Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells

1 Childhood in a global context

       Introduction

      This book is about children and childhood in a global context. In it I connect children’s experiences to changing ideas about and practices of childhood, drawing on research about children’s lives across the globe. I show how concepts of childhood shape children’s lives and how children, in turn, shape concepts of childhood. These concepts or ideas about what children should and should not do, of where children are safe and where they are at risk, and of where childhood begins and where it ends have been the central theme of the new social studies of childhood since its inception three decades ago (Jenks 1996; James and Prout 1990; James et al. 1998). These studies have been important in advancing our understanding of how childhood is shaped by cultural and social practices and processes. However, Childhood Studies has continued to focus on national contexts and has been dominated by accounts of North American and European childhoods. In an increasingly globalized world, a focus on national contexts has to be supplemented by an understanding of how local practices are impacted on by global processes and that where people live affects how they live. It is the task of this book to show that where children live affects what kinds of childhood they have and to explore how global flows and structures, including flows of capital, the activities of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and structures of international law, are reshaping childhood.

Is there a global form of childhood?

Although childhood is socially constructed and therefore people may have profoundly different expectations of children depending on the society and culture of any specific time or place, childhood also has universal features because all children, by virtue of their immaturity, have similar needs and limitations. Infants are dependent on others for their physical care: for food, shelter, hygiene and safety. An abandoned infant cannot survive for very long. Children also need emotional attachment and, as with their physical care, how and who forms emotional bonds with the young child can be subject to a great deal of variation, but the forming of strong emotional attachments to close caregivers is a universal feature of human society. Of course, the need for emotional attachment does not end with the end of childhood, but secure attachment is very important, cross-culturally, for the child’s wellbeing. If the infant’s biological immaturity makes them dependent on others for their physical care, the child can also be considered as socially and culturally immature. Children may not be born as blank slates but teaching young humans the whole range of cultural practices, from how to eat their food to living ethically or morally, is a shared concern of all human societies.

      The dependency of the young child on others and their biological, social and cultural immaturity is a material fact that places limits on how plastic or constructed early childhood can be. Nonetheless the limits that the infant’s dependency places on the plasticity of childhood can be very broad. Europeans, for example, tend to think of the new-born child as being a ‘tabula rasa’: sometimes the idea of the child as a blank slate might extend back to the baby’s sensory awareness in the womb, but in any case it is the child’s sensory awareness (whether before or after she is born) that is the beginning of making marks on the blank slate of the child. This view contrasts very sharply with the widespread view in sub-Saharan Africa that infants remember the world they came from and indeed that, to stay in this world or even to become properly human, they have to forget that other life (Gottlieb 2004). Similarly, the infant has to be fed but who feeds the infant will vary from culture to culture. In eighteenth-century Europe wet-nursing was a widespread and acceptable practice but changing ideas about what the baby ingested with her mother’s milk made the practice less acceptable. In Amy Gottlieb’s study of child-raising among the Beng people in Cote d’Ivoire any lactating woman may feed the child and the child will only be passed back to her mother if she refuses other women’s milk.

The dialectic of childhood is not only, then, in the play between social structures and children’s agency; it also involves the movement between the materiality of the child’s body (its immaturity, size, vulnerability) and the sociality of the child’s lifeworld (Prout 2000; Wells 2018). This also means attending to age as an important element impacting both on how children experience the world and on what the social world expects of children. A young child, for example, will have a very different experience of the physical and the social world from a young teenager, and yet both might be discussed in the category of ‘child’ (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 7).

       The new social studies of childhood: childhood is socially constructed and children have agency

      While the biological capacities of young humans shape their capacities, this still leaves room for great plasticity and variation in how childhood is lived. Childhood is socially constructed, and children’s lives are profoundly shaped by constructions of childhood – whether in conformity, resistance or reinvention. The new social studies of childhood, whether from a historical, spatial or social perspective, have established that children’s lives are shaped by the social and cultural expectations adults and their peers have of them in different times and places; what concept of childhood prevails in any specific time or place is shaped by many factors external to a child, including the complicated intersections of age with ‘race’, gender and