changing versions of childhood and adulthood.

Critiques of the Generational Approach While, as this brief overview demonstrates, the importance of generation to understanding childhood has been subject to critical evaluation with not all childhood theorists supporting this approach, proponents argue that adopting a generational framework illuminates childhood as a permanent structural feature of society whose membership constantly changes as children are born into or leave childhood, but this does not detract from the observation that the segment remains. A focus on generation highlights commonalities in childhood. The relationships between children and adults are durable and patterned and embed both in structural sets of social relationships which in turn become part of a stable durable wider social order. However, this is not to suggest that a universal childhood exists. In any given society, age interacts with other variables such as class, gender, and ethnicity producing a diversity of childhood experiences. At the same

Generational Conflict

time, some common features of childhood can be identified, and one of the most obvious is the positioning of childhood in relation to adulthood. The study of social relations and social structure is central to a generational approach. Adults are the ones who decide to have children. Even if socialisation moves beyond a one-way process and is resisted, nonetheless, it is adults who are charged with socialising the young. Legally children are located as minors with differing legal rights based on separating childhood from adulthood, and this is supported by a range of other institutions such as educational, health, and welfare systems. The concept of ‘generation’ enables us to understand and challenge the ways in which children are positioned and respond to their positioning within hierarchal generational categories. Adopting a generational focus enables attention to be paid to these wider economic, social, and cultural forces and their impact and consequences for both children and adults. Madeleine Leonard See also Emerging Adulthood Generationing; Intergenerational Relations; Mannheim, Karl

Further Readings Alanen, L. (1994). Gender and generation: Feminism and the “Child Question.” In J. Qvortup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood matters: Social theory, practice and politics. Aldershot, UK: Avebury. doi:10.1177/026101839501504422 Alanen, L. (2001). Explorations in generational analysis. In L. Alanen & B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualising adultchild relations (pp. 11–22). London, UK: Routledge. Leonard, M. (2016). The sociology of children, childhood and generation. London, UK: Sage. Mayall, B. (2013). A history of the sociology of childhood. London, UK: Institute of Education. Narvanen, A., & Nasman, E. (2004). Childhood as generation or life phase. Young, 12, 71–91. doi:10.1177/1103308804039637 Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1, 4–14. doi:10.2304/ gsch.2011.1.1.4 Qvortrup, J. (2009). The development of childhood: Change and continuity in generational relations. In J. Qvortrup (Ed.), Sociological studies of children and youth: Vol. 12. Structural, Historical and Comparative

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Perspectives. Bingley, UK: Emerald. doi:10.1108/ s1537-4661(2009)0000012006 Qvortrup, J. (2011). Childhood as a structural form. In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230274686

Generational Conflict The term generational conflict addresses questions of distribution and economic justice between generations. Generational gap, by contrast, addresses political and cultural disagreements. After a short introduction into societies’ perception of generational relations, the prevailing arguments within the current discourse and the interests therein are discussed. This is followed by the results of studies on intergenerational exchange that question assumptions of conflict. Finally, the Western bias of this discussion is addressed. From the 19th century onward, social philosophers considered the succession of generations a moment of instability and therefore either an opportunity for social change or an impending breakdown of order. Sigmund Freud used the myth of Oedipus to refer to generational relations. This cruel metaphor appealed to well­ -educated people of not only his time but also later—which may hint at real tensions that were experienced. The notion of a generational gap became prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. While political and cultural divisions between generations have lost topicality in recent decades, the distribution and use of resources have nevertheless come into the fore of public and political discourse. The discussion on intergenerational justice began in the 1980s with media headlines such as Kids Versus Canes or Greedy Geezers. Even in scientific argumentation, one finds a strong vocabulary warning of generational conflicts. The World Bank titled its 1994 report “Averting the Old Age Crisis.” What the World Bank and others deem an old-age crisis is—as they argue—threatening all generations. The old generation can no longer be supported in the same ways. Young generations, children, and grandchildren, however, face the threat of shouldering the heavy burden of providing for the aged. Proponents of this stance say the crisis is caused

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by demographic developments: rising life expectancy and declining fertility. Given the usual “­ pay-as-you-go” schemes for financing old-age retire­­ment, a lower proportion of young people have to pay for a rising one of aged. Accordingly, younger generations might have a lower standard of living than their parents and be poorly financed when they reach old age. Advocates of these arguments prefer privately funded pensions instead of pay-as-you-go schemes, as this would limit the nonwage cost of labor and stimulate economic growth. This line of argumentation is contested by others in favor of states’ redistributive function and demographically reformed pay-as-you-go schemes. The objections are as follows: Firstly, while demographic arguments cannot be denied, their relevance is overestimated, as economic developments are more important for the prosperity of a given generation. Secondly, the anxiety over the financing of pension schemes is said to be fueled by unemployment and economic deceleration, the fears of which actors such as the World Bank exploit to curtail the welfare state and promote their agendas. Thirdly, there is, looking at available income and poverty rates in different stages of life, a relative profit of aged people compared to youths. For a number of decades now, children and youth have had the highest poverty rates of all age-groups in many Western countries, whereas until the 1970s, old people had been poorest. However, the income of old people is below the income of the active generation, and poverty rates in the old age-group are higher than in the working group. This is especially true for women and those over 75 years of age. Fourthly, the privatization of old-age pensions, as proposed by the World Bank and implemented by several countries, proves to have detrimental effects on the conditions of low-income retirees with interruptions in their professional activity, and hence, it has a considerable gender bias. There are many studies on intergenerational relations—on attitudes, transfers, and s­ olidarities— providing evidence of positive relations overall and important private money and time transfers. The flow is mainly directed toward kin with the greatest needs. In this way, there is considerable support provided by the generation born after or during World War II to their children, who are

already of adult age. This private transfer is supported by public transfers to retirees. Meanwhile, many elderly people place money in savings to augment the inheritances they leave behind. Higher emotional dependency of elderly people on their children drives such financial support. Financial transfers often happen in a rather concealed way, either in passing or by referring to the needs of grandchildren: Embarrassing the adult children by blunt financial support has to be avoided. The flow of money and care transfers only changes if parents are old and frail. In such cases, the assistance of the younger for the older generation is higher if public infrastructure is additionally available. All in all, state and private transfers are not alternatives but rather mutually supportive. Public discourse on generational conflict hardly corresponds to the reality of people’s intergenerational relations; instead, it makes up part of modern societies’ mythology. The situation is different in many contexts of the Global South: Public transfers are scarce and generational relations are largely regulated by filial piety, children’s lifelong indebtedness to their parents for their upbringing and for giving them life. This causes a transfer of money and time in the opposite direction: from children to their parents. Such relations today are influenced by globalization processes, migration in particular. Different solutions are worked out by parents and children—some better, some worse—while several governments resort to moral appeals directed at the middle-aged generation to support their elderly parents. Some states even impose legal consequences while abstaining from developing infrastructural solutions. It is therefore difficult to establish a clear outlook for the future. Doris Bühler-Niederberger See also Age; Generation Gap; Generationing; Welfare State

Further Readings Arber, S., & Attias-Donfut, C. (Eds.). (2000). The myth of generational conflict. New York, NY: Routledge. Bistow, J. (2015). Baby Boomers and generational conflict. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Cole, J., & Durham, D. (Eds.). (2007). Generations and globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Generationing

Generationing Generationing is a concept addressing the processes in which people come to be identified (by others and themselves) as members of a certain age category with the characteristics attributed to these members (i.e., whereby they come to be children, adults, or older adults in a socially relevant way). Furthermore, the concept of generationing implies that it is always the double and reciprocal work of members of society that makes chronological age socially relevant. This subsumes people under age categories, but the categories themselves must constantly be worked out: their relevance, their demarcations, their meanings, and the exact attributes and values that are given to the members in general and, in particular, to individuals in a given situation. This entry examines why generationing is a key concept in childhood studies and how it views generational interactions. This entry also offers historical and cultural perspectives on the concept.

Generationing as a Key Concept in Childhood Studies The idea of age categorizing processes and the term generationing were introduced into childhood research by Leena Alanen and Berry Mayall. They took it to be a key concept for a relational approach to understanding children and childhood, insisting that—no matter if the categorization of a single member is meant, or the work on the category with a further reaching impact—age categories and memberships are always defined in relation to other age categories and their respective members. Consequentially, from the very beginning, this sociological approach toward children has also implied a relativization of adult researchers’ position, reflecting and questioning their perspective on their subject. Attention for relational categorization processes allowed for the enlargement and overcoming of the perspective of former scientific approaches to children and childhood in sociology, educational sciences, and psychology. The formerly dominant perspective was criticized for its (unquestioned) adultism as it had conceived of children as mere becomings, and hence, the main

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interest had been in children’s overcoming their immaturity and deficiency. This gradual integration into adult society was called socialization by sociologists and development by psychologists. Researchers studying it mostly conceived of children as more or less passive objects and products of parenting behavior and institutional influences. By contrast, the concept of generationing opened a space that included children in sociological thinking as agents in social relations. This new view about children and childhood necessitates the study of children’s contributions, experiences, and perspectives in regard to such relations. To be a child does not primarily mean to be inexperienced or immature but, first of all, to have a certain status in one’s society and to act from this position (i.e., to come up to the social expectations bound to it, use the possibilities it offers, mind the restrictions it imposes, and possess a practical knowledge of all these aspects). While the consideration of such relational processes by a community of childhood researchers began in the 1980s, one can find some most relevant contributions from before. However, this earlier work did not constitute a coherent field of childhood research. Processes of generationing establish a distribution of power, voice, resources, rights, and duties between age-groups and always take place in unequal conditions caused by previous categorizing. To address this constantly reproduced inequality by age categorization processes, one can speak of a generational order or generational ordering. The attention for processes of generationing—their conditions and consequences—has major importance for the study of children and childhood and for the consideration of their limited scope of action and social recognition. It is, therefore, often closely related to child rights programs. A multitude of meanings had been attributed to the term generation long before it became a pivotal theoretical element of childhood studies. Generation originally signified kinship descent. In public discourses and social sciences, the term assumed additional meanings; it referred to cohorts (individuals being born or confronted with important events in the same time interval), life stages, and historical periods. The concept of generationing adds a further meaning to the term generation: societies’ interpretation, valuation, and institutionalization of chronological age. The analogy to the

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meaning given to the terms gender and sex in feminist theory is evident, the latter speaking of gender to address the social definition and implementation of the biological sex. Childhood theorists explicitly point to this parallel and to the lessons they learned from feminism.

View on Interactions Generationing addresses the ongoing practices of age categorizing and valuation on different levels of social life. On the microlevel of social interactions, these relational processes can be studied, for example, in conversational patterns. Researchers reconstructing conversations among adults and children show how the openings of conversations, the sequence of questions and answers, the opportunities to gain the floor, and the wordings used can be analyzed against the backdrop of age-specific conversational rules and of doing generation in conversations. What at first glance appear to be situations of socialization, of obvious instruction of children in academic matters and/or social behavior by adults who structure the situation, are proven to be accomplishments of adults and children. A fine web of age-specific and age-constituting rules is skillfully enacted by any participant, repeatedly creating and confirming the generational order. This is what researchers found when they analyzed how school lessons or preschool classes are structured and how dialogues between children and their parents or between children and other adults are accomplished. Conversational analysts, ethnomethodologists, and other sociologists working in the tradition of an interpretive paradigm undertook several such studies. The researchers worked with fine-grained analyses of small interaction sequences. Among the first researchers who did this in the 1970s—in a meticulously precise way—was a working group around Aaron V. Cicourel, one of the sociological founders of an empirically oriented sociology of knowledge. However, the researchers who studied such processes of generationing in daily life did not yet use the term. They likely selected such situations of adult–child interaction to show how everyday situations—familiar to and taken for granted by anybody—are in fact produced by a multiplicity of social rules and beg for the constant search for the valid rules and their application. Two decades

later, and once the concepts of generationing and generational ordering were coined, many childhood researchers began to study children’s interactions with family members, among peers, with social workers, and with teachers. The interest was no longer a very general one for the construction of an everyday world taken for granted—it became child-specific. Guiding questions in these studies were how children understood and assumed their own part and how they knew about the part of the adults. It became an important aim to show the social competence of children, their contribution to the social world, and to also show how their competence and their perspective— while being crucial for ordered interactions—were (paradoxically) disregarded by the adult participants. Such research did not remain limited to childhoods of the Global North; many studies of children in poor countries were added. Studies on Southern childhoods showed how children got along with conditions of poverty and even exploitation and made evident how children’s scope of action was limited by asymmetrical generational orders. Such research was mostly qualitative— that is, interviews and participant observation were the main research methods, sometimes enriched by instruments, which enabled children’s participation in the research process.

Historical Perspectives Historical approaches provide insights into major variations and changes of generational relations, hence into the macrolevel processes of generationing. Historians reconstructed changes of specific age categories: They documented how new concepts of childhood as an entirely different life stage became social reality, how programs to enhance parents’ responsibilities were implemented, how adolescence was discovered as a special life stage, or how old age was defined as a social problem. They made evident how this framework of age categories was worked out over the centuries and how protagonists of the state and the churches were involved in these processes, both groups strongly motivated by interests of social order and striving for a productive society. Experts established their superior status by contributing to the discourses on age and by solving the newly discovered problems: pediatricians,

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pedagogues, social policy experts, and—­somewhat later—gerontologists. Perhaps the most impressive contribution of historians was showing how chronological age gained its importance for modern societies at all. Before the 19th century (some researchers maintain before the 18th century), chronological age did not receive the relevance for virtually any aspect of social life which it was attributed with later on and is today a given. This growing age awareness and the separation of age-groups—in different school classes, different schools, different leisurely activities, different clubs and associations, along with different clothing and music styles—marks a major historical change. Philippe Ariès’s work on the discovery of childhood was a milestone for the research on the ­rising importance of age for social life. According to him, the idea of childhood did not exist in medieval society and was only discovered and institutionalized in later centuries. While there was much contradiction from other historians against this bold thesis, it became nevertheless validated by many researchers that central institutions of society changed remarkably due to a stricter consideration of age for which the social definition of childhood—as a life phase of education, protected and separated from the adult world—was seminal. Families had to become arranged in a different way around the child as main figure. While they had been centered on economic existence, they were meant to become private and intimate entities from then on: places of love, havens in an uncertain world. Schools changed dramatically as well, according to the educational mission attributed to them—a stricter age grading and a limitation of freedom young people enjoyed before were the most obvious changes. The new age consciousness was important for the economic world as well. Children became excluded from paid work. An overall new evaluation of children became gradually realized: Any usefulness of children and any calculating attitude toward them became an offense to their true value. Viviana Zelizer analyzed legal cases and public discourses assessing children’s value at the turn of the 20th century, and as she summed it up, the tenor was that children were economically useless but emotionally priceless. Such a definition of proper childhood was clearly directed against

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family relations, as they were still common in lower class and migrant families in which children supported their parents with their work inside and outside the home. While the definition and institutionalization of childhood as a distinct life phase is the most obvious aspect of the historical process of age categorization, it is not the only remarkable one. During the 19th century, concern in regard to old-aged people was growing. Gradually, they became defined as a distinct group and separated from other age-groups. Like children, they became excluded from paid labor. Work, which had once united all age-groups, became a matter for mostly middle-aged men. Interestingly, G. Stanley Hall, the same scientist who in the 1880s defined adolescence as a life phase with proper needs, defined the concept of senescence some decades later.

Comparative Perspectives Studying intergenerational relations in various countries of the Global South and the Global North makes one aware of solidarities as they are organized according to age. While intergenerational solidarities are universal, the normative patterns guiding them and the direction and amount of transfers between generations differ. To simplify somewhat, two models of intergenerational solidarities can be outlined. In the first, children are considered to be indebted to their families by virtue of birth: for life and the care they are given. Children are expected to pay back through their work in and outside of the home, which they nowadays often do in addition to school attendance. Recompense is also expected when they are grown up by supporting parents through earnings and by caring for their elderly parents. In this pattern, one or several of the grown-up children tend to remain in the parents’ household, even after marriage. The normative pattern guiding this model of generational solidarity may be called filial piety. The other model of generational exchange is guided by the normative pattern of proper childhood. Children are considered to be born as beings with an inherent nature, as defined by the experts, that must be taken into consideration. Their proclivities and talents have to be cultivated so that they can meet and cope with the requirements and

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expectations of later adult life. This is the childhood of the useless and emotionally priceless child as previously described, which is a product of a long history of state and expert interventions. In this model, children are meant to leave the household once they are adults; there may be cases in which frail and widowed parents enter the household of their adult children to spend their last years of life with their children. The flow of material transfers in the family remains mostly one from parent to child, even when children are grown up: Parents support their adult children when they have to overcome difficulties as they enter the labor market, buy their own house, and struggle with life events such as unemployment, divorce, and single parenthood. Welfare state provisions are indispensable not only for the installment of the childhood pattern but also for the relatively comfortable standard of living of old-age people, which is ensured by public pension systems (typically payas-you-go schemes) and other infrastructures. Meanwhile, the model of intergenerational solidarity guided by filial piety may mostly be found in countries with weak welfare states. The variety of ways in which generational categories and intergenerational relations may be organized gives further evidence of their inherently social character. Doris Bühler-Niederberger See also Age; Feminism; Generational Conflict; Globalization of Childhood; Hall, Granville Stanley

Punch, S. (2015). Youth transitions and migration: negotiated and constrained interdependencies within and across generations. Journal of Youth Studies, 18, 262–276. Zelizer, V. (1985). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924 During its fifth annual assembly in 1924, the League of Nations (the intergovernmental organization established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, primarily to keep peace after World War I) unanimously adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, better known as the Declaration of Geneva. This entry examines the Declaration’s mandate, history, and the basis upon which it has often been critiqued.

Key Mandate The Declaration is considered one of the first global human rights instruments in general, targeting children in particular. However, as becomes clear from the Declaration’s short preamble and five general principles, it differs in both approach and legal force from most human rights treaties that followed. As stated in the Geneva Declaration:

Further Readings Alanen, L., & Mayall, B. (Eds.). (2001). Conceptualizing child–adult relations. London, UK: Falmer. Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. New York, NY: Random House. Bühler-Niederberger, D., & Schwittek, J. (2014). Young children in Kyrgyzstan—Agency in tight hierarchical structures. Childhood, 21, 502–516. Chudacoff, H. P. (1989). How old are you? Age consciousness in American culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cicourel, A. V., Jennings, K. H., Jennings, S. H. M., Leiter, K. C. W., Mackay, R., Mehan, H., & Roth, D. R. (Eds.). (1974). Language use and school performance. New York, NY: Academic Press. Cole, J., & Durham, D. (Eds.). (2007). Generations and globalization. Bloomington: Indian University Press.

By the present Declaration of the Rights of the Child, commonly known as “Declaration of Geneva,” men and women of all nations, recognizing that mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give, declare and accept it as their duty that, beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality, or creed: •• The child must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually. •• The child that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succored.

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•• The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress. •• The child must be put in a position to earn a livelihood, and must be protected against every form of exploitation. •• The child must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of fellow men.

There is consensus in the literature that despite its full title, the Geneva Declaration is not based on ideas of children’s rights, but on principles of child welfare. In the spirit of the Declaration, the child is not a subject of rights, but merely the object of economic, social, and psychological provisions. Historians have shown that this has much to do with the Declaration’s origins, which can be traced back to the child saving movement of the early 20th century.

Impetus for the Declaration The brutalities of World War I left millions of children displaced, lacking parents, food, and shelter. In many countries, charity organizations were founded with the aim of saving these children from their dire emergency situations and helping them in their basic needs. One of them was the Save the Children Fund, established in the United Kingdom in 1919. Humanist and pacifist Eglantyne Jebb (1876–1928) was in charge of the organization whose objective it was to save and serve all children in need, regardless of their nationality, religion, or race. With the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jebb succeeded in forming the Save the Children International Union (SCIU) in 1920. With its headquarters in Geneva, it became the international umbrella organization for the many different national Save the Children chapters. A small task group led by Jebb was responsible for drafting a universal children’s charter that could be easily translated into all relevant languages, and which would serve as the foundation of the SCIU’s work. There was debate within the group about the proposed appellation “Declaration of the Rights of the Child.” Children in need were not thought of as being able to exercise their rights and the Declaration was therefore entirely made up of duties toward vulnerable children. Yet,

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for propaganda purposes it became the official title of the document, which was quickly baptized the Declaration of Geneva, a deliberate reference to the 1864 Geneva Convention. By 1923, the Declaration was adopted by the SCIU and publically announced as a program which calls on individual and collective goodwill and on legislators around the world. It was initially translated into 36 languages and propagated around the globe. In its preamble, the Declaration states that “mankind owes to the child the best it has to give” and places the duties it further stipulates directly under the responsibilities of the “men and women of all nations.” Historians and international lawyers agree that the Declaration was never intended to be an instrument of international law that would legally bind nation-states. Instead, it was considered to be a wakeup call, aimed at the conscience of the world. The nonbinding character of the Declaration was the main reason why, after a brief campaign by the SCIU, the Assembly of the League of Nations unanimously adopted the document in September 1924, placing it on the highest level of international relations. The text that accompanied the adoption clearly set out the function of the Declaration within the League: Member states were to be guided by its principles in their work on child welfare.

Critiques of the Declaration In the early years, the Declaration was already being criticized for its soft power approach and its paternalistic outlook on children, who are solely depicted as helpless victims in need of saving by adults. The renowned Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak, a contemporary of Jebb, accused the Geneva lawmakers of confusing duties with rights and loathed the Declaration for being a plea for kindness instead of an insistence on children’s rights. Yet despite these apparent limitations, the Geneva Declaration takes up an important place in the history of children’s rights, as it was instrumental in their further shaping on the international level. Several decades later, the Geneva Declaration served as the basis for the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child which was adopted in 1959. The latter, in its turn, is considered an important harbinger of the 1989

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Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified now by all but one United Nations member state. Edward van Daalen See also Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History; Children’s Rights; History of Childhood; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Ennew, J. (2000). The history of children’s rights: Whose story? Cultural Survival Quarterly, 24(2), 44–48. Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. (1924). Retrieved from http://www.un-documents.net/ gdrc1924.htm Marshall, D. (1999). The construction of children as an object of international relations: The declaration of children’s rights and the child welfare committee of League of Nations, 1900–1924. The International Journal of Children s Rights, 7(2), 103–148. doi:10.1163/15718189920494309 Moody, Z. (2017). Les droits de l’enfant: Genèse, institutionnalisation et diffusion (1924–1989) [The rights of the child: Genesis, institutionalization and dissemination (1924–1989)]. Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses. doi:10.26530/ oapen_624531 Van Bueren, G. (1998). The international law on the rights of the child. Leiden, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

Gesell, Arnold Arnold Gesell (1880–1961), philosopher, ­psychologist, physician, and founder of the Yale Child Development Clinic, is best known for ­maturational–developmental theory and his understanding of the development of the normal child. Born and raised in Alma, Wisconsin, Gesell completed a PhD in psychology at Clark University, under the tutelage of G. Stanley Hall, and an MD at Yale in 1915. His major contributions to developmental psychology include his pioneering investigations into early development and use of cinematography to record and establish what he would establish as normal infant development, his activism and advocacy for educational and social

reform for children, his work to benefit children with disabilities, his championing of preventive mental health programs, and his success in appealing to a general audience with his child-rearing research. This entry offers an introduction to Gesell’s key works, his quantitative approach, ideas on child hygiene, and contributions to developmental psychology.

Gesell’s Key Works The allusions to “the terrible twos,” children “passing through stages,” and “school readiness” stem from Gesell’s work such as The Mental Growth of the Preschool Child (1925) and The Child From Five to Ten (1977). Inspired by the disciplines of embryology and anatomy, Gesell sought to approach the phenomena of infant behavior or mental growth with the same interest in development and changes governed by mechanisms of form regulation. Mental growth could be understood similarly to that of developmental morphology, as effects of consistent and orderly patterns. For Gesell, mental growth reflected that of the nervous system in which it was innate and in accord with the laws of nature—that is, a product of evolution. He asserted that the development of an organism is directed by the biological systems and the process of maturation. Despite the major criticism of his work as dismissing the role of the environment, Gesell, however, was an interactionist, arguing that the environment was of some importance in modulating and inflecting, but not determining, the progressions of development, as did biological directives. Many facets of Gesell’s work, one of which was its emphasis on the maturational point of view, were pioneering in child psychology during the 1940s when Watsonian behaviorism, environmentalism, and the Freudian movement gained currency. Amid a debate among scientists and parents on the relative degree of influence heredity and the environment had on human behavior, Gesell maintained the view that both genetic and environmental factors determined individuality and behavior in infants and children, with genetics playing a primary and fundamental role. Gesell referred to the innate process of growth maturation and the child’s inhabitance of the social environment and culture as a process of acculturation. While the

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acculturation process inflects and modifies the growth of the child, the process of maturation generates and ultimately produces the likenesses and differences among children. Gesell’s motif of the priority of genetics over the environmental runs throughout one of his books, Wolf Child and Human Child: A Narrative Interpretation of the Life History of Kamala, the Wolf Girl (1941).

Gesell’s Quantitative Measures Gesell was among the first child developmentalists to use quantitative measures as tools for assessment throughout childhood. His major contributions to developmental psychology include his pioneering investigations into early development and use of cinematography to record and establish what he would establish as normal infant development, his activism and advocacy for educational and social reform for children, his work to benefit children with disabilities, his championing of preventive mental health programs, and his success in appealing to a general audience with his childrearing research. His work informed contemporary assessment measures of motor and language development, adaptive behavior, and personal– social behavior in children aged between 4 weeks and 6 years. The result was the Gesell Development Schedules, which child psychologists use to quantify children’s motor, language, adaptive, and social responses as a development quotient, a measurement which serves as a marker of the child’s relative proximity to a standardized of children of the same age.

Child Hygiene The topic of child hygiene was important to Gesell, as reflected by his title (of his own choosing) at Yale University as Professor of Child Hygiene and Director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development. In combining both mental health and physical health, Gesell would invoke a holistic framework that encompassed the physical, psychological, and educational well-being of the child. In subsequent years, mental health or mental hygiene would be frequently used rather than child hygiene. While he did produce articles and chapters concerning the physical health of the child, for example, on pubertas praecox, mongolism and cretinism, cerebral

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palsy, and birth injury, Gesell’s references to child health and child hygiene concerned more the mental than the physical health of the child. He contended that health work in the preschool years is of critical significance because it is during this period that physical and development defects of schoolchildren originate. Mental deficiencies, according to Gesell, emanated and were recognizable during the preschool years as well. During the 1920s, Gesell promoted kindergartens as sites of collaboration among teachers, medical and dental officers, and nurses for the advancement of child health and development. His advocacy for parental involvement in their child’s health emphasized periodic health examinations during preschool and kindergarten and systematic parental guidance and child consultation by nurses and doctors. For Gesell, mental hygiene began at home but did not end there. Preschools, in his view, were a panacea, to some degree, for the deficiencies in child-rearing at home.

Gesell’s Contributions to Developmental Psychology Gesell’s greatest contribution to developmental psychology was arguably his normative framework of infant and preschool-aged children’s behavior that was established from his research under the auspices of the Yale Clinic of Child Development, which he founded in 1923. Using cinematography, essentially using motion pictures as illustrations, Gesell and his colleagues charted and captured the development of complex behavior and skills in terms of motor development, intelligence, habit achievement, and social reactions. Incorporating observational reports from mothers, Gesell inspired mothers to engage increasingly in a more scientific posture toward childcare. Initially studying a sample of over 100 infants and young children, Gesell expanded his sample size to over 500. From 1930 to 1948, these babies and their mothers were filmed and observed in achieving tasks in four areas: (1) motor development (e.g., sitting, standing, postural behaviors), (2) adaptive behavior (e.g., eye-hand coordination, reactions to objects such as cups, mirrors, cubes), (3) language behavior (e.g., facial expression, babbling), and (4) personal–social behavior (e.g., toilet-training, feeding habits, play).

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The ages of the infants and young children studied were 4 to 56 weeks. His systematic charting and analysis of the norms of infant development relied on the notion of the cinematographic gaze as complete, reliable, and impartial. The films of the Yale Clinic of Child Development formed the basis of various publications including An Atlas of Infant Behavior: A Systematic Delineation of the Forms and Early Growth of Human Behavior Patterns (1934), which contains 3,200 photographs; Infant Behavior: Its Genesis and Growth (1934); and The Psychology of Early Growth Including Norms of Infant Behavior and a Method of Genetic Analysis (1938). Deriving norms and developmental sequences ascribed to be representative of normal development, Gesell’s findings and conclusions may have been far overreaching as all the children he studied were middle class and White. While open to improvements and revisions even after his death in 1961, Gesell’s developmental schedules and tests, nevertheless, formed the basis for widely used contemporary measures of early development. The prominent childcare expert from the 1920s and on, Gesell’s influence reflected a growing societal interest in child-rearing practices and the publicly authoritative posture of the childcare expert. He published for academic and general audiences and appeared on nationally broadcast radio shows. Reminiscent of Enlightenment physicians who aimed to disseminate their expertise to young mothers in matters of child-rearing, Gesell urged his colleagues to share their information and better inform mothers and fathers about parenting and child development. Concerned with parental and preparental education, Gesell published extensively throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s on the importance of parent–child relations, child development courses in high school and college, period health examinations from infancy to school entrance, mental hygiene control, and training in morale. Gesell regarded the pediatrician not only as an authority in healing and alleviating maladies but in parenting as well. His education for parents included the use of films that promoted the use of cinema not only to instruct parents but also to buoy up their attitudes. Gesell, the prominent childcare expert who was displaced by a psychoanalytic pediatrician, Benjamin Spock, in the 1950s, nevertheless was acknowledged to be the

first to advocate flexible parenting and for his stage model of growth. Gesell undergirded his research with the belief that mental growth is subject to natural laws and therefore also subject to diagnosis. Empirical studies of infant behavior which accorded with these natural laws allowed for the development of diagnostic procedures to be used in a clinical manner. Gesell promoted a supervisory type of pediatrics that would periodically conduct health examinations and surveys of behavior patterns of infants and young children. The norms of behavior development allowed for the detection of aberrations or deviations such as sensorimotor defects, endocrine deficiencies, mental defects, and behavior disorders, and thus, as Gesell inferred, their prevention or improved management and control. Like physical growth, mental growth, Gesell contended, could be supervised only through the clinical application of norms and of diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, Gesell maintained that norms were not to be taken as absolutes and that children varied in their rates of development. Despite the waning of his influence in the 1960s due to the favorability among scientists toward Jean Piaget’s more interactional theory, Gesell regained consideration in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 21st century, Gesell is recognized as one of the most zealous pioneers in and contributors to developmental psychology. Elisabeth M. Yang See also Child Study; Developmental Psychology; Infancy; Nature Versus Nurture; Stage Theories of Development

Further Readings Ames, L. B. (1989). Arnold Gesell: Themes of his work. New York, NY: Human Sciences Press. Gesell, A. (1934). An atlas of infant behavior. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gesell, A. (1934). Infant behavior: Its genesis and growth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rose, N. (1985). Psychology and the clinic. In N. Rose (Ed.), The psychological complex: Psychology, politics and society in England, 1869–1939 (pp. 197–219). London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Weizman, F., & Harris, B. (2012). Arnold Gesell: The maturationist. In W. E. Pickren, D. A. Dewsbury, &

Gifted Children M. Wertheimer (Eds.), Portraits of pioneers in developmental psychology (pp. 1–20). New York, NY: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis.

Gifted Children The term ‘gifted child’ generally refers to a child whose intelligence is evaluated as far superior to the norm. However, how far superior to it exactly, how ‘the norm’ is calculated, and what (if anything) should be done about children who display that superiority are hotly debated variables, subject to large geographic and cultural differences. Since its inception, the concept of giftedness and the associated science have been controversial. This entry first offers a historical perspective on research on gifted children. This entry further examines critical discourses on the notion of child giftedness and the contemporary evolution of these discourses.

The History of Giftedness ‘Giftedness’ was not a common word in academic or scientific writing, or indeed in common parlance, until the turn of the 20th century. ‘Genius’ was a preferred word to refer to exceptional intelligence in adults, while children who exhibited early intellectual competence tended to be labelled ‘prodigies’, ‘supernormal’, or ‘precocious’. Such labels, however, did not all carry positive resonances. In the Victorian era, precocious children were considered suspicious: ‘early ripe, early rot’ was a common thought in relation to these children, and intellectual precocity carried hints of sexual earliness. The advent of gifted children as a recognised object of study and educational attention occurred in connection with the rise of intelligence measurement in the Progressive Era in the United States. In the early 1900s, research on the calculation of intelligence suddenly accelerated, in a way closely intertwined with contemporaneous concerns in educational efficiency. In France, the psychologist Alfred Binet devised in the early 1900s an intelligence test which, unlike all previous ones, rested on a distinction between chronological age and mental age. In other words, relation to the

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norm could be calculated by evaluating how far a child’s answers were from the average answers of their age cohort. With Binet, intellectual precocity became a marker of intelligence. Following Binet’s death, the test was imported and adapted to the United States by several American scholars, most prominently Lewis M. Terman, who set up at Stanford University a laboratory of educational research on intelligence measurement. This was the Progressive Era, animated by ideals of Social Darwinism and Taylorism; there was an overall sense that everything, including education, could and should be made more efficient. In California, in particular, the pressures of rocketing immigration made it urgent to develop tools to allow for more tailored teaching. Terman’s Stanford–Binet test allowed for the selection and differentiated education of children according to their identified levels of intelligence. Terman had had a lifelong interest in the science and politics of high intelligence, and within the context of his laboratory, those who came to be labelled as gifted children—generally those with IQs above 130—were given particular attention by the researchers. In the climate of the time, there was a consensus amongst giftedness researchers that exceptionally intelligent children should become the leaders of the future, and that they constituted an untapped resource. Many programmes to help gifted children realise that assumed potential were set up in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, and Terman, as well as psychologist Leta S. Hollingworth, became vocal advocates of the gifted children cause. Terman launched a longitudinal study of gifted children, following a cohort of almost a thousand participants, which would become the longest running study in the history of psychology. It yielded mixed results as to the successes of the gifted cohort. The gifted child was principally an American phenomenon in its early decades, with comparatively little take-up in other countries in the world. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, highly able children (though terminology and conceptions of giftedness were different there) were also identified and intensively trained. This led to considerable competition in the 1950s and 1960s, when, spurred by the Space Race with the Soviet Union, interest in gifted children peaked in the United States, and increased political involvement allowed for still

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more focus on their education and nurturing, especially in the fields of science and technology. In Europe, there were then, and still are, vast cultural differences concerning the identification, special provision, and interest for gifted children, ranging from very little attention to gifted children in Scandinavia, to a British model more aligned with the United States, with special gifted and talented programmes within schools and a (not entirely comparable) system of ability grouping. Researchers studying giftedness in Asian contexts generally use different models more pliable to visions of intelligence as trainable and more embedded in social and familial hierarchy. Overall, there is in the world relatively little cross-­cultural consistency in conceptions of child giftedness (or equivalent words), identification thereof, and visions of how it should be nurtured (if at all).

naturally inherited their extraordinary abilities, though the possibility of congenital talent is sometimes evoked. In the conservative view of giftedness, it is possible—indeed desirable—to nurture gifted children through tailored education so that they could achieve as highly as their intelligence quotient seemed to promise; however, conservatives generally reject the claim that high intelligence could be nurtured in a child who would be, so to speak, born without it. The two central parameters of conservative conceptions of giftedness are that it is inborn and fixed. Such conceptions are no longer dominant in today’s research and education. Models known as progressive view giftedness as wide-ranging, and do not assume that intellectual potential is either unchangeable or set at birth. They also tend to allow space for environmental factors in the development of high ability. Progressive visions of gifted children developed to Critical Discourses on a large degree in response to the social critique of Giftedness and Their Controversies giftedness. On the terrain, more energy was put The concept of giftedness was never uncontroverinto gifted education programmes identifying sial; from its early days, methods of intelligence gifted children from minority ethnic backgrounds measurement were deeply debated, and left-­ or from underprivileged families. leaning educators questioned the need for special The fields of exceptionality encompassed by the educational provision for gifted children. But it is term ‘gifted’ also expanded considerably. The term from the 1960s to the 1980s that the cause of was already employed to refer also to children gifted children was most strongly attacked. The with exceptional artistic talent; as research develserious sociological critique of intelligence meaoped, conceptions of giftedness diversified to surement which took place in those years had a include other kinds of superior skills, including strong impact on gifted education. As the scientific creativity, leadership, sociability, moral sense, or concept of IQ and its normative character was physical ability. As the construct of giftedness deconstructed, gifted children, too, increasingly stretched to those abilities, instruments of meabegan to be seen as an ideological construct. surement were created to identify children who Researchers and educators alike began to pay may display superiority in one of them. attention to the fact that children in gifted programmes were disproportionately White, male, Contemporary Perspectives on Giftedness and middle-class, and that the types of intelligence valued by intelligence testing were likely to advanThere are today several influential models of giftedtage those children with a bourgeois cultural ness to make sense of and attempt to address the knowledge and informal education. In a climate particular characteristics and needs of gifted chilfriendlier to educational equality than to differendren. The inheritability of intelligence, its definition tiated provision, gifted education was sidelined. and measurement, and the possibility (or lack Giftedness advocates separated into what is generthereof) of nurturing ‘all’ children to reach high ally perceived as two theoretical branches, conserability are important variables across those models. vative and progressive visions of giftedness. To the conservative models of giftedness respond, Conservative theories of giftedness, close to the for instance and amongst others, Joseph Renzulli’s scientific literature between the early and midthree-ring model, where talent is seen as evolving, 20th century, view gifted children as having multifarious, and subject to nurturing; and Robert

Girl Power

Sternberg’s WICS model, which lays the emphasis on a synthesis of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity in the identification and nurturing of giftedness. Essentialist models of giftedness, however, may be making a comeback with a recent rise in interest in the genetics of intelligence. Special provision for gifted children, as indeed the very concept of giftedness, remains controversial today around the world. Even within the field of gifted education, influential voices have expressed concern about the conceptual shakiness of the concept of giftedness, for which there is no clear definition and which always implicitly refers to the equally tricky to pinpoint ‘normal’ intelligence. Outside of scientific and educational scholarship, gifted children and the concept of ‘giftedness’ continue to have tremendous symbolic weight in contemporary culture. Beauvais Clementine See also Binet, Alfred; Child Prodigy; Intelligence Quotient (IQ); Intelligence Testing; Special Education

Further Readings Hollingworth, L. S. (1926). Gifted children: Their nature and nurture. New York, NY: Macmillan. Margolin, L. (1994). Goodness personified: The emergence of gifted children. New York, NY: Aldine De Gruyter. Sternberg, R. J., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.). (2005). Conceptions of giftedness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Girl Power Girl power can be defined as a dynamic, contradictory, and contested version of contemporary girlhood generally characterized by educational achievement, delayed childbearing, career advancement, consumer market participation, and social success via hypervisible, apolitical participation in cultural and lifestyle economies. The concept is relevant to childhood studies because normative conceptions of girl power shape global cultural expectations for young, female-identified, feminine bodies despite the enduring power of intersecting structural exclusions (e.g., racism, cisheterosexism,

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ableism, classism, imperialism, militarism) to constrain the conditions of possibility for most subjects. This entry discusses girl power as a cultural phenomenon in the Global North, describes how Western notions of girl power circulate to the Global South, and reflects on the use of post-girl power to signal cultural changes in the 30 years since girl power emerged as a social force.

