Abstract
Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in “the social studies of childhood,” sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology’s relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children’s perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children’s perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
My main engagement here is with sociologists who study broad theoretical questions without considering children at all. I leave aside the large and interesting body of work by demographers who are interested in the impact of social phenomena on children’s outcomes (e.g., Musick and Meier 2012; 2010; Carlson and Corcoran 2001; Carlson and Berger 2013; Bianchi 1999).
In this article, I refer to the social studies of childhood and childhood studies interchangeably, to signify the large interdisciplinary field dedicated to the active child subject.
It is beyond the scope of this article to document the presence of these ideas in other fields, such as psychology or education, where some scholars have long taken issue with socialization, or have begun to complicate the universalizing characteristics of the developmentalist paradigm. Instead, our task here is to sketch out the constructionist views that unite the social studies of childhood, to make note of the intractability of essentialist visions of children—even within sociology, a discipline dedicated to mapping the social construction of inequality—and to outline at least three areas where that myopia has engendered costs to theory.
Yet there are also many other factors—beyond the insularity of the scholarly community—contributing to the intransigence of the ideology of projected childhood. Among these we might point to demographic changes as crucial, especially the decrease in children as a percentage of the population in developed nations, and the massive participation of mothers in the paid labor force. Both of these changes arguably contributed to a hyper-symbolization of children as the last vestige of home, the private sphere, of sacralized domesticity and all of its attendant cultural power (Zelizer 1985; Pugh 2009). The increasing homogeneity of adult life—in which women’s schedules increasingly look like men’s, as working hours converge—may serve further to demarcate children as the Other, those who continue to embody dependence even after more women are leaving that derogated status behind (Hochschild 2003; Fraser and Gordon 1994). In addition, adults surely find the ideology of projected childhood useful for their own ends, thus contributing to its longevity. Both passivity and innocence, for example, are entangled in the notion of children as victims, and, as Thorne (1987, p. 90) notes, media accounts of child victims often successfully deflect victim-blaming discourse, allowing for journalists to “convey the severity of problems that adults often face as well.” A full accounting of the reasons for the imperviousness of sociology to the insights of the social studies of childhood is beyond the capacities of this article.
Using “independence” thus to mean free of others’ influence, he argued that this new life stage contributed to increasing numbers of same sex and interracial partnerships (Rosenfeld and Kim 2005; Rosenfeld 2007). Critics largely ignored the cultural implications of this work, and focused on his empirical claims, contending that Rosenfeld may have underestimated the degree to which children formed transgressive unions earlier in history (Furstenberg 2007; Chananie-Hill 2008).
References
Adler, P., & Adler, P. (1998). Peer power: Preadolescent culture and Identity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Alanen, L. (1988). Rethinking childhood. Acta Sociologica, 31(1), 53–67.
Alanen, L. (1994). Gender and generation: Feminism and the child question. In J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood matters. Social theory, practice and politics. Brookfield: Avebury.
Alanen, L. (2005). Women’s studies/childhood studies: Parallels, links and perspectives. In J. Mason & T. Fattore (Eds.), Children taken seriously in theory, policy and practice. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Ambert, A.-M. (1986). Sociology of sociology: The place of children in North American sociology. In P. Adler & P. Adler (Eds.), Sociological studies of child development, vol. 1 (pp. 11–31). Westport: JAI Press.
Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood (trans. Baldick R.) New York: Knopf.
Arnett, J.J. (2004). Emerging adulthood: The winding road from the late teens through the twenties. New York: Oxford University Press.
Baraldi, C. (2003). Planning childhood: Children’s social participation in the town of adults. In P. Christensen & M. O’Brien (Eds.), Children in the city: Home, neighbourhood and community. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Bianchi, S. M. (1999). Feminization and juvenilization of poverty: trends, relative risks, causes, and consequences. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 307–333.
Blatterer, H. (2007). Contemporary adulthood - reconceptualizing an uncontested category. Current Sociology, 55(6), 771–792.
