childhood social construction essay

Social Constructions of Childhood – 14 Examples

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

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Social Construction of Childhood: A Brief Definition

The social construction of childhood refers to the idea that childhood is seen (or “constructed”) differently by different societies. Examples of social constructs include “Children as good”, “Children as evil” and “children as innocent”. If you believe childhood is socially constructed, you believe ways of seeing childhood can change across times and cultures.

How is childhood constructed by society.

When talking about childhood as a social construct, you need to remember the focus is on perceptions or the ways we see children and how this can change.

Looking back into history, we can observe that the way we perceive childhood has changed. We can see this clearly when we consider it across the following vectors:

Time. What we might have considered to have been a ‘normal’ child 100 years ago is very different to what we see as a child today. We tend to see children as much more innocent these days than in the past;
Culture. Different cultures see children differently. Interestingly, in Japan, children are trusted to walk home from school at much younger ages than in the United States. Why? Do the Japanese have a different perception of childhood to Westerners?
Social Class. Do middle-class people try to prevent their children from associating with working-class children? Might this be because working class children are tainted with the ‘Oliver’s Twist’ image of rowdy, ratty, street kids?
Race. Unfortunately, some people see children of minority races as a ‘threat’ to the majority. We’ve seen this in history when children of certain racial classes were murdered to try to enact genocide (see: the social construction of race ).

Don’t mistake me here: it’s not that somehow children are actually any different now than they were at any other point in the past. It’s that the ways society perceives childhood can change in different times, cultures, places, or contexts.

What field of Study does this Concept come From?

The scholars who believe that child is a social construct call their research:

‘New’ Sociology of Childhood; or
Childhood Studies

This is a field of study that has been around since around the early 1990s, but is based on the earlier works by Philippe Aries (1962), who I discuss later in the piece.

Scholarly Explanations

Here’s a few scholarly definitions you can rely upon to define the social construction of childhood:

Scholarly Definition 1

In their seminal book, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood , James and Prout (1990, p. 8) state:

“Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor a universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies.” Here, they assert that the focus of childhood studies is on the ways the idea of childhood changes over time. The issue at play is that how we perceive childhood changes over time.

Scholarly Definition 2

Kehily (2008, p. 7) argues that:

“Childhood is not universal; rather, it is a product of culture and as such will vary across time and place.”

A note to Students

Do you need a definition of the ‘Social construction of childhood’ for your essay?

Make sure if you’re using the quotes above, you cite the authors I listed above and not this post. Teachers don’t like to see you citing websites.

Here’s the APA style citations for the above to quotes:

James, A., & Prout, A. (1990). A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Providence, Promise and Problems . In: James, A., & Prout, A. (Eds.). Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (pp. 1- . Basingstoke: Falmer.

Kehily, M J. (2008). Understanding Childhood. In: Kehily, M J. (ed.). An Introduction to Childhood Studies, (2nd ed., pp. 1 – 16). Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Example 1: The Miniature Adult

According to Philippe Aries (1962), British society used to see children as miniature adults.

In other words, childhood wasn’t a distinctly different period of life than adulthood.

To make this claim, Aries showed pictures of children in medieval portraits.

He remarked that children in these portraits appeared the same as adults in their mannerisms, dress, and facial expressions. They wore the same clothes as adults, smiled the same as adults, and appeared to be acting in all ways as if they were adults.

Aries also claimed that due to lack of child labor laws, children became workers, and therefore basically adults, at 7 years of age.

Thus, he assumes, from about the age of 7 children were considered to be adults in all ways but height!

They were miniature adults!

Today, we believe childhood to last until about 18 years of age. Thus, we perceive children to be distinct and different from adults for a much longer period of time.

We also protect children from labor, hard work and politics because – again – we don’t consider them to be like adults the way people did in the past.

Here’s some examples of the miniature adult child:

The child who works. When children are set to work in factories like in Victorian England, they appeared to have been seen and treated like adults;
The child soldier. In the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo there are still many thousands of child soldiers. We can argue that these children are considered miniature adults, given that they’re tasked with undertaking very serious ‘adult’ tasks.

Example 2: The Evil Child

Another very common way of viewing childhood in the middle ages was to see them as ‘Evil’.

This was for a long time a deeply religious view of children.

Beginning with early Christian and Judean theologians, many believed children were born sinners having inherited Adam’s guilt for his ‘original sin’ in the Garden of Eden (Wiley, 2002).

While it must be noted that the idea of children as sinners is one of many Christian and Judean views (indeed, Pope Leo defended the innocence of children in the fifth century (Wiley, 2002)), it has historically been an influential idea amongst many followers of Christian and Judean religions.

For example, original sin is alluded to several times in the Old and New Testament. Genesis 8:21 states:

“Every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.” (New International Version, 2011)

At various times, Christian churches have preached that children must be baptised at a young age in order to relieve them of their inherited sins (Wiley, 2002).

Dionysian Childhood

Chris Jenks (2005) also used the phrase ‘Dionysian childhood’ to explain the view of children as evil.

Dionysus us the prince of wine and revelry – hence, he is the prince of sin.

Jenks coined this term because, like Dionysus, the evil child “loves pleasure, it celebrates self-gratification and it is wholly demanding” (2005, p. 63).

Here are some more examples:

Child Murderers. One of the most prominent examples of the evil child today is that of the child who has committed unspeakable crimes. Take, for example, the two 10-year-old children Robert Thompson and Jon Venables who murdered a toddler, James Bulger, in 1993. These two 10-year-old murders were widely seen in British society and British press as being innately evil and incapable of redemption.
Children who get the cane. If children are evil, it’s our job to discipline them to give them a positive civilizing influence. That may be a reason why we used to cane children in schools.

Example 3: The Good Child

While the view of children as ‘evil’ persisted for much of the middle ages, it is believed that the upper classes in England began to perceive children as ‘innately good’ at some point in the 17 th Century.

Philippe Aries, who I mentioned earlier, believed that the growing middle classes in Britain developed enough money that they no longer needed to see their children as ‘miniature adults’.

When parents had enough money to pamper their children, suddenly their views of children changed.

According to Aries, children of the rich upper classes were therefore suddenly seen as good, sweet and incapable of doing wrong.

In fact, this view is the exact opposite of the Evil child.

The Evil child was seen to be born innately bad and in need of discipline to become a good adult.

The Good child was seen to be born innately good and was, sadly, corrupted by the evil of adults!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emile, the ‘Good’ Boy!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most well-known proponent of the view of childhood as innately good and natural.

He rejects the idea that children are corrupt at birth, but rather argues that civilisation is the culprit of corruption, arguing that:

“All things are as good as their Creator made them, but everything degenerates in the hands of men” (Rousseau, 1762, p. 1).

In Rousseau’s acclaimed book, Émile, or On Education (1762), he hypothesises how he would raise Émile, a fictional child, to resist the corruptions of society. Throughout, he proposes moralising and romantic ideas about the child’s goodness.

He believed children should be protected from the evils of the adult world.

Just for good measure, his controversial interpretations of religious texts got him chased out of France. Bonsoir, Rousseau!

Apollonian Childhood

Chris Jenks, who I mentioned earlier, also has a name for the good child.

He calls the good child the Apollonian child, named after the god of sun and light!

Like Apollo, the good child represents all that is good in the world: happiness, laughter and sunshine

Here are a few more examples of the good child:

Montessori Education. In Maria Montessori’s model of education, children are seen as having an innate tendency towards goodness. When a child misbehaves, we need to consider what corrupting influences may have led to this behaviour.
Parents blinded by love. Sometimes parents have quite poorly behaved children, but they view them with rose colored glasses. We don’t see our children for who they are due to our deeply held desires that our precious darlings have only goodness in their hearts and do no wrong.

Example 4. The Innocent Child

The view of childhood as a time of innocence is, by and large, the dominant way of viewing children in today’s day and age.

A quick distinction:

The good child is born with an innate tendency to do good things .
The innocent child is born neither good or bad: they are the blank slate , or tabula rasa .

Because a child is innocent, they are very precious. We must be very careful not to corrupt them.

Therefore, we often treat the innocent child in much the same way as we treat the good child (above).

We try to protect the innocent child from bad influences, and we try to encourage them to do good things!

When a child misbehaves, we don’t hold them accountable because they don’t know better.

Furthermore, we want to prolong this innocence as long as possible.

We place warning on TV shows and movies to protect the innocence of children. We mourn lost innocence when we see our children growing up, we hear them swear for the first time, and when we see them being devious and sneaky.

Examples of the Innocent Child

Here’s some examples of the innocent child:

Children in the Courts. Most western countries do not hold children accountable (or, at least, as accountable as adults ) in legal proceedings because we believe that they ‘cannot know better’ at a young age.
Anne Geddes Imagery. If you’re not sure who Anne Geddes is, I recommend googling her images! She takes photos of children in angelic poses to emphasize their innocence.

Example 5: The Incompetent / Bubble Wrapped Child

Often, our desire to protect children from the corrupting influences of the outside world become somewhat obsessive.

When we fail to accept that children need chances to explore, challenge themselves and take risks, we create a new type of childhood: The bubble wrapped child.

The bubble wrapped child is an image of the child that has emerged in recent decades.

It is a child who is so overly protected that they are afforded no freedom.

The bubble wrapped child is not allowed to play outside or do things for themselves. They are pampered and protected to within an inch of their life.

We adults over-play this child’s incompetence and fail to see its ability to navigate the world. We protect too much out of good intentions and the child never learns resilience, persistence or self-reliance.

Examples of the Incompetent / Bubble Wrapped Child

Here are some examples of the bubble wrapped child:

Children who can’t think for themselves. When we bubble wrap our children, they fail to have the capacity to predict and react to potential dangers. They don’t get a chance to test their own limits or learn to regulate their behaviour, which stunts their development.

