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59 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What is a child?
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Childhood is not simply defined by the bodily immaturity of being a young human. It is also marked by the way children are dressed, by the way they are treated, and by social and cultural norms about what they should and should not do.
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What is a child?
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Concepts of what a child is vary from culture to culture and from one historical time to another. Some definitions relate to children's biological immaturity, some definitions are constituted by laws, but others are more socially and culturally constituted.
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What is a child?
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Childhood can also be studied from different points of view. This chapter explores three major view points or approaches, scientific, social constructionist and applied.
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What is the scientific approach to childhood?
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Science seeks to establish objective facts by using rigorous methods. A scientific approach to the study of child development typically consists of three main activities, constructing theories to explain aspects of child development, from these theories making predictions and testing these predictions through experiments, observations and surveys
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Who is Piaget?
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Piaget used scientific methods for testing his theory of child development. He hypothesised that children do not gradually get better and better in their thinking capacities but rather go through a systematic progression of distincy stages. Using observation and experiments Piaget developed data to test his theory.
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Who is Kohlberg?
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Kohlberg and his colleagues asked children to respond to a series of moral dilemmas. On the basis of their answers, he constructed a theory of stages of moral development through which children pass in their maturation from a child's way of thinking to adult levels of competence.
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What is done with this data?
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The data obtained from such studies can be used to address practical questions such as the ages and stages at which children acquire an understanding of right from wrong.
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What is social constructionism?
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Social constructionism draws attention to the influences of culture, history and social processes on the way people make sense of the world and the way people act. The concepts of child and childhood are socially constructed, it challenges the assumption that things like moral values can be objectively defined and measured.
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What is the romantic discourse and puritan discourse?
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Using a social constructionist approach allows people to recognise that children who commit serious crimes like murder can be see through 2 different discourses. The romantic discourse of childhood sees children as inherently good, doing terrible things only if they have been damaged in some way. Consequently child murderers should be treated by therapy. The puritan discourse sees children as inherently evil and amoral. If they do terrible things this is because of their innate wickidness and they should be punished.
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Summary of the approaches
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An applied approach can draw on both scientific and social constructionist approaches when applying theory and research to social policy, professional practice and the law. A scientific approach has produced info about children's capacities at different stages in their maturation. This info has been used to inform policy about ways in which children who commit crimes can be reformed. A social constructionist approach provides insight into why there is so much controversy about what to do with children who commit serious crimes. Identifying historical social and cultural roots of 2 antagonistic models of treatment, the welfare and justice models, help us to make sense of current moves to change systems of juvenile justice.
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Constructions of childhood
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Ideas and beliefs about children are not fixed but are a product of the particular social and cultural setting
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Constructions of childhood
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Ideas about childhood also change over time and depend both on individual experience and wider socio-cultural beliefs.
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Constructions of childhood
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Many social constructionists use the term discourse to refer to the set of interconnected ideas which people draw upon when discussing childhood, both adults and children use discourses to make sense of their experiences of childhood.
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Constructions of childhood
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Ideas of what a person is and when life begins vary widely among and across societies. Social constructionism enables the study of these ideas, these discourses, as part of the whole system of beliefs within any society.
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Who is Aries?
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Aries was one of the first historians to point out that childhood was a social construction not a biological given. He claimed that the idea of childhood did not exist in medieval Europe and that children during this period did not count
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Who is Aries?
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For students of the evolution of childhood as a social construction Aries' thesis remains an important starting point in beginning to understand ideas about childhood in European history.
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Major themes in Western constructions of childhood
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In the North there are multiple contrdictory discourses that surround children.
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Who are Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau?
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Hobbes saw children as inherently evil (Puritan), Locke saw children as a blank slate to be shaped by their upbringing (tabula risa) and Rousseau saw children as inherently good (romantic)
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The globalisation of childhood
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Discourses of children are changing under the new social and economic conditions caused by globalisation. Images of the ideal childhood have been standardised and exported globally so that now all countries are judged by a single set of standards
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The globalisation of childhood
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International legislation, direct financial pressue and advertising have all contributed to impose a Western notion of childhood on countries which have previously constructed childhood and children's roles very differently. The globalisation of childhood has also had several unforseen effects which have penalised poorer countries, stigmatising them and reinforcing power differentials between them and richer nations.
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The child in development
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The story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron illustrates the origins of scientific studies of childhood as well as the link with wider cultural ideas about childhood.
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Darwin's theory
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Darwin's observations illustrate the etablishment of child study as a research tradition as well as the links to evolutionary biology.
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Darwin's theory
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One of the goals of early research was to identify norms of development as a standard for measuring children's developmental progress.
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Scientific approach to childhood
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The new scientific approach to childhood was established against a background of social changes in which the new knowledge and techniques could be applied to practical social issues. Theories about emotional development and the effects of deprivation illustrate the links between scientific research and theory and cultural discourses about children's needs for specific kinds of care. Cross-cultural studies provide a broader perspective on these issues.
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Stages of development
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Piaget's influential account of stages in intellectual development links to progressive traditions of theory and practice in education.
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Piaget
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A comparison between Piaget's classic investigations into children's thinking and more recent experiments highlights how human sense alters children's apparent competence. These experimental studies illustrate scientific methods of hypothesis-testing and show how empirical research can challenge dominant theories.
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Development in context
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Lev Vygotsky represents a tradition of developmental research that draws attention to the ways that childhood is a social and a cultural process
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Research
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Research into early infancy suggests human babies are pre-adapted to social interaction and cultural learning
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Who is Dunn?
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Dunn's research with very young children appear highly socially competent in every day situations at home, raising questions about cultural beliefs about young children's innocence.
