The Changing Nature of Childhood and Boyhood

Abstract

Although there is a realization in Western society today that childhood is changing, the topic remains clouded in confusion and contradictory viewpoints. The central question, if and how the nature of childhood itself has changed, has led the author to conduct a metabletic inquiry. Metabletics or the science of change is a human science research approach that incorporates phenomenological methods and seeks to understand a phenomenon by taking its historical development, its social cultural context and relevant synchronistic developments into account. In exploring the changing nature of childhood, historical, metabletic, and phenomenological studies were consulted as well as some selected sources from literature, art, and entertainment that portray the lives of children and, in particular, of boys in the past and in the present. First, a brief historical perspective on the changing nature of childhood from traditional to modern times is presented. This is followed by the concept of modern childhood and its transition to a postmodern childhood. The author aims to describe the essential characteristics of childhood with a focus on boyhood as lived in different historical time periods in order to contribute to a clearer understanding of its changing nature. The present study is exploratory and opens a vast domain that awaits further detailed investigations.

Adultization and blurring the boundaries of childhood in the late modern era

“…Living in their risk societies, the prototypical modern child of the modern nuclear family has nearly disappeared (Elkind, 1981, 1992; Kehily, 2010, 2013; Mook, 2007; Wyness, 2012). Late modern social theorists suggest that personal relationships are allowing new practices of intimacy, which are in some way affected by electronic media and communication in familial social relations (Oswell, 2013).…”

“…Postman (1985), in his famous book The Disappearance of Childhood , argued that childhood emerged as a consequence of the age of literacy and was disappearing as we entered the age of electronic media, which transformed communication in a way that bridged the distance and distinctions between childhood and adulthood (Mook, 2007: 150; Oswell, 2013: 200). Postman attributed this to television, dual-parent careers and family breakdowns that blurred the boundary between children and adults.…”

“…However, there are a variety of views regarding the concept of childhood today; some claim that childhood has disappeared (Nelsen, 1985; Postman, 1985; Winn, 1983), while others claim that childhood has never been alive, liberated and/or empowered (Archard, 2004; Freeman, 2012; Mook, 2007; Smith, 2010). Beyond these opposing views, this study asserts an alternative view regarding the concept of childhood, one which is useful for problematising and analysing it.…”

Introduction

“…Historical perspective makes us aware that no society, including our own, is static. What Bertha Mook (2007) in an earlier issue of this journal outlined as the "metabletics" of cultural systems must provide a context for our consideration of social developments surrounding childhood, especially the continuous and dynamic renegotiation of all adult-child interactions. She faults the field of developmental psychology for insufficient attention to the social constructedness of its concepts.…”

Reproduction, Resistance and Hope

“…Schools come into the story of childhood early on, in response to the Renaissance concern that the child-a "tabula rasa"-must be more carefully molded: "Henceforth it was recognized that the child was not ready for life, and that he had to be subjected to a special treatment, a sort of quarantine, before he was allowed to join the adults" (Ariès, 1962, p. 412). It was boys, of course, who were the special targets of this molding and were the first beneficiaries of schools designed to perpetuate the aims of the social and cultural order (Mook, 2007). Favored this way, boys encountered the contradictions of boyhood, described by Kaufman as "a strange combination of power and powerlessness, privilege and pain" (1994, p. 142), at the hands their schoolmasters, in classrooms and school hallways.…”