Example 6: The Snowballing Child

Another way we adults make a mess out of parenting is our inability to discipline our children.

The phenomenon of the snowballing child has become more and more popular in recent decades.

Sorin and Galloway (2006) argue that the snowballing child is a social construct of childhood that frames children as desiring – and taking – power from parents.

The snowballing child occurs when parents cede power to children.

It often occurs because parents are too busy with work and other pressures.

While many people in society today may be wealthier than every before, they’re also busier.

So when a child asks for or demands something, we give it to them.

Child wants candy. We give them candy. Child wants a toy. We give them a toy.

The child learns that they have control over the parent and their behavior snowballs.

Before long, this child has no boundaries and knows that a simple temper tantrum will deliver them whatever they desire.

Here’s the one and only example of the snowballing child you’ll ever need:

Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Veruca Salt demands everything of her dad, and he fawns over here. He trips head over heels to give her everything she wants. And she knows she’s the boss.

Example 7: The Sexualized Child

Contemporary media is to blame for an insidious image of the sexualized child.

Children striking adult-like poses in hyper-sexualized clothing adorn many high-end clothing adverts in today’s age.

Often, we’ll see images of very young girls in makeup striking suggestive poses.

Here, we are often presented a view of the child in a way that suggests sex.

This image saw a surge in popularity as society and consumer culture became liberalized and companies sought newer, raunchier and edgier ways to turn a dime.

However, images of the sexualized child also draw our minds to the shadows of society. Child slavery and sex trafficking continues to occur in many parts of society, to the horror of right-thinking people around the world.

Here are some examples of the sexualized child:

Advertising. Take a look around at the magazine rack next time you are at the shopping center. See if you can find advertising that places children in sexualized poses.
Sex Trafficking. This is usually done in the shadows, although infamously the so-called Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq openly traded Yazidi girls as sex slaves during their reign of terror in recent years.

Example 8: The Child as Commodity

The commodified child is seen less for its innate worth as a human being and more for its economic worth.

Adults use the commodified child for financial gain. They turn children into movie stars, then pocket the profits; they force them to work in order to generate money; and they sell images of their child for their own personal gain.

Now, many children may want to be child actors. And that’s okay, too.

The premise behind the commodified child perspective is that parents or adults will use children to generate money for their own good, without regard for the welfare of the child.

There are two main ways in which we commodify children:

Child Actors. When parents force their children to act in order to make money off their own children, they become commodified.
Child Labor. When we put children to work in sweatshops and as chimney sweeps, we also commodify them. Note that sometimes this is inescapable; for example, areas of the world that experience extreme poverty have no choice but to set their children to work.

Example 9: The Victim Child

The victim child is a child who is voiceless and oppressed by social, political and economic forces out of their control.

The victim child is the child suffering from famine or displaced due to war. It’s the orphaned child, homeless child, or child living in an abusive household.

Victim children are often unseen and unheard. They exist in every country in the world, but are more often seen in nations torn apart by war and poverty.

Victim children often have no adults to advocate for them and protect them, or the adults in their lives are also victims themselves.

Examples of the Victim Child

These are the most common times we see the child constructed as a victim:

In Charity Advertising. You’ll see victim children regularly in advertisements seeking your money to help them out. Often times, these children are also photographed without their permission and these images commodified.
In Domestic Violence Households. Another common time we construct children as victims is when they are living in violent households. These children lack advocates, because the adults who should be advocating for them are abusers.

Example 10: The Noble Child

Noble children are children who are seen as saviours whose role is to save adults from themselves.

These children appear regularly in biblical mythologies (think: Jesus) and children’s books. Next time you flick through a children’s book, have a look at how the children are the heroes of the story. They save the world, the adults in the world, and all of their friends.

The noble child can also be a child who steps in and take an adult role when there is no competent adult to do the role for them.

This is most commonly seen when children lose their parents, and the oldest child assumes the role of the mother.

Here are two examples of the noble child:

Jesus Christ. Jesus is the child born to save the world from itself. He is seen from the very first day of his life as the answer to the problems that plague the world.
Harry Potter. Harry Potter fights against evil adults on behalf of goodness. Like Jesus, Harry Potter was always destined to take his position as the noble saviour.

Example 11: The Wise Child

Next time you watch a movie, pay close attention to the way the children in the movies act.

It is a very common trope in movies that the child takes a minor role in a movie, but plays an important role as the bearer or all wisdom.

The adult in the movie might find themselves in a tricky situation and ask the child for advice. The child, regularly, has very wise advice to give out of the blue!

The wise child is similar to the noble child because they’re seen as being blessed with great skill or knowledge.

The difference between the wise child and the noble child is that the noble child is an anointed saviour, while the wise child will lose their wisdom as they move towards adulthood.

Here’s a great example of the wise child:

‘From the Mouths of Babes.’ This saying reflects the trope that exists in popular culture: children have the capacity to make very wise statements that we adults should pay close attention to.
Rachel Hansen, 500 Days of Summer. Next time you watch the movie 500 Days of Summer , take a listen to the advice Rachel gives to her older brother Tom. What role does Rachel play in the movie?

Example 12: The Gendered Child

While we talk about social constructions of childhood, many feminist scholars also talk about the social construction of gender.

At the intersection of these two concepts is the social construction of gender in childhood .

Social and cultural theories from within the ‘new’ sociology of childhood argue that gender roles are drilled into children from a very young age.

All our perceptions of girls liking princesses may, maybe, have to do with the fact that media has reinforced this perception over and over again.

Others disagree that this is a social construct of childhood, and argue that there are some things biologically built into us that make girls and boys gravitate toward different activities.

Here are some more examples of how we gender children:

Boys like blue, Girls like pink. Why does my niece love pink so much? Is there something inherent in girls’ preferences for pink, or is it simply a socially constructed idea about childhood?
Boys like trucks, Girls like ponies. Is this, also, a social construct? Has media taught girls they should like ponies and princesses, or do they naturally gravitate to ‘girly’ things?

Example 13: The Agentic Child

The view of the child as ‘agentic’ is growing increasingly popular.

The term ‘Agentic’ stems from the concept of agency , or more simply “capacity to act out of free will”.

This perspective of childhood holds the belief that children are competent and capable. Children are seen as human beings with more power than we’ve traditionally afforded them the power.

An empowering vision, this way of seeing childhood tries to include children in decision making.

Agentic children are consulted and their opinions, thoughts and feelings. Thus, they are given more chances to be parts of participatory democratic society.

Here’s another example of the agentic child:

Contemporary Teaching Theories. Nowadays, most teachers see children as competent and capable. This filters through to their teaching strategies where they give children choices in their own education and are encouraged to play in their environments to engage in ‘active learning’.

Example 14: The Digital Native Child

We often perceive children these days as being digital natives.

A digital native is a person who has some in-built strengths in navigating digital technologies.

Children somehow are able to flick through tablet computers with ease at very young ages. They can code and navigate the labyrinth of files in desktop computes very efficiently.

And they frustratingly can adapt to and learn about new technologies rapidly.

The digital learning curve seems so much less steep for young people!

Now, whether this is our social construct (or ‘perception’) or if it’s reality, I don’t know!

But we’re beginning to construct children as computer wizards and masterminds, which is another cog changing the ways we perceive children and childhood.

Here’s some examples of the digital native child construct:

This article about a ’13-year-old prodigy’.
This article about tech savvy toddlers.

Some Final Thoughts

I’ve covered a lot of information about the social construction of childhood in this post. Different cultures and even subcultures see children differently.

If you’re using this post for writing an essay, I’ll just remind you one more time to try to cite original scholarly sources in your essay.

Here are the citations in APA format for the sources used in this article:

Ariés, P. (1962). Centuries of Childhood. Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK: Penguin Books (first published in English in 1962 by Jonathan Cape Ltd).

Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood (2nd ed.). Oxon USA: Routledge.

Sorin, R., & Galloway, G. (2006). Constructs of childhood: Constructs of self. Children Australia , 31 (2), 12-21.

Here are citations for additional quality scholarly sources that are influential in childhood studies:

Cunningham, H. (2006). The Invention of Childhood . London: Random House.

Holland, P. (2005). Picturing Childhood . London: I.B. Taurus.

Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Green Flags in a Relationship
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Signs you're Burnt Out, Not Lazy
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Toxic Things Parents Say to their Children
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Red Flags Early in a Relationship

Social Constructs of Childhood Essay (Critical Writing)

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Childhood is defined as the period preceding adulthood when one is considered a child, and this definition is accompanied by some responsibilities and privileges. Despite childhood generally falling within the aforementioned period, different societies treat those who fall within this category differently, underpinning the theory that childhood is a social construct.

Childhood ends at different ages in varying societies, with some labeling the adult age as 18 and others as 21 (Edwards, 2020). Some societies consider childhood as a period when one requires a lot of nurturing as they are considered vulnerable due to their significant newness to the world.

Other constructs consider childhood as a period when one should be exposed to all things in the world for their education and growth so that they interact with things in their environment effectively. The various constructs of childhood illustrate the varied views society has on childhood and shows that childhood is not a mere notion of age. Childhood is defined and affected by different tenets, with each sector of society offering invaluable input on what childhood is and offering contributions that enrich the period.

Childhood at a global scale is defined by international organizations such as the UN, which has an organ that defines the legal age and the accompanying rights and responsibilities. Political factions offer crucial input into what childhood entails, and the focus of political campaigns is usually based on what politicians can do for children when they clinch power (Spyrou, 2019).

Historically, the place and needs of children have varied with different societies and periods, depending on the needs of a certain time. Economic conditions sometimes underpin how the community defines childhood, depending on the resources available and how much help is needed to meet societal needs (Chetty et al., 2018).

