BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD:

SELECTIVE AND PARTIALLY ANNOTATED *
[Updated, February 2003]

By Barrie Thorne
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
<bthorne@socrates.berkeley.edu>

I. Overviews of the Field

A. Starting Orientation

The sociology of childhood (also known as the "new social studies of childhood") emerged in the 1980s as an effort to expand social, historical, and cultural understanding of children, childhoods, and age categories and relations. The field, which has close ties to the history, anthropology, and geography of childhood, breaks with the assumptions of developmental psychology and 1960s “socialization” frameworks, which cast children primarily as the next generation’s adults, reproducing the social order. The contrast between these two general approaches can be briefly summarized as follows:

Developmental and child psychology: Emphasis on biology and on naturalized and universal images of human growth and development. Epistemological roots in positivism, with an emphasis on measures and outcomes. Tends to be a-historical, to start with a dichotomy between "the individual" and "contexts" or environment, and to theorize the present in terms of likely outcomes or "endpoints." Functionalist theories of "socialization" are more sociological and less driven by biological metaphors, but they also have a teleological cast, framing the present in terms of presumed future outcomes.

Sociology of childhood: Intent on "de-naturalizing" age categories and relations, asking, for example, how particular ideas of "the child" are constructed and used. Efforts to theorize age as a structural and discursive dimension of social life, analogous to and intersecting with gender, racial-ethnicity, and other lines of difference. Emphasis on historical changes and cultural variation in the social construction of age relations and childhoods and on children as social actors, agents, and cultural creators. Alert to conflict, contradictions, and the workings of power.

Scholars in this field continue to refer to "the new sociology (or social studies) of childhood," but this approach is now over twenty years old. The "new" continues as a statement of breaking from functionalist theories of "socialization" and staking out turf that was previously ceded to developmental psychology. Now that more fully historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches have solidified, I believe that the time is ripe to revisit questions about child development, or the constitution of persons over time, with a fuller, more historical sense of children's varied lives and experiences. See John Modell, "How may children's development be seen historically?" Childhood 7 (2000): 81-106; and Hanne Haavind, "Contesting and recognizing historical changes and selves in development: Methodological changes," in Thomas Weisner (ed.), Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development (forthcoming).

B. Conceptual Overviews

Allison James, Chris Jenks, Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood. (Polity Press, 1998) A recent stock-taking and overview of the field, emphasizing social theory; excellent chapter on working children.

Allison James and Alan Prout, eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, 2nd ed. (Falmer Press, 1997). The authors’ introductory chapter (from the1990 first edition)has been an influential statement. Includes an interesting article by Martin Woodhead on “Psychology and the cultural construction of children’s needs” (some of the other chapters are mentioned elsewhere in this bibliography).

Chris Jenks, Childhood (Routledge - “key ideas” series, 1996). Philosophical overview of various ways of thinking about children, by a British sociologist. Jenks first theorized the "sociology of childhood" in an early, pathbreaking introduction to his 1982 edited book, The Sociology of Childhood: Essential Readings (London: Batsford).

Berry Mayall. Towards a Sociology for Childhood: Thinking fr,o Children's Lives (Open University Press, 2002). A recent overview by a British sociologist, emphasizing children's perspectives and agency and drawing connections to feminist theory.

Leena Alanen and Berry Mayall, eds., Conceptualizing Child-Adult Relations (Falmer, 2001). A collection of research and theoretical articles that explore processes related to "generationing" (a term coined by, Alanen, a Finnish sociologist, for practices through which one becomes, or is made, a "child" in relation to non-children)..

Martin Woodhead and Heather Montgomery, eds., Understanding Childhood: An Interdisciplinary Approach (published jointly by The Open University in London and Wiley, 2002). The first of four interdisciplinary textbooks published in conjunction with the Open University's new long-distance course in childhood and youth studies (forthcoming volumes include Childhoods in Context; Children's Cultural Worlds; and Changing Childhoods: Local and Global). The volumes draw upon the latest research, across disciplines, with vivid illustrations and examples. For details about The Open University course U212, Childhood, and other courses in the B.A. degree program in Childhood and Youth Studies, see <www.open.ac.uk/courses>

Diana Leonard, “Persons in their own right: Children and sociology in the UK,” in Lynne Chisholm et al, eds., Childhood, Youth and Social Change: A Comparative Perspective (Falmer, 1990). Especially insightful on the subject of children and families; discussion of children’s work and patterns of consumption

Julia Brannen and Margaret O’Brien, eds., Children in Families (Falmer, 1996). Papers from an International Sociological Association conference designed to bring the sociology of childhood into fruitful conjunction with the sociology of families (a field where children’s perspectives have been surprisingly absent). Useful introduction by the editors, focusing this challenge.

