nature of children’s friendships in British schools. She argued that, despite their importance to children, friendships are often overlooked or trivialized by adults or interpreted only through an adult lens which looked at how children learn from peers rather than how children felt about their friendships and how they had an impact on their daily experiences.
Child‐centered anthropology is seen as a corrective to the previous marginalization of children within anthropology and an inversion of power relationships between adult and child and between researcher and researched. The term child‐centered anthropology also underlines the point that these anthropologists conduct research with rather than on children so that children are acknowledged as the experts on their own lives and experiences and serve as anthropologists’ primary informants. Children must be researched in their own terms, not talked about with parents or other adults, or their experiences extrapolated from large scale datasets. Examining childhood in this way means focusing on how children themselves perceive their lives, surroundings, parents, and upbringing – and what impact this has on wider social and cultural structures and institutions. It is based on the premise that children have agency. They are not empty vessels or blank slates who are socialized by others – but play an active part in their own upbringing, shaping and transforming themselves and others. Children themselves create meanings and form their own belief systems, negotiating and shaping social attitudes about childhood. Anne Solberg (1997), for example, looked at children’s perspectives of their daily domestic lives, as well as analyzing how children see their role in Norwegian society, and showed how this identity is arrived at through a process of negotiation between children and adults in the domestic sphere and beyond.
This emphasis on children’s voices and agency has been complemented by a more politicized theorization of the global cultural politics of childhood. This has analyzed how childhood became a conflicted and contested idea and laid bare the multiple structures and processes of power, between countries and within families (Scheper‐Hughes & Sargent, 1998; Stephens, 1995). Much of this work has pivoted on the new focus on children as rights‐bearing citizens in the international arena and the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, United Nations, 1989). The UNCRC reaffirmed the idea that children’s rights are human rights, and that while children need special protection because of their biological and social vulnerability, these rights spring from the inalienable fact of their humanity. Such ideals fitted easily with academic theorizations that children were people, that society could not be properly understood without understanding the role and experiences of every member, including children, and that children’s own perspectives and daily realities were valid and worthwhile areas of research. By valuing them in their own right children were seen by both academics and those drafting and implementing the UNCRC as individuals with rights and the potential for independent action and agency, not as appendages to their family or the passive recipients of socialization (Montgomery, 2017).
The UNCRC, while providing a rationale for seeing children as autonomous agents and key informants, has not, however, been universally welcomed by either child‐centered anthropologists or indeed those interested in studies of socialization and social development. Robert LeVine, for instance, rejects the argument that an anthropology of childhood should focus only on children as active agents, existing in their own world, refuting the claim that studies of childrearing are in some ways dismissive or even oppressive of children. He argues (2003, p. 5) that studies of socialization do not treat children
simply as objects rather than subjects, suppressing their voices and taking their perspective of the adults who oppress, victimize and exploit children. These allegations come from those who see an anthropology of childhood as a political weapon against injustice like political struggles to end the persecution of women and ethnic minorities, rather than a search for knowledge and understanding. One of the strengths of socialization research is that it has resisted this kind of politicization in its pursuit of a deeper understanding of children and their parents.
However, the United States is the only member state in the world not to ratify the UNCRC and children’s rights, inevitably, have different standing and meanings among US researchers. Whether or not any studies of childhood can be politically neutral is much debated and, as argued earlier, the lack of a political dimension and a failure to understand diversity or privilege is one of the criticisms levelled at psychologists from those in the New Social Studies of Childhood. Even so, while the cultural politics of childhood, and children’s rights in particular, have been a source of inspiration to child‐centered anthropologists, there has also been a certain amount of frustration and distrust of any universalization of childhood, whether from psychological theories or international legislation. On a macro level there have been concerns that the UNCRC has created a notion of a universal childhood, globalized in line with inflexible Western standards and ideals, which is being imposed on cultures with very different notions of what a child is, how they should grow up and what the relationships between adult and child should look like, and which does not allow for cultural variation or political and economic circumstances (Boyden, 1997). The Convention, for example, clearly defines a child as any person under the age of 18 but anthropologists have pointed out that this simply does not hold true in many societies where children marry, bear their own children, work, or are initiated as adults before the age of 18 and where personhood is thought about very differently and both childhood and adulthood acknowledged at different times and in different ways. On a micro‐level, anthropologists have also argued that an insistence on children’s rights has the potential to destabilize family relationships, undermine parental authority and change understandings of what a good childhood looks like and how children should interact with others and develop socially (Burr, 2004). In Ghana, for example, some research has suggested that parents believed that children’s rights would lead to division within families, cause children to become selfish, neglect their parents and forego their responsibilities and reciprocal obligations. In one study, parents said: “we don’t want Western children in Ghana” (Twum‐Danso, 2009, p. 426).
Anthropology and Social Development in the 21st Century – Tentative Steps Towards Dialogue
Despite this history, recent years have seen tentative steps towards rapprochement and an understanding of the need to work across disciplines to understand children’s social development holistically (Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2021). Spurred on, in part, from the insights of the New Social Studies of Childhood, many of the assumptions of 20th‐century psychology are now actively being critiqued from within: increasing visibility is being accorded to developmental psychologists who take cultural, sociological, ethnographic, or child‐centered approaches to studying children and childhoods, and build contextualized understandings of concepts such as social development into studies of children’s lives. Social psychologists such as Martin Woodhead (1999) and Erica Burman (1996) have challenged the idea that “social constructionism” and “psychology” are mutually exclusive terms and rejected the idea that children’s development can be viewed as a universal, unidirectional process of maturation which can be identified in a single cultural setting with simple experimental studies. Increasingly too, psychologists from Africa and Asia are beginning to question the use of the Western child as the developmental norm (Serpell & Marfo, 2014).
There is also a growing recognition that some psychologists have, since the 1970s, and indeed long before the rise of the New Social Studies of Childhood, argued that social development should be seen as a series of culturally and environmentally situated and transactional series of processes (see Chen & Eisenberg, 2012) and that these need not be incompatible with child‐centered research. This is particularly the case with the increasing use made of cultural‐ecological models within the New Social Studies of Childhood, especially those developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1997). His bio‐ecological model of human development, generally presented as a set of nested circles radiating out from the child, representing the contextual systems in their environment, definitively places the child at the center of research and recognizes the interplay between the levels of influences and – implicitly – the child’s agency (Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2021). Other psychologists have also used cultural‐ecological