This paper critically analyzes different constructs of childhood offered by the two presentations of this period. The first presentation is a poem that presents a view of children as innocent and clueless humans in need of constant care and protection. The second presentation is an image that depicts children as humans who must learn to become ready for adulthood.

Parental Care

The first presentation of social constructs of childhood is a poem titled ‘Simplicity of Childhood’. The poem by RoseAnn V. Shawiak is present in Figure 1 (Shawiak, 2015). The poem consists of four sentences that describe a child as a young human being in need of constant care and who is exposed to minimal stresses of life, shielded by adults. The first sentence of the poem highlights childhood as a period of gentle love of parental caring. This is a global characteristic of childhood as parents all over the world take responsibility for the welfare of their young ones.

UNICEF is the branch of the United Nations that deals with issues affecting children and conducts oversight of how the rights of children are observed in their countries (Bornstein and Rothenberg, 2022). Parental love is displayed to children differently in various societies, based on culture, the needs of those children, and the ability of those parents. Parental care varies based on the period of childhood one is at, as age increases before one achieves adulthood.

Parental love highlights childhood as a period of vulnerability when a child is incapable of meeting their own needs. The kind of care guardians offer their children entails feeding them during the early years because their bodies are not well developed to feed themselves. Parental care also ensures the financial needs of children are met, including shelter and clothing, alongside other basic needs.

Parental care additionally involves directing the steps children take to prevent them from veering from what is right. This involves correcting children whenever they make mistakes to ensure they acquire the right moral standards that make them valuable members of society (Cheah et al., 2019). The morality instilled in children is done following certain community standards generally acceptable amongst all people. The ethics instilled are sometimes derived from religious teachings, including Christianity and Islam. The moral standards instilled are a vital part of parental care as they teach children to adhere to the laws of the land to prevent contravening the authorities.

Simplicity, Purity, and Innocence

In the second sentence, childhood is depicted as a period characterized by simplicity, purity, and innocence. Children are usually born with no knowledge of all the things happening in the world. Newborns are not usually aware of the good or the evil within the world. The depiction of childhood as a period of simplicity elicits children as empty vessels ready to be filled with whatever is in the world (Berry, Vintimilla, and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020).

Children are also considered inherently innocent and without fault because they harbor no knowledge to commit atrocities. Even when they commit errors, they are excused because they have no evil intent. They are instead corrected to ensure they acquire the benefits of the lesson and so that they do not repeat the mistake. Children have no sophistication, and the complications of the world are gradually instilled into them through teachings in the world. These teachings are lessons picked from the various content these children consume in their environment.

Children are gradually corrupted in the world when they encounter the difficulties characteristic of life. Their innocence is initially preserved by their parents and guardians by teaching them kindness and goodness. The parents also teach these children to respect the laws prescribed in different environments to ensure these children do not encounter the negative effects of contravening these laws (Garlen, 2018).

An accurate illustration of the purity and innocence assumed characteristic of childhood is when these humans commit mistakes. Adults usually associate their errors with their age and lack of experience or knowledge while punishing adults for the same. However, this kind of treatment only lasts as long as society considers them children and stops with advanced age. A popular component of character building with the advancement of age is to ridicule adults committing mistakes and not behave as though they were children. Children are also considered simple due to the nature of their demands and the minimal complications associated with their expression.

Filled with Play

The life of a child is also described in the third sentence as one associated with play. The popular phrase ‘child’s play’ illustrates the limited seriousness of a child’s life and the fun associated with this stage of living. Play is a crucial stage of development that allows children to interact with the things around them and learn new things. Child play sometimes occurs at a personal level, with children engaging their toys alone (Sutapa et al., 2021).

Other times, play is with other children, where they meet and share the joy in games and enable each other to grow. The poem illustrates this by providing play with dolls, sisters, and brothers as examples. Adults, on the other hand, are required to deal with everything else within the environment and life in general, allowing children the freedom to have fun. In various cultures, the importance of play for children is emphasized as their adults provide various infrastructures and mechanisms for this.

Play enables children to imitate the various situations within their environment, increasing their familiarity with the new world. Play with dolls of various sizes and different sexes, for example, enables children to visualize the variety available concerning people. Childhood as a period filled with play is highlighted in some communities that allow children to share space during their early years (Dankiw et al., 2020). This is the essence of the daycare centers that have continued to become popular the world over, enabling children to play with others.

Play generally evolves with the growth of children, enabling them to become more physical with the increase in age. Engagement in sports such as football, athletics, and wrestling is a popular characteristic of later childhood (Haga, 2021). Play enables children to create friendships, become competitive, and develop their physical faculties. Play as a construct of childhood also enables children to become players within teams, underpinning the importance of teamwork and coordination.

Family Love and Embrace

The fourth sentence of the poem highlights the place of family in the stage of childhood and illustrates the need for love and embrace in the growth of children. Childhood is a stage that ought to be characterized by the closeness only a family can give children. Family is composed of loving parents, and a huge part of the memories children carry to their later years in life is how the family was closely knitted in their early years (Cekaite and Bergnehr, 2018).

The poem especially recognizes a mother as a critical component of childhood by highlighting the loving embrace they provide to their families. The role of the family in the stage of childhood is highlighted by society sufficiently and there are mechanisms instituted to ensure children have a family. The measures include adoption services for children who do not have families to ensure they have the blanket of a family that ensures their development is effective. Family offers children identity and provides a soft spot for children to land whenever they have challenges in life.

The lack of a family for some children growing up during these crucial formative years is a cause of dysfunction in adulthood. This represents a major inequality in the system that sets apart different types of adults. While this situation is inevitable for some societal reasons that cause divisions in families and deny some children the opportunity to enjoy affection, there is no denying the disadvantage (Likhar, Baghel, and Patil, 2022).

Childhood was originally envisioned within this social construct as a time of vulnerability and protection for children. Society has tried to devise mechanisms that repair the gaps in basic family structure, creating alternatives for these children. These include care homes, orphanages, and adoption services, and these vital infrastructures ensure that children can grow in an environment that accords them love and embrace. These families are mostly artificial constructs meant to replace the natural order of families and may sometimes not serve the purpose due to their limited longevity.

The second presentation of social constructs of childhood is an image of several children by a tree. The image is presented in Figure 2 (LifeSchool, 2018). The children are pictured playing beside a tree with a stream on the side. One child is hanging on the branch of a tree while the other children watch. Two children are pointing at the child while the other two just watch. The branch the child is hanging on overlies the stream and there is the danger of falling into the river. This illustrates the wild nature of childhood and the societal construct of this stage of life (Bley-Vroman, 2018).

Children are born clueless, empty, and without any experience of life, and the period of childhood encompasses exploring various aspects of life and learning. The surroundings of the children pictured are wild, and such environments are associated with massive danger.

The forest is not the only wild environment children are introduced to at birth, as all places are new. The view children have of the world is a place where they are naïve and where they are likely to acquire knowledge slowly (Howitt, Morris, and Colvill, 2020). Children, therefore, conduct various experiments in life, which enable them to understand their varied environments without apprehension of the dangers they are likely to experience.

In the image provided, the one child hanging on the branch is oblivious to all the happenings likely to occur. There is a possibility that the branch may break, and the child falls while hanging on for dear life. Breaking the branch is likely to harm the child’s body, breaking a bone or simply injuring muscles and other body tissues.

Additionally, the child is likely to fall into the stream and based on their knowledge of swimming, likely to drown. Drowning is a major marine accident likely to terminate the child’s life. The child does not visualize all these possible scenarios as an adult would and, therefore, continues to hang on the branch, and the depiction of childhood as a wild stage is clear from this scenario.

Experimentation in the Wild

Childhood allows children to make various experiments in life, to enable familiarization with the environment and life in general. The environment also allows children to test their limits through exposure to danger. Some societies believe that shielding children too much from creating memories and living experiences is a negative way of parenting (Samonova et al., 2022). These constructs argue that children learn best through trying new things and deriving vital lessons from these occurrences.

The child hanging on the branch is likely to realize their weight is a factor when attempting such experiments in the future through the fatigue experienced and the possibility of a fall if the child is unfortunate. Additionally, the child is likely to learn the dangers of water if they fall, experience the cold, and get saved or swim away in the long run. These are essential lessons children learn through interacting with the various elements of nature within their surroundings.

The lessons accrued are relevant not only for the child hanging on the branch but also for those around to witness the unfolding events. This highlights another vital component of this societal construct where children are poised to learn from the activities of other people, including other children (Vogt et al., 2020). Childhood memories with personal experimentation or peer experimentation are a vital component of adulthood, and the laughter such incidents evoke later is a testament to the importance of this. Some children are lucky to learn in the sight of others while some are not fortunate to have such a surrounding based on their families.

Most believers in the construct of childhood as a period that requires experimentation agree an ideal environment should include other children. The learning process is more comprehensive, and the demystification of the wild nature of life is quicker when lessons are not solely derived from personal experiences.

Supervision in the Learning Process

The image only includes the children, and it is possibly accurate to assume that the adult took the photo. This illustrates the importance of personal experiences in the process of educating children and development in childhood for functionality in adulthood. Verbal instruction as a method of learning for children is insufficient in providing all the lessons needed (Samawi et al., 2019). Trying new things ensures that children make observations, as compared to telling them things that rely on the guardian’s experience.

Guardians and parents are, however, urged to assume a safe distance while their children interact with the environment. This ensures that the process of learning does not result in bodily harm or become self-sabotaging, endangering life or health (Murray, 2021). In the image provided, if the adult is responsible for capturing the mage, they might dash and rescue the child before they drown. This is an intervention that does not interrupt the learning process and grants the child a chance to gain more lessons through the preservation of life.

