SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

The Critical Historiography of Childhood Roundtable

Rebecca de Schweinitz, Brigham Young University

In my research I’ve been interested in both shifting ideas about childhood and youth and young people as historical and political agents. Theories of child development have played a role in helping me to understand both, but in different ways.

In order to understand how historical actors understood childhood and youth and then used or applied those understandings, I think we have to understand how a variety of scholars (and for me that’s included psychologists, sociologists, education experts, and anthropologists) thought and talked about child development at the time. As it turns out, in the case of my research, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) organizational stance toward young people and their use of ideas about childhood as a weapon in the struggle for racial equality, closely reflected the ways that contemporary scholars talked about child development and development-related issues.

So I saw that child development theories help to explain the trajectory of the civil rights movement and it successes and limitations—which is to say that attention to such theories can be quite useful!  But I’ve been less interested in “a historically useful and rich approach to a theory of childhood and child development” than in examining how people in the past used theories and ideals (often shifting) to judge themselves and push for change (or to keep things the same).

As historians we’re well equipped to be wary about any one child development theory and to recognize that such theories don’t exist in a vacuum.  As children’s historians I hope we’re equipped to show that theories about the young are sometimes shaped by young people themselves.  So in my research, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War (and the effects—or fears about the effects—of those events) as well as young people’s activism serve as an important backdrop for helping make sense of shifting views of children and youth and a reassessment of their agency and place in American life in general and the black freedom struggle in particular. I have been especially struck by how young people themselves sometimes stimulated different ways of thinking about childhood and childhood development. What I’ve seen is how attention to young people’s developmental needs encouraged young people to become more politically active, which then resulted in greater attention to their needs, which further encouraged youth activism, and so on. So there’s this circular or dialectic process happening whereby young people are both acting on ideas about themselves and urging a reevaluation of those ideas. Young people have also been among those who are adept at using child development theories to challenge the status quo. In my research, for instance, young civil rights protestors, bring up ideas about childhood innocence, children as victims of racism—how prejudice warps their personalities and makes them “unable to cope with society”—while it’s clear that the young people who are employing such theories are hardly dependent victims. [1]

I also found child development theory useful in trying to understand generational differences and the proliferation of youth activism for civil rights in the late 1950s and 60s. There I drew on ideas from William Tuttle’s Daddy’s Gone to War, Robert Coles’s work, Erik Erikson’s theories, and the work of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu.  Tuttle talks about how age, culture, and history determine individual development and shape social change. [2] Coles suggests that “a nation’s history becomes a children’s apparently idiosyncratic conscience.” For him, and he was an observer/participant in the movement, young people’s stage in human development made it likely that they would be successful actors in American’s racial battles. But it is was “this very time,” as he put it, that acted as “their essential catalyst.” [3] Erikson similarly argued that “in youth the life history intersects with history,” and Bourdieu  posited that “conditions of existence . . . impose different definitions of the impossible, the possible, and the probable” and that childhood experiences form “the basis of perception and appreciation of all subsequent experience” and account for generational conflict (or differences). [4] What I found useful here was that each of these scholars pay attention to child development theory but see it working in specific historical and cultural contexts. They accept the idea that young people experience things differently and the importance of an individual’s childhood—their most formative years to later life choices and perspectives—but time and place matter, too. Age plays a role in how people see and interact in their specific worlds—and how we understand (or should understand) history.

So for me I think this means we can say, okay, young people are different. And maybe we don’t know exactly how or why—but there is a general consensus that childhood is a significant period of identify formation. The task then becomes identifying what influenced young people of a particular time period during their formative years, how young people acted, or thought, or felt differently than their elders, and determining if, why, and how that matters. 

I would also like to warn against the desire to see young people acting, thinking, and feeling differently when they don’t—developing a kind of obsession with discovering agency. We don’t want to let child development theory, the idea that young people are different than adults, keep us from seeing the ways they are or act or think the same. This danger was especially clear to me at a recent early America conference where one presentor suggested that the diaries of elite eighteenth century Philadelphia girls show them challenging gender and class norms and asserting personal autonomy. The evidence, however, more persuasively shows the degree to which these young women internalized class-based gender prescriptions. This is not the kind of argument that’s very exciting to make. But just like women and gender historians have emphasized the need to look at anti-feminists as well as feminists, or women who supported the KKK as well as civil rights activists, children’s historians need to recognize young people’s collusion with socio-political norms and the success of adult-directed socializing processes as well as the ways young people exercise agency.

On the other hand, just because young people have similar experiences as adults—including experiences that we associate with adulthood we can’t assume that those experiences are actually the same or have the same effects on young people in history. An example of this might be Jim Marten’s decision to not look at boy soldiers in the Civil War in his (otherwise brilliant) study of children and the Civil War because, “military service made them de facto adults.” [5] At the same early American conference mentioned above, Caroline Cox gave a compelling paper on Revolutionary War boy soldiers that shows that war did not necessarily make boys men (or even independent) and that boys experienced war service decidedly differently from their older counterparts, and not because they were relegated to being fifers and drummer boys. [6]

In my work I found that many scholars of the civil rights movement have started with the assumption that young people are different (and I would suggest that even if, in response to question 1, we say we don’t need a theory of childhood or child development, most of us usually start with assumptions that look like one). But those scholars end up (along with many people at the time) generally taking for granted young people’s activism in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and1960s, suggesting that’s it’s no wonder children and youth were on the front lines—they had less to lose and were rebelling (like young people are wont to do) against norms, etc. But by not looking at what theories of child development meant for a particular cohort growing up in a particular time and place, historians of the movement miss much of the story (not to mention not being able to explain why it didn’t happen earlier).  Child development theory then, even if we’re conscious of it, isn’t enough. We don’t want to let it take on explanatory power that it doesn’t really have.

I would say, too, that historians, and this is generally true in civil rights scholarship, also start with the assumption that what adults do is most important in history. So here again I think we see assumptions about child development playing a role in historical scholarship without historians being conscious of it. In this case, the very idea that childhood is a developmental stage on the way to becoming what matters (an adult), shapes the stories we usually tell about the past.  Here again I think children’s historians have something to say.

Notes

1 Sermon (Prince Edward County, Virginia, 28 July, 1951) by the Rev. L. Francis Griffin quoted in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Racial Equality, 480. See also Rebecca de Schweinitz, If They Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) 237-39.

2 William Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 236-41.

3  Robert Coles, The Political Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968) 62-71; Robert Coles, “Children and Racial Discrimination,” American Scholar 34 (Winter 1964-65) 90-92.

4 Erick H. Erikson, “Youth: Fidelity and Diversity” in Youth: Change and Challenge edited by Erik H. Erickson (New York: Basic Books, 1963) 20; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 72, chapter 2. On these points and those from notes 2 and 3 see also de Schweinitz, If They Could Change the World, chapter 5.

5 James Marten, The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

6 Caroline Cox, “Boy Soldiers: Citizenship and Patriarchy in the American Revolution,” paper presented at the Omohundro Institute and Early American History and Culture Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah (June 2009).

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