“A civilized society is one which strives to make the world better

for children”

Enlightened Socialization: protecting the vulnerable or preparing the

citizen?

DeMause: Emerging from the Nightmare

Professional Discourses on Socialization

• Sociology Law and Public Policy - child social movements and social control

• Family Life and Social Work• Education, Cognitive Development and Learning• Psychology and Trauma/ Healthy Development• Business and Children’s Pleasure/ Entertainment• Anthropology and Cultural Studies - identity,

individuation and peer relations

Emerging Crisis: Socialization as a site of conflict

• the child as a distinct category of human being

• Locke vs Rousseau: child is innocent and vulnerable needing protection vs irrational and out of control needing careful socialization and guidance

• Conflicted Symbols of Modernity:– Child and progress myth

– For the sake of the child sacrifice and future

– Family as sanctuary from Industrialization

– Production and Consumption/ work vs leisure/ male vs female

Competing Grand Narratives of History: Children make meaning but not in conditions of

their own making

• Heroic View of History

• Celebrate Change

• Mass Education

• Material Well Being

• End of Brutality and Growth of children’s rights

• Liberationism-freedom and power of child to make culture for self

• Tragic View of History• Worry about change• Failures of modern values• Insistence on vulnerability in

the face of persistent brutality• Suspicion about forces outside

family and supporting the need for social control

• Protectionism-policy and resources to ensure the health and well being of the child

Institutional Formations mobilized around changing

ideologyLaw and Economics

legal history

Paradox of History

• Gain universal rights• Freed from industrial

work• Educated for

citizenship• Provisioned for

Leisure and Freedom of expression

• But lack political ones• But loose economic

value to parents• Forced into Schooling• Socially controlled on

playgrounds and regimented by domesticated play forms

Bringing Up The Spock Generation

Progressive Promise of the 1950’s: The family re-constituted through mass

consumerism•Paul Porter, Federal Communication Commission (FCC)•television’s illuminating light will go far, we hope, to drive out the ghosts that haunt the dark corners of our minds—ignorance, bigotry, fear. It will be able to inform, educate and entertain an entire nation with a magical speed and vividness…It can be democracy’s handmaiden by bringing the whole picture of our political, social, economic and cultural life to the eyes as well as the ears.

Rethinking the Paradox of Affluence

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Celebrating Abundance vs. Amusing Ourselves to Death

Post-war Polemics:Childhood as Symbol of Freedom and Autonomy

Comic Panic: Dr. Wertham and Seduction of the Innocents

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Debates the Role of Stories

• Moral and Religious Instruction

• Teach Rationality• Provide Knowledge• Challenge the Reader

• Liberated Imaginations and Rich Fantasy

• Provide Entertainment• Delight the Reader

David Reisman: Debates about the Matrix of Socialization

• Inner vs other directed character types: focused on self-control and discipline vs conformity and reward

• Growing influence of peer and media in traditional zones of family control

• The role of narrative as allegories of social values and emotional subjectivities

Spigel: Seduction of the Innocents? The family re-constituted through media or

children abandoned

Lynn Spigel: Seducing the Innocents

• Worse still, parents may not even know how and where their children have acquired this information. With the mass commercial dissemination of ideas, the parent is so to speak left out of the mediation loop, and the child becomes the direct addressee of the message. Perhaps for this reason, the history of children’s involvement with mass media have been marked by a deep concern on the part of adult groups to monitor their entertainment and survey their pleasures’.

– L. Spigel, (1998) Seducing the Innocents in H. Jenkins, The Children's Culture Reader (New York: New York University Press), p. 114.

Crisis of Childhood: the widing

gap between

the progressive dream and

reality

Mary Winn: The Plug in Drug

• The mediated matrix of socialization

• Breakdown of Traditional Family Life - divorce etc.

