Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells
published their edited collection on the history of American childhood in 1985. Taken together, the chapters in this book tell a now familiar story in which children’s lives become less harsh, more sheltered and possibly more cherished as the centuries unfold. However, this picture is complicated by the acknowledgement of how race, class, gender and geography impacted on children’s lives and on expectations of childhood held by both children and adults.
A decade after the publication of American Childhood Hawes and Hiner edited Twayne’s History of American Childhood series, which has published books on child-rearing in the period from the Revolution to the Civil War (Reinier 1996), on how the Civil War and industrialization shaped the experience of childhood (Clement 1997), on the impact of Progressive Era reforms on children (Macleod 1998), and on how children experienced the interwar years (Hawes 1997).
Reiner uses archival sources to trace what she argues is a shift in child-rearing from authoritarian, patriarchal discipline to the management and guidance of ‘malleable’ children. This shift in ideals of child-rearing was uneven in its impact, and Reiner shows that poor and enslaved children’s labour provided the capital accumulation on which middle-class children’s education and consumption depended. Clement’s study also picks up this theme of the differentiation of childhood. Her main argument is that industrialization and Civil War sharpened differences between the experience of working-class and middle-class children and between African American and European American children. Sallee’s The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South (2004) also points to how the emerging concept of protected childhood was used to deepen racialized exclusion in campaigns that mobilized support for the abolition of child labour around the idea that it undermined white power and childhood for white children to be working.
Macleod’s study continues the chronology of American childhood, covering the period 1890–1920. Macleod’s claim is that the hardening of class differences in experiences of childhood did not diminish in the Progressive Reform era. Indeed, he contends that the ideal of a protected childhood stigmatized parents who were unable to protect their children, as well as those children who resisted increased protection because it diminished their freedom.
The unevenness of the shift to protected or sheltered childhoods draws attention to the need for multiple histories that describe and illuminate how the experience of childhood has been shaped by race, class, gender and region. There is a small body of work on the history of African American, immigrant and working-class childhoods, as well as references to their experiences in general histories. Wilma King’s African American Childhoods (2005) is a useful collection of essays on different aspects of African American childhood from slavery through to the civil rights era. It explores different aspects of children’s lives in this period, including slavery, education and violence. Many of the chapters focus on minority experiences of African American childhood – there are chapters on African American slave-owners and on African American families categorized as Native American for school attendance. While this is very interesting, there is yet to be a comprehensive history of the experience of the majority of African American children in any era of American history. Steven Mintz has a chapter in his Huck’s Raft on growing up in bondage. In Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race, Jennifer Ritterhouse (2006) examines how the determination of most white adults to maintain racial inequality after the Civil War shaped the childhood experiences and sensibilities of Black and white children.
Ritterhouse’s book makes extensive use of archival interviews and biographies of adults looking back on their childhood. This illustrates some of the problems with constructing histories of childhood: children leave few written records, and those that do tend to be children of elite groups. Despite the limitations of the sources and the focus on relations between Black and white children, Growing up Jim Crow rounds out the experience of African American childhood after emancipation. A growing literature on children’s involvement in the desegregation of schools and the civil rights movement has also added to our understanding of childhood and the agency that children bring to bear on their lives in very difficult circumstances (King 2005: 155–68; de Schweinitz 2004).
In each of these diverse regions societies recognized childhood as a distinct phase in the life cycle, and children as a different kind of people from adults. A historical narrative of general improvement in children’s lives secured through a combination of state intervention, philanthropic concern and economic growth is evident in North America and, less decisively, in Europe. In both these regions, however, this story of progress went hand in hand with an increased differentiation of children’s lives by class, ethnicity and region. In Africa and Latin America there is no comparable narrative about the constant improvement of children’s lives and increasingly benign experience of childhood. The differentiation of childhood experience evident in North American and European histories is deeper and broader in the Global South, and a protected, nurturing childhood has been available only to a minority of elite and white settler children. In the absence of a narrative of progress there is considerable continuity between the history of childhood in these two regions and the sociology of African and Asian childhood, small though that literature is. In both history and sociology we find a preoccupation with children’s social problems – in particular in relation to work and family life.
These national and regional histories can be brought together to construct a global history of childhood if that is underpinned by the recognition of the globalizing forces of racial capitalism and its uneven and socially differentiated impacts from the late fifteenth century through to the present day.
Social and cultural geography
One of the central concerns of childhood geographers has been to examine children’s use of public space. Much of this work contends that children subvert the intended use of designed play space and make play and leisure spaces out of the interstices of public space – hidden spaces and wasteland. Colin Ward’s lovingly photographed The Child in the City (1978) is probably the classic text here. Other geographers working in this area include Stuart Aitken (2001a) and Owain Jones (2000). On a slightly different but perhaps related track, other geographers have written on how children in public spaces are often considered to be ‘out of place’ and therefore unruly and threatening. This is an interesting area of inquiry in that it allows for comparative analysis of the experiences of street children in the South and that of teenagers caught in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood in the North (see Valentine 2004; Beazley 2000; Matthews et al. 2000).
Holloway and Valentine in their introduction to the edited collection on Children’s Geographies claim that ‘geographical studies can add texture and detail to the currently rather broad-brush analysis of the social construction of childhood’ (2000: 9). Whether the claim that the sociology of childhood has a ‘broad-brush’ approach is justified, social geography has made it very clear that, just as childhood changes over time or in history (see above), it is also shaped by place or geography. Literally, where children live will shape their experience of the world and the expectations placed on them (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 9–11). The split that James et al. (1998) identify between global processes that shape children’s lives and local cultural lifeworlds can be transcended by a spatial appreciation of the connections between the local and the global. Cindi Katz’s excellent comparative study of the lives of children and youth in Howa, a Sudanese village, and in a district of New York, Growing up Global, shows how global economic restructuring has reshaped experiences and expectations of childhood and youth, and how children and their parents are responding to the new demands that new economic processes have placed on them (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 11; Katz 2004).
Thinking about how space and territory are organized by global forces and processes and how these impact on the organization of children’s lives and concepts of childhood has been fertile ground for childhood geographers.
Organization of the book
History and geography, with their attention to the organization of space and time, suggest that there cannot be a global form of childhood, in the sense that children’s lives