Bluebond-Langner, M. (1978). The private worlds of dying children. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boulding, E. (1980). The nurture of adults by children in family settings. In: H. Lopata (Ed.), Research in the interweave of social roles: Women and men (Vol. 1, pp. 167–189). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Brannen, J., Heptinstall, E., & Bhopal, K. (2000). Children’s contribution to family life. In Connecting children: Care and family life in later childhood (pp. 154–177). London: Routledge Falmer.
Buckingham, D. (2000). After the death of childhood: Growing up in the age of electronic media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Buhler-Niederberger, D. (2010). Childhood sociology—defining the state of the art and ensuring reflection. Current Sociology, 58(2), 155–164.
Carlson, M. J., & Berger, L. M. (2013). What kids get from parents: packages of parental involvement across complex family forms. Social Service Review, 87(2), 213–249.
Carlson, M. J., & Corcoran, M. E. (2001). Family structure and children’s behavioral and cognitive outcomes. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(3), 779–792.
Chananie-Hill, R. A. (2008). Book review of The age of independence: interracial unions, same-sex unions, and the changing American family, by Michael J. Rosenfeld (2007). Journal of Marriage and Family, 70, 832–833.
Cherlin, A. (2009). The marriage go-round. New York: Knopf.
Christensen, P. (1993). The social construction of help among Danish children. Sociology of Health and Illness, 15, 488–502.
Christensen, P. M. & O'Brien, M. (2003). Children in the city: home, neighbourhood and community. London and New York: Routledge.
Cockburn, T. (1998). Children and citizenship in Britain. Childhood, 5(1), 99–117.
Coleman, J. S. (1988). Social capital in the creation of human capital. American Journal of Sociology, Supplement: Organizations and Institutions: Sociological and Economic Approaches to the Analysis of Social Structure, 94, S95–S120.
Connolly, M., & Ennew, J. (1996). Introduction: children out of place. Childhood, 3(2), 131–145.
Connolly, P. (2008). Race, gender and critical reflexivity in research with young children. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices (2nd ed.). London: Falmer Press.
Cook, D. (2004). The commodification of childhood: The children’s clothing industry and the rise of the child consumer. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cook, D. (2008). The missing child in consumption theory. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 219–243.
Corsaro, W. A. 1985. Friendship and peer culture in the early years. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Côtè, J. E. (2000). Arrested adulthood: The changing nature of maturity and identity. New York: New York University Press.
Cross, G. (2004). The cute and the cool: Wondrous innocence and modern American children’s culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Castro, L. R., & Kosminsky, E. V. (2010). Childhood and its regimes of visibility in Brazil: an analysis of the contribution of the social sciences. Current Sociology, 58, 206–231.
DiMaggio, P. (1987). Classification in art. American Sociological Review, 52, 440–455.
Dreby, J. (2007). Children and power in Mexican transnational families. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 69, 1050–1064.
Dreby, J. (2010). Divided By borders: Mexican immigrants and their children. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Feld, B. (1998). Juvenile and criminal justice systems’ responses to youth violence. Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, 24, 189–261.
Ferguson, A. A. (2000). Bad boys: Public schools in the making of black masculinity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Fraser, N., & Gordon, L. (1994). A genealogy of dependency: tracing a keyword of the U.S. welfare state. Signs, 19(2), 309–336.
Fuller, S. (2003). Creating and contesting boundaries: exploring the dynamics of conflict and classification. Sociological Forum, 18(1), 3–30.
Furstenberg, F. Jr. (2007). Review of “The age of independence: interracial unions, same-sex unions, and the changing American family” by Michael J. Rosenfeld. Population and Development Review, 33(4), 822–825.
Gamson, J. (1995). Must identity movements self-destruct? A queer dilemma. Social Problems, 42(3), 390–407.
Gordon, H. (2009). We fight to win. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Grindstaff, L., & West, E. (2006). Cheerleading and the gendered politics of sport. Social Problems, 54(4), 500–518.
Haugen, G. M. D. (2007). Caring children: exploring care in post-divorce families. Sociological Review, 55(4), 653–670.
