SHCY Bulletin

Society for the History of Children and Youth

“The Critical History of Childhood”

Essays from the Conference Session, July 10, 2009

The Critical Historiography of Childhood:Introduction…Harvey J. Graff

On the Role of Theory and Investigation in Critical Childhood Studies…Jim Block

The Critical Historiography of Childhood Roundtable… Rebecca de Schweinitz

Round Table on the Critical Historiography of Childhood… Colin Heywood

Comments for Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood… Jennifer Ritterhouse

History and Theory, and Whose Side We Are On… Michael Zuckerman

The Critical Historiography of Childhood:  Introduction

Harvey J. Graff, The Ohio State University

This session focusing on Critical Historiography of Childhood follows, at least in part, from a session at the 2007 Norrköping conference, entitled “How can the history of children grow up?” [aka “What’s wrong with the history of children/childhood”] with Jim Block, Harvey Graff, Pavla Miller, and Bengt Sandin.

This year our focus falls on issues related to critical approaches to questions of “child development” in a critical historiography of childhood.

Jim Block and Harvey Graff developed the session protocol and proposal (and the questions for the participants), circulating it first among potential panelists and then to the SHCY program committee. It read:

If there is no such thing as a ”natural child,” but only children socially generated and culturally constructed in particular societies at particular historical times, how can and do historians of childhood and youth understand the generational cohorts they are investigating and critically evaluate what societies do to, for, and with their young?  How can we address the role of the social and the historical in examining child-rearing and socialization practices and child development itself? 

That is, are there standards of appropriate practice and/or optimal development against which social practices and their consequences are or should be compared? How might they be measured or otherwise determined? If so, from what discourses or disciplines do they arise, and what clarity and persuasiveness do they offer?  Is there a place for the discourse of nature and what is naturally viable?  If there are no standards applied from outside the historical evidence itself, then is it possible to locate or develop alternatives to the standards applied by the specific society, or subculture, or family being investigated?  Does holding a social group to its own standards constitute sufficiently critical historiography?  Or does it in the end risk validating that group’s treatment of the young as the fulfillment of its own particular social claims?

This effort to render more explicit the standards historians of childhood and youth bring to their work is essential to the issue of generational interaction and social change.  Michael Zuckerman has argued that “childhood” is a discourse framed by adult culture to specify its agenda for shaping the adults it wants.  At the same time, young people often appropriate the ideas, expectations and claims adults have constructed about childhood to their own ends.

What happens when generational or other forms of social conflict over treatment of the young are an explicit dimension of the investigation?  Does the evaluation of generational relations turn into a discourse on institutional power?  Are the standards, expectations or anticipations of adults a better or worse measure of the treatment of the young than the young’s own aspirations?  Or are there viable ways of thinking about childhood and human development that enable historians to evaluate a social group’s socialization and integration of the young?  As historians of childhood and youth examine developmental and generational issues, can they bring their own insights to shed light on the processes that might not be accessible in other fields?  Can we think of particular ways in which this might or does occur?

The goal of this panel is less to provide firm answers to these complex matters than to open up a dialogue among working historians and theorists in the field about their practices.  Through a roundtable discussion of our work and its assumptions and methods as well as extensive conversation with the audience participants, we hope to help historians of the field become more self-conscious about the assumptions embedded in their work.  By encouraging historians to make our assumptions explicit, and to consider the dangers of uncritical approaches to theories and interpretations we employ, we believe that participants in this field will move toward increasingly reflective readings of the evidence and formulation of theses regarding childhood, child socialization and child development. No small goals.

Panelists responded to these questions, and especially to questions 1 and 5 in 5-7 minutes opening statements, followed by discussion.

Questions for SHCY Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood

If there is no such thing as a “natural child,” only children social generated and cultural constructed in particular societies in particular historical times, the concern is how do and in what ways should historians of children, youth and the family frame their inquiries:

1. Does the student of the history of the child, history of childhood, and history of children need a theory of childhood and/or child development? If so, why?

2. In order to critically evaluate what societies do to socialize, shape and integrate their young, is it feasible to judge social practices by the standards of that group?  Or does this risk validating those practices?

3. What does a historically useful and rich approach to a theory of childhood and child development require?  From what discourses and disciplines is it most likely to arise?  What discourses are more problematic?  Can historians of childhood and youth bring their own insights to shed light on these processes?  Examples?

4. How should generational conflict or other forms of social conflict over the treatment of the young be framed?  Is it simply a discourse on institutional power?  Given that the young often appropriate the ideas, expectations and claims adults have constructed about childhood for their own ends and aspirations, how does one balance the perspective of the different generations in such cases?

5. What is the place of child development in your own scholarship?

6. Are theories or other approaches to child development part of the future of the history of children and youth, as you see it?  What possibilities and problems do you see emerging in such a discourse/s.

That the stakes can be great is emphasized in the recent work, for example, of André Turmel on the construction of “normal” and “normality” A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental thinking, categorization and graphic visualization (Cambridge University Press, 2008)—about how historical sequential development and statistical reasoning led to a concept of what constitutes a “normal” child and resulted in a form of standardization by which we monitor children “This book reveals how wrong it is to assume that childhood is either a natural or universal entity, which amounts to an inconsiderate denial of its historical processes. . . . Childhood is neither an inevitable consequence of the historical accumulation of western societies’ public policies, be it in the form of infant welfare, compulsory schooling or whatever, nor a simple outcome of experts’ advice to parents and others. It is, rather, the product of the complex movement of cooperation, conflict and resistance between a broad range of social actors, including children themselves, in a historical process of moulding a form via diverse social actions: the child as a social form to be moulded throughout ‘a sequence of biographic trajectory’ [Bourdieu]”

The presentations sparked a very lively and bracing set of exchanges that, in one way or another, etched the borders and questioned the boundaries and limits of the history of childhood and the history of children. This included recognition of the different approaches and meanings of child and psychological development; developmentalism more generally; critical historiography and critical theory(ies); “voices” and agency of the young; historical change; and the very possibility of a history of children as opposed to a history of childhood.

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