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Open University Press
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First published 2004

Second edition published 2008
First published in this third edition 2015

Copyright © Mary Jane Kehily, 2015

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 Praise for this book

“I don’t know of a better introductory text. This is an excellent

­collection from some of the key figures in the field and gives the r­ eader
a clear sense of the past, present and emerging future of c­ hildhood
studies.”
Nick Lee, Associate Professor of Childhood,
University of Warwick, UK

“The critical insight which characterises every chapter in this new

edition reminds readers that there is no one right way to study
childhood any more than there is one right way to be a child.
Sociology, history, anthropology, policy studies and, yes, even
­
developmental psychology all have contributions to make and the
lively tensions in this family of perspectives can prevent the study
of childhood from settling into a ‘spurious consensus’. For anyone
who thinks they understand what childhood is, why it matters and
how it varies across time and cultures, this book offers new and
challenging perspectives which will encourage readers to think
again.”
Rod Parker-Rees, Associate Professor of Early Childhood Studies,
Plymouth University, UK
 Contents

The editor and contributors ix

1 Understanding childhood
An introduction to some key themes and issues 1
Mary Jane Kehily

Part I 17
Studying childhood
2 Childhood studies: past, present and future 19
Martin Woodhead
3 The historical construction of childhood 34
Diana Gittins
Part I Activity 48

Part II 51
Sociocultural approaches to childhood
4 Constructing childhood sociologically 53
Chris Jenks
5 Developmental psychology and the study of childhood 71
Valerie Walkerdine
6 Anthropological approaches to childhood 83
Heather Montgomery
Part II Activity 97

Part III 99
Policy perspectives on childhood
7 Promoting better childhoods: constructions of child concern 101
Wendy Stainton Rogers
8 Children’s rights in early childhood 120
Glenda MacNaughton and Kylie Smith
9 Working with children: an integrated approach 135
Jane Read
Part III Activity 153
viii CONTENTS

Part IV 155
Emergent issues
10 New media, new markets, new childhoods? Children’s changing cultural
environment in the age of digital technology 157
David Buckingham
11 Lost innocence? The sexualization of childhood 173
Naomi Holford
12 Children in armed conflict 191
David M. Rosen
Part IV Activity 207
13 The future of childhood: crisis, cyclical concern or accommodation? 208
Mary Jane Kehily

References 219
Index 241
 The editor and contributors

David Buckingham is Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University and

formerly Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of
London, where he directed the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and
Media. He has directed several major research projects on young people’s
relationships with the media and on media education, and has lectured on
these topics in more than 20 countries worldwide. He is the author of numerous
books, including Children Talking Television (Routledge, 1993), Moving Images
(Manchester University Press, 1996), The Making of Citizens (Routledge,
2000), After the Death of Childhood (Polity Press, 2000), Media Education:
Literacy, Learning and Popular Culture (Polity Press, 2003) Beyond Tech-
nology: Children’s learning in the Age of Digital Culture (Polity Press, 2007).

Diana Gittins is Associate Lecturer in creative writing for The Open Universi-
ty. She has taught in higher education for many years and also runs creative
writing workshops. She is the author of four works of non-fiction: Fair Sex,
The Family in Question, The Child in Question and Madness in its Place. She
was a Hawthornden Fellow in 1993 and has published a collection of poetry,
Dance of the Sheet.

Naomi Holford is Lecturer in Childhood Studies at The Open University.

Chris Jenks is Emeritus Professor and formerly Vice-Chancellor of Brunel

University, UK. His previous books include Rationality, Education and the
Social Organization of Knowledge (Routledge, 1976), Worlds Apart – Readings
for a Sociology of Education (with J. Beck, N. Keddie and M. Young) (Collier-
Macmillan, 1977), Toward a Sociology of Education (with J. Beck, N. Keddie
and M. Young) (Transaction, 1977), The Sociology of Childhood (Batsford,
1982), Culture (Routledge, 1993), Cultural Reproduction (Routledge, 1993),
Visual Culture (Routledge, 1995), Childhood (Routledge, 1996), Theoriz-
ing Childhood (with A. James and A. Prout) (Polity, 1998), Core Sociologi-
cal Dichotomies (Sage, 1998), Images of Community: Durkheim, Social
Systems and the Sociology of Art (with J.A. Smith) (Ashgate, 2000), Aspects
of Urban Culture (Sinica, 2001), Culture: Critical Concepts (four volumes)
(Routledge, 2002), Transgression (Routledge, 2003), Sub-culture: The
Fragmentation of the Social (Sage, 2004), and Urban Culture (four volumes)
(Routledge, 2004). He is interested in sociological theory, post-structuralism and
heterology, childhood, cultural theory, visual and urban culture, and extremes of
behaviour.
x EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Jane Kehily is Professor of Gender and Education in the Faculty of Ed-
ucation and Language Studies at The Open University. She has a background
in cultural studies and education, and research interests in gender and sexu-
ality, narrative and identity and popular culture. She has published widely on
these themes. Recent publications include Sexuality, Gender and Schooling
(Routledge, 2002) and (with Anoop Nayak) Gender, Youth and Culture: Young
Masculinities and Femininities (Palgrave, 2013). Her edited collections in-
clude: Understanding Youth, Perspectives, Identities and Practices (Sage/
The Open University, 2007), Understanding Childhood: A Cross Disciplinary
Approach (Policy Press/The Open University, 2013) and (with David Bucking-
ham and Sara Bragg) Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media (Palgrave,
2014).