• Laissez faire Childrearing: wonderous innocence vs spoiled, rude and lazy

• Generation Gap: diverging values and mounting opposition between generations

Neil Postman: the disappearance of childhood

• Kids Growing up too soon: • End of Literate Culture: guilt and secrets• The values of mass culture blur the lines between

adult and child:– Adultified child– Immature adults (Simpson’s, Married with Children)

• Children don’t have real knowledge or experiences that allow them to understand and make complex life choices

Nanette Davis: the kids aren’t ok

• Forgetting Social Justice: structure and distribution of risks and benefits to families persists (class and education?)

• Psychological Disturbances: understanding the stresses and contradictions experienced by children in contemporary society

• Loss of Compassion: it has less to do with the ideology of innocence than with a loss of caring and compassion for children

Generations in Crisis: Moral Panic and Folk Devils

• “A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion.......;the moral barricades are manned......; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.” (Stanley Cohen 1972, 9)

Media Panic: Kirsten Drotner

• “Children and young people are prime objects of ‘media panics’ not merely because they are often media pioneers; not merely because they challenge social and cultural power relations, nor because they symbolize ideological rifts. They are panic targets just as much because they inevitably represent experiences and emotions that are irrevocably lost to adults.” (1992: 59).

Media Panics

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE?

Changing Matrix of Socialization

ChildMarketers

Parents

Peer Culture

Media

Schools

Marketing

Family

From Wonderous Innocence to Lost Innocence

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Who rocks? Who sleeps?critiquing children’s cultural industries

• Mediatization of Childhood– Children as Targets: the Commodification of Childhood– Alienation: End of street cultures and kids culture

making– Popular culture vs folk culture– Gendered segmentation: Star Wars vs Style Wars– Colonization of the Imagination-Disney– Technologies and virtualization of life– Materialist Values– Identity, Anxiety and Unhappiness

Signs of Mass Alienation

• Violence, gangs drugs bullying

• Poverty, Child abuse, depression and suicide

• Failure of schools, declining standards of language, lack of general knowledge

• anti-social kids, lack of social skills

• Obesity, and sedentary lifestyles

Rising Crime

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AGE OF VICTIM 50-64

AGE OF VICTIM 65+

Pressured Lifestyles: Spending on Entertainment

Digital divides:

new class structures

Geldoff: Protecting Kids from Patriarchy or Denying them Fatherly Love

Disappearance of Childhood: Adultified Child, Infantalized Adults

Children in the Mirror: A Distrust of Children’s Culture

Hurried Child:

Progeny as Cultural Capital

Celebrity Culture

Schor: Does Affluence Bring Happiness?

Opies, Mergen, Sutton Smith

• Rethinking oral cultures and play cultures in history– What happens to street culture– What happens to children’s rhymes and humour– Children’s games and oral culture– Children’s peer groups and relations– Family cultures and lifestyles

The End of Play

Hockey Violence: From Street Play to Professionalism

• Should children’s hockey leagues allow body checking?

• Health and safety (risk) considerations in children’s public leisure

• Are kids hockey careers in the making or just having fun?

Is there a Children’s Culture?

Children Culture

Conflicting Ideologies: Little Devils in need of teaching and discipline vs. Vulnerable Innocents in need of love and encouragement?

Education and Social Control

Identity, Personality and Self-expression

Matrix of Socialization: Schooling, Courts, Church, Family

Humour, Stories, Play, Peers

PREPARATIONEducationCitizenship skillsMoral KnowledgeCivility-responsibility

CULTIVATIONFree Play/ explorationTaste and Self-ExpressionPleasure

Family Life as Resistance: From Out of the Garden to Jingle all the Way

• Nurturing vs self interest• Sharing vs ownership• Responsibility vs Pleasure• Community vs.

Individuality• Public Interest vs.

Corporate Interest

Home Alone: unpacking a postmodern morality tale

• Child as hero: facing paradox of postmodern family life

• the critique of postmodern family– Distracted, alienated, conflicted, fragmented

• the triumph of the competent/ coping child in the face of threat– abandonment, fear and threats, creative use of

media

• the redemption of the lost family– Mother and son restored; old man shoveling is

reconciled with son’s family at christmas)