Abstract
Children are in the news—Mexican children held at U.S. detention centers, Syrian children dying in the war or on refugee boats in the Mediterranean, U.S. elite female adolescent gymnasts sexually abused by their team physician. In Different Childhoods, the editors asked each author to “take as their starting point the view that ‘children’s’ development is partial, contextual, and relational” (p. 3). Thus, each chapter questions what a “normative” childhood is, and also what the limits of childhood are.
The editors Lindsay O’Dell, Charlotte Brownlow and Hanna Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist examine various developmental trajectories to further the conversation about what can be described as a normative childhood. In today’s current climate of change this conversation is crucial because what was normative 20 years ago is often in flux and evolving. All of this leads to changes in how children are raised and what the needs are for different families.
Most of the chapters cover issues that have never before been discussed in the scholarly literature and will be of interest to feminist psychologists. For example, mothers with children on the autism spectrum (Ryder and Brownlow) focus on the children’s hobbies and special interests, discussing their awareness of “the pressures to ‘fit in’ with a neurotypical worldview and the challenges this posed for them and their children” (p. 22). Children with autism are viewed by the general public to have a limited amount of interests, to spend a significant amount of time focused on those interests, and to have extreme difficulty breaking away from these activities. Yet the authors describe research that found children with autism to actually have more interests than neurotypical children, highlighting the inaccuracies of how “special interests” within the autism community are viewed by the public.
The book is not positioned as focusing on gender, yet this is a constant theme. Mothers are held responsible for their children’s nutrition, and so mothers are blamed for their children’s eating habits, when in fact food availability is strongly linked with socioeconomic class (Woolhouse). Migrant girls from Zimbabwe at the South African border who want to work are accused of not being “sufficiently childlike” when they use their income to buy fashionable clothing (Mahati and Palmary, p. 109). Children who experience domestic abuse are viewed as passive and lacking agency (Callahan, Alexander and Fellin). Teen magazines for girls in Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom focus on ways in which girls can be popular, caring, and fun, but also how to handle the challenge of boyfriends interfering with female friendships (Bertilsdotter-Rosqvist and Brownlow).
Regarding masculinity, there are chapters on “troubled” boys and the lack of male role models due to absent fathers (Robb, Featherstone, Ruxton and Ward, p. 72), the transition to fatherhood among young men (Robb, Featherstone, Ruxton and Ward), decisions about testosterone-blocking drugs for gender variant children whose assigned sex at birth was masculine (Johnson), and boys who are school shooters and child soldiers (Holt). These examples from the text are all gendered perspectives on how males and females operate in their society.
Given the gendered nature of the children or parents described in most chapters, it is surprising that the editors do not highlight these gendered aspects of child development, parenting, and children’s socialization in their introduction or conclusion. A second missed opportunity is the intersectionality of a child’s world. Even the chapter titles skip over the intersectional nature of the content: “children who kill” (Holt, p. 132) omits the fact that it is white boys who are school shooters, not girls or boys of color (cf. Gloria Steinem, cited in Darrough, 2018).
One suggestion for future editions is an introduction for each section of the book. This could provide a space where the editors could go into detail about how to contextualize each of the chapters chosen for that portion.
Different Childhoods should also be praised for its transnational perspective. The chapter on “Working Children” (O’Dell, Crafter, de Abreu and Cline) is a case in point. The current belief among middle-class parents is that children should go to school during their formative years and work should not interfere with that. This chapter challenges this belief by describing children who have no choice but to help support their families. If they went to school instead of work, their families would not survive financially. How should one understand these children and families? Are their parents doing them a disservice? What about the work children do inside the home—caring for younger siblings or cooking the family dinner while the parents are at work? What are the views on this type of work that is in the private sphere and unknown to child protective services?
Overall, Different Childhoods presents a much-needed critique on the entrenched traditional thinking that still dominates the field of child development and family relations today. It also presents a unique perspective on what childhood means—and who is included (and excluded) in that term. It is clear that researchers in the field need to take an intersectional approach to the study of child development, which will differ by cultural, economic, political and geographical dimensions as well as individual identity (gender, sex, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, age, etc.) in order to more adeptly provide “navigational aids” (p. 154) to children and their care-givers.
By approaching child development through a comparative lens, the editors of the book give the reader a lot to think about when it comes to normative versus non-normative childhoods. In Different Childhoods, the editors have collected accounts about how “children who stand outside of normative expectations of the developing child are seen as different and often pathological” (p. 3). We, the reviewers, do not have children, but all of us have worked with children in clinical mental health settings. We recommend the book to students, trainees, and researchers who work with children in any aspect so that they can learn about ways that children and families transgress.
