Confessions of a Grinch: Why I hate
Xmas
•
Parenting can be radicalizing
– Children’s culture has become a central issues for parents who come to
recognize the contradictions of consumer culture and its values --Especially at Xmas
Crossing the Thin Black Lion: The Personal is the Political:
– Why has childrearing become the most difficult form of social
communication I practice?
– Historical reflection on the changing cultural environment
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The Irrationality of
Childrearing and the Study
of Socialization
• Are we slaves to our genes?
• Socialization: defined as the
pattern of social communication
which enables the young to
become autonomous members of
human society
• Cultural diversity of socialization
practices and beliefs
– Provisioning
– Protecting and Disciplining
– Preparing and Training
The Social Necessity of
Childrearing
• Biological continuity of the gene pool
(lineage)
• Transmission of property, power, status in
family
• Transmission of culture in terms of
knowledge, skills, identities and values
Protection or Preparation: Children make
culture -- but not in conditions of their
own making
• Within three years the child
has gained control over their
body
• Learned the language and
core stock of cultural
knowledge
• Can interact and form social
relations with others -engage in conversation, play
and culture making on their
own
Deconstructing Socialization:
Tracing Children’s Culture in
Historical Studies
Text and Image Analysis: literary,
rhetorical, ideological, strategic
(Cross, De Mause)
Childhood
The ideology and discourses
within which children are raised
Matrix of Socialization
Institutional processes and social controls of families and
children (training, law exceptations, rituals, stories)
Documentary: laws, economics,
surveys, social movements,
official records (Pollock, Zelizer,
Cook)
Children's Culture
Children as active makers of meaning: games, peer interactions, stories
Cultural: Oral history, folklore,
artifacts, diaries, observations,
interviews/ biographies (Opies, Sutton
Smith)
Terminology: Childhood, Socialization
and Children’s Culture
• Children: (a category of
• Childhood - constructed in
human subjects: their
representations and
experiences, demography,
discourses about children
identity)
• Matrix of Socialization • Childrearing: familial beliefs,
mandated institutions (family
rules, practices - ie family
law, schools, child spaces
relations as a system of
and movements)
communication
• Children’s material culture • Children’s culture: stories,
games created by children and
cultural commodities
transmitted through their peer
produced for children,
interactions
children’s cultural industries
Beyond Wonderous Innocence: Markets
as Agents of Socialization
•The rise of commerical
discourses on
socialization, family life
and markets;
•The rise of marketing
targeting children as
consumers
•The importance of
consumer socialization
in the family system
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Little house on the prairies
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Father knows best
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Leave it to Beaver
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Simpsons?
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Children before Childhood
• Hammurabi Law Code - children and property
inheritance
• Children in Greece and Rome
– Plato thinks they shouldn’t read poets
– Spartan boys are bonded in military training
– Alexander is taught by Aristotle
• Laws and patriarchy: War, Women and Children in
Ancient Rome, John Evans, Routledge, NY:1991.
– patria potestes – where the father has total control over
the child -- life and death;
– Plautus: Parents are the builders of their children. They
lay the bases of their children’s lives. They raise them up,
take great pains to put their lives on a firm foundation.
They stop at nothing to make them useful and upright,
both as men and citizens, nor do they reckon money spent
• Father controls: issue of when children can marry;
when children can own property and pass it on;
when children are no longer under the control of
their parent etc.
• Exemptions
• notion of infanticide and the emotional relations between
parents and children
• but a law which made juveniles who had lost their fathers, able
to borrow money and make decisions without a tutor or
guardian (Lex Plaitoria)
• But children are also valued for their contribution
to the family honour and the productive household
Aries: Discovery of Modern
Childhood in the 17th Century
Theology of the Holy Child:
- child and original sin
–child is symbol of divinity not
humanity
–Christ has no childrearing
•Modern childhood:
–Children as a distinct stratus
or category
–Expanding discourse on
children: childrearing
•New attitudes and changing
institutions:
–Church orphanages
–Schools
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The Child of History?
Linda Pollack, Forgotten Childhood
• “Many historians have subscribed to the mistaken belief that, if a past
society did not posses the contemporary Western concept of childhood,
then the society had no such concept. This is a totally indefensible
point of view - why should past societies have regarded children in the
same way Western society today? Moreover, even if children were
regarded differently in the past, this does not mean that they were not
regarded as children.”
Bosch’s Torment of St. Anthony
Limited representation of children in
middle ages: why?
• monasticism,
• low survival rates and the failure
of bonding
• no institutions for poor child under
pater familias which explains
orphans ie the children’s crusade
Bruegel
Children’s
Games
Aries: in the seventeenth C
• “the family ceased to be an institution for the transmission
of a name and an estate - it assumed a moral and spiritual
function, it molded bodies and souls. The care expended on
children inspired new feelings, a new emotional attitude, to
which the iconography of the seventeenth century gave
brilliant and insistent expression: the modern concept of
the family”
Child as part of Household
Workforce
Child as Lineage
Child in Training
Educating the Child
• Early Writers on Childhood and Education
(Locke)
• The role of discipline and control
• “I would also remark that parents cannot take a
single step to advantage in endeavoring to train up
their children to piety, without first obtaining their
unlimited , unqualified, entire submission to their
authority”
making children ‘subject to the rules
and restraints of reason’.
J. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education,
• ‘great care is to be had of the forming children's minds,
and giving them that seasoning early, which shall influence
their lives always after.’