Glenda MacNaughton has worked in the early childhood field for over 30
years. Formerly Professor in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, at
the University of Melbourne, Glenda established and directed the Centre for
Equity and Innovation in Early Childhood. Her years in early childhood have
included work across all sectors as a practitioner and a manager and she has
been a senior policy advisor to government in the UK and Australia. Glenda
has a passionate interest in social justice and equity issues in early childhood
and has published widely, nationally and internationally, on these issues. Her
two most recently published books focus on action research in early child-
hood and on the politics of knowledge in early childhood. She is currently re-
searching how gender, class and race intersect and construct young children’s
learning, how teachers explore contemporary issues in the early childhood
curriculum and staff–parent relations in early childhood.

Heather Montgomery is Reader in the Anthropology of Childhood Studies at

The Open University. A social anthropologist by training, she has focused on
issues of childhood, sexuality and children’s rights. She has worked in Thai-
land conducting research among young prostitutes and published this work in
Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand (Berghahn, 2001). She
also writes more generally on the role of children in anthropology, examining
how children have been portrayed and analysed in ethnographic monographs
over the last 150 years and what lessons contemporary anthropologists can
learn from these descriptions. An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological
Perspectives of Children’s Lives was published by Blackwell in 2008.

Jane Read is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of

Roehampton, London. She has taught in higher education for many years
following a career as archivist, notably for the Froebel Trust (formerly the
National Froebel Foundation) and the Froebel Educational Institute, now a
constituent college of the University of Roehampton. She also worked on
the Margaret McMillan archives at Rachel McMillan College in Deptford. Her
research and teaching draws on these primary sources and focuses on the
 EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS xi

dissemination of Froebelian pedagogy across time and space and in diverse

educational settings, and has been presented in history of education, social
science and education conferences globally. Recent publications have adopt-
ed socio-historical perspectives to illuminate (dis)continuities in historical and
current policy and practice. Her research is currently applying these perspec-
tives to long-standing issues of professional identity and status in the early
years workforce.

David Rosen is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Scienc-

es and History, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey. Prof.
Rosen’s research interests are in the relationship between law and culture. He
has carried out research in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Israel and the United States.
Key publications include: Child Soldiers: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO,
2012), Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism (Rutgers
University Press, 2005), ‘Reflections on the well-being of child soldiers,’ in Ash-
er Ben-Arieh, Ferran Casas, Ivar Frones and Jill E. Korbin (eds), Handbook
of Child Well-Being (Springer, 2014), ‘Child soldiers: tropes of innocence and
terror,’ Antropologia, 2013, and (with Sarah M. Rosen) ‘Representing child sol-
diers in fiction and film’, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 2012.

Kylie Smith is an academic based at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate

School of Education. Kylie’s research examines how theory and practice can
challenge the operation of equity in the early childhood classroom and she
has worked with children, parents and teachers to build safe and respectful
communities. In her work with the Centre for Equity and Innovation in Early
Childhood, Kylie has been actively involved in leading consultations with
young children in curriculum and policy-making in the early years.

Wendy Stainton Rogers is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at The Open

University, in its Faculty of Health and Social Care. For the last 30 years she
has taught and carried out research within the area of childhood and youth,
particularly into the social policy, law and practice issues connected with child
protection; children’s sexuality; and the application of postmodern theory to
childcare and youth justice practice. More broadly, Wendy is a critical health
psychologist, especially interested in theorizing ‘risk’ and exploring risk-taking.
She has published widely on these topics, and remains a proud amanuensis for
Beryl Curt.

