Modern childhood? : exploring the 'child question' in sociology

Abstract

The study explores the 'child question' in sociology and aims to specify concepts by which childhood might be understood as a modem social phenomenon. The exploration is conducted by way of examining what the feminist movement and, within social science, academic feminism, may offer as they have asserted the position of women in science. These are identified as critique, analysis of gender, deconstruction of conventional theoretical knowledge and, finally, its reconstruction by researching and rethinking the social world from new (gendered) standpoints. The emerging interdisciplinary Childhood Studies is clearly motivated by dissatisfaction and criticism of existing childhood knowledge. Childhood is also beginning to appear as a topic for sociological study. Children, moreover, form and are increasingly treated as a social category with specific relations to other social categories and groups - a social 'class' with which various groups of more powerful 'others' maintain economic, political and cultural interests and social relations. These are now becoming visible; childhood has stopped being just a private family affair. Finally, the subjectivity and agency of children is becoming recognized. The study investigates each of these developments as they appear in sociological literature on children and childhood and in empirical inquiry into the organization of everyday life of twenty-five children living in one-parent households. This exploration, conducted from a child perspective, or standpoint, reveals the active and constructive roles that children have in the making of their own everyday lives. Three different everyday life patterns, or childhoods, were found in the study: A 'classical' childhood that is an extension of the modem childhood phenomenon (Aries) in children's postdivorce situation; a modem (sub)urban childhood that is predicated on the development of a child and youth market and an apparatus of social and cultural services for children and youth; and an innovative childhood that may be seen as an extension of the child's familial relations beyond the conventional boundaries of the nuclear family ('familiality'). The results not only describe the choices that children may make in terms of standpoints to knowledge. Such research, hopefully, also begins to show the many levels and the complexity in children's experience of the (historical) phenomenon of childhood and to validate the methodological significance of a children's standpoint in researching that experience.