The Origins of Girl Power Although scholars trace the origin of the term girl power to the U.S.-based feminist, anti-capitalist Riot Grrrl subcultural movement in the early 1990s, girl power as a cultural phenomenon is associated more broadly with changes in the liberal democracies across the Global North beginning in the 1970s, specifically expanding institutional access based on sex (e.g., Title IX in the United States) and neoliberal macroeconomic restructuring (e.g., deindustrialization, the rise of service economies, the feminization of labor). These institutional changes were accompanied by ideological changes, and the energy young feminists generated around girls’ fundamental power to create culture against structural injustice was easily commodified in the context of what scholars refer to as postfeminism—the cultural appropriation of feminist political ideas regarding agency, empowerment, freedom, and choice as depoliticized, individualized, and often entrepreneurial achievements rather than the contingent results of collective social struggle. By the beginning of the 21st century, empowered girlhood as a form of self-styled individualism dominated mainstream notions of youthful femininity. As a sexier, nonthreatening and easily marketable alternative to feminism, girl power has gained (and sustained) power via popular and academic media and the lucrative and increasingly global tween and teen girl market for consumer products and services and related markets in girlness targeting adult women. Yet, girl power is postfeminist empowerment embodied and is therefore not readily available to all bodies identified or positioned as girls. Studies of girls’ lives in the Global North document how expectations for social success via girl power rely on techniques of self-discipline, self-help, and self-responsibility structured by normative and ­ essentialized White, Western/settler femininity,

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able-bodied/able-mindedness, conspicuous consumption, and heterosexual social arrangements. In this cultural milieu, girlhood is reduced to a cando/at-risk binary that disregards the effects of social forces and institutions. Girls and young women better positioned by race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, sexuality, gender expression, ability, and geopolitical location to participate are hailed as successful subjects, whereas their less ideal ­ counterparts are further marginalized and disproportionally criminalized and institutionalized for failing to leverage this purportedly universal access to gendered empowerment. Can-do girls are said to succeed (avoid failure) and at-risk girls fail (avoid success) because they have made respectively good, or bad, individual life choices, while the exclusion and violence multiply marginalized girls (e.g., girls of color, transgirls, queer girls, Indigenous girls, disabled girls, undocumented girls) face are d ­isavowed. For instance, scholars document how girls of color (e.g., Black girls, Indigenous girls, Latinx girls) actively create culture that centers their voices and experience and indicts structural violence (e.g., White supremacy, settler colonialism, cisheterosexism), but these invocations of girl-pride, ­self-­confidence, and collective history are read as refusals to conform to proper, mainstream girlhood rather than expression of girl power.

Girl Power Beyond the Global North Despite these uneven effects, assumptions about girls’ new power in the Global North undergird the turn to the girl in the global development industry. In the early 2000s corporations, governments, multi- and bilateral aid agencies, and nongovernmental organizations focused on economic development in the Global South began to leverage girl power as rationale for targeting poor, racialized adolescent girls’ lives for investment and intervention. Scholars document the uneven effects of this turn. On one hand, this focus has effectively disaggregated girls as a discrete target category from women and youth and moved them from the margins to the center of the development agenda. On the other, this focus extends the cando/at-risk binary to all girls in the global system. Girl power development discourses position Other, non-Western girls’ bodies and lives as sites

of extractive human capital. Accordingly, girls who are better positioned to succeed according to Western girl power scripts (i.e., educational advancement, delayed child bearing, cultural disavowal, etc.) are endowed with the exceptional power to break intergenerational poverty and increase economic growth, while those who are structurally positioned to fail are rendered disposable to the global system.

Post–Girl Power While critiques of girl power continue, some childhood studies scholars use the term post–girl power to point to changes in the cultural terrain in the past 30 years since the emergence of girl power as a social force. Various deployments of post–girl power foreground a shift from girls’ empowerment as an aspirational narrative to social and cultural demands for girls’ empowerment as always and already secured, no matter how constrained girls’ lives may actually be, and the complexities this shift presents for girls’ agency, resistance, and the ability to claim injury or any affect other than confidence and self-­ assurance. For instance, some scholars suggest the possibilities social media affords for girls’ public feminism while also documenting how social expectations for girls to speak out regulate girls’ subjectivity, particularly sexual subjectivity. Still others suggest the rise of intersectional feminist activism among adolescent girls and young women signals possibilities for girl power as a mode of political engagement and collective organizing that rejects cultural claims that feminism is finished or unnecessary. These critical interventions continue to problematize any easily affirmative account of gendered empowerment as a new mode of power for girls. Heather Switzer See also Adolescence; Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising; Feminism; Gender; Girlhood; Girlhood Studies; Girling; Girls; Riot Grrrls

Further Readings Aapola, S., Gonick, M., & Harris, A. (2005). Young femininity: Girlhood, power, and social change. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Girlhood Bent, E., & Switzer, H. (2016). Oppositional girlhoods and the challenge of relational politics. Gender Issues, 33(2), 122–147. doi:10.1007/s12147-016-9161-x De Finney, S. (2015). Playing Indian and other settler stories: Disrupting western narrative of indigenous girlhood. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(2), 169–181. doi:10.1080/10304312.2015 .1022940 Gonick, M., Renold, E., Ringrose, J., & Weems, L. (2009). Rethinking agency and resistance: What comes after girl power? Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2(2), 1–9. doi:10.3167/ ghs.2009.020202 Halliday, A. (2017). Envisioning Black girl futures: Nicki Minaj’s anaconda feminism and new understandings of Black girl sexuality in popular culture. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 6(3), 65–77. doi:10.1525/dcqr.2017.6.3.65 Harris, A., & Dobson, A. S. (2015). Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(2), 145–156.

Girlhood For female identified children, girlhood is the period that encompasses childhood and adolescence before womanhood. Cultures mark girlhood by chronological age, but because the social meanings, roles, and responsibilities associated with childhood are determined by region, culture, and history, girlhood is a social and historical construct. Moreover, the boundaries of girlhood shift even within a culture. Children experience biological development, but the gendered meanings and the idea of gender itself is steeped in culture and society. The study of girlhood examines the process of how girl children adapt to their culture’s understanding of girlhood and how they perform it. This entry examines the changing historical meanings of the concept of girlhood and the experiences of girls collectively. It begins by discussing girlhood as a construct.

Girlhood as a Construct Parts of the female life cycle related to sexual maturity and marriage have tended to demarcate girlhood. Physical markers such as puberty or menarche vary due to nutrition levels, and girls

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may experience those physical changes with varying degrees of anxiety, solemn acceptance, or pride depending on their culture and background. For girls, self-sufficiency, which is a common marker of the end of childhood for males, has not always been politically, culturally, and socially attainable. In both Islamic and Christian patriarchal societies, girlhood blended into adulthood as girls traded dependency on a father for dependency on a husband. Age of consent laws, school attendance laws, and other child protections have also shaped girlhood’s definition. For privileged girls, girlhood extends through college. Other times, the end of girlhood is marked individually by menarche, defloration, marriage, or labor. For example, bint,  girl in Arabic, is closely associated with daughter, female child, and virgin but is not used to name a female person who has had sexual intercourse. In ancient Toltec and Mayan cultures, girlhood was bounded by fertility rituals that occurred at puberty. Rituals celebrated the girl’s new powers of womanhood, and she embarked on an education for marriage or sometimes to become a priestess. Girlhood is further constructed by institutions such as family, school, youth organization, and reformatory, as well as by religion, literature, the media, and discourses on child psychology and development. The lived experience of girls is part of this history, but it is not always synonymous and sometimes contrasts with the dominant concept of girlhood. Scholars view girlhood identity formation as a dialectical process that takes into account socializing influences as well as the peer culture and individual values girls bring to their experiences. Girls mediate adult expectations to formulate their own identities. Although girlhood in the Global North has often been naturalized as White, middle-class, able-bodied, and Western, recent girls’ studies research examines girlhood as one of many intersectional identities within the context of global diversity. Age and gender operate alongside myriad other identity categories to produce specific historical and cultural experiences. Early girlhood studies research exposed the vulnerabilities associated with progression from girl to adult woman. Psychologists have examined the devaluation of the self that girls experience during their teenage years and assert that girlhood

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is a comfortable authentic identity that adolescents mourn as they leave it behind for a womanhood full of constraints. Sexual abuse, eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, and juvenile delinquency are other perils of girlhood. Nongovernmental organizations, political organizations, and activists regularly use images of vulnerable girls to affect a response for humanitarian action. Recent popular culture has favored empowering depictions of girlhood, and scholars have probed the degree to which girls have been agents of change, resisting prescribed forms of play and other adult messages. Girlhood in the form of girl power is often a resilient, independent category that rejects vulnerability in favor of a heteronormative masculine individualism and self-sufficiency. Queer, disabled, or non-White girls who fail to produce girlhood in the mode of girl power, however, risk invisibility within this paradigm since it is more attainable for White, educated, upper- and middleclass girls. A recent campaign by the 2004 Nike Foundation nonprofit, the Girl Effect, simultaneously reminds investors of the importance of taking care of girls and their importance to the global economy. The responsibility it places on girls’ shoulders to impact the world is at once inspiring and a burden on girls and women to pull themselves out of the poverty that is rooted in external institutions and structures. These neoliberal framings of girlhood do not fundamentally alter patriarchal or predatory capitalist structures.

Historical Girlhoods The historical study of girlhood examines the attitudes of adults toward girls and girlhood, the conditions that have shaped the development of girlhood as a unique concept, the subjective experiences of girls in the past, and how girls have influenced adults and shaped historical events. Extant sources have especially supported research on European and North American girlhoods and girls in colonial contexts. Girls’ studies asserts that girls must be understood on their own terms and not only as future women, though they have been regarded as future women in many places and times. Critical race, disability, postcolonial, and queer studies have forced the field to examine the multiplicity of girlhoods. Who is a girl differs by historical time period and across cultures.

Since the 1960s, when Philippe Ariès first argued that the concept of childhood did not emerge until the 1500s, scholars have regarded childhood as a dynamic concept. The labeling of girls and boys as separate has differed across time. The use of the term girl in English to differentiate two genders of children first occurred in the 1500s. Although Europeans in the Middle Ages recognized “ages of man” with at least three stages including infancy, girlhood and boyhood, and adulthood, the gender of infants was not significant. Into the American colonial period, no real gender differences characterized treatment before age 6 years when boys were breeched and followed men into apprenticeships, and girls followed mothers and sisters in home production and housework. The birth of girls has not always been celebrated. In ancient Greece, China, and India, for example, girls were viewed as a financial burden since the family would have to pay a dowry to their future husbands. In some African societies, however, the husband’s family paid a bride price to the girl’s family to make up for the loss of her labor. In Coastal Gabon, the man’s family did not pay, however, until she proved her fertility by bearing children. Many girls, such as those in the Roman Empire, married in their early or mid-teens, a practice that was designed to maintain virginity until marriage. Although some early medical practition­ ers sought to postpone marriage until girls’ bodies were mature enough for childbirth, many laws also encouraged girls to marry men who deflowered them, even if done through rape. Before the industrial era, girls’ education and labor overlapped. In Africa and in much of the world, girls tended vegetables and livestock and did household tasks. Although Greek boys went to school at around age 7 years, girls stayed within the domain of the household to learn domestic skills and perform tasks related to religious rituals. Roman girls remained under the auspices of their mothers until this time but a few went to monasteries or girls’ schools run by churches. In medieval Europe, most girls learned from their mothers how to manage a household and a few noble girls were taught to read and write. The Enlightenment saw expanding education for girls, but its emphasis was training for motherhood. In the context of the American Revolution, White

Girlhood

middle- and upper- class girls were viewed as future mothers who would be charged with raising virtuous voters and therefore gained access to education in the classics. Girlhood responsibilities to help with domestic tasks, especially looking after younger siblings, curtailed girls’ play hours as did obligation to attend school a girl’s and church or synagogue. As a result, girls had few playthings. The dolls they owned they had usually made, an activity that helped them learn sewing skills and develop usefulness within the domestic sphere. During the 19th century, middle- and upper-class girls in the Global North increasingly experienced a domain of protection through extended education and freedom from paid employment. Not all girls received protection or education. As the institution of slavery in the Caribbean shifted from reliance on the international trade of slaves to their reproduction and coerced breeding, girls’ medical care and nutrition improved as planters sought to increase the life span and breeding potential of enslaved girls, but girlhood as a protected category did not extend to these girls who experienced sexual coercion as well as forced labor. Enslaved girls in the United States also faced work and threats to the concept of girlhood innocence. Harriet Jacobs referred to her teenage years as “a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl” because of the added threats of sexual assault. The market revolution also brought girls into the labor sector in increasing numbers. In the United States and Europe, girls and young women were among the earliest factory workers as they followed their customary textile work into the mills. These girls’ writings illustrate the shocks of industrialization to the working classes as well as girls’ solidarity, pride in earning for one’s family, and camaraderie. In late 19th-century Egypt, as the Egyptian cotton economy expanded, girls entered the labor force in cotton ginning factories there too. Labor complicated their status as girls as the state had little conception of workers as anything but adult. Dangerous work environments, violence, and sexual abuse were among the hazards laboring-class girls experienced in industrial contexts. In settler societies such as the American West, girls continued to do more housework than their brothers, but they also worked outdoors more

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than their eastern counterparts did. They took pride in taming the land and wrote with a sense of excitement and adventure often absent from the diaries of women burdened with childcare. Still, frontier conditions brought heavy responsibilities to 15- or 16-year-old girls as they married young to establish settlements or took over their mother’s responsibilities in case of death. Recognizing the pivotal role girls and women shared in maintaining culture, settler societies targeted native girls for assimilation. Native American girls were coerced and sometimes forced to attend boarding schools run by missionaries and government agents. Although their experiences varied, most learned English, homemaking skills, Christian beliefs, and United States or Canadian history. In Australia, the Euro-Australian government forced mixed-race aboriginal girls into boarding schools where they learned domestic skills to work for ­settler families. The light-skinned aboriginal girls were prepared for marriage to single Euro-­ Australian settler men in a policy that sought to whiten the aboriginal races through generations of cross-marriage. The late 19th century also saw new opportunities and changes for girls. The modern concept of childhood promoted extended protection of children, and girls in particular, from the influences and responsibilities of the adult world. For some girls in the Global North, this led to more leisure time. Girl diarists wrote their personal thoughts— often emphasizing efforts to improve their morals and habits—and used their diaries as creative outlets. Walking—sometimes several hours a day— allowed girls time to visit with friends and enjoy physical exertion. The term girl itself came into usage to describe lively, fashionable, and respectable middle-class adolescent females in the latter half of the 19th century. Girlhood at the time also symbolized the successes and failures of the nation-state to support all its citizens. In Nigeria, the category of African child came into shape in the 1920s as colonial officials responded to the emerging global children’s rights movement. While the African child was usually a boy, colonial officials, elite Nigerian women, and nationalist men in their turn tried to reform the city’s working-class girl-­traders so as to demonstrate norms of girl protection consistent with the legitimate nation-state. Yet as states

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emphasized protection of girls, they did so unevenly. As menarche—sometime a marker of womanhood—appeared earlier due to improved nutrition and health among the prosperous classes, adults fretted over girls’ supposed sexual precocity. Reformers sought to raise the age of consent to criminalize male seducers, but sexually active girls soon went from being the objects of protective legislation to being defined as sexually delinquent by protective juvenile courts. In the Jim Crow South, Black girls rarely saw age of consent laws enforced. At the same time, the parents of some poor immigrant and African American girls used the expanding courts and reformatories to rein in their daughters’ behaviors. In Mexico, too, girls under age 16 years were protected by el rapto—or seduction—laws that criminalized men who stole the virginity of vulnerable girls. Yet if she was 16 years or had previously had sexual intercourse, she was deemed complicit. By the early 21st century, the image of the modern girl, a teenage girl or young woman who was a prominent leisure consumer, had emerged around the world. Working-class urban girls in England and the United States had forged new forms of public entertainment and courtship in amusement parks and dance halls. Girlhood in the 20th century meant navigating consumer messages that offered dominant social messages about femininity, heterosexuality, and beauty as girls purchased and made choices about cosmetics, revealing fashions, and searched for romantic love. Advertisers used the modern girl image to market products in diverse locales including North America, ­Germany, South Africa, and China. Girls from different backgrounds experienced the lure of consumer culture differently. As the Spanish-speaking population in the United States increased in the 1920s and 1930s, lured by jobs in agriculture and industry, Mexican American girls balanced their parents’ traditions with the lure of Hollywood and consumer culture. Younger girls also enjoyed greater leisure. Factory-made toys, books, magazines, clothing, and furniture were made especially for girls. Rather than merely learning sewing skills through doll play, new emphasis centered on social rituals like teas and practicing the affection associated with mothering. Girls’ fiction reflected the themes of greater freedoms alongside girls’ continued subordination.

Girls’ educational opportunities also expanded, and secondary school education became a middleclass expectation for girls as well as for boys. By the 1920s, high school was a defining experience of American teenage years. Young people spent more time with schoolmates and less time with their families. Schools were coeducational but gendered tracks separated girls in cooking, sewing, home economics, typing, and bookkeeping courses. For girls from minority religious and ethnic groups, education was both an opportunity and a threat to cultural traditions. As children spent more time with classmates and less time with families, they identified themselves as distinct from their parents’ generation and values. Twentieth-century wars also shifted the meanings of girlhood. During World War I and World War II, girlhood became a locus of political action as girls contributed to their nations’ efforts and participated in the patriotic fervor of wartime. Girls performed wartime labor that was regularly minimized as volunteerism as they rolled bandages for the Red Cross, grew victory gardens, and participated in scrap drives. During World War II, vulnerability accompanied children’s greater mobility as British and Japanese children were evacuated to rural safe areas and U.S. children relocated with their parents to war plant cities. During this period, Japanese American and Japanese Canadian children were also forcibly removed to internment camps. As large groups of young military men traveled to training centers across Europe, local girls also frequently entered into fraught relationships with them as they presented sexual temptation and sometimes physical danger. Girlhood was a powerful symbol of the success of the nation-state in the postwar period. Rehabilitation efforts in Europe emphasized restoring girls’ supposed threatened maternal instincts as a result of wartime’s displacements. As leaders in the United States and Soviet Union created militarized societies during the Cold War, children’s idealized images—especially those of girls—­symbolized the successes and failures of the nation to protect, provide for, and produce happy innocent children. In the United States, uncontained sexuality became a metaphor for a disordered society so child experts urged parents to serve as sex-role models for their daughters, and girls learned to channel heterosexual desires into marriage. Images of

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protected girlhoods masked the ways that the ideological rivalry, the arms race, and nuclear testing put children around the world in harm’s way. Still, unprecedented prosperity in postwar ­America expanded girls’ consumer culture. Allowance and baby-sitting money fueled girls’ spending capacity and made them a consumer segment to whom advertisers paid attention. Although this provided some cultural clout, girls could do little to control advertising’s messages. Magazines like Seventeen and girls’ organizations provided career advice and citizenship training alongside heteronormative fashion, beauty, and domesticity. Into the late 20th century, girls were less visible in public youth cultures than boys were. Girlhood was often produced within the home and within friends’ homes. Although some scholars have characterized bedroom-oriented girls’ culture as devoid of politics, bedrooms were also places for girls to read and learn about LGBTQ identities. In the 1960s, girls’ cultures also confronted old assumptions as civil rights, rock and roll, and feminism entered girls’ worlds through television, local protests, and church and youth groups. Although the change in outlook was more gradual for some and less overtly political for many, many girls in the 1960s championed the rights of others and themselves. The expansion of civil rights to racial minorities and women extended opportunities for girls. One significant advance in the United States has been Title IX of the Education Amendments, which has allowed girls to take advantage of school-related activities like sports. Its broadening interpretation protects them from sexual assault and harassment on their school campuses as well.

Twenty-First Century Girlhoods Access to the category of girlhood is undergoing a process of change as post-structuralist epistemology influences views about gender. Femininity or girlhood is no longer considered to be only the province of those named female at birth just as masculinity is no longer the province of males alone. Although many laws around the globe endanger nonbinary and transgender children, they increasingly express themselves, and girlhood now includes consideration of where one fits on a gender spectrum. Half of teenagers

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report that their school has an LGBTQ-alliance club or program. Still, the suicide rate among LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual) teenagers is higher than the general teenage population. Lesbians are less likely to attempt suicide than are gay and transgender children, but they attempt suicide at twice the rate of the heterosexual girl population. In some ways, girlhood seems more perilous than ever. Globally, girls are targeted by reactionary terrorists seeking to end girls’ education and rights. In the Global North, girls encounter a media culture that is obsessed with the body and that sexualizes girls at early ages. Male politicians threaten girls’ reproductive rights and actively cultivate a dangerous rape culture. Social media in the 21st century further elevates the pressure to appear sexy, successful, and popular, and body shaming and bullying pervade these platforms. Still girls all over the world fight to define their own sexuality with slut walks that seek to publicize and end rape culture. Some young feminists celebrate girlhood as a source of unique female identity, finding social power in the repossession of the adjective girlie and in the strategic enactment and celebration of girlhood. They draw attention to how girlhood is a category forced upon females, but that girls have power to negotiate and mediate its meanings. Girls also benefit from intersectional feminist analysis that underscores how girls’ identities are produced through interrelated oppressions of sex, race, class, and age. Girlhood remains a flexible category for those who identify with it. Jennifer Helgren See also Girlhood Studies; Girling; Girls

Further Readings Bettis, P., & Adams, N. (Eds.). (2005). Geographies of girlhood: Identities in-between. New York, NY: Routledge. Blue, M. G., & Kearney, M. C. (Eds.). (2018). Mediated girlhoods: New explorations of girls’ media culture. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Brumberg, J. (1998). The body project: An intimate history of American girls. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

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Caldwell, L. (2015). Roman girlhood and the fashioning of femininity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chatelain, M. (2015). South side girls: Growing up in the Great Migration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822375708 Erevelles, N., & Nguyen, X. T. (Eds.). (2017). Special issue on disability and girlhood: Transnational perspectives. Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10, 3. Forman-Brunell, M. (1998). Made to play house: Dolls and the commercialization of American girlhood, 1830–1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. doi:10.1086/ahr/100.3.942 George, A. (2014). Making modern girls: A history of girlhood, labor, and social development in Colonial Lagos. Athens: Ohio University Press. doi:10.3138/ cjh.ach.50.3.rev35 Helgren, J., & Vasconcellos, C. (Eds.). (2010). Girlhood: A global history. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Higginbotham, J. (2013). The girlhood of Shakespeare’s sisters: Gender, transgression, adolescence. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/ edinburgh/9780748655908.003.0001 Maynes, M. J., Søland, B., & Benninghaus, C. (2005). Secret gardens, satanic mills: Placing girls in European history, 1750–1960. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. doi:10.1086/ahr.110.4.1302-b McRobbie, A., & Garber, J. (2000). Girls and subcultures. In A. McRobbie & J. Garber (Eds.), Feminism and youth culture (Rev. 2nd ed., pp. 12–25). New York, NY: Routledge. The Modern Girl around the World Research Group; Weinbaum, A. E., Thomas, L. M., Ramamurthy, P., Poiger, U. G., & Dong, M. Y. (2008). The modern girl around the world: Consumption, modernity, and globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Girlhood Studies Girlhood studies is a multidisciplinary field of inquiry into the lives, experiences, and cultural practices of people who identify as girls, as well as an examination of how girls are discussed and represented in popular and academic venues. It draws from and informs diverse disciplines, such as education, psychology, sociology, history, literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies,

and is often framed by feminist theories and methodologies. As girl is a broad, contested, and diverse term that is intersected by gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and nationhood, girlhood studies scholars focus on contextualizing girlhoods across time periods, regions, and identity categories in order to move away from a universal, dehistoricized understanding of the girl. Girlhood studies scholars have also sought to increase awareness of girls across the globe, engage in activism that raises the status of girls, and bring attention to girls’ voices by making them the subject of qualitative research. The field of girlhood studies overlaps with and informs boyhood studies and childhood studies, though it remains distinct in its goals to increase possibilities for, and interest in, girls. To that end, Marion de Ras and Mieke Lunenberg suggest two guiding questions: How and why are girls understood in particular ways at specific points in history? How is girlhood a separate and unique experience from womanhood? Girlhood studies has been the focus of international conferences, including A New Girl Order? Young Women and the Future of Feminist Inquiry, which took place in London in 2001. Claudia Mitchell, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, and Jackie Kirk credit this conference with planting the seed for Girlhood Studies: An International Journal, which highlights research, theories, and methodologies that relate specifically to girls. This entry discusses why girlhood studies is needed, its connection to third-wave feminism, and its status in the 21st century.

The Need for Girlhood Studies Up until the 1990s, there was little academic research on girls. Girls were ignored, marginalized, or framed as lesser than boys, men, and women. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan challenged women to grow up if they wanted to lead fulfilling lives outside of the home. In Friedan’s analysis, only career women could be feminist adults, whereas housewives were viewed as immature adolescents. This admonition to grow up reinforced a division between girl and woman that elevated the latter at the expense of the former. Women’s studies programs often bear the stamp of this division, only recently incorporating courses on girls and girlhood due to high demand.

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First- and second-wave feminist movements also turned away from girls to further the cause of women’s liberation, which was tethered to adulthood, maturity, and autonomy. The common practice of calling an adult woman girl became emblematic of patriarchal and sexist culture during the 1960s and 1970s, infusing girl with negative connotations, such as childish, immature, and dependent. Marion Leonard explains that the second-wave feminist refusal of the term girl reduced its value, rendering it a depoliticized social category while simultaneously helping to strengthen the cause of women. The devaluing of girls also has a long-standing tradition in Marxist cultural theory. Embedded in the culture industry thesis put forward by the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer characterize the masses as tasteless, easily manipulated dupes who operate under false consciousness—most often represented as girls. Considered undiscerning consumers and conformists, Lisa Lewis suggests that this negative view of girlhood has made it difficult to study girls’ culture with the same kind of legitimacy as the culture of boys, men, and women. Instead, consumer girl culture is often treated as a form of marketplace delusion with little validity, potential for resistance, or significance in relation to the production of empowering subjectivities. Catherine Driscoll notes that girls’ culture is often dismissed as frivolous by sheer dint of the fact that it relates to girls, while conformities by boys and men are hardly ever commented upon. In the 1970s and 1980s, the influential work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham focused on youth cultural practices, but in these studies, youth largely stood for male. Girls were ignored or assigned minor roles in spectacular male subcultures, such as punks, skinheads, and mods, and were uncritically framed as sexual objects in examinations of ­working-class lad culture. These oversights caused Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber to critique the invisibility of girls and to question the bias of male researchers. McRobbie and Garber, as well as Christine Griffin, challenged the masculine and sexist nature of youth studies by conducting research that focused specifically on girls and their cultural practices. These explorations were often based on ethnographic observations and interviews

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with girls relating to subcultures, friendship, leisure, mall culture, school-to-work transitions, magazines, dances, youth clubs, bedroom culture, and working-class identities. Developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts of the early 20th century also framed girls in negative terms that suggested they were lesser than boys. Sigmund Freud described an early stage of female psychosexual development in relation to penis envy. Girls’ sex organs, he notes, are inferior, small, and inconspicuous in relation to the superior sex organs of boys. Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg often focused on boys to the exclusion of girls in their studies of moral development. Girls’ experiences were either grafted onto those of boys’ or viewed as less exemplary. Piaget found girls’ games to be unsophisticated compared to those of boys; and Kohlberg did not include girls in his original study on moral development, implying that boys’ experiences were universal and that child stood for boy. Carol Gilligan sought to redress this androcentric disparity in developmental psychology through a number of well-known studies. In 1989, Gilligan and her colleagues, Nona Lyons and Trudy Hanmer, published Making Connections: The Relational World of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School. This book revolves around the stories and experiences of girls as they navigate school and peer relationships. Highlighting a crisis of connection brought on by adolescence, Gilligan and colleagues suggest that girls give up their authentic voices in order to please others and be seen as feminine. In 1992, Lyn Mikel Brown and Gilligan published Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, which highlights girls’ difficult journey from childhood to adolescence, marked by a split between true and false selves. The feminist researchers mentioned in this section, along with critical psychologist Valerie Walkerdine, social psychologist Michelle Fine, criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind, journalist Peggy Orenstein, critical psychologist Deborah Tolman, and the American Association of University Women, were some of the prominent scholars who brought attention to girls in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. This momentum, combined with the emergence of third-wave feminism and the rise of girl culture, catapulted girlhood into its own field of study.

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Third-Wave Feminisms and the Rise of Girl Culture The rise of girlhood studies in the 1990s is inextricably linked to what Mary Celeste Kearney calls coalescing, or the combination of cultural, political, and academic elements that brought attention to increased representations of girls in popular culture, and created platforms from which girls could speak for themselves. In 1992, 22-year-old Rebecca Walker published an essay in Ms. magazine after sexual harassment charges were dismissed against Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas. Angered by this decision, Walker proclaimed, “I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the third wave.” This statement inspired a burgeoning movement known as thirdwave feminism, which included the voices of girls. Third-wave feminism embraces difference in a way that second-wave feminism does not, incorporating a do-it-yourself, individualistic attitude toward feminist politics, as opposed to a collective agenda meant to unite all women. As noted by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, the third wave is a continuation of the second wave, but one that speaks specifically to young feminist activists with diverse interests. Drawing on postmodern and poststructural critiques of truth, language, and identity, the third wave promotes intersectionality, multiplicity, the proliferation of genders and sexualities, a sex-positive focus, trans-global concerns, third world feminisms, youthful feminist identities, and multiple forms of activism, including marches, zines, e-zines, blogs, and music. For the first time in feminist history, the role of girls shifted from margins to center. While the third wave brought girls into the discussion, it also helped to salvage the word girl from first- and second-wave dismissals. As Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards argue, girl was reclaimed by the third wave as an identity for adult women who enjoyed girlhood toys (Barbie and Hello Kitty), girlish fashions (baby doll dresses, braids, and tiny T-shirts), girl-focused films and television shows (Clueless, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Powerpuff Girls, and My SoCalled Life), girl-focused magazines (Sassy), and girl-focused music (Madonna, Hole, Alanis Morissette, Salt-N-Pepa, the Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child, and Lilith Fair Festivals). Baumgardner and

Richards also explain that some third-wave feminists proudly claim the feminine without feminist guilt—an ethos also embodied in Bitch and Bust magazines, two publications devoted to feminist analyses of culture that have helped make girl a respected word and girlie an acceptable adult identity. Third wave rock culture also aided in reclaiming girl through what Gayle Wald calls the performance of girlish femininity. Wald sites Gwen Stephani of the band No Doubt as an example of the deliberate and ironic presentation of girlhood in the song “I’m Just a Girl.” The third wave’s reclamation and revitalization of girl culture are connected to a feminist movement of the early 1990s known as Riot Grrrl. The third wave is often viewed as growing out of or in combination with Riot Grrrl, initially a feminist punk scene that began in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC, in response to the misogyny of indie and mainstream music industries. Bands such as Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Babes in Toyland, and Sleater-Kinney produced and performed music that tackled sexism, racism, homophobia, capitalism, and violence against girls and women. Riot Grrrl shows became political events, where girls were invited to mosh, dance, or stand at the front and boys were asked to move to the back. Riot Grrrl bands adorned themselves in girlie outfits and wrote words such as whore and slut on their clothing in order to call attention to the sexual double standard. Out of these politically charged concerts emerged a youthful feminist movement that spread through zines, e-zines, blogs, pamphlets, and rallies. When Bikini Kill published a zine called Girl Power in 1991, the term initially became symbolic of the do-it-yourself feminist political activism that defined the movement—Grrrl Power! By the late 1990s, girl power had become a mainstream expression made popular by the British pop group the Spice Girls, who were successfully marketed through what Catherine Driscoll calls everygirlness. While the Riot Grrrl movement spoke to the politically engaged college girl about rape, queerness, and anti-corporatism, the Spice Girls spoke to young girls about friendship, fashion, and fun. Dawn Currie, Deirdre Kelly, and Shauna Pomerantz note that girl power took on several distinct meanings in this commercialized form: meanness, hypersexuality, the pursuit of perfection, and the kick-ass girl. Girl power

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exploded in the marketplace around these categories through products that many feminists felt were diluted of political significance. Suddenly, girls were the focus of feminist analyses that generated critiques, op-eds, anthologies, and academic articles that helped to formalize the nascent field of girlhood studies. A key theme during this era was whether girls’ engagement in consumer girl culture could constitute resistance, agency, and a form of youthful feminism.

Girlhood Studies in the 21st Century In the early 2000s, central texts and articles emerged that continued to define the field and expand its range of topics. Girlhood studies ­scholars focused on agency, resistance, sexualization, sexual desire, activism, SlutWalk, feminist clubs, dress codes, tween culture, girls’ academic success, sk8er girlhoods, rural girlhoods, racialized girlhoods, dis/ abled girlhoods, queer girlhoods, Aboriginal girlhoods, online girlhoods, rape culture, slut­ shaming, violence, fangirls, celebrity culture, African girlhoods, Scandinavian girlhoods, Canadian girlhoods, computer girls, girls who make media, girls in history, girls in fiction, and representations of girls in film and television. Cutting across many of these topics, two broader themes emerged that shaped girlhood studies into the 21st century: neoliberalism and postfeminism. In their study of class, young women, and deindustrialization in the United Kingdom, Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody define neoliberalism as a strategy of modern-day government that denies inequality and depends on selfinventing, entrepreneurial, and flexible subjects who are able to make themselves relevant in the new global economy. The authors argue that girls have been remade as ideal neoliberal subjects who are capable of not just surviving but thriving in this time of social and economic change. Yet not all girls are treated similarly under neoliberalism— class produces and divides girls in unequal ways through the family, education, and the job market. For example, the authors’ longitudinal study shows that middle-class girls pay a high emotional price for maintaining the expectation of perfectionism, such as stress and anxiety, while workingclass girls suffer humiliations and frustrations in a crushing labor market. The authors thus note that

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class is still a critical feature in the production of girls’ subjectivities. Anita Harris also identifies unequal girlhoods under neoliberalism: the at-risk and can-do girls. Can-do girls are constructed as girls of the future who are best able to take up the call for adaptable students and workers in the new global economy. Typically, White and middle-class can-do girls are the epitome of individualized girl power. The atrisk girl, on the other hand, represents the unproductive subject who is incapable of succeeding within a neoliberal context. The at-risk girl is usually represented as a poor or working-class girl of color who is lazy, criminal, or deviant. Harris explores how this problematic can-do/at-risk binary is formed around assumptions of personal weakness and strength, rather than oppression and privilege. For example, when can-do girls struggle, they are individualized as girls who temporarily go astray but must be pulled back from the brink, as described in Mary Pipher’s best-­ selling book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. But when at-risk girls struggle, their problems are often pathologized as bad personal choices that cannot be easily recuperated. The thread of neoliberalism in girlhood studies is inextricably connected to another key focus in the early 2000s: postfeminism—or the popular belief that gender equality has been achieved in the West, making girls and young women beyond the need for feminist politics. Defined by Rosalind Gill as a pervasive cultural sensibility in education, government, and popular culture, postfeminism has been taken up by girlhood studies scholars in complex ways. Angela McRobbie explains postfeminism as that which takes feminism into account while simultaneously representing it as a spent force that is outdated and irrelevant. In this way, feminism becomes a form of common sense and a rejected and derided political position. Nowhere has this sensibility been taken up more strongly than in popular culture, where girls and young women are routinely depicted as living their own choice lives because they have transcended sexism and other forms of social inequality. Shows and films such as The Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, High School Musical, Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mulan, and Frozen draw on characters whose lives are disconnected from but made possible by feminism.

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McRobbie and other girlhood studies scholars, such as Sinikka Aapola, Marnina Gonick, Rebecca Raby, Jessica Ringrose, Harris, and Pomerantz, have focused on the widespread narrative of female success (top girls, A1 girls, successful girls, smart girls, supergirls, can-do girls, perfect girls) as a flash point for the dissemination of postfeminism in contemporary culture. What McRobbie calls the glamorous high achiever is often seen as proof that girls now experience gender equality due to high grades, university acceptances, consumer and sexual power, and unlimited choice in the spheres of work and family. As a result, girls have become synonymous with freedom and self-regulating autonomy. However, McRobbie explores this power in relation to what she calls the new sexual contract—an understanding that girls and young women can enter social, public, and political life but only on condition that they partake in a non-threatening, individualizing form of femininity. Girlhood studies scholars focusing on girls’ activism, media production, and feminist engagement have challenged the idea that girls are apolitical or postfeminist. Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold explore girls’ activism on social media that tackles rape culture, slut-shaming, and everyday instances of gender inequality, including the challenging but empowering work of feminist clubs in schools. Mary Celeste Kearney explores girls’ production of multiple forms of media in the wake of the Riot Grrrl movement, and how girls can be active producers rather than the passive consumers written about by the Frankfurt School and the youth culture theorists of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. And Jessica Valenti identifies a nascent fourth wave of feminism that is youth driven and online. Girlhood studies is an evolving, diverse, dynamic, multidisciplinary field that continues to grow, shift, and respond to relevant issues facing girls across the globe. Since its beginning in the 1990s, girlhood studies scholars have explored girls’ lives through multiple theoretical lenses, including feminisms, phenomenology, critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and critical and social psychology, often creatively expanding these theories in relation to data collected through observations, interviews, focus groups, textual analyses, and surveys. In the 21st century, girlhood studies will see more focus on

intersectionality, third world girlhoods, refugee girlhoods, queer girlhoods, online girlhoods, and the continuing investigation of global capitalism as it produces, and is resisted, by girls. Shauna Pomerantz See also Feminism; Girl Power; Girlhood; Girls; Riot Grrrls; Schooling, Gender, and Race; Tween

Further Readings Aapola, S., Gonick, M., & Harris, A. (2004). Young femininity: Girlhood, power and social change. London, UK: Palgrave. Currie, D. H., Kelly, D. M., & Pomerantz, S. (2009). ‘Girl power’: Girls reinventing girlhoods. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Driscoll, C. (1999). Girl culture, revenge and global capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Grrrls, Spice Girls. Australian Feminist Studies, 14, 173–195. doi:10.1080/08164649993425 Driscoll, C. (2002). Girls: Feminine adolescence in popular culture and cultural theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Gonick, M. (2006). Between “girl power” and “reviving Ophelia”: Constituting the neoliberal girl subject. NWSA Journal, 18, 1–23. doi:10.2979/ nws.2006.18.2.1 Harris, A. (Ed.). (2004). All about the girl: Culture, power, and identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Harris, A. (2004). Future girl: Young women in the twenty-first century. New York, NY: Routledge. Jiwani, Y., Steenbergen, C., & Mitchell, C. (2006). Girlhood: Redefining the limits. Montreal, Canada: Black Rose. Kearney, M. C. (2006). Girls make media. New York, NY: Routledge. Kearney, M. C. (2009). Coalescing: The development of girls’ studies. NWSA, 21(1), 1–28. McRobbie, A. (1991). Feminism and youth culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just seventeen’. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. Los Angeles, CA; London, UK: Sage. Mitchell, C., & Reid-Walsh, J. (Eds.). (2005). Seven going on seventeen: Tween studies in the culture of girlhood. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Pomerantz, S. (2009). Between a rock and a hard place: Un/defining the “girl.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 1, 147–158. doi:10.1353/jeu.2010.0000

Girling Pomerantz, S., & Raby, R. (2017). Smart girls: Success, school, and the myth of post-feminism. Oakland: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/ california/9780520284142.001.0001 Ringrose, J. (2013). Postfeminist education? Girls and the sexual politics of schooling. London, UK: Routledge. Wald, G. (1998). Just a girl? Rock music, feminism, and the cultural construction of female youth. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 23, 585–610. doi:10.1086/495280 Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H., & Melody, J. (2001). Growing up girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave.

Girling Girling can be defined as the process of becoming socially intelligible as a girl according to precedents for the performance of girlhood in any given sociocultural, geographic, political, economic, and historical context. In this usage, girl names a gendered social category and embodied process that is more complex and contingent than a self-evident, universal, biological, or demographic indicator for a young, non-adult, female-bodied, or feminine presenting person. The concept of girling is relevant to childhood studies because it provides a theoretical framework for documenting and analyzing how various bodies become socially understood as girls, and therefore, troubles articulations of girl as a biologically determined social category. This entry first discusses girling as a theoretical concept named by feminist philosopher Judith Butler. The remainder of the entry discusses how girling has been mobilized to account for how social institutions rely on and reproduce a narrow range of cultural expectations for contemporary gendered childhood and young adulthood associated with the exclusionary norms for girl power and the uneven effects of these processes for those girls who fall outside of normative social categories.

Girling Defined The phrase girling is most often used in scholarly literature focused on cultural studies of girlhood, referred to as girls’ studies. Girls’ studies centers the

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intersections of gender, age, and generation along with other axes of social difference (e.g., race, sexuality) in order to foreground gender as integral to, though often marginalized in, studies of childhood and youth, and for challenging adult-centrism in gender studies. Girls’ studies scholars use girling in reference to Butler’s influential formulation of gender as performative. According to this theory, gendered embodiment is produced over time through the repetition of historical cultural norms for gender that determine and perpetuate social relations in which those who conform to expectations are rewarded and those who fail to conform are penalized. Within this logic, neither sex nor gender is simply biological or natural. Rather, the social repetition of gender norms materializes bodies as sexed and gendered. Butler uses the example of how, when a baby is born, it becomes a she through the social authority invested in experts (e.g., delivery room medical professionals). Once it is named she, the baby is girled. In other words, the girl comes into being in a social context of recognition and reward through language and action, a process Butler calls girling. From the moment of her naming as she, the girl is thereafter repeatedly girled: She is given a girl’s name, dressed in girls’ clothes, surrounded by girls’ toys, and trained according to the rules for girlhood in the cultural context in which she is embedded. In most Western contexts, for example, she learns that gender norms are based on exclusionary principles: to be a girl is not to be a boy and not to be a woman. Over time, through repetitive social interactions, her existence as a girl is reinforced when others around her see her and treat her as a girl. As she masters the performance of girl-ness, she comes to see her girl-ness as normal, natural, and immutable. In this sense, a girl is only what she is because girling is what she does in socially recognized and approved ways. Girling, therefore, names a process conventionally understood as the effect of the onetime act of revealing a baby’s sex at birth as more accurately an on-going, repetitive and contingent process of social identity construction that is compulsive and compulsory.