Valerie Walkerdine is Research Professor at Cardiff University School of Social

Sciences. Her publications include: Children, Gender, Video Games: Towards
a Relational Approach to Multimedia (Palgrave, 2007), Challenging Subjects:
Critical Psychology for a New Millennium (Palgrave, 2002), Growing up Girl:
Psychosocial explorations of Gender and Class (with H. Lucey and J. Melody
(Palgrave, 2000), Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (with
L. Blackman) (Palgrave, 2001).
xii EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Martin Woodhead is Emeritus Professor of Childhood Studies at The Open

University and Associate Research Director of Young Lives, an international
study of childhood poverty based at the University of Oxford. With a back-
ground in psychology, sociology and educational research, he pioneered inter-
disciplinary teaching at The Open University through leading on development
of the undergraduate course in Childhood and Youth Studies. Martin’s main
research area relates to early childhood development, education and care, in-
cluding policy studies and extensive international work. He has also carried
out research on child labour and children’s rights, including consultancy work
for Save the Children, the Council of Europe, OECD, UNICEF, UNESCO and
the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. He is former editor of the journal
Children and Society, and a member of the editorial board for Childhood and
advisory board for Journal of Early Childhood Research.
1 Understanding childhood
An introduction to some key themes
and issues

Mary Jane Kehily

Recent developments in education and the social sciences have seen the
growth of childhood studies as an academic field of inquiry. Over the last dec-
ade or so childhood studies has become a recognized area of research and
analysis, reflected in the success of publications such as Constructing and
Reconstructing Childhood (James and Prout 1997) and Stories of Childhood:
Shifting Agendas of Child Concern (Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers
1992). A growing body of literature points to the importance of childhood as
a conceptual category and as a social position for the study of a previously
overlooked or marginalized group – children. Childhood studies as a field of
academic endeavour offers the potential for interdisciplinary research that
can contribute to an emergent paradigm wherein new ways of looking at chil-
dren can be researched and theorized. This book aims to bring together key
themes and issues in the area of childhood studies in ways that will provide an
introduction to students and practitioners working in this field.
In this chapter I aim to introduce and comment upon some of the key
themes and issues that will be revisited throughout the book. I begin by asking
the question, ‘What is childhood studies anyway?’ Is it a collation of already
existing knowledge about children and childhood, or does the term constitute
a new academic field? An obvious point to acknowledge is that the study of
children and childhood has been a part of a diverse range of academic disci-
plines for some time. Disciplines have developed different ways of approach-
ing the study of children, often using different research methods driven by
a far from coherent set of research questions. For some disciplines (such as
sociology and cultural studies) childhood as a concept is specifically ad-
dressed, while for other disciplines (such as psychology and education) the fo-
cus has been upon the child or children. In order to develop an insight into the
diversity of childhood studies as a field of inquiry, the book is divided into four
parts: studying childhood over time; sociocultural approaches; policy perspec-
tives; and emergent issues. Collectively, these offer a different and sometimes
distinct way of looking at children and childhood, providing the reader with a
conceptual framework for understanding the field. Each part is considered in
more detail below.
2 MARY JANE KEHILY

Studying childhood over time

Historical studies provide a rich source of knowledge about children and
childhood in the past and the present. Many of the issues that concern contem-
porary studies of childhood have a historical trajectory that elucidates and
informs the present in powerful ways. Issues of concern for contemporary
scholars of childhood such as child labour, the gulf between the experience
of childhood in the West and the non-Western world, and Western anxieties
about children in the new media age can be usefully explored by recourse to
history. Historical approaches suggest that childhood was reconceptualized
in the UK between the late nineteenth century and the beginning of World
War I (Steedman 1990; Gittins 1998). These studies demonstrate that concerns
with child poverty and ill health produced a significant shift in the economic
and sentimental value of children. Over a fairly short historical period the
position of working-class children changed from one of supplementing the
family income to that of a relatively inactive member of the household in eco-
nomic terms, to be protected from the adult world of work and hardship (Cun-
ningham 1991). A contemporary US-based study elaborates upon this theme
by indicating that children’s contribution to the family in Western contexts
is economically worthless but emotionally ‘priceless’ (Zelizer 1985). Zelizer’s
study suggests that children’s ‘value’ lies in their ability to give meaning and
fulfilment to their parents’ lives. Further historical research suggests that
childhood provides a site for thinking about the self and locating selfhood;
a way of mapping and developing human interiority (Steedman 1995). Seen
from this perspective, the child represents an extension of the adult self, a
symbolic link with one’s own childhood and a psychic dynamic between the
past and the present.
Some of these themes can be seen in the work of Henry Mayhew, a
nineteenth-century social commentator who observed and documented the
lives of working-class people in London. His detailed descriptions chronicled
in London Labour and the London Poor (first published in 1861), provide us
with a rich social history of life and conditions in nineteenth-century England.
Mayhew’s encounter with an 8-year-old street vendor, the watercress girl, doc-
uments his feelings of surprise at meeting a child who, to his mind, is not a
child. Mayhew’s sense of surprise rests upon his observation that a child of 8
has ‘lost all childish ways’. Mayhew begins by positioning her as a child and
speaking to her about ‘childish subjects’ such as playing with toys, playing
with friends and going to the park. The watercress girl, however, is not famil-
iar with this aspect of childhood and has no experience of playing for pleas-
ure. Her experiences are centred round a few streets in London where she
lives and works. Mayhew draws our attention to the material circumstances
of the girl’s existence: she is pale, thin and unused to eating regular hot meals;
she is unkempt and inadequately clothed; she no longer attends school; and she
has become accustomed to a life of hardship that includes occasional bouts of
physical abuse. Mayhew is moved by the child’s description of her life to the
 UNDERSTANDING CHILDHOOD 3

