THE PARADIGM OF SOCIAL PROMOTION OR THE SOCIAL ROLE OF CHILDHOOD-

ADOLESCENCE

It appears as a strong position in the 80s and 90s, mainly in Latin America, with its main intellectual
apologists being: political scientists, sociologists and popular educators, who work with the children's
and youth movements of Nicaragua, Peru and Paraguay and spread in embryonic form to other
countries in Latin America and other continents such as Asia and Africa . Some European educators
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collaborate in the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm

This paradigm is not opposed to the Convention on the Rights of Children, nor to our new legislation on
children that establishes the Protection of their Rights, but rather moves forward, seeking to grant the
child fundamentally the rights of SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP, from a novelty. epistemological. Start by
considering the true situation of the children. in the world and especially in Latin America and develops
2

new categories for childhood-adolescence.

Despite the International Convention on the Rights of Children, their situation in the world has
worsened in the 90s with the hegemony of neoliberalism.

This reality today has not changed substantially. It has worsened in continents such as Asia and Africa
due to the war conflicts caused by the US and NATO that have forced families and their children to
emigrate around the world with disastrous consequences for their lives. On our continent, progressive
governments have improved in their ideologies and practices the living conditions of children and the
respect and protection of their rights. But these latest achievements today run the risk of being repealed
by the return of neoliberal governments or in some countries like Argentina, they are already in clear
decline.

Obviously, these data are enough to recognize that in reality there are two ways of living this stage of
life and that the majority of children and adolescents in the world and the continent go through a
situation of exclusion and vulnerability that places them in the condition of providing for their own
survival.

This paradigm makes child labor visible as an unavoidable reality-need. From the "working child" duo,
another conceptualization of childhood is developed. Childhood did not always exist as a differentiated
stage of life, but child labor did always exist, therefore this duo is inseparable.

Alejandro Cuassianovich writes about it. "In fact, working children, regardless of whether they are
salaried or self-employed, or whether they work with their parents, etc., are really workers and as such
are part of the economic and productive structures. They also show the serious deterioration to which
human work is subjected in the current economic order3

Unlike the Doctrine of Comprehensive Protection, this paradigm requires the recognition of child labor
and the creation of conditions to protect them as workers. It does not accept the UNICEF position of
classifying children's work as survival strategies and believes that the child, in addition to being a
1 Several authors who are developing this theory are of European, German and Italian origin and worked in countries such
as Peru, Paraguay, Colombia and Nicaragua in the Deployment of Children's Movements. Latin American intellectuals also
participate. In Italy, the NATS Magazine (Working Children and Adolescents) with worldwide circulation is published. In
Peru, the IFEJANT Institute for the Training of Educators of young people and Working Adolescents publishes materials
that are disseminated on the Internet and in print throughout South America
2 In this paradigm we use the acronym NNyA to overcome the limitations of language and speak of the masculine gender,
boys, and feminine, girls in an equal situation.
3 -Cuassianovich Alejandro.- Art. WORKING CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS - THEORIES - IMAGES -
CULTURES - NATS Magazine February 1995 '- Dei Gabrielli Editions - Verona Italy
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worker, is an economic subject who contributes with his or her income to the national economy, that of
his or her family, and to personal sustenance. Rejects UNICEF's classification of street children as
stigmatizing and moralizing and explains that children and adolescents are on the streets because they
need to work to live. Considers that the so-called marginal activities are also work because they do not
have their socialization completed and the scale of values formed from adults. Children and adolescents
only turn to robbery, drug sales and prostitution when they find no other resource for their survival and
they leave them as soon as better means of obtaining income appear.
From there, their right to work and to be recognized as workers is vindicated, with a fair salary, with
decent conditions, with the possibility of joining unions and fighting for their sources and working
conditions. It is the same children and workers who demand and claim these rights.
"The expression *working child* brings together two categories of different order, the first is of a
cultural generational order and the other is economic-social. We could talk about two nouns and the
question that arises is whether one of them, when fulfilling an adjective-qualifying function, is
subordinate to the other or rather it is the condition for it to gain specificity, original visibility and
identity, both can be articulated in another field, that of the social role of the subject, that is, in the
historical operational order, while a conceptual coherence is built at the epistemological level." 4