Jens Qvortrup, ed., Childhood Matters (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1994). Essays by European sociologists who collaborated in a comparative study of childhoods (see IV below). Among the papers: Judith Ennew, “Time for children or time for adults?”; David Oldman, “Adult-child relations as class relations”; and Ivor Frones, “Dimensions of childhood.”

Manuela Du Bois-Reymond, Heinz Sunker, and Heinz-Hermann Kruger, eds., Childhood in Europe: Approaches, Trends, Findings (Peter Lang publishing, 2001). A collection of original articles reporting on studies of childhood in France, Germany, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, the U.S., and Denmark. I especially liked du Bois-Reymond's paper, "Negotiation Families."

Michael G. Wyness, Contesting Childhood (Falmer, 2000). A British sociologist draws upon work from childhood studies to examine policy-related issues such as limits to child protection, the individualisaton of schooling, and childhood and citizenship.

Enid Schildkrout, “Age and gender in Hausa society: Socio-economic roles of children in urban Kano,” in Jean LaFontaine, ed., Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation (Academic Press, 1982), pp. 109-137. An inspiring study of children as social participants who transport food and textiles between markets and households, and thereby facilitate the income-generating labor of adult female kin who are in purdah and avoid public places. The author poses a question-- what would happen to a particular social arrangement [other than its long-term extinction] if there were no children? -- that rivets attention on children’s agency in sustaining institutions like purdah. (Reprinted with an introduction in Childhood, Vol. 9, no. 3, August 2002, pp. 342-368)

R. Stainton-Rogers and W. Stainton-Rogers, Stories of Childhood: Shifting Agendas of Child Concern (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). The authors review different ways in which children and childhood have been and are “knowledged into being,” e.g. by the stories of developmentalism, history, biosociology, constructionism, and discourses of “child concern” (eg about sexual abuse).

Barrie Thorne, “Re-visioning women and social change: Where are the children?” Gender & Society, 1 (1987): 85-109. Yer humble bibliographer’s initial foray into this conceptual terrain, critiqueing theories of socialization, calling for research on children as actors in a range of institutions, and discussing connections to feminist thought.
"The sociology and anthropology of childhood," 3000-word entry in The Encylopedia of the History of Childhood, ed. by Paula S. Fass. NY: Macmillan, forthcoming.

William Corsaro, The Sociology of Childhood (Sage, 1997). The first textbook rooted in “the new sociology of childhood”; bridges to developmental approaches more than James and Prout, eg in Corsaro’s theory of children’s play and interaction as “interpretive reproduction.” Gives overview of sociolinguistic and other empirical studies of children interacting with one another.

Arlene Skolnick, ed., Rethinking Childhood (Little Brown, 1976). Out of print, alas; a pioneering collection which traces earlier roots and which bridges to developmental approaches (eg Ruth Benedict’s 1930’s article “Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning”; Erik Erikson;
Roger Barker’s ecological psychology; Urie Bronfenbrenner; Mathew Speier’s classic critique of “the adult ideological viewpoint” in studies of childhood; historical work by Joseph Kett and J.H.
Plum; Berger and Hackett on the decline of age-grading in rural hippie communes; John Newson and Elizabeth Newson on cuiltural aspects of childrearing in England.

Robert Coles, Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers (Little Brown, 1971); Privileged Ones (Little Brown, 1977), Children of Crisis (Little Brown, 1977); The Moral Life of Children (1991). Coles, a psychiatrist, began writing about children with an initial book (Children of Violence) based on interviews with African American children who integrated schools in the south. He has been a
pioneer in bringing forth diverse children’s experiences and voices, situated in specific social, economic, historical contexts and in conjunction with the voices of their parents.

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C. Theorizing Age Categories and Age Relations

Age, like gender and "race," is a power-laden division of social life, whose structure and meanings vary and change over time, yet the theorizing of age (compared with theories of gender, "race," and sexuality) is minimally developed. Why is gerontology, the study of elders, so split off from social science research on youngsters? Why aren't (unmarked) conceptions of adulthood more often highlighted and deconstructed? The age structuring of institutions needs closer attention (think, for example, about the age grading of the military and of academia), in conjunction with racial, gender, and sexual structures. The literature on the life course is salient, but lacks the structural punch and the querying of discourses that one finds in feminist and critical race theories. We need to launch a tradition of "critical age studies"! Leads for this project:

1) Historically grounded analyses of age divisions, cultural meanings, and stratification; the processes by which American society became age-conscious and age-graded

Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Conciousness in American Culture.
(Princeton University Press, 1989); Thomas Cole, Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge Univ.Press,1997). [Question: why don't we talk about children as "aging"? "Growing older," "growing up" and "growing old" are concepts in need of deconstruction.]

