Genius Around

When you see a caterpillar, do you think of it as a “becoming-butterfly” or a “not-yet-butterfly”?

I ask because I think it is something we do, I do, when I think about childhood. Children are different from adults, they are still developing in “order to become”. It is difficult to get rid of this way of seeing, even though I know that childhood has not always been a developmental stage in history I still catch myself falling back into my old way of thinking.

In fact Wikipedia (english) starts the historical part about childhood as follows:

It has been argued that childhood is not a natural phenomenon but a creation of society.

Quite a statement, hein? After all they are different, aren´t they. Well research shows that first of all this stage of development has not always existed in our history as for example before 17th-century they have been seen as a sort of small adults. The German researcher Gerold Scholz (Scholz, 2001, p.2) asks the question: Gibt es so etwas wie eine „Natur des Kindes? (Is there such a thing as a “nature of the child”). He takes an example from Devereux who makes a great point in comparing childhood with black people or Helotes. They were socialized by the South Americans/Spartans in such a way that they behaved inappropriately just so that later on they could argue that this was the nature of the “Blacks” or Helotes. Scholz himself compares it to the question of the “nature of a woman” which he thinks today nobody dares to ask anymore. In a piece entitled “The american child and other cultural inventions“, Kessen (1979,p.815-16) takes three quotes ranging from 1753 until 1973 that show how the conception of children has changed over the years. Hatch (1995, p.118) writes that:

There is no permanent and essential nature of childhood. The idea of childhood is defined differently in every culture, in every time period, in every political climate, in every economic era, in every social context.

We might see it as a period of innocence, hope and full of joy or we might see it as a developmental stage where we still have to learn and get to know the world but in a way it always appears to be a social construction. When the questions become more concrete, more practical things appear blurry. When is childhood over? What comes after it and when does that stop? Are these stages all the same for everybody?

Ok, so childhood is an invention. What now? Well, I personally think it might be a useful concept but we should be aware of its limits and we need to know that there are a variety of different perceptions on children and childhood in the world. Going back to my introduction I would think that childhood is more than just a “becoming”, it is a state (even if constructed) on its own; maybe we can learn as much from a child than we can from an adult if we recognize this.

References

Further resources:

On social construction (10 minute video giving interesting explanations with examples)

More details on the social construction of childhood