A contemporary issue with childhood development is the change in the family unit and the consequence of these changes in the instruction of children. Scholars insist on the importance of both parents in the education of children, yet there are more single-parent families at this age (Ray, Choi, and Jackson, 2021). For many reasons in life, and customized causes in different families, the unit has disintegrated and the customary nuclear family faces threats (Rollè et al., 2019).

The mother, by being the nurturer, is always the primary source of instruction for children. There are situations where the mothers are absent and the fathers have been forced to provide the primary instruction. The other types of families in the modern age include ones with adopted children, where both parents belong to either the male or female sex. This has complicated the customary means of enlightening children, invoking the need for these families to adapt differently.

Lifetime Lessons

This construct enables the visualization of childhood as a preparatory stage for adulthood, enabling children to acquire skills and knowledge that prepare them for various roles in later life. Children are usually set on a path that enables them to assume various responsibilities in later life. Childhood offers children the choice to pick whatever interests them career-wise and equips them with the skills for certain jobs.

The educational system, for example, is one largely focused on producing adults who can become professionals in various fields, continually serving their communities (Zelkowitz et al., 2021). In addition to the knowledge for certain jobs, the education system teaches children the soft skills necessary to serve their communities diligently. Children also learn how to behave when at certain positions in life to ensure they display dignity and focus.

Early childhood lessons at home additionally teach children how they are expected to behave within a marriage setting. Boys acquire lessons from their fathers about how to become dads and husbands to their wives, while girls learn how to become mothers and wives to their husbands.

These lessons are underpinned by the societal division of roles and the expectations of each gender by the community. It is a largely accepted fact within the scholarly community that boys grow up to become a reflection of their fathers and the same is true of girls (Milman et al., 2018). This illustrates the vitality of childhood as a learning stage and a preparatory phase for children to acquire knowledge and skills for future roles.

In conclusion, society constructs childhood differently and offers various standards for this stage. The rights of children and their responsibilities are a crucial component of this phase, agreed upon by various stakeholders. The first representation provided in this paper is a poem that offers an in-depth understanding of societal views of childhood. The poem demystifies childhood as a stage filled with happiness and parental care. Additionally, childhood is a stage of simplicity, purity, and innocence, and one without many responsibilities but instead filled with play.

The place of family, and especially mothers in the early stage of life, is invaluable and well-illustrated in the poem. The second presentation is an image of children playing, and vital lessons are drawn from this photo. Childhood is linked to the wild and experimentation is highlighted as a crucial method of learning and acquiring new knowledge. Supervision in the learning process is important and the ideation of childhood as a preparatory stage for adulthood is essential.

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Sociology of Childhood: Significance, Social Construction, Examples

Childhood is a significant period in the lives of most individuals, and it is generally considered to be a natural biological stage of development that heavily influences one’s thoughts, ideas and attitudes. This article will mainly discuss the period of childhood from a sociological perspective, focusing on the notion of childhood as believed by society. It will mainly address the social construction of childhood and how experiential childhood differs across cultures and communities, eventually shedding light on how adults construct childhood.

Significance of Childhood

Social Construction of Childhood

Social construction is usually 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” (Norozi & Moen, 2016). The consensus is that children and childhood knowledge is a social construct, and it is not rooted in organic realities. The notion of childhood is deeply intertwined with societal perspectives. The reality of how childhood is perceived does not exist in isolation. It is heavily influenced by other factors such as culture, time, values and norms. Therefore, sociologists argue that as opposed to common belief, the reality of childhood is not determined by age. Rather, it is socially constructed through ideas and beliefs that are reinforced by society. Taking this into account, childhood experiences across the globe differ in significant ways. Not only this, but the year of birth and other cohort effects can also influence experiences of childhood across different generations. Other factors include socio-economic background, race, ethnicity, etc.

According to Philippe Aries, a French medievalist, childhood was not even seen as a separate stage of life until the 15th century. In his book, the Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1960), he argues that the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval century. Children were expected to work and live as adults. According to his thesis, social constructionism of childhood is then a valid phenomenon, because, without it, the notion of childhood would fail to exist.

Cross-Cultural Differences

We have already discussed how different factors affect childhood experiences. Values and norms are some of these important factors and these attitudes are mainly reinforced by the culture that one is associated with. Thus, sociologists argue that childhood exists mainly as a dominant product of culture. According to Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, cultural learnings precede development, which means that culture heavily influences a child’s thoughts and beliefs. According to Jens Qvortrup, childhood as a social construct is extremely open to cultural change and since culture is mainly upheld by adults, the theoretical notions of childhood are also mainly constructed to reflect adult beliefs (Qvortrup, 1989). Other developmental theorists such as Bronfenbrenner also view development in a socio-cultural context, asserting that child-rearing differs across different ecological systems.

In Japan, children are trusted to walk home alone after school much earlier than in India. Even children in elementary schools are trusted to take the subway and run errands. Due to the high culture of interdependence and joint ownership, children are taught to trust almost any member they encounter in public (The Wire, 2016). This is wildly different from India, where even teenagers depend on caregivers for routine tasks.

Adult Construction of Childhood

In 2006, Sorin and Galloway outlined ten constructions of self that position the notion of childhood in relation to an adult. These constructions provided a significant lesson on the psycho-social impact of adult relationships on the notions of childhood. These constructions are:

Also Read: How to Apply Sociology in Daily Life

Ali Norozi, S., & Moen, T. (2016). Childhood as a social construction. Journal of Educational and Social Research . https://doi.org/10.5901/jesr.2016.v6n2p75

Barone, F. (2020, January 31). A cross-cultural perspective on childhood . Human Relations Area Files – Cultural information for education and research. Retrieved May 29, 2022, from https://hraf.yale.edu/a-cross-cultural-perspective-on-childhood/

Leonard, M. (2016). The sociology of children, childhood and generation. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529714494

Qvortrup, J. (1989). On change of children and childhood. Early Influences Shaping The Individual , 85–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-5634-9_8

Sorin, R. (2016, January 31). Constructs of childhood: Constructs of self . Children Australia. Retrieved May 29, 2022, from https://www.academia.edu/21282427/Constructs_of_cconstructs_of_self

Childhood as a Social Construction

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Social Constructions of Childhood

Not until we start to ask the necessary questions, of the world and ourselves, can we begin to uncover, de-construct and understand the very constructs that have shaped our lives and experiences. Every single child and adult is affected by society’s historical and social constructions. With the alarming increase in the intensity and complexity of physical, emotional and mental ill health, violence, corruption and self-abuse, it is clear that as a society we have lost our natural way of being. The construct of the agentic child represents what may be possible when adults remember the power and responsibility they hold and the possibility of reflecting this back to our children. An adult’s willingness to self-reflect, uncover and deconstruct their own childhood, is what ultimately guides a deep respect, understanding and equality with children.

Related Papers

Reesa Sorin

ABSTRACT Notions of childhood have been debated through time and place. This paper works from the understanding of childhood as an adult imposed, socially constructed and culturally transmitted concept. This paper provides a typology of ten ways in which adults construct children and childhood. The authors assert that in the process of defining children, adults necessarily and simultaneously define their own position/s in relation to children. Thus for each of the ten constructs of childhood, the authors present ten types of relationship adults consciously or unconsciously impose upon themsleves when they work from these constructions. The authors intend that the typology presented creates a beginning tool for conscious, critical reflection of how we are perceiving children and how this perception may drive our work and relationships with them. It may also provide a reflective tool for imagining working differently with children in ways which better serve them (and us!).

Childhood and Youth Studies

Will Coster

Views of children and childhood vary historically, culturally and individually. While historic views positioned children as either evil (products of their parents' intimacy) or innocent (passive and in need of nurturing) (Branscombe, Castle, Dorsey, Surbeck & Taylor, 2000), a number of other images of childhood have emerged. In 2005, taking a reconceptualist perspective and examining written and visual documents and emergent data, Sorin and Galloway developed a Typology of ten Constructs of Childhood, These are: the child as innocent, the child as evil, the child as miniature adult, the child as adult-in-training, the noble/saviour child, the commodified child, the snowballing child, the out-of-control child, the child as victim and the agentic child. This paper uses the typology to examine data collected through parent and child interviews in Canada and in Australia.

Education 3-13

patrick lewis

Olivia Stead

David F Lancy

Center for Educational Policy Studies Journal

Jasmina Jerant

Ivana Bankovic

A central part of recent debates in the sociology of childhood has been the division between children as becomings and children as beings. Both positions have been well argued and have had significant impact on everyday teachers’ practice, but still they present diametrically opposite attitudes towards the concept of a child and his/her development. In former view, children are seen as subjects largely without subjectivity and individuality, as a ‘set of potentials’ or a ‘project in making’ which are to develop into adults (beings) or, in other words, that children are in the state of ‘not yet being’. The new perspectives on the concept of children regard children as beings. In this view children are seen as active human beings, who take part in everyday life which is more than just preparation for the future. A child is seen as a social actor and should be understood in its own right and not by assumed shortfall of competence, reason or significance. There is a growing need for a model that can bring these different positions together and make them integrated, interdependent and necessary components of the same field instead of being competitive, in order to better understand the concept of a child and to increase his/her agency in the contemporary world. This paper will examine different constructions of childhood as well as concepts of children as beings and children as becomings and argue for the importance of connecting these two concepts, so that they should not be considered as opposed but rather integrated and complementary. Although they are well-supported, neither being nor becoming discourse on their own provide adequate viewpoint for understanding of children and childhood in the society they live in. Both aspects are interrelated in children’s lives. Furthermore, both views on children and childhood have shortcomings which could be overcome by complementing one with the other. Keywords: childhood, children, beings, becomings

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy

Jurgen De Wispelaere , Anca Gheaus

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are thus essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source for the key topics, problems and debates in this crucial and exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: · Being a child · Childhood and moral status · Parents and children · Children in society · Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults’ rights? What (if anything) gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disability in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children? How are children’s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology.