point where he finds her account ‘cruelly pathetic’. From his description we
can deduce something of what Mayhew’s expectations of childhood may be.
Contemporary images of children in advertisements, television and film
also comment on the concept of childhood in ways that bespeak a particu-
lar relationship with the past. Barnardo’s is a leading children’s charity based
in the UK. About 20 years after Henry Mayhew’s encounter with the water-
cress girl, Dr Thomas John Barnardo became so concerned about the plight of
street children in the East End of London that he opened an orphanage. This
children’s home became a model for the setting up of others throughout the
UK, and Barnardo’s name has since been associated with the institutional care
of children and young people. Barnardo’s no longer run children’s homes, but
they continue to be involved in many charitable projects to support children
and young people. Barnardo’s describe their approach to caring for children in
the twenty-first century in the following way:

Children have only one chance of a childhood. They deserve to be

protected from harm, to enjoy good emotional, mental and physical
health, and to feel that they belong in their home, at school and in their
local community.
Barnardo’s believes that it is never too early or too late to offer
a helping hand – and to give the most disadvantaged youngsters the
chance of a better childhood and a brighter future.
(Barnardo’s 1999)

Like other charities, Barnardo’s rely upon donations from the public and are
constantly engaged in fundraising ventures to support their work and promote
the public profile of the organization. In October 1999, Barnardo’s launched
an advertising campaign in newspapers and magazines to raise awareness of
their work with children. The series of advertisements portrayed children in
a variety of ‘adult’ situations: homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, prostitu-
tion, suicide and prison. The image of a baby injecting drugs aroused a great
deal of controversy. The Advertising Standards Authority received 28 com-
plaints from individuals and organizations that considered the advertisement
to be shocking and offensive. In the face of public protest, Barnardo’s replaced
the image with one of a happier baby without the syringe and tourniquet. But
why is the image such a shocking one? It could be argued that the power of
the image lies in the fact that it deliberately and self-consciously transgresses
boundaries. While it is generally accepted that adults have knowledge of the
world of drug use, it is usually assumed that children should be protected from
such knowledge. The sight of a baby who is not only exposed to the reality of
drug use but actually participating in it may be seen as a violation of general-
ly held sensibilities about appropriate knowledge and behaviour. Yet all drug
users were, of course, once babies. And this is the point that the Barnardo’s
advertisement makes very forcefully. Childhood leads inevitably to adulthood
and, furthermore, the child’s environment and experiences can have a bearing on
4 MARY JANE KEHILY

adult life. In the advertisement the image and the text work together to create
this message. The text reads:

John Donaldson. Age 23. Battered as a child, it was always possible

that John would turn to drugs. With Barnardo’s help, child abuse need
not lead to an empty future. Although we no longer run orphanages,
we continue to help thousands of children and their families, at home,
school and in the local community.
(Barnardo’s 1999)