Hays, S. (1994). Structure and agency and the sticky problem of culture. Sociological Theory, 12, 57–72.
Hecht, T. (1998). At home in the street: Street children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hernandez, D. J. (1993). America’s children: Resources from family, the government and the economy. New York: Russell Sage.
Hill, M., Davis, J., Prout, A., & Tisdall, K. (2004). Moving the participation agenda forward. Children and Society, 18(2), 77–96.
Hochschild, A. (2003). The commercialization of intimate life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Holland, J., Reynolds, T. & Weller, S. (2007) Transitions, networks and communities: the significance of social capital in the lives of children and young people. Journal of Youth Studies 10(1), 97–116.
Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Cody, R., Herr, B., Horst, H.S., Lange, P. G., Mahendran, D., Martinez, K., Pascoe, C.J., Perkel, D., Robinson, L., Sims, C., & Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
James, A. (2011). To be (come) or not to be (come): understanding children’s citizenship. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 633, 167.
James, A., & James, A. L. (2001). Childhood: toward a theory of continuity and change. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 575(1), 25–37.
James, A., Jenks, C. & Prout, A. (1998) Theorizing childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press.
James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (pp. 7–33). London: Falmer Press.
Jencks, C. (1982). The sociology of childhood. London: Batsford.
Johnson, H. B. (2001). From the Chicago school to the new sociology of children: the sociology of children and childhood in the United States, 1900-1999. Advances in Life Course Research (Children in the Millennium: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Going?), 6, 53–93.
Katz, C. (2005). Growing up global: Economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kavanagh, D. (2013). Children: their place in organization studies. Organization Studies. doi:10.1177/0170840613495329.
Kitzinger, J. (1997). Who are you kidding: Children, power and the struggle against sexual abuse. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood (pp. 165–189). London: Falmer Press.
Lamont, M. (1992). Money, morals, and manners: The culture of the French and American upper-middle class. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.
Lamont, M. (2000). The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lamont, M., & Molnar, V. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 167–195.
Lansdown, G. (1994). Children’s rights. In B. Mayall (Ed.), Children's childhoods: Observed and experienced (pp. 33–44). London: Falmer Press.
Lareau, A. (2002). Invisible inequality: social class and childrearing in black and white families. American Sociological Review, 67, 747–776.
Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Latour, B. (1988). The pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in an age of uncertainty. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Livingstone, S. (2009). Children and the internet. London: Polity Press.
Lizardo, O. (2006). How cultural tastes shape personal networks. American Sociological Review, 71, 778–807.
MacNaughton, G., Hughes, P., & Smith, K. (2007). Young children’s rights and public policy: practices and possibilities for citizenship in the early years. Children and Society, 21, 458–469.
Mason, J., & Hood, S. (2011). Exploring issues of children as actors in social research. Children and Youth Services Review, 33(4), 490–495.
Matthews, S. H. (2007). A window on the ‘new’ sociology of childhood. Sociology Compass, 1(1), 322–334.
Mayall, B. (2000). Sociology of childhood in relation to children’s rights, the special issue: Childhood 5-16: Papers from ESRC Research Project in the U.K. URL: http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/intjchrb8&div=24&g_sent=1&collection=journals#262. Accessed September 27, 2010.
Mayall, B. (2001). Understanding childhoods: A London study. In L. Alanen & B. Mayall (Eds.), Conceptualizing child-adult relations (pp. 114–128). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology for childhood: Thinking from children’s lives. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Mead, M. (1928). Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation. New York: Blue Ribbon Books.
Mintz, S. (2004). The social and cultural construction of childhood. In M. Coleman & L. H. Ganong (Eds.), The handbook of contemporary families (pp. 35–54). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Mintz, S. (2008). Reflections on age as a category of historical analysis. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 1(1), 91–94.
Morrow, V. (2001) Young people's explanations and experiences of social exclusion: retrieving Bourdieu's concept of social capital. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 21(4–6), 37–63.
