by historians of childhood and the family, by developmental psychologists, social policy specialists, socialisation theorists and others’ (2004: 17); but perhaps this is overstating disciplinary differences. Histories of childhood and children are not only ‘structurally determined’, they also attempt to record and account for the interplay between children’s agency and the social structures that organize and constrain their lives. Similarly, the sociology of childhood has to consider how social structures constrain or at least shape the lives of contemporary children (Corsaro 2005). Nonetheless, they are right that a focus on children’s agency has been a defining feature of Childhood Studies.
Indeed, making children’s agency visible has been one of the core goals of the paradigm of Childhood Studies. David Oswell (2013) has argued for an understanding of children’s agency as always the product of social relations between children and other actors (human and non-human). This approach moves away from a liberal framing of agency as the capacity for action following from the will of an individual agent.
Another approach to theorizing children’s agency, articulated by Berry Mayall (2002) in her book on the lives of London children, is to approach children’s lives from a ‘child standpoint’. Standpoint theory, an approach developed by feminist scholars, claims that a subaltern social group, say women, or children, have a deep understanding of the structures of feeling developed through the experience of living within a patriarchal or agepatriarchal (Hood-Williams 1990) society. This experiential understanding enables a social group to theorize society more robustly precisely because they approach it from a particular standpoint. Feminist standpoint theory has been criticized for its implicit assumption that women’s life experiences are not radically fractured or cut across by other social locations, particularly race and class. The same critique can be made of child standpoint theory – that it emphasizes the common, age-based and generational experience of being a child over the way that experience is shaped by the raced and classed identities and locations that children occupy. Furthermore, child standpoint theory shares with participatory methods of child research the problem that the researchers working with children are not themselves children, a fact that undermines the credibility of applying standpoint theory and fully participatory methods to research with children.
James and James do note that childhood is a specific moment in the life course with common experiences that also has differences embedded in it that fracture or cut across the shared experiences of children and shared concepts of childhood in any particular time or space (2004: 22). Whilst this is clearly the case, the challenge of depicting and analysing how childhood is shaped by other social identities, including race, class and gender, has not been actively or extensively taken up within the contemporary sociology of childhood. Research on the childhoods of white and middle-class children are still the main focus of most Anglophone research in the sociology of childhood and frequently these children’s experiences are then extended to develop a general theory of childhood. This is to some extent, perhaps, connected to the emphasis on children’s agency within Childhood Studies and the concomitant underplaying of how structures (economy, the state, racism, class) overdetermine children’s lifeworlds.
This is not to say that the sociology of childhood pays no attention to social structures. The structure/agency binary is one of the classic binary structures that frame the discipline of sociology, and Childhood Studies is engaging with that binary (and not only the agency part of it) when it insists on the importance of children’s agency. Given the importance of school and family as structures of power in the lives of children, this means that the sociology of childhood runs alongside the sociology of education and the sociology of the family (Bühler-Niederberger 2010). What made the sociology of childhood distinct from these two disciplines is its emphasis on children’s agency on the one hand, and on the other its identification of a set of processes, captured in the neologism ‘generationing’ (Huijsmans 2016), that produce adults and children as distinct subjects comparable to the way that racism and racialization produces race and sexism and gendering produces gender. These theoretical concepts suggest that there is such a thing as a global form of childhood, although in practice research on the exercise of agency by children in the Global South and practices of generationing has mostly been done by anthropologists, reproducing the classic divide of sociology’s interest in industrial and post-industrial societies and anthropology’s in rural or sub-cultural groups.
The sociology of childhood also emphasizes that childhood is a relational category that cannot be understood, in any time or place, without an understanding of the expectations of adulthood. Mayall identifies this as a ‘structural sociology of childhood’, contrasting it to ‘a deconstructive sociology of childhood’ and also to a ‘sociology of children’. It is within the ‘structural sociology of childhood’ that Mayall places her own work and that of Jens Qvortrup, both of whom deploy Mannheim’s concept of generation to understand how childhood is conceptualized and lived by cohorts of children (Mayall 2002: 27; see also Alanen 2001). It emphasizes the shared experiences of children. A deconstructive sociology of childhood, by contrast, attends to local constructions of childhood whilst the sociology of children stresses ‘children’s relations with adults in their daily lives’ (Mayall 2002: 22). These distinctions seem to me to be overdrawn. Qvortrup does argue for the use of the singular ‘childhood’ rather than the multiple ‘childhoods’, but his work is confined to the European context, in which there is a normative childhood against which the actual lived experiences of children are understood as being ‘normal’ or ‘pathological’ (Ovortrup 1994). Within any particular historical and social context there will be a normative and hegemonic concept of childhood against which children themselves are compared as individuals and collectives. Finally, although Mayall places her own work in the ‘structural sociology of childhood’ (2002: 23), elsewhere in the same book she argues for the importance of understanding children not only as actors but also as agents (2002: 21).
History of childhood
In 1960 Philippe Aries published his seminal study L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime. This book, first published in English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, has been the key reference point for the debate on whether the concept of childhood is an invention of the modern period. Aries’s argument was essentially that in the Middle Ages in Europe there was no concept of children as a separate category of people requiring special or distinctive treatment from adults. He argued that as soon as children left the dependent state of early childhood they were treated like small adults, were immersed in all aspects of social and working life and were not accorded any special protection, rights or responsibilities. His sources, mostly analyses of images of children in medieval portraiture, depicted children as small versions of adults. In these pictures, Aries claims, children are invariably wearing the same clothes as adults, without any of the stylized features – chubbiness, large eyes, body–head ratios, smiling faces, small hands – that later artists used to depict children as different kinds of people from adults. Aries infers from this difference in how children are depicted that in the earlier period there was no such thing as childhood.
Historians have taken issue both with the limited sources that Aries relies on and the inferences that he draws from these sources (Vann 1982; Pollock 1983). Portraiture was expensive and the people who commissioned portraits of their families or themselves were a small elite whose attitudes to childhood and, for the children, experience of childhood were likely to be very different from those of the general population. Portraits are also highly stylized and use special conventions, so that how children are portrayed in these paintings cannot necessarily be taken as an indication of children’s experience of everyday life or their representation in more popular media.
Despite the lively debate about Aries’s work, the central contention of Centuries of Childhood, namely that the attitudes, sensibilities and experiences that we now think of as immanent to childhood are an invention of the modern period, is widely accepted by historians and social scientists. In their introduction to the important collection of papers on historical research into American childhood, Hawes and Hiner comment that ‘Aries has been