Research on Girling Girling has been used most commonly in research focused on Western girls and their

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girlhoods, particularly as they are represented in popular media. Scholars document how the process of becoming embodied according to cultural expectations for gendered personhood assumes an ideal girl who is White, heterosexual, conventionally feminine and attractive (e.g., thin, voluptuous), middle-class, able-bodied, secular, and a documented citizen of a nation-state. Girling, in this literature, is often closely associated with notions of girl power ascribed to specific modes of youthful femininity (e.g., consumerism) that can be easily commodified, circulated, and thus authorized as normative. To be girled in this context is to become subject to a narrow range of dominant embodiments, behaviors, attitudes, and experiences despite any individual girl’s socially located capacity to conform to these modes. Scholars focused on Western girlhood document how the process of girling for non-ideal girls remains fraught and often disempowering, as new kinds of social power for girls are tethered to age-old exclusions (e.g., racism, heterosexism, ableism) that marginalize, criminalize, and disproportionately institutionalize other bodies and desires. In related scholarship, girling has been used to critique the political implications of Western girl power assumptions embedded in the relatively recent incorporation of poor adolescent girls in the Global South into development paradigms. Scholars foreground how purportedly neutral global institutions are not only gendered but also girled through the celebratory circulation of the girl as a development category and site of intervention and investment. In this literature, girling is a transnational process in which girlhood becomes a form of gendered embodiment that predicts economic value only insofar as any given girl conforms to local and global expectations for gendered labor, obligation, and responsibility in the service of economic growth. To be girled then is to become instrumental to development based on a girl’s natural capacity to shoulder the burden of social reproduction by succeeding in the marketplace. Despite their differences, scholars show how girls’ lives in the Global North and South unfold within globalized processes of girling and document how these processes unevenly engender new possibilities as

well as create new, or newly recycled, regulations for girls’ everyday lives around the world. Heather Switzer See also Feminism; Gender; Girl Power; Girlhood; Girlhood Studies; Girls

Further Readings Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York, NY: Routledge. Durham, M. G. (2003). The girling of America: Critical reflections on gender and popular communication. Popular Communication, 1(1), 23–31. Erevelles, N., & Matua, K. (2005). ‘I am a woman now!’: Rewriting cartographies of girlhood from the critical standpoint of disability. In P. J. Bettis & N. Adams (Eds.), Geographies of girlhood: Identities in-between. Mahwah, NJ: LEA Publishers. doi:10.4324/9781410612632 Murphy, M. (2012/2013). The girl: Mergers of feminism and finance in neoliberal times. The Scholar & Feminist Online, 11.1/11.2 [Online]. Retrieved October 17, 2017, from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/ Swindle, M. (2011). Feeling girl, Girling feeling: An examination of girl as affect. Rhizomes, 22 [Online]. Retrieved October 17, 2017, from http://www .rhizomes.net/issue22/swindle.html

Girls Childhood is a gendered phenomenon with very different sets of expectations, experiences, and effects depending on the designation of male or female. When generic terms, such as childhood or youth, are used, often what is imagined is the male version of the term. It is therefore essential to think through the specific relationship between childhood and girlhood. It is also important to think about girls and girlhood in intersectional ways. That is, gender is only one aspect of social identity, and others such as race, class, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality also shape experiences of girlhood. The meaning of girl is shaped by different social, political, economic, and historical contexts. This means that girls and girlhood is defined as more than simply a biological phenomenon or a limited

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chronological time period occurring in the life course. Rather, it should be understood as a collection of social and cultural issues and questions as well as a social geography that one lives with and returns to throughout one’s life. In Western cultures, girls has often been used as a pejorative term to symbolize triviality, superficiality, and silliness. Second-wave feminism worked hard to change cultural norms that had even adult women referred to as girls, as if females were understood to never achieve adult status, but always remain childlike in need of the guidance and control of male adults. More recently, the term girl has been reclaimed by third-wave feminists, particularly by the Riot Grrrl Movement, with its political slogan “Revolution Grrrl Style Now!” This signaled a collective rupture from mainstream sociopolitical life, boldly juxtaposing the lexicon of radical protest and rebellion (revolution) with that of female youth. The rebranding of the term girl was central to the movement’s practice of rescripting and renaming traditional female identities, not just girl but a defiant grrrl identity that roars back at the dominant culture. In making sense of what girl means in the current time of the 21st century, two dominant and somewhat contradictory discourses are evident. The effect of these discourses is not directed at all girls in the same way. The first understands girls as vulnerable to damaging, destructive, and dangerous forces. The second understands girls as powerful, in-charge, as agents of change and as saviors of our collective future. This entry examines common representations of girls, including vulnerable girls and means girls, and further examines the idea of girls as saviors of a collective future.

Vulnerable Girls Recent years have seen concern raised about a range of issues negatively affecting girls living in Western countries and making them vulnerable to nefarious influences. One of these is the sexualization of girls and girl cultures occurring through the effects of commercial marketing and popular media. The girls’ market has become saturated with adultlike fashions such as underwear and T-shirts with provocative sayings printed on them, stilettos, and makeup. Media directed at girls such as teen soaps, music videos, and magazines are accused of glamourizing sexiness as girls’ sole important attribute.

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The sexualization of girls has been addressed in several popular books for parents as well as at the level of public policy with national inquiries conducted in Australia and Britain. Although much of the attention to this issue assumes this is a new phenomenon borne of an intensification of marketing, research shows that it is in fact not an issue unique to our times. There is a long history of girls being represented as erotic objects. Examples include Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Liddell, American child actress Shirley Temple’s ­ films and memorabilia, and Victorian era advertising for all kinds of household products.

Mean Girls While stories of sexualized and racialized harassment of girls are not usually given widespread attention, stories about bullying are central to contemporary narratives about schooling in Western countries. These stories circulate widely in traditional and online media as the subjects of social media campaigns, talk shows, documentaries, and Hollywood blockbusters. In recent times, a particular version of bullying has captured the imaginations of many—that is, the mean girl phenomenon. The mean girl literature uniformly represents girlhood as a time of crisis with the greatest danger coming from girls’ own friends and girl culture. Feminist researchers trace the emergence of the mean girl phenomenon within a political, social, and educational climate increasingly characterized by neoliberal values and beliefs, with an emphasis on individualism, personal responsibility, and choice. Thus, the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts of girls’ lives are ignored and the problem is confined to the private world of the individual girl, her parents, or her therapist for resolution. These stories of girls’ meanness or relational aggression have become so ubiquitous as to be understood as inherent to girlhood itself. However, feminist researchers have also produced compelling research critiquing how these stories represent girls, girlhood, and school experience. These critiques argue that these stories constitute a near total objectification of the girl creating a binary which normalizes male physical aggression while pathologizing what is understood as female forms of aggression. What is obscured in

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these stories are the social contexts and power relationships within which bullying occurs. Much of the mean girl literature works to mask how much of the concern and controversy over indirect and relational aggression is primarily about White and middle-class girls. The universalization and normalization of girl meanness elides complex differences among girls and vastly different familial, community, and educational contexts under which femininity, aggression, and violence are constituted and regulated. A wider lens might allow for alternative interpretations of the phenomenon of the mean girl. For example, for girls living in difficult circumstances such as those living under state care, aggression might be understood as practices of survivability, in a world of uncertainty and trauma, rather than as deviant or pathological.

Girls as Saviors of the Collective Future Girls in the Global South are often positioned as the untapped resource of the developing world, who with the right investment in their education, will ultimately lift their communities and nations out of poverty. This discourse is found in policy documents such as the influential 1995 World Bank document titled Priorities and Strategies for Education. These powerful discourses promote girls’ education as a potential boost to the global economy. Girls’ education is thus closely tied to economic development and creating pathways for the success of globalization. The concern for feminists is that girls and their education are seen solely in these terms. Other features of the promise of education and the potential of girls’ lives, such as human rights, personal autonomy and fulfillment, the love of learning, identity exploration, creating an informed and engaged citizenry, preparedness for participating in public life, and supporting knowledge production and creating knowledge producers are all absent and ignored. The problem with the way programs and policies use this discourse is that not only are the multifaceted possibilities of education erased, but they also reduce girls’ lives to human capital indicators of development. The complexities of girls’ lives, ambitions, and challenges are flattened to merely their economic potentiality in the interests of global capitalism.

Furthermore, in these programs and policies, understandings of gender are essentialized into a binary between girls and boys without the intersectionalities of other social locations such as race, sexuality, ethnicity, and ability. The social construction and nuances of gendered and sexual difference are not analyzed, and there is only limited discussion of cultural and social differences in definitions of gender and sexuality. The effects of these limitations are that this education policy promotion often fails to take into account and address the intricacies of the relationships between education and gender relations. Specifically, as feminist researchers have discussed, it is important to recognize that there may be gendered relations of power in cultural, economic, and political domains that are not easily rectified through schooling. While schooling clearly creates more options for girls, in some contexts, attending school may also entail dangers and vulnerability. For example, Heather Switzer, Emily Bent, and Crystal Leigh Endsley use Switzer’s research with the Maasi people of Kenya to show that schoolgirls face an empowerment paradox in which education is presented to girls as the surest path to legible personhood and the purported power of visibility, yet attending school also creates new versions of persistent vulnerabilities that expose girls to gender discrimination and violence precisely because of their (in)visibility as schoolgirls. Switzer argues that schoolgirls growing up in poverty may become sexual targets because they often need the money or material goods their boyfriends offer to secure their access to education. As such the dis/empowerment they feel as potential and actual victims of violence threatens the access to agency that schooling promises but may not be able to deliver. This contradiction they suggest challenges the logic that schools are inherently safe spaces protecting schoolgirls from gendered abuse and violence. Thus, this discourse, and the policies and programs it engenders, is limited by its promotion of a specific kind of empowerment defined within a neoliberal globalization in which girls’ human rights take a backseat to their economic potentiality and in which the value of education itself is understood in only very limited ways. Moreover, the on-the-ground school conditions in local

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contexts and on-going gendered inequalities remain unaddressed by this discourse. The concept of girl and girlhood in childhood studies is integral to putting gender and other forms of social identities such as race, class, nationality, ability, and sexuality at the forefront of making sense of the concept of childhood in the current era.

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Switzer, H., Bent, E., & Endsley, C. L. (2016). Precarious politics and girl effects: Exploring the limits of the girl gone global. Feminist Formations, 28, 33–59. doi:10.1353/ff.2016.0014 Unterhalter, E., & North, A. (2017). Education, poverty and global goals for gender equality: How people make policy happen. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315104225

Marnina Gonick See also Girl Power; Girlhood; Girlhood Studies; Girls

Further Readings Aapola, S., Gonick, M., & Harris, A. (2005). Young femininity: Girlhood, power and social change. HoundsMills, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Bethune, J., & Gonick, M. (2016). Schooling the mean girl: A critical discourse analysis of teacher resource materials. Gender and Education. doi:10.1080/09540 253.2016.1156654 David, M. (2016). A feminist manifesto for education. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. DeJaeghere, J., & Frances, V. (2011). Educational formations: Gendered experiences of schooling in local contexts. Feminist Formations, 23(3), vii–xvi. doi:10.1353/ff.2011.0042 Gonick, M. (2003). Between femininities: Ambivalence, identity and the education of girls. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gonick, M. (2004). The mean girl crisis: Problematizing representations of girls’ friendships. Feminism and Psychology, 14, 395–400. doi:10.1177/ 0959353504044641 Gonick, M., & Gannon, S. (Eds.). (2014). Becoming girl: Collective biography and the production of girlhood. Toronto, Canada: Women’s Press. Gonick, M., Renold, E., Ringrose, J., & Weems, L. (2009). Rethinking agency and resistance: What comes after girl power? Girlhood Studies, 2(2), 1–9. doi:10.3167/ghs.2009.020202 Renold, E. (2010). Fighting for an education: Succeeding and surviving for girls in care at school. In C. Jackson, C. Paechter, & E. Renold (Eds.), Girls and education: Continuing concerns, new agendas. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press. doi:10.1080/00 071005.2011.611290 Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2010). Normative cruelties and gender deviants: The performative effects of bully discourses for girls and boys in school. British Journal of Educational Research Journal, 36(4), 573–596. doi:10.1080/01411920903018117

Global North Childhoods The concept of Global North childhood includes an inherent presumption of a North–South binary axis and North versus South (or North over South) relations of power. The Global North is not an exactly defined place on the map nor does it cover half the globe. And the Global North contains a huge variety of childhoods which, because of space limitations, cannot be comprehensively addressed in a single encyclopedia entry. What follows is organized into four sections. The first addresses some key definitional concepts; the second briefly explores academic and legal discourses on children and childhood and their legal/political consequences. The third part grounds the discussion by touching on a single fragment of lived childhood experience in the Global North, and the fourth consists of some concluding remarks.

Conceptual Clarifications: Geography or Power? The concept of Global North implies a concept of Global South as its counterpart. Even if this conceptualization refers to geography, it is not about clear boundaries traced on the map. The Global North/South binary is more of a metaphor even though it has its references in the real world. Historically, a similar distinction has been made between developed and developing countries, and at present, the distinction is often conceptualized as the minority world versus the majority world. Whereas the term Global North versus Global South refers to geography, the developed/developing division relates to economic inequalities and the minority/majority distinction to respective population sizes. Together these concepts present

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a picture of an economically wealthy northern sphere inhabited by a minority of the world’s population, in contrast to a southern, economically poorer sphere where the majority of the world’s population reside. The Global North has a relatively high preponderance of older people in its population compared with the Global South, inhabited as it is by the great majority of the world’s children and young people. Defining childhoods according to these narrow characteristics will always be inadequate, given the wide variation in economic status between people in Southern countries and between some countries in the northern and southern hemispheres (e.g., Iran vs. Australia). A more socially and analytically meaningful line of definition rests in the idea of relations of power between these two spheres. The power position for the Global North is, for example, grounded in a long history of economic exploitation of the South and in the production and promulgation of cultural naturalness. Cultural naturalness refers to scientific truths as well as a shared common ground of meaning that is obvious. As a citizen of the Global North, I am aware that this obviousness forms the lens through which we define, assess, and judge the Other, that is, the ideas, customs, practices, relationships, religions, identities, and so on that are lived in the Global South. The imposition of a hierarchical order between the Global North versus the Global South is also obvious in the process(es) of constituting an Other. Postcolonial theorizers and authors elaborate lucidly and authoritatively on this point and are worth touching on, briefly. The scholarship of the late Edward Said (1935– 2003) on orientalism offers groundbreaking contributions to postcolonial theorizing. Said studied Western (Global North) discourses on the Orient (part of the Global South) and the Oriental. He examined Western museums, movies, novels, and other works and institutions within the fields of history, religion, anthropology, and the arts and analyzed their construction of the Oriental as the Other. The Other was constituted by variation in physical appearance, belief, customs, and ways of living. The Western constructor, on the contrary, was left in the shadow, not as a constructing and telling I, but as a seemingly neutral observer of facts. In his scientific works, Said highlighted an

important property of the Western constructor: the power to define the Other. Within Said’s scholarship, the imbalance of power between the colonizing and the colonized people was brought inescapably to the fore. Imbalance of power is, however, also a matter of fact within a country or geographical part of the world. Uneven distribution of economic resources will most often form the foundation of imbalance of power also when it comes to the distribution of cultural ideas, moral values, and acknowledged academic contributions within a nation. This point should be kept in mind as we now turn to cultural and academic ideas of childhood and children.

Academic and Legal Discourses on Children and Childhood Childhood may be seen as a phenomenon shaped by a society’s social, economic, and legal structures as well as the cultural meaning systems that permeate the understanding of childhood. In this sense, childhood is a structural category defined by societal organization, and the category exists independent of the actual children that populate it at a specific historical moment. But it must never be forgotten that childhoods also encompass the actual persons populating the category at a certain time and location. Childhood and children have traditionally been at the center of attention in academic disciplines such as pedagogy and psychology, both of focus on children’s trajectories throughout the life phase of childhood. Ideas of biologically anchored levels of development have been prominent in both these fields, ideas which have in turn nurtured concerns about deviances from the normal developmental pathway. The same concerns have paved the way for creation of psychological scales and measuring procedures, right from the beginning of the 20th century. Ascribing the process of growing up to biology was certainly a way of raising psychology and pedagogy’s standing in a scholarly climate where the natural sciences were the most prestigious disciplines. But naturalizing a phenomenon may also be a cultural response to the taken for granted, the not questioned, the things that “just are as they are.” Indeed, depictions of the “normal phases of childhood” were almost always based on investigations into socially mainstream childhoods,

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mainly lived in the United States or European middle-class worlds. Children living under economic and cultural conditions other than that of the Global Northern middle classes often fell short in measurement regimes whether these regimes were directed toward intellectual, emotional, or moral characteristics. Also worth underlining is the gender gap that arose in these test regimes; girls appeared to be naturally intellectually and morally inferior to boys in the Global North as well as in the Global South. The status of these childhood phases and their associated measurement regimes as grounded in nature made them resistant to critique for decades and helped fuel a cultural meaning system serving ideas of supremacy along several axes; among them social class, gender, and race, as well as the Global North/South divide. The power to set the standard for childhood development thus belonged to the Global North academic middle class, and since these standards were considered natural, they were hardly a topic of negotiation. When, in the mid/late 20th century, the new sociology of childhood entered the academic domain, it stood in stark contrast to the orthodox pedagogical/psychological focus. Childhood sociologists turned to childhood as a life phase in its own right, and as human beings, children were ascribed agency, justifying protection of their individual human rights. The political movements advocating children’s rights and the scientific movements involved in creating the new sociology of childhood were mutually fertilizing and supportive. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC) was signed in New York in 1989. UNCRC can thus be seen as the climax of academic and political efforts in relation to the sociology of children throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Such efforts originated squarely in the Global North. And further development of the politics and scholarship of childhood and children’s rights were in accordance with, as well as fueling, emergent ideas of children and childhood. Now, with inalienable individual rights, the child was suddenly put into an elevated position of power toward families, teachers, and other professionals and toward institutions of importance in his/her life. The child’s right to have a say in all matters affecting him/her is stated in CRC article 12, which also establishes that the views of the

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child are to be given due weight in accordance with the child’s age and maturity. The UNCRC establishes the idea of children’s individual rights and, through its 54 specifying articles, the convention lays out the many spheres of children’s lives to be covered by these rights. However, even these specifications need further interpretations when put to work via government policy or in a court of law. This raises the question of who has the power of interpretation. Let us look at a current example. The mainstream of migration in our time moves within the Global South or from the Global South to the Global North. The implication is that large groups of children with Global South backgrounds are and will live their childhoods in the Global North. Global North childhoods thus also include migrating children’s childhoods, a factor that is likely to challenge the typically accepted differences in Global North childhoods. A good (Norwegian) example can be found among children and staff in a care center for unaccompanied minors younger than 15 years of age. Researchers following the minors’ entry into a new society learn something about the young migrants but also about our own society and the prevailing understanding of children. A telling example may be the contradiction arising when a 13- to 14-year-old insists on taking care of his (it is most often a boy) younger siblings as he has done for months during the flight from their homeland. In a Norwegian (Global North) context, this is considered a burden that a young teenager should be spared from. In the dominant picture of a happy childhood, a 14-year- old shall go to school, do his homework, take part in sport and other leisure activities, and not be burdened by responsibilities for younger siblings. They are taken care of by adults at the care center where all of them live their first months in the new country. Fortunately, these sorts of conflicts are usually sensitively handled by experienced care center professionals. They do, however, exemplify differences in cultural assumptions—as well as material situations—on meanings of age and agency. The eldest sibling takes on the responsibility for the younger ones and handles these care responsibilities as an integral part of his agency. In meeting with Global North standards, this agency may be overseen or directly opposed. Such situations put

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the question of children’s agency on the agenda: Where, when, and by whom is children’s agency defined and made relevant? A global pattern where the standards of the Global North often override the standards of the Global South is still at work. The Global North generally represents the norm, a bias grounded in economic as well as in a postcolonial situation comprising cultural and academic primacy.

Explorations Into a Global North Childhood As stated earlier, childhoods are organized and lived in a huge variety of ways in the Global North as well as in the Global South. Referring to childhoods or children we principally focus on what all childhoods or all children have in common, sometimes as lasting phenomena and sometimes as phenomena in a certain historical era, as in our time. Children live their early years interacting with the structural, cultural, and legal framing of childhood. To understand children’s lives, whether as individuals or groups, we also have to include their societal conditions in our investigations. Children live their lives in specific social and material contexts, and they associate themselves or are associated with socially defined groups. Children are generally identified according to social categories together with their parents or other care persons, such as nationality, social class, and ethnicized or racialized identifications. Children are also identified as girls or boys, and, more recently, trans-/queer-positionings are opened up for children in some countries; children’s age(s) forms the basis for belonging to school classes, sport groups, rights, and responsibilities; bodily dis-/abilities allocate children to yet another system of categorization, partly based on medical diagnostic systems. That children belong to social categories is an inevitable aspect of the social conditions they explore and deal with as they grow up. Like everybody else, children are continually affiliated with several categories. The conditions and meaning systems associated with one social category will intersect with the conditions and meaning systems associated with another. By using an intersectional approach, we can explore how a child’s memberships in several social

categories work together to form the affordances and restrictions in the child’s life. In the last part of this entry, Eric, a Norwegian boy in his early teens, will serve as an example of an explorative approach to children and childhoods. A few years ago, Eric was a boy going from 12 to 13 years of age in a small town in Norway. Because of physical impairments, Eric needed a wheelchair to move around. He took part in a study of the legal and social participatory opportunities for children who needed special professional support in their everyday lives. Norway has ratified the UNCRC and is thus obliged to follow its order. Eric was interviewed 4 times through his 7th and 8th school year, a period also encompassing his transition from primary to lower secondary school. According to the CRC, article 12: States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Article 12 formulates an ambitious aim, which is quite general and always has to be interpreted within the contextual frames of the child’s coming of age. Eric attends a public school together with 98% of the other children in the geographical neighborhood of his home. The public school in Norway is free and is obliged to be “a school for all.” Almost all special schools were closed down during the 1990s under government policy, justified by the powerful, prevailing idea that all children should participate in a joint social and pedagogical context. Eric’s schools thus had to facilitate his entry into their buildings, outdoor areas, and pedagogical activities. It is within the frames of these legal rights and cultural ideas that Eric is encouraged to form and express his own views. An overarching aim for Eric is to be one of all children, not a child primarily belonging to a small group of children with disabilities, a group of some children. This does not mean that he tries to conceal his impairment. Rather he negotiates what can be interpreted as the extent of his

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belonging to the category of children with physical impairments. When, where, and in what ways is his impairment relevant for his activities, relations, learning opportunities, etc.? Eric has a special teacher assisting him with physical training. Eric and his teacher used to work out in a small room next to the gymnasium where the rest of his class had their activities. In his 7th school year, Eric took issue with this arrangement. He initiated a meeting with involved parties and suggested he should carry out his special exercises in the same room as the rest of his class. In a qualitative interview, Eric (E) explains to the interviewer (I): E: B  ecause it is much easier to . . . or—it’s more social, to be able to talk with the others maybe, and. . . . I:  What is the most important part of being social? E: It is that it’s important to be together with friends and. . . . I: Is that the most important of all? E: Yes, basically—in the end it is!

Eric has caught the idea of “a school for all,” and he uses arguments that fit the school’s basic obligation. He also knows something about his right to have a say, even if he does not necessarily know article 12 in the CRC. However, by asking for a meeting with his caregivers and school authorities, he demonstrates adequate “age and maturity” and fulfills his aim. This example of a child’s participation in everyday life and in professional practices indicates how context-dependent such processes are. Even if Eric will always have special challenges due to his physical impairments, he grows up in a social, economic, and cultural context that, all in all, facilitates his participation. At the age of 12 years, he has come to share the pervading cultural ideas of all children’s rights to participation, and he presents himself as a boy capable of exercising this right. Again and again throughout his interviews, he underlines his contentment with his ability and opportunity to be one of all children in his class.

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Many children in the Global North will grow up under conditions far from those facilitating Eric’s ambitions and wishes. This glimpse into Eric’s story cannot be generalized as a typical Global North childhood. Also in the Global North, there are a great variety of childhoods as well as a great variety of children. What may be generalized, however, is not the substantial results but the methodological approach. Important to notice here is the necessity of investigating childhoods and children’s lives both at contextual levels and on the level of the child’s understanding of him/herself in his/her social world. By so doing the substantial variations among childhoods and children may counteract the historical tendency to prioritize natural or culturally taken-for-granted childhoods and children’s lives. This kind of strategy may also undermine the traditional hierarchical relationship between the minority and the majority worlds where scholarships developed in the Global North are uncritically exported to the Global South.

Concluding Remarks To expand our knowledge of children and childhoods, there are several levels of knowledge to be taken into account. First, there are the levels directly involved in examining the child’s situation and her/his own handling of this. The idea of childhood as both societal arrangements and as a lived life phase allows us to turn our interest to the child-in-context, that is, to explore how child-persons act and interact in and with the societal arrangements and cultural ideas given in their historical period of time as well as how the societal arrangements and cultural ideas are challenged and formed by children’s ongoing activities and participations. Further, it seems relevant to explore how the child’s interactions with her/his family, peers, neighbors, teachers, and other significant persons are framed by, embedded in, and challenging society’s norms as well as the social and cultural organization in which the child takes part. Second, consideration of hierarchies of power in the scholarly field as well as in general culture  should be part of the methodological approach. Searching for explicit as well as implicit power mechanisms is necessary to investigate and

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theorize the variety of childhoods within the Global North and the Global South, both respectively and in common. Liv Mette Gulbrandsen See also Childhood; Childhood Studies; Children’s Rights; Disability Studies; Gender; Global South Childhoods; Participation Rights, UNCRC

Further Readings Burman, E. (2008). Developments: Children, image, nation. London, UK: Routledge. Hedegaard, M., Aronsson, K., Højholt, C., & Ulvik, O. S. (Eds.). (2018). Children, childhood, and everyday life: Children’s perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Mayall, B. (2013). A history of the sociology of childhood. London, UK: Institute of Education Press. Pérez, M. S., & Saavedra, C. M. (2017). A call for ontoepistemological diversity in early childhood education and care: Centering Global South conceptualizations of childhoods. Review of Research in Education, 41, 1–29. Spyros, S., Rosen, R., & Cook, D. T. (Eds.). (2018). Reimagining childhood studies. London, UK: Bloomsbury.

Global Politics

of

Childhood

Childhood has only recently come to be recognized as a socially constructed entity. Although children have existed for as long as humankind has, childhood as a sociocultural phenomenon did not engage the interests of academics and policy makers until very much later. In the Western world, it was not until the publication of Philippe Ariès’s book on the history of childhood in 1962 titled Centuries of Childhood that childhood came to be recognized as a distinct phenomenon and came to be studied on its own. Although Ariès has since come under some scrutiny and criticism for overexaggerating the lack of distinction between children and adults in medieval times, his work remains significant in that it paved the way for an entire field of study to arise. In the years since, childhood has received wide attention not only as a distinct phase in human life

but also as an apolitical period of becoming, rather than being, marked by innocence and vulnerability. As scholars of childhood have often reiterated, childhood is conceived of as a period free from politics. The rights of children are thought to be something that everyone can agree on, as among human beings children need the most protection and experience the most ill effects from global problems such as conflicts, diseases, and climate change. In industrialized societies, as economic conditions improved to where children no longer had to participate in the workforce, children’s lives have gradually separated more and more from adult spheres. However, around the world, this has not been the case, as economic conditions and cultural practices have continued to necessitate children’s participation in adult worlds. These conflicting realities have resulted in a clash between the espoused values of Western industrialized nations who support the idea of childhood as a prolonged period of innocence, to be cherished and kept uncontaminated by the often unpleasant realities of adult life, and those from the Global South, whose lives are defined by unpleasant realities such as undernutrition, poverty, and environmental hazards. The global politics of childhood have often revolved around this fundamental incompatibility between an idealized universalized version of childhood as a time when children need to be protected from the world and the realities of worlds where children are active and productive participants in it. This entry looks at the issues of age, the role of mothers, how nations politicize childhood, childhood labor, and capitalism as axes around which the global politics of childhood have revolved.

Issues of Ageism and Child-Rearing According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a child is defined as everyone between the ages of birth and the age of 18 years. This declaration of a universal demarcation of the beginning and end of childhood has been widely problematic, as childhood has been defined differently across cultures and across time, and even within Western democracies, privileges have been extended to younger human beings at different points within this timespan, such as the right to choose their own names, the right to work, and

Global Politics of Childhood

the age at which they can be considered legally responsible for crimes. However, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child definition of childhood as lasting for a specific period of time carries particular weight, since it is widely held up universally as the gold-standard definition of children’s rights on a global scale and is used by many countries as an ideal to which to aspire. Reducing childhood to a specific period within the human life span also reduces the opportunities that children have to participate in larger social and political worlds. For example, the arguments for halting climate change are often presented as something to be done for the sake of children, rather than as an activity that children themselves can engage in. Closely related to the issue of ageism is the question of who is expected to care for children when they are young. Across the globe, childrearing responsibilities have fallen to women for a variety of reasons including a focus on the biological connections between mothers and children as well as the widespread belief that women are natural caregivers. It has also been observed that over the past few decades, the discourse of intensive mothering has become more prominent, demanding that women locate themselves primarily as mothers before they are anything else. A failure to do so, it is implied, will result in negative consequences for one’s children. Proponents of such ideas are also often strong believers in the idea that children are extremely vulnerable beings who need to be catered to and protected for extended periods of time. A natural consequence of such discourses is that children’s issues have often been separated from family issues at large. For example, there are more social programs that focus on reducing the effects of poverty on children than there are on family poverty. Scholars also point out that prioritizing children’s rights can result in diminished opportunities for mothers to achieve their own potential.

Childhood and Nationhood Childhood is also often politicized through the ways in which it intersects with discourses of nationhood. On the one hand, governments often perceive children not only as future workforce participants but also as a fertile ground where

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notions of what citizens can do for their countries can be reinscribed. Children are seen as the ones who will carry the notion of the then nation forward, including what it means to be a citizen. However, modern discourses of childhood that emphasize and encourage children to construct their own ideas about the world can clash with the notions of belonging to a particular nation-state that center on race, class, gender, religious beliefs, and linguistic identity. For example, research shows that Palestinian children who engage in acts of resistance are better able to cope psychologically with the trauma of life under occupation than children who do not similarly engage. Other instances of conflict between individual nationstates and discourses of childhood have occurred when nations hold fast to established immigration policies even when many of the would-be immigrants are children.

Childhood and the Global Economy Childhood is further politicized through competing interests between capitalism, Western education, and Western conceptions of the rights of the child. Certain economic and educational discourses are valued more, if not preferred around the globe. As more and more communities are influenced if not tied to global markets, a Western style of education is seen as the institutional structure that will provide positive outcomes for communities in nondeveloped and developing areas of the world. When education is imported in these communities, traditional values and respect for land-based life is threatened. Indigenous and traditional cultural values are seen in an antagonistic relationship with modern life and economies. Knowledge and wisdom that have sustained societies over centuries are eroded. Children and families are caught between living in traditional ways and/or modernizing their future livelihoods in order to be part of the global economy. Education then coupled with rights-of-the-child discourses advances the idea that it is the child’s right to have and obtain an education in order to fight the odds of living in poverty. This kind of education, however, is not multicultural/lingual in scope and values and often promotes Euro-­ American cultural values and lifestyle aligned with the interests of capitalism and global markets. The

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rights of the child becomes synonymous with a Euro-American version of what it means to live as a White male middle-class child. Rights-of-thechild discourses on education honor and exalt the individual child over family and community needs. This is so because Western nations value individual rights over community, environment, and economic rights. As globalization of markets continues, the demand for cheap goods rises in first-world nations opening the door for multinational companies to set up their manufacturing in thirdworld countries. Creating a desire for many families to leave their lands in search of urban settings to make money and compete in the global economy, families, and often more so Westernized models of schooling encourage students and whole communities to desire the types of lifestyle that require employment found in urban areas. As less dependence on local farming and agrarian life grows, it follows that sending children to work can provide a family a better opportunity to sustain and survive the global impact of capitalism and consumerism in their countries. However, when communities create their own unique markets where children form part of that labor force often these communities are not seen with favor by Western eyes. Families are responding to their economic needs often sending their children to work in ways that make sense culturally but are not approved by the adult/child binary created within the rights-of-the-child discourses. At the same time, many societies and communities around the globe are finding that the illusion of developing their communities has destroyed precious cultural and traditional values that in fact can provide answers and solutions to the problems created as a consequence of climate change. Although working conditions need to be considered for the safety and well-being of all human beings, Western conceptions of childhood have declared and propagated a deep sense that childhood is a sacred stage in life that must be protected at all cost and not having children work is an example of such protection. However, childhood as a sacred stage is a cultural value that is universalized and when deconstructing it can be seen as the way to manage, control, and regulate children and those whose lives surround them. When Westerners boycott certain companies or

markets because of child labor not only are Westerners expressing a specific cultural value but also devastating entire communities who depend on child labor for their livelihood. This conflicting interest between the Western economic need and Western concepts of childhood can be devastating on families worldwide who exist within the subaltern realm—courted by economic development and chastised by Western narratives of the rights of the child. Moreover, globalization of the economy and the need to develop all countries along the same economic models in which first worlds have developed also conflict with and politicize global understanding of childhoods. For example, child rights advocates do not critique the marketing and consumerism aimed at younger and younger children. Children as consumers fits with Western economic agendas and values. In fact, the normal path to development seems to be for children to grow as competent consumers. These specific cultural values are passed as universal values for all people. The idea of children working deviates from the prescribed path to adulthood and needs to be regulated. Yet conditions in developing countries almost necessitate that all family members contribute to the household income as more and more land-based economies are becoming obsolete and displaced by economic policies that promote urbanization and competition in global markets. Western style and values of education play a key role in shaping the goals of education worldwide. Globalization efforts to educate every child around the world have significantly reified Western conceptions of childhood and values that are also in line with creating a desire for certain ways of life that are seductive to capitalism and economic development. Poverty is not examined as a consequence of Western development and economic policies but only as a condition related to the lack of modernization and education. Education then is seen as the savior to all problems faced by developing and nondeveloped societies. Education is instrumental in the development of a nation-state whose economy is rooted in capitalism. In this world order, children play a role and that is to be passive, consumers of things to the point that they can spend over tens of billions of dollars making them a target for global markets and giving them a role to play in capitalism’s structurers.

Global Politics of Orphanhood

Final Thoughts The global politics of childhood is complex and indeed has a strong Western underpinning that is evident in the ways discourses of global education, rights of the child, and the global economy (capitalism) are propagated around the world. Childhood is not a universally understood concept and is in fact intimately tied to diverse economies, cultural values, and ways of life that warrant discussion, debate, and constant careful examination when attempts to universalize it globally are made. Radhika Viruru and Cinthya Saavedra See also Global North Childhoods; Global Politics of Orphanhood; Global South Childhoods; Globalization of Childhood; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Alderson, P. (2016). The politics of childhoods real and imagined: Practical application of critical realism and childhood studies. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315669380 Britto, P. R., Engle, P., & Super, C. M. (2013). Handbook of early childhood development research and its impact on global policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199922994.003.0001

Global Politics

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Orphanhood

Orphanhood has long been understood as the condition of children whose parents have died. Orphans are usually considered to be particularly vulnerable children because of the loss of their parent(s). However, many societies have different local definitions for orphans that serve to minimize the social exclusion of children without parents, especially through social mandates for extended family to provide care to children who have lost their parents. Children’s experience of orphanhood is therefore highly variable and not necessarily an indicator of extreme vulnerability. In the 1990s, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) adopted a broad definition of an orphan as any child who

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has lost one or more parents to death. This has had consequences for global social policy on—and humanitarian responses to—orphanhood. This entry details the implications of the broadening and universalization of this particular understanding of orphanhood.

The UNICEF Definition of Orphanhood The decision to adopt a broad definition of orphanhood came in the midst of the AIDS pandemic, which threatened to drastically increase the number of orphans, particularly in Africa, where the disease was taking the highest toll. In Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS, Kristen Cheney argues that because UNICEF combined that broad definition of orphanhood with responses that bolstered community-based care, they arguably prevented the “African AIDS orphan crisis” they feared by directing development assistance to kin and community-based responses. Since 2001, the estimated number of orphans worldwide has consistently declined from 155.4 million to less than 140 million. Of these, however, according to UNICEF, only a fraction—15.1 million—are double orphans who have lost both parents. Even then, they are not considered social orphans in most communities, where the extended family still have a strong social obligation to care for orphaned children. The vast majority of orphaned children thus live with surviving family members. However, raising the alarm about the orphan crisis played all too well into certain Western preconceptions of orphanhood based on nuclear family ideology that easily assumed that these were children left without care—when in fact most societies have a more extended-family ethos of care for children. The idea that there were so many orphans living outside parental care consequently distorted the global perception of orphanhood to the extent that orphanhood has been reified and given priority over other conditions that might, in fact, make children more vulnerable.

Interventions in Orphanhood Despite the decrease in the total number of orphans and the fact that orphanhood is not necessarily synonymous with a lack of care, popular

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narratives about the number of orphans—especially those meant to elicit charitable or humanitarian responses—continue to posit that there are hundreds of millions of orphans left without parental or family care. This discourse has taken both religious and secular forms, with the U.S. Christian evangelicals launching an orphan ­movement and with the rise in popularity of voluntourism—a form of tourism involving voluntary or charitable work—particularly in orphanages. UNICEF’s broad definition has thus been picked up by charities to argue for wellmeaning but inappropriate interventions. The Fall and Rise of Orphanages

Orphanages may seem a logical response to orphanhood. However, research demonstrating the developmental deficits that institutional care causes children has led to the gradual disappearance of orphanages in the Global North by the beginning of the 21st century. For example, a 2011 UNICEF study estimated that for every three months that young children are in institutional care, they lose 1 month developmentally. Children in institutions are also at higher risk of physical, sexual, and mental abuse. Yet many charitable efforts to help orphans in the Global South started at this time by opening new orphanages—even as orphan numbers were steadily declining and families were proving capable of shouldering the burden of orphan care, especially with financial support and family strengthening measures. In their chapter “Addicted to Orphans: How the Global Orphan Industrial Complex Jeopardizes Local Child Protection Systems”, Kristen Cheney and Karen Rotabi discuss how the demand to help orphans (rather than the supply of orphans) is driving the expansion of an “orphan industrial complex.” The orphan industrial complex includes such activities as orphan tourism, orphanage establishment, and international adoption, mainly in developing countries but funded by private donations from the developed world. The orphan industrial complex commoditizes children by making orphan assistance a for-profit industry consisting of charitable organizations, brokers of volunteering and travel, and adoption agencies, which all stand to profit from the orphan industrial complex. They argue that this industry is thus driving the

manufacture of orphans through unnecessary separation of children from their families and institutionalization in order to service donor demand. A study carried about by the Better Care Network found that worldwide, about 80% of children in orphanages have a living, locatable family—and thus are not in fact orphans, even by UNICEF’s broad definition. Most children in orphanages are actually there because of poverty or to access education. Orphan Tourism

Driven by stories of orphan crisis and the desire to help through volunteering, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Western tourists traveling to developing countries and volunteering in orphanages for short periods of time, from 1 day to several weeks or months. This is usually preceded and/or followed by fund-raising for the establishment, maintenance, and support of orphanages. Many of the people who volunteer in orphanages are young people who are untrained and unqualified to work with children. Church youth groups plan regular mission trips to orphanages abroad, and even private schools market orphan tourism as part of the service-learning package they offer their students. This creates a stream of unvetted and unqualified volunteers passing through orphanages and having unfettered access to vulnerable children, making it difficult for children when they attach to temporary caregivers who inevitably leave them. It also causes perverse incentives to institutionalize children for the purpose of hosting and entertaining visitors. The children are sometimes held in the orphanage for the express purpose of facilitating foreigners’ visits and trained to solicit cash or kind donations from visitors. Aside from the resulting damage to and exploitation of individual children, scholars and practitioners have pointed out that this causes broader disruption to the development of more robust child protection systems, which are undermined by such well-intentioned but poorly informed interventions on behalf of orphans. International Adoption

Marketization can also be seen in patterns of international adoption, with flows of children primarily from poor sending countries in the Global

Global Politics of Orphanhood

South to wealthier countries in the Global North. The 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption was meant to regulate practices by increasing international cooperation in international adoptions and to prevent trafficking in children. However, the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption has acted mainly as a regulatory device, so in response, when regulations are put in place, the intercountry adoption market tends to move to more free-market countries where there is less regulation. As a result of corruption in other adoption markets and its subsequent regulation, Africa has become a primary destination for intercountry adoption, further fueling misrepresentation of the magnitude of the “AIDS orphan crisis.” This shift toward Africa has taken place in the midst of a global drop in the number of international adoptions. According to one Newcastle University study, global adoptions reached a high of over 45,000 in 2004 but dropped to 12,000 by 2015, but international adoptions from Africa nearly doubled during this same period. Amidst a push for adoption by Evangelical churches and adoption agencies as a response to the supposed orphan crisis, more and more African countries are also closing to adoption due to the corruption and commoditization it brings. Countries like Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have either closed to international adoptions or have drastically reduced the numbers of adoption orders granted. Despite the dwindling supply of children available for adoption, though, one 2017 study carried out by Beatriz San Román and Karen S. Rotabi estimated that there are 25 to 30 waiting prospective adoptive parents for every adoptable child. This exacerbates demand that recirculates distorted numbers of orphans and further, often fails to distinguish between those children who are orphans and those who are ­actually adoptable according to child protection ­standards—which is an even smaller number. The result is an industry scrambling to find children for families who want them rather than families for children who need them. Often, the children who most need families are not, in fact, those most desired by prospective adoptive parents: healthy infants. Rather, they tend to be older children who are difficult to place due to their inability to bond with a new family, special needs, and other factors.