2) Comparative research on and theories of age structuring, mostly by anthropologists and sociologists

David I. Kertzer and K. Warner Schaie, eds., Age Structuring in Comparative Perspective. (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989); David Kerzer and J. Keith, eds., Age and Anthropological Theory. (Cornell Univ. Press, 1984); Jean S. La Fontaine, ed., Sex and Age as Principles of Social Differentiation. London: Academic Press, 1978; S. N. Eisenstadt . From Generation to Generation (NY: Macmillan, 1956); Jenny Hockey and Allison James, Growing Up and Growing Old: Ageing and Dependency in the Life Course (Sage, 1993).

3) Theories of "generation" (a category which varied meanings that need specification)

David Kertzer, "Generation as a sociological problem," Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1989): 125-149. (Clarifies varied uses of the germ: a) "generation" as divisions and relations of kinship --grandparents, parents, children; note the relational point that although I am an adult, I am still the child of my mother; b) "generation" as an age cohort, that is, a succession of people moving together through time-- as in "second generation immigrant"; c) "generation" in the sense of people who share a historical experience, like the "World War II generation" (a concept theorized by the sociologist, Karl Mannheim).

Leena Alanen and Berry Mayall, eds., Conceptualizing Child-Adult \ and Berry Mayall, Towards a Sociology For Childhood (see annotations in section I-B above) theorize childhood as a distinctive "generational position" (constructed in contrast with and relation to adulthood) and practices of
generationing" (analogous to "gendering"), which are set in motion by earlier generations of adults, and constitute the position of "child". They also attend to the historical particularity of different childhoods (using "generation" in the spirit of Mannheim).

D. The Trappings of a (Relatively) New Subfield

--In 1998 the Sociology of Childhood became a full-fledged research section of the International Sociological Association, after several years as a working group. The American Sociological Association has a relatively new research section on The Sociology of Children and Youth [note use of “children” rather than “childhood,” the term preferred in Europe].

--Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, published by Sage, with editors from 4 countries, based at the Trondheim, Norway Centre for Child Research, is now in its 9th volume. Even older is a JAI series (one issue a year), Sociological Studies of Child Development, edited by Peter Adler, Patricia Adler, and Nancy Mandell. An expanding parade of new and very interesting books (e.g. Alanen and Mayell, above) is now marching under the Routledge/Falmer Press banner, "The Future of Childhood Series," edited by Alan Prout.

--There is a movement in U.S. (e.g. at Rutgers University --<http://children.camden.rutgers.edu> ; Case Western Reserve University <www.cwru.edu/artsci/childstudies>; Eastern Washington University) and U.K. universities (the Open University -- <www.open.ac.uk/courses>) to develop interdisciplinary curricula in Childhood Studies).

II. The History, Anthropology, and Geography of Childhoods

Philippe Aries started it all with Centuries of Childhood (Vintage, 1962); other very useful books include Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (Basic, 1985), on the turn-of-the-century shift, with child labor laws and compulsory public schooling, from a view of the child as economically useful, to “economically useless but emotionally priceless”; John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making (Basic, 1996), a cultural history of the Western family “imaginary,” including the sentimentalization of protected and domesticated childhoods. For a large, richly informative collection of documents about the history of U.S. childhoods see Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason, eds., Childhood in America (NYU Press, 2000> Also see Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (Longman, 1995).

Now, a century later, “the nature of the child” is again being contested, in part as the result of processes of globalization-- first and third world childhoods juxtaposed in cities like Los Angeles; images of street children, child soldiers, child prostitutes challenging Western images of the innocent, domesticated, schooled, and protected child, even as Disney and Nintendo become global in scope. The entry of more and more mothers into the paid labor force and challenges to the
ideology of the traditional nuclear family with mothers caring for children full-time, have also led to increased anxiety about and attention to the nature of childhoods.