Child labor contributes to a country's economy and acquires different characteristics than that of adults.
They mix work with play and fun and also with education. Hence the proposal of a public school with
different content, methodology and dynamics for NN and A. workers, which also prepares them for
their task OF PRESENT AND FUTURE CITIZENSHIP "So child labor is still not recognized as
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citizenship or, at most, second-level citizenship is granted, which is granted either to pathologies or
secondary phenomena, we would almost say accessories. For this reason, child labor is often assumed
to be the marginal residue of other phenomena and not as its own reality that needs its own explanation
at a sociological level, as well as at a properly economic level." 6

The reason why the right of children and adolescents to work is defended is not a complicity with the
causes of poverty, but a recovery of the ethical, creative and mobilizing potential of human work and a
denunciation of the instrumental and commercialized form that this has acquired in capitalist society.
They call this critical appraisal of child labor because they argue that one cannot enter into the
contradiction of considering work bad up to a certain age and then valuing it positively. What must be
abolished is not the work of children and adolescents, but rather the exploitation, harmfulness and
alienation of their work. What must be prohibited is their use in marginal activities, which harm their
health or with exploitation by adults, but not We must discriminate against them with stigmatizing
language, because they are there to feel like active subjects who manage their survival and that of their
family. It is also necessary to clarify that in their families, children and adolescents contribute to social
reproduction with unpaid work. This position does not mean sending them to work from childhood, but
rather recognizing their work when they see the need to do so and educating them in the work culture
that includes the recognition and defense of their labor and union rights.

For Manfred Liebel (1994, defender of this paradigm in his writings), “abolitionists are neo-
correctionalists. Their proposals are made from a position of techno-bureaucratic and scientific
professional power and they cannot perceive what it means for a child to cooperate with their family.
Abolitionists manage economic resources and international influences and from technocratism and legal
norms they try to impose a ban on States and children and workers. “They mutilate the subject and
appropriate faculties that are typical of children and adolescents,”

4 Cusianovich op. Cit.

5 ) The MANTHOC Movement of Peru has created a school for working children that unifies education and work and
assumes their reality in the contents.
6 Giangi Schibotto - ECONOMY AND CHILD LABOR - NATs Magazine Nº 4 - op. cit..ç
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They conceive of adolescence as a cultural “invention” of capitalism, a form of oppression over an age
class to prevent them from enjoying the rights of adult life, such as the right to work, to move freely, to
form a family, to political life, participating and electing their representatives. From this theory, the
adolescent is a marginal adult who is not allowed to act according to his desires, needs and interests, he
is a socially infantilized adult and the so-called crisis of adolescence is not a natural fact of the life
stage, but is related with the situation of oppression. This marginalization and subordination does not
respond to the needs of young people, but to those of a society that is moving towards growing injustice
and produces a “social moratorium on youth” to prevent them from accessing work and citizenship. 7
From the globalized neoliberal society, they are offered social exclusion or consumerist integration. 8

They believe that there is no society that can be built without love and without review of power and that
it is about recognizing childhood and adolescence social, economic and political capacities and
corresponding rights so that a democratic society can be considered as such.

They do not sacralize the family as a place for the child and consider that this, in itself, is not always the
most appropriate place for them, since many times the bonds of dominance or abandonment that are
established there destroy life and the process. of personality growth. The problem is that the family is
affected by the consequences of poverty and contaminated by the neoliberalism of the media. Each boy
or girl must decide to remain in their families and we must support them to escape poverty. In this way,
we work with families to insert them into community spaces, networks or social movements and train
parents in their responsibilities and respect and fight for the rights of their children.
This support for poor and/or excluded families is not resolved only at the individual level but also
through collective mobilization together with children and adolescents demanding State policies that,
far from abandoning them to their fate, support the child and their family in the parenting processes.
Respect for the family and community culture from which children and adolescents come. It is also a
fundamental premise; respect that preserves the best of those original cultures and questions actions that
violate their rights from a conception of them that is not only Western.

They also propose another view of the school, a school that leaves an established place and goes in
search of the child, a school where they have a say in the decisions that affect them through the student
centers, which in our country have a rich history of struggle or other organizations they can create;
where conflicts are discussed with the students to resolve them, where cultural diversity is taught,
history linked to memory and the struggles of people for freedom, equality, fraternity and critical
thinking is promoted . Not only the transmission of knowledge, but also learning from feelings and
from the Pedagogy of Tenderness, as Alejandro Cussuanovich explains, apprehending the human
condition. Where work culture is taught,

7 Lutte, G. He is the one who develops this concept of adolescence in his book “Quando gliadolescentisona adulti”. Rome
Kappa 1989. Quoted by Cussianovich in
8 This proposal further stratifies the generation and desolidarizes young people from the middle sectors of the poorest by
changing a social and political project for their lives into a discriminatory and competitive project such as consumption.
3
through collective work and the formation of cooperatives, labor and union rights, the history of the
working class. It is a school that trains them in the enforceability of their rights.