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This leads to further commoditization and creates an enabling environment for illicit practices in adoption. In 2017, the UN Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography issued a report on illegal adoptions, highlighting issues of trafficking based on demand and marketization of the international adoption industry. In 2016/2017, the Netherlands was also debating ending international adoptions due to violation of the Hague Convention’s subsidiarity principle—which states that international adoption should be a last resort after all other in-­ country solutions for permanent family care have been exhausted—corruption, and the disruption that the orphan industrial complex was causing to the development of robust child protection systems in affected developing countries. But the issue remains contentious, as popular stories of children in need who could be rescued by wellintentioned adoptive parents continue to overrule narratives of unethical adoptions, child trafficking, and international adoptees’ own struggles with acceptance, identity, and their personal histories that problematize the happily ever after stories of international adoption. Adoptive parents’ perspectives tend to be overrepresented in popular media while adoptees’ perspectives are least represented and/or discounted.

Deinstitutionalization and the Alternative Care Movement In response to increased child institutionalization in the Global South, some child protection advocates are coming together to argue for worldwide deinstitutionalization. An alternative care movement emphasizing family-based responses to orphanhood—prevention of family separation, reunification, fostering, and domestic adoption— has also risen and is gathering support to end unnecessary institutionalization. In 2010, the UN adopted the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, setting international standards for the maintenance of children outside of orphanages. It has been adopted by a number of developing countries trying to address the issue of unnecessary institutionalization, while international advocacy organizations try to sensitize would-be voluntourists and philanthropists in the Global

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North to the dangers of orphan tourism. There has also been more legal attention to the potential exploitation of the orphanage system. For example, the 2017 U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report was the first to acknowledge the problem of children being trafficked into institutions for exploitative purposes (in this case, in Nepal). Still, the orphan industrial complex and a determined proadoption lobby continue to argue for their continuance, using a non-existent orphan crisis as their justification. Public services thus continue to be pitted against private charity, the evidence against affect, and children’s protection against their commodification. Kristen E. Cheney See also Adoption, History of; AIDS Orphans; Child Trafficking; International Child Saving; Orphans and Orphanages as Childcare in the United States; United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF); Vulnerability of Children

Further Readings Beatriz, S. R., & Rotabi, K. S. (2017). Rescue, red tape, child abduction, illicit adoptions, and discourse: Intercountry adoption attitudes in Spain. International Social Work, 62. doi:10.1177/ 0020872817714314 Cheney, K. E. (2014). Giving children a ‘better life’? Reconsidering social reproduction and humanitarianism in intercountry adoption. European Journal of Development Research, 26(2), 247–263. doi:10.1057/ejdr.2013.64 Cheney, K. E. (2017). Crying for our elders: African orphanhood in the age of HIV and AIDS. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. doi:10.7208/ chicago/9780226437682.001.0001 Cheney, K. E., & Rotabi, K. S. (2014). Addicted to orphans: How the global orphan industrial complex jeopardizes local child protection systems. In C. Harker, K. Hörschelmann, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Conflict, violence and peace (Vol. Geographies of children and young people, 11, pp. 1–19). Singapore: Springer Science+Business Media. doi:10.1007/ 978-981-4585-98-9_3-1 Hague Conference on Private International Law. (1993). The 1993 Hague convention on protection of children and co-operation in respect of intercountry adoption. The Hague, the Netherlands: Hague Conference on Private International Law.

doi:10.1163/1875-8096_pplrdc_ej.9789041100870 .191_456.19 Joyce, K. (2013). The child catchers: Rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption. New York, NY: Public Affairs. United Nations General Assembly. (2010). Guidelines for the alternative care of children. Geneva: United Nations. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/ga/ search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A%2FRES% 2F64%2F142 United Nations International Children’s Fund. (2017). Orphans. Retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/ media/media_45279.html United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. (2016). Report of the special rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. doi:10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-9846-0070 US Department of State. (2017). Trafficking in persons report. Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://www .state.gov/documents/organization/271339.pdf

Global South Childhoods Global South is a notion charged with multifaceted meanings. Geographically speaking, the Global South broadly identifies world regions such as Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania, which are situated outside of Europe and North America. Previously, those regions were designated as being part of the so-called Third World in opposition to the Western First World and the communist Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites (Second World). The countries under the umbrella of the Third World label were commonly described as underdeveloped, uneducated, and needy. Today, the Global South still identifies as low-income, less developed, and marginalized countries implying a condition of inferiority, dependence, and powerlessness vis-à-vis the rich developed and industrialized countries of the North. However, from a geopolitical viewpoint, the Global North and the Global South are a blurred binary. Countries like Brazil, China, and India, for example, that are located geographically in the Global South are engaged in economic development that makes them closer to the countries from the Global North. The children of these regions are often caught between an identity of being from the

Global South Childhoods

South and efforts on the part of development industries and humanitarian interventions which generally espouse and implement a Global North version of childhood as a normative ideal. This entry discusses the various changing definitions of the Global South in relation to the Global North and how these notions relate to interdisciplinary understandings of what may be called Global South childhoods and the challenges posed to these childhoods moving forward.

The Global North/Global South Binary Over the years, the binary of Global North/Global South has become a conceptual tool for detecting economic inequalities and dependency relationships between northern and southern countries and for making these inequalities and relationships appear to be essentialized qualities of the people in question, including children. The latter have mostly experienced colonial rule from Western imperial powers that is now translated as struggles with ongoing economic dependency, exploitation, and poverty, as well as struggles with the cultural hegemony often referred to as a postcolonial society. As such, the term Global South connotes struggles between two opposite worlds: (1) the colonial imperialist Global North and (2) the decolonized, subaltern, emancipatory South. In this context, the social and economic development of the Global South depends mostly on ­foreign—namely Western—humanitarian aid through the action of a global civil society, including international nongovernmental organizations and agencies. Functioning as civilizing institutions, these organizations operate in the Global South supported by a number of international human rights codes and declarations (for instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) with the aim to disseminate and to enforce internationally defined universal standards of human rights, including children’s rights. Through their humanitarian and development programs, international nongovernmental organizations and agencies export a rights-based development rhetoric that also embraces the criteria for assessing a good and normal childhood. They are conducive to globally expanding a particular dominant notion of childhood highlighting the innocence and distinctive

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nature of children, their vulnerability and dependency, lack of maturity, and need of protection, with the direct consequent universalization of the Western concept of childhood. However, this notion of childhood, itself being subject to global expansion, does not necessarily correspond to local representations and experiences of childhood and children in non-Western countries, since it often tends to normalize the childhood of the Global North as an aspirational ideal and that of the South as infantilized and undesirable. Presuming that the global notion of a particular version of childhood expands globally to address or cover most conceptions of children tends to render the lived, local experiences of children and adults as abstract and decontextualized. Consequently, the Global South child appears as Other—as deviant, abnormal and improper—and consequently in need of assistance so as to be neutralized and to conform with the mainstream notion of childhood. The various forms of childhood actually existing and being lived in the South threaten the notion that a singular, generic globalized childhood is a possibility or even desirable. Some children’s experiences in the Global South, such as child labor and child violence, challenge the Western model of a presumably sheltered, innocent childhood despite the fact that such experiences can be found in different parts of the Global North. Such is the hegemony of the dominant ideology and imagery concerning the South. While these conceptions recognize the inadequacy of the normative ideal represented by a Global North version of childhood as itself a kind of ongoing cultural colonialism, they also emphasize the accuracy in speaking of childhoods in the plural rather than childhood in the singular.

Global South Childhoods Caught in a Northern, Normative Ideal In the 1990s, the emerging social studies of childhood provided a new paradigm, offering alternative conceptualizations for studying children and childhood around the world. One of the key tenets of the paradigm concerns the notion of childhood. Childhood is understood as a social construction that appears as a specific structural and cultural component within different societies. This means

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that there exist a number of childhoods that vary across time and place and not a single and universal childhood. Another essential feature of the emergent paradigm regards children. They are studied as social agents, active in the construction of their own social lives and those around them, in micro- as well as macro-social contexts. Through its emergent paradigm, the new social studies of childhood has furnished theoretical constructive critiques of dominant discourses and challenged hegemonic representations of childhood. In doing so, they have influenced interdisciplinary research on childhood and children in the Global South. Geographical studies, for example, turned their attention to childhood and children’s lives in southern countries in the late 1990s. Perhaps their most fruitful contribution to the development of childhood studies has been to highlight the importance of place. By exploring childhood and children’s everyday lives in local contexts within the Global South, geographers have countered the dangers of ethnocentrism and demonstrated the truthfulness of the principle according to which childhood is constructed in different ways in different times and places. They hence proved that what is generally considered as a normal childhood can be far from normal in other cultural, political, and social contexts. In practice, taking into account place in the analysis of children’s lives and childhood permits that the same topics addressed in the North and the South reveal different understandings of childhoods. The caring experience of children and young people illustrates this assumption. Children caring for others (ill or disabled parents, for instance) in the North often stands in tension with the conception of the child who is supposed to be free of obligation, concentrating on play, schooling, and development, generally speaking. Abundant evidence shows that many children in the Global North undertake such familiar caring duties. However, the cultural valuation of the activities and of the childhoods in question leaves little doubt that being a young care provider in the South is instead seen as a special experience which positively impacts their maturation process and sense of accountability but negatively impacts their education opportunities. Southern children’s actions and lifeworlds, in this way, challenge Western dominant discourses

regarding passivity, immaturity, and dependency on adults. Their day-to-day lived experiences in southern contexts reiterate the necessity to deconstruct childhood as something crafted by the Westernoriented development industry and humanitarian interventions in the Global South. Indeed, through practices and discourses, international development and humanitarian efforts tend to deploy a similar approach to childhood, one that leads to formulation of a particular narrative of childhood and to create a specific children’s category. Childhood becomes a stage of life mainly characterized by vulnerability, needs, and victimhood. As for children, their natural vulnerability infantilizes them, depriving their actions of any impact on their own lives and on people around them. This way of conceiving childhood and children serves only to reinforce the legitimacy of humanitarian and development interventions in support of those who are considered the most vulnerable, such as children in the Global South. The downside of the development and humanitarian policy with their regard is the tendency to advertise images of children depicted as disadvantaged and unfortunate victims in need of interventions. Through a process of commodification, the aim of marketing this stereotyped model of children in need is clear: appealing to consumer audiences’ (i.e., donors, volunteers, organizations) emotional awareness in order to benefit from their generosity and increasing fund-raising campaigns for the development and humanitarian factory. Some authors explain this misrepresentation of children and childhood in the Global South through postcolonial theories that underline colonial, paternalist trends that are often employed to epitomize the Global North as an adult-­Northerner versus an infantilized South in need of northern aid. These theories question the well-established knowledge about the Western modern discovery of childhood or children’s rights, criticizing their universalized approach and contextualizing them. Applied concretely in fields such as child protection, the contextualization highlights the necessity to extend the protection of children’s rights in every country around the world—whether it is in the North or in the South—and to adjust them to  needs and situations peculiar to each culture. While the contextualization approach helps to understand children in their own context and to

Global South Childhoods

recognize their participation in their everyday experiences, the further benefit of this approach is to acknowledge that southern children are not a homogeneous group and that other childhoods exist in different places, including the regions of the Global South.

Challenges of Childhoods in the Global South Even though childhoods in the Global South raise many challenges, focusing here on some of them permits the recognition of further steps that may be helpful for addressing southern childhoods appropriately in respect to their distinct features. It has now become urgent to analyze the world in terms other than those employed so far, particularly through the dualistic lens of a developed and rich Global North versus an underdeveloped and poor Global South. Such a dualistic conception of the world tends to highlight the differences between and within the dichotomous global parts of the world and, in so doing, underestimates the endless connections—increasingly intensified by the globalization phenomenon—existing among many from one side of the globe to another and from a global to a local context. When childhood is analyzed in respect of glocalized processes that inevitably impinge on children’s lives, whether they are in the Global South or the Global North, then commonalities of childhoods’ experiences emerge in both the world areas. This does not imply a plea for a standardized and universal childhood. Rather, while differences inevitably exist in being a child in the North or in the South—as well as differences within the North and within the South—they should be interpreted according to cultural, social, political, or economic criteria regardless of living in or belonging to the North or the South. In this regard, a number of authors remind us of the imperative to conceive of childhoods beyond the strictures of a North/South divide that inevitably lead to an asymmetric positioning of one against the other and hence an inappropriate and discriminatory way of thinking in terms of us and them. The interconnections of a wider range of variables such as social relations, cultural heritage, historical paths, and political and economic changes at micro- and macro-scales are taken into

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consideration in the efforts to study childhoods beyond those binary terms. On one hand, these interconnections disclose the complexities of children’s experiences and their everyday practices in local contexts; on the other hand, they prove how historical and global processes such as colonialism, migration, and wars similarly affected children’s lives in diverse contexts. Therefore, an integrated and relational approach to childhood helps to seize the wholeness of childhoods’ experiences and to situate them contextually and historically. This approach also permits one to take on another challenge of childhoods in the Global South, namely the assumption that a number of existing topics and problems lie exclusively at the feet of the Global South. Many issues, such as interconnections between poverty and childhood; work and childhood; and war, militarism, and childhood, seem to be topics predominantly focused on children in the Global South. Exploring childhood in southern contexts mainly through these problems leads to the construction of particular types of southern children as being out of place—such as working children, child soldiers, street children, and trafficked children. Children in and of the South appear and reappear repeatedly as victimized, disadvantaged, and vulnerable, resulting in the eclipse of children’s competence and active roles in the processes of social change, conflict resolution, peace-building, political participation, economic development, and decision making. In order to counterbalance this trend, authors endeavor to demonstrate the nonspecificity of those themes of southern childhoods by recognizing that children in (post)industrial and rich societies from the Global North might meet with similar struggles and challenges. For instance, even though children’s militarization is an issue mainly addressed in the southern context, M ­ arshall Beier stresses the point that focusing exclusively on militarized children in the Global South is a way to pathologize it and its childhoods and to distract from the current militarization of childhoods in the Global North. Chiara Diana See also Children and International Development; Global North Childhoods; Globalization of Childhood; Postcolonial Childhoods; Universalization of Childhood

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Further Readings Ansell, N. (2017). Global south research in children’s geographies: From useful illustration to conceptual challenge. In T. Skelton & S. Aitken (Eds.), Establishing geographies of children and young people: Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 1., pp. 1–20). Singapore: Springer. Burman, E. (1994). Innocent abroad: Western fantasies of childhood and the iconography of emergencies. Disasters, 18(3), 238–253. Cannella, G. S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization: Power, education, and contemporary practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Cheney, K., & Sinervo, A. (Eds.). (2019). Disadvantaged childhoods and humanitarian intervention: Processes of affective commodification and objectification. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Ensor, M. O. (Ed.). (2012). African childhoods: Education, development, peacebuilding and the youngest continent. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Holloway, L. S., & Valentine, G. (Eds.). (2000). Children’s geographies: Playing, living, learning. London, UK: Routledge. Holt, L., & Holloway, S. L. (2006). Editorial: Theorising other childhoods in a globalized world. Children’s Geographies, 4(2), 135–142. James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. London, UK: Falmer. Marshall Beier, J. (Ed.). (2011). The militarization of childhood. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Twum-Danso Imoh, A., & Ame, R. (Eds.). (2012). Childhoods at the intersection of the local and the global. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Twum-Danso Imoh, A., Bourdillon, M., & Meichsner, S. (Eds.). (2019). Global childhood beyond the NorthSouth divide. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Global Womb The notion of global womb is a metaphor for the largely invisible socioeconomic spaces inhabited by children in the Global South. Most information and knowledge about children is about the minority of relatively privileged children who grow up in the wealthier countries of the Northern hemisphere. Much less is known about children in the Global South, or what is also termed the

developing world, even if nine in 10 children are likely to live there, often in very difficult circumstances. In the Global South, children also represent 45–60% of the population against less than 19% in the North. The result is that populations in the Global South are not only poor but also young and fast growing, while those in the Global North are comparatively rich, aging, and need immigration in order not to shrink. But why are children so much more numerous in the Global South than in the Global North? This is what the notion global womb seeks to explain. This entry examines the theoretical underpinnings of the global womb, describes the notion’s dimensions and applicability, and offers empirical evidence to support the concept.

Theoretical Underpinnings The notion global womb draws from several sets of theoretical strands, both in international development studies and in anthropology. In international development studies, one can distinguish international trade theory, dependencia theory, and ecofeminism. In international trade theory, large families with a very low standard of living represent a formidable comparative trade advantage for the Global South, which can help its economic growth under a global free trade regime. Dependencia theorists point at the same phenomenon and argue that large households in the Global South can survive on incomes that would by far not cover the costs of livelihood in the Global North because children contribute in a variety of ways to their own maintenance. They are, however, pessimistic about its effects and believe that the so-called comparative advantage feeds a growing gap in wealth between the North and the South. Ecofeminists are equally pessimistic and believe that economic growth disrupts an environment that is the product of the largely unaccounted work of women, children, and peasants and on which their livelihood depends. What these theories have in common is their pointing at the existence of vast areas in the world where large numbers of children work and contribute wealth to the global economy. They, however, do not explain how this wealth is created and how it is crucially linked to poor children’s lives.

Global Womb

Three specializations in anthropological theory, drawing from demography, feminism, and postcolonialism, address this question. Anthropologists specializing in demography have offered an explanation in terms of children’s value to their families. Children in the Global South are the central link in wealth transmission across generations who, if they survive and are lucky, ensure their parents both oldage security and ancestor status after death. In many areas of the Global South, having many children sanctions a good, respectable life and is the source of power and prestige. Not having children is, by contrast, considered an ignominy and a source of insecurity. Paradoxically, this holds particularly among the very poor, for whom the cost of upbringing is generally not a deterrent to desiring a large family. One of the reasons is that among the poor, child mortality may still be high so that parents’ sacrifices for their offspring may fail to result in the expected security. Another is that the cost of raising children is comparatively low because children begin at a very young age to care for younger siblings and the elderly, help in and around the home, in the fields and the informal urban sector. Importantly, the wealth children create is twofold: It is both immaterial care and material goods, the latter either for subsistence or for sale. For this reason, children’s work is mostly performed outside the market and remains largely unpaid and unaccounted for. But why is the importance of this work denied? Feminist anthropologists claim that what children, and particularly girls, do is systematically devalued and dismissed because, as minors, they enjoy lower status vis-à-vis older males. An example is how mostly male international lawyers and development experts privilege the idea that labor is only valuable if it is performed by adult males and dismiss all unpaid domestic and subsistence work as beneficial to children and of no economic value. Paradoxically, this entails that children can only work unpaid, as claiming payment would turn their work into prohibited child labor. While feminists focus mostly on intra-household relations, postcolonial scholars adopt a global perspective. Their main preoccupation is disrupting the Eurocentric colonial narrative of the colonizer as the great transformer of unused raw material and bare life, to reclaim the history, culture, and self-worth of the colonized. For

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anthropologists the perspective has two advantages: It helps, first, to free children in the Global South from the colonial gaze and its accompanying stereotyping of their childhoods as an anomaly in need of reform. Second, it sets the stage to reclaim these childhoods as the new normal and inform a fundamental critique of childhood as an invention or discovery of the West.

Dimensions and Applicability Three dimensions can be distinguished in the notion of global womb, depending on whether one focuses on North–South relations, the status of children, and the nature of life in societies in the Global South. First, in North–South relations, the notion captures the Global South’s role in producing abundant life for free, to provision the North, shielded behind walls of bureaucratic procedures, security guards, and concrete, with a steady stream of cheap workers and products. Second, with respect to the status of children, the notion intimates that children in the Global South live beyond borders that make it very hard to claim or realize their human rights. Their lives are as it were in suspense, as if not yet born, as fetuses in the womb. Third, life in societies in the Global South is of a fundamentally different nature than life in the North. While in the Global North, values such as self-realization and freedom underpin the myth of the self-made individual, in the Global South, life is subordinated to the womb, the source of the endless cycle of life reproduction. The womb informs the prevailing moral economy, where intergenerational commitment to the kin-group in its widest possible sense and such values as reciprocity, sacrifice, and responsibility guide daily life. Both old-age security and repositories of the collective’s endeavors and hopes for the future, children are born with a debt to be repaid rather than a right to entitlements. These three dimensions inform the sociopolitical study of children and childhood in the Global South and work as an antidote against their routine representation as victims of their putatively ignorant families and failing societies. Positioning children in the global womb helps bring to the surface their important contribution to the global economy, their struggles for rights and emancipation, and their agency in seeking to realize a good life for themselves and their families.

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Empirical Evidence The notion of the global womb is derived from Olga Nieuwenhuys’s anthropological research on girls’ work in the production of coir yarn in a coastal village of the Indian state of Kerala. Although the earnings that the girls and their mothers derive from this work are marginal and rarely exceed 10% of total household income, according to Nieuwenhuys, they play a critical role in feeding the family when men are thrown out of work or migrate to distant fishing grounds. Importantly, girls’ work represents between 60% and 70% of the labor necessary to produce an important export article of the Indian state. But girls’ work is widely dismissed and seen as a labor of love, and this is crucial for the survival of this labor-intensive handicraft. While in parts of India where there is no coir making husks are used as cheap fuel, and near to worthless, women and girls in Kerala buy coconut husks at such inflated prices that the income they can realize after they have been processed into yarn drops near to nothing. The labor of love that they are capable of absorbing by being turned into coir yarn by poor women and their daughters turn husks into alluring objects of investment and enable local dealers to realize profits on investment as high as 120%. Recent anthropological studies confirm this pattern of intergenerational sharing of responsibilities and work allocation in both rural and urban societies across areas of the Global South. In rural Malawi, Gautam Hazarika and Sudipta Salangi found, for example, that as parents get access to microcredit and are busy running smallscale enterprises, children are put in charge of most of the housekeeping and childcare. Kate Swanson relates how Ecuadoran mothers rent their children to others to use for begging. Condemned by social workers, urban planners, and religious leaders as exploiting their children, the mothers argue that it is a practice integrally connected to notions of redistribution, reciprocity, kinship, and skill building. Jane Dyson describes how in a Himalayan village in India children make significant contributions to their household and village economy and that their work helps them develop their identities, exercise their agency, and become active, competent beings in their society. Maya Mayblin contends that poor peasants in

the northeastern Brazilian countryside consider work an essential means to prepare children to establish and negotiate moral personhood and develop such qualities as courage and endurance, crucial to facing the hardships that await them in future. It is in view of these widely shared moral qualities that working children’s movements in Latin America have for decades claimed their right to work in dignity. Anthropological studies substantiate then that children’s work cannot be understood in isolation from the totality of activities that make up local economies and that it is a crucial aspect of their lives. In the Global South, children are firmly committed to their primary role as carers, while also providing very essential services in the sphere of subsistence and helping produce the raw materials and manufactures that drive market-led globalization. Being couched in the moral economy of the family, with its preoccupation with subsistence and the preservation of life across generations rather than with economic gain and individual assertion, is the ubiquitous way in which children’s work in the Global South is embedded and acquires its meaning. Market-led globalization has opened ways of tapping a steady stream of disposable adult labor and products that are cheap because of their embeddedness in a family economy where women, the elderly, and particularly children provide a host of services for free that families in the Global North must buy in the open market. Notwithstanding family wages, social security, childcare, free education and medical care, pensions, and housing schemes, children are much less available for these kinds of services in the Global North and tend therefore to become an increasingly prohibitive luxury. Olga Nieuwenhuys See also Global North Childhoods; Global Politics of Childhood; Global South Childhoods; Globalization of Childhood; Transnational Childhoods

Further Readings Abebe, T. (2007). Changing livelihoods, changing childhoods: Patterns of children’s work in rural southern Ethiopia. Children’s Geographies, 5, 77–93. doi:10.1080/14733280601108205

Globalization of Childhood Dyson, J. (2014). Working childhoods: Youth, agency and the environment in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hazarika, G., & Sarangi, S. (2008). Household access to microcredit and child work in rural Malawi. World Development, 36(5), 843–859. doi:10.1016/j .worlddev.2007.05.008 Mayblin, M. (2010). Learning courage: Child labour as moral practice in Northeast Brazil. Ethnos, 75(1), 23–48. doi:10.1080/00141840903402476 Nieuwenhuys, O. (1996). The paradox of child labor and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 25, 237–251. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.237 Nieuwenhuys, O. (2007). Embedding the global womb: Global child labour and the new policy agenda. Children’s Geographies, 5(1–2), 149–163. doi:10.1080/14733280601108312 Phillips, N., Bhaskaran, R., Nathan, D., & Upendranadh, C. (2014). The social foundations of global production networks: Towards a global political economy of child labour. Third World Quarterly, 35(3), 428–446. doi:10.1080/01436597.2014.893486 Swanson, K. (2010). Begging as a path to progress: Indigenous women and children and the struggle for Ecuador’s urban spaces. Athens: University of Georgia Press. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01192_8.x

Globalization

of

Childhood

The globalization of childhood refers to those processes through which a specific set of practices and ideas about children’s capacities, vulnerabilities, and needs that stabilized in Western Europe and North America in the long 19th century were transmitted, received, and implemented in the rest of the world. This specific set of practices and ideas can be glossed as modern childhood. The term is problematic because it presumes that childhoods that do not conform to this set of ideas and practices are backward, premodern, or traditional. Nonetheless, modernity remains a convenient term for the global forces at play in the period from the end of the 15th century through to either the end of the long 19th century (1918) or the end of the short 20th century (1989), and hence, modern childhoods is a useful shorthand for how this period changed generational social relations. The glob­ alization of childhood can therefore be thought

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of in relation to the periodization of globalization itself. Globalization can be characterized as a period beginning in the late 20th century that involved the international exchange of ideas, values, cultural practices, and people facilitated by rapid technological innovation, 24-hour financial trading, deregulation of financial markets, or even the collapse of the Soviet Union. Globalization can also be thought of as a much longer period beginning in the late 15th century with Spanish and Portuguese mercantile capitalist–imperialism and intensifying through the transatlantic slave trade before arriving at colonialism and modern capitalism. For the purposes of this entry, this long-term view of globalization is adopted to understand the globalization of childhood. After all, it is this long period that has brought about the development of new ideas about children and childhood and the structurally uneven and unequal incorporation of groups of children into globalized economies and practices. This entry is organized around major epochs of globalization since the 16th century. It begins with early modern capitalism and the significance for childhood of the shift from status to consent as the basis for political rule. It then considers how these ideas were circulated outside of the West in the colonial period. The final section considers postcolonial globalization including the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international development in furthering the globalization of childhood.

Early Modern Capitalism It is often remarked that the conceptualization of childhood that arose in the modern period and that is sharply differentiated from childhood in other times and spaces was one in which children came to be seen as playful, innocent, and protected and were increasingly seen as different kinds of people to adults with different needs and capacities. To some extent this is true, as this entry will show. However, all cultures differentiate between immature human beings (children) who have the capacity to become mature human beings (adults). The extended period of human dependency on others for their very existence means that this difference is rooted in biology. The

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innocence of childhood might be better expressed as the ignorance of childhood. In other words, children’s manifest lack of knowledge about cultural practices, social rules, economic relations, and political organization and their gradual acquisition of understanding about society, culture, and political economy means that their transgressions may be viewed as innocent, in the sense of lacking culpability, because they do not understand the significance of their actions. In medieval Europe, children were not excluded from the spaces that adults were in and might see adults being intimate or having sex, but this exposure of children to what the modern period would spatially exclude them from was not because they were seen as the same as adults but because they were seen as lacking the understanding to know what it was they were witnessing. Playing in the sense of games that are of no particular value, which is seen as perhaps the sharpest demarcation between the modern idea of childhood and other childhoods, is also a universal feature of childhood (and in fact of the immaturity of other primates). In short, the idea that children and adults are different kinds of people is not peculiar to the modern period. What is peculiar to the modern period is rather an idea about how children become adults and what the purpose of human activity is. In brief, the idea of development and progress emerges in the modern period, requiring that children are correctly supported in the unfolding of their potential which can otherwise be arrested or distorted and prevent their coming into normative adulthood. Further, the idea that they can improve on their innate capacities through cultivation and effort takes root. These ideas contrast to a view of children’s passage to adulthood (or their early death) as being determined by other forces, fate, or destiny, or simply by their social status. The idea that a peasant could become a lord in a statusbased society would have been viewed as not only foolish but also heretical. Connected to these ideas about development and cultivation is that of productivity for profit and capital accumulation not only of people but also of land. It is these ideas that tie the modern idea of childhood to capitalist globalization. A key source for understanding how childhood was being rethought in this period is in John Locke’s writings on political theory. Locke is

widely cited in childhood studies, in particular his depiction in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding of the child’s mind as white paper that is furnished through sensation from or reflection on experience. However, important as this text is in the history of empiricism (the philosophical position that all knowledge derives from evidence), it is the formation of liberal political theory, of which Locke was a key scholar in the Atlantic Anglophone world of the 17th century, that is central to how childhood was conceptualized in the modern period. Our evidence for this comes from Locke’s writings, especially his widely read and highly influential Two Treatises on Government but also from court records in the English colonies in America, in the post-revolutionary United States, and in England that trace a shift from the importance of status toward the importance of reason in determining how people were treated before the law. In By Birth or Consent, Holly Brewer shows that prior to the 17th century, crime and punishment and contract in English Law (including in the American colonies) did not distinguish between children and adults in either the crime or the punishment or the ability to contract (e.g., to employment or marriage). What determined differences in who appeared before the courts, in who could contract, and even in who held political power was inherited status. In the modern period, as self-reflection, understanding, and reason became the hallmarks of the citizen, the child’s ability (or inability) to reason and to understand the meaning of their transgression or of their consent became increasingly important in separating out children from adults. In the 17th century, political theory and practice was shifting the understanding of governance from a ruling over subjects or owed obedience to the sovereign who ruled through divine right to ruling through citizens. Citizenship depended on the ability to consent to being governed through exercise of reason developed through reflection on experience. Since children had neither experience nor the facility of abstract reasoning they could not be citizens. Children were therefore in a hybrid state where they owed obedience to their parents (in the same way that the subject owed obedience to a sovereign) until they attained an age of reason when they would become citizens.

Globalization of Childhood

The importance of Locke’s writing to the development of liberal political theory is difficult to overstate. However, in Locke’s work and life, one can also find the simultaneous theorization of freedom to some humans (adult European men) and the denial of freedom to other humans. Locke owned shares in the Royal African Company, a chartered company that held the English monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade in Africa. He also drafted the constitution of the colony of Carolina that legitimated the removal of persons from Indian land on the grounds that they (the contemporary and original inhabitants) were not cultivating the land. Locke’s partial vision of liberalism has formed the basis of the thesis that liberalism was twinned with unfreedom from its inception and that racial exclusion and liberal capitalism were necessary partners. Important though this debate is to assessing to what extent Locke intended that his theory of liberty should extend to all adults, and therefore his recognition of the equality of all humans, the more critical point is whether capitalism from its outset was a racial capitalism that depended on a division between subjects and citizens in which the ascription of race to people of African descent marked them as subjects and the ascription of humanness to people of European descent marked them as citizens. Whether or not this can be resolved in relation to liberal theory, it is an ­irrefutable fact that at the same time that White settlers in the Americas were demanding self-­ governance and citizenship they were binding Africans, adults and children alike, to the status of subjects. There is a growing literature on the relationship between childhood, liberalism, and racial capitalism in the founding of the United States.

Colonialism The English colonies in the American continent in what became Canada and the United States, along with South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, continue to be treated as exceptional to the general model of colonial rule. Ironically, the ­ American war of independence is seen as a moment of liberation from colonial rule although for the indigenous Indian or First Nations it was just another phase in colonialism. Activists and postcolonial theorists note that nowhere in the

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Americas, Australia, or New Zealand can be meaningfully called a postcolonial state because First Nations continue to be governed by the descendants of colonial rulers. If in these polities liberal citizenship and various degrees of unfreedom from enclosure on reservations to being bought and sold like a commodity coexisted, in the other colonies, in which the indigenous majority continued to survive, people were subjects of the British crown and continued to be so long after British subjects in Britain were citizens. What happened here then to the dissemination of new models of childhood and how did colonial subjects implement, adapt, or resist these models? The answer to this question varied across the European Empires depending on such differences as to how European rule was established, the extent to which it became embedded in local systems of governance or replaced them, and when it started and ended. The formal imposition of European rule over sub-Saharan Africa can be dated to as late as 1885 with the Conference of Berlin or as early as the Portuguese incursion into present-day Mozambique and Angola in 1498 and 1575. British rule in India began in 1759 with the East India Company, becoming part of the British Empire in 1858 until independence in 1947. Empire was not a singular process and therefore the ways in which models of childhood were disseminated was also multiple. Despite this heterogeneity, one can discern three practices or praxis (theory and practice) that had a profound impact on children and childhood across the colonial territories of all the European powers and that continue to resonate with the globalization of childhood today: the church, law, and education. It is also important to note that the modern idea of childhood that was being developed and enacted in Western Europe and North America was not disseminated to the colonies or at least not in a uniform way. Colonial rule was often not much more or less than simple extraction of taxes and labor. It was coercive and demanded compliance in the delivery of taxes (which could mean money or commodities) and labor. To that extent, colonial authorities demanded recognition of their right to rule, but they did not necessarily demand cultural change. Ideas about a good childhood, particularly the importance of school displacing work as children’s main productive activity,

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circulated through missionaries rather than through legal measures for compulsory education. Nonetheless, colonial rule did undermine statusbased claims to authority replacing them with new claims based on expertise and knowledge. In recognition of this, colonial subjects often demanded their children’s inclusion in the new models of childhood. In colonial Z ­ imbabwe, for example, Beverley Grier describes how African parents demanded school provision for their children and children themselves demanded education in recognition that prestigious work required school certification and English language fluency. However, the colonial authorities in Zimbabwe whose intention was to structure colonial rule along racial lines and have whites govern and Africans be governed, resisted African parents, demands and passed legislation compelling African children to work at the same time as legislation was being passed in England banning children from working. The church was an important player in the framing and dissemination of these new models of childhood. Shifts in the praxis of childhood are above all cultural changes underpinned by new ethics that require people to think differently about children’s capacities, needs, and vulnerabilities and the responsibilities of adults toward children. It is unsurprising that the church, with its largely unquestioning belief in the moral fortitude of its own ideas about how people should live, was at the forefront of insisting that colonial peoples change their social relationships and attempting, not always successfully, to mobilize the colonial state to enforce its ideas. In relation to children these ideas largely focused on family life, marriage, and reproductive health. Many of these campaigns continue to be an active part of contemporary NGO agendas, which include campaigns against child marriage, polygamy, ­ ­traditional reproductive practices (including birthspacing, abortion, contraception, and upright birthing), and nakedness. In the 19th century, missionaries were not against child labor (it still being a significant part of most British children’s lives), but they also insisted on the importance of schooling. The extent to which the colonial authorities used the force of the law to compel colonial subjects to change their practices depended on a

myriad of local contextual factors, not the least of which, as with the Zimbabwe juvenile labor example, depended on the extent to which the colonial state’s economic and political interests coincided or not with the churches’ agenda. The British state, for example, never sought to ban polygamy in predominately Muslim states fearing that the backlash would be fatal to British rule and at the same time not deliver any political or economic benefit. In Kenya, the colonial authorities enforced a lower age for genital cutting of Meru girls rather than, as the Churches wanted, to have it banned. In this case too, an outright ban was seen as potentially fatal to British rule. However, because girls who got pregnant before they were cut would abort the fetus or abandon the infant (because they were culturally not yet adults), the British were concerned about the impact of low population growth on economic productivity and so ordered girls to be cut as soon as they reached puberty so that if they did get pregnant it would be culturally acceptable and they could keep the child. Education was, and undoubtedly still is, the main site through which new ideas about childhood were disseminated. Across the colonial empires, this involved the founding of church schools and their eventual incorporation into colonial schools (although continuing their religious orientation) or the molding of existing religious schools, including Hindu tols and Islamic madrassas, through the provision of colonial support into hybrid secular–religious schools. The law, the church, and school education were the principle sites of the globalization of ideas about what kinds of people children are and how they should live from the beginnings of European mercantile imperialism and slavery through to late colonization. Philanthropists were also important players in the reform of childhood in the capitalist economies from about the mid-19th century. All of the major child-saving organizations were founded in this period including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Barnardos, another U.K.-based organization founded in the mid-19th century with a mandate to protect children. However, the relationship between philanthropic individuals and the state was close with Members of Parliament (in Britain) and Senators (in the United States) often being

Globalization of Childhood

part of the same family and social network as capitalist philanthropists. Their work was closely tied to funding and enabling Christian missions (both at home and abroad) and pressing for legal reform to protect the health and well-being and recognize the specific needs of children. Although these organizations were minor players in the landscape of child reform in the colonial period, they were to become significant players in the postcolonial period.