• “I wish that those who complain of the great decay of
Christian piety and virtue … of this generation, would
consider how to retrieve them in the next. This I am sure,
that if the foundation of it be not laid in the education and
principling of the youth, all other endeavours will be in
vain. And if the innocence, sobriety, and industry of those
who are coming up, be not taken care of and preserv'd,
'twill be ridiculous to expect, that those who are to succeed
next on the stage, should abound in that virtue, ability, and
learning, which has hitherto made England considerable in
the world.”
Rousseau and Protecting the
Innocent From Civilization?
• retaining the natural freedom of childhood
• “May I venture at this point to state the greatest, the most
important, the most useful rule of education? …Education
of the earliest years should be merely negative. It consists,
not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart
from vice and from the spirit of error.’
• ‘If the infant sprang at one bound from its mother's breast to
the age of reason, the present type of education would be
quite suitable, but its natural growth calls for quite a
different training. The mind should be left undisturbed till
its faculties have developed; for while it is blind it cannot
see the torch you offer it, nor can it follow through the vast
expanse of ideas a path so faintly traced by reason that the
best eyes can scarcely follow it.’
The Child of the Enlightenment
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Chris Jenks: The Making of Modern Childhood?
• Childhood becomes key construct in public discourses of
modernization:
– An idealized projection of progress onto children
emerging out of the enlightenment - as children develop
to maturity so do modern societies
– A condition within which children experience growth and
development through learning - education of the young
becomes essential to progress
• Childhood is also a site of conflict because historically we
have developed conflicting ideas about progress -- and the
values which legitimize children within the workplace, the
family, the state and the culture.
The Playful Child
The Child Abandoned
The Socialized Child: focus on
preparation
The Moralized Child: focus on
protection
Institutionalization of Childhood
• Changing Legal Structures of Protection and Preparation:
– Family - protected against abuse and harm vs neglect
– Community - extended family, peers, and resources for children
– State: prov./ federal laws - bullying, pornography, prostitution, ritual abuse
– Schools - curriculum set by state (limits religion, values, ideology)
– Media - stories and ideas for children: inform enlighten and entertain - Protected
from violence and sex for reasons of community taste and harm
– Market: Protected from commercial manipulation for reasons of developmental
inadequacy
• The Politics of Childhood: Anti-Child Labour, Sunday school, Scouts, Mass
education, Playground, Camping, Corporate, Child Poverty and Well fare
Children’s Rights etc.
• Emerging Child Professionals: teachers, social workers, educational psychologists,
family physicians, counsellers, play workers, marketers and writers etc.
Children’s Advocates
Movements for Childhood
Froebel: “let us live for our children”
Child Labour
Victorian Childhood Debated
• Psychology and development - study of maturation, psychoanalysis and the
notion of childhood trauma (Freud to Erikson)
• Schools and Mass Literacy - material to support the transmission of civilized
culture; tools of the enlightenment (Foebel; Vygotsky; Piaget; Dewey)
• Children’s labour as teaching work ethos vs skills and training - chores and
allowances (reward vs obligation)
• Empathizing with children- seeing the world from the childs perspective - the
problem of growing up novels turn to biography - Dickens
• Parental Advisories - professional discourses on parenting and childrearing
• Schools and Discipline - beating knowledge and obedience into children vs
rewarding learning (strict punishment and rules)
• Children’s peer culture- the playground movement -- street culture is
domesticated and disciplined
• Organizing Peers - the natural child is social: the scouts, hitler youth, mickey
mouse club etc.
• Nursery schools - gardening as metaphor for learning; focus on
developmentalism and cognitive growth
Educating Girls for Service
The 20th Century: From work to
leisure
• Cultural activities: clubs, community festivals,
playgrounds, sports, clothes, radio, films,
comics, TV, video and computer games, web
sites etc.
• Cultural industries - designed experiences for
children (toys, books, movies, TV, )
• Family Ideals and Childrearing Practices laissez faire parenting, changing punishment
and restrictions on leisure; socialization to
consumption
Improving Moments
Children’s status: what’s wrong
with this picture
Historical overview of the Institutional context and Child Oriented
Movements
Courts/ laws
Family
Church
Community/ Schools
Culture/
Media
1600
Child as
Paterfamilias Family
Childrens
Church schools
Poor Laws
property of
-obedience
registers
readers
Apprentice
father/ Wards
and labour
Learning
Pilgrims
Latin
of state/
-obligation
scriptures
Progress
indenture
for moral
Orphans
bastards
and well
and poor
being
houses
-establish
Moral
1700
Children sent
Poor house, Non church
1774 custody to colonies/
custody and discipline
adoption,
schools classics
to mother
All children
control in
advocates apprentice,
and literacy
inherit
father
– learning Guliver,
agenda
to obey
1800 – Child
Child labour/
Socialization Sunday
Street
Kindergarten
labour, 10
and training
as discipline Schooling
children,
Public schooling;
hours
- 1833
plus learning Moral
orphans
training
1850
cruelty
Brutality and Behaviour Children’s
-child welfare
best interests
cruelty
child rights
of child
-schooling
rights of
The Three R’s
ie learning literature
to judge
mother
-illegitmacy
-support
1900
Custody and
Family care
Principles
Play ground Literacy and
children’s act
Family law; ie
and neglect
for living
Scouts
democratic
For the sake
of
the
Children
Children of Progress: the
domestic sanctuary?
Play is children’s moral equivalent to work
Childrearing in
Transition
Psychology: and
New Mechanisms
of Regulation and
Control
Conflict over
the
Socialization
of
Children
The Spock Generation
DeMause: Emerging from the
Nightmare