Organized Child Protagonism (POI) is a fundamental axis of this position; it considers dependency
not to be a constitutive attribute of the condition of children and adolescents, but rather the permanence
of a feudal idea of protection that devolves into tutelage. Subjection-domination, which with male
adults was overcome by the French Revolution and the Declaration of Human Rights. Not so for the
children who were able to raise it only two centuries later. They go even further, as they maintain that
paternalistic ideas of protection and dependence have been destroying children's creativity, eliminating
the subjectivity of childhood.

It is not an individual role, but a collective role. Not even isolated local children's organizations, but
rather building the articulation of these associations and coordination with other popular organizations,
women's organizations, the working class, the human rights movement, etc. Because they are workers
and economic subjects, children are also social subjects and can self-determine, outside the decision of
adults, and constitute children's movements such as in Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil
and Peru, which with different cultural and operational characteristics, demand their rights and fight
against their social and political exclusion. They constitute a worldwide movement. The NATs
(Children and Adolescent Workers) and ONJATS (Children's and Young Workers' organizations) seek
and want to influence international organizations and decide on public policies aimed at children and
adolescents. that affect them. They even managed to participate in some UN conclaves and question
UNICEF's positions.

He declares himself against all adult paternalism; the traditional one, where children and adolescents
are subordinated and their opinion does not count, and the modern bourgeois one that assigns childhood
and adolescence a separate area of social moratorium, where they acquire responsibilities, but not
participation (Liebel 1994). This paradigm places adults and the children and adolescents in social
equality, with different unemployment functions without control of one over the other.

Social movements are the third central axis in this paradigm. Through them, the decision-making
process of social policies by the recipients is proposed. They bring childhood out of its invisibility. s
Children and adolescents are not only subjects of rights, but also social subjects with autonomy and
participation and will be able to fully develop outside of the paternalism of adults, who must assume
the role of facilitators and guides and, above all, know how to listen to them and act accordingly. The
organized presence of NNyA and its social movements is the only guarantee to achieve their rights and
defeat patriarchal and sexist Adultism.

From this paradigm we seek to build a new culture of childhood. where this is not a preparation for life,
but life itself and therefore leads to also building another adult culture in the exercise of knowledge and
recognition of childhood and in the promotion of their rights.

“The principle it articulates is an epistemological choice and a historical definition, a new construction
of childhood, a praxis of working children and adolescents towards all children with representation
before society and before the State. Without this perspective, protagonism lacks political, cultural and
ethical significance” (Cussianovich 1996).

Finally, by the National Constitution, which adheres to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and
by the National Law on the Protection of Rights, the State is obliged to guarantee them, promoting
them and restoring them when they have been violated. The State has to promote the organization of
children in 4
children's forums or parliaments and in the Children's Councils, listen to their proposals, debate them
with them and put them into practice. The State must listen to children to develop policies and
programs for children and promote their organization, in addition to fulfilling and guaranteeing their
rights in all dimensions of their lives. For this reason, we reiterate any state policy or program on
children and adolescents must be based on the focus on their rights and ensure their participation.
Adult society must learn to consider children and children as everyone's children and act with them
from this premise, always promoting their participation and organization. only way to affirm your best
interest.

Social Work and other professions in the promotion of childhood

In the development of this last paradigm, Social Workers are increasingly participating with an active
commitment in favor of the autonomous organization of the NATs. Such is the case of the Latin
American countries mentioned. From what we learned from and/or with them and the intellectuals who
write and develop this paradigm, cited here and resorting to our own theoretical and practical
experience, we believe it is important to suggest some guidelines and criteria for the professional task.

What we propose for Social Workers can be transferred to all adults who carry out tasks with Children
and Adolescents. Adults are also protagonists but with different functions: we accompany, guide,
collaborate with their organizations and Social Movements

At the level of theory development, the work of NNy A is a topic under debate, which is necessary to
investigate in all its forms to provide new ideas and perspectives, as it is also essential to develop the
new conception of childhood and adolescence.

