Childhood studies - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Childhood Studies is a multi-disciplinary field that utilizes all areas of study to understand childhoods as experienced by children today. CS draws on scholarship in the social sciences (specifically anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, economics

Economics

Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

, history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

, and sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

), the humanities (especially literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, religion

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

, philosophy, and the fine arts), and the behavioral sciences (with an emphasis on psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

History

Childhood Studies is a relatively new academic field. Discussions of its development can be found in Mary Jane Kehily’s An Introduction to Childhood Studies and in Jean and Richard Mills’ Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood. According to Kehily, dedicated degree programs in childhood studies are a recent development. Gertrud Lenzer writes an article in August, 1991 titled "Is There Sufficient Interest to Establish a Sociology of Children?" in the journal Footnotes. James S. Coleman, ASA President-Elect writes as an addendum to this article, "I believe that the call for increased attention to the sociology of children is well-placed, and it may be that a new section of the ASA is the best way to do that." Edward Rothstein writes in an article in The New York Times titled How Childhood Has Changed! (Adults Too), "Three years ago, at Brooklyn College, the sociologist Gertrud Lenzer founded a pioneering program in children studies applying anthropology, psychology, literature and history to the study of children and adolescence. Nearly 100 students now minor in the area; other schools have begun similar programs". In the Sunday Reader of The Dallas Morning News an article titled Lenzer Champions Growing Field of Children's Studies, Ira J. Hadnot writes that Lenzer created a novel program that is being copied across the country. In an article in the Lion and the Unicorn in 2001 Lenzer provides a short history of Children's Studies. She writes the new and interdisciplinary field of Children's Studies was founded in 1991 at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. The Open University

Open University

The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...

degree program was one of the first in the UK and was begun in 2003. In the United States there are now dozens of children/childhood “modules,” minors, or concentrations within the degree programs of academic disciplines, as well as BA and Masters programs across the globe. York University in Canada quotes Lenzer in their proposal for a new degree program in Children Studies writing "In a special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn in 2001, Gertrud Lenzer, co-founder and Director of
the Children’s Studies Program and Children’s Studies Center at Brooklyn College, provides a brief
history of, and rationale for, the emerging field of children’s studies. According to Lenzer, before
the 1990s, most disciplines in the arts and sciences failed to “provide a special focus on children”;
indeed, advertisers and politicians “discovered” childhood before scholars did. Only during the past
two decades, Lenzer argues, has “an increasing number of disciplines in the arts and sciences
. . . begun to manifest an interest in children and youth. In the humanities, these growing subfields
include children’s literature, the history of childhood, and the philosophy of children.”
However, Lenzer suggests, even “the recent sharpening focus on children and youth in the
humanities, social sciences, and international law” limited the efficacy of studies of children and childhood because “the intellectual division of labor in children-related scholarship across the disciplines was largely adding new subspecialties of and within the disciplines themselves.” By
contrast, Lenzer emphasizes the need for holistic, interdisciplinary—indeed, humanities-based—
approaches to children’s studies: “. . . [C]hildren are not fully characterized by psychological
developmental processes, nor . . . by any single perspective. . . . [C]hildren also exist . . . as individuals, as a social and cultural class, and as a historical generation.”
York’s Children’s Studies program adopts many goals Lenzer proposes for this emerging area “as a
genuinely interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary new field of study. By bringing carefully chosen
knowledge of children from different studies to bear upon the class or category of children to
students in a Liberal Arts course of learning, we hope that a more holistic understanding of children and childhood should emerge, which in the end will represent more than simply the sum of its parts. . . . Children’s Studies . . . makes the ontological claim that children must be viewed in their fullness as human beings.” The importance of this field of study was underscored in March 2005, at the “Off to See the Wizard: Quests and Memory in Children’s Literature” conference, when Roni Natov, author of Poetics of Childhood (2002), suggested that “interdisciplinary childhood studies” would transform future understandings of children and children’s literature."

Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

, Camden, New Jersey, developed the first Childhood Studies Department in the United States to award degrees from BA through PhD. This is an multi-disciplinary department in which PhD students study a range of methodologies to explore cultural constructions of childhood. Rutgers University also operates The Center for Children's and Childhood Studies, the Rutgers University Press Book Series in Childhood Studies, and The Exploring Childhood Studies listserve, an online community of nearly 1300 academics and practitioners studying children and childhood in every discipline and around the world.

The evolution of Childhood Studies as an academic field has much in common with the development of other types of multi-disciplinary scholarship such as African-American Studies and Women's Studies

Women's studies

Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...

. Each was initiated for the purpose of bringing to the academy points of view that had been underrepresented, if not repressed.

New developments in the field of childhood studies include the founding of international childhood studies. This is interested in how global and international structures and processes shape children's lives and cultures of childhood. Birkbeck College offers Msc and PhD study in International Childhood Studies in the Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/pg2011/childhoodstudies/TMSINTCH.html), reflecting the strong interest of this field in the intersections between childhood and international development. Karen Wells writes in Childhood in a Global Perspective (Polity 2009) that 'global processes and structures - especially the increasing influence of international law and international NGOs are reshaping childhood' (2009:1). Further developments in this area include the launch in 2011 of a new journal, Global Studies of Childhood and a two year ESRC seminar series, Violence and Childhood: international perspectives (www.internationalchildhoodstudies.org)

History

Further reading