Postcolonial Globalization Slavery in the United States and colonial rule in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean were challenges for liberal theory. Britain was liberal at home and tyrannical abroad. The United States was liberal to White citizens and tyrannical to Black ­Americans whom it continued, even after slavery ended, to treat as subjects. The end of European imperialism and the transitions to nationalist majority rule created a new context for the reform of childhood. European powers could no longer legislate to force changes in how children spent their time, what they were taught, how their bodies were managed, and how social relationships were organized. In any case, the extent to which they did try to enforce change in practice through the deployment of state power was piecemeal and only happened where childhood reform did not undermine economic accumulation. In the immediate postcolonial period, which for most European colonies outside of the White settler states was in the late 1940s through to the late 1950s, reform of childhood did not figure centrally in the plans of the postcolonial state. In most ­African and Asian states, the church stayed on after independence with varying degrees of embeddedness in society. In most of Asia and in North Africa and the Sahel, precolonial religions and philosophies (Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) continued to be providing the framework for how to live including ideas about children’s capacities and vulnerabilities and their relationship to society, culture, politics, and economics. The exception was sub-Saharan Africa south of the Sahel which incorporated Christianity deeply into cultural and social life, although usually in ways that melded it with local cosmologies. However, the postcolonial state recognized the importance of

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school as the site for the inculcation of ideas about nationalism and citizenship and the responsibility of children to build the new nation. The Collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has become a signifier for the end of the short 20th century (that started in 1916 with the Soviet revolution). It heralded the collapse of the USSR and the formation out of their demise of new nation-states many of which, like the national states that emerged out of European imperialism, had never existed as nation-states before. It also ended socialist rule in Eastern Europe. Most importantly, from the point of view of the globalization of childhood, it coincided with the acceptance into international law of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). If the cold war between the United States and the USSR had not been ended by the collapse of the USSR then this legislation would likely have remained a paper commitment and had little meaningful impact on how nations legislated for children. It has become the touchstone for all international action that touches on children’s lives and has been adopted into international law in 195 countries. It is often cited as the single most effective tool, for better or worse, in the globalization of ideas about modern childhood. Although the United States is not a signatory to the UNCRC, it was involved in the drafting of the legislation and it incorporates key ideas about liberal childhood. Of almost equal significance to the passing of the UNCRC is the role that it gave to NGOs in drafting the legislation and then in monitoring its implementation. Indeed, the governance of childhood by NGOs and the distribution of ideas founded in the advanced capitalist countries to the rest of the world are central to the globalization of childhood. NGOs have played a central role in the framing and implementation of the Millennium Development Goals and now the Sustainable Development Goals. In relation to children and childhood, these demonstrate the remarkable continuity between contemporary development objectives and rationalities in relation to childhood and those of the colonial powers. Increasing school enrollment and managing reproduction (now

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mostly in the direction of lowering the number of births but in the past in some places by increasing it) and managing children’s involvement in the economy (mostly in both periods by banning child labor but sometimes, as in colonial Zimbabwe, by compelling child labor) were and are the mainstay of the official globalization of childhood. The most fundamental change in how children spend their time is in the shift from children being idle or working (usually, but not exclusively for their families) to spending most of their days from the age of about 5 years to about 12 years in school. School is an interesting institution in the debate on the globalization of childhood because it suggests that children everywhere are doing the same kinds of things with their time, reading similar books, studying similar syllabi in more or less the same ways. The colonial legacy in education from the language of instruction through to the examination boards that students take their final school exams with encourages this view that school is more or less the same everywhere: that the school student in East London, England, and the school student in East London, South Africa, are learning to be the same kinds of people with access to the same kinds of bodies of knowledge. For some school students, this presumption of a globalization of childhood is true. Children attending elite boarding schools across the globe have a similar educational experience. Some of their experiences, perhaps the food they eat, their religious instruction, or the style of their school uniforms will differ but since the very purpose of elite education is to make students feel at home governing their nation but also representing it on the global stage for children, as in fact for adults, it can be said that the elite participate in a shared global culture. Economic Globalization

It has been argued that globalization is not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different to other periods of global integration. It is not only that global flows of people, goods, and finance have increased in pace and degree in the late 20th and early 21st century, not only that there are more international NGOs, more international legislation, and more integration of global markets but that these are qualitatively different to the imperial and colonial periods. Crucially, there is a kind of globalization

from below, which is the exchange of cultural goods whose value does not necessarily map onto political power in the international system and which flows in contradictory, unexpected ways. In relation to children and young people, the most obvious and oftcited example is music, closely followed by film, television, and video and often with content and distribution being increasingly controlled by young users using sharing sites like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Vimeo, and so on. In the exchange of, say, hip-hop from its origins in Los Angeles to its remix in Cape Town and the importing of South African hip-hop back into the United States influencing new styles of mixing, lyrics, and dance can be seen as a kind of globalization of childhood. It depends, perhaps, on where one draws the upper limits of childhood but certainly cultural forms and political cultures are bouncing between Anglophone youth cultures and influencing one another while at the same time generating profit for the platforms that use this to disseminate targeted advertising and capitalize on and respond to new consumer (child and youth) markets.

Concluding Thoughts The globalization of childhood is often taken to mean that a single model of childhood in which children are protected, playful, and innocent that emerged in the capitalist countries in Western Europe and North America sometime from the 17th century onwards is being disseminated to and implanted in the rest of the world. The primary mechanism for this process is usually taken to be the activities that surround the implementation of the UNCRC. Many scholars in childhood studies object to these processes on the basis that people in other countries cannot afford for their children to have protected, playful, and innocent childhoods. In Childhood in a Global Perspective, Karen Wells observes that the globalization of childhood can be objected to on many ethical and politically progressive grounds, but that postcolonial states cannot afford the luxury of lifting children out of poverty is not one of them. In any event, the premise that the globalization of childhood is about globalizing a singular model of childhood elides the fact that nowhere in Western Europe or North America did this model exist as a one-dimensional model: It was

Globalization of Childhood

always and continues to be bifurcated by race and class and gender. Furthermore, having a view of children as being innocent (or ignorant), playful, and in need of protection from harms that their age and dependency make them vulnerable to is not specifically a modern idea of childhood. Indeed, one could argue that the emphasis in modern childhoods on the development of reason and consent over status and destiny in determining children’s future made modern childhood less playful and protected than other models of childhood. Ideas about children and childhood that were developing in the milieu of industrial and urban capitalism were circulated in the colonial territories and in the antebellum United States by many social actors including philanthropists and activists, the church, and schools. Frequently, parents and children mobilized the modern ideals of childhood to demand the freedom of Black and colonial subjects or their inclusion in the new economic and political opportunities of the colonial state. Parents might also demand that they have rights over their children, that children are part of the private life of citizens that the state has no rights over. In the postcolonial state’s schools, philanthropists (now organized as NGOs) and churches in (especially non-Muslim) Africa continue to be important forces for the globalization of childhood but there are many countervailing forces that circulate other models. The major shifts in the practices of childhood in the Global South have come about through the force of economic processes. Childhood is above all a biocultural state in which the affordance of children’s biological development is shaped by the cultural fields in which they live. These cultural fields are themselves shaped by myriad local and global processes. While the most noticeable shift in children’s lives is the by now almost universal acceptance that children belong in school and that they should not work, a fact that suggests a globalization of childhood, childhood is still far from being or becoming the same everywhere. Indeed, even its superficial similarities, as in the expansion of schooling, cloak a myriad of differences. Karen Wells See also Global Politics of Childhood; Global Womb; Locke, John; Postcolonial Childhoods; Racial Formation

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Further Readings Aderinto, S. (Ed.). (2015). Children and childhood in colonial Nigerian histories. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Boddy, J. P. (2007). Civilizing women: British crusades in colonial Sudan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.3366/e0001972008000491 Brewer, H. (2005). By birth or consent: Children, law, and the Anglo-American revolution in authority. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press. doi:10.3138/cjh.41.3.625 Browner, C. H., & Sargent, C. F. (Eds.). (2011). Reproduction, globalization, and the state: New theoretical and ethnographic perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1111/ amet.22_12146 Cole, J., & Durham, D. L. (Eds.). (2007). Generations and globalization: Youth, age, and family in the new world economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. doi:10.1353/arw.2008.0006 Duane, A. M. (2011). Suffering childhood in early America: Violence, race, and the making of the child victim. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tr ue&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=437024 Grier, B. (2006). Invisible hands: Child labor and the state in colonial Zimbabwe. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Kenway, J. (2016). Class choreographies, elite schools and globalization. New York, NY: Springer. King, W. (1998). Stolen childhood: Slave youth in nineteenth-century America (Nachdr.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Levander, C. F. (2006). Cradle of liberty: Race, the child, and national belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822388357-008 Linde, R. (2014). The globalization of childhood: The international diffusion of norms and law against the child death penalty. European Journal of International Relations, 20(2), 544–568. doi:10.1177/ 1354066113475464 Marten, J. A. (Ed.). (2012). Children and youth during the Civil War era. New York: New York University Press. Pomfret, D. M. (2016). Youth and empire: Transcolonial childhoods in British and French Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. doi:10.1017/ s0165115317000195

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Governmentality

Twum-Danso Imoh, A., & Ame, R. K. (Eds.). (2012). Childhoods at the intersection of the local and the global. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wells, K. C. (2015). Childhood in a global perspective (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Governmentality The term ‘governmentality’ is derived from the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984). It originated in Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures to the Collège de France; however, Foucault never committed these lectures to a final written form, and the majority of the lectures remained unpublished until after his death. In spite of this, the term has become one of Foucault’s most enduring, inspiring a particular kind of philosophical and political analysis, which seeks to understand the nature of the practice of government. The term ‘government’ should be taken here not only in the narrow sense of the instrument through which state power is enacted but also as the ‘rationality’ or ‘art’ according to which power and rule are effected; in Foucault’s own terms, this is government as ‘the conduct of conduct’. ‘Governmentality’ therefore bears some comparison to contemporary uses of the word ‘governance’, as it proposes a shift from thinking about the actions of the state to thinking about the manner in which the state becomes embedded in action. This entry examines the rise of governmentality and how it applies to understandings of childhood risk and self-regulation.

Situating Governmentality It is important to first situate the concept of ‘governmentality’ within Foucault’s understanding of power, which was distinct from contemporary views of political power as a necessarily totalising and repressive force. Instead, Foucault argued that power was relational and productive, shaping possible outcomes, but always addressed to individuals who are free to act in a variety of ways. New practices of government, therefore, are always accompanied by new forms of individual action or ‘counter-conducts’.

Foucault proposed the concept of governmentality in relation to the historical shift away from sovereign forms of power in early modern Europe, towards a ‘reason of state’. In this new art of government, Foucault saw both the traces of the ancient Greek political system of citizens and laws, and the Christian pastoral preoccupation with the care of souls. He described this as a new form of secular political pastorate combining both individualisation and totalisation. At the centre of this art was the attempt to develop individuals in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state. This ‘science of police’ (or ‘policy’ as some argue is the better translation) develops and builds upon classificatory schemes which aspire to render governable all aspects of collective life (e.g., religion, science, business, crime). This enacts Foucault’s insistence on the essential relationship between power and knowledge, in this instance that developing knowledge about a sphere of public life renders that sphere, at least potentially, governable. In this ‘potentia’ is the limits of both possible control and individual freedom. In this respect, Foucault’s concept of governmentality reimagines the central sociological problem of structure versus agency as a paradox: Individuals act freely, or with agency, and in doing so contribute to the structural relations through which they are formally governed. This paradox has been the source of a substantial secondary literature in relation to governmentality within the context of children and childhood studies (amongst many other areas). Foundational studies in this area have examined the forming of conduct through, for example, the modern institutions of family, social work, and social policy. Such studies have described how governmentality implies the breakdown of conventional distinctions between public and private, for example, through the manner in which the state shapes legitimate familial relations through legal frameworks that privilege certain types of relation through rules of inheritance and reinforce heteronormative assumptions about procreative sexual relations.

Childhood and Risk The idea that both control and freedom are everpresent possibilities within the same sphere of action has led to a sustained focus within the

Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm)

childhood-governmentality literature upon the concept of risk. Here, risk is associated with specific practices of distribution and normalisation, which render particular kinds of group and person knowable and governable. Studies have examined, for example how risk is constructed, calculated, and managed at the population level, and how this plays out in its effects upon those groups deemed ‘at risk’, their choices, and the consequences of those choices. Here, governmentality studies have overlapped substantially with studies of identity, exclusion, and social justice, particularly in relation to the differentiating effects of group membership (e.g., gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality) within formal structures of risk calculation and management.

Self-Regulation Another area of childhood studies that has received sustained attention in response to the governmentality thesis is self-regulation. This can be closely related to work on risk that individuals are socialised into norms of ‘non-risky’ behaviour, and they ‘choose’ to adopt standards of behaviour that conform to these norms. The dominance of psychological perspectives in the understanding of childhood behaviour has meant that nonconforming and risk-taking behaviours are often understood in terms of an internal defect of some kind, a failure of self-regulation. The concept of governmentality has been used to invoke a different understanding, which instead examines the role of socially approved categories of understanding and their effect in creating both acceptable and unacceptable roles and behaviours. Such work attempts to shift the individualised focus of deficit towards an interrogation of the limiting effects of institutionalised forms. Simon Bailey See also Biopolitics of Childhood; Developmentality; Governmentality

Further Readings Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P. (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London, UK: Sage.

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Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York, NY: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.22439/ fs.v0i5.1412 Rose, N. (1989). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London, UK: Routledge.

Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm are best known together as the Brothers Grimm. They were academics, lecturers, editors, folklorists, and collectors, as well as writers. The Grimm brothers gained the most recognition as the literary duo that gathered German folk and fairy tales primarily from the oral tradition and presented  them as printed literature. This served to protect the tales from dying out, but it also ended up changing them in the process. They are still considered one of the most important sources for fairy tales and part of the children’s literature canon. This entry examines the Grimm brothers’ early lives and development, key publications, and legacy.

Early Life Jacob and Wilhelm were the eldest sons of a lawyer in Hanau, Germany. After both parents’ deaths, they were charged with taking care of their remaining siblings. Both chose to attend the University of Marburg to study law with the intent to practice. However, after working with several poets and folklorists, most notably Clemens Brentano, Jacob and Wilhelm chose to pursue literary research instead. As they collected folk songs and poetry for Brentano’s collection, they discovered their own passion for the German poetic form that was usually only passed down orally from generation to generation. The brothers felt that the transmission of folk and fairy tales was unstable, which made the stories in danger of vanishing. As a result, they sought to preserve German folk tales by creating a collection in printed form. It was the Grimm brothers’ way of preserving the wealth of German folk history, tradition, and literature.

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Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm)

Publications In 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm published the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales]. It featured stories such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Rumpelstiltskin. Their first collection attempted to convey the stories as authentically as possible, mainly relying on pure transcription to deliver the material as close to the storyteller’s words as possible. Jacob and Wilhelm gave a voice that allowed generations of folk storytellers to be heard. However, it was not met with a favorable reception nor was the second edition. There was an issue with purely transcribing the stories as they had been told, as in their original form, versus their new audience: people who would never hear the stories, but only ever read them in print. The transmission from oral narratives to printed literature required some literary finesse. As the brothers worked on the collection over the years, they added and removed stories, editing for smoother readability. The transition from oral storytelling to printed literature did not come effortlessly to the Grimm brothers. The duo worked on seven editions of their fairy tale collection from the first publication in 1812 to the last in 1857. However, as their later editions became smoother and more polished, the collection grew more popular. The Brothers Grimm fairy tale style grew with each revision and subsequent edition, added depth and detail, and moved away from the original and simplistic versions to more aesthetic prose. They even added their own tales to the collection. In the end, the Grimm brothers’ talent as editors and writers created a polished and poetic collection of fairy tales for reading, true literature in itself. Despite their initial intentions of pure preservation based on transcriptions from oral sources, the stories and anthology evolved into a literary masterpiece. It is considered to be the most important source of German folktales.

Impact The Brothers Grimm succeeded in preserving folk and fairy stories from their native Germany. However, their popularity far exceeded their intended reach. The Grimm brothers’ fairy tales became known across Europe and the United

States in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, the advent of moving motion pictures allowed for their fairy tales to reach a broader audience in a different format. Paramount filmed a silent version of Snow White in 1916 based on an earlier Broadway play, but the biggest influence was probably Walt Disney’s full-length animated version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937. It was the first of its kind, and it catapulted both Disney and the story of Snow White into silver screen history and fame. It was both the first full-length animated feature for Walt Disney and is considered the first Disney princess film. Other famous Disney princess films were also based on other Grimm brothers’ fairy tales: The Princess and the Frog based on The Frog Prince and Tangled based on Rapunzel. Many people want to argue that the Brothers Grimm versions are the original. However, Jacob and Wilhelm adapted earlier oral stories for publication. In much the same way as the Grimm brothers, Disney also made some changes and adjustments for his intended audiences but in a different medium: film. The term Disneyfication in relation to folk and fairy tales came about because of this very trend and specifically, D ­ isney’s propensity to modify a tale to suit its purpose. By adjusting the method of transmitting the story, the stories have changed. However, they have also endured. Both stories and films are currently considered staples of the modern childhood ­ experience. Josianne Campbell See also Bettelheim, Bruno; Children’s Literature; Disney; Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition; Folklore, Children’s

Further Readings Donald, H. (Ed.). (1993). The reception of Grimms’ fairy tales: Responses, reactions, revisions. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. (1987). The complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York, NY: Bantam. doi:10.1515/9781400851898 Jack, Z. (2015). Grimm legacies: The magic spell of the Grimms’ folk and fairy tales. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400852581 James, M. M. (Ed.). (1991). The Brothers Grimm and folktale. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Growth

Growing Sideways See Queer Childhoods

Growth The concept of growth is surely ubiquitous in childhood studies: growth as weight gain against a variety of norms; growth as natural, as universal, and cross-cultural; growth as panic in the context of obesity and of anorexia and so on; pathologies of growth and the effects of the obstruction of the proper, natural course of growth; growing fast, growing slow, ‘growing up too soon’, and ‘all grown up’. Growth is paradigmatically scientific and medical, and its patina of objectivity, precision, and professionalised expertise is daunting. Yet, for that very reason, it is important for scholars of childhood to step back from the status claimed by this concept and by the practices that surround it and maintain its power. ‘Growing up’ has its dark sides as well as its bright sides. Juliet’s nurse rehearses and relishes the story of her falling on her face as a toddler, at which her husband had jovially remarked that she, Juliet, would fall backwards before too long; a brilliant and chilling observation by the secretive playwright on the developmental fate of a girl child, at which the modern audience still laughs. Growth is ideology. It is difficult to strip away the layers of conventional science, medicine, and education that surround the concept of growth, and perhaps optimistic to anticipate finding anything substantive after having done so. This entry examines growth, development, and progress and further explores the difference between understandings of growth as a description and explanation. This entry concludes by examining some of the challenges of measuring growth.

Growth, Development, and Progress The concept of growth overlaps substantially both the concept of development and the concept of progress. In many circumstances of usage two of these three terms or even all three may be substituted one for the other without noticeable loss of

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precision. But in neither case relating to the concept of growth (growth and development; growth and progress) is the overlap complete. To frame this overview, a tentative relationship between the three may be employed. Progress can be said to be necessary for development so that the former concept is presupposed by the latter. Development thus lies ‘inside’ progress. Growth would seem to overlap both while extending beyond the scope of progress. If so, the conceptual relationships between growth and development are somewhat complex. (Connections with the concept of evolution are beyond the scope of this contribution.) Approaching growth from ‘outside’ progress, it is clear that any quantifiable increase may be described as growth. Whatever is measurable is one might say capable of growth, decline, and stasis in relation to that measured factor. This also means that to refer to growth where one might also have used the term ‘development’ is to make a claim that the factor that has been identified is measurable. If there is a cachet or other rhetorical advantage to the assertion of measurement—such as the prestige that attaches to science—then it operates here. The quantifiability of observed change may be as generic as the claim of ‘more’ or ‘less’, of ‘getting bigger’ versus ‘getting smaller’. The apparent precision that attaches to measurement might thus be coveted by claims about growth in complexity and suchlike dimensions whose measurable qualities are dubious. Again, the precision of measurement in terms of scales with ordinal qualities and so on, or scales with the distributional properties of the IQ, is a matter distinct from validity. Mathematical precision and manipulability may be achieved by importing assumptions of various kinds into a much more modest model with the methodology of the IQ again being a good example. In the context of childhood studies, the significant role played by chronological age in the developmental equivalents of IQ exemplifies another important point: Genuine precision may be irrelevant. Exact and in every way correct information on chronological age of a specific child or sample of children does not guarantee the transfer of those virtues to a scheme that amalgamates chronological age with other information and other assumptions, such as the developmental quotient or similar indices. The problematics of

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Growth

measurement are closely related to the problematics of growth.

Growth as Description Versus Explanation It may be helpful at this point to tentatively ­distinguish growth as description from growth as explanation. Growth as description is hardly ideology-free. It imports naturalness and hence might be said to gesture towards an inchoate kind of explanatory framework in any event. What to measure, and with what instruments, whom to measure, when and where may all be decisions saturated with the political. Norms of growth such as expected weight at various ages, expected weight increase at various times prenatally and after birth, all bring with them other forms of normativity. But some applications of the concept of growth are more expressly explanatory. The best examples of growth as explanation are found in the discourses of speed and acceleration: specifically, the concept of ‘slow’ development and the concept of ‘growth spurts’. The latter is the more direct application of the notion of growth. What is at issue here is not the factual matter of a quantifiable increase across time, in an individual or in the central tendency of some population, but the explanatory or even predictive power attributed to such a measured effect. Typically, the argument runs that an acceleration of physical growth, such as in height or weight, in itself gives rise to secondary effects of an affective or cognitive variety. The claim being made, or implied, is that a relative stable period has been interrupted and that the individual has been (more or less literally) ‘thrown off balance’ by the physical phenomenon. As such the ‘growth spurt’ refers back to ancient or at least premodern understandings of human conduct and its causes, in a way also still familiar to us in the notion of ‘chemical imbalance’ (in the brain) as an explanation of mental disturbance. Growth as temporary instability connects with even more general assumptions around age-dependent conduct such as emotional instability in teenagers, ‘tantrums’ in toddlers, and so on. Events thought of as prototypically age-dependent such as teething are subsumed under the same rubric of personal conduct as secondary to the unfolding of natural processes.

Measuring Growth With respect to ‘slow development’, the connection to growth is through the assumption of a natural schedule, akin to physical growth, appertaining to cognitive capabilities. Any stage theory of cognitive development, or indeed of emotional, social, or motor development, is at least formally capable of generating a theory of slow development in such functions whether such a theory is fragmentary or coherent. In Piagetian theory, the characteristic notion of décalage is a formulation of relative speed of development (or ‘evolution’) in different areas of cognitive functioning. When development can thus be understood in terms of speed, development is in effect being treated as growth. The connection to a stage theory of ‘normal’ development buttresses the explanatory power of any such theory. In turn the plausibility of a slow development account, whether in the form of within-subject lag or ‘slippage’ (dècalage) or the form of an account of developmental disability, seems to offer empirical support to the normative theory. However, the apparent explanatory value of these accounts is circular and on examination ‘growing slowly’ is as theoretically limited as the growth spurt. Of course, it is difficult to gainsay the value of measured growth for some important purposes. Height and weight are practical, inexpensive, intuitive, easy to record, and relatively non-­ invasive measures for thriving, for evidence of neglect or abuse, and so on. The related training of personnel is relatively straightforward. While recognising the population surveillance and the market power of the pharmaceutical and nutrition industries that may closely accompany these practices, and the gendered structures of the professions involved, change in weight as proxy for growth and growth as proxy for ‘healthy’ development is no chimaera. A baby born light for dates may well require extra monitoring. Thus, empirical considerations snap at the heels of the critic in this area of childhood studies. Yet this is an indication not of the vacuity of a sceptical or a reflective attitude but to the contrary, an indication of the complexity and the importance of such scholarship. John R. Morss

Growth See also Development; Developmental Psychology; Developmentality; Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

Further Readings Greene, S. (2015). The psychological development of girls and women (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Holzman, L. (2016). Schools for growth: Radical alternatives to current educational models. New York, NY: Routledge. Morss, J. R. (1995). Growing critical: Alternatives to developmental psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. Stainton Rogers, R., & Stainton Rogers, W. (1992). Stories of childhood: Shifting agendas of child concern. London, UK: Pearson Education.

THE SAGE Encyclopedia of

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES

Editorial Board Editor Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden

Associate Editors Sarada Balagopalan Rutgers University–Camden

Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus

Matthew Prickett Independent Scholar

Editorial Board Tatek Abebe Norwegian University of Science and Technology Jill Bradbury University of the Witwatersrand

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein University of Reading Ingrid Palmary University of the Witwatersrand

Erica Burman University of Manchester

Ann Phoenix Institute of Education, University College London

Lise Claiborne University of Waikato

Bengt Sandin Linköping University

Marisol Clark-Ibáñez California State University San Marcos

Oddbjorg Skiær Ulvik Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science

Raquel S. L. Guzzo Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas Karl Hanson University of Geneva

Hans Skott-Myhre Kennesaw State University

The SAGE Encyclopedia of

CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES 3 Editor Daniel Thomas Cook Rutgers University–Camden

FOR INFORMATION:

Copyright © 2020 by SAGE Publications, Ltd. © Introduction and editorial arrangement by Daniel Thomas Cook, 2020

SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [email protected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London, EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 18 Cross Street #10-10/11/12 China Square Central Singapore 048423

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20 21 22 23 24 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Volume 3 List of Entries   vii Entries H 887 M 1073 I 939 N 1123 J 1011 O 1153 K 1033 P 1179 L 1045 Q 1319

List of Entries ABC Books Abortion Addams, Jane ADHD. See Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity ­Disorder (ADHD) Adolescence Adolescence, History of Adolescent Pregnancy Adoption, History of Adoption, Transnational Adoption, Transracial Adultism After-School Centers Age Age Assessment, in Migration Age Compression Age of Consent Ageism Agency AIDS Orphans Andersen, Hans Christian Anorexia Nervosa Anticipatory Socialization Anti-colonial Movements, Role of Children Antislavery Movement, Role of Children Apprenticeship Apps (Mobile Applications) Ariès, Philippe Artificial Insemination Assent, Children’s, in Research Asylum, Children as Seekers of Attachment Theory Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Autism, Child Development, and Theory Autism and Neurodiversity Autonomy

Babysitting, U.S. History of Baptism Barbie Doll Bechstein, Ludwig. See Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Beings and Becomings, Children as Benjamin, Walter Bernstein, Basil Best Interests Principle Bettelheim, Bruno Better Baby Contests Bilingualism and Multilingualism Binet, Alfred Binge-Watching Biopolitics of Childhood Birth Birth Control Birth Order Blank Slate, Children as. See Tabula Rasa Boarding Schools Borders, National Bourdieu, Pierre Bowlby, John Boyhood Boyhood Studies Breastfeeding Bronfenbrenner, Urie Brownies’ Book Buddhism Bullying Bullying, Genealogy of the Concept Bullying and Parents Bullying and Teachers Bullying in Schools Capitalism and Childhood Care, Feminist Ethic of Care, Institutional Caregivers, Children as Care-Work

Babies’ Rights Baby, Social Construction of Baby Farms vii

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List of Entries

Carroll, Lewis Child Child Abuse. See Abuse and Child Abuse Child Actors in Film and Television Child Actors in Theater Child and Youth Activism Child as Method Child as Other/Stranger Child Attachment Interviews Child Beauty Pageants Child Consumption: A Vygotskian Perspective Child Depravity Child Domestic Work Child Labor Child Labor in Europe, History of Child Marriage Child Mortality Child Neglect Child Pornography Child Pregnancy Child Prodigy Child Prostitution, Sex Work Child Psychology, Clinical. See Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Child Soldiers Child Study Child Suicide Child Trafficking Child Welfare Childcare Child-Centered/Child-Led Research Child-Centered Design Child-Friendly, Concept of Child-Friendly Cities Child-Headed Households Childhood Childhood, Anthropology of Childhood and Architecture Childhood and Nature Childhood as Figuration Childhood Embodiment/Embodied Childhood Identity Constructions Childhood in Western Philosophy Childhood Insanity Childhood Nostalgia Childhood Poverty Childhood Publics

Childhood Representations in Media and Advertising Childhood Studies Childhoods and Time, Philosophical Perspectives Childing Childism Children and Art Children and Borders—Cyprus Children and Borders—Palestine Children and International Development Children and Nationalism Children and Social Policy Children and Technology Children and the Law, United States Children and U.S. Adoption Literature Children and Youth in Prison Children as Citizens Children as Competent Social Actors Children as Consumers Children as Legal Subjects Children as Philosophers Children as Photographers Children as Political Subjects Children as Victims Children as Witnesses Children as Workers Children at Risk Children in Postcolonial Literature Children in Romantic Literature and Thought Children Living With HIV in Africa Children Who Murder Children’s Bodies Children’s Bureau, United States Children’s Consumer Culture. See Children as Consumers; Child Consumption: A Vygotskyan Perspective; Consumer Socialization Children’s Culture Industry Children’s Cultures Children’s Drawings and Psychological Development Children’s Geographies Children’s Hospitals Children’s Libraries in the United States Children’s Literature Children’s Mobility Children’s Museums Children’s Music Industry, U.S. Children’s Ombudspersons/Commissioners for Children’s Rights Children’s Perspectives

List of Entries

Children’s Radio Children’s Rights Children’s Rights, Critiques of Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on Children’s Social Participation, Models of Children’s Television, U.S. History Children’s Time Use Children’s Voices Children’s Work Christianity Citizenship Classroom Discipline Clinical Psychology and Clinical Child Psychology Clothing, Children’s Colonialism and Childhood Columbine (High School) Massacre, U.S. Communion, Holy Community of Learners Concerted Cultivation, Parenting Style Conduct of Everyday Life Consent, Children’s, in Research Consent, Sexual Consumer Socialization Corporal Punishment Counseling Children CRC. See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Critical Children’s Literature Studies Critical Legal Studies Critical Pedagogy Critical Race Theory Critical Realism Critical Theory, the Child in CRT. See Critical Race Theory Cultural Capital Cultural Politics of Childhood Cyberbullying Darwin, Charles Day Care Death, Children’s Conceptions of Death Rates, Children’s, Historical Deleuze, Gilles Depression Development Developmental Psychology Developmentality Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) Dewey, John

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Diaspora Childhoods Dickens, Charles Different Childhoods Digital Childhoods Digital Literacy Digital Media Digital Mobile Technologies Disabilities Disabilities, Children With—Global South Disability Studies Disability Studies in Education Discipline and Childhood Disney Distributed Violence Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara Dolls, U.S. History of Dolto, Françoise Domestic Chores Domestic Violence, Children’s Experiences of Domestic Workers, Children as Early Childhood Education Early Marriage Ecological Approaches. See Bronfenbrenner, Urie Ecology and Environmental Education Education Education, Child-Centered Education, Co-operative Education, Inclusive Education and Nationalism in Late Imperial China Education for All (EFA) Education Versus Care Emerging Adulthood Emotion Regulation (Children) Emotional Intelligence Enabling Education Network (EENET) Enlightenment and the Child Ennew, Judith Erikson, Erik Ethics Ethnicity Ethnography Eugenics Evolutionary Developmental Psychology Fairy Tales in the Western Tradition Family Family Photography Fashion, Children’s

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Fatherhood Fathers/Fathering Federal Indian Boarding Schools, U.S. ­Architecture of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Feminism Feral Children Fetal Personhood Film, the Child in Folklore, Children’s Food Studies and Children Foster Care, U.S. Foster Parenting Frank, Anne Freire, Paulo Freud, Anna Freud, Sigmund Froebel, Friedrich Gay and Lesbian Parenting Gender Gender Identity Gender Independent Children Generation Gap Generational Approach Generational Conflict Generationing Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child 1924 Gesell, Arnold Gifted Children Girl Power Girlhood Girlhood Studies Girling Girls Global North Childhoods Global Politics of Childhood Global Politics of Orphanhood Global South Childhoods Global Womb Globalization of Childhood Governmentality Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) Growing Sideways. See Queer Childhoods Growth Habitus Hall, Granville Stanley Health

Health Care Hidden Adult, in Literature Hinduism Hine, Lewis Historical Methods History of Childhood Home Learning Environment Homeschooling Homeless Children and Youth Homes, Institutional Hope Hug-Hellmuth, Hermine Human Capital, Child as Human Capital Theory Human Development Index Human Rights Identity Imaginary Companions Immigrant Children Immigration In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Inclusion in Schools Indigenous Childhoods Infancy Infant Mortality Rate. See Child Mortality Infantilization Innocence Institutionalization of Childhood Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Intelligence Testing Intergenerational Learning Intergenerational Relations Interiority International Child Saving International Child Welfare Organizations International Children’s Aid Organizations International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOs) Interpretive Reproduction Intersectionality Interviews iPad Isaacs, Susan Islam Judaism Juvenile Courts Juvenile Courts, U.S. History Juvenile Delinquency

List of Entries

Juvenile Justice, International Juvenocracy/Juvenocratic Spaces Key, Ellen Kindergarten Klein, Melanie Korczak, Janusz La Leche League Lacan, Jacques Language, Social, and Cultural Aspects Language Learning/Acquisition League of Nations Least-Adult Role in Research Lego Life Mode Interview Lindgren, Astrid Literacy/Literacies Literature, Golden Age Literature for Children. See Children’s Literature Locke, John Mannheim, Karl Material Culture, Children’s Media, Children and Medicalization of Childhood Mental Health, Child Mid-day Meal Militarization Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Milner, Marion Miniature Adulthood Minority Group, Children as Modernity Montessori, Maria Montessori Schools Moral Development, Cultural-Developmental Perspective Mothers/Motherhood Moveable Books Mulberry Bush School Narrative Research Method Narratives, Children’s National Identity Native American Children, Religion and Spirituality Natural Growth, Parenting Style Nature Versus Culture Nature Versus Nurture

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Neurocognitive Development Neuroscience Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) Numeracy Learning in Early Childhood Obesity One-Child Policy, China Opie, Iona and Peter Orphan Care Orphan Homes Orphan Trains Orphans Orphans and Orphanages as Childcare in the United States Out-of-School Children Paganism Parental Advice Literature Parenthood Parenting Parenting Children Parenting Studies Parenting Styles, History of Parents of Children With Disabilities Parents With Disabilities Participation, Protection, and Provision Rights (Three Ps), UNCRC Participation Rights, UNCRC Participatory Action Research Participatory Research Methods Pedagogy Pediatrics Pedophilia. See Child Sexual Abuse and Pedophilia Peer Culture Peer Group Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich Peter Pan Philosophy, the Child in Philosophy for Children Photo-Elicitation, Research Method of Photovoice, Research Method of Piaget, Jean Piaget’s Interview Methods: From Clinical to Critical Picture Books Play, Theories of Play Therapy and Autism Playground Movement, U.S. History Playgrounds Playrooms

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List of Entries

Pocket Money Political Geographies of Youth Political Rights of Children Popularity Popularity, Social Media and Popularity and Gender Postcolonial Childhoods Posthumanism and Childhood Postman, Neil Postmodern Childhoods Power Relations in Research Pregnancy Priceless Child Private Schools Professional Conversations With Children Protection Rights, UNCRC Provision Rights, UNCRC Psy Disciplines Psychoanalysis, the Child in Psychosocial Studies Puberty Quantitative Methods Queer Childhoods Queer Children, Representations of Queer Studies Race and Childhood in U.S. Context Racial Formation Racial Innocence, Child and (U.S. History) Racism Reality Television Recapitulation Theory Reflexivity Refugees Reich, Wilhelm Relational Violence Religion and Children Representations of Childhood in Early China Reproductive Choice Residential Child Care Resilience Restavek Riot Grrrls Rites of Passage Roma Children Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Same-Sex Parenting Save the Children

School Desegregation, U.S. School Dress Codes School Readiness School Story, The School Uniforms School Violence Schooling Schooling, Gender, and Race Scouting, Boys Scouting, Girls Sea Hospitals Self-Esteem Self-Starvation. See Anorexia Nervosa Sesame Street Sex Education, Psychoanalysis in Sexual Citizenship Sexual Exploitation of Children Sexual Orientation Sexualities Education Sexuality and Childhood Sibling Rivalry Slavery, United States Social and Emotional Learning Social Exclusion and Bullying Social Inclusion Social Media, Children’s Use of. See Digital Media; Digital Mobile Technologies; Media, Children and Social Welfare Regimes Social Work Socialization Socialization Paradigm Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Sociology of Childhood Special Education Spencer, Herbert Spielrein, Sabina Spinoza, Baruch Spock, Benjamin Sport Stage Theories of Development Standpoint Theory State Socialism, Childhood During Steiner, Rudolf Stepparents Strange Situations. See Attachment Theory; Child Attachment Interviews Street Children Street Children, History of

List of Entries

Structural Violence Subjective Well-Being Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Sully, James Sunday School Supplementary Schools Surrogacy Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Sutton-Smith, Brian Tabula Rasa Teddy Bear Teen Magazines Teenage Fathers, United Kingdom Teenage Mothers. See Adolescence Pregnancy Teenager Television Series Teenagers Temple, Shirley Theme Parks Time, Concept of, in Children Time and Childhood Toilet Training Toys Toys, Digital Toys, History of Toys, Optical Toys, War Toys and Child Development: Montessori, Piaget, and Vygotsky Transgender Children Transitions Transnational Childhoods Transnational Families Transnational Migration Trauma-Informed Care Tween Unaccompanied Minors, Migration UNCRC. See United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) Undocumented Children United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF)

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Universalism Universalization of Childhood Violence Virtual Materiality Visual Methods Vocational Education Vulnerability of Children Vygotskij, Lev. See Vygotsky, Lev; Zone of ­Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev) Vygotsky, Lev Waldorf Schools War and War-Affected Children Watson, John B. Welfare State Well-Being, Children’s White House Conferences on Children (U.S.) Wholeness Approach Winnicott, Donald W. Women and Children Wordsworth, William Workhouses Working Children Working Children’s Movement Young Adult (YA) Literature Young Lives Study Young Offenders Young-Girl, Theory of Yousafzai, Malala Youth Youth and Representation in Popular Media, U.S. Youth Clubs Youth Culture Youth Gangs Youth Justice Youth Sexting Youth Studies Youth Studies, Birmingham School Youth Work YouTube Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

H understand the Kabyle peasants’ practices through developing the notion of ‘habitus’.

Habitus The word ‘habitus’ is derived from the Latin −’, which means ‘to have’ or ‘mainword ‘habeo tain’. In contemporary social theories and research, the concept of habitus is predominantly attributed to the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work in which he focuses on understanding human practice in the lived world. The purpose of this entry is to give an overview of the definition of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, its relation to other theoretical tools such as field and capital, and to highlight a few key examples that represent some of the strengths and challenges of trying to understand practice through habitus in educational research. In one of Bourdieu’s earliest works as a sociologist, he researched the effect of the French-Algerian war (1952–1962), colonialism, and uprooting on agricultural and marital practices of Algerian ­Kabyle peasants. Bourdieu found that the Kabyle society appeared to have a ‘traditional’ way of working (cultural practices) and maintenance of social hierarchy within the Kabyle house that had survived through generations, where the grandson appeared to be enacting the same principles of agricultural practice demonstrated by the grandfather. Peasants, however, were not able to take up new agricultural roles when uprooted and away from their ancestral lands. Yet, returning to their own lands (where their practice originated from) with new experiences, could at times lead to subtle transformations of the traditional practices. Thus, Bourdieu tried to

Habitus as Embodiment of the Social World The concept of habitus serves here as a tool to understand practice by overcoming the dichotomy presented between objective structures of society and subjectivities of agents acting within these social worlds. It is not the case of either/or, but the relational aspect of a person’s subjective experience within the social constraints of society. Thus, habitus is seen by Bourdieu as the embodiment of the social world (i.e., the embodiment of a person’s personal history of experience within a social structure). In educational research, the concept of habitus (both for individual students and collectively in the classroom) allows for analysis of the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender, as well as students’ cultural capital (here, cultural capital relates to accumulation of legitimate knowledge, experiences, and skills required to acquire further knowledge, skills, etc.) and social capital (i.e., who you know that matters in acquiring further capital conferring power onto the individual). Habitus is seen as a tendency to behave in a certain way or a ‘propensity to consent’ to acquire further cultural capital or power. This is because habitus is the embodiment of one’s experience of practice in the social world; in other words, the embodiment of a person’s personal history mediated by family, gender, ethnicity, and class relations, which structures one’s perceptions of the world in a certain way. 887

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Also, the classroom ‘activity’ is understood to be structured by a ‘field’ of objective power relations and positioning amongst students (and teachers, ‘inter alia’—including peer group norms and teacher positioning).