Any intervention strategy with children and adolescents, even if it refers to a specific problem or a
specific level of approach, cannot be absolutely focused and lose sight of a comprehensive perspective,
nor a vision from the social totality. It is necessary to insert oneself into the child's real world, into their
culture, which is not always Western culture in the case of Latin America, into their daily life,
recognize their work and encompass in a gradual process the recreational, productive, educational and
organizational dimension. . This means decolonizing the thinking about childhood (Marzolín 2011)
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since childhood and adolescence cannot be thought of outside the topic of work. and the participation
and construction of their own organizations and social movements.

At the same time, it is necessary to invent strategies that affirm the identity of children, not as a project
for the future, but as a free experience of their here and now. The recognition of positive personal,
family and sociocultural identity is linked to the child's potential and not only to the risk or deficiencies
attributed to that stage or to their ethnic or social origin. Identity is closely related to citizenship,
belonging to a people, nation, to the human species in harmony with nature. As “El Buen Vivir” or
Sumak Kawsay teaches us. Citizenship understood as the right to belong to a people, a culture and to
have equal rights to one's peers. Without any exclusion 1

The central task is to produce a place for them, where they can organize themselves to grow. Think
creatively about how to decode the non-places in your daily life in this postmodern, consumerist,
individualist world, where the neoliberal model of globalization has penetrated in an overwhelming
way and does not leave you space to live with dignity, both in material aspects and psycho-affective
and social.

9 See the broader development of the topic in my work on “Comprehensive intervention strategies with children and
adolescents”
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Strive to modify the authoritarian criteria of the family and the school, seeking to involve both in the
debate of these new conceptions. In informal education tasks with adults, Social Work can foster an
attitude of respect and support for childhood, adolescence and not subordination and separation. It can
contribute to making children visible and de-privatized, providing a space in the public sphere for their
opinions and their word and also respect for their decisions. Promote in the Municipalities the
implementation of Children's Councils with the commitment of the adults who work with them and the
organization and training of children to participate in these spaces. Calling for isolated forums without
a progressive plan is useless; it is necessary to institutionalize their participation and the forms of
representation and election among peers.

Another task in the collaboration of Social Work is to guide towards values, which are spontaneously
difficult for NNyA to acquire (Liebel), due to the great alienation that this society transmits to them.
The profession can contribute to values such as respect for gender, elimination of violence in
relationships, etc., contribute with instruments for the continuity of the children's organization, once its
members overcome the stage of remaining in it, to preserve the memory and so that in the youth stage
they are not absorbed for other proposals that do not contribute to their life projects or the social
environment in which they develop.

Furthermore, it is up to the profession to cooperate with the articulation of solidarity networks, where
children and adolescents can build their spaces, know and evaluate the social conflict that surrounds
them, the causes of poverty; form work cooperatives and counteract criminological networks that from 10

the adult world trap adolescents in the "no place" and the "no way out." Affirm the child as a subject of
rights, but also economic and social subjects; Collaborating in the construction of this identity is also a
political task for Social Work that recognizes the social role and supports the empowerment of new
generations in the present time.

In the constitution of social movements of childhood and adolescence, professionals can guide and
prepare the communication space for the work networks of adults and children themselves. These
networks allow meetings, exchanges and acquiring new knowledge and skills, accumulating strength to
report violations. of their rights and propose innovative social policies, overcoming the discouragement
of social fragmentation in local spaces. .
There are five pedagogies, of different origin, that intersect and complement in this paradigm: the
Pedagogy of Tenderness of Popular Education, Street Education, Education through Work and the
Pedagogy of Children and Youth Social Movements and the Rights approach in training to transform
society and develop State policies towards this stage of life. Social Work in its socio-educational and
organizational function, with research and practice, can converge with other actors in its development
and enrichment. The five arise in different historical stages and from different social spaces but
converge in the practical application of this paradigm.

The Pedagogy of Tenderness . It promotes a process that starts from the deep meaning of care and
tenderness and means recovering affection; This is the object of reflection of all pedagogical action,
emphasizing knowing how to take care of the ethics of the human, that is, placing the centrality on the
care of human dignity. Educate about dignity. “apprehend the human condition” It includes not only
knowledge but also affection, emotion, feeling, coexistence, encounter; transiting

10 We call criminological networks the organized crime of adults, often encouraged or protected by power and that
involves boys, girls and especially adolescents in their activities. For example, drug trafficking and sale, prostitution, theft,
etc. Instead of forming a protective fence, a perverse network is formed through them in peripheral urban neighborhoods
that traps them.
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by indignation and hope and knowing how to act in tensions. Care and tenderness keep us away from
any deviation towards tutelage. It means knowing the other from our own being to their different
identity, respecting them and taking responsibility for them.

