Slide 1

Confessions of a Grinch: Why I hate Xmas Parenting can be radicalizing Childrens culture has become a central issues for parents who come to recognize the contradictions of consumer culture and its values --- Especially at Xmas Crossing the Thin Black Lion: The Personal is the Political: Why has childrearing become the most difficult form of social communication I practice? Historical reflection on the changing cultural environment Slide 2 The Irrationality of Childrearing and the Study of Socialization Are we slaves to our genes? Socialization: defined as the pattern of social communication which enables the young to become autonomous members of human society Cultural diversity of socialization practices and beliefs Provisioning Protecting and Disciplining Preparing and Training Slide 3 The Social Necessity of Childrearing Biological continuity of the gene pool (lineage) Transmission of property, power, status in family Transmission of culture in terms of knowledge, skills, identities and values Slide 4 Protection or Preparation: Children make culture -- but not in conditions of their own making Within three years the child has gained control over their body Learned the language and core stock of cultural knowledge Can interact and form social relations with others -- engage in conversation, play and culture making on their own Slide 5 Deconstructing Socialization: Tracing Childrens Culture in Historical Studies Text and Image Analysis: literary, rhetorical, ideological, strategic (Cross, De Mause) Cultural: Oral history, folklore, artifacts, diaries, observations, interviews/ biographies (Opies, Sutton Smith) Documentary: laws, economics, surveys, social movements, official records (Pollock, Zelizer, Cook) Slide 6 Terminology: Childhood, Socialization and Childrens Culture Children: (a category of human subjects: their experiences, demography, identity) Childrearing: familial beliefs, rules, practices - ie family relations as a system of communication Childrens culture: stories, games created by children and transmitted through their peer interactions Childhood - constructed in representations and discourses about children Matrix of Socialization - mandated institutions (family law, schools, child spaces and movements) Childrens material culture - cultural commodities produced for children, childrens cultural industries Slide 7 Beyond Wonderous Innocence: Markets as Agents of Socialization The rise of commerical discourses on socialization, family life and markets; The rise of marketing targeting children as consumers The importance of consumer socialization in the family system Slide 8 Little house on the prairies Slide 9 Father knows best Slide 10 Leave it to Beaver Slide 11 Simpsons? Slide 12 Children before Childhood Hammurabi Law Code - children and property inheritance Children in Greece and Rome Plato thinks they shouldnt read poets Spartan boys are bonded in military training Alexander is taught by Aristotle Laws and patriarchy: War, Women and Children in Ancient Rome, John Evans, Routledge, NY:1991. patria potestes where the father has total control over the child -- life and death; Plautus: Parents are the builders of their children. They lay the bases of their childrens lives. They raise them up, take great pains to put their lives on a firm foundation. They stop at nothing to make them useful and upright, both as men and citizens, nor do they reckon money spent on this effort as an expense. Slide 13 Father controls: issue of when children can marry; when children can own property and pass it on; when children are no longer under the control of their parent etc. Exemptions notion of infanticide and the emotional relations between parents and children but a law which made juveniles who had lost their fathers, able to borrow money and make decisions without a tutor or guardian (Lex Plaitoria) But children are also valued for their contribution to the family honour and the productive household Slide 14 Aries: Discovery of Modern Childhood in the 17th Century Theology of the Holy Child: - child and original sin child is symbol of divinity not humanity Christ has no childrearing Modern childhood: Children as a distinct stratus or category Expanding discourse on children: childrearing New attitudes and changing institutions: Church orphanages Schools Slide 15 The Child of History? Linda Pollack, Forgotten Childhood Many historians have subscribed to the mistaken belief that, if a past society did not posses the contemporary Western concept of childhood, then the society had no such concept. This is a totally indefensible point of view - why should past societies have regarded children in the same way Western society today? Moreover, even if children were regarded differently in the past, this does not mean that they were not regarded as children. Slide 16 Boschs Torment of St. Anthony Limited representation of children in middle ages: why? monasticism, low survival rates and the failure of bonding no institutions for poor child under pater familias which explains orphans ie the childrens crusade Slide 17 Bruegel Childrens Games Slide 18 Aries: in the seventeenth C the family ceased to be an institution for the transmission of a name and an estate - it assumed a moral and spiritual function, it molded bodies and souls. The care expended on children inspired new feelings, a new emotional attitude, to which the iconography of the seventeenth century gave brilliant and insistent expression: the modern concept of the family Slide 19 Child as part of Household Workforce Slide 20 Child as Lineage Slide 21 Child in Training Slide 22 Educating the Child Early Writers on Childhood and Education (Locke) The role of discipline and control I would also remark that parents cannot take a single step to advantage in endeavoring to train up their children to piety, without first obtaining their unlimited, unqualified, entire submission to their authority Slide 23 making children subject to the rules and restraints of reason. J. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, great care is to be had of the forming children's minds, and giving them that seasoning early, which shall influence their lives always after. I wish that those who complain of the great decay of Christian piety and virtue of this generation, would consider how to retrieve them in the next. This I am sure, that if the foundation of it be not laid in the education and principling of the youth, all other endeavours will be in vain. And if the innocence, sobriety, and industry of those who are coming up, be not taken care of and preserv'd, 'twill be ridiculous to expect, that those who are to succeed next on the stage, should abound in that virtue, ability, and learning, which has hitherto made England considerable in the world. Slide 24 Rousseau and Protecting the Innocent From Civilization? retaining the natural freedom of childhood May I venture at this point to state the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of education? Education of the earliest years should be merely negative. It consists, not in teaching virtue or truth, but in preserving the heart from vice and from the spirit of error. If the infant sprang at one bound from its mother's breast to the age of reason, the present type of education would be quite suitable, but its natural growth calls for quite a different training. The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed; for while it is blind it cannot see the torch you offer it, nor can it follow through the vast expanse of ideas a path so faintly traced by reason that the best eyes can scarcely follow it. Slide 25 The Child of the Enlightenment Slide 26 Chris Jenks: The Making of Modern Childhood? Childhood becomes key construct in public discourses of modernization: An idealized projection of progress onto children emerging out of the enlightenment - as children develop to maturity so do modern societies A condition within which children experience growth and development through learning - education of the young becomes essential to progress Childhood is also a site of conflict because historically we have developed conflicting ideas about progress -- and the values which legitimize children within the workplace, the family, the state and the culture. Slide 27 The Playful Child Slide 28 The Child Abandoned Slide 29 The Socialized Child: focus on preparation Slide 30 The Moralized Child: focus on protection Slide 31 Institutionalization of Childhood Changing Legal Structures of Protection and Preparation: Family - protected against abuse and harm vs neglect Community - extended family, peers, and resources for children State: prov./ federal laws - bullying, pornography, prostitution, ritual abuse Schools - curriculum set by state (limits religion, values, ideology) Media - stories and ideas for children: inform enlighten and entertain - Protected from violence and sex for reasons of community taste and harm Market: Protected from commercial manipulation for reasons of developmental inadequacy The Politics of Childhood: Anti-Child Labour, Sunday school, Scouts, Mass education, Playground, Camping, Corporate, Child Poverty and Well fare Childrens Rights etc. Emerging Child Professionals: teachers, social workers, educational psychologists, family physicians, counsellers, play workers, marketers and writers etc. Slide 32 Childrens Advocates Movements for Childhood Froebel: let us live for our children Slide 33 Child Labour Slide 34 Slide 35 Slide 36 Victorian Childhood Debated Psychology and development - study of maturation, psychoanalysis and the notion of childhood trauma (Freud to Erikson) Schools and Mass Literacy - material to support the transmission of civilized culture; tools of the enlightenment (Foebel; Vygotsky; Piaget; Dewey) Childrens labour as teaching work ethos vs skills and training - chores and allowances (reward vs obligation) Empathizing with children- seeing the world from the childs perspective - the problem of growing up novels turn to biography - Dickens Parental Advisories - professional discourses on parenting and childrearing Schools and Discipline - beating knowledge and obedience into children vs rewarding learning (strict punishment and rules) Childrens peer culture- the playground movement -- street culture is domesticated and disciplined Organizing Peers - the natural child is social: the scouts, hitler youth, mickey mouse club etc. Nursery schools - gardening as metaphor for learning; focus on developmentalism and cognitive growth Slide 37 Educating Girls for Service Slide 38 Slide 39 Slide 40 The 20th Century: From work to leisure Cultural activities: clubs, community festivals, playgrounds, sports, clothes, radio, films, comics, TV, video and computer games, web sites etc. Cultural industries - designed experiences for children (toys, books, movies, TV, ) Family Ideals and Childrearing Practices - laissez faire parenting, changing punishment and restrictions on leisure; socialization to consumption Slide 41 Improving Moments Slide 42 Childrens status: whats wrong with this picture Slide 43 Slide 44 For the sake of the Children Slide 45 Children of Progress: the domestic sanctuary? Slide 46 Play is childrens moral equivalent to work Slide 47 Slide 48 Childrearing in Transition Psychology: and New Mechanisms of Regulation and Control Slide 49 Conflict over the Socialization of Children Slide 50 The Spock Generation Slide 51 Slide 52 DeMause: Emerging from the Nightmare