The visual and textual juxtaposition of John Donaldson, baby, and John Don-
aldson aged 23 makes a direct link between a battered childhood and drug
abuse in adulthood. In this sense the image is stark and uncompromising.
From the perspective of the charity, the link between abused childhood and
troubled adulthood calls for intervention and change encapsulated in the
Barnardo’s logo, ‘Giving children back their future’. Mayhew and Barnardo
both view working-class children as poor and impoverished in many ways;
their sense of lack is material, emotional and experiential. The Barnardo’s ad-
vertisements suggest that children deserve to have a future and that they rep-
resent the future. As such, Mayhew and Barnardo both contribute to a view
of childhood defined by its social status as a subordinate group in need of
protection in order to be prepared for adulthood. Of course, it is adults who
are claiming a future for children rather than children themselves, and this
brings us to another point. Mayhew and Barnardo both position children as
essentially passive – things happen to them that they do not choose and cannot
control. Issues of agency and powerlessness remain central to contemporary
discussions of childhood, emerging across several chapters in this volume.
The idea that childhood innocence should be preserved is a pervasive one
and can be seen to operate on many different levels. Henry Mayhew’s account
implies that children should be protected from the harsh realities of life. The
advertisements featured in the Barnardo’s campaign may be aligned with this
sentiment but go further to indicate that the child is an adult-in-the-making
and therefore requires quality care and attention. The idea of childhood that
can be discerned in Mayhew’s account and Barnardo’s advertising reflects two
discourses that underpin contemporary understandings of childhood – the Ro-
mantic discourse and the discourse of tabula rasa (blank slate). Drawing upon
the work of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the Roman-
tic discourse claimed that children embody a state of innocence, purity and
natural goodness that is only contaminated on contact with the corrupt outside
world. The Romantic vision of the child ascribed children a spirituality that
placed them close to God, nature and all things good. Children’s purity should
be respected and protected in order for them to express themselves freely and
creatively. These ideas about children were taken up in England by William
Wordsworth, who famously claimed that ‘The Child is father of the Man’ (‘My
Heart Leaps Up’, 1802). The tabula rasa discourse draws upon the philosophy of
 UNDERSTANDING CHILDHOOD 5

John Locke who developed the idea that children come into the world as blank
slates who could, with guidance and training, develop into rational human be-
ings. Within this discourse the child is always in the process of becoming, an
adult-in-the-making with specific educational needs that adults should take se-
riously. It is the responsibility of adults to provide the appropriate education
and control to enable children to develop into mature and responsible citizens
(for a further discussion of discourse informing childhood, see Brockliss and
Montgomery 2013). The Romantic and tabula rasa discourses, along with a
third discourse – the Puritan – postulating that children are potentially wicked
or evil, underpin many contemporary discussions of childhood and are elabo-
rated upon further in many chapters of this book.
Chapter 2 takes on the role of providing a conceptual map of the field of
childhood studies and the way it has evolved across disciplines to become
a multi-disciplinary approach to researching and studying childhood. As a
fascinating overview of the field, Martin Woodhead enables us to develop a
fuller understanding of childhood studies through sustained engagement with
key studies in this area. The chapter builds up a rich and compelling account
of the ways in which childhood studies has been shaped in the past and the
present. Finally, in an interview, Woodhead reflects on the themes of the chap-
ter and looks forward to the future to suggest ways in which current concerns
could usefully be explored in future research and teaching agendas.
The theme of representations is taken up in Chapter 3 to illustrate the
ways in which the concept of childhood has been constructed over time. Using
a range of historical examples, Diana Gittins points out that childhood is an
adult construction that changes over time and place. Moreover, she suggests
that the concept of childhood serves to disguise differences between children,
especially in relation to social categories such as gender, ethnicity and social
class. The chapter provides a clear and insightful discussion of the Ariès the-
sis, an influential historical study that analysed paintings to argue that child-
hood is a modern invention that emerged from the beginning of the sixteenth
century. Gittins points out that the development of childhood as a concept was
class-specific, reflecting the values and practices of a rising European middle
class that increasingly differentiated adults and children, girls and boys.

Sociocultural approaches to childhood

Part II considers the ways in which the study of childhood has been ap-
proached within the social sciences, anthropology and cultural studies. Here
the focus is largely upon the period associated with the emergence of anthro-
pology, sociology and the ‘psy’ disciplines – from the late nineteenth/early
twentieth century to the present day. As a period marked by an expanding
interest in knowledge production and forms of reflexivity, academics working
within these disciplinary boundaries posed questions concerning the nature
and status of academic inquiry such as ‘How do we know what we know?’
6 MARY JANE KEHILY

