Understanding Children’s Participation through an Eliasian Lens: Habitus as a Barrier to Children’s Everyday Participation Rights

Abstract

In spite of the rhetoric of children’s participation in the public sphere, in their everyday life interactions young children’s rights continue to be denied or given entitlement on the basis of assumptions about the social category to which they belong, and opportunities continue to be missed to make links between the everyday and the societal, political and legal contexts by those wishing to further children’s participation rights. Drawing on the sociology of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of “habitus” and “drag effect” we will explore the dissonance between the public and private status of young children’s rights and suggest ways that this might be remedied. The paper will conclude by arguing that it is important to work towards young children’s increased participation rights in their everyday lives because adults must acknowledge young children’s moral competence to participate in decisions about their everyday lives in order to develop children’s agency to do so.

Children’s Right to Participate: How Can Teachers Extend Child-Initiated Learning Sequences?

“…Opportunities for children to have a say on matters that concern them is tied to perceptions of competency. Authentic consultations with children necessarily rest on knowing children to be competent and capable members of society (Hester and Moore, 2018).…”

Pathological demand avoidance: What and who are being pathologised and in whose interests?

“…The findings from Waksler’s study (and replicated in Hester and Moore, 2016, 2018) demonstrate that children ‘throw tantrums’ or pretend to be sick to avoid doing something that causes them distress. Of course, adults, in the main, do not want to cause distress to children but the fact that this behaviour might be characterised as PDA reflects ‘the habitual and unconscious dispositions of adults as well as taken for granted assumptions about children and their capabilities’ (Hester and Moore, 2018: 15). Their behaviour cannot be interpreted as agentic or as a reflection of the complex ways in which children engage with and shape the world around them.…”

“…As a result, deep-rooted beliefs about who children are, how they should behave and how they should interact with adults have become institutionalised and taken for granted. Furthermore, as Hester and Moore (2018) suggest, ‘[A]dults, usually unconsciously, are heavily invested in the adult/child dichotomy and the power relations that arise from it’. They are, therefore, reluctant to challenge dominant constructions of childhood and relinquish power over children.…”

“…Childhood and adulthood are constructed as oppositional and hierarchical categories and children lack control over many aspects of their everyday lives, simply because they belong to the social category of childhood and resultant assumptions about members of that social category. There is evidence that children experience that lack of control as a hardship (Waksler, 1991) or as oppressive (Hester and Moore, 2018) and that they use a range of complex strategies to avoid the demands that adults make of them, which reflects children's competence as active meaning makers of their worlds. However, when one of the defining characteristics of PDA is an inability to recognise and, presumably, respect social hierarchy, children's competencies can easily become pathologised as defiance.…”

"In Fact, We Can All Decide": An Action Research on the Participation Right of Young Children

“…Providing children with the opportunity to express their views on issues related to them depends on their perspective on their competencies. Perceiving children as active and capable members of society guides their participation (Hester & Moore, 2018). Participation is about children's self-regulation and individual freedom, and interaction between adults and children and adults' control over children's school life affect this process (Puroila et al, 2012).…”