is there one childhood or many

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Sociology                                                                               Meredith D Doherty

Is there one childhood or many? Explain your point of view.

In this essay which we are about to examine we are going to answer the above question of ‘Is there one childhood or many?’ How it links to social construction in modern day England, where the theory of social construction comes from, and the relevance in childhood and society today. We are also going to read about several different childhoods, from various societies, and try to see that there is not just one childhood but many we are also going to see how their childhoods differ from each other yet still fit into social construction.

Childhood as a social construction has changed considerably over the last 200years.   As a social construction it has slowly turned out to be more multifaceted, as ever-increasing numbers of theories have developed within the discipline of sociology. Here we are going to read about one of the most respected of these theorists and see what his definition of childhood social construction is.

 Philippe Aries the French historian was the first academic to disparage the idea of childhood. As a fixed universal state and his main argument was that childhood changes over time, (Giddens Antony) 175. In medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (Aries 1962:115) (Giddens Antony) 175

As one can see from Aries childhood isn’t a particular easy subject to define, as it changes over time, and is extremely fluid, although his points of reference on mediaeval childhood could be still in effect as we will read about later on concerning childhoods in non western countries.

To understanding the increasingly shifting forms of childhood firstly we must see the characteristics of childhood, as a social concept Hendrick identifies a collective of childhood models as consisting of the romantic, natural, evangelical and exemplar, he also sees this as symptomatic of social change revolving around the abolishment of child labour and the Universalization of the child as delinquent and the consequential reformation of the juvenile delinquent through education. (Hendrick 1997:45)

This we can see is extremely true of today and the present education system, and the wonderful ideal of children being evangelical. Then progressing from the work place to the schools of education but this seems to be more of a shift from one system of ordered control to another.

Although these conceptions from Aries on childhood follow an ideal, they remain heavily critzsed as Aries himself was a social historian, and mediaeval scholar as he relied on images of child paintings his methods were extremely controversial for the time.

Hendrick (1978) depicts that of all social groups which formed societies of the past, children remain the most obscure and visible only through the eyes of the artist who painted them or were sentimentalised at the hands of the Victorian literature (Hendrick 1997:37)

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But do we not see childhood the same? The first 12 years of life is a time of freedom and no responsibility compared to adults, a time of innocence and freedom from adult cares and wants but is this case? Once children were able to survive without constant care, medieval Europeans expected them to take their place in the world as working adults. Aries (1965)

This brings us on to children taking the place in society, we are going to look at the day in the life of a child solder, and how social construction manifests itself in Sri Lanka. ...

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