and ‘How far does research bring into being the subject it purports to study?’
The argument could be made that, in conducting research on children, re-
searchers also produce a version of ‘the child’ and indeed a version of child-
hood. The recognition that there may be different ways of being a child and
different kinds of childhood is important to the development of contemporary
approaches to childhood. Central to contemporary approaches across the so-
cial sciences is the understanding that childhood is not universal; rather, it is a
product of culture and as such will vary across time and place.
The disciplines of psychology and sociology have made a significant
contribution to contemporary understandings of childhood. In general, psy-
chological research has focused upon the individual child, while sociological
research has been interested in children as a social group. In the early twenti-
eth century, developmental psychology became established as the dominant
paradigm for studying children (Woodhead 2003a). Developmental psycholo-
gy documented the stages and transitions of Western childhood. Within this
framework, childhood is seen as an apprenticeship for adulthood that can be
charted though stages relating to age, physical development and cognitive
ability. The progression from child to adult involves children in a developmen-
tal process wherein they embark upon a path to rational subjectivity. Sociolog-
ical approaches, by contrast, have been concerned with issues of socialization;
ways of exploring how children learn to become members of the society in
which they live. The differences between the two approaches are outlined and
discussed in an academic intervention that sets out the parameters for a ‘new
sociology of childhood’ (James and Prout 1997). James and Prout propose that
‘the immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which it
is understood and made meaningful [are] a fact of culture’ (p. 7). They suggest
that there is a growing body of research that identifies an emergent paradigm
for the study of childhood. Key features of the paradigm, as outlined by James
and Prout, are:

• childhood is understood as a social construction;

• childhood is a variable of social analysis;
• children’s relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own
right;
• children should be seen as active social agents;
• ethnography is a useful method for the study of childhood;
• studying childhood involves an engagement with the process of recon-
structing childhood in society.

The differences between psychological and sociological approaches

to childhood are frequently emphasized and mobilized as part of a move to
critique the universalism of child development (James and Prout 1997; Jenks,
this volume). In Chapter 4, Jenks discusses the different ways in which develop-
mental psychologists and sociologists have approached childhood. His chap-
ter points to the influence of Piaget and, by contrast, the conceptual grounds
 UNDERSTANDING CHILDHOOD 7

of sociological thought. Finally, Jenks’s chapter offers a series of models of

the child that provide an overview of sociological approaches to childhood.
While it is instructive to think about the differences between developmental
psychology and sociology, it is also helpful to hold onto the commonalities
and points of continuity between the two approaches. Socialization also calls
into being an adult-in-the-making, a child that is in the process of becoming
a responsible citizen, albeit a more socially orientated one. The histories of
developmental psychology and sociology can be seen as engagements with the
project of liberalism – the production and regulation of rational and civilized
adult citizens (see Walkerdine, this volume). There is a further methodological
point to be made in support of developmentalism. As Martin Woodhead (2003b)
notes, many of the critiques of Piagetian approaches overlook the research
goals and practices that informed the investigation of children’s thinking and
learning. Woodhead points out that Piaget’s approach was child-centred: to
encourage greater respect for children’s thinking and behaviour; to attempt to
understand children’s perspectives on their own terms.
Walkerdine’s chapter aims to think about the place of psychology in the
understanding of childhood. She notes that developmental psychology has
played a central role in the scientific study of children since the end of the
nineteenth century. The sociological critique of this body of literature has
had the effect of purging psychology from childhood studies only to replace
it with forms of neuroscience. Walkerdine suggests that psychology can con-
tribute to our understanding of childhood and can be understood within the
context of a historically specific political moment of Western democratic soci-
eties. Walkerdine explores the experience of schooling in nineteenth-century
England as a process designed to address national problems of crime and
pauperism. Education would teach moral values and good habits. This invest-
ment in pedagogy produced a new way to understand the nature of children.
From this perspective, developmental psychology provides valuable insights
into childhood as a process of adaptation marked by the staged progression
towards adulthood. Walkerdine points out that childhood is always produced
as an object in relation to power. Moreover, the modern Western conceptual-
ization of the child exists in circuits of exchange between the Western and the
non-Western world. Walkerdine suggests that it is important to move beyond
dualisms to understand how people become subjects within specific local
practices and, further, to understand how subject positions and practices op-
erate within complex circuits of exchange. In conclusion, Walkerdine outlines
three approaches to rethinking the place of psychology in childhood: situated
learning and apprenticeship; actor network theory; and Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of assemblages.
The final chapter of Part II shifts the focus to a consideration of anthropo-
logical approaches to childhood. Montgomery profiles the significant contribu-
tion anthropologists have made to the study of childhood. Based on the premise
that childhood is given meaning through culture, anthropological studies doc-
ument cross-cultural differences to be found in the role and status of children