Sharon Stephens, ed., Children and the Politics of Culture (Princeton, 1995), includes an excellent introduction exploring the current crisis of representation of childhoods. The editor and many of the other authors are anthropologists. Among the topics: the disappearance of childhood in
contemporary Japan (Norma Field); the examination war in South Korea (Hae-joang Cho); the “inner child” obsession in the US (Marilyn Ivy); youth in South Africa (Pamela Reynolds; Njabulo Ndebele); children of the Turkish migrant diaspora in Germany (Ruth Mandel).

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, eds., The Cultural Politics of Childhood (Univ. of California Press, 1998), a collection of essays by anthropologists who have studied children/chiildhoods in the US, Ecuador, Japan, Israel, Canada, Portugal, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, South Africa, England, Croatia, Brazil, Mexico. Central themes: negotiating parenthood and childhood; child survival; children and violence.

Note that anthropological studies of children and childhoods go back to Margaret Mead (e.g. Mead and Wolfenstein, eds., Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (1955), Erik Erikson and the culture and personality tradition; also the comparative studies, more positivist in nature, reported in Beatrice Whiting, ed., Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing; also see Jean Briggs, under IV-C below.

The geography of childhoods is also a burgeoning field. See a wonderful collection, Children's Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning (Routledge, 2001) edited by Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine; Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity by Stuart C. Aitken; and a forthcoming (2003) special issue of Childhood, edited by Marta Gutman and Ning deConinck-Smith, on "Children in Public: Places, Geography, and Cultural Landscapes." An interesting comparative analysis: Cindi Katz, “Growing girls/closing circles: Limits on the spaces of knowing in rural Sudan and US cities” in Cindi Katz and Janice Monk, eds., Full Circles: Geographies of Women Over the Life Course (Routledge, 1993).

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III. Structural (Macro and Comparative) Approaches to the Study of Childhoods

This approach has been most extensively theorized by a Danish sociologist, Jens Qvortrup (see his article “A voice for children in statistical and social accounting” in James and Prout; Qvortrup’s introduction to Childhood Matters; and his essay in Childhood as a Social Phenomenon (Eurosial Report 47, Vienna), where Qvortrup lays out basic premises:
--Childhood is a particular and distinct form of any society’s social structure, eg in contemporary western societies adults define children by placing them in schools and legally situating them as minors; childhood is sociologically speaking not a transient phase, but a permanent social category (whose organization changes historically and varies from society to society)
--Childhood is an integral part of society and its division of labor and, like adulthood, it is shaped by macro forces such as political decisions and economic forces.
--Childhood is a classical minority category, subject to both marginalizing and paternalizing tendencies
--Children are co-constructors of childhood and society

Qvortrup directed a cross-national research project on “Childhood as a Social Phenomenon,” under the auspices of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research (Vienna), which

resulted in national reports on children in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, England, Scotland, Israel, the US, Canada. (Reports include statistics on child
populations; children’s migration; children and parents’ employment; childhood economies, including children’s own money; dwelling conditions by age groups; children’s activities, eg school
work, paid work, daily duties at home, organized leisure, public day care; the legal status of children; children’s health; distributive justice; children at risk)

Other examples of research on childhoods from a macro perspective:

Donald Hernandez, America’s Children: Resources from Family, Govertnment and the Economy (Russell Sage, 1993). Hernandez presents U.S. demographic information with children (rather than households or parents) at the center.

Steven Kennedy, Peter Whiteford and Jonathan Bradshaw, “The economic circumstances of children in ten countries,” in Brannen and O’Brien, eds., Children in Families.

Chiaro Saraceno, “The social construction of childhood: Child care and education policies in Italy and the United States,” Social Problems 31 (1984): 351-363. Italy and the US differ in extent of government intervention and the criteria used to single out groups with particular needs, resulting in differences in the perception of a normal child’s experiences and in definitions of rights and needs.

Judith Ennew, an anthropologist at the Univ. of Cambridge, has organized a cross-national team of researchers who are developing a comparative political economy of “children out of place” (their term for “street children” and “working children”); this includes the use of participatory methods and an emphasis on the children’s experiences. (see special issue of Childhood, vol 3, no 2, May 1996). This approach links the positioning and experiences of particular groups of children (eg those living on the streets in Johannesberg or working in factories in Bangladesh) with economic and political structures and changes. Families, parents, schools are in the picture but the portrait is much larger, children are at the center, and there is a focus on political advocacy sensitive to the children’s situated and variable contexts. Related references: Jo Boyden, “Childhood and the policy makers: A comparative perspective on the globalization of childhood,” and Benno Glauser, “Street children: deconstructing a construct,” both in James and Prout, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. For information about community-based development projects involving children as active participants see Roger A. Hart, Children’s Participation: The Theory and Practice of Involving Young Children in Community Development (Earthscan Publications, 1997).

