Childhood
different from the modern, particularly western,
SALLY MCNAMEE
King’s University College at Western University,
Canada
What is now known as the “new paradigm” of the
sociology of childhood grew out of a rejection
of traditional sociological and developmental
psychological theories of childhood. Children
in earlier sociological accounts were subsumed
into accounts of the family, or the school – in
other words into the major sites of socialization.
Children were, therefore, most visible when they
were being socialized. Socialization, which is
sociology’s explanation for how children become
members of society, parallels developmental
psychology, in that children progress from
incompetent to competent adulthood through
the process of acculturation or socialization. In
both socialization theory and developmental
psychology there was no view of children as
active social agents; rather, children were seen
(if they were seen at all) as passive recipients
of socialization. In addition, both socialization
theory and developmental psychology fail to see
the child as existing in the present – instead the
focus is on what children become. It has been said
that socialization theory ignores children’s role in
socializing both themselves and others. In fact, it
fails to take account of the child as a competent
social actor. What was missing from sociology,
then, was an account of the socially constructed
nature of childhood which focused on children
as social actors rather than passive “becomings.”
The historian Phillipe Ariès (1962) noted that
childhood as a concept has not always existed in
the same way. Ariès discusses the development of
the idea of childhood through reference to diaries,
paintings, and other such historical documents
and traces the changes in attitudes to children
from those based for example on indifference, to
coddling (the child as a plaything) to the develop-
ment of psychological interest in childhood. The
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosc030.pub2
historical childhoods described by Ariès are very
conception of childhood to which we subscribe.
In the modern western view, childhood is a
time of innocence and children are in need of
protection from adult society, not expected to join
it. In order to see some of the anomalies around
childhood in contemporary western society, we
have only to think of the ages by which children
are – and are not – allowed to do certain things.
For example, in the United Kingdom, children
can work (in certain jobs) at the age of 14. They
attain the legal age of responsibility at 10 years
old, but cannot vote until the age of 18.
Those working within the “new paradigm” of
the social study of childhood began the task of
de- and reconstructing childhood in the 1980s.
Of particular note in the United Kingdom is the
work of Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan
Prout. Collectively and separately they have
authored many texts which have stimulated and
led the debate around childhood. In Europe, the
work of Qvortrup, Alanen and others contributed
to the debate. James, Jenks, and Prout’s (1998)
work provided the social study of childhood with
a paradigm which was able to draw together dif-
ferent disciplines and which located a conceptual
space for theorizing childhood. The new social
study of childhood, then, moves away from a
conception of childhood as an age-bound devel-
opmental process, and from a view of children as
passive recipients of socialization toward seeing
childhood as a time of competence and agency.
The central tenets of the “new paradigm” as set
out by James and Prout (1997) are as follows:
• Childhood is to be understood as a social
construction.
• Childhood as a variable of social analysis can-
not be separated from other variables such as
class, gender or ethnicity.
• Childhood, and children’s social relation-
ships, are worthy of study in their own
right.
• Ethnography is a methodology which has a
particular role to play in the new sociology of
childhood.
 2 CHILDHOOD
• Childhood sociology engages in and
responds to the process of reconstructing
childhood in society.
Under the rubric of the “new paradigm” many
aspects of children’s everyday social lives have
been studied over the last 10–20 years. Child-
hood is now theorized, not as a universal concept,
but as being differentiated by variables such as
gender, disability, class, and so on.
In the early days of the “new” paradigm, the
research focused on showing children as compe-
tent social actors and in hearing and listening to
the voice of the child. While this was an important
first step in theorizing childhood, more recently
researchers have begun to problematize the con-
cept of voice. It is insufficient to merely insert
quotes from children into research reports; we
must pay attention to how those voices were pro-
duced through the research process, and whether
or not we are in fact accurately representing what
children say. We can do this by taking account of
the context within which the research takes place
and by being much more reflexive about the role
of the researcher in the process.
The traditional sociological concerns of struc-
tural versus action theories of society have
been reflected in theorizing around childhood.