Popular Education (PE) was born as literacy for adult workers and peasants in the unions and later as
political training for the liberation process and today it has advanced as a praxis of accompaniment in
the transformation of daily reality and structural reality from the interests of the subaltern classes and
from various positions of subjects, women, peoples, ethnic groups, even children and adolescents. We
say even them because the E. P, although in its beginnings it did not take childhood into account. Just
as the EP laid the foundations to question class hierarchies, it also later did so between genders and
generations and to create organizations, where its members do not play the role of spectators or
executors but rather a political role in defense of their interests. and rights, to assume the leadership of
their own destiny and in the case of children and adolescents to escape from being a dominated sector,
as is the case with women and indigenous peoples.

Street Education originates from the need to educate children and adolescents. in the place where they
meet on the street, to integrate them socially. One modality of Street Education is to create an
infrastructure where children can spend the night, feed themselves, recreate and in some cases obtain
some school education. Another modality is to work in their communities with their problems and
those of their families so that they do not separate from their place of origin and are not forced to face
the risks of the streets of the city center to obtain the resources that allow survival or if they already do,
find the necessary support in their neighborhood.
Today, several criticisms are made of the use of street education to obtain greater control over children
and adolescents or when it is carried out with preventive common sense to control crime and problems
such as drug addiction, child prostitution, theft or begging and it falls back into repression, into a
moralizing criterion and defense of society against dangerous adolescents. When we think about
children as workers, we cannot only think about those who are most visible: those who live on the
streets who are the fashionable target of all interventions towards poor children and adolescents and
who appear in the public world as objects of compassion for the supposed abandonment of his parents
and the vices that the street would bring... This thinking sees only a part of children who work and
ignores those who do so in rural areas or in other places in the city and the child caregivers who work
in their homes collaborating with their parents in care. of siblings and in household chores. Many times
street education sees only part of the life of these children and adolescents: the lack, the need, and does
not take into account potential and resilience at all. Without their active participation and confidence in
their possibilities, any strategy with them leads to failure and greater submission.
With several criticisms of this position, today the idea regarding the street has been changed,
recognizing it as an area of work and the need to initially educate where the child is is recovered.

Education through work attempts to unite the world of school with the world of work by integrating
the productive process into the educational process, recognizing it as a means of life for the learners
and filling the school with content and values that account for this reality. of NNyA workers.
Supporting awareness of their economic and social role and enabling them to face a world that no
longer only exploits but also excludes and dehumanizes work. Education through work is a central
socio-educational strategy of the paradigm, recovering the work culture, training in different
occupations and trades, in cooperativism, also in work management and training in the defense of labor
rights.

The pedagogy of social movements: its objective is to develop children's organizations 7

autonomous but not isolated. The NATs Movement is not only made up of organizations from a
neighborhood or an area of the city, but they are coordinated at the national level and undertake an
internationalist struggle with the objective of changing the culture of protecting and controlling
children and seeks to integrate into networks the organizations of the different popular subjects to
acquire greater social impact in the denunciation and in the fight. Its educational spaces are mobile, all
the places where children and adolescents meet are spaces for social and political learning.
It is a pedagogy where they exercise, seek to know themselves and their reality, the reason for poverty,
train themselves by developing a critical spirit, seek solutions to their problems with initiative and
participation in decisions and defend their rights and their organizations. It is a pedagogy of organized
resistance, of games, of meetings, of facing conflict and of rituals to change their living and working
conditions.

The paradigm of social promotion presents infinite possibilities for Social Work to propose new
concepts and new ways of intervening, but for this it is necessary to look for references in children and
adolescent workers and detach ourselves from past and current myths such as welfare, managerial
technicality, theoretical professionalism. , utilitarian pragmatism and apoliticism and of course,
Adultism.

For reasons of time and space, only some central guidelines have been pointed out here, but the
proposal constitutes a real challenge for the profession to shake off old stigmas, incorrectly constructed,
such as that of controllers and child-removers or Adultism, in accordance with the neoliberal projects
Putting ourselves at the level of the true history of the people and the young boys and girls with whom
we work, let us construct our professional identity in a different way.

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Cussianovich A. Schibotto. - (1991) Social Work and Popular Education with children – Module III.
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1
Expanding the meaning of the word citizenship also to peasant children