IV. The Social Construction of Childhoods -- Qualitative Studies

A. Studies of Children’s Worlds, in the interactionist and ethnographic traditions

Berry Mayall, ed., Children’s Childhoods: Observed and Experienced (Falmer, 1994). Empirical studies of British children in school, home and urban environments; their use of television and talk about their viewing; and discursive construction of childhood in adult society (eg the “child’s best interest” and “dependence” - including research on children’s understandings of such constructs).

1. Children's experiences of and active participation in family life

Annette Lareau. Unequal Childhood: The Importance of Social Class in Family Life (University of California Press, 2003). A comparative study, based on fieldwork and interviews in the U.S., of class and racialized differences in children's daily lives and patterns of child-rearing. Lareau found that the practices of middle-class parents emphasized organized, age-graded activities and were oriented to "concerted cultivation" of the child. Working-class and low-income children hung out, often with
relatives and in cross-age groups; their parents were oriented to creating safe spaces that would encourage "natural growth."

Berry Mayall, Negotiating Health: Primary School Children at Home and School (Cassell, 1994).. Takes the accounts of 5 and 9 year-olds in London as starting points for studying how their health is maintained, promoted, damaged and restored at home and school; explores teachers’ caring work, the lay health care system of the school, and interactions between parents and teachers on behalf of children.

Carol Smart, Bren Neale and Amanda Wade (Polity Press, 2001). The Changing Experience of Childhood: Families and Divorce. Children's accounts of family life after divorce in the U.K.

Rosalind Edwards, ed., Children, Home and School: Regulation, Autonomy or Connection? (Routledge/ Falmer 2002). Brings children's perspectives and practices into the heart of research on famuly-school relations.

2. Children's daily lives and interactions in schools and preschools

This is a huge and growing literature, including U.S.-based studies: Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms; Barrie Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School; William Corsaro, Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years (preschool); Vivian G. Paley’s books on a kindergarten class; Patricia Adler and Peter Adler, Peer Power; Anne Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Back Masculinity; Amanda Lewis, Race in the Schoolyard; and Debra Van Ausdale and Joseph Feagin. The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism. Among studies done in the U.K.: M. Hammersley and P. Woods, eds. Life in Schools: The Sociology of Pupil Cultures; Andrew Pollard, The Social World of the Primary School; B. Troyna and R. Hartcher, Racism in Children's Lives: A Study of Mostly White Primary Schools; Tuula Gordon, Janet Holland and Elina Lahelma, Making Spaces: Citizenship and Difference in Schools (compares schools in the U.K. and in Finland).

Valerie Polakow Suransky, The Erosion of Childhood (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982) is a marvelous comparative ethnography of preschools in Ann Arbor with different philosophies, daily practices, and, in effect, different constructions of what children need (practices often depart from stated beliefs).

Joseph J. Tobin, David Y. H. Wu, and Dana H. Davidson, Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan , China, and the United States (Yale, 1989). An ethnographically based comparison.

3. Children’s interactions in neighborhoods

Marjorie Harness Goodwin, He-Said She-Said: Talk as Social Organization Among Black Children; [this terrific book is also an example of a flourishing tradition of sociolinguistic research done with children- with a skew towards studying children’s arguments; another example, Douglas Maynard, “On the functions of social conflict among children,” American Sociological Review, 50 (1985): 207-223)

Roger Hart, Children’s Experiences of Place (Irvington, 1979). A pathbreaking, close-up study of children’s uses and experiences of space in a New England village -- hideouts; spatial ranges; dangerous and comforting places; boys had twice the spatial range of girls of the same age.

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4. Ethnographic research on children in public places (eg their status as non-persons):

Spencer Cahill, “Childhood and public life: Reaffirming biographical divisions,” Social Problems 37 (1990): 390-402; “Children and civility: Ceremonial deviance and the acquisition of ritual competence,” Social Psychology Quarterly 50 (1987): 312-321. Also see the section on the geography of childhoods, above.

5. Research on children’s folklore and play, starting with Iona and Peter Opie, who initiated a tradition of taking children seriously and recording their rituals, lore, and games; Brian Sutton-Smith has done extensive writing on children’s folklore; a detailed review of studies and theories of children’s play. The new Open University-sponsored textbook, Children's Cultural Worlds (Wiley, 2003) reports from a wide array of studies (it's a delightful read). Also see The Children's Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins (NYU Press, 1998).