Prout’s (2005) text attempts to deal with the
dichotomies of structure/agency, nature/culture;
in his argument the “new” paradigm as originally
conceptualized overstated the social construction
of childhood and ignored that children expe-
rience everyday life as embodied beings. For
Prout, we should begin to study childhood as a
hybrid of, for example, nature and culture. The
potential of Prout’s work for what has been called
the “new wave” of childhood studies remains
undertheorized at present, although Lee and
Motzkau (2011) usefully draw on it in their dis-
cussion of the biopolitics of childhood through
their discussion of the use of the “mosquito”
device (an electronic box positioned in areas
where the presence of young people is seen as
problematic, and which emits a high pitched tone
that is allegedly only audible to young people) as
a deterrent to the presence of children and young
people in public places.
The “new” paradigm has benefited from work
in a variety of disciplines, and of late children’s
geographies has made an important contribution
to the topic. Looking at “how place and space
matter” in children’s lives (Matthews, 2003: 4)
this perspective enables us to see difference and
inequality in both local and global settings. A
good example of the work of social geographers
of childhood can be seen in the work of Klocker
(2007) and her discussion of “thin” and “thick”
agency. Studying child domestic workers in
Tanzania, she notes that while girls have little
choice in taking up this kind of work, because
their agency is “thinned” by structural forces
such as gender and ethnicity, they are still able to
exercise some agency, however thinly. Agency is
not, then, unfettered but even if expressed only
negatively (for example, in terms of resistance
to adult control) the child is still able to make
choices. A consideration of the concepts of thin
or thick agency encourages us to think about
ways in which it might be possible to “thicken”
the agency of children.
The topic of children’s rights and the question
of whether or not children can be seen as citizens
has been prominent over the last two decades
of work within the “new” paradigm. The 1989
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child has been hailed as radical in giving par-
ticipation rights to children, but also held up to
widespread critique for imposing a westernized
developmental perspective which fails to account
for cultural difference. The meaningful participa-
tion of children in matters which concerns them
continues to be compromised by the overarching
principle of “best interests,” by which adults
decide whether a child’s view can indeed be taken
into account.
Childhood as a concept has been examined
and children’s social lives made visible from
many angles. In order to do this, children were
metaphorically removed from the home and the
school where previously they were hidden from
the sociological gaze. The recent work of James
(2013) revisits the child in the family and in other
contexts (with peers, at school, etc.). Drawing on
new ways of thinking about family (family as a set
of practices rather than a “thing,” for example)
James revisits socialization theory but this time
from the perspective of the child. How, she asks,
does the socialization process work? What part
do children play in the process? Drawing on her
extensive research with children, she demon-
strates in the text a more nuanced view of the
 CHILDHOOD
socialization process through understanding the
social context within which children as actors,
and, in interaction with others, experience and
shape the process of socialization, thus providing
the continuing social study of childhood with an
additional site of research and theory.
SEE ALSO: Agency (and Intention); Develop-
mental Stages; Family, Sociology of; Socialization.
References
Ariès, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood, Jonathan Cape,
London.
James, A. (2013) Socialising Children, Palgrave Macmil-
lan, London.
James, A., Jenks, C., and Prout, A. (1998) Theorizing
Childhood, Polity, Cambridge.
James, A. and Prout, A. (eds) (1997) Constructing and
Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the
Sociological Study of Childhood, 2nd edn, Falmer,
London.
Klocker, N. (2007) An example of “thin” agency: child
domestic workers in Tanzania, in Global Perspectives
on Rural Childhood and Youth: Young Rural Lives (ed.
3
R. Panelli, S. Punch, and E. Robson), Routledge, New
York.
Lee, N. and Motzkau, J. (2011) Navigating the bio-
politics of childhood. Childhood: A Journal of Global
Child Research, 18 (1), 7–19.
Matthews, H. (2003) Coming of age for children’s
geographies. Children’s Geographies, 1 (1), 3–5.
Prout, A. (2005) The Future of Childhood: Towards the
Interdisciplinary Study of Children, RoutledgeFalmer,
London.
Further Readings
Alanen, L. (1988) Rethinking childhood. Acta Sociolog-
ica, 31 (1), 53–67.
Alanen, L. and Mayall, B. (eds) (2001) Conceptualizing
Child-Adult Relations, Routledge Falmer, London.
Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood, Routledge, London.
Qvortrup, J., Bardy, M., Sgritta, G., and Wintersberger,
H. (1994) Childhood Matters, Avebury, Aldershot.
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child (1989) Available at http://www.unicef.
org.uk/Documents/Publication-pdfs/UNCRC_
PRESS200910web.pdf (accessed June 24, 2015).