Mirjana Šagud

Recently, research on the child and childhood as a social and cultural phenomenon has been approached from the position of multidimensionality and extreme complexity. Childhood, as opposed to the beliefs of the majority of adults, is not an isolated, protected, well controlled and predictable manner of guiding a child towards the adult world. Childhood is more focused on the general perception of child and suggests the existence of a special, separate and fundamentally different social group and category. A child’s status as seen from the adult view and its culturally and historically defined construct changes and varies with its definition of the physical and/or sexual maturity, legal status or age group affiliation. The concept of child and childhood deals with the individual, usually defined from the point of view of an adult person. Two extreme views of children and childhood are related to the concept of designing, modeling, building and desirable socialization, or emphasizing ...

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Childhood: The Concept of Social Construction

Jame Allison and Alan Prout argue that changing times and cultural trends give rise to different conceptions of children and childhood. They note that these conceptions have been influenced over time by socio-economic, cultural and religious factors that became dominant at various historical times. Apart from societal ideologies, parental ideas also shift to give rise to different sets of conceptions about childhood. During the eighteenth century for instance, religious rhetoric by John Wesley urged parents to “break the will of their children, and bring their will into submission to theirs (parents) that it may be afterward subject to the will of God” (Allison and Prout 36). By examining the various socio-culturally defined conceptions of childhood, and with reference to early childhood learning, this paper argues that notions about childhood and children are socially constructed.

The integration of children into the society is characterized by socio-cultural conditioning processes that mould the child to fit his/her expected role within the community. During the early childhood learning and social interaction stages, children are exposed to learning experiences that reflect the dominant socio-cultural trends. This is seen right from pre-schooling years, where the child’s cognitive skills are developed through planned and controlled learning activities. The approaches that are used in child education are informed by the society’s beliefs about children, and these constructed images influence the way learning is modeled and implemented. The social cultural beliefs about children’s cognitive development determine the way adults relate with children, how children’s behavior is shaped and used by educators in curriculum development and pedagogy. For instance, in the Victorian Curriculum, the first phase of schooling is within the Early Learning and Development Framework that begins at birth and ends in year eight. At the same time, the educational process is aimed at socializing children into the larger society as well as preparing them for communal life. Victoria’s Minister for early childhood education, Maxim Morand, says that “It enables early childhood professionals to support individual children and families, and design programs which respond to local families and communities” (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development 2009).

The concept of children’s social construction is portrayed by the respected American kindergarten teacher and author Vivian Gussin Paley, in her book You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. Paley revisits childhood, and the things that little children do on their journey to maturity and adulthood. She explores the daily experiences that impact on their socio-cognitive development, with emphasis on social situations and interaction experiences as the forces that shape their understanding of the world.

Paley represents the world from a child’s point of view, examining how young minds perceive themselves and others. Their guilt is innocent, for their discrimination and unfairness is honestly sincere….a belief by which they believe and act. Christine Woodrow views this as a socially constructed understanding of children, especially when they are portrayed in the media as always being innocent and victims of abuse. She notes that the most embraced and easily visible image in contemporary western society is the portrayal of the child as virtually innocent. She reports that:

This image of innocence is constantly represented in the sentimental world of greeting cards as well as being played out in the media portrayal of tragic and catastrophic events such as child murders and abuse. When children are involved, the event is often characterized as something that has taken away children’s innocence, as if this is an inherent condition of childhood (Woodrow 57).

This socially defined understanding of children’s behavior places them in a context within which they are given the freedom to express themselves in assertive terms, since it is part of their development. In Paley’s class, for instance, Lisa believes ‘the game is hers’, and therefore should make the rules- choosing who should play and who shouldn’t. This behavior by children is not portrayed as a system of rules, but rather as part of childhood development processes, in which the child is self centered. Paley thus portrays the child’s world, the little universe in which he/she is the center around which everything else ought to operate. If they don’t want you in their game, they simply, out-rightly and plainly tell you “You Can’t Play.” This construction of children as being susceptible to certain behaviors at different stages is seen in the application of teaching methodologies that are learner centered, in an effort to identify and meet learner needs.

Similarly, Paley highlights the importance of social interaction in a child’s development, and the negative effects of social rejection upon victims. She examines the loneliness and psychological drift of the outsider who can’t fit in any group. The fat girl with only one dress is an out-cast among her classmates. In the child’s world, she will only get friends if she lost her weight, or be accepted if she got a new dress. This simplistic explanation of children’s reasoning is a reflection of the collective societal understanding of childhood behaviors, and that what society knows about children is used as a framework of describing their behaviors.

With different historical developments, different ideologies emerge to describe childhood. Jane Kehily notes that history ushers in different perspectives. She says that memory get reconstructed with new images, narratives and experiences” (Kehily 26). In childhood education, these changes are reflected in the theoretical perspectives that have been developed in relation to child education, al of which point the fact that the child and the concept of childhood is socially constructed. This is reflected in the educational concept that children’s minds are blank, ready to receive and integrate what the child learns through various mediums such as socialization in affective skills and classroom learning for the development of cognitive skills. One such theory is the social learning model by Albert Bandura, which posits that children learn through observation and imitation of adults. In Pale’s book, for instance, she noted that when children are left alone, they conform to certain patterns of a hierarchical order, which reflects the aspect of authority in the society. In her experiences with kindergarten children, she observed that within their social circles, a hierarchy of importance and power quickly establishes and develops into castes, giving some the right of power to limit the social and physical activities of others (Paley 12). On this basis, educators are trained to act as role models, by displaying desirable behaviors which children are expected to copy. As mentioned before, the learned behavior should reflect what is acceptable within the larger society.

Levy Vygotsky’s theory of child development takes a socio-cultural perspective on development, indicating that different cultures have a different conception of childhood. He focused on the role of language and culture in nurturing a child’s development. Language supplies the material and medium through which children learn. In Paley’s class, which represents a typical American classroom, the use of language is central in communicating ideas to the learners. It is by language that she engaged them in an interactive discourse, in which they were able to examine their actions and those of others, as well as expressing their feelings. in the Victorian curriculum, on the other hand, children at this stage are not considered to be ready for a focused cognitive learning. On the contrary, they focus on physical exercise. Culture, on its part, provides the context within which a behavior is both born and developed. Within the school environment, children establish a system of group inclusion and exclusion, where non-members are not to participate in group activities such as games. The exclusion of Clara from playing by Lisa demonstrates this element of a culture that discriminates against outsiders. Once it takes roots, new comers will find an established culture into which they adapt. In this light, Vygotsky’s theory suggests that the right culture should be promoted so as to enable children to develop social skills that help them accommodate others. This means that different cultures will have different behavioral expectations on learners of the same age.

Similarly, the socio-cultural perspective posits that society and culture work together to promote cognitive development of a child. Children from different cultural backgrounds have conflicting viewpoints. For instance, Lisa’s viewpoint is that she is free to decide who to play with. Vygotsky recognizes the role of self talk in enhancing learning. The involvement of learners in discussions under the guidance of adults helps them to understand difficult concepts. Paley’s discussion with her pupils shows how dialogue is important in engaging children in the learning process.

Finally, Vygotsky’s theory argues that teachers should operate within the “Zone of Proximal Development,” the activities a child can perform with assistance from a peer or adult, but cannot perform independently” (Berk 64). Educators ought to understand the needs of the learners at their various stages of development, and help them achieve those needs. Thus, children of the same age should be presented with experiences that address their needs. However, children from different cultural societies do not always exhibit the same abilities or educational needs at the same developmental stage.

The application of the Classical Conditioning Theory by Ivan Pavlov in early childhood learning further demonstrates that childhood and the child are socially constructed. Based on his experimentation with dogs, it is assumed that children could also be conditioned to behave in certain ways. In Pavlov’s experiment, the dogs produced saliva when the bell rang following its repeated pairing with food. The food acted as the unconditioned stimulus (US) since it could elicit a response (salivation) naturally. Eventually, continued association of the bell and food started to elicit similar reactions from the dogs.

In learning contexts, the theory is applied to achieve predetermined educational goals by way of conditioning the learners’ behavior. The socio-cultural idea behind this approach is the socially entrenched belief that the environment conditions the children’s perceptions. For these reasons, the school environment is designed to elicit learning instincts in children. For instance, the use of visual displays helps to elicit certain patterns of reasoning in children, in terms of the particular subject. The idea of manipulating the environment to influence learners’ behavior reflects society’s belief that children’s mental processes are shaped by their surroundings.

The Operant Conditioning Theory by B.F Skinner posits that “some responses are learned because they produced pleasant consequences, rather than because they were associated with an existing stimulus-response connection” (Hayes and Orrell, 19). He called it the ‘Law of Effect,’ since what resulted after a certain behavior either discouraged or reinforced the behavior. For instance, saying ‘excellent’ after a correct answer by a pupil will reinforce the behavior of answering questions.

In positive reinforcement, a certain behavior is rewarded, such as buying a child a gift or prize after posting good academic results. The gift will motivate the student and other learners to work hard. Negative reinforcement takes place when a certain behavior is rewarded by exempting the person from undesirable experiences or activities. For instance, when a student gets to school on time may be excluded from manual work.

The grading of the learning process into different stages indicates the differentiation of children’s learning capacities at different stages. Piaget argued that children learn systematically in relation to their mental development. They pass through various stages of cognitive development, learning to conceptualize and assimilate various concepts depending on their mental capacities. In each stage, their points of reference shift as their scopes of perception widen to accommodate expanded understanding of their experiences. At her age, Clara thinks that everybody dislikes her because Lisa does. The one single situation of being rejected is taken to represent the whole of reality. Later, after an intellect engaging discussion with their teacher, she learns that Cynthia had actually all along wanted to play with her, only that she can’t do so without approval from Lisa. (Though unfortunate, the incident also reflects how children learn to respect what they think are centers of authority- their friends who are presumed to have the right to decide on behalf of the rest). It is the stage when children learn to analyze individual units taken from the whole.

But what comes out most clearly, and perhaps is captured by the book’s title, is the stage of egocentrism in cognitive development. Lisa believes that the game is hers, and is quite surprised that others want to determine the rules for her. In response to the challenge against her right to decide who plays and who don’t, she argues: “But it is my game! It is up to me; else I won’t play again; ever!” (Paley 16). At this stage, children tend to think that they are the center of the universe and that it rotates around them (Atherton, 2009). Accordingly, Lisa believes that the game is what everybody else wants. Since the game happens to belong to her, then she should decide the rules and nobody should challenge her. It then follows that educators should try to provide learning experiences that allow learners to exercise some degree of independence. At the same time, they should try to perceive things from learners’ point of view so as to understand their needs.

However, the age-based grading system is not universal to all human societies, but subject to the educational system of each society. For instance, the Victorian curriculum reflects the Australian approach to age and learning ability, which puts emphasis on different aspects of learning with each stage of progress. In early childhood stages, learning is focused on physical exercise and ways of maintaining their physical health. This domain reflects Jean Piaget’s stage of motor skills development in children, when they can actively move their body parts. In other societies, aspects like interaction and socialization may integrate into the curriculum during one stage. This is despite the fact that children in both settings may belong to the same age group.

In the US, for instance, cognitive development is emphasized during the formative years, which begins at birth through the age of five. Up to the age of three, homecare and childcare centers prepare children for early childhood learning. At this stage, childcare and education are inseparable, in that adult-child relationship and learning bear heavily on shaping their educational, social and emotional development in readiness to join preschool programs. Therefore, early childhood caregivers and educators play a key role in preparing children for preschool education in the US system, which is absent in most other societies. The different approaches taken were dependent on the predominant discourses that existed (Burr 26).

In addition, early childhood education in the US emphasizes on the child’s social and emotional needs. Social and emotional needs address aspects of social interaction, behavior and emotion regulation as well as paying attention. At this stage, attention is paid to language competency for English language learners, physical, mental, cognitive and mental disabilities that may hinder learning and delay transition into early elementary level learning. Children’s economic background is also addressed to offer necessary support for poor families.

The holistic approach of the American system to all aspects of learners’ needs differ from those in other third world countries. It recognizes various child related issues, which such as economic backgrounds. Poverty affects a child’s growth and development in several ways. Children from poor families may not benefit form childcare services that nurture a child’s socio-cognitive abilities. They lack professional care to develop their mental faculties necessary for effective early childhood and preschool learning. Cognitive development is affected most in that they don’t get exposure to experiences that foster language competency and communication skills. Poor families, for instance, may lack interaction with the media through TV, which is a very crucial medium in developing a child’s language abilities. Poor health is another aspect of early childhood education that is taken into consideration in the American curriculum. It has the effect of delaying the child’s cognitive faculties or impairment. The long-term effects will be late school entry and slow learning. And finally, poor economic backgrounds can affect the child’s emotional development in case of financial related disputes and quarrels between parents. It creates a tense atmosphere within the home, where the child cannot express her/him-self freely.

In this regard, several programs have been put in place to help children from poor families. They are state funded initiatives to support low-income families in educating their children. They include: Early Reading Program which give grants to develop model programs to promote school readiness of children from poor families; Preschool Grants for Special Education which support for children of the ages 3-5 with disabilities; Early Childhood Educator Professional Development for Program to train educators in poor areas and Ready to Learn Television Program which facilitate learning through video programs for children and parents.

Historical developments in early childhood education portray a changing landscape of treating different age groups within the schooling system. In the ancient Greek education system, the Spartans laid much emphasis on the physical development of children. This was because in relation to the society’s needs, which directed educational goals to physical body strength. Because of the any wars the Spartans where involved in, their education system was concerned with raising accomplished warriors. Accordingly, male children were taken at birth and exposed to severely cold conditions, so that weaklings could die and leave those equipped with better survival mechanisms. The survivors were taken into barracks or training camps, where they grew up learning physical exercises necessary for defense and combat skills. Similarly, the education of girls was intended to raise strong women who could give birth to equally strong males to be trained as warriors. Consequently, girls were trained in gymnastics so as to make their bodies enduring the strains of child bearing. This approach departs from contemporary understanding of childhood, where children are treated tenderly and with affection” (Allison and Prout 35).

In conclusion, the perception of childhood is determined by socio-cultural institutions of different societies. In the education system, the different theoretical approaches to learning indicate that society has predetermined conceptions about children and childhood. Different curriculums focus on different domains of learning at a given age, indicating that there are no universal standards for childhood. And lastly, societies have historically held different societal expectations for society’s members, assigning different roles to various age groups.

Works Cited

Allison, James, Prout, Alan. Constructing and reconstructing childhood: contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Atherton, Steve J. Learning and Teaching;Piaget’s developmental theory [On-line] UK.2009. Web.

Berk, Laura E. Child development . New York: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2006.

Burr, Vivien. An introduction to social constructionism . Routledge, 1995.

Kehily, Mary J. An introduction to childhood studies . New York: McGraw-Hill International, 2004

Hayes Nelly., Orrell, Slick. Psychology: An Introduction . London: Longman Group UK Ltd, 2004

Paley, Vivian. G. You can’t say you can’t play . New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority. “Curriculum Structure.” Victoria Curriculum Development Authority. 2009. Web.

Woodrow, Christine. “Revisiting Images of the Childhood Education: Reflections and Considerations.” Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 24 [1999] 57.

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Childhood: Social Construction of Childhood

Last updated 29 Oct 2020

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To what extent are the ideas we have about childhood created by society, rather than being determined by the biological age of a ‘child?

That is what we explore in this video as part of our series on the nature of childhood, and changes in the status of children in the family and society.

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Good videos showing the social construction of childhood

Table of Contents

Below are some relatively recent examples of documentary video evidence which demonstrate how attitudes to children vary across cultures, supporting the view that childhood is socially constructed .

This post has been written primarily for students studying the families and households module within A-level sociology

Child Brides

In India, teenage girls aged 14-15 are sometimes pressurized into marrying by their family against their will, often due to financial reasons. The video below explores this, but looks at how teenage female victims try to avoid getting married when they do not want to…

In the less Developed United States of America, it appears that the agents of the State are sometimes less willing to protect child victims of rape and coerced marriage than they are in India.

For reasons that I don’t fully understand and aren’t really explored in the video, the 24 year old child rapist wasn’t prosecuted.

Instead he was legally allowed to marry his by then 15 year old pregnant ‘girlfriend’, with further violent abuse continuing after the marriage.

As I say, I don’t understand how the State can legally sanction violence against children, but that’s life in an underdeveloped country such as America I guess!

Ritualised Violence against girls

In the Hamar Tribe in Ethiopia,

NB this isn’t play whipping, some of the blows these girls receive are serious, as you can see from the scars in the video still below, the whipping often opens up quite significant wounds which take time to heal, and with healing comes scaring.

Child slavery in West Africa

In the documentary below, one victim of trokosi revisits her home country of Ghana to find out why this happened to her.

She was lucky enough to get out because an American negotiated her release and became her adopted father, which kind of suggests this religion is pretty flexible!

Further examples of how childhood is socially constructed

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DOI: 10.5860/choice.50-1160
Corpus ID: 143342365

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Saint petersburg.

Ewer and basin (lavabo set)

Probably made at Chisinau Court Workshop

Andrei Nikiforovich Voronikhin

Alexander Danilovich Menshikov (1673–1729)

Unknown Artist, Swiss, Austrian, or German, active Russia ca. 1703–4

Samuel Margas Jr.

The Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) on Horseback, Attended by a Page

Attributed to Georg Christoph Grooth

Table snuffbox

Niello scenes after a print entitled Naufrage (Shipwreck) by Jacques de Lajoüe , published in Paris 1736

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)

Jean Antoine Houdon

Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, St. Petersburg

Cup with cover and saucer

Two bottle coolers

Zacharias Deichman the Elder

Catherine II The Great, Empress of Russia

Jean-Baptiste Nini

Coffee service

Johan Henrik Blom

Tureen with cover

Tureen with cover and stand

Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers

Possibly by Pierre-François-Mathis de Beaulieu (for Jean Georges)

Pair of scallop-shell dishes

Sugar bowl (from a tea service)

Workshop of David Roentgen

Beaker and saucer

David Roentgen and Company in Saint Petersburg

Johann Friedrich Anthing

Drop-front desk (secrétaire à abattant or secrétaire en cabinet)

Attributed to Martin Carlin

Pair of Flintlock Pistols of Empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796)

Johan Adolph Grecke

Gardner Manufactory

Center table

Imperial Armory, Tula (south of Moscow), Russia

Female Shaman

Pair of vases

Nikolai Stepanovich Vereshchagin

Jugate busts of Czarevitch Paul and Maria Feodorovna of Russia

James Tassie

Wolfram Koeppe Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2003

The Birth of Saint Petersburg Russia, or “Muscovy” as it was often called, had rarely been considered a part of Europe before the reign of Czar Peter I (Piotr Alexeievich), known as Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725). His supremacy marked the beginning of the country’s “Westernization,” whereby the political, economic, and cultural norms of the western European monarchies would become the basis for “civilizing” Russia. A radical transformation was needed to launch Russia into the modern world, a transformation later called the Petrine Revolution. The young czar, feeling oppressed by the medieval traditions and ecclesiastical patriarchy of seventeenth-century Moscow, wanted to Westernize Russia in a hurry, defying the sluggish pace of history.

Saint Petersburg was born on May 16, 1703 (May 5 by the old Julian Russian calendar). On that day, on a small island on the north bank of the Neva River, Peter cut two pieces of turf and placed them cross-wise. The setting was inauspicious. The area was a swamp that remained frozen from early November to March, with an annual average of 104 days of rain and 74 days of snow. The army, under the command of Alexander Menshikov ( 1996.7 ), had conquered the region shortly before. To show his gratitude, the czar later appointed Menshikov the first governor-general of Saint Petersburg. The fortification of the territory kept the Swedish enemy at bay and secured for Russia permanent access to the Baltic Sea. The partially ice-free harbor would be crucial to further economic development. All buildings on the site were erected on wooden poles driven into the marshy, unstable ground. Stones were a rare commodity in Russia, and about as valuable as precious metals.

The Dutch name “Piterburkh” (later changed to the German version, “Petersburg”) embodied the czar’s fascination with Holland and its small-scale urban architecture. He disliked patriarchal court ceremony and felt at ease in the bourgeois domestic life that he experienced during his travels throughout Europe on “the Great Embassy” (1697–98). However, the primary purpose of this voyage was to acquire firsthand knowledge of shipbuilding—his personal passion—and to learn about progressive techniques and Western ideas.

The victory over the Swedish army at Poltava in June 1709 elevated Russia to the rank of a European power, no longer to be ignored. Peter triumphed: “Now with God’s help the final stone in the foundation of Saint Petersburg has been laid.” By 1717, the city’s population of about 8,000 had tripled, and grew to around 40,000 by the time of Peter’s death in 1725. Saint Petersburg had become the commercial, industrial, administrative, and residential “metropolis” of Russia. By the 1790s, it had surpassed Moscow as the empire’s largest urban vicinity and was hailed as the “Venice of the North,” an allusion to the waterway system around the local “Grand Canal,” the Neva River.

Peter the Great’s Successors The short reign of Peter’s second wife, Empress Catherine I (r. 1725–27), who depended on her long-time favorite Menshikov, saw the reinstatement of the luxurious habits of the former imperial household. The archaic and ostentatious court display in the Byzantine tradition that Peter had so despised was now to be restored under the pretext of glorifying his legacy. Enormous sums of money were lavished on foreign luxury items, demonstrating the court’s new international status and its observance of western European manners ( 68.141.133 ).

During the reigns of Empress Anna Ioannovna (r. 1730–40), niece of Peter I ( 1982.60.330a,b ), and her successor Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna, r. 1741–62; 1978.554.2 ), Peter’s daughter, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a Baroque extravaganza through the talents of architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–1771) and other Western and Russian artisans. Foreign powers began to recognize Russia’s importance and competed for closer diplomatic relations. Foreign immigrants increased much faster than the local population, as scholars, craftsmen, artisans, and specialists of all kinds flocked to the country, and especially to Saint Petersburg ( 65.47 ; 1982.60.172,.173 ; 1995.327 ).

Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) In a coup d’état assisted by the five Orloff brothers ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ), Catherine II overthrew her husband, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762) and became empress. Catherine saw herself as the political heir of Peter the Great. A German-born princess of Anhalt-Zerbst who, after her marriage, became more Russian than any native, Catherine aimed at completing Peter’s legacy ( 52.189.11 ; 48.73.1 ). Having lived in isolation in the shadow of Elizabeth I since her marriage to the grand duke in 1745, the time had come to satisfy her thirst for life and her insatiable quest for culture and international recognition. An admirer of the Enlightenment and devoted aficionada of Voltaire’s writings, Catherine stimulated his cult in Russia ( 1972.61 ). In response, the French philosopher dedicated a poem to the czarina; her reply, dated October 15, 1763, initiated a correspondence that influenced the empress on many matters until Voltaire’s death in 1778. The hothouse cultural climate of Saint Petersburg during Catherine’s reign can be compared to the artistic and intellectual ferment in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century.

Catherine’s desire to enhance her fame and her claim to the throne was immortalized by her own witty play on words in Latin: “Petro Primo / Catharina Secunda” (To Peter the First / from Catherine the Second). This she had inscribed on the vast lump of granite in the form of a wave supporting the Bronze Horseman on the banks of the Neva in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. This triple-lifesize equestrian figure of Peter the Great took the French sculptor Falconet twelve years to complete, until it was finally cast—after three attempts—in 1782.

Catherine had military expansion plans for Russia and a cultural vision for its capital Saint Petersburg. Above all, she knew how to attract devoted supporters. Only nine days after the overthrow of her husband, Catherine wrote to Denis Diderot, offering to print his famous Encyclopédie , which had been banned in France. Catherine recognized the power of art to demonstrate political and social maturity. She acquired entire collections of painting ( Watteau , for example), sculpture, and objects. The empress avoided anything that could be called mediocre or small. With the help of sophisticated advisors, such as Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, her ambassador in Paris, Denis Diderot, Falconet, and the illustrious Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, the empress assembled the core of today’s State Hermitage Museum. Catherine favored luxury goods from all over Europe ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ; 17.190.1158 ). She commissioned Sèvres porcelain and Wedgwood pottery as well as hundreds of pieces of ingeniously conceived furniture from the German manufactory of David Roentgen in Neuwied ( 48.73.1 ). Furthermore, she encouraged and supported Russian enterprises and craftsmen, like local silversmiths ( 47.51.1–.5 ; 1981.367.1,.2 ) and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory ( 1982.60.171 ; 1982.60.177,.178 ; 1982.60.175 ), as well as privately owned manufactories ( 1982.60.158 ). Catherine especially liked the sparkling decorative products of the Tula armory steel workshop ( 2002.115 ), genuine Russian art forms with a fairy-tale-like appearance, and in 1775 merged her large collection of Tula objects with the imperial crown jewels in a newly constructed gallery at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg.

Catherine’s son and successor Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, r. 1796–1801) disliked his mother and her aesthetic sensibility ( 1998.13.1,.2 ). As grand duke, he had spent most of his time with his second wife Maria Feodorovna ( 1999.525 ) outside of Saint Petersburg, in Gatchina Palace and Pavlovsk Palace. These they transformed into the finest Neoclassical architectural gems in Europe ( 1976.155.110 ; 2002.115 ).

Koeppe, Wolfram. “Saint Petersburg.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stpt/hd_stpt.htm (October 2003)

Additional Essays by Wolfram Koeppe

Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Abraham and David Roentgen .” (June 2013)
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France, 1600–1800 A.D.
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Blom, Johan Henrik
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Chisinau Court Workshop
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St Petersburg: the city of three revolutions

25 October 2017 By Owen Hatherley Essays

Instigated by an unequal and divided populace, St Petersburg was pivotal in a succession of momentous revolutionary upheavals

The city variously known through history as St Petersburg, Petrograd or Leningrad used to be called ‘the Cradle of Three Revolutions’. It was central to a succession of massive upheavals: the eventually failed Empire-wide uprising of 1905, the February Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the Tsar, and the October Revolution of the same year that began an experiment in total social transformation. Over recent decades, it has become something of a forgotten city, though it is the fourth largest metropolis in Europe, after Moscow, Istanbul and London. Its 18th-century canal-side streets look to the untrained eye like a tougher Copenhagen, yet rather than being lined by bicycles, they’re choked with traffic. A Petersburg ‘clan’ dominates Russian politics, but the city seems to have benefited little in terms of investment. Its piercing beauty coexists with a sharp carelessness.

Supporters of the provisional government inside the Winter Palace in November 1917. Photograph courtesy of World History Archive / Alamy

Aside from its revolutions, Petersburg is best known for a beauty that predates the uprisings. The place that erupted three times in strikes, factory occupations and insurrections was not defined by perfectly calculated Enlightenment classicism, but by 19th-century suburbs of tall, crowded tenements, wooden slums, red brick mills and heavy metal engineering works. Petersburg’s industry was monolithic, defined by a few enormous complexes employing thousands of people, staffed by workers whose grandparents were serfs. This made it an ideal city of what Bolshevik theorists called ‘uneven and combined development’. Yet Petersburg is extremely ‘even’ in its planned structure. A centre like an ideal Renaissance town plan come to life is surrounded successively by equally homogeneous quarters of the 19th century, the avant-garde 1920s, the Stalinist 1930s to ’50s, the prefabricated 1960s to ’80s. It is these last decades where new development is concentrated, because of the most influential Soviet legacy – the historical preservation of the entire city centre, which is sometimes circumvented, but never quite defeated, by property developers and their friends in government. Instead, developers cram ultra-high-density complexes of Postmodernist ‘luxury’ flats – quickly built by brutally treated Central Asian migrant workers – into tight plots in former industrial districts. It is an unpleasant side effect of conservation that the city government seems prepared to accept.

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Winter Palace, Palace Square. The events of 1917 are largely ignored by the Kremlin in this centenary year. Photograph by AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, courtesy of Rex/Shutterstock

There are many traces of the revolution in the centre if you know where to find them. The cruiser Aurora , a volley from which was the signal for insurrection in October 1917, still stands on the river Neva, and was recently restored, although it currently downplays its revolutionary use. Plaques are sometimes to be found on the buildings occupied by the various revolutionary governments, such as the Tauride Palace or the Smolny Institute. There are monuments, like the exceptionally moving Field of Mars, a burial ground for victims of the February Revolution, later completed with poetic inscriptions by the Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky. There are the streets and squares where protest and insurrection happened. Nevsky Prospect, where demonstrators were shot in the suppression of the violent protests of July 1917. The unforgettable dream-space of Palace Square, where the Winter Palace was stormed, and where the storming would be re-enacted by avant-garde theatre groups and Constructivist film directors.