6. Children as consumers.

-Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001). An ethnography of African American, low-income kids and their relation to consumption.
-David Buckingham, After the Death of Chldhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media (Blackwell, 2000).
-Viviana Zelizer, "Kids and commerce," Childhood 9 (2002):375-396. Theorizing children's economic activity in social relations with other household members, with agents of organizations outside households, and with other children.
-Deborah S. Davis and Julia S. Sensenbrenner, "Commercializing childhood: Parental purchases for Shanghai's only child," In D. S. Davis, ed. The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (U of CA press, 2000).

7. Research on children’s uses and experiences of time

-Elliott Medrich et al, The Serious Business of Growing Up: A Study of Children’s Lives Outside School (Univ. of Calif., 1992). Based on a survey of fifth graders in Oakland; useful information.
-Pia Christensen and Chris Jenks, "All we needed to do was blow the whistle: Children's embodiment of time," in S. Cunningham Burley, ed., Exploring the Body (Macmillan, 2000).

8. Research on the bodily experiences of children

Alan Prout, ed., The Body, Childhood and Society (Macmillan, 2000); Karin Martin, "Becoming a gendered body: Practices of preschools," American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 494-511.

B. Children as participants in processes of family labor and caregiving

Miri Song, “‘Helping Out’: Children’s labor participation in Chinese take-away businesses in Britain,” in Brannen and O’Brien, eds., Children in Families. Song also has a book from this project -- Helping Out: Children's labor in Ethnic Businesses (Temple Univ. Press, 1995)-- a terrific ethnographic study of children’s contributions to a family business, which they described as ‘helping out’ as opposed to ‘work." "Helping out" conveys willingness to contribute one’s labor, without clear boundaries; children sometimes accepted payment because they realized it was one of the only
things their parents could give them- parents had little time to take them on family outings. Gets at ambivalence and tension.

Virginia Morrow, "Rethinking childhood dependency: Children's contributions to the domestic economy," The Sociological Review 44 (1996): 58-77.

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, "The work kids do: Mexican and Central American immigrant children's contributions to households, school, and community in California," Harvard Educational Review 71(3): 366-389. Also see Orellana, Barrie Thorne, Anna Chee, and Wan Shun Eva Lam, "Transnational childhoods: The participation of children in processes of family migration," Social Problems 48 (2001): 573-592; and Orellana, Thorne, Lam, and Chee, "Raising children, and growing up, across national borders: Comparative perspectives on age, gender, and migration," in Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed., Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends (Univ. of California Press, 2003).

Marianne Gullestad, “Children’s care for children,” ch V of The Art of Social Relations (Scandinavian Univ. Press, 1992). On the “passepike,” Norwegian girls ages 9 to 15 who regularly, for a fee, take care of a small child between 3 and 5 o-clock in the afternoon -- an institutionalized role within the larger activity system of childcare. Includes an analysis of “chains of care” which also includes mothers. grandmothers, mother’s female friends.

Jean Doyle, “Helpers, officers, and lunchers: Ethnography of a third-grade class,” in The Cultural Experience ed by Spradley and McCurdy.. “Helpers” (eg “door captains”, “lavatory captains,” “messengers”) are examples of institutional practices to enlist children in cycles of care..and control.

Bluebond-Langner, M. The Private Worlds of Dying Children (Princeton, 1978). A study of terminally ill children in a leukemia ward and the ways they made sense of the hospital context; even when they understood their own fate, the children didn’t reveal it to their parents, since they saw how worried they were and didn’t want to burden them further.

Alan Prout, “Sickness as a dominant symbol in life course transitions,” Sociology of Health and Illness 11 (1989): 336-59. Includes a discussion of how boys and girls respond to the illness of their
peers-- girls with care and concern, eg visiting sick friends at home; boys understanding illness as competitive weakness.

Also by Prout, “‘Off school sick’: Mothers’ accounts of school sickness absence,” Sociological Review 36 (1988): 765-789. Interviews used to examine the process of mothers negotiating sickness claims with children, categorizing children as “pretending,” “upset,” or “really ill” [note that children have their own experiences of this process.] And ‘Wet children’ and ‘little actresses’: Going sick in primary school,” Sociology of Health and Illness 8 (1986): 111-136 - how school staff handle children’s claims on sickness and staffs’ typifications of childrearing practices of parents.

Pia Christensen, “The social construction of help among Danish children,” Sociology of Health and Illness 15 (1993): 488-502. An ethnographic study of Danish primary school children during episodes of sickness and minor accidents; includes a discussion of how children give help to others. Also dicusses time and tempo; children and adults may work with different temporal frameworks.