Morrow, V. (2005). Social capital, community cohesion and participation in England: a space for children and young people? Journal of Social Sciences, Special Issue 9, 57–69.
Morrow, V. (2013). What’s in a number: unsettling the boundaries of age. Childhood, 20(2), 151–155.
Musick, K., & Meier, A. (2010). Are both parents always better than one? Parental conflict and young adult well-being. Social Science Research, 39, 814–830.
Musick, K., & Meier, A. (2012). Assessing causality and persistence in associations between family dinners and adolescent well-being. Journal of Marriage and Family, 74(3), 476–493.
Oakley, A. (1994). Women and children first and last: Parallels and differences between children and women’s studies. In B. Mayall (Ed.), Children’s childhoods observed and experienced (pp. 13–32). New York: Falmer Press.
Offer, S., & Schneider, B. L. (2007). Children’s role in generating social capital. Social Forces, 85(3), 1125–1142.
Orellana, M. F. (2001). The work kids do: Mexican and Central American immigrant children’s contributions to households and schools in California. Harvard Educational Review, 71(3), 366–389.
Pachucki, M., Pendergrass, S., & Lamont, M. (2007). Boundary processes: recent theoretical developments and new contributions. Poetics, 35(6), 331–351.
Pain, R. (2006). Paranoid parenting? Rematerializing risk and fear for children. Social & Cultural Geography, 7(2), 221–243.
Prout, A. (2000). Forward. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices. New York: Falmer Press.
Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood. London: Routledge Falmer.
Pugh, A. J. (2009). Longing and belonging: Parents, children and consumer culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pugh, A. J. (2011). Distinction, boundaries or bridges?: children, inequality and the uses of culture. Poetics, 39(1), 1–18.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Quinn, J. F. 2010. Work, retirement, and the encore career: elders and the future of the American workforce. Generations: the Journal of the American Society on Aging, 34(3), 45–55.
Qvortrup, J. (1994). Childhood matters. An introduction. In J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood matters. Social theory, practice and politics (pp. 1–23). Brookfield: Avebury.
Qvortrup, J. (2003). Editorial: an established field, or a breakthrough still pending? Childhood, 10, 395.
Qvortrup, J. (2008). Macroanalysis of childhood. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices (2nd ed., pp. 66–86). London: Falmer Press.
Qvortrup, J., Corsaro, W. A., & Honig, M.-S. (Eds.). (2009). Why social studies of childhood: An introduction to the handbook. The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ridge, T. (2007). Negotiating childhood poverty: Children’s subjective experiences of life on a low income. In H. Wintersberger, L. Alanen, T. Olk, & J. Qvortrup (Eds.), Childhood, generational order and the welfare state: Exploring children’s social and economic welfare. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark.
Rosenfeld, M. J. (2007). The age of independence: Interracial unions, same-sex unions and the changing American family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosenfeld, M. J., & Kim, B.-S. (2005). The independence of young adults and the rise of interracial and same sex unions. American Sociological Review, 70(4), 541–562.
Scheper-Hughes, N., & Hoffman, D. (1998). Brazilian apartheid: Street kids and the struggle for urban space. In N. Scheper-Hughes & C. Sargent (Eds.), Small wars: The cultural politics of childhood (pp. 352–388). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scheper-Hughes, N., & Sargent, C. (1998). Introduction: The cultural politics of childhood. In N. Scheper-Hughes & C. Sargent (Eds.), Small wars: The cultural politics of childhood (pp. 1–33). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schildkrout, E. (1982). Age and gender in Hausa society: Socio-economic roles of children in urban Kano. In J. S. LaFontaine (Ed.), Sex and age as principles of social differentiation (pp. 109–137). London: Academic.
Schor, J. (2004). Born to buy: The commercialized child and the new consumer culture. New York: Scribner.
Schwartzman, H. B. (1978). Transformations: The anthropology of children’s play. New York: Plenum Press.
Scott, J. (2000). Children as respondents: The challenge for quantitative methods. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices. London: Falmer Press.