Habitus, Capital, and Field In a 1989 interview with Loïc Wacquant, Bourdieu describes a field (such as a classroom) as a network of objective relations between agents (such as students and teachers) positioned according to the capital/power (such as institutional cultural capital in the form of prior achievement) they possess. And it is due to this positioning that these agents can either access more capital or are hindered to do so, which then impacts their success at obtaining profits that are at stake in the field (further success in, e.g., mathematics attainment). Similarly, schools can be positioned in a wider field of power such as neighbourhood area (according to their mean GCSE Mathematics attainment as a measure for capital/power). Hence, the interaction of students’ habitus with a classroom field can be seen to generate behaviour or social practice (e.g., engagement or disengagement in educational ‘activities’), which can then be observed. Therefore, whilst habitus may be the manifestation of structural relations at the local level, one can never observe it outside of its interaction with the field. Indeed, it is difficult to understand habitus, without Bourdieu’s other sociological tools (such as capital and field). As mentioned before, Bourdieu pointed out that a habitus is defined in terms of (systems of transposable and durable) dispositions; for example, in educational research, students’ dispositions towards engagement in tasks set in lessons or as homework or, in other words, tendencies to behave in a certain manner mostly functional on an unconscious level. Additionally, the collective nature of habitus tends to reproduce social division and restructure society without necessarily consciously aiming at such reproduction. For example, Paul Willis showed how working-class boys were culturally and socially disadvantaged by the school, as well as their own perception of their social positioning. When Willis investigated how a group of working-class ‘lads’ got out of education and into working-class jobs, he found that it is their working-class, laddish ‘culture’ that is at the

very heart of class reproduction. He further argued that these conditions of reproduction were deeply embedded (a) in the pedagogic relationships within schools and (b) in the relationship between schools and the labor market. Based on a Marxist review of an ethnographic account of how working-class children get working-class jobs (mainly focusing on schooling), Willis used the term ‘counter-school culture’, hence, distancing ‘the lads’ from the school culture. Willis argued that this counterschool culture is embedded within the conditioning of the working class, favouring working-class job skills (amongst others) over any theoretical skills the school might instil in them. Willis also elaborated that in school these lads stick together and support each other in their endeavour of rejection of school authority and anything else that could take them away from their laddish personas and their peer group counterculture. Arguably from a Bourdieusian perspective, these lads are conditioned by their working-class habitus to behave in this way without any conscious or strategic rationale to do so. Again, in educational research, this is particularly useful in a classroom investigation where we might seek to connect differential achievement patterns (which may in some way be indicative of the collective habitus) with students’ dispositions towards learning. Bourdieu himself applied his work in education to understand inequality, stratification in the educational system, and its relation to the reproduction of a classed society. In 1970s, Bourdieu himself, with his colleague Jean Claude Passeron, analysed the French school system and found that students with a middle-class habitus are more likely to succeed. For example, these students might have higher prior achievement in a subject (cultural capital), which they can then reinvest in the classroom field by successfully engaging in and participating with tasks, thus enhancing their learning experience. Similarly, if the parents of the middle-class students are able to provide them with extra resources such as additional books, tuition, and so on (economic capital), it can then be seen as being reinvested by the students in the field in order to exchange it into further cultural capital (e.g., qualifications in mathematics). In contrast, students with a working-class (habitus) can be seen to lack the possession of these forms of capital (power), which can then affect the objective positioning of such students within the

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classroom (field) and lead to their disengagement with learning practices. Robyn Jorgensen (Zevenbergen) (2005) operationalizes this aspect of the habitus ‘as structuring structures’, to show how a mathematical habitus (of a learner) is constructed when in dialogue (i.e., through structuring practices) within a given field; hence, not only structuring the mathematical educational field in a cultural arbitrary way in terms of lower and higher ability tier/classes groupings but also restructuring (or as Jorgensen [Zevenbergen] calls it, ‘constructing’ the habitus of these students which gives rise to such practices). The study of the habitus along with capital and field has a specific prevalence in understanding childhood. This is so because habitus is created by past experiences: Early experiences have a large effect on a person’s perceptions—such experiences can have more an effect on a person’s perception than ‘objective’ reality. Early parental practices (such as higher or lower expectations) appear to be related to young children’s emergent educational habitus. Factors such as class, gender, and ethnicity are found to mediate parental practices and thus play a role in shaping children’s habitus with parents from working-class backgrounds having lower educational expectations. Hence, educational disadvantage starts early and possibly even before formal schooling begins and early childhood intervention is necessary to mitigate the risks of increasing educational disadvantage. However, in the educational research literature, the notion of habitus has been the least explored, in comparison with capital and field theory. Critiques have found this notion too obscure and too difficult to establish empirically leading it to take many multifold forms in data. Specifically, educational research appears to be dominated by a theorization of the tool rather than understanding how it is operationalized in practice. Diane Reay has argued that habitus is to be used as a method rather than just an explanatory tool in order to understand the role of education in reproducing social inequality. Reay alludes to using habitus as an interrogative method and has shown how in one example the dispositions toward education arising from a working-class group habitus continue to disenfranchise a woman who now sees herself as having middle-class status. Other critiques have argued that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is too deterministic; that is, there is no room

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for agency (see Jenkins, 1992). However, Bourdieu’s later writing alludes to the possibility of intragenerational change and social agency, specifically when one finds oneself in unfamiliar circumstances, which may lead to reflectivity and ‘conscious awakening’. Sophina Choudry See also Bourdieu, Pierre; Cultural Capital

Further Readings Bodovski, K. (2010). Parental practices and educational achievement: Social class, race, and habitus. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31(2), 139–156. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (pp. 52–65). Devon, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). The politics of protest. An interview by Kevin Ovenden. Socialist Review, 242, 18–20. Retrieved from http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org .uk/sr242/ovenden.htm Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. London, UK: Sage. Cleveland, G., Corter, C., Pelletier, J., Colley, S., & Bertrand, J. (2006). A review of the state of the field of early childhood learning and developing in childcare, kindergarten and family support programs. Toronto, ON: Prepared for the Canadian Council on Learning, Atkinson Centre for Society and Child Development, University of Toronto. Jenkins, R. (1992). Pierre Bourdieu. London, UK: Routledge. Jorgensen [Zevenbergen], R. (2005). The construction of a mathematical habitus: Implications of ability grouping in the middle years. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37(5), 607–619. Reay, D. (2004). ‘It’s all becoming a habitus’: Beyond the habitual use of habitus in educational research. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), 431–444. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working-class kids get working-class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Hall, Granville Stanley Granville Stanley Hall (1844–1924) is a significant figure in the history of psychology and childhood studies. Scholars have long acknowledged

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the important role he played in helping to establish psychology as a new academic discipline in the United States. His intellectual convictions and ambitions took him into the public realm, too, where he was involved in influential social reform movements of his time. Hall’s scientific stature faltered in the middle of his career, for several reasons discussed in this entry. However, scholars have argued that the 1904 publication of his twovolume masterpiece, Adolescence, helped restore his reputation. A few years later, Hall hosted Sigmund Freud on his first and only trip to the United States, when Freud gave a landmark series of lectures in 1909 at Clark University, where Hall was president for over 30 years.

Williams College and Union Theological Seminary Hall was born in rural Ashfield, MA. His parents, who were modest farmers, recognized his academic strengths and supported his love of words, with hopes he would become a minister. As a student at Williams College, Hall was selected as a class orator and class poet. During these intellectually formative years, he was influenced by ­Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, Williams College president Mark Hopkins, English literature professor John Bascom, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose series of guest lectures at ­Williams sparked a lifelong devotion in Hall. Upon graduating from Williams in 1867, Hall attended Union Theological Seminary for further education in history, philosophy, and theology. Many of his teachers had studied abroad, which stirred in him a deep desire to do the same, a goal he was able to realize with the help of his pastor, Henry Ward Beecher. Hall arrived in Germany in 1869, where he studied the history of philosophy in Bonn and Berlin. He returned to Union Theological Seminary during the fall of 1870 and graduated in 1871.

Antioch College, Harvard University, and Germany Revisited During a 4-year stint of teaching the history of philosophy at Antioch College, Hall became interested in a new branch of philosophy focused on the impact of Charles Darwin’s ideas on

psychological subjects. At the age of 32 years, Hall decided to leave Antioch to pursue graduate studies in psychology at Harvard University, under the tutelage of the eminent philosopher/psychologist William James. There, in 1878, he received the first PhD awarded by Harvard’s philosophy department and the first American one on a ­psychological topic. Also, of note, during Hall’s Harvard years was the in-depth biography he published on Laura Dewey Bridgman, the first blind/ deaf person to be educated in the United States. After receiving his PhD, Hall returned to ­Germany for further training in psychology, coming into contact with several key figures in the history of the discipline, including Gustave Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Weber, and Wilhelm Wundt. Indeed, Hall worked in Wundt’s psychological laboratory at Leipzig University from winter 1879 through summer 1880.

Johns Hopkins University and Early Years at Clark University Hall came home to the United States in fall of 1880, and with few job opportunities available in psychology, he agreed to offer lectures on pedagogy at Harvard. The following spring, he accepted an appointment to be the first chair of an American psychology department at the new Johns Hopkins University. While at Johns H ­ opkins from 1882 through 1888, Hall taught psychology, pedagogy, and history, and opened a small psychological research laboratory, which was later recognized as the first of its kind in the United States. He also began publishing the first U.S. journal in psychology, The American Journal of Psychology. Several of his students at Johns Hopkins went on to become leading contributors in the field, including James Mark Baldwin, James McKeen Cattell, John Dewey, and Arnold Gesell. In April 1888, Hall was invited to become president of Clark University in Worcester, MA. Although no campus or faculty existed yet, he accepted the invitation to lead the newly chartered university, which became the first institution in the United States to offer only graduate degrees. With Hall at the helm, psychology became the most prominent of Clark’s five graduate programs, producing more PhDs in the discipline

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than any other U.S. university at that time. Hall was actively involved, teaching formally and holding his famous Monday-night seminars, where graduate students joined him at home, often until quite late, to read and discuss newly published research. In 1892, during his early years at Clark, he founded the American Psychological Association and served as its first president, giving an address on the history and promise of experimental psychology in the United States. It was just after this, however, when Hall’s status among his fellow psychologists began to wane. Hall experienced the decline on an institutional level, when the founder of Clark began to withdraw financial support, and many of his faculty left for the newly established University of Chicago, downgrading the standing of the psychology program, as well as the university overall. His personal reputation was also under scrutiny, due to public disagreements with William James and others over the direction psychology should turn. Hall was developing a reputation as cantankerous, difficult, and less than trustworthy. This chapter in his life was preceded by personal tragedy, when his wife and 8-year-old daughter died by accidental asphyxiation while he was away, recuperating from an illness in 1890. With his hopes and ambitions in decline by the middle of the 1890s, Hall turned back to the child study movement, a movement that he had partially stumbled into earlier in his career, before he was hired at Johns Hopkins.

Child Study Movement One of Hall’s early publications on the subject of what children know before entering school launched the child study movement. Hall’s lectures at Harvard, before he was offered the psychology position at Johns Hopkins, were on pedagogy and coincided with a strong societal focus on educational reform. Hall disagreed with early experimental psychologists who thought that children were not worthwhile subjects of study. But he also disagreed with the laypeople and scientists who had begun publishing case studies of individual children. Instead, he argued that a modern approach to child study would involve surveying large quantities of children, yielding a more empirical, scientific understanding

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of child development. Hall’s views were initially embraced by teachers, reformers, and new psychologists alike, including those students he trained at Johns Hopkins and Clark. Even by contemporary standards, the number of teachers and students that Hall surveyed in the mid-1890s is impressive: It is estimated that he reached 800 teachers and principals and maybe as many as 100,000 children. Although Hall’s goals to collect and produce scientific knowledge about childhood had a nationwide impact, it was not too long before his approach was strongly criticized, for several reasons. First, Hall’s critics argued that his research was limited to the description. He had not tested any hypotheses or even designed the surveys very carefully, his critics said, and his conclusions were unwarranted, even slipshod. Second, other critics were dismissive of his interdisciplinary inclinations. Hall was interested in the way several disciplines understood childhood and adolescence, including anthropology, sociology, and religion, among others. If scientific psychology would eventually bypass these disciplines, then collaborating with the other fields would only diminish psychology’s stature. But perhaps, the more defensible concerns about Hall’s approach to child study were related to his firmly held beliefs about how development unfolded.

Recapitulation and Lamarckism Hall believed in recapitulation, the idea that as individual human beings develop, they reenact the history of the species. Hall and his colleagues at the time understood Darwin’s theory of evolution, but since Gregor Mendel’s research was not yet available, they did not understand genetic inheritance. They ascribed to Lamarckism, the idea that memories and skills acquired in one person could be passed on to one’s biological children. Hall was loyal to this view and it shaped his teaching and writing. In some cases, he advocated for reforms that his contemporaries could support, such as plenty of fresh air and exercise for children. Outdoor play, he argued, had been important during the early stages in the evolution of our species. In other cases, his ideas ran counter to prevailing norms. For example, in contrast to John Dewey and other educational reformers, Hall held that

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different educational environments would not have much of an impact on children’s learning. He believed that our competencies were inherited and that education could not alter a child’s underlying potential. Already partially discredited over methodological concerns related to his questionnaires, Hall’s adherence to recapitulation and his interpretation of Lamarckism brought him further out of step with many of his colleagues.

Parent Education Movement and Child Welfare Movement Scholars have noted that even as the child study movement bypassed Hall, his ideas were discovered and embraced, mostly by mothers, as part of the parent education movement. His views on childhood were popular among mothers during the late 1890s because he valued children’s individuality and believed that mothers had important work to do, drawing out each child’s latent potential. He thought children’s development should occur naturally, rather than be actively shaped, and that parents should value their own intuition. This message was especially appealing to middleclass mothers, and Hall was invited to speak at mothers’ clubs and contribute to parenting magazines. His views had not changed, but he had found a new, appreciative audience. In this realm, his interdisciplinary interests were welcomed— especially his inclination to combine psychology and religion. Whereas the parent education movement was predominately driven by middle-class concerns, those involved in the child welfare movement rallied around a commitment to improving the lives of disadvantaged children, with a particular focus on juvenile justice reform. Poor living conditions, especially in urban settings, were also a target of the movement. On this front, Hall’s ideas received a mixed reception. On the one hand, his enthusiasm for rural life and plenty of outdoor exercise were in keeping with child welfare advocates’ commitment to better living conditions for all children. But his continued beliefs in recapitulation and Lamarckism led him to conclude that possibilities for improvement were limited and that heredity played a dominant role in determining one’s social status, views that directly conflicted with those of the child welfare reformers.

The Publication of Adolescence and Freud’s Visit to Clark The editors of a 2006 special issue of the journal History of Psychology, devoted to a centennial reappraisal of Hall’s masterpiece Adolescence, argued that the 1904 publication and commercial success of this massive, two-volume book, made a considerable difference in reestablishing Hall’s standing in psychology. It was his one and only major publication, and it took him 10 years to write. Although it contains many theories that would be dismissed today, the book sold incredibly well and is credited with establishing the academic field of adolescent psychology. Further evidence of Hall’s professional rehabilitation was his success at inviting Sigmund Freud to give a series of lectures at Clark University in 1909. Freud was joined by several other psychoanalytic theorists, including Carl Jung, on this sole visit to the United States, where his controversial ideas developed traction for the first time. Hall served as president of Clark University for over 30 years, until his retirement in 1920, at the age of 76 years. Even colleagues who highly disagreed with him acknowledged the infectious energy and enthusiasm that he inspired in others. Although his scientific work was largely discredited for various reasons, including lack of methodological rigor and incorrect understanding of hereditary science, he was an early advocate of interdisciplinary collaboration, the scientific study of childhood and adolescence, and the conviction that research should inform public policy. As a tireless promoter of the discipline of psychology in America, few rival his organizational and institutional achievements. Phyllis A. Wentworth See also Adolescence, History of; Child Study; Child Welfare; Freud, Sigmund; Gesell, Arnold

Further Readings Arnett, J. J., & Cravens, H. (2006). G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence: A centennial reappraisal introduction. History of Psychology, 9, 165–171. doi:10.1037/ 1093-4510.9.3.165 Bringmann, W. G., Bringmann, M. W., & Early, C. E. (1992). G. Stanley Hall and the history of psychology. American Psychologist, 47, 281–289.

Health Brooks-Gunn, J., & Johnson, A. D. (2006). G. Stanley Hall’s contribution to science, practice, and policy: The child study, parent education, and child welfare movements. History of Psychology, 9, 247–258. doi:10.1037/1093-4510.9.3.247 Goodchild, L. F. (2012). G. Stanley Hall and an American social Darwinist pedagogy: His progressive educational ideas on gender and race. History of Education Quarterly, 52, 62–98. doi:10.1111/ j.1748-5959.2011.00373.x Leary, D. E. (2006). G. Stanley Hall, a man of many words: The role of reading, speaking, and writing in his psychological work. History of Psychology, 9, 198–223. doi:10.1037/1093-4510.9.3.198 Ross, D. (1972). G. Stanley Hall: The psychologist as prophet. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Siegel, A. W., & White, S. H. (1982). The child study movement. In H. W. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (pp. 233–285). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Health Definitions of health in childhood recognise development alongside health as the state of ‘physical, mental, and social well-being’ identified by the World Health Organization. Children’s needs differ as they develop from infancy through childhood, adolescence, and the transition to adulthood. A developmental perspective is consistent with the salutogenic theory, which defines health as a resource for a productive and healthy life and the ability to adapt and to self-manage. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child asserts children’s rights to survive and develop healthily and to have a standard of living adequate for physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development. The health of children is also a key concern for families because of their personal attachments and children’s roles in biological reproduction (as carriers of parental DNA) and social reproduction (as carriers of culture). Children’s health is important to communities because as adults they will inherit the legacy of economic and social conditions and take on responsibility for its future development. Early life exposures, many mediated through disadvantage and deprivation, have consequences for adult health and well-being—and can even affect

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succeeding generations. Child health is, therefore, also a locus for intervention to avoid or redress economic and social disadvantage. Understanding issues surrounding children’s health involves identifying inequalities, considers the importance of nutrition, and addresses how patterns of disease change with economic development and the social construction of health problems as well as the implication that an increasing number of children live with long-term conditions.

Inequalities in Children’s Health Social, educational, and economic factors are the strongest determinants of indicators of child health, including death in infancy and childhood. Longitudinal studies of cohorts of children from the 1940s demonstrated strong associations amongst socioeconomic status at birth, early survival, and subsequent health and development. Further studies have demonstrated associations with educational achievement and influences of intervening events such as divorce. By their nature, these studies require long timescales to produce their results, sometimes to questions that are not foreseen when children are recruited, which can make this type of research difficult to fund. The complexity of influences on children’s lives also means there is potential for confounding effects because children can experience multiple disadvantages (e.g., poverty, poor housing, not being breastfeed, exposure to tobacco, family instability). Studies of causal mechanisms are also required, and collection of DNA, tissue, and other specimens in biobanks could in the future help to establish how genetic factors interact with the environment. The effects of antenatal and early childhood development and nutrition can be seen in health throughout the life course because they are associated with educational, social, and economic outcomes in adult as well as child life. The first 1,000 days of life have been identified as of particular vulnerability to the effects of nutritional deficiencies and cognitive underdevelopment. Brain development in early childhood is an example of a critical period of vulnerability, which can be influenced by the emotional and social as well as the physical and nutritional environment. Another critical period is middle adolescence (12–16 years) when hormonal changes, the social context, and the environmental context interact. As well as

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specific times of vulnerability, risks to health can build up throughout childhood, by the cumulative effects of disadvantage on health and development. There are major inequalities in children’s life chances, with nearly one in four under 5 years old worldwide suffering from stunting (low height for age), which can be an indication of chronic malnutrition. Children’s health is also influenced by other environmental factors, including at the neighbourhood level (e.g., deprivation, housing density, proximity to high volumes of traffic) as well as the family environment (e.g., parental income/wealth, educational attainment, occupational social class, unemployment, occupational demands, mental health, smoking, breastfeeding, housing, and material deprivation). The risk of infant death increases with greater maternal deprivation, due to higher rates of preterm delivery and maternal health as well as early environmental factors. The complex of factors associated with child health is indicative of the multiple contexts within which children are embedded, including family, peer group, school, and community.

Nutrition and Health Nutrition is an important influence on child health that illustrates relationships and interactions among physical, psychological, and social factors. There is clear evidence of the health benefits of breastfeeding for infants (and mothers). However, the rate of breastfeeding at 6 months varies widely among nations and across socioeconomic groups. Undernutrition remains a major problem of child health in some countries. There are also variations associated with social conditions. The World Health Organization reports that the mortality rate and stunting prevalence in children under 5 years of age are substantially higher in rural than urban areas, in lower economic status families, and in families with parents with low education. In addition to undernutrition, childhood obesity has emerged as one of the greatest health threats to children and their future adult health globally. Obesity is described as an epidemic by the World Health Organization. It can affect educational attainment, self-esteem, and body image and can limit one’s ability to take part in physical activity. Childhood weight status is an important

predictor of overweight and obesity in adult life, with associated increased health risks including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and bowel cancer. As with undernutrition, social conditions influence overconsumption malnutrition. Research in the United Kingdom demonstrates that children are at a much greater risk of being overweight or obese if they grow up in deprived circumstances. Contributors to obesogenic environments that increase the risk of children becoming overweight and obese include physical (e.g., fast-food outlets) and economic (e.g., limited income to support healthy food choices) components. These are more concentrated in deprived communities.

The Changing Profile of Disease in Childhood Epidemiologists describe phases of disease across the history of human development, from the Age of Pestilence and Famine through the Age of Receding Pandemics in which children’s life expectancy improved as infectious diseases caused less mortality. Children in low-income countries with less well developed sanitary and/or public health infrastructure remain vulnerable to infectious diseases. As economic conditions and health facilities improve, countries enter the Age of Degenerative and Man-Made Diseases when chronic or longterm conditions are more frequent causes of death than infections. This pattern is reflected by changes in the global burden of disease in childhood between 1990 and 2015. The number of deaths per year in childhood and adolescence is estimated to have nearly halved from 14.18 million in 1990 to 7.26 million in 2015. The improved survival is mainly due to reductions in causes of death associated with infectious diseases, malnutrition, and perinatal mortality (i.e., occurring at or shortly after birth). The reduction was not evenly spread— the countries with the lowest sociodemographic scores accounted for a higher proportion of global deaths in 2015 than in 1990. The proportion of children living with disability decreased at a much slower rate (about 6%) than deaths. Children can have continuing health effects from conditions they survive, and the contribution to childhood disability of noncommunicable diseases and injuries has increased in importance.

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Social Construction of Health Problems Child health and illness, like childhood and adolescence, are socially constructed. The World Health Organization’s International Classifications of Diseases is regularly updated (the 11th revision was released in 2018). New iterations arise from scientific advances but also illustrate contests about the boundaries between a normal childhood and pathological problems. Attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder is an example of a diagnosis used with widely varying frequency across different countries. While the interests of children, families, and society overlap, they are not identical and so there is potential for conflict about children’s health and different perspectives on what constitutes a health problem. Understandings of the meaning and purpose of childhood influence the extent to which identification of health conditions and medical intervention is viewed as providing appropriate support and treatment or imposing inappropriate labels, treatments, and restrictions on children.

Living With Long-Term Conditions Long-term conditions require self-care, including taking regular medication (e.g., anti-convulsants to prevent epileptic seizures), avoiding environmental factors (e.g., allergens that provoke asthma attacks), following restricted diets (e.g., to reduce overweight) or exercise regimens (e.g., to clear chest secretions in cystic fibrosis), and management of acute episodes (e.g., pain caused by acute sickle cell crisis). In childhood, parents and other adult carers have the primary responsibility for self-management, including monitoring symptoms, organising everyday routines, and adjusting medications and nonpharmacological interventions. Parenting skills are, therefore, required to engage the cooperation of infants and young children with self-management regimens. Responsibilities must be shared with other adults as children attend school, requiring negotiation of arrangements for managing routines and responding to crises. Cultural ideas about the roles of parents, extended family members and others who interact with children can lead to international variations in the expectations of children and those involved in their care.

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There is increasing need for children to take responsibilities for their own self-care. This can involve physical skills (e.g., it is recommended that children need to be approximately 7 years of age in order to brush their teeth effectively) combined with cognitive skills (e.g., children with diabetes mellitus matching insulin injection doses to carbohydrates prior to meals). Parents and others are involved in caring for children, and children must, therefore, negotiate how they share the work of self-management and adjust the division of responsibilities so they are developmentally appropriate. Relinquishing control can be challenging for adult carers as they manage tensions between their responsibility for protecting children and nurturing children’s independence and increasing autonomy. The adolescent phase of development can be particularly challenging. Selfmanagement requirements can be affected by physical developmental changes (e.g., the nutritional requirements of growth spurts can disrupt established patterns of diabetes control). Adolescence varies across cultures, although there are consistencies as a time of exploratory behaviours, which can expose young people to risks of injury from adventurous activities, intake of tobacco, alcohol and other substance use, sexual infections, and unwanted pregnancy. The increasing self-consciousness and focus on development of identity in adolescence can also mean that young people are coming to understand the implications of a long-term condition for their adult lives. Normalization can become an increasing priority for young people as they develop their social identities. Self-management of a long-term, or disabling, condition requires young people, parents, and other carers to balance the need to adapt to special needs with enabling young people to lead a normal life. This can include the type of school attended, and whether adaptations can be made to participate in mainstream education or whether a specialist school would be more enabling for a young person. In adults, long-term conditions are associated with biographical disruption. However, the context for young people’s conditions is complicated by the changes associated with puberty and the development of sexual and other aspects of identity. Adherence to medication and other regimens is often reduced in adolescence as young people reject

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unwanted illness identities. Diabetes mellitus control can deteriorate, increasing the risks of damage with life-changing effects such as kidney failure and blindness. The best control is associated with a pattern of young people taking responsibility for self-management but parents (or other adult carers) remaining involved. The need to negotiate these relationships and responsibilities adds to the potential for conflict with parents as young people seek to assert more independent identities.

Final Thoughts Health is central to children achieving their rights, for the biological and cultural reproduction of communities and for economic sustainability. Health can be understood as a resource, with needs that change across the developmental spectrum of children and young people. Inequalities in health are evident within and across countries, with consequences across the life course. Increased survival as a result of improved nutrition and reduction of mortality associated with childbirth and infectious diseases is changing the pattern of health and illness. As more children survive, the number living with long-term conditions increases. Adult carers and children need to negotiate developmentally appropriate divisions of responsibility for self-management of long-term conditions. Technologies that improve children’s health opportunities can, therefore, be expected to make increasing demands on children as well as their adult carers to understand and engage with managing their health. Peter Callery See also Adolescence; Health Care; Medicalization of Childhood; Mental Health, Child; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Pearson, H. (2016). The life project: The extraordinary story of our ordinary lives. London, UK: Allen Layne (Penguin). Pillas, D., Marmot, M., Naicker, K., Goldblatt, P., Morrison, J., & Pikhart, H. (2014). Social inequalities in early childhood health and development: A European-wide systematic review. Pediatric Research, 76(5), 418–424. doi:10.1038/pr.2014.122

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. (2017). State of child health report 2017. London, UK: Author. Singh, I., & Wessely, S. (2015). Childhood: A suitable case for treatment? The Lancet Psychiatry, 2(7), 661–666. doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(15)00106-6 The Global Burden of Disease: Child and Adolescent Health Collaboration. (2017). Child and adolescent health from 1990 to 2015: Findings from the global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors 2015 study. JAMA Pediatrics. Online First. doi:10.1001/ jamapediatrics.2017.0250 World Health Organization. (2015). State of inequality: Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health. Geneva, Germany: Author. Wysocki, T., Buckloh, L. M., & Pierce, J. (2017). The psychological context of diabetes mellitus in youth. In M. C. Roberts & R. G. Steele (Eds.), Handbook of pediatric psychology (5th ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Health Care Health care is organised within health care systems and includes elements focussed on preventing health problems and providing suitable expertise and interventions when they arise. All children require access to care to support their healthy development, and most will require healthcare interventions, some of which can be complex and demanding of children and families as well as of health-care professionals. Health care also highlights the social status of children; the extent to which their perspectives are respected, they can exercise rights. This entry considers special features of health care for children, preventive and other components of health-care systems, international variations in access to health care, the integration of health care and self-care, and issues that arise in decisions about children’s health care.

Special Features of Health Care for Children Children’s health care differs from adults’ health care in important respects. Some conditions are seen only in specific developmental stages, such as birth. There are implications for the organisation of health-care services, the delivery of care by

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practitioners, and the role of parents and other adult carers. Developmental status has fundamental implications for health care for children and young people. At the practical level, it is necessary for processes to be adapted to children’s needs, including the size of equipment and the way that practitioners interact. Some diseases are specific to childhood or to adolescence, and health problems can present differently in children than in adults. The developmental perspective that emphasises health as a resource for a productive and healthy life, and the ability to adapt and to self-manage, means that the objectives of children’s health care include maximising future development as well as addressing immediate needs. The social status of children and young people in health care is influenced by how both health care and childhood are conceptualised. Health care can be understood both as a service for individual consumers to purchase within a market economy and as a public good organised to achieve social ends. Children may rarely be consumers who seek out health care themselves; however, those with parental responsibility can act as proxy consumers. Seeking appropriate health care is a moral responsibility of parents, but the wants of parent proxies are not necessarily the same as the needs of children themselves. The potential for conflict between the wants of parents and the needs of children is recognised in some legal systems. The UK law defines ‘parental responsibility’ as the rights and responsibilities of parents including consent to medical treatment. However, parental responsibility can be shared with a local authority if a child is subject to a care order or restricted by a court order in order to protect the best interests of the child. Thus, what parents want can be denied if the court determines that it does not meet the needs of the child. Such cases are rare but indicate that health care has a status as a societal responsibility as well as a service to individuals.

Preventive Health Care Health-care interventions can also prioritise achieving public health goals. Vaccination programmes immunise individual children against infections. While some children may be at particular risk (e.g., those with compromised immune

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systems due to disease or treatment), the objective of vaccination programmes is to reduce the potential for spread of disease by maximising the proportion of the population with immunity. Parental consent to immunisation is a moral responsibility to society as well as individual children. Therefore, policy makers sometimes consider using social sanctions to promote immunisation, such as requiring vaccination as a condition of school enrolment.

Components of Health Care Health-care systems include components that focus on promoting the health of the population and preventing disease (public health), ­community-based first contacts with general practitioners (primary care), hospital specialisms (secondary care), and highly specialised management of complex problems (tertiary care). Children are a key focus of public health interventions to prevent disease. This can lead to social and politically contentious issues about the role of state versus family—for example, in decisions about the timing and content of sexual health advice.

International Variations in Access to Health Care Indicators of the effectiveness of health-care systems include mortality from treatable conditions, such as pneumonia and asthma. International comparisons can reveal substantial differences even between neighbouring countries with similar economies. There are also variations in other indicators, including avoidable hospital admissions, which highlight the important role of primary care in managing conditions in the community and public health interventions to prevent ill-health. The number of physicians per thousand population varies from less than one to more than seven, as calculated by the World Health Organisation, and for nurses and midwives, the range is from less than one to nearly 20 per thousand population. Variations in health-care outcomes may be associated with differences in health-care training, for example, general practitioners in Sweden receive more specialist training than do those in the United Kingdom. The organisation of services can also be an important factor—for example,

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Swedish general practitioners can be collocated with paediatricians and children’s nurses, facilitating close working.

Integration of Health Care for Children Children contribute a high proportion of primary care workload, as parents seek help for minor illnesses and for signs that may indicate longer-term health problems. While paediatricians can be available in some primary care systems, others such as in the United Kingdom employ general practitioners who may have limited training in the specific needs of children and young people. Integration with secondary and tertiary care is, therefore, necessary to provide children and young people with access to specialist advice and care. Children require health-care systems designed for each life stage. Services also need to be integrated vertically (between primary and secondary care), horizontally (between health, education, and social care), longitudinally (to support transitions across developmental stages), and with wider public health systems (e.g., policies to reduce exposure to health risks such as air pollution and obesity). The ‘house of care’ model can be used to conceptualise the integration of services. The ‘house’ has ‘walls’ (an engaged and informed patient; professional partners) under a roof (organisational systems and processes) resting on a foundation (commissioning plans). The idea of a ‘patient’ is complicated in children’s and young people’s health care. Although the primary focus is the health of a child patient, children’s health care also needs to take into account the family setting in which children live, so there is an aspiration to be ‘family-centred’ as well as ‘child-centred’. Parents can play a crucial role in coordinating care, particularly for children with complex needs. It is possible for multiple health-care practitioners to contribute specific expertise and support, which needs to be coordinated with social and educational services. A parent can be the only person with an overview of how the various services interact with each other and their child. The demands of care of complex and/or life-limiting conditions can be stressful and emotionally charged, as well as affect family members’ health, employment, and financial status.

Self-Care Health-care systems must adapt as the patterns of disease in childhood change with fewer infections, less malnutrition, and more long-term conditions. Self-care by children themselves and their families is central to managing such health problems. Health-care systems need to develop models of care that are focused on supporting self-care and integrating health-care interventions into community settings as well as providing emergency care in hospitals for acute exacerbations.

Parental and Societal Roles in Health-Care Decisions The concerns and interests of children and parents are usually assumed to be aligned; however, there is potential for them to diverge, in which case health-care decisions can become complex. The nature of the parental role has historically emphasised ownership of children and family life as a private area into which the state only intervenes in extremis. The development of a rights perspective on childhood has consequently led to a reframing of the role as parental responsibility, in some societies. This can limit parents’ autonomy in healthcare decision making. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the courts have sometimes overruled parents and taken a view about the best interests of an individual child, either to ensure that a child receives treatment (e.g., a blood transfusion that parents decline on religious grounds) or to prevent treatment (e.g., desperate treatments that would increase suffering with little chance of extending life). The approach varies across societies dependent on the social status of children, and also the societal view of health care as a good to be purchased by individuals or a common resource to be distributed according to need.

Different Forms of Knowledge and Expertise in Child Health Care Decisions about children’s health care can be informed by different forms of expertise. The professional knowledge required to deliver health care to children and young people includes understanding the biology of childhood healthy development and disease, psychological typical and atypical

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development, and social development through childhood. Biological knowledge includes embryology and how physiology changes at birth and various subsequent stages of growth. It also includes the pathologies of childhood, which include congenital diseases and other conditions that are specific to childhood and adolescence as well as diseases that can present throughout the life span. The presentation of illness in childhood can be nonspecific, and distinguishing between minor and potentially serious problems can be a major challenge for health professionals. This is all the more problematic because children’s conditions can deteriorate very quickly with little warning. Health professionals can have limited experience of less common childhood conditions and so struggle to diagnose problems promptly. Rare diseases form a large health burden—the UK government, for example, estimates they affect 3 million people in the United Kingdom. Because many are life-limiting conditions, children account for approximately half of people living with a rare disease. Biomedical knowledge is often of limited use in isolation because children are psychological and social as well as biological beings. Psychological and social factors can influence health and development influences the extent to which children can communicate about their health problems and needs. Health professionals often work in a context of uncertainties. There can be uncertainty due to the limitations of knowledge, in part, because of methodological difficulties of producing robust evidence from researching small populations of children with rare diseases. Individual practitioners have to be content with the uncertainty about whether they are fully informed about all knowledge about a specific topic. There is also uncertainty about which of these forms of uncertainty apply as a professional deals with a specific problem. Knowledge derived from experience can, therefore, be an important complement to the scientific knowledge of a discipline. Parents and other family members also bring experiential knowledge of a specific child which can be important in assessing the presentation of a health problem in an individual. Practitioners and family members are then faced with a further level of uncertainty about which forms of disciplinary and experiential knowledge are most appropriate to understanding

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a child’s problems. The context of dis/trust in science and authority adds a dimension which can lead to contests about whose knowledge should be given priority in health-care decisions. These contests can be seen in conflicts at the population level (about whether children should be given immunisations) as well as about the diagnosis and treatment of individuals (whether a child is recognised as having a medical condition and whether specific treatments are appropriate). Such conflicts can become public causes through Internet communication, which can also facilitate parents seeking alternative opinions to challenge those of their own practitioners.

Contests in Health-Care Decision Making Decisions about interventions in the most severe conditions can be moral choices about trade-offs between survival and quality of life. For example, aggressive treatment of some brain tumours with some high-risk surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiography can cause lifelong disabilities. There are also contests about the boundaries of health care. An example is the diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and whether this is an appropriate extension of medicalisation to prevent suffering and promote development or used as a method of social control of children. Children seeking gender reassignment also raise issues about whether and when hormone and/or surgical interventions should be offered to alter anatomy and physiology in line with gender identity. This is just one of the most obvious examples of how children’s developmental status influences health-care decision making. In the case of gender reassignment, there are clear physical developmental stages that require decision making, including throughout puberty. The legal age of independent consent varies across jurisdictions, giving parents rights and responsibilities to consent on behalf of children. Sensitive cases such as provision of contraception have led to case law such as the concept of ‘Gillick competence’ in the United Kingdom, which allows for assessment of individual children’s competence to make informed decisions about their own care. The changes from historical conceptions of children as possessions to rights-based views of childhood highlight the need to explore children’s own

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perspectives and priorities. There is evidence of differences in parents’ and children’s own reports of their mental and physical health and of their quality of life. Peter Callery See also Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); Health; Mental Health, Child; Residential Child Care; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

Further Readings Klaber, R. E., Blair, M., Lemer, C., & Watson, M. (2017). Whole population integrated child health: Moving beyond pathways. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 102(1), 5–7. doi:10.1136/archdischild-2016-310485 Mathers, N., & Paynton, D. (2015). Rhetoric and reality in person-centred care: Introducing the house of care framework. British Journal of General Practice, 66, 12–13. doi:10.3399/bjgp16X683077 Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Nursing, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health & College of Emergency Medicine. (2011). Right care, right place, first time? United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. (1990). The convention on the rights of the child (Vol. 2006). New York, NY: Author. Waldboth, V., Patch, C., Mahrer-Imhof, R., & Metcalfe, A. (2016). Living a normal life in an extraordinary way: A systematic review investigating experiences of families of young people’s transition into adulthood when affected by a genetic and chronic childhood condition. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 62, 44–59. doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2016.07.007 Wallander, J. L., & Koot, H. M. (2016). Quality of life in children: A critical examination of concepts, approaches, issues, and future directions. Clinical Psychology Review, 45, 131–143. doi:10.1016/j .cpr.2015.11.007 Wolfe, I., Lemer, C., & Cass, H. (2016). Integrated care: A solution for improving children’s health? Archives of Disease in Childhood, 101, 992–997. doi:10.1136/ archdischild-2013-304442

Hidden Adult,

in

Literature

The term ‘the hidden adult’ was coined by Perry Nodelman through his navigations of the debate

surrounding the definition of children’s literature by analysing the adult presence in the field, concluding that all children’s literature is inevitably shaped and created by adults. Since his seminal work, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (2008), the term ‘the hidden adult’ in children’s literature scholarship is used to refer to the pedagogical function, didactic nature, adult agency, or ideology in a children’s text. Specifically, it refers to the adult influence in the creation of children’s literature, in terms of structure, content, and ideological messages. Therefore, the term ‘adult’ does not refer to actual authors or readers, rather, it refers to the implied figure of the ‘Adult’ that permeates children’s literature. The main interest in the study of the hidden adult is not the particular messages that children’s literature communicates to its audiences, but rather it is the examination of the power (im)balance or struggle between adult and child that surrounds and shapes the medium. In children’s literary criticism, the hidden adult, generally discussed under the term ‘didacticism’, has been a topic of debate since the late 1980s.

The Impossibility of Children’s Literature The study of the hidden adult in children’s literature centres on an argument made by Jacqueline Rose, who controversially stated that children’s literature is impossible because it is a nostalgic adult’s self-therapy rather than any actual dialogue between adult and child. Because the adult addresses an implied child, which is a figment of their own imagination and memory of themselves, the resulting ‘children’s’ literature is an adult creation and reflection of adult thoughts and feelings and has nothing to do with children or childhood. Children’s literature, then, is adult literature in disguise. The text also comes from a power disbalance between adult provider and child consumer, a disbalance that Rose saw as necessarily malign. The impossibility of children’s literature is exacerbated by the issue of a lack of a clear distinction between children’s literature, young adult fiction, and adult literature. In children’s literary criticism, distinctions may be drawn between studies of young children’s texts and young adult fiction for the purpose of clarity; however, the term ‘children’s literature’ can serve as an umbrella

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term for all literatures that are somehow marked as being for an audience which is younger than and differs from the audience for adult literature. Although a difference exists, this distinction is bounded by temporal and cultural factors, may differ from individual to individual, and remains difficult to pinpoint exactly. One difference between children’s literature criticism and ‘adult’ literature criticism, some scholars argue, is that children’s literature criticism is based on the notion that, for adults, the child is a knowable entity. Not necessarily simple but unchanging enough to be understood completely, adults claim understanding of all of the child’s faculties. Because adults believe that they know fully what the child thinks, feels, wants and needs, they feel that they can analyse children’s literature. This attitude towards children, childhood, and children’s texts leads to projections of adult ideas on childhood rather than analyses of children’s literature as a children’s product and feeds into the impossibility of children’s literature argument.

Ideology in Children’s Literature An important and oft-discussed characteristic of adult agency in children’s literature is the transmission of ideological messages through the text. The presence of a specific ideology in the narrative need not be overt or even intentional; much of the hidden adult’s presence or influence within a text lies in assumptions and unspoken understandings. The reinforcement of the dominant culture’s ideology through literature is not exclusive to children’s texts; it is an aspect of all literature. However, the implied form of ideology is particularly effective in children’s literature because novice readers are unlikely to be able to identify it as they consume it, and are, therefore, unable to critically engage with it. The study of such underlying ideological messages, in combination with more overt expressions of particular norms and values, attempts to reveal the ideological intentions and/or possible impacts of such texts on the implied child reader. In the discussion on ideology in children’s texts, the adult–child power relationship is considered colonial in nature by some scholars. The adult is considered the base norm, complete, and finalised, the child the Other, a future adult under construction. This is age-related normativity, termed

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‘aetonormativity’, and underlines all adult–child interactions, including the production and consumption of the literature. Following this argument, the powerful and authoritarian adult is able to define itself by constructing an idea of what adulthood is by opposing it to their construction of the child Other, which is inferior and needs to be educated, trained, and moulded. The binary opposition between adult and child is a temporal one, as children necessarily grow up to become adults themselves. To ensure that the child transitions seamlessly into adult society, it needs to be instructed following the adults’ norms and values. Children’s literature can serve as a means of socialisation and education to prepare the child for joining the fold of adulthood by communicating desired ideological ideas to its audience. This aspect of children’s literary criticism employs and adapts critical theory from general literary studies to analyse and discuss overt and covert ideologies in children’s texts. Examples of such critical approaches include feminist studies, analysing male–female power dynamics, postcolonial theory, analysing race and Othering, and ecocritical approaches, which examine human–nature binaries. The aim of this type of approach to studying children’s literature is to reveal underlying power dynamics that form the base of the worlds, such texts present as being (a)typical to child audiences. Through underlying power dynamics and overt discussions thereof, the implied adult creates a shared understanding of what is and is not acceptable in adult society, although the actual extra-textual adult who constructed the narrative may not have been consciously aware of writing a particular text in this way.