Elise Boulding, “The nurture of adults by children in family settings,” in Helena Lopata, ed, Research in the Interweave of Social Roles: Women and Men, vol. 1 (1980): 167-189 (Jai Press).

Boulding interviewed U.S. college students about memories of having given aid and nurturance to their parents. Discussion of empathy as the basis for child-adult relations.

There is a large anthropological literature on children's labor (including child slavery and wage labor), e.g. see O. Nieuwenhhuys, Children's Lifeworlds: Gender, Welfare and Labour in the Developing World (Routledge, 1994).

C. Growing Up as a Social Process ( “needs” and “rights” as socially constructed, negotiated, shifting over life course/biographical and historical time)

Hanne Haavind, a Norwegian developmental psychologist, has developed a relational perspective on the process of growing up, with empirical research on parents’ balancing of demands and protection, and children’s negotiations of autonomy. She seeks to transcend the “individual vs context” dichotomy and normative assumptions which obscure multiple trajectories of development, and she gathers detailed deta through “life mode interviews” with children as well as adults (she found that 4 and 5 year-old Norwegian children tend to think they are changing by themselves, whereas their parents talk about varied strategies for “developing” their children. Among her publications (in English): Hanne Haavind and Agnes Andenaes, “When parents are living apart: Challenges and solutions for children with two homes,” in Arnlaug Leira, ed., Family Sociology, Report no. 5, Institute for Social Research, Oslo; Hanne Haavind, "Contesting and recognizing historical changes and selves in development: Methodological changes," in Thomas Weisner (ed.), Discovering Successful Pathways in Children's Development (forthcoming).

Ann Solberg, “Negotiating Childhood: Changing constructions of age for Norwegian children,” in James and Prout, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. On children’s active negotiation for greater autonomy; “social age” (when a child seems and feels older or younger). Rivka Polatnick ("Too old for child care? Too young for self-care?: Negotiating after-school arrangements for middle school," Journal of Family Issues 23(6), 2002) analyzes ways in which parents and kids negotiate "growing up schedules."

Nick Lee, Childhood and Society: Growing Up in an Age of Uncertainty (Open Univ. Press, 2001). A reflective discussion of conceptual and institutional divisions between adult "human beings" and child "human becomings" and the erosion of this divide in the contemporary era of uncertainty. Highlights the study of "growing up."

Julia Brannen, “Discourses of adolescence: Young people’s independence and autonomy within families,” in Brannen and O’Brien, Children in Families. A study of young people’s transition from childhood to adulthood in Britain; different social constructions of adolescence held by parents and by their 16 year-old children, and negotiations between them. Parents’ worry taken as a sign of caring.

Pat Allatt, “Conceptualizing parenting from the standpoint of children: Relationships and transition in the life course,” in Brannen and O’Brien, Children in Families. On micro-transitions within the domestic domain in children’s uses of time, access to money, allocation of space, transfer of responsibilities; children’s concern with the principle of fairness re parent treatment of siblings.

Robert Dingwall et al, The Protection of Children: State Intervention and Family Life (Blackwell, 1983) A detailed empirical study of the interactions of health workers, social workers, teachers, doctors, police ,and judges as they handle reports of family ill-treatment of children in England.

D. Psychoanalytically-inspired research on the “constitution” (deep emotional shaping) of children through intense social relations with parents and others, in specific cultural contexts.

Jean Briggs, Inuit Morality Play: The Emotional Education of a Three-Year-Old (Harvard, 1998). An inspiring example, which weaves a dialectic between culturally shared “ways of being” and the unique nature of “persons” (and which reaches to children’s subjectivities and actions). Also see Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Harvard, 1980). And for an evocative conceptual statement, “Mazes of meaning: How a child and a culture create each other,” in W.A. Corsaro and P.J. Miller, eds., Interpretive Approaches to Children’s Socialization (Jossey-Bass, 1992).

David Sibley, “Families and domestic routines: Constructing the boundaries of childhood,” in Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, Mapping the Subject (Routledge, 1995).(uses object relations theory to examine the ways children experience the contexts of home, including objects as well as spaces and social relations.)

E. Symbolic or Discursive Constructions of Children and Childhood

Daniel Thomas Cook, ed., Symbolic Childhood (Peter Lang Publishing, 2002). An engaging collection of original studies of representations of childhood; emphasizes connections between the exercise of power and portrayals of children and childhood.

Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (Verso, 1990). Walkerdine theorize the discursive regulation of children, e.g. “the child” of progressive pedagogy -- implicitly a boy who is “developed” via the work of women (mothers and teachers of young children), leaving girls in a
contradictory position; the discourse of the sexualized schoolgirl, whose childhood is a sign of her enticing eroticism (one of the author’s great phrases: “gender is a fantasy and fiction which is lived as fact.”) In an analogous vein, Frigga Haug (Female Sexualization: A Work of Memory) and her collaborators in Germany developed a technique they call “memory work” -- sharing memories, photos, personal writing -- to uncover childhood experiences of eroticized embodiment, eg in experiences of hair and legs.

Bronwyn Davies, Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales (Allen & Unwin, 1989). Combines poststructuralist theory with ethnography in a preschool, to study the ways in which children make sense of feminist children’s books; Shards of Glass (1993) is a sequel, reporting on interactions with children urging them to speak and write in ways which will disrupt the male/female dualism.

Leslie Margolin, Goodness Personified: The Emergence of Gifted Children (Aldine, 1994). A historical and ethnomethodological study of a discourse and set of practices relating to “gifted education,”:which has propagated social inequality among children. Shows experts have helped to
create the very realities they study, and (in a more Foucaultian vein) another example of the reification of types of children.

Joel Best, Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims (Chicago,1990). Analyzes the contemporary image of threatened children (child abuse, incest, molestation, sadism, pornography) and the rhetoric of experts and the media which raises public anxiety. (The effects on the positioning and experiences of children include a striking diminishment in their spatial autonomy.)

There is also a literature on representations of children and childhood in art and in popular culture. A provocative essay that elaborates and also takes on Aries re representations of children in European art: Peter Fuller, “Uncovering childhood” in Martin Hoyles, ed., Changing Childhood (1979).

On popular culture,
Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993); Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing (Verso, 1993); and Lynn Spigel, “Seducing the innocent: Childhood and television in postwar America,” in W.S. Solomon and R.W. McChesney, eds., Ruthless Criticism (U of Minn., 1993).

Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (NYU Press, 1998). A collection of previously published articles (by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, folks in cultural studies and literature) organized under the topics of childhood innocence; childhood sexuality; child’s play; family in crisis; children at war; popular culture and the family; freedom and responsibility; the permissive family.

V. Methodological Reflections

Pia Christensen and Allison, James, eds., Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices (Routledge/Falmer, 2000). Essays on the methods and ethics of child research.

Anne Solberg, “The challenge in child research: From ‘being’ to ‘doing’” pp 53-65 in Brannen and O’Brien, Children in Families (see I). A thoughtful series of reflections on the difficulty of seeing children’s work; “ignorance of age” as a research technique; and interviewing children by approaching them as equals (vs, e.g., Nancy Mandell, “The least-adult role in studying children,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 16 [1988]: 433-467.)

Gary A. Fine and K. L. Sandstrom, Knowing Children: Participant Observation with Minors (Sage, 1988). Useful review of literature; see Solberg for astute criticisms of some of their assumptions.

Jon Wagner, ed., Seeing Kid's Worlds. Special issue of Visual Sociology, 14 (1999) focused on how children see, construct, talk about, and negotiate their social worlds. Illustrated with photographs, some taken by children.

John Modell, “The uneasy engagement of human development and ethnography,” in Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard Shweder, eds., Ethnography and Human Development (Chicago,1996). An insightful essay on the tensions between “the characteristic scientism of American work in child
development” and the interpretive approaches used by ethnographers. Modell, who has long bridged these terrains, discusses some of the lures and tensions which emerge when ethnographers and developmentalists dialogue with one another.

VI. Selected Internet Resources: Bibliographies, Data Sources

Annotated List of Web-Links on Children and Youth. (2003). SocioSite, University of
Amsterdam. < www.pscw.uva.nl/sociosite/topics/familychild.html#CHILD>

Bandelij, Nina; Zelizer, Viviana A.; Morning, Ann. (2001). "Materials for the Study of
Childhood." www.princeton.edu/~children

Child Trends Data Bank (U.S. ) (2003). <www.childtrendsdatabank.org>

Economic and Social Research Council (U.K.), Children 5-16: Growing into the 21st
Century Project. (1997). "Children as Social Actors: A Bibliography."
<http://www.hull.ac.uk/children5to16programme/biblio.htm>

UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund). (2002). The State of the World's Children.
< www.unicef.org/sowc02/>

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