The End 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.”

DeMause: Emerging from the Nightmare

Childhood as Site of Struggle:the growing debates about socialization

• Philosophy - Locke vs. Rousseau• Law and Policy - child social movements• Parenting and Family Advise• Education• Psychology• Business• Sociology• Anthropology, History and Cultural Studies

Myth of Innocence or Crisis of Modern

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Celebrating the Pleasures and Affluence of Affluence vs. Amusing Ourselves to Death

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

Progressives Perspective on Family Life

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• Child as property to child as rights

• Exploitation of Industrial Workplace to Enlightenment in Schooling

• Poverty and Abuse to Material Well Being and Own Pleasures

• Socialization to Children’s Culture

Geldoff: Protecting Kids from Patriarchy or Denying them Fatherly Love

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 playforms

The Role of Media in Social Change

• Traditional Oral Culture: – Breugle - Children’s Games: Community Festivals/ Religion, Folk Tales,

Saga’s, Games– Recitation: Faye’s Altzheimers the art of conversation; the child’s voice,

drama

• Books/ Schools – the creation of autonomous zone of children’s literature – The cultural agenda: knowledge, skills and appropriate literatures

• Rise of Popular Culture:– Adapting folklore and generating a shared popular culture– Blurring the boundaries between adult and child knowledge– Eroding the Basis of Parental Authority and Family micro culture: programming

the V-chip– Ideological: Sanitization/ Contamination of Folk tales– Commodification of Culture - audiences rather than children

Opies, Mergen, Sutton Smith

• Looking beneath the ideology of education: 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

Debates Books and Literature

• Moral and Religious Instruction

• Provide Knowledge• Challenge the Reader

• Liberated Imaginations and Fantasy

• Provide Entertainment• Delight the Reader

Neil Postman

• ‘Because reading makes it possible to enter a non-observed and abstract world of knowledge, it creates a split between those who cannot read and those who can’

Comic Panic: Dr. Wertham and Seduction of the Innocents

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Has Postmodern Childhood been liberated or Colonized by

Marketers?• Children’s rights• Education and equal opportunity

(democracy)• Escape from Innocence: the competent

child• Consumerism: and choice and self

expression in market (establish their own taste cultures)

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE?

New DiscoursesOn the Modern Child

Gary Cross and Dan Cook

Wonderous Innocence and the Invisible Hand of Marketing

Childrearing inTransitionPsychology: and New Mechanismsof Regulation and Control

Conflict over theSocialization ofChildren

The Spock Generation

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

consumerism

TV: optimism

• 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.

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

The Politics of Childhood: Changing Arenas of Socialization

ChildMarketers

Parents

Peer Culture

Media

Schools

Marketing

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Hockey Violence: From 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?

Home Alone: Deconstructing the Modern Fairy Tale

• Class Conflict: powerful and powerless (poor as victims/ other)

• Dysfunction of the Family: siblings • Abandonment of children: the erosion of affective bonds

and involvement• Blurring the Generation Gap: Adultified child and the

Incompetent Adult• Child as hero: from fear and incompetence to triumph

over chaos and adversity

Who rocks? Who sleeps?Analyzing Children’s cultural industries

• Critiques of Multinationals and Global Children’s Culture– Mediatization of Life: Colonization of the Imagination-Disney

– Children as Targets: the Commodification of Childhood

– End of street cultures

• Marketing – Gendered segmentation: Star Wars vs Style Wars

– Consumerism: Popular culture vs folk culture

– technologies and virtualization of life

• Production of Alternatives– Critical Education - ie Commercialism in Schools: BC

– Creating Alternatives - Media Lab Productions

Crisis of Childhood or Adulthood?

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The personal challenges of parenting

• Purposiveness: Defining a healthy, meaningful and happy life for oneself?

• Complexity: what constitutes healthy psychological and social development

• Self-knowledge: discovering continuity in family traditions and moral foundations for life

• Resistence: demands the moral courage to be thoughtful, critical and creative in dealing with the dilemma of modern life