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Human Rights
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Universal human rights have been discussed for over 2 centuries. They were written down and codified in 1948. The UN Declaration was designed to prevent global war ever happening again.
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Human Rights
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Human rights are based on the idea that each person is an autonomous individual. Human rights have thus proved hard to implement in some societies which retain very different notions about the nature of the individual and the relationships between people.
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Protection and Participation rights
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Children's rights are an integral part of human rights legilsation. Children have rights because they are human, however children are different from adults and need special protection because they are more vulnerable.
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Four categories of children's rights
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Children's rights legislation aims to give children right in four categories: provision (growth and development), prevention (harm), protection (against exploitation), participation in decisions made on their behalf.
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Children's rights
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The first 3 are relatively uncontroversial but participation can be problematic and participation and protection rights can come into conflict. Participation rights are difficult because they raise important issues about children's competence. Its hard to know when children are physically, mentally and emotionally competent to participate fully. Most governments use age as the criterion for competence although this is problematic.
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The UNCRC
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Came into force in 1989. It took as its basis the notion that a child is an individual, autonomous person with alienable rights which parents and the state must protect. It emphasises that children's rights are not seperate from human rights, they are integral to them. It gives all the children in the world particular rights that are theirs regardless of which state they live in
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Problems with UNCRC
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There have been problems with the UNCRC as some countries have found that it does not adequately address the particular circumstances of African people and have claimed that it is based on a political philosophy that they do not share. Additional treaties such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child have been drawn up
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African Charter?
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The African Charter has a different focus to the UNCRC. It concentrates less on the individual child and more on the child as part of a community. It emphasises the duties of children as well as their rights.
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Has the UNCRC improved children's lives?
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An acknowledgement of children's rights means looking at the impact of policies on children. Aid agencies have realised that some policies have had an adverse effect on children even when they have been beneficial to others in the community.
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Has the UNCRC improved children's lives?
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In some cases giving children rights might involve giving them too much responsibility which they do not want. It is very important to strike a balance. However analysing the implementation of children's rights might not be the only way of measuring improvements in children's lives. It is worth looking at children's quality of life as well as the extent that their rights are being upheld.
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Gendered childhoods
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Researchers distinguish sex differences arising from biology from gender differences arising from social, cultural and psychological influences. This is often presented as an issue about nature versus nurture and about the interactions between the two.
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Social constructionist approach
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The ways people are disabled by social attitudes including the design of places ad processes, provides an illustration of the social constructionist approach
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Scientic approach
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One scientific perspective sees the biological foundation upon whichy a child's gender is built. Social constructionists reverse the argument. They see awareness of and interest in sex differences as a product of human meaning making. From this point of view it is gender that produces sex.
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Biological approach
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Biological processes are largely responsible for the development of sex in the sense of female and make physical difference.
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How is sex determined?
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There are 23 sets of chromosomes, xx = female and xy=male. Some people are born with genetic defects which can mean they have their gender wrongly assigned.
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Acquiring gender
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Psychological studies of the way children learn to act and think in gender-appropriate ways stress the influence of the environment in which they grow up.
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Acquiring gender
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One way children learn gender-appropriate behaviour is through rewards and punishments which often take the form of approval for some kind of play but disapproval for others
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The social constructionist of gender
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Social constructionism argues that in all human societies gender is both taken for granted and so pervasive that people tend to assume its natural, they claim gender is constructed through the social and cultural practices whereby people live together.
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Butler's argument
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She argues that gender produces sex. If gender were not important a child's sex would not matter and child development would not include the acquisition of gender.
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The impact of gender on childhood
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A child's gender will have significant impact on their childhood experience. This impact will differ depending on the social, cultural and economic location, children's education can be affected due to gender, access to employment etc
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Innocence and experience
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Ideas about children's innocence are difficult and sometimes contradictory, innocence has several connotations and is a contested concept, there are several ways of seeing innocence - a lack of knowledge re sex, a lack of experience of the adult world, a lack of evil or sin, synonymous with purity and virtue, related to lack of knowledge of economics and consumerism, inherent to children
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Images
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Images of innocence are used by advertising companies and charities such as Barnardo's. Commerical advertising tends to emphasise the uncorrupted innocence of children to sell products, whereas groups like Barnardo's stress the catastrophic effects of knowledge and experience on children.
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Childhood and sexuality
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Children's awareness and experience of sex are conditioned by age, culture, gender and parental expectation.
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Freud
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Freud argued that all children are inherently sexual and that this sexuality was repressed by their society. Critics of Freud claim that different forms and expressions of sexuality are culturally sepcific
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Focault
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Focault argued that attempts to repress sexuality have had the opposite effect. He suggests that since the 18th century societies have developed new ways of talking about sex, sexual activity and defining people in terms of their sexual identity. All of these developments produce new forms of control and regulation.
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Childhood and sexuality
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In relation to the sexuality of girls, some commentators point to the eroticisation of pubescent girls in Western cultures and the unstable boundary between innocence and experience - ie Lolita The eye of the beholder is responsible for making associations and interpretations and this is done within specific cultural and historical contexts.
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Childhood and crime
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Children who participate in acts of criminality disrupt the notions of childhood innocence. The behaviour of such children is seen as aberrant and becomes newsworthy. Media attention may turn individuals into symbols of deliquency.
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Childhood and crime
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The ways that children who commit serious crimes are conceptualised have profound implications for the ways in which they are treated
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Examples of crime
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In Norway the killers of Silje Raedergard were seen as innocent because they were children
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James Bulger
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In the UK the killers of James Bulger were demonised and seen as fully knowing the consequences of their actions. They were not innocent and therefore could not be treated as children.
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