Constructing the Child Through Children’s Literature Children’s literature is an adult activity. Although there are cases of children’s literature written by children themselves, these are exceptions to the rule, and in these instances of child authors, the marketing, publishing, and purchasing activities overwhelmingly remain the purview of adults. The adult remains hidden because although children’s literature may in name, reputation, and structure appear to be aimed at child audiences, it is produced by adults (authors, publishers, critics, and

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scholars), for parents to give or read to their ­children—as children generally do not have the means to purchase books for themselves, independent from adults. Because of this particular characteristic of children’s literature, it is often marketed in a dual way to adults and children by appealing to what adults think children like. This leads the adult to shaping both the text and the audience, as the adult writes children’s literature not for a specific child but for what they believe children are and need. What the child ‘needs’ to read is that which instructs the child in appropriateness and prepares them for conforming to adult understandings of correct living. Children’s texts (seem to) discuss childhood or aspects thereof, yet these written children and ideas of what childhood is and should be are created and propagated by adults. Therefore, the childhoods represented in children’s texts are adult constructions, based on a (colonial) supposition of an understanding of what children are combined with fragmented memories of the adult’s own past childhood. Through constructing childhood, the adult also creates a counter-image of adulthood, as both concepts are defined through their opposition to each other. The child the implied author writes for cannot be a real child as the adult author cannot know the child; instead, it is the adult’s memory of their own child self, what they needed and liked. The child audience and adult creator are the same being. Children’s literature is past-oriented because it builds an image of childhood based on the adult’s own fragmented memories, yet it is future-oriented as it attempts to influence current child readers, which are not in a state of being but rather of becoming, on their journey to adulthood. When viewed as an unsurmountable obstacle for actual communication with the intended child audience, this is part of the argument for why children’s literature is impossible. The conservative image associated with much children’s literature can be ascribed to this continued assertion of values from the author’s past as being appropriate for future society.

Adult–Child Power Relationships and Children’s Literature Children’s literature is characterised by the adult– child power relationship which underlines it, both

intra- and extra-textually. The inherently didactic nature of children’s literature can be seen as a negative, oppressive force that the implied adult exerts on the figure of the supposed malleable child reader. Especially when the adult–child relationship is viewed as colonial in nature, it is possible to see the influence adults exert on child readers as manipulative, limiting, and potentially damaging to the child. A counterargument to this negative view on the pedagogical function of children’s literature is that although the adult and child have differing types of power, the child is not a submissive, powerless ‘tabula rasa’. The difference between the adult and the child lies in lived time: Because the adult has had more time, they are more knowledgeable, experienced, and carry more authority than the child. The child, on the other hand, has power because it has more unlived time: The instability and insecurity of the child’s future means that the adult has only limited control over what the child experiences, learns, and values. The child does not necessarily adopt the ideologies present in the text and may take away lessons learnt that are not what the adult intended. The unknowability of the child and its future is what gives it power. The imagined ideal child that children’s literature attempts to create through its ideological and prescriptive discourse is not a finalised being. Through aetonormative discourse, the child is seen as lacking, a deficient adult; the imagined child is not the end destination, it is on its way to becoming an ideal adult. Like the construction of childhood in children’s texts, the concept of ideal adulthood is based on the adult’s own self; however, this stems not from an image of the adult self as happily finalised. Rather, it is because the current adult experiences frustration regarding their experiences of adulthood that they create a narrative to instruct the child so that they may resolve such frustrations in the future. The ideal adult is based on but not the same as the living and lived adult who created the text. Because of this the adult–child power relationship is complicated: The adult has power over the child because they are more knowledgeable and informed, yet the child holds power over the adult because it is not a finished product of society and has the potential to change society, rebel against it, or conform.

Hinduism

The hidden adult, the adult agency that underlies all children’s literature, is an ideological discussion between the adult and the imagined child, a careful negotiation of power based on frustrated aetonormativity. Its aim is socialisation, instruction, and entertainment. Inherently didactic, children’s literature is formed by adults, attempting to communicate and instruct an imagined future for an implied child. Vera Veldhuizen See also Children in Romantic Literature and Thought; Children’s Literature; Critical Children’s Literature Studies

Further Readings Beauvais, C. (2015). The mighty child: Time and power in children’s literature. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins. Hollindale, P. (1997). Signs of childness in children’s books. Stroud, UK: Thimble Press. Hollindale, P. (2011). The hidden teacher: Ideology and children’s reading. Stroud, UK: Thimble Press. Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (1994). Children’s literature: Criticism and the fictional child. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Nikolajeva, M. (2010). Power, voice and subjectivity in literature for young readers. New York, NY: Routledge. Nodelman, P. (2008). The hidden adult: Defining children’s literature. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Rose, J. (1984). The case of Peter Pan: The impossibility of children’s literature. London, UK: Palgrave. Trites, R. S. (2000). Disturbing the universe: Power and repression in adolescent literature. Iowa: University of Iowa Press.

Hinduism Hinduism is one the world’s major religions, comprising an 80% Hindu majority in India and a large Hindu diaspora across the globe—most notably in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Hinduism encompasses plural religious beliefs and practices across time and space, which have produced diverse theological and

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philosophical views regarding childhood, as well as a wide array of social and cultural practices involving children and child-rearing. This entry provides an overview of research on Hindu understandings of childhood, children, and child-rearing through the ages, moving from the ancient to the contemporary period. The Vedas (ca. 1500 BCE), the oldest scriptures in Hinduism, are at the basis of much of historical and contemporary Hinduism. They posit that the birth of a son is a key moment in a prosperous life, as having a male child guarantees a good ritual death. The Vedas include a large body of texts known as the ‘Upanishads’ (900–300 BCE), which differentiate between two stages of childhood: (1) early childhood (‘balam’) and (2) studentship (‘brahmacharya’). Studentship involved abandoning the family home for that of a teacher. Under the teacher, the student remained celibate and meditated, gaining knowledge of Brahman (the monistic force that animates the Universe). Childhood ended when the individual became a householder. As legal texts, the ‘Dharmas´− a stras’ (ca. 200 BCE) delineate the rights, duties, and proper treatment of children on the part of adults. Perhaps most influential is The Laws of Manu, which describes an idealised upbringing that is articulated through ritual. This law code lays out the rituals of childhood along caste and gender lines. Depending on a boy’s caste and ambition, childhood could ritually end at any age from 5 to 24 years. For instance, a committed Brahmin student—that is, one belonging to the highest ­ caste in Hinduism—could leave childhood behind at the age of 5 years. On the other hand, girls moved on from childhood to adulthood with marriage, which should occur after the first menstrual period and lead to moving to the husband’s home. In terms of behaviour, The Laws of Manu states that children should obey their elders, as deferential respect is the highest form of ascetic pursuit. Adults should treat children with indulgence even when they misbehave. − The wide body of knowledge of ‘Ayurveda’, the medical practice that emerged in the Indian subcontinent around 200–100 BCE, also includes texts concerning childhood. In particular, Ayurvedic texts ponder on the physical and psychological development of children. They stress

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the importance of a strong bond between children and their mothers, especially in early childhood. In the medieval tales of Krishna—an avatar of the God Vishnu, the preserver—the innocence of childhood is combined with divine strength. After a switch at birth, Krishna grows up as a cowherd under the care of Yashoda and her husband. These stories present Krishna as a mischievous yet charming toddler whose love of dairy products often gets him into trouble, and his relationship with his foster mother is an example of the ideal love that should exist between child and mother. The Krishna poems of Surdas (15th–16th century) pinpoint the qualities that characterise children. Even in his adult tales, Krishna retains the playfulness of children. In contemporary north India, theatrical performances known as ‘lilas’ recreate Krishna’s childhood. A boy selected from the community plays the role of Krishna, acquiring divine status as he performs. The idea is central to Hindu notions of childhood: Children possess divine qualities. In fact, the creation of the Universe is frequently compared to Krishna’s childlike play. The colonial period saw the emergence of complex negotiations regarding childhood between colonial administrators, social reformers, missionaries, and orthodox and revivalist Hindus. As British rule became more intrusive, Europeans ­ intervened into Hindu childhood by setting up reform schools, elite schools, and other educational institutions. Debates focused mostly on girls, just as they did on women—both served as indicators of India’s failings in the scale of civilisation and as receivers of the civilising mission. In the meantime, Indian social reformers—often under the aegis of the All India Women’s Conference and the Women’s Indian Association—­ targeted the practice of child marriage and the attendant issue of child widows. From the 1860s, a series of legislative acts attempted to limit the marriageable age for girls, such as the Marriage Bill (also known as the ‘Sarda Act’) of 1929. It was not until after independence in 1947, however, that the Marriage Restraint Act made child marriage a punishable offence and raised the age of the girl to 15 years. In contemporary India, some Hindu families mark the end of childhood by giving new garment, gifts, or garlands to girls after their first menstrual period. In rural north India, patrilocal practices

remain strong: The departure of a bride from her parents’ home is a key moment that marks the end of childhood. In this contemporary context, both beliefs concerning childhood and practices of child-rearing are affected by divergences between rural, urban, and diasporic Hindu communities. In this heterogeneous configuration of Hinduisms, childhood is central to public discourses amongst policy makers, nongovernmental organisations, and activists. Contemporary research has brought to the fore issues such as discrimination against girls, policies to target child labour, and the role of the state in providing education and health care to children. There is also a growing body of research on the varied experiences of Hindu childhood across the diaspora. Both in historic and contemporary terms, Hindu children have much in common with non-Hindu children in South Asia. Teresa Segura-Garcia See also Colonialism and Childhood; Islam; Religion and Children

Further Readings Kakar, S. (1978). The inner world: A psychoanalytic study of childhood and society in India. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. Patton, L. L. (2011). Hinduism. In D. S. Browning & M. J. Bunge (Eds.), Children and childhood in world religions: Primary sources and texts (pp. 217–276). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Sen, S. (2005). Colonial childhoods: The juvenile periphery of India, 1950–1945. London, UK: Anthem.

Hine, Lewis Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940) was a photographer and social reformer best known for his thousands of photographs documenting practices of child labor in the United States for the National Child Labor Committee. The National Child Labor Committee was founded in 1904; Hine produced over 5,000 images of working children between 1906 and 1918—a period during which it is estimated that millions of laborers under 16 years of age were employed in the United States in some capacity.

Hine, Lewis

The child subjects in Hine’s photographs work in a range of industries such as cotton (from the fields to the mills), mining, canning, agriculture, other factory work, home piecework, and newspaper sales. Hine’s documentary style frequently emphasizes children’s dirty faces, unkempt hair, and clothes in poor condition. Many images feature children staring directly into the camera’s lens, seemingly returning the observer’s gaze, perhaps even indicting the viewer. In other images, children are rendered diminutive in relation to the industrial apparatus surrounding them, their small hands working with intricate machine parts, or their whole bodies dwarfed by machinery that appears to box them in. Some young laborers appear on stools in order to reach the heights necessary to work their machines. Hine’s captions commonly noted details such as children’s heights to highlight the visual mismatch in scale between children’s bodies and overwhelming, large, and perilous working environments such as factories and swift-moving streetcars (see Figure 1). In some cases, Hine’s work has been straightforwardly interpreted as documentary evidence.

Figure 1 Photograph by Lewis Hine: Knitter, Loudon, Tennessee, 1910, This Little Girl (like many others in this state) is so small. She has to stand on a box to reach her machine. She is regularly employed as a knitter in Loudon Hosiery Mills. Said she did not know how long she has worked there. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540, USA https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ pp.print; digital ID nclc 02002 https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ nclc.02002

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As a social documentarian, Hine endeavored to capture the realities of child labor in the United States. Regarded in this way, his images effectively revealed the truths of the dangerous and inhumane working conditions that children faced. However, most critical interpretations emphasize not the self-evidentiary role of the photographs, but rather, Hine as an active constructor and contributor to Progressive era labor reform through the formal choices he made. In his lectures and exhibition materials, Hine himself never understood his pictures simply as evidence, but as persuasive forms that could be combined with other media, edited, and manipulated to best support reform efforts. Alan Trachtenberg and Maren Stange have argued that Hine’s work implicitly challenged—or at least complicated—Progressive reformers’ propensity to characterize the disadvantaged populations whose conditions they sought to improve as somehow inferior to middle-class Americans in moral or hygienic character. Others, including George Dimock and Patricia Pace, have conversely suggested that as foils to an idealized middle-class childhood, Hine’s subjects—a position stressed through visual strategies as well as other features, such as captioning—helped to narrow and concretize what constituted acceptable American childhood. Within visual culture studies, the history of photography, and histories of the Progressive era, considerations of Hine’s photographs as mediated representations add complexity to the already complex terrain of child labor reform, which often cast the issue as a moral polarity through assumptions about children as figures of innocence and in need of protection. Moreover, although Hine’s individual images capture the piercing and seemingly singular gaze between Hine and his subjects (and between subjects and viewers), the efficacy of Hine’s project for reform efforts resided more in its scope. Hine was often required to infiltrate work sites under false pretenses so that he came onto the scene knowing relatively little about the regions, industries, and children whose images he captured. In still other cases, captions misname or even inaccurately describe children, as in one instance where one subject labeled as tough successfully sued on the grounds that he was mischaracterized as a delinquent. Hine’s prioritization of quantity,

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sometimes at the cost of individual details, highlights his endeavor to chronicle the scope at which child labor operated in the early 20th century. Captions that emphasized workers’ ages, heights, and details such as their working hours or length of employment, served rhetorical functions, positioning children as small, overworked, and deprived of educational and sanitary services. These same details also operated as a kind of sociological data, aggregated to indicate the scope of the problem of child labor. The thousands of images that Hine produced, Kathy Quick argues, correspond with a broader turn toward statistical methods in the social sciences. Hine’s images thus spread popular awareness of child labor practices in the United States and were instrumental in labor reform efforts, yet they remain complex artifacts that engage both the actual lived experiences of individual children and a set of socially ingrained assumptions about children and childhood. Contemporary work continues to navigate Hine’s own alternation between framing children as individual victims of child labor and statistical figures in a larger structure. Joe Manning, for instance, has used publicly available documents such as census records to identify many of Hine’s subjects and has conducted oral histories with surviving friends and relatives. Many critical accounts—including those by Patricia Pace, Robert Macieski, and George Dimock—consider how Hine’s images naturalize particular ideas about the normative child based on race, class, and ability. Through the camera’s lens, Hine’s subjects failed to conform to the rapidly institutionalizing figure of the innocent child. This mismatch simultaneously rendered them figures in need of protection and reform and reified the conception of childhood in America as conforming to middle-class standards. Meredith A. Bak See also Child Labor; Child Labor in Europe, History of; Child Savers/Child-Saving Movement, U.S. History

Further Readings Alan, T. (1970). Walter Rosenblum, and Naomi Rosenblum. America & Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904-1940. Millerton, NY: Aperture. Alexander, N. (2016). Soulmaker: The times of Lewis Hine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

George, D. (1993). Children of the mills: Re-reading Lewis Hine’s child labour photographs. Oxford Art Journal, 16(2), 37–54. Joe, M. (2019). Lewis Hine project. Mornings on Maple street. Retrieved from February 23, 2019 https:// morningsonmaplestreet.com/lewis-hine-project-indexof-stories/lewis-hine-project/ Kate, S. W. (2009). Lewis Hine as social critic. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Kathy, Q. (July 3, 2018). The average child: Lewis Hine, statistics, and ‘social photography.’ Visual Studies, 33(3), 231–250. doi:10.1080/1472586X.2018.1533429 Maren, S. (1992). Symbols of ideal life: Social documentary photography in America 1890-1950. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Patricia, P. (2002). Staging childhood: Lewis Hine’s photographs of child labor. The Lion and the Unicorn, 26(3), 324–352. Robert, M. (2015). Picturing class: Lewis W. Hine photographs child labor in New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Russell, F. (1994). Kids at work: Lewis Hine and the crusade against child labor. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Historical Methods Researchers in childhood studies often find it valuable to use a diversity of methodologies in their work; it is not uncommon for scholars in the social sciences or literature to turn to historical methods to flesh out their projects. This entry provides an overview of the most commonly used methodologies in historical research involving children and youth, and briefly discusses their benefits and limitations. Scholars who focus on the history of childhood and youth employ methods similar to their colleagues in other historical specialties but encounter particular methodological challenges in working with historical source materials created by, for, or about young people. Broadly speaking, it is reasonable to understand the origins of the history of childhood and youth as another branch of the new social history that entered the academy in the 1960s–1970s and turned scholarly attention to previously marginalized groups, including the working class, women, and racial and ethnic minorities. Historians of youth who coalesced as a discipline approximately

Historical Methods

a decade later took up many of the concerns of these social historians, including a penchant for examining individual agency and a tendency to read critically sources that emerged from institutional and governmental archives. Although many historians would acknowledge Philippe Ariès’s 1962 text Centuries of Childhood: A Social H ­ istory of Family Life [l’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime] as a starting point in the historical inquiry into the lives of youth, scholars quickly moved on from the questions of when and where childhood began to investigations into the complexity of children’s lived experience in a vast array of social, economic, cultural, and political circumstances. In addition, historians are acutely aware of the interplay between the history of children versus the history of childhood—by which they mean the lived experience of actual children as well as the ideological construction of the meaning of childhood. Exploring these questions and distinctions requires the use of novel methodologies in addition to the subtle transformation of some of the existing ones.

Child-Produced Sources Archival sources are located at the heart of historical inquiry. As difficult to locate as they are valuable to the historian, traditional child-­produced sources, including diaries, letters, school notebooks, yearbooks, scrapbooks, camp newsletters, and drawings, can offer a unique window into children’s lived experience. It is impossible to detail the specific archives—both digital and ­traditional—that a scholar interested in the history of youth might find valuable, but it is important that scholars familiarize themselves with collections that are relevant to their research area. Even as these collections offer evidence of children and youth’s thoughts and feelings, the environment in which they were produced must be part of the historian’s interpretation of these sources. Unlike similar materials created by adults, historians are sensitive to the possibility of adult editorial hands positioned behind the child writer or artist. While scholars broadly agree that the potential presence of adult cocreators does not obviate the ability of historians to locate children’s voices within these sources, they also affirm that the adult presence must be accounted for as much as possible.

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Moreover, the meaningful use of child-produced sources requires historians to have a rich understanding of the conventions and norms surrounding their creations. For example, many Anglo-American schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries emphasized rote learning and student reproduction from adult-created materials; students often copied poems or artwork displayed on the class chalkboard in their own copybooks. Uncovering these sources offer historians a mixed legacy of authenticity. In another example, scholars in 19th-century North America note the convention of open diary writing and reading, with private texts routinely passing between children and parents, and among peers. Alternatively, historians have observed that high school yearbooks and newspapers in the late 19th century—many of which were widely, if not nationally, circulated by young editors—tend to be relatively free of adult influence compared with similar sources written in the mid-20th century. An understanding of these historical contexts is necessary to make the most of child-produced archival sources. Scholars who are able to locate child-­ produced sources within archives that overwhelmingly document the experiences of adults can use these sources to build arguments that can speak to children’s voices and agency.

Memoirs and Oral Histories Scholars have long recognized the challenges, and rewards, of incorporating material gleaned from written memoirs and compiled through oral histories. Because of the relative scarcity of sources produced by children during their childhoods, historians of youth are often more dependent on sources obtained through memory and reflection than are historians who work exclusively with adult-created records. These sources can offer rich, complex, and deeply affecting stories of childhood but should be handled with consistent attention to their origins. Those interested in the history of childhood and youth can draw on the methodological insights advanced not only by historians but also by scholars in the literature and the social sciences who have long employed techniques in reader-response theory and ethnography to incorporate young voices into their work. Scholars who specialize in autobiography and memoir have created a robust literature that

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details the narrative structures commonly deployed by the creators of their own life stories. Specialists in memoir first identified conventional heroic plots and rags to riches narratives that tended to characterize the life stories of statesmen and entrepreneurs. Parallel to the growth of social history, and concomitantly with the liberation and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, literary scholars began to detail the deviations from those plots that tended to structure the memoirs of women, workers, racial minorities, soldiers, and athletes, to name only a few authorial categories. This work allowed historians of youth to come to more sophisticated analyses of a broad array of life stories and to develop tools to help them parse written recollections of childhood. Conducting oral histories can be quite timeconsuming but also very satisfying for scholars who want to include individual voices and experiences in their work. Methodological issues in oral history can be broadly divided into the practice of conducting interviews and the use of material obtained in constructing a narrative. Scholars broadly agree that productive interviewing requires a combination of focused preparation of questions and significant background research on a subject’s general life circumstances. This preparation must be paired with a willingness to listen attentively and the flexibility to adapt to the stories an informant wishes to tell, as opposed to directing an informant into a rehearsed exchange. Over the past several decades, oral historians have developed increasingly sophisticated analytic tools to help them better interact with their informants. Interview techniques that benefit from reflexivity and sensitivity to the values and norms that shape informants’ sense of community and identity have produced unique narratives. Although there is little scholarship on how to apply these techniques specifically to an informants’ memories of childhood or youth, all the techniques encourage the production of anecdotal and communal memories that historians find valuable.

Advice Literature All different kinds of adults—educators, medical professionals, reformers, government officials, and moral crusaders—have expressed many

opinions about how children should live their lives, and historically, few have expressed qualms about voicing those opinions in the most forceful terms. Moreover, it often seems that for every piece of advice dispensed to children themselves there were a dozen dire warnings directed to parents about the behavior of their offspring. Thus, the advice literature—though by no means absent from the work of feminist scholars or historians of the working classes—typically has an oversized presence in the scholarship of historians of children and youth. Far from being restricted to etiquette books or primers on behavior, advice literature can be seen as encompassing an eclectic and far-reaching collection of historical texts. Parents were reached through advice columns in popular magazines; children were targeted in sermons and school books and also in their comic books and dime novels. As with historical sources produced by children, it is critically important to understand the major trends in advice literature in any given time period. Aspirational suggestions, while no guarantor of actual behavior, nevertheless constitute a valuable guide to a nation’s obsessions and ­anxieties—and advice about children, in particular, can reveal cultural fixations about the future. While scholars of children and youth are rightly wary of drawing lines of causality between advice and actions, it is important to have a clear picture of both the proscriptions and prescriptions that emanate from the advice literature in a given period. This over-abundance of source material can be a boon to historians but working with it requires the methodological tools to disaggregate broad themes of behavioral norms from the idiosyncratic obsessions of particular organizations.

Material Culture The relative paucity of written records produced by children has made historians especially attentive to the material culture of childhood. Virtually, all historical eras have produced some artifacts of youth: child-sized furniture, toys and games, clothing, and accessories. However, beginning around the turn of the 20th century, an avalanche of consumer products created for young people and marketed to both them and their parents began to shape the lives of youth in the

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industrialized world. Scholars of material culture stress how much of a society’s ethos can be built into objects—from the rigidity of elementary school desks to the gender identity woven into pink and blue fabrics. Children can learn tolerance and respect as well as racial bigotry through their toys and games, and historians of youth can read these objects just as they read printed texts.

Additional Sources In addition to the sources already discussed in this entry, historians of children and youth rely on a wide array of other sources—including government documents, children’s literature, visual representations, or educational materials. Government statistics and documents, including census data, reveal trends in children’s health and well-being. Children’s books, from trash to canonic treasures can be read as easily—and as fruitfully—as historical sources as literary ones. School—the workplace of childhood for much of the Anglo-American world in the 20th century—is a similarly rich source of historical insight, from yearbooks to records of boards of education. Visual images of children and youth, from the early modern portraits that caught the eye of Ariès to contemporary Internet advertising, reveal volumes about idealized understandings of childhood. Scholars who wish to enrich their research by using the historical methods touched upon here, as well as the myriad others available, will find all of these avenues filled with methodological challenges, but even more so with fascinating revelations about the history of childhood and youth. Susan A. Miller See also Adolescence, History of; Childhood Studies; Folklore, Children’s; History of Childhood; Narrative Research Method; Parental Advice Literature; Toys, History of

Further Readings Anna, M. D. (Ed.). (2013). The children’s table: Childhood studies and the humanities. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Anne, H. (1998). Pictures of innocence: The history and crisis of ideal childhood. London, UK: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

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Ann, H. (2003). Raising America: Experts, parents, and a century of advice about children. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Anya, J. (2005). Major problems in the history of American families and children. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Karin, C. (1992). Children in the house: The material culture of early childhood, 1600-1900. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press. Mary, J. M., Pierce, J. L., & Laslett, B. (2008). Telling stories: The use of personal narratives in the social sciences and history. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stephanie, O. (Ed.). (2015). Childhood, youth and emotions in modern history: National, colonial and global perspectives. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Steven, M. (2004). Huck’s Raft: A history of American childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

History

of

Childhood

Seemingly coming from nowhere during the 1960s and 1970s, the history of childhood and children soon carved out a respectable niche for itself in the historical literature. It is generally accepted that Philippe Ariès launched the subject in 1960 with the original French version of his Centuries of Childhood. He was the first to reveal that childhood could have a history, that besides the ‘natural’, physical, emotional, and cognitive growth common to all children, there were huge variations in the perception and experiences of the young at different periods in the past. While the oft-cited assertion from Ariès that there was no idea of childhood in mediaeval society is now generally discredited, it did provoke historians into researching different conceptions of this stage of life in various societies (the cultural history of childhood), and how the young were treated as they grew up (the social history of children). Like other historians, they were particularly concerned to identify change over time, as well as underlying continuities in their subject matter. They also moved on from sweeping generalisations about children and childhood to more careful explorations of such influences as class, gender, and ethnicity. The outcome is that

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historians can now help social scientists place their findings on the contemporary world in a long-term perspective. This entry starts by examining the various approaches to the history of children and childhood and continues with analysis of some of the main issues it has covered. The underlying aim is to demonstrate the increasing volume and diversity of historical material available.

Approaches to the History of Children and Childhood Early historians of childhood tended to follow the agenda set by Ariès, focusing on the questions of whether childhood was ‘discovered’ in the West during the 16th and 17th centuries and whether parents in the past loved their children. They relied on qualitative rather than quantitative evidence, engaging particularly with the mediaeval and early modern periods, and drawing their evidence almost exclusively from Western Europe and North America. However, the Ariès thesis always had its critics, and during the 1980s and 1990s, there was a growing feeling that it was time to move out of its shadow. Besides children in the family and the school, historians investigated those on the streets, those at work, those caught up in major wars, and those in institutions such as orphanages, hospitals, and reformatories. Some made extensive use of statistics as well as texts. Demographers were interested in family size and infant mortality, and economic historians were interested in the contribution children made to the family economy. Many joined the general movement in the social sciences to give a voice to groups previously ignored by scholars: Children were an obvious group to join those such as women and ethnic minorities. Relatedly, they revealed how the oppressed might play an active role in determining their own lives: The agency of children became a common theme. Further developments occurred during the early 21st century. There was a growing interest in the history of adolescence and youth, compensating for a relative neglect of this area earlier on. There were moves to explore the previously taboo subject of child sexuality. And, importantly, research in Latin America, Africa, and Asia gained momentum, making possible some exploratory works on

a global history of childhood. To replace the Ariès thesis, a number of historians have traced the emergence of a ‘modern’ or ‘protected’ childhood, first amongst nation-states in the West during the 19th century and becoming increasingly influential amongst developing countries elsewhere during the late 20th century. This was the ideal at least of a long childhood and adolescence, revolving around play, schooling beyond the elementary level, and a warm, nurturing family. All researchers have to decide whether they lean towards a top-down or bottom-up approach to the history of childhood. Amongst the former, a common view is that the history of adult attitudes to the young is more compelling than a history of children, and it is certainly readily compatible with the mainstream of political and social history. The alternative is to argue that the social relations and culture of children are worth taking seriously, irrespective of adult concerns. This means attempting to adopt the child’s perspective on such matters as family life, school, and work, a challenging task the further back one delves into the past. The two approaches are by no means mutually exclusive, not least because it is impossible to discuss children’s experiences without the institutional framework established by adults.

Adult Attitudes Towards Children Ideas on Childhood

From early on, historians adopting the topdown approach took an interest in the way conceptions of childhood have changed down the centuries. It is taken as axiomatic, with due respect to Ariès, that all societies in the past had some awareness of the particular nature of the child. Historians have also accepted the notion that childhood is in part socially constructed, with the result that conceptions taken for granted as natural and universal in one society, such as the common assumption in the West today of its innocence and vulnerability, are virtually unknown in others. The fact is that from birth children readily adapt to their environment, which will vary according to a number of social and cultural influences, hence the diversity of childhoods both between and within societies. The drawbacks to social constructionism have been well aired, especially the

History of Childhood

risk of emphasising the social at the expense of the underlying biological imperatives. It might be noted that historians inclined to argue for longterm continuities in the history of childhood often appeal to the latter influence. Some mediaevalists, in an effort to rescue their period from disparaging references to the ‘Dark Ages’, suggest similarities in child development between the mediaeval and the modern era on these grounds. Boundaries Around Childhood

However, it is the social and cultural influences on childhood in the past that most readily lend themselves to an analysis by historians. This partly concerns the question of where the boundaries between childhood, youth, and adulthood lay. By the late 20th century, the school system and its age-graded classes had the young firmly in its grasp in many parts of the world, making possible such distinctions such as those between ‘children’ in the primary schools and ‘young people’ at the secondary level. During earlier periods, when many missed out on schooling entirely and had only a vague idea of their age in the absence of civil registration systems, such precision was out of the question. Village societies in preindustrial Europe had various turning points for the young, a series of partial transitions between infancy and adulthood, not unlike those investigated by anthropologists in other parts of the world. There was the phase of early childhood, beginning somewhere around the age of 2 or 3 years, when youngsters began to play amongst themselves, and ending at the age of 7 or so, when both boys and girls started to make themselves useful around the farm or workshop. Confirmation for Protestants and First Communion for Catholics, taken anywhere between the ages of 10 and the mid-teens, was often associated with the end of childhood. However, ethnologists such as Arnold Van Gennep noted that a ‘social puberty’, usually occurring a few years later than physical puberty, had to take place before a male or female could join the society of local youths. Finally, marriage or even the first child brought the end of the youth stage. This was during the late teens in many parts of the world but normally in the mid- to late-20s in much of Northwestern Europe. What counted

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more than age in the villages was what a young person could manage. This might involve being able to look after younger siblings, or moving on from a child’s work such as bird scaring to heavier tasks around the farm. The Nature of the Child

Besides boundaries, changing ideas on the nature of the child have proved fertile ground for historians, given the huge amount of evidence left by theologians, philosophers, pedagogues, artists, poets, and novelists. Until the 18th century at the earliest, religious influences dominated thinking about childhood. They produced a diverse and even contrasting set of ideas. During the early centuries of the Common Era, all of the major religions in the world encouraged families to ‘be fruitful and increase in numbers’, as the Bible puts it (Genesis 2:28). In Europe and the Middle East, this meant condemning infanticide, exposure, and abortions, as practised by the Greeks and Romans to limit their populations. Children were seen as a blessing for their parents, though sons more so than daughters (particularly for Muslims). At the same time, religious authorities generally struggled to resolve the contradictory notions of the innocent and the evil child, leading to a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the young. The idea that children were born pure and innocent was common in many religions, ranging  from Judaism to Neo-Confucianism. For ­Christians, children were gifts from God, and in the words of Jesus himself, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:1–7). At the same time, influenced by St. Augustine (354–430 CE), Christianity also harboured the idea that even a newborn child was tainted by original sin. Protestant reformers, including Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564), often pursued this line vigorously, emphasising once again the sinfulness of children. Other religions such as Judaism and Islam never adopted the idea, though they might consider children to be ignorant and weak. The Enlightenment brought a secular alternative to such views, and in general, a more positive image of children. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) stood out as the first to

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‘despiritualise’ the child, with his famous declaration in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) that it was neither virtuous nor evil by nature, but like white paper or wax that could be moulded or fashioned as one pleased. The Swissborn Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) went further in his Emile, or On Education (1762) by asserting that the child was born innocent. He also implored his contemporaries to treat childhood as worthwhile in its own right, on the grounds that nature wants children to be children before being adults. It should be added that both Locke and Rousseau had in mind young males from amongst the elite, and Rousseau, in particular, envisaged a subordinate role along traditional lines for females. The Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries capped the 18th-century developments with the idea of the child blessed with superior wisdom to adults, and childhood as a special period that was fundamental in shaping the adult self. In this way, there emerged the phenomenon of the idealisation of the child in Western culture. Ideas such as original sin and the child of nature gradually disappeared, to be replaced during the 20th century by scientific or sociological models. Nonetheless, some of the early writers understood childhood as a process of development rather than a fixed state. It is possible, for example, to link the turning points in life perceived by mediaeval authorities to 20th-century stage theories. The idea of the innocent or the evil child also continues to be common in popular discourse today. Advice Manuals for Parents

Besides works on the nature of childhood, adults wrote copiously on such issues as the health, education, and spiritual needs of children. Indeed, one of the planks in the argument for an awareness of the special nature of childhood during the mediaeval period in the Christian and Islamic worlds was the existence of sections on paediatrics in general works on medicine, and concessions to the minority status of children in various law codes. Advice books for parents reflected many of the changes and contradictions in the underlying ideologies concerning childhood. During the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a tendency amongst Calvinists in Europe and North

America (though not Calvin himself) to recommend that children should have the original sin beaten out of them as part of a generally repressive approach. The logic of the Enlightenment philosophers, by contrast, was to promote less formality and more affection between parents and children. For Rousseau, this meant mothers giving up established customs such as hiring wet nurses, swaddling newborn babies, and inflicting corporal punishments. Indeed, mothers came to play an increasingly important role in child-rearing, encouraged by a new ‘cult of motherhood’. The late 19th and early 20th centuries ushered in a new development with the increasing role for doctors and psychologists in the prescriptive literature. Although the early authors were helpful with advice on health matters such as diet and hygiene, they also recommended what now appears as an excessively strict regime for infants, with cuddling a child to stop it crying disapproved of, a regular timetable for feeding, and an early start to toilet training. The long-run drift towards support for a more permissive approach returned during the mid-20th century, associated with the American Dr. Benjamin Spock. Advice manuals can reveal what an assortment of clergymen, philosophers, and medical professionals, not to mention experienced mothers and fathers, thought about child-rearing. However, whether parents paid much attention to them is another matter entirely. Children and the State

During the mediaeval and early modern periods, children were in effect treated as the property of their parents, with the power of fathers virtually unchallenged. Nation-states were, therefore, reluctant to act in the interests of the child on the grounds that it would compromise the responsibility of the family to look after their young. This attitude began to change during the 18th century, as states became concerned about both the quantity and quality of their population and ‘child saving’ legislation appeared more frequently during the 19th century, notably in the West. Fortunately for the historian, these efforts left a large paper trail in the archives of legislatures and state bureaucracies. Yet children remained exceptional amongst oppressed minorities in that they had to

History of Childhood

rely on others to campaign for them, and the emphasis was on ‘excluding’ them from the polity. The result was a global movement towards a protected childhood, separate from the world of adults on the grounds that children were helpless and dependent. Amongst the first campaigns was to curb the exploitation of labour in industry. This was pioneered by the British during the late 18th century, appropriately enough as the first industrial nation, and other countries eventually followed suit. More important in the long run for child welfare was the gradual introduction of compulsory elementary schooling. In this case, the lead was taken during the early 19th century by authoritarian regimes in Prussia and Denmark. In Japan, after 1868, governments pushed hard to expand primary education, with the result that nearly all children were receiving some schooling by the end of the century. In many European colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the movement was reversed, with the priority for governments being to mobilise the young for work as early as possible. Spending on elementary schools for the indigenous population was meagre, and pressure to start work on commercial farms and in mines was intense. Other legislation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries covered such issues as abusive parents, infant welfare, and juvenile delinquency. During the 20th century, reformers increasingly talked in terms of children’s rights. Their first breakthrough on the international stage came in 1924 with the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, from the League of Nations. As with the United Nations declaration in 1959, it was vague and difficult to enforce. However, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was more effective, requiring states to enforce its provisions. It was also progressive in combining ‘protective rights’, covering health and education, with the more ambitious ‘participatory rights’, such as allowing children the opportunity to be heard in judicial or administrative proceedings.

