Bachpan ki awadharna (बचपन की अवधारणा ), Concept of childhood ( Childhood and Growing up)

 🔹 CONCEPT OF CHILDHOOD :-

Children and childhood are familiar terms to us. We all have been through the age when we were called ‘children’ and have experienced the phase called ‘childhood’. Not only childhood but also we have passed through the stages of adolescence with varied experiences. The word childhood means the state of being a child. Till the end of the twentieth century the idea of childhood as a separate social category had been paid very little attention. According to cultural norms and expectations, the definition of childhood also varies.

As adults, we see children in the same manner and not as unique individuals who have varied experiences, interests, styles of learning, and knowledge. We often force them to be the way we want them to be, which deeply influences children’s development. As teachers or prospective teachers, we need to develop a familiarity with experiences of children, so that we can question our own perceptions about ‘the children we teach’. In this Unit, an attempt has been made to become aware of limitations of our own understandings about children. In order to understand the different experiences, it is fair to consider the variety of perspectives of childhood. Let us first examine the anthropological perspective of childhood.

➡️ Anthropological Perspective of Childhood :-

While examining the anthropological viewpoint, you could see that there are no chronological limits of childhood or biological boundaries. From anthropological viewpoint, childhood can be perceived from five angles. Firstly, children are socialized to learn and perpetuate a set of norms and customs. According to this view, we may treat children as small adults in the making, moulded by parents and adults in a community to sustain the culture of a society.

Secondly, children’s personalities are understood as natural reactions of the anxieties and cultural aspects in which they grow up with. The emphasis is on how the cultural patterns are internalized and in turn are reproduced in society.

Thirdly, childhood socialization is a process by which norms, attitudes, ways of thinking and values of society are acquired by children to enter the next stage of development. This view suggests that child rearing practices are influenced by the geography, history and ecology of a community, which, in turn, shape the personality of a child.

Fourthly, childhood is viewed in terms of ‘developmental niche’. The ‘developmental niche’ stands for the framework for examining the cultural structuring of the micro-environment of the child. It also tries to explain the environment in terms of child’s viewpoint and to understand the process of development and acquisition of culture.

The child is seen as bringing its own temperament, as well as species-specific potentials, to the developmental niche provided by its culture. The developmental niche is divided into three components as given below:

i) the physical and social settings in which the child lives (for example, type of house or living space the child has)

ii) the customs of child care and child rearing (for example, scheduling of activities such as sending children to play schools or showing them TV programmes)

iii) the psychology of the caretakers (for example, do the care takers believe that a regular sleep schedule is necessary for healthy development).

These three components function together in shaping the developmental experience of a child within the larger culture. Finally, some anthropologists view childhood itself as a cultural construction shaped by forces within as well as outside a single cultural community. Children experience culture within a family through their daily routine of life. Here daily routine consists of going to school, religious practices, play, mealtimes and family visits.

Generally, culture enters into the mind of a child through various growing up experiences. The experiences children had in childhood might have impacted their adult life. Here we have to remember that child rearing practices vary from culture to culture and represent an adaptation to different environments. You will study in detail about the growing up experiences of children in various contexts such as in different types of family structures, growing up in discomfort zones and growing up as a girl in Unit 2 titled ‘Socialization and Growing Up in Diverse Contexts’ of this Block.

The ways in which children assign meaning to their everyday environments, be they city, rural, suburban or discomfort zones and how they involve in these environments play a major part in shaping children’s lives. In the subsequent paragraphs, we will be referring to the sociological perspective of childhood.

➡️ Sociological Perspective of Childhood :-

We understood that there exist variety and diversity in experiences of children across times and societies. Further, there are different conceptions about child and childhood across time, societies and contexts. These are so different that it is difficult to have one idea for child or childhood. Yet, in general as adults, we envision childhood as one category. Such a vision is more of a creation or construction, which is not based on an empathetic understanding of experiences of children.

It is shaped by a uniform and narrow vision of society, which may have a deep implication on lives of children. This way of looking at children seems to be adults’ construction of childhood. We may agree with Mayall’s (1991) argument that ‘children’s lives are lived through childhoods constructed for them by adults’ understanding of childhood and what children are and should be’. Childhood as a Social Construction A social construction can be defined as ‘a theoretical perspective that explores the ways in which “reality” is negotiated in everyday life through people’s interactions and through sets of discourses’. It focuses on culture and context in understanding what happens in society and in constructing knowledge based on those understandings. When we examine the idea of social construction,

we have to highlight the following points:

➤ All ways of understanding are culturally and historically relative;

➤ Our knowledge about the world is constructed through our daily interactions; and

➤ There are many possible constructions of the world

You may notice that when developmental psychologists differentiate children from adults on the basis of ability in a range of domains, social constructionists argue that childhood has more to do with how people define it; thus making childhood a social construction.

Our attitude towards childhood is influenced by the dominant belief systems of the society in which we live, and so it may vary across time and culture. We can only begin to understand our views of childhood if we take account of our own position in a particular social, political and cultural context. The constructed nature of childhood becomes more apparent when we contrast the concepts of childhood that prevailed at different historical periods or in different cultures. Let us discuss the historical perspective of childhood.