Seiter, E. (1993). Sold separately: Children and parents in consumer culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sewell, W. (1992). A theory of structure—duality, agency, and transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.
Sgritta, G. B. (1997). Inconsistencies: childhood on the economic and political agenda. Childhood, 4(4), 375–404.
Silva, J. (2013). Coming up short: working-class adulthood in an age of uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press.
Small, M. L. (2009). Unanticipated gains. Origins of network inequality in everyday life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Smith, A. B., & Taylor, N. (2003). Rethinking children’s involvement in decision-making after parental separation. Childhood, 10(2), 201–216.
Solberg, A. (1997). Negotiating childhood: Changing constructions of age for Norwegian children. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood. Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood (pp. 126–144). London: Routledge Falmer.
Song, N. (1996). Helping out: Children’s labor participation in Chinese take-away businesses in Britain. In J. Brannen & M. O’Brien (Eds.), Children in families. London and New York: Falmer Press.
Stacey, J., & Thorne, B. (1985). The missing feminist revolution in sociology. Social Problems, 32(4), 301–316.
Thorne, B. (1987). Re-visioning women and social change: where are the children? Gender & Society, 1, 85–109.
Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Thorne, B. (2005). Unpacking school lunchtime: Structure, practice and the negotiation of difference. In C. Cooper, C. Garcia Coll, W. Todd Bartko, H. M. Davis, & C. Chatman (Eds.), Developmental pathways through middle childhood: Rethinking contexts and diversity as resources (pp. 63–88). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Thorne, B. (2009). Childhood: changing and dissonant meanings. International Journal of Learning and Media, 1(1), 19–27.
Tisdall, E., Kay, M., Davis, J. M., Prout, A., & Hill, M. (Eds.). (2006). Children, young people and social inclusion: Participation for what? Bristol: Policy Press.
Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as ‘being and becomings’: children, childhood and temporality. Children and Society, 22(4), 303–313.
Valentine, G. (2004). Public space and the culture of childhood. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company.
Van Ausdale, D., & Feagin, J. R. (2001). The first R: How children learn race and racism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
van Krieken, R., & Bühler-Niederberger, D. (2009). Rethinking the sociology of childhood: Conflict, competition and cooperation in children’s lives. In A. Denis & D. Kalekin-Fishman (Eds.), The ISA handbook in contemporary sociology: Conflict, competition, cooperation (pp. 185–201). London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Verhellen, E. (1999). Facilitating children’s rights in education: expectations and demands on teachers and parents. Prospects, 29(2), 223–231.
Walkerdine, V. (2004). Developmental psychology and the study of childhood. In M. J. Kehily (Ed.), An introduction to childhood studies (pp. 96-107). New York: Open University Press.
Waters, M. (1990). Ethnic options: Choosing identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wimmer, A. (2008). The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel process theory. American Journal of Sociology, 113(4), 970–1022.
Zelizer, V. (1985). Pricing the priceless child. New York: Basic Books.
Zelizer, V. (2002). Kids and commerce. Childhood, 9(4), 375–396.
Acknowledgments
This article has been through many iterations, including as the Jackson Memorial Lecture in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the “Childhood and Diversity—Multiple childhoods?” conference of the International Association of Francophone Sociologists –Research Committee on the Sociology of Childhood and the Canadian Sociological Association, as well as talks at a thematic session on children and childhood at the 2012 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and at the University of South Florida. In addition to these helpful audiences, I am very grateful to Barrie Thorne, Jennifer Petersen, Jennifer Rubenstein, Jalane Schmidt, Jennifer Silva, Denise Walsh, and the Theory and Society reviewers for their comments on earlier versions. As editor, Raewyn Connell was particularly cogent and insightful in guiding revisions. This article was written with support from the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Work-Family Career Development Grant; and the University of Virginia’s Faculty Summer Research Award in Humanities and Social Sciences.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pugh, A.J. The theoretical costs of ignoring childhood: rethinking independence, insecurity, and inequality. Theor Soc 43, 71–89 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9209-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9209-9