Chapter 2-The Constructions and Representations of Childhood (original) (raw)

Concepts of childhood: what we know and where we might go (2007)

Renaissance Quarterly, 2007

The publication some forty years ago of the landmark work by Philippe Ariès, entitled Centuries of Childhood in its widely-read English translation, unleashed decades of scholarly investigation of that once-neglected target, the child. Since then, historians have uncovered the traces of attitudes toward children -were they neglected, exploited, abused, cherished? -and patterns of child-rearing. They have explored such issues, among others, as the varieties of European household structure; definitions of the stages of life; childbirth, wetnursing, and the role of the midwife; child abandonment and the foundling home; infanticide and its prosecution; apprenticeship, servitude, and fostering; the evolution of schooling; the consequences of religious diversification; and the impact of gender. This essay seeks to identify key features and recent trends amid this abundance of learned inquiry.

Social Constructions of Childhood (2007)

Childhood and Youth Studies, 2012

Each of us has experienced not one, but two childhoods: the first as a biological state of growth and development and a second as a social construction, which is to say as an institution that has been socially created. If this is true then it follows that childhood is dependent on the nature of a society into which an individual is born and will vary from place to place and time to time. In the last half of the twentieth century a number of thinkers and writers in a variety of fields began to consider the ways in which this process of constructing childhood has been carried out, both in the past and today, and what the implications are for our experience of childhood and for current and future generations of children. If we accept this thesis then it follows that we can only understand childhood if we comprehend how it has been formed and how it varies and changes.

Contemporary Childhood and the Institutional Context

2015

Recently, research on the child and childhood as a social and cultural phenomenon has been approached from the position of multidimensionality and extreme complexity. Childhood, as opposed to the beliefs of the majority of adults, is not an isolated, protected, well controlled and predictable manner of guiding a child towards the adult world. Childhood is more focused on the general perception of child and suggests the existence of a special, separate and fundamentally different social group and category. A child’s status as seen from the adult view and its culturally and historically defined construct changes and varies with its definition of the physical and/or sexual maturity, legal status or age group affiliation. The concept of child and childhood deals with the individual, usually defined from the point of view of an adult person. Two extreme views of children and childhood are related to the concept of designing, modeling, building and desirable socialization, or emphasizing ...

Children and childhood From the Middle Ages to the to the threshold of the Enlightenment

Děti a dětství od středověku na práh osvícenství, 2019

Seeking childhood among the period theoretical treatises and educational texts on the one hand and source documents on the real life of children on the other hand has brought a wide range of new knowledge, but at the same time it has revealed the desiderata and limits of researches focused in this way. The chronological scope of the publication-from the Middle Ages, when, compared to the later period, we have to rely on a substantially more modest base of written, pictorial and material sources, until the 18th century, just before the onset and application of Enlightenment ideas-proved to be crucial in terms of its conception and methodological grasp but also its contribution. All of the transformations and progressions of the phenomenon of childhood were monitored in our study on the background of the advancement of the entire society, while taking into account the specificities of individual social classes. In Czech historiography, it is the first ever application of such a complex approach. It has made it possible not only to capture the continuity of the opinions on children and childhood, but at the same time to highlight the long-term constants of the monitored topic as well. The first chapter presented the opinions on the position of children in society. Precisely the intention to separate out the period observations related to childhood showed to be more than justified, because from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18 th century we can work with a number of texts of an educational character, which expressed themselves to a great extent on childhood. Considerations or targeted tractates can be found in many theoretical-educational sources, in legal summaries or codes, but also in historiography or literature. On the pages of these works, childhood corresponded to the period mentality of the so-called proper society (pro bonum commune), into which the ideal of education and respect for the discovered and gradually codified law fell. The education idea, at the same time, was adopted from Antiquity, and in the Middle Ages inspired the creation of typologically similar works, called princely mirrors. The texts were usually personalized, intended for an individual-the future ruler. This genre did not fully exhaust itself with the actual period of the Middle Ages, because for instance John Amos Comenius also wrote the first two educational texts forthrightly for noblemen. He subsequently turned his interest to school as such, including preschool education in the family. The emerging trend, which resulted in the modern conception of the treatises known as theatrum mundi, but it is already clear in the Late Middle Ages, when the first work appeared with a broader scope of the description of society, including children. Particularly, the opus Ykonomika by the priest in Regensburg Conrad of Megenberg from the middle of the 14 th century provided a view even of the children of the

Theories and Concepts of Childhood

To a large extent, the way that a society understands its young will shape the well-being and choices open to the young. Since no single field of study can speak to the variety of ways that children and youth are understood, in this course we will be introduced to discussions across a broad set of disciplines and intellectual traditions. We will engage with the idea of the child as taken up in the study of history,, and the environment. Throughout the course we will grapple with enduring questions about the nature of childhood: What qualities, if any, should be considered essential to childhood? Is childhood a " stage " of development into full humanity, or simply a different way of being human? Are our understandings of youth held globally or are they a specifically 'western' view? How are our visions of the child influence by intersections with race, gender, and class? What sorts of responsibilities and obligation do adults have towards the young? What are the political implications of these different theories of childhood and youth?

Introduction: Symposium on The Nature and Value of Childhood

Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2018

Children and childhood have been largely ignored by philosophers outside the philosophy of education. Recently this has started to change. In particular, the past few decades have seen a growing interest in children as subjects of political philosophy, with a focus on questions concerning duties of justice towards children and especially parental duties, as well as parental rights and filial duties. Most of the current debates rest on more foundational positions about the nature and value of childhood, issues that are not normally given the same scrutiny. The purpose of this symposium is to examine precisely these foundational questions.

The Child in the Classroom: Teaching a Course on the History of Childhood in Premodern Europe

The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality, 2005

In the Fall of 2004,1 taught a class at UMass Lowell entitled "Childhoodin Premodern Europe", and my experiences in that class form the basis of this essay; many of the course materials are available through the course website, http://faculty.uml.edu/ccarlsmith/teaching/43.329 (last accessed on March 14,2005). All cited texts appear in the bibliography. Footnotes containspecific references and additional comments. 3 Classen, "Philippe Aries and the Consequences." See also Hugh Cunningham's call for crossdisciplinary conversations in his review essay, "Histories of Childhood,"

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy, 2019

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are thus essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source for the key topics, problems and debates in this crucial and exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: · Being a child · Childhood and moral status · Parents and children · Children in society · Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults’ rights? What (if anything) gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disability in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children? How are children’s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology.