Childhood

This article draws upon new analysis from a qualitative study of four-generation English families. It takes a historical generational perspective and explores perspectives on the childhoods of three generations of women. The article also offers a number of theoretical and methodological reflections upon the interpretation of life stories: the need to make sense of accounts in relation to life course phase; the need to examine the nature of the account being given and the time frames to which different parts of an account refer; the problems in treating accounts as reflections of historical conditions; and the difficulties in contextualizing accounts where context is assumed or ignored.

This article presents an analysis of the family context and everyday negotiations around risk, safety and danger between children and parents in four families drawn from a larger qualitative study. The challenges of analysing accounts from several family members are highlighted. Case study families are described; and fragments of their interwoven individual and shared biographies, on which respondents regularly drew to legitimate risk-related beliefs and practices, are outlined. The dynamic, fluid and contingent nature of risk construction and reconstruction in everyday family life is discussed and three main themes explored: establishing ‘the bottom line’; assumptions, collusions and contradictions around age, siblinghood and time; and contextualizing risk in the conduct of others. The authors conclude that, just as with childhood itself, it is important also to contextualize ‘risk’ within socioeconomic, cultural and institutional frameworks; and that, for most children, their families both constitute one such context and mediate wider social structures.

This article reports on a reconstruction of some major pragmatic presuppositions in recent Dutch and English discussions in scientific media about the say children should have in devising settlements after parental divorce. Pragmatic presuppositions – such views as discussants implicitly assume to be taken for granted by their audience – were interpreted as indicating implicit conventions with respect to conceptions of childhood that underlie explicit discussions. We concentrated on three dimensions of such underlying conventions: the child’s supposed interests in having a say, supposedly required competences for having a say, and the supposed links between and relative priority of the child welfare perspective and the rights perspective in this issue. Closer examination reveals that not all of the presuppositions that appear to be characteristic for the discussion at hand are selfevident.

In childhood studies identity and difference are generally framed in the context of adult–child relationships. In this article it is explored how children and youth come to construe self and other in relation to other children and youth. Difference/otherness becomes an important organizing aspect of children’s social practices favouring a new agenda of analysis: that which examines the conditions of children’s constructions of social bonds in the midst of perverse social inequalities and social antagonism. Furthermore, a certain positive ‘value’ of difference is argued for having in view its political underpinnings: difference can be regarded as the result of discursive-material social practices which introduce plurality and diversity in human societies. This point seems to be crucial to the dynamics of social life and to a discussion of social cohesion and social fragmentation.

Six weeks of field research on 14 poor youth who sell services or products on the opulent Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo, Brazil, explored their work, play, aspirations and childhood outcomes. Comparing the 12 younger children to the two older youth workers who supervised them and to the few Brazilian longitudinal accounts of street youth, the authors seek to understand the longer-term prospects for young street workers. Placing the findings within two dominant theoretical contexts – the study of children’s daily interactions, emphasizing their role as agents, and a structural sociology of childhood – the research joins those who combine these perspectives for an understanding of poor youths’ childhoods and childhood outcomes in urban Brazil.

Parents, educators and social commentators have repeatedly claimed that passive media consumption can harm children. Building on recent attempts to understand how children actively interpret media, the authors use an interpretive model of socialization to analyze fieldnote excerpts from a Taiwanese kindergarten and first grade. Contrary to popular opinion, the findings demonstrate that young children did not simply internalize and reproduce the messages received from media or adult authority figures. Instead the authors found that children actively incorporated popular media into their peer cultures through knowledge displays, play planning episodes and collective play. Further, the children in this study used popular media to enact, explore and resist the Confucian values of being a good student, a good family member and a good peer.