The Perspective of the Child While primary sources on adult attitudes to children in the past are relatively abundant, the same

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cannot be said for those revealing what the young themselves thought. Material written by children themselves, usually in the form of letters and diaries, is of interest, though not a great deal survives. The alternative is reflection by adults on their own childhood in the form of childhood reminiscences, autobiographical works, and for more recent cases, oral histories. There is now a vast amount of advice from historians and others on how to handle these sources, given obvious issues such as memory lapses in old age and the framing of questions in oral history projects. Some historians consider all such ‘ego documents’, in which people discuss their own thoughts and feelings, as the least reliable form of evidence. However, what follows takes the opposing assumption that, carefully used, such sources provide insights into the past by revealing the thoughts of the people involved. It should be added that most of the texts available concern the 19th and 20th centuries, and the developed rather than developing countries. No less importantly, even if it is difficult to give a voice to children from the past, there is a case for not treating them as shadowy, passive figures in an adult world. Family and School

Early enthusiasm in childhood studies for revealing children to be active in determining their own lives soon gave way to a more measured approach. Bearing in mind the generally unequal power relationship between adults and children, it makes sense to distinguish areas where the young had no impact at all, such as high politics, from others where they had some scope for agency, including home and school. Even in the latter cases, parents and teachers were invested with considerable authority over their charges, which put children at a disadvantage when negotiating their position. One striking finding is the high level of violence children were exposed to in their daily routines. This might occur in the home. Parents in numerous societies across the globe routinely resorted to corporal punishments to discipline both boys and girls from a young age. A study of American children found that during the second half of the 18th century all of the sample, both girls and boys, had been beaten with an instrument. Testimony from

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History of Childhood

autobiographical evidence during the following century suggests that children everywhere generally took this in their stride, as long it was not judged excessive. Most indicated that their parents stayed within accepted limits, or even avoided slapping and beating them entirely. Nonetheless, a few revealed bitter memories of harsh treatment. Amongst the middle classes, Samuel Butler took his revenge in The Way of All Flesh (1903) on his clergyman father and his mother, alleging that they continually whipped him to enforce obedience: a vestige of the old belief in the wickedness of children. A statistical survey of British autobiographies from the industrial revolution by Jane Humphries provides further examples of abusive fathers amongst the working classes but concludes that they were a tiny minority (under 5%), usually taking out on their children their own failures at work. A more likely setting for violent treatment at the hands of authority was the schoolroom. Teachers in Europe had a long-standing reputation for beating their pupils; further afield, teachers in missionary schools in the colonies might rely heavily on corporal punishment, and it was commonplace in the Quranic schools of the Islamic world and in the schools of imperial China. The grim reality in many elementary schools in Europe was that teachers were trying to control restless students with little incentive to study for a leaving certificate that was virtually worthless on the job market. The children meanwhile complained that they were being punished harshly for mistakes in their academic work, or randomly for reasons that they failed to understand. Time in class was often depicted as a bruising experience, for boys in particular: They often responded by playing truant. It follows that children sometimes had fraught relations with their parents and their teachers. Historians have devoted much attention to the question of whether parents loved their children, rather less to the reverse. Autobiographies are full of mothers who were revered for creating a loving home, often in difficult circumstances, and of fathers who worked hard to support their families. The impression is that these children felt that their parents helped rather than hindered them in their efforts to make their way in life. There are also occasional examples of cruel mothers and

drunken fathers. A closer look reveals more nuanced views, set in the context of period and place. Parents amongst the aristocracy were often attentive to the welfare of their children, taking on board enlightened approaches to parenting, but examples from Russia (amongst others) indicate that many retained an emphasis on formality that intimidated their sons and daughters. At the other end of the social scale, poverty appeared to have a corrosive influence, hindering expressions of affection from hard-pressed parents. Alwyn Ger, brought up in a mining community in Saxony during the mid-19th century, felt that it had hardened mothers to the point of cruelty. As for teachers, if some were detested, others were respected for being strict but fair. If large numbers of people remembered their eagerness to start work, a few acknowledged that it was their successful school career that allowed them to work their way up the social scale later in life. In this way, early in the 20th century, Emilie Carles escaped the rigours of village life in the Alps, while Pierre-Jakez Hélias moved on from his farming background in Brittany: Both became schoolteachers. There were also authors who retained bitter memories from this period of having to give up their studies prematurely or turn down a scholarship at a secondary school because of the pressure to start earning. And then there were the girls, most famously Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), who were acutely aware of the obstacles to their education, and the expectation they were being prepared for a life as wives and mothers. Work and Play

The majority of children in the past worked on the land. They were generally ignored by contemporaries because of a tendency to idealise the rural way of life. This was particularly the case for small family farms, whether a subsistence-oriented peasant farm or those producing for the market. Particularly invisible were the girls in Africa who shouldered most of the work in the fields with their mothers. First-hand accounts, from males especially in Europe, recalled the satisfaction of learning the skills they needed beside their parents and contributing to the upkeep of the family. The downside was long hours of often monotonous work and, in Northwestern Europe, putting up

History of Childhood

with cold and wet weather. Nonetheless, farm children appeared to accept the common assumption that an early start to work was essential for them. Employment on a larger commercial farm meant a more regimented existence and joining a hierarchy of workers. But the young male or female could acquire the skills necessary for running a farm and, in addition, make some savings for a household of their own. Free labour, such as the youthful farm servants of the early modern period, frequently changed employers to broaden their experience and to bring some variety into their lives. By contrast, slaves in the Southern United States had no such choice. Interviews with former slaves on the cotton and rice plantations brought out in vivid detail the early start to working in the fields, the ever-present threat of violence from overseers, and the insecurity of family life when individuals could be sold at the whim of the owner. The minority of children who worked in industry, especially in the early textile mills of the industrial revolution period, were anything but invisible. The contemporary debate over whether, as reformers argued, work on the machines was disastrous for their health and education or, as employers countered, provided them with a training and subsistence, continues to resonate in historical debates today. The description by Robert Blincoe (1792– 1860) of the deception of workhouse children in London by poor law officials to lure them into the cotton mills of the Midlands, and the cruel treatment they endured at the hands of fellow workers, stands as a pillar of the pessimistic view from historians of the industrial revolution. There was no shortage of memoirs from former child workers giving details of the unhealthy conditions and oppressive discipline in the new factories and mines. Conversely, Norbert Truquin (1833–1887), author of one of the most prominent workingclass autobiographies in France, wrote that he found employment in a woollen mill in Amiens during the 1840s more tolerable than his time in a small workshop, with the workers joking and telling stories when their foremen were not around. Long working hours on a farm or in a workshop, and later mass schooling, restricted leisure time for most children in the past. All the same, such children contrived to find time for play, with young shepherds, for example, often combining

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their flocks so that they could amuse themselves together, free from adult supervision. Village children formed bands to explore the countryside around them, while their working-class counterparts in the towns played in the streets, with parents confident that other adults in the community would keep half an eye on them. Battles between children of rival villages or parishes were common, and folklore studies record the games that were passed down the generations. War and Displacement

The history of warfare was for long a matter of men in battle, but recently, with the two ‘total wars’ of the 20th century, in particular, the impact on civilians has attracted interest. Children suffered like other civilians from foreign invasions, strategic bombing, starvation, and in the cases of Armenians and Jews, genocidal campaigns. The exposure of the young to the violence of war was considerable. Essays written by schoolchildren in northern France express their shock at the looting of their homes and the occasional killing by ­German troops at the outset of the First World War. Similarly, interviews with survivors of the battle to liberate Caen during the Normandy campaign in 1944 highlight their memories of sheer terror in the face of shelling and bombing by both sides. At the same time, many children relished the excitement of it all, turning bomb sites into playgrounds or joining campaigns to collect paper and scrap metal. In Russia, some in their desperation to escape food shortages in the villages attempted to join the Red Army or partisans on the front line. The war also brought huge movements of population that disrupted the lives of children. Before the Second World War, thousands of Jewish children fled Nazi Germany via schemes to take them to safe havens such as Palestine and Britain. During the early stages of the war, large numbers were evacuated from the cities to avoid the expected bombing. In Britain, this took place relatively smoothly, while in Russia the rapid advances of the German army often led to chaos. The British experience of evacuation is well-­ ­ documented, with memories of humiliation for children not chosen at the initial ‘cattle auctions’ when host families chose from the new arrivals  and, at worst, abuse by poorly supervised

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Home Learning Environment

villagers. The large majority of evacuees in the warring nations evidently settled in quite well, managing to pursue their education and adapt temporarily to the rural way of life.

Final Thoughts With regard to research in the history of childhood, Martha Sexton asserted in the first volume of the Journal of History of Childhood and Youth (2008) that studying the experiences of young people was invaluable when investigating areas such as individual identity formation, family structures, and the relationship between the household and the state. It may be that its growth will always be hindered by the lack of an organised political constituency behind it, as childhood is always a brief transitionary period in life. Yet there is a historical dimension to contemporary issues such as child abuse and children’s mental health. Colin Heywood See also Adolescence, History of; Ariès, Philippe; Child Labor in Europe, History of; Children’s Rights, Historical Perspective on; Enlightenment and the Child; Locke, John; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Street Children, History of

Further Readings Ariès, P. (1996). Centuries of childhood. London, UK: Pimlico. Browning, D., & Bunge, M. J. (Eds.). (2009). Children and childhood in world religions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Burnett, J. (Ed.). (1982). Destiny obscure: Autobiographies of childhood, education and family from the 1820s to the 1920s. London, UK: Routledge. Cunningham, H. (2005). Children and childhood in Western society since 1500 (2nd ed.). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. Fass, P. (Ed.). (2013). The Routledge history of childhood in the western world. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Foyster, E., & Marten, J. (Eds.). (2010). A cultural history of childhood and family (Vol. 6). Oxford, UK: Berg. Heywood, C. (2018). Childhood in modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Heywood, C. (2018). A history of childhood: Children and childhood in the west from medieval to modern times (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Humphries, J. (2010). Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, C. (2007). Children’s world: Growing up in Russia, 1890–1991. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lieten, K., & van Nederveen Meerkerk, E. (Eds.). (2011). Child labour’s global past, 1650–2000. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Mintz, S. (2004). Huck’s Raft: A history of American childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Morrison, H. (Ed.). (2012). The global history of childhood reader. London, UK: Routledge. Shahar, S. (1990). Childhood in the middle ages. London, UK: Routledge. Stearns, P. (2017). Childhood in world history (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Home Learning Environment The home learning environment is briefly described as a combination of quality parent–child interactions, availability of learning materials, and children’s participation in learning activities at home. During the early childhood years, the home environment is one of the immediate environments in which children engage in face-to-face interactions with their caregivers and others (e.g., siblings, grandparents). Children’s parents or caregivers are the individuals who meet children’s physical and emotional needs that provide them with a variety of educational and commercial materials (e.g., books, toys, computers, tablet devices) as well as experiences for their development and learning. Parents, in particular, are considered as children’s first teachers who teach their children the foundational skills through talk and interactions. Children acquire early learning experiences and activities in their home contexts before starting formal education. As a result, the quality of ­parent–child interactions, parents’ attitudes toward children’s learning, and availability of materials at home play a predictive role in children’s development, learning, and future school success. This entry provides an overview of current research on the importance of home learning environment as well as highlights research findings on the impact of high-quality home learning activities in children’s development and future achievement.

Home Learning Environment

The early childhood years are one of the most critical periods of humans’ lives. This is because it is a time of significant physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. For example, children learn how to walk, talk, and engage with others during the early years. It is during these first years after birth that a great deal of brain architecture is shaped. Basic aspects of brain function, as well as higher order functions, depend critically on early experiences. For this reason, providing children with age-appropriate materials and play opportunities and predictable routines (e.g. reading, playing, meal times) is essential for children’s early experiences with their parents. In particular, the quantity and quality of parent– child interactions and availability of materials and learning opportunities in the home are crucial in terms of preparing children for school. One of the well-known studies conducted by Betty Hart and Todd Risley in the 1990s emphasized the quantity of parent–child talk before age 4 years. According to their research, if children come from lowincome families, they are more likely to have a vocabulary gap compared to their peers, and that gap is likely to influence their achievement in school. Similarly, prior research indicated that the quality of home learning activities, particularly in literacy and mathematics, contributes to children’s cognitive and language development. More recently, research has expanded our understanding of the long-lasting impact of the home learning environment. For example, longitudinal studies suggest that children’s early learning environments predict their academic achievement in later elementary school years. The quality of the home environment can create a buffer zone for young children who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged or ethnically diverse backgrounds. The predictive effect of the early learning environment on children’s fifth-grade skills was found to be similar for children from low-income and ethnically diverse backgrounds in the United States. Relatedly, the benefits of the home learning environment on children’s development and achievement seem to be universal. For example, European researchers found that children’s home learning environment when they were in kindergarten was a predictor of their literacy and mathematics skills in later grades. Another research has found that children’s reading performances were affected by

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the index of home literacy activities, the number of books at home, and parents’ attitudes toward reading, when parental education and other individual characteristics were controlled. In addition to books, toys, and various learning activities (e.g., going to the museum or library), today’s parents benefit from educational media (e.g., programs, videos, games, applications) and expose their children to emergent literacy and foundational mathematics skills even before they start receiving a formal education. The affordability and widespread use of touch screen tablets and similar technologies make it possible for parents to contribute to their children’s learning earlier than their school experiences. For instance, talking to children while playing with educational media, asking questions, and providing meaningful feedback expand young children’s learning from the media. This recent research shows that parents, no matter what kind of socioeconomical or ethnic backgrounds they come from, have a powerful impact on the children’s learning, development, and academic achievement. Children’s home context presents an invaluable environment in which parents can facilitate their children’s learning by providing them with materials, meaningful learning opportunities, and high-quality interactions in early childhood years. Burcu Izci and Ithel Jones See also Bronfenbrenner, Urie; Homeschooling; Parenting; Social and Emotional Learning; Vygotsky, Lev; Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, Lev)

Further Readings Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes. Niklas, F., & Schneider, W. (2017). Home learning environment and development of child competencies from kindergarten until the end of elementary school. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 49, 263–274. Park, H. (2008). Home literacy environments and children’s reading performance: A comparative study of 25 countries. Educational Research and

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Homeschooling

Evaluation, 14(6), 489–505. doi:10.1080/ 13803610802576734 Rideout, V. J. (2014). Learning at home: Families’ educational media use in America. A report of the families and media project. New York, NY: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Rodriguez, E. T., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2011). Trajectories of the home learning environment across the first 5 years: Associations with children’s vocabulary and literacy skills at prekindergarten. Child Development, 82, 1058–1075. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-8624 2011.01614.x Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Luo, R., McFadden, K. E., Bandel, E. T., & Vallotton, C. (2017). Early home learning environment predicts children’s 5th grade academic skills. Applied Developmental Science, 23, 153–169. doi:10.1080/10888691.2017.1345634 Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Homeschooling Homeschooling refers to situations in which a “school-aged child receives his or her education primarily at home,” usually provided by the child’s family, instead of attending a public or private school. The existence of homeschooling highlights complex issues regarding the proper roles of parents and government in the provision of education for children. This entry discusses the challenges involved in defining homeschooling, the status and social significance of homeschooling in different parts of the world, reasons why parents choose homeschooling for their children, and some debates over its merits and drawbacks.

Defining Homeschooling Providing a single authoritative definition of homeschooling is difficult because there are many different circumstances that the term could encompass and because different scholars draw the boundaries of what counts as homeschooling in different places. For example, some scholars regard the decision to educate a child at home as homeschooling only if there are institutional schooling alternatives available that the child’s parent or guardian declines to access. However, other researchers also

include in the definition of homeschooling a situation in which a child is educated at home because public or private educational institutions are not feasible options, due to factors such as location, special educational needs, or intensive participation in extracurricular activities (e.g., elite sports, a career as a child actor or musician). Researchers, advocates, and other commentators also use different terms for similar educational arrangements, such as homeschooling, home education, and home-based education, and these terms can indicate slightly different definitions. For example, home education might be understood to include students whose studies are undertaken entirely through correspondence or online courses provided by an educational institution. Further complicating the definition of homeschooling is the development of hybrid models of education, in which home-schooled children complete online learning modules or gather in groups to participate in classes or workshops organized either by their parents or by a school board or other organization that is involved in supporting home education.

Homeschooling Around the World Homeschooling can look quite different depending on the legal and social context in which it is taking place. In some countries, educating a child at home instead of enrolling the child in a school or other institutional education program is forbidden by law in most cases (e.g., Germany). In other countries, homeschooling is permitted but with a great deal of regulation and supervision by the state (e.g., New Zealand). In still others, parents and guardians are free to educate their children at home with relatively little involvement by the government (e.g., the United Kingdom). There are also different levels of compliance with the laws pertaining to homeschooling; for example, some families may not declare their homeschooling status to their government, despite this being a legal requirement in certain jurisdictions. There are even a small number of families in Germany who educate their children at home despite the practice’s illegal status in that country. While homeschooling is often understood to involve a deliberate refusal of the schooling opportunities offered by the state, there are also cases in which homeschooling serves

Homeschooling

as a way to provide an education for children whom the government is unwilling or unable to educate (e.g., girls in Afghanistan). Homeschooling in the United States

As a social phenomenon, homeschooling is most widespread in the United States, and the largest share of the research on homeschooling also focuses on the United States. Data from the National Household Education Surveys, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, indicates that approximately 1.8 million American school-aged children were homeschooled in 2012 or 3.4% of the school-aged population. While families in the United States and elsewhere have educated their children in the family sphere in various capacities throughout history, the specific practice of homeschooling as an intentional rejection of, and alternative to, institutional schooling emerged in earnest in the ­ American context in the late 1970s, in response to countercultural political trends of the 1960s and 1970s. For increasingly politically engaged Evangelical ­Christians, homeschooling offered a way to defy the social changes taking place in American secular society, by using the family home as a site for a moral and religious education that would equip their children to continue resisting liberalizing social influences. Meanwhile, some parents on the radical left saw homeschooling as a way of rejecting institutional, bureaucratic education systems in favor of a more personalized, child-centered learning environment. Milton Gaither attributes this desire to free children from mass schooling, in part, to an espousal of romantic conception of the unique nature and potential of children, which can be traced back to the writings of 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Gaither argues this view of the child ultimately influenced both parents on the political left and the religious right. Homeschooling had questionable legal status in many American states in the 1970s, but due to advocacy and several court challenges throughout the 1980s, homeschooling became legally recognized in all states across the country by 1993. Several key figures have influenced the development of modern American homeschooling (and, to some extent, homeschooling in other Englishspeaking countries). These include philosopher Ivan Illich, who argued for the dismantling of

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institutional education and other bureaucratic social institutions. Author and former teacher John Holt wrote best-selling books condemning mass education for destroying children’s natural curiosity. Influenced by Illich, he became an advocate for a relatively unstructured type of homeschooling called unschooling, in which children direct the topics and methods of their learning based on their own interests. Holt started a popular newsletter for homeschooling families called Growing Without Schooling in 1977, and he became an influential leader in the American homeschooling movement, working with families with various political and religious affiliations. Education researcher Raymond Moore critiqued the failings of institutional education but differed from Holt in emphasizing parental authority as central to children’s education. Moore and his wife, Dorothy, were advocates of a later age of entry to formal schooling for children, drawing on Moore’s research findings and the educational traditions of their Seventh-day Adventist faith. Eventually, they became supporters of homeschooling more generally and took a public leadership role in the growing American homeschooling movement. American homeschooling families are often assumed to be White, conservative, mostly middleclass, and mostly Evangelical Christians; however, the homeschooling population in the United States has become increasingly racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. For example, research indicates that African American families sometimes turn to homeschooling as a response to the failure of institutional schools to create supportive, effective learning environments for Black children, due to the effects of systemic racism. Latinx and ­African American families may also choose homeschooling in order to provide a curriculum that emphasizes the history and contributions of people from their own ethnic or cultural groups, content which may be missing from lessons provided in public schools. Latinx families may also use homeschooling to teach their children the parents’ native language, an opportunity that could also be unavailable at their local schools. Homeschooling in Other Contexts

In Europe, the United Kingdom is the country where homeschooling is most prevalent. While the

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legal climate there provides homeschooling families with considerable latitude in how they provide home education for their children, homeschooling is not nearly as well understood or socially acceptable in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States. While families in the United Kingdom may choose homeschooling for reasons similar to those that motivate American homeschoolers, another reason for homeschooling relates to a shortage of schools and therefore places for students, especially in the United Kingdom. If parents are unable to find a suitable school placement for their child, or if they are waiting for a spot to open at a particular, desired school, they might homeschool their child in the interim or indefinitely. Homeschooling in Canada is also an established educational option. Canadian homeschooling has been influenced by its American counterpart and has resembled it in some ways, but research suggests that homeschooling families in Canada are less likely to have religious motivations than their American counterparts. Similarly, Australian parents who choose homeschooling seem to be most commonly motivated by concerns about the perceived pedagogical, curricular, and/or environmental shortcomings of institutional schools. Homeschooling families can be found in some non-Western or non-English-speaking regions as well, such as Latin America, China and other parts of Asia, and South Africa, although less Englishlanguage research exists on home schoolers in these parts of the world. In every case, homeschooling families are motivated and affected by their own legal, social, and familial contexts and practices.

Motivations and Critiques As discussed, parents choose homeschooling for many reasons. Perhaps the most well-known framework for understanding the motivations of home schoolers was developed by Jane Van Galen, who describes two nonexclusive categories of homeschooling parents: (1) ideologues and (2) pedagogues. Ideologues are parents who object to the curriculum content and other influences that are found in institutional schools, and they want their children to learn the parents’ values and beliefs instead. These parents also wish to teach their children the importance of the family unit and to strengthen their family ties. Pedagogues

believe that institutional schools provide an inadequate educational experience for their children, and they take responsibility for providing what they believe to be a richer learning environment at home. While Van Galen’s framework was developed in reference to American homeschooling, other scholars have adapted and applied her framework to research on non-American homeschooling as well. Ultimately, homeschooling parents usually believe that they can offer their own children a better education than the institutional alternatives offered. Some homeschooling families also view children’s education to be primarily a parental responsibility. Consequently, they may also see government projects of compulsory mass schooling as interfering in the domain of the parent. A criticism of homeschooling, made in the American context, is that by diverting both children and resources away from public school systems, it weakens public education and disrupts its putative role in combatting inequity and supporting the public good. Critics also raise concerns that homeschooled children miss out on exposure to a range of people and points of view beyond their families. When it comes to the academic and other outcomes of homeschooling, it is difficult to draw any general conclusions, due to both a relative paucity of empirical data and the vast diversity of circumstances, resources, and approaches among homeschooling families around the world. Lauren Jervis See also Education; Family; Parenting; Schooling

Further Readings Bhopal, K., & Myers, M. (2018). Home schooling and home education: Race, class and inequality. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Gaither, M. (2008). Homeschool: An American history. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Gaither, M. (Ed.). (2017). Handbook of home education. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Kunzman, R. (2009). Write these laws on your children: Inside the world of conservative Christian homeschooling. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Kunzman, R., & Gaither, M. (2013). Homeschooling: A comprehensive survey of the research. Other

Homeless Children and Youth Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives, 2(1), 4–59. Rothermel, P. (Ed.). (2015). International perspectives on home education: Do we still need schools? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Galen, J. (1991). Ideologues and pedagogues: Parents who teach their children at home. In M. A. Pitman & J. Van Galen (Eds.), Home schooling: Political, historical, and pedagogical perspectives (pp. 63–76). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Homeless Children

and

Youth

Social exclusion of marginalized and vulnerable groups makes them a nonproductive part of society in today’s globalized world. They can, however, be productive if given a chance. As noted in the literature, marginalized groups such as homeless youth, and young people working on the streets, are often stigmatized as vagrants engaging in deviant behavior. Moreover, the current scenario worldwide does not portray an optimistic view for homeless children and youth. Working children on the streets and homeless youth are neither the priority of the government in many countries—for example, in Pakistan, the focus of this entry—nor do many local governments show concern for them. The phenomenon of homelessness among young people across the globe has given rise to many conceptual difficulties. First of all, there is no exact figure for the number of homeless ­children and youth, although it is a phenomenon that has been studied for years. Relatedly, research by Asma Khalid found that there are no official data available on homeless children and youth in Pakistan, making it difficult to formulate policies and take appropriate measures. Homeless youth are typically defined as unaccompanied youth ages 12 years and older who are without family support, live in shelters, on the streets, in cars or vacant buildings, or who are couch surfing or living in other unstable circumstances.

Why Young People Become Homeless Previous and current research shows that there can be many reasons for homelessness among

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children and youth; these vary from country to country and region to region. Among the main reasons cited are poverty, domestic and relationship violence, child maltreatment or neglect, dysfunctional families, physical or sexual ­ abuse, family substance abuse, and family conflict. ­Additionally, a shortage of affordable housing in growing cities causes homelessness among youth, who constitute much of the population that migrates to cities for economic opportunities. As noted in the literature, the majority of such youth have experienced and/or witnessed physical abuse. Further, homeless youth also face more sexual violence than youth who are not homeless. In this connection, it is also common for these homeless youth to be forced into illicit sexual activities and drug use because, living on the streets, they come in contact with a wide variety of individuals with different intentions; such experiences often lead to emotional and psychological disturbances, sometimes severe, in young people. In addition to abuse, neglect, and family conflict, there are other factors that contribute to youths’ inclination to run away from home. These include school difficulties or conflicts with teachers, problematic relations with peers, relationships with delinquent peers, teen pregnancy (rare in Pakistan) or parenthood, being gay or lesbian (again rare in Pakistan where the law and social mores do not allow LGBTIQ identities), and behavioral or mental health problems.

Issues Facing Homeless Youth Concerns Around Well-Being

Homeless youth are usually well aware of their situation and also acknowledge the fact that they are not being taken care of by parents, society, government, or other organizations (nonprofit and international) who are assisting them. They can have a particular definition of their wellbeing. According to interviews conducted with homeless youth in the neighboring Pakistani cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, they believe that they should have the right to live decently. They should have decent employment, the opportunity to go to schools/colleges, health check-ups, and decent housing among other things (Khalid, 2016, p. 61). It is also argued in the literature that their

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well-being should be the priority of concerned governments (either local or national). Exclusion in the Participatory Process

Khalid’s 2014 PhD thesis involved a study of a group of working young people and homeless youth in Pakistan. She found that they themselves are never consulted on those decisions which affect their lives, for example, regarding drop-in centers, shelter homes, vocational training, or family reunification among others. These youth strongly believed that they should be given a chance to participate in those matters that affect them. When they were offered assistance, they wondered how anything could be planned for them without their consent and without taking their views into account. Unfortunately, as observers and critics have noted, this is common practice not only in Pakistan but also across the world. These homeless youth are of the view that they should be consulted for needs assessment and planning so that the responsible authorities get to know their real lives; this could then lead to appropriate design assistance. For example, homeless youth shared that a designated drop-in center should mean a place where they can visit any time for facilitation or assistance; as of this writing, however, drop-in centers in Pakistan are open only from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and are thus unavailable for evening visits, when the majority of these street youth are free from work. According to the youth, the current drop-in centers (run by nongovernmental organizations) do not provide shower facilities, evening hours, or a place to relax after a hard day, among other amenities. Another issue raised by the group interviewed in Khalid’s research was related to the availability of facilities for older youth (16 years and above). Current facilities operate only for boys up to 13 or 14 years and do not cater to those who are above this age. This point struck the researcher as quite surprising, given that youth work or roam in an unprotected environment the whole day and voiced an acute need for a protective environment even if only for a short period. The current working facilities make no provision for youth to stay the night. Interviewees often complained that no sustainable programs have been developed for them by any government. Several young people did acknowledge some of the

steps taken by the local government with the help of international funding; however, none regarded these steps to be sufficient. Sexual Abuse

Research around the globe shows that many homeless youths face sexual abuse on a daily basis. It is a common phenomenon on the streets that young girls and boys who are homeless become victims of sexual abuse. As noted earlier, since the street is a public place, there exists a likelihood of getting sexually abused. In addition, many children are forcibly involved in illicit sexual activities including trafficking. However, there are often no measures to protect homeless youth from sexual abuse and its aftermath. In most countries, there are no services at the facilities provided for homeless youth where professional counselors could provide services to these emotionally and psychologically traumatized youth. Security Issues

The existing research literature indicates that security is the biggest issue for homeless youth around the globe. These young people either have no specific place of shelter, or the places provided do not have adequate facilities; thus, they end up on the streets. In Pakistan, the dearth of shelter services for homeless young people is an everpresent source of concern among youth for their security and physical safety. A contrasting perspective can be found among the local authorities, who consider these youths as vagrants and a threat to the safety of the neighborhood. This has sometimes led to the filing of (often flawed) legal charges against them. Homeless youth interviewed during Khalid’s research stated that living on the streets makes them more vulnerable to theft and other kinds of abuse, especially at night. It has also been reported in the literature that police have arrested homeless youth at night on the basis of false evidence and have kept them under custody for a night or two, sometimes releasing them only after receiving money or other favors. Drugs and Thefts

It is often the case that homeless youth are involved in the use of illicit drugs. There are many

Homeless Children and Youth

contributing factors to such patterns of behavior, such as depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, feelings of worthlessness, family breakups, and frustration due to earning a meagre amount of money while working on the streets. Homeless youth may take drugs as a form of escape from the harsh realities of life and to overcome feelings of low self-esteem. Another reason that homeless youth are labeled as delinquents is involvement in petty theft; however, not all homeless children and youth engage in this activity. According to the literature, however, local police of every district where police were interviewed considered homeless youths on the whole to be thieves. The newspapers and electronic media continually report incidents of homeless youth involved in such crimes as stealing, shoplifting, or mugging on streets. In some instances, they are falsely accused of greater crimes such as robbery, automated teller machine embezzlement, and even murder and are jailed without being afforded the chance to mount an adequate legal defense. In such scenarios, their vulnerability and marginalization increases. Some human rights activists and organizations work to help and rescue these youth. However, there is often a complete absence of any organized system for their protection and safety; instead, the government adds risks and vulnerabilities in the form of neglect by police and local government.

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concerned. They have a deep aspiration for dignity and self-respect and want society to consider them an important part of the social fabric because, despite being stigmatized as a group, they are not all vagrants, delinquents, or thieves. They are a product of society. These homeless youth may lack a clear idea about their future, yet they are hopeful that someday they will have their own families and will be accorded respect by society. Asma Khalid See also Child Labor; Child Neglect; Children as Workers; International Child Saving; Street Children; Street Children, History of

Further Readings

Decker, M. R., Miller, E., McCauley, H., Tancredi, D., Levenson, R., Waldman, J., . . . Silverman, J. (2011). Intimate partner violence and partner notification of sexually transmitted infections among adolescent and young adult family planning clinic patients. International Journal of STD & AIDS, 22, 345–347. Kennedy, A. C. (2007, July). Homelessness, violence exposure, and school participation among urban adolescent mothers. Journal of Community Psychology, 35(5), 639–654. Khalid, A. (2014). An investigation of support organisations (government and non-governmental organisations) and processes in assisting Afghan and Pathan children and youth working on the streets in Rawalpindi and Islamabad (Pakistan) (Unpublished Self-Esteem PhD thesis). University of Wollongong. Retrieved from https://ro.uow.edu.au/do/search/ Despite feelings of being marginalized—­ Khalid, A. (2016). Knowing daily lives of children and throwaway products of society—homeless youth youth working on the streets through photononetheless believe that they deserve to have a elicitation. Journal of Asian Development Studies, decent life and a family. Research reviewed by 5(3), 57–67. Khalid shows that homeless youth continue to Kulik, D., Gaetz, S., Crown, C., & Ford-Jone, E. (2011). have strong feelings of self-esteem and strong Homeless youth’s overwhelming health burden: A wishes for families. They want to be reconnected review of the literature. Paediatrics & Child Health, with their own families—parents, siblings, and 16(6), 43–47. other relatives—but they also want to start their Natasha, S., Pushpanjali, D., Amber, L., Gizem, E., & own families, having spouses/partners and chilJulianne, S. (2009). A review of services and dren as do other, more fortunate people. They feel interventions for runaway and homeless youth: deprived while living and working on the streets Moving forward. Children and Youth Services where nobody cares for them, nobody takes them Review, 31(7), 732–742. seriously, and nobody thinks about their future. Skott-Myre, H., Raby, R., & Nikolaou, J. (2008, Researchers around the globe have reported that February). Towards a delivery system of services for even living a marginalized life, homeless youth can rural homeless youth: A literature review and case have very conventional views as far as family is study. Child Youth Care Forum, 37(2), 87–102.

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Thrane, L. E., Hoyt, D. R., Whitbeck, L. B., & Yoder, K. A. (2006, October). Impact of family abuse on runaway, deviance, and street victimization among homeless rural and urban youth. Child Abuse and Neglect, 30(10), 1117–1128. Tyler, K. A. (2006). A qualitative study of early family histories and transitions of homeless youth. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 21(10), 1385–1393. Tyler, K. A., & Johnson, K. A. (2006, August). Trading sex: Voluntary or coerced? The experiences of homeless youth. Journal of Sex Research, 43(3), 208–216. Xiaojin, C., Thrane, L., Whitbeck, L. B., Johnson, K. D., & Hoyt, D. R. (2007). Onset of conduct disorder, use of delinquent subsistence strategies, and street victimization among homeless and runaway adolescents in the Midwest. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2(9), 1156–1183.

Homes, Institutional At a rudimentary level, institutional (also known as ‘residential’) homes for children are shared group living spaces, providing 24/7 care for children unable to live with their parents and/or alternative caregivers. Children live in institutional homes for a variety of reasons, including individual factors, such as parental ill-health, death, abuse, or neglect but also wider structural factors, such as structural inequality. Children can also be placed in other forms of residential institutions such as mental health hospitals or secure prisons. In institutional homes, children are almost always placed with other children, often unrelated, although sibling groups can be placed together. In some exceptional circumstances, children can be placed in single-bedded units. What primarily distinguishes institutional homes from other forms of alternative care, such as foster care, however, is the rotational staff team that cares for children on a 24/7 basis. Staff teams are typically paid, although in some circumstances staff will volunteer and work in homes unpaid. Institutional homes are used to care for children around the world, although the form these institutions take varies. There is no officially verified number of children living in institutional homes globally, and the

varied range of estimations place it somewhere between 2 and 8 million. Nonetheless, there are a significant number of children being cared for and living within institutions worldwide, and therefore, institutional homes constitute an important aspect of contemporary childhood. This entry provides an overview of research concerning institutional homes in England and Wales as a case study and then considers wider global perspectives on the future of institutional care.

Early Origins of Institutional Homes Institutions in sociology are often associated with the order. Institutions can be physical buildings (such as hospitals, prisons, universities) but also beliefs and ideas that bind individuals together (such as religious or political beliefs). It is important to note this prior to considering institutional homes because there are significant current debates pertaining to institutional care in research and literature, which will be discussed at various points throughout this entry. Institutions vary significantly across time and space, and processes of institutionalisation will have occurred in different forms in different countries at different times. The earliest example of institutional homes for children in the United Kingdom is found in the Royal Hospitals (1552), which provided basic care for infants and children. Royal Hospitals, whilst socially progressive, were short-lived due to economic pressures and replaced by workhouses in the 1600s. Since this time, institutional homes have remained as part of the formal social welfare system in England and Wales, coinciding with the formation of other large institutions. These early spaces had a dual purpose: To protect children from societal ills and to protect society from the perceived ills of poor and/or illegitimate children. From the mid-1700s, due to changing conceptualisations of children and childhood, many prominent philanthropists, including Thomas Coram in 1751 and Dr. Thomas Barnardo in 1867, began to provide alternatives to workhouses and street life for children by establishing charity-based institutional provisions. Whilst appearing altruistic and noble, they were also underpinned by a religious desire for social change, conceptualising children’s families as morally dubious and something to ‘rescue’ children from.

Homes, Institutional

Broadly speaking, therefore, prior to the early 20th century, institutional care was rooted in a punitive response to poverty and societal ‘ills’ and practised traditional, regulatory, and reformatory approaches to raising children. This is not to suggest, however, that all children in institutional homes had overwhelmingly poor experiences; however, and conditions within institutions may have been superior to conditions they experienced in their home lives.

Second World War and the Deinstitutionalisation Movement The end of the Second World War marked a significant shift in the conceptualisation of, and the provision of care for, children. It is widely acknowledged that the knowledge produced as a result of the systematic separation of children and families as a consequence of war forced policy makers to reconsider the care of vulnerable children. During the war, many families’ homes and lives were destroyed and there was less obvious distinction between social classes, and accordingly, there was a shift towards a more egalitarian approach to social welfare. The Curtis Report, published in 1946, challenged inadequacies regarding basic, but generic and impersonal, care for children. Criticisms were also directed at the lack of opportunity for ‘normal family life’ available within institutional homes, underpinning the principle that children who cannot remain with birth families should be placed in adoptive or foster placements. The resultant Children Act (1948) allocated greater responsibility to local authorities for children who may previously have been cared by religious organisations or charities, and the principle of keeping children with families and out of the care system was introduced. Beyond societal and legal changes, developments in both psychological and sociological ­theory were also emerging. In 1951, John Bowlby published his highly influential ‘attachment theory’, emphasising the mother’s role as vital in forming healthy attachments in infancy, and the significance of what he defined as ‘positive attachments’, which he argued had consequences far into adult life. In sociological theory, Irving G ­ offman’s 1961 work on ‘total institutions’—spaces in which

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every aspect of life was undertaken within institutions—began to inform a further critique of institutional life for children. Informing the policy shifts that occurred alongside theoretical developments, however, should also be understood economically, as caring for children within institutions is considerably more expensive than within family settings (i.e., foster care and adoption). The amalgamation of these changes (social, legal, theoretical, and economic) can be understood as aspects of the wider deinstitutionalisation movement. Concerns surrounding institutionalisation have permeated literature regarding group homes for children since this period and remain pertinent in contemporary literature. The emergence of multiple abuse scandals during the 1980s taking place within institutional homes for children—in multiple locations across the globe—further compounded a negative perception of institutional care for children, and large institutional homes began to close, with children increasingly placed in foster care. Despite the push to eradicate institutions for children globally, in many locations, this has not been possible thus far, with demand for places still outweighing alternative provisions. Despite most large institutional homes—with the exception of young offenders’ institutions and mental health hospitals—having been replaced by smaller group homes (typically referred to as ‘residential homes or children’s homes’), many institutionalised features still persist within smaller homes; therefore, institutional homes should not be assumed to be a historical concept in England and Wales.

The Future of Institutional Homes The future of institutional homes remains uncertain. There is a strong push towards the elimination of institutional homes, particularly for young children (under 8 years of age), in the charitable sector, for example, with J. K. Rowling’s charitable foundation Lumos. This is particularly targeted at institutional homes in the former Soviet Union, in which current conditions reflect the conditions of institutional homes in Victorian England. To explore institutional homes further in the Global South, Tuhinul Islam and Leon Fulcher’s 2016 edited collection of chapters on residential childcare provides a nuanced debate on the various

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forms of institutional homes across the globe, offering critical debates surrounding the influence of Western ideologies on institutional care and the colonial roots of institutional homes in the Global South. In contrast, however, there is a counterargument from academics involved in residential childcare who argue that current narratives regarding group-living residential homes are primarily informed by economic factors and overlook the complex array of factors informing what constitutes the ‘best’ placement options for looked after children.

Final Thoughts Institutional homes have been a key feature in the provision of care for children in England and Wales from the 1600s onwards. Since then, the number of homes provided in England and Wales has declined monumentally, and with the exception of specialised provisions, children typically live in small group homes. Institutional homes are not necessarily wholly positive, or wholly negative, as this is context-dependent. Whether the pattern of deinstitutionalisation continues is dependent upon scholarly and policy debate, and the wider economic and social terrains in and on which institutional homes, for now, stand. Lisa M. Warwick See also Orphan Care; Orphans; Workhouses

Further Readings Disney, T. (2015). Complex spaces of orphan care—A Russian therapeutic children’s community. Children’s Geographies, 13(1), 30–43. doi:10.1080/ 14733285.2013.827874 Islam, T., & Fulcher, L. (Eds.). (2016). Residential child and youth care in a developing work: Global perspectives (Vol. 1). Cape Town, South Africa: The CYC-Net Press. Petrowski, N., Cappaa, C., & Gross, P. (2017). Estimating the number of children in formal alternative care: Challenges and results. Child Abuse & Neglect, 70, 388–398. doi:10.1016/j.chiabu .2016.11.026 Smith, M. (2009). Rethinking residential child care: Positive perspectives. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

Hope Hope is future oriented, a desire for that which is not yet present and the anticipation that this future will be positive or at least better than both the past and the present. In contemporary language, hope is considered to be an attitude or feeling, closely aligned with optimism or even wishful thinking, implying that things hoped for are out of one’s control but nonetheless possible. In many religious traditions, hope is an expression of trust in God or the forces of the universe and, in this worldview, hope extends beyond the span of individual mortal life. Whilst this religious articulation of hope has an ultimate orientation towards the afterlife, on earth, children embody the continuation of intergenerational human life. The colloquial cliché ‘children are the future’ concretises the synergy between hope and children. The hopes vested in children are partly material: In many societies, children’s labour and future earning power are essential for family livelihoods. However, hope is also expressed in relation to less tangible abstract notions of ‘the good’ or psychological fulfilment and congenial social relationships. Children are construed as innocent, not yet contaminated by the evils of the world or worn down by the stresses and strains of adult life, and thus seem to offer fresh energy and hope.

Intergenerational Life: Adults’ Hopes for Children’s Futures Human life is intergenerational and children live communally in various family formations. Babies cannot physically survive without the support and care of at least one adult or older child in the initial years of life, and this period of childhood dependency on adults extends for several years beyond infanthood. The length and nature of this dependency varies in relation to different forms of social organisation and is particularly extended by participation in schooling and higher education. In addition to caring for the physical needs of children, the institutions of family and education are sites of enculturation, transmitting historical knowledge and ways of doing things, and equipping children for their future adult roles in society. This process means that the past experiences of the older generation are enfolded into the future lives

Hope

of young people through the interactive experiences of the shared present. This process is what makes human culture in all its forms possible: Each successive generation inherits what has gone before and can extend and further develop this knowledge base rather than ‘reinventing the wheel’. Hope is thus often closely aligned with notions of progress or the anticipation that the future (including the longer future of children) will be better than the present. Conversely, present difficulties or the challenges of adult life may also evoke nostalgia for the past towards a life that is often perceived of as simpler or less troubled. Although directed towards the past, nostalgia may be thought of as an emotional mirror of hope and is also intertwined with childhood, in this instance, adults’ recollected childhoods. The loss of one’s own childhood may be recapitulated in hopes for the future.

Adolescence: The Identity Crisis and Hope Long human childhoods also mean that the mistakes and failures of the past are not easily consigned to history but live on across generations. In particular, global and more local conditions of socioeconomic inequality and political asymmetries are perpetuated and are highly resistant to change. Despite the hopes that children’s innocence will provide fresh possibilities for humanity, by the time children become adolescents, these hopes are often unrealised. Young people are typically less than satisfied with continuing the older generation’s way of life and may resist their parents’ views of the world as out of touch with both current realities and their imagined futures. This is what is colloquially termed the ‘generation gap’, characterised by misunderstandings between the older and younger generations. Theories of psychological development variously describe adolescence as a critical transitional period in which children become adults. Erik ­Erikson’s concept of the ‘identity crisis’ has been subsumed into popular discourse in the 21st century and it is now taken for granted that adolescence is a distinct developmental phase characterised by exploration and rebellion. Instead of young people’s restlessness being seen as a source of hope for positive change, it is either

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dismissed as an adolescent phase that they will ‘grow out of’ or perhaps even construed as a threat to the fragile fabric of society.

Youth, Politics, and Hope At particular moments in history, the disjuncture between young people and the older generation may take the form of political action in which the younger generation actively attempts to both resist the past and generate new forms for the future. The 1960s’ rebellion may now be mostly caricatured as ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ but was also infused by feminist and anti-imperialist hopes, articulated in various youth movements of political protest, including opposition in the United States to the Vietnam war and the 1968 student protests that began in Paris. By contrast, youth in the global North today have often been dismissed as apathetic and politically disengaged. Election outcomes in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and the 2015 Brexit referendum vote in the United Kingdom have been attributed to the absence of the youth vote. However, there are signs that this lack of participation in formal democratic processes may reflect disillusionment rather than apathy. Young people all over the world are at the forefront of multiple political battles, for example, #OccupyWallStreet, the climate change movement, and gay rights campaigns. These political actions make use of new technologies, particularly social media, operate outside of formal national political structures, and often emerge in response to the perceived limitations of