The cruiser Aurora signalled insurrection in October 1917. Photograph courtesy of Interfoto / Alamy

The most interesting and enduring legacy is more invisible – the Kommunalka . This hugely unequal and divided city’s apartments were audited and split up during the bloody Civil War that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power, with one result being extreme subdivision – several families in one huge, high-ceilinged imperial flat. Few outside Russia realise that many of the opulent apartment blocks in the centre are actually still Kommunalki, with a tangle of doorbell switches to each door. This has two results today. The neglect of these lush tenements is obvious, but inner-city districts have mostly not been fully gentrified, as the complexity of who owns what often deters investors. Defying conservation laws, some developers find it easier to just knock down and build replicas instead, dispersing the residents and owners in one fell swoop rather than negotiating with them. It’s hardly utopian, but the persistence of the Kommunalka is nonetheless a definite revolutionary legacy in 2017.

Profusion of doorbells on the main door of a Kommunalka . Photograph by Sergey Kozmin Photography

The earliest legacy in terms of new space is Narvskaya Zastava, ‘the Narva district’, which stretches roughly from the Narva Gate, a flamboyant victory arch for the Napoleonic Wars, to the Putilov engineering works, the largest and most important factory in 1917, whose support was crucial for the Bolshevik insurrection of October. This was one of the first districts to have been built in the USSR – given that the Putilov workers began to rebel against Bolshevik statism as early as 1920, satisfying their demands for a better quality of life was important for the revolutionary regime’s legitimacy. The earliest part, from 1926, is Tractor Street, designed by Aleksandr Gegello, Aleksandr Nikolsky and Grigory Simonov, a very attractive Neoclassical estate that subtly distorts the limpid classicism that defines St Petersburg, with half-arches and unexpected vistas. On the oversized Square of Strikes, a collection of public buildings face each other. Some – like Noi Trotsky’s early 1930s Town Hall, and ASNOVA architects’ dramatic Factory Kitchen – are ambitiously Constructivist, with asymmetrical towers and ribbon windows, while others, such as the 10th Anniversary School and the Gorky Palace of Culture (both 1927), are in a Perret-like Rationalist style. Few are in a good state of repair, and the townscape is marred by the hideous mirrorglass-Classical 1812 Shopping Centre, but a few years ago, a Walter Benjamin-like tour of the district formed the basis of a project by the contemporary avant-garde group Chto Delat (What is To Be Done?), which was published as an issue of their intriguing newspaper. Square of Strikes was also the setting for their film Angry Sandwich People , where the text of a Brecht poem about the fading of revolutionary hope is carried on sandwich boards by a group of Petersburgers.

A room shared by a family of three and a dog in a Kommunalka, or communal apartment. Photograph by Sergey Kozmin Photography

If this is the only entire district in the city where you can still just about feel the pulse of post-revolutionary ambition, there are Constructivist factory kitchens and workers’ clubs dotted around the inner suburbs. In Vasilevsky Island, next to surviving shipyards and docks, there is a factory with an abstracted tower by Iakov Chernikhov, best known for his 1933 book Architectural Fantasies; a couple of miles north is Erich Mendelsohn’s Red Banner Textile Factory, an Expressionist battleship marooned among disused 19th-century mills and warehouses. These two buildings are among the monuments of an era when the USSR was, briefly, the centre of European Modernism; but most of the buildings that directly invoke the revolution in imagery and rhetoric are from the Stalinist years. The city’s palatial Metro is studded with bronze, steel, porphyry and glass monuments to unnamed insurgents and their named leaders. It works almost as a narrative, going from Lenin speaking to workers on a giant relief in the entrance to Narvskaya, to the central Uprising Square, where state power is seized in ceramic medallions. A statue of Lenin commands the classic totalitarian urbanism of the Moskovsky (Moscow) District, with its huge squares and castellated apartment buildings for the Soviet elite.

With exceptions, such as Catriona Kelly’s admirable Shadows of the Past, St Petersburg after the end of the Second World War – during which the city was blockaded and starved nearly to death – is ignored in histories. It was only really between the ’60s and ’80s that the housing problem inherited in 1917 was seriously solved, with the mass building of prefabricated housing – most of the results are nondescript, save the memorable Brutalist enfilades that line the canals in the north of Vasilievsky Island. Perestroika Leningrad saw a late artistic flowering as a city of the post-punk avant-garde, via musicians such as Sergey Kuryokhin and Viktor Tsoi. It is also the home of Vladimir Putin, and his coterie of former secret servicemen. Its city government has been proudly reactionary – the recent law against ‘homosexual propaganda’ was first tested out in St Petersburg. The vote to rename the city in 1991 was narrow, and many institutions just had their names changed rather than being abolished. One such was the Museum of the Revolution, which became the Museum of Political History.

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Kirovsky, former Putilovsky factory, site of workers’ strike, taken in 1917. Photograph by AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, courtesy of Rex / Shutterstock

This was once Ksheshinskaya’s Palace, built for a ballerina, to the designs of Aleksandr Von Gogen in 1904. The Palace was a sprawling home for one fortunate person, a short walk from the overcrowded tenements of the proletarian Vyborg district. In 1917, the Bolsheviks requisitioned it as their HQ; in the ’50s, it became a museum. When I visited in 2010, you still had to wear plastic slippers and photos were strictly forbidden. The collection of revolutionary memorabilia had, at some point in the ’90s, been supplied with new captions telling you how awful the Bolsheviks really were. Now, these rooms coexist with a more nuanced but still schizophrenic depiction of revolutionary events, after a recent expansion and restoration. One room will tell you about Ksheshinskaya, another replicates the Bolshevik Central Committee’s offices, another gives a potted history of Soviet housing in the city. Most pertinent of all is a permanent exhibition on the Duma, the rigged parliament that Tsar Nicholas II conceded after the first of the ‘three revolutions’ in 1905. It is aptly placed alongside the equally powerless current Russian parliament of the same name. You might miss the most important thing – the expropriation of the rich, their luxuries transformed into a base for plotting out the parameters of a new and better kind of society. The streets of Petersburg have abundant evidence of how that ended up; but they also show why people believed it possible.

October 2017

Since 1896, The Architectural Review has scoured the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new are chosen as prisms through which arguments and broader narratives are constructed. In their fearless storytelling, independent critical voices explore the forces that shape the homes, cities and places we inhabit.

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Social Construction of Childhood Essay
Social Construction of Childhood Essay. In order to consider how child protection policy and practice has been shaped, a definition of child protection and significant harm and abuse is required. The Department for Education (DFE, 2011) defines child protection as the action that is carried out to safeguard children who are suffering, or are ...
(PDF) Childhood as a Social Construction
The very basic notion of "child" is connected to further through historical perspectives of childhood which further leads to accentuating the importance of childhood as a social construction ...
Social Constructions of Childhood
The social construction of childhood refers to the idea that childhood is seen (or "constructed") differently by different societies. Examples of social constructs include "Children as good", "Children as evil" and "children as innocent". If you believe childhood is socially constructed, you believe ways of seeing childhood can ...
The Social Construction of Childhood
A good way to illustrate the social construction of childhood is to take a comparative approach. We can look at how children are seen and treated in other times and places other than our own. Four fairly well-known examples of how childhood can vary in other countries include: Child labour. Child soldiers.
Social Constructs of Childhood Essay (Critical Writing)
The first presentation of social constructs of childhood is a poem titled 'Simplicity of Childhood'. The poem by RoseAnn V. Shawiak is present in Figure 1 (Shawiak, 2015). The poem consists of four sentences that describe a child as a young human being in need of constant care and who is exposed to minimal stresses of life, shielded by adults.
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The consensus is that children and childhood knowledge is a social construct, and it is not rooted in organic realities. The notion of childhood is deeply intertwined with societal perspectives. The reality of how childhood is perceived does not exist in isolation. It is heavily influenced by other factors such as culture, time, values and norms.
PDF Childhood as a Social Construction
The idea that childhood is socially constructed refers to the understanding that childhood is not natural process rather it is society which decides when a child is a child and when a child becomes an adult. The notion of childhood cannot be seen in isolation. It is deeply intertwined with other factors in society.
[PDF] Childhood as a Social Construction
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Judith Ennew argues that some children's experiences of childhood are very different from those living in the western world. She found wide variations in terms of factors such as work, living conditions and sexual exploitation. Childhood is known as a social construction: the meaning varies over time and differs between cultures.
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In exploring about childhood as social construction, it has been attempted to explicate certain of the conceptions at the heart of social studies of children and childhood. So the essay begins with the basic conceit of childhood studies: what is a child? The very basic notion of "child" is connected to further through historical perspectives of ...
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This essay will demonstrate an understanding of childhood as social construct and identifying how poverty determines children's educational achievement in academic and social health and well-being in the United Kingdom contemporary society. Childhood is a time where children enjoy their life as a child, to grow and learn under the love and ...
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In this essay I will be underlining the ways in which different societies construct childhood in terms of geographical location, culture, religion, time period and history and critically assessing these ideas. I will also be looking at counter arguments that suggest childhood is not a social construct.
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The aim is to show that the 'social construction' of childhood is central, but the New Paradigm uses categories that are at the same time founded on neo-liberal views and abstracted from concrete social relations. This article maintains that a concrete critique of processes of socialisation (which is here understood as the socialisation of ...
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This means that social construction of childhood is not a natural process because it has multiple meanings in different societies. This essay aims to explore the definition of social constructions of childhood and about children's rights and agency and why it is important.
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Childhood: Social Construction of Childhood. To what extent are the ideas we have about childhood created by society, rather than being determined by the biological age of a 'child? That is what we explore in this video as part of our series on the nature of childhood, and changes in the status of children in the family and society.
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