The First International Society for
Child Indicators Conference
The Dynamics of Childhood,
Anticipatory Socialization and the
Development of Indicators
Ivar Frønes
Department of Sociology, University of Oslo, Norway
Norwegian Centre for the Studies of Conduct Problems and
Innovative Practice Ltd
Chicago, 26 June 2007
Childhood of The Industrial Society
 Affluent industrial society provided access to well-paid
jobs for unskilled male workers, and produced young
families with the housewife at the centre.
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Protection of children from work.
Most left school after compulsory education.
Young people were integrated into work at an young age.
Children, as children, were outside the production system
Little pressure from the educational system.
 Strong mechanisms for integration into adult roles:
 Work and family (Willis, Learning to Labour).
 The great narrative of the family:
 The family dominated the life course, factually and culturally.
 Minor children at home (Popenoe/Whitehead 2006).
 1970: Children at home: Women aged 25-29: 74% 50-54: 27%
 2000:
aged 25-29: 49% 50-54: 15%
Post-industrial Childhood
 Post-industrial children enter work at a mature age, but
childhood is at the centre of educational production
(human capital) and future national competitive power
(see e.g. PISA/OECD).
 Post-industrial childhood is characterized by early
social and sexual maturation and late and differentiated
transitions to adult roles.
 Post-industrial socialization is underlined as navigation,
requiring planfulness and cultural/social capital to
move successfully into the future.
The Post-industrial Family
 Parents are more important than under the industrial
regime.
 Time with children is increasing in general
 Children are at the centre of the family.
 The (hyper)active supermoms of to day are different
from the good mothers of the 1950s.
 Mothers are becoming better educated than fathers.
 Parents’ educational level is correlated.
 Changing narratives of the life course and the family.
 The marriage gap.
Educational Reframing
 Educational culture and educational reframing.
 After-school activities and Baby Einstein.
 Chinese children; more than 80% do homework at the weekend
(Hongyan, 2003).
 78% of Chinese students identify studies as their greatest worry, only
beaten by students from South Korea (84%) (Hongyan 2007).
 Educational pressure on the children.
 Japanese junior high students spend more time studying than college
students.
 Increase in homework among the youngest in the US/UK.
Producing both “The hurried child” and marginalization.
What is Childhood?
 A life phase.
 Childhood as a social construction.
 The right to a childhood.
 Childhood as a normative concept.
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Childhood as a cultural and social framework.
Synchronic structures .
Diachronic structures.
The factual life of children.
Anticipatory Socialization
 Theories of socialization are often accused of
not conceptualizing the agency of the child.
 Anticipatory socialization.
 Socialization is influenced by the future, the future
is an active part of the present.
 A dynamic model of childhood.
 Children are moving within synchronic economic
social and cultural frameworks, and diachronic
institutional and cultural frameworks.
 Children’s activities are formed by the pressure of
the future predicted-
Indicators on Being and Becoming
 Being: how the child is doing currently, as a child.
 Becoming: the field of socialization.
 Indicators of being measure the state or order of
things, such as demographical patterns, percentages
living in poverty, educational levels, number of
criminal acts and standard of living.
 Indicators on being often refer to normative
yardsticks.
 The models provide certain thresholds for the set of
indicators (like poverty line).
 Becoming, based on matrixes of correlations.
 Indicators on becoming imply predictions.
 CRC underlines being and becoming.
Key Indicator Challenges
 Social change requires new domains, and often a
reorganization of existing domains.
 Predictive indicators on becoming.
 Indicators on risk.
 Positive indicators:
 Indicators on flourishing. (Moore et al: What Do Children Need
to Flourish?)
 Differentiated data: ethnicity, class, region, gender.
Age/cohort etc. and the dynamics of these factors.
 Longitudinal data.
 Dynamics models:
 Models of cumulative risk factors.
Indicators and Evaluation
 Challenge: evaluation of policies through trends and
indicators.
 Evaluation of specific programs with identifiable
participants.
 Evaluation of MST /multi-systemic therapy through
data from databases.
Policies and Models
 Indicators may give policies direction, but
indicators do not provide causal models.
 “Knowledge for action” (Aber et al.) must partly be
found elsewhere.
 Politics is about values, traditions, interests.
 Models are political instruments as well as
scientific instruments.
 Identifying trends does not imply telling people
where to go or what to do…
 Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought
to go from here?
 The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you
want to get to.
 The social sciences are part of a civic discourse.