➡️ Historical Perspective of Childhood :-

When we try to know the meaning of child in different societies, it is better to overview the history of the idea of childhood. If one analyses history, one will realize that meaning and description of children varies across time periods in history. A French historian named Philippe Aries, analyzed how children were depicted in history. Using works of art, letters, and many other sources he explored how the meaning of childhood evolved from medieval times onwards to the present.

Read the following given below

Philippe Aries wrote that childhood is a very new concept. It did not exist at all in the medieval period. He found that there were no children depicted in paintings of that era. There were only young babies or adults. All those who were not babies were painted in adult dresses, with adult body language, and adult-like expressions. Most young people were apprenticed, became workers in the fields and entered the adult roles at a very early age. Even ‘people’ around seven years of age were seen as little adults, and not as children.

The medieval cultures lacked the concept of childhood. Childhood is a later historical creation. It came into existence among the rich people (upper class) in the 16th and 17th centuries. It further developed in the 18th century among the upper class. And it finally emerged on the scene in the 20th century in both the upper and lower classes.Once the institution of childhood began to emerge, the situation of the young person began to change in society. First they were named children. A theory of innocence of the child emerged. Children were to be protected from adult reality. The facts of birth, death, sex, tragedy and adult world events were hidden from the child. Children were increasingly segregated by age.

-Philippe Aries (1962), Centuries of Childhood

Another thinker, John Holt, wrote about young people and their place, or lack of place, in modern society. He talked about the institution of modern childhood, the attitude, customs and laws that defined and located children in modern life and determined, to a large degree, what their lives were like, and how we, their elders treated them. He further talked about many ways in which modern childhood seemed to him be bad for most of those who lived within it and how it should and might have changed.

-John Holt (1974), Escape from Childhood

Now you know that there have been different ways in which childhood has been

perceived in different times in the history of civilization. For example, children in non-industrial society are treated differently from children in industrial societies which will be discussed in detail in the section 1.5 ‘Concept of Adolescence’. Therefore, childhood is not a given concept; it is a concept which develops through adults’ lenses, and their ways of perceiving children in the society

➡️ Cultural Perspective of Childhood – 1 :-

Variations in our images of childhood can be found not only by going back over time but also by travelling through the different cultures in the world. In different cultures there is a variation in children’s social position and roles. These variations are seen between rural and urban areas, among different communities, and among different countries. Let us look at some examples of how children are reared in various cultures.

Observe an Indian mother with her baby on her lap. The mother does her best to foster emotional tie by cuddling, smiling, singing and talking, and thus ensure that she is very much the focus of the baby’s attention. While looking at Kaluli mothers and their babies, we will get a different picture. The Kaluli people are a small society living in the tropical rainforests of Papua New Guinea (close to Australia), and there mother-baby interaction takes a very different form.

Mothers hold their babies outwards so that they can see others who are part of their social group. Mothers rarely talk directly to their babies; instead, other people talk to the baby. Why is it so? As Kaluli people are living in one large long house with no internal walls, the mother-child bond is less significant and children are prepared to be aware of the social community as a whole. Hence they adopted the practice of facing the child outward and not towards the mother

An example of mother-child play session in two societies is given below:

In the course of childhood, a mother in western society tries to develop independent nature among children by providing situations to explore on their own. On the contrary, a Japanese mother socializes the child to become dependent on other members of the group. For example, during play sessions while confronted by a car, a western mother might say: ‘This is a car. It has nice wheels. You can play with it.’

(To be continued in the next Slide……)

➡️ Cultural Perspective of Childhood – 2 :-

A Japanese mother would say: ‘Hello chan, It’s a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now give it to me. Yes. Thank you.’

What difference do you observe between these two mother-child play sessions? The mother in western society gives much importance to teach the child the name of the object and its properties whereas in the second case, the mother wants to teach the child the cultural norms for polite speech and to focus on interpersonal aspects. Another point you can observe is that in western society, mothers join their children in play to foster their cognitive and educational skills whereas in Japanese society, play is merely a means of involving a child in social rituals that will develop mother-child relationship.

From the above examples, you might have inferred that child rearing practices are important in shaping the personality of children. Even today there are variations in our images of childhood when we compare different parts of the world with different cultural traditions. What is normal in one society may not be acceptable in another. These differences are due to the rearing practices as how children are talked to, held or played with.

Thus we may say that each society sets out to produce children with personality characteristics that fit in with its own values. The social and cultural contexts in which children grow up exert influences in making sense of the social world of the child. Thus, you may say that there is no single universal definition of childhood. Childhood differs across time, place and culture. In the next section we will discuss the meaning of the concept ‘Child.’

Check Your Progress 1

Notes: (a) Write your answers in the space given below.

(b) Compare your answers with the one given at the end of the unit.

i) “Childhood is a social construction”. Do you agree with this statement? Why?

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