EDITORIAL

When a child is not a child,

and other conceptual hazards
of childhood studies1

Childhood Copyright © 2009

SAGE Publications. Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC,
Vol 16(1): 5–10.
www.sagepublications.com
10.1177/0907568208101687

To be invited to serve as Editor of Childhood was a surprise and is an honor. I

make no pretensions about aspiring to “replace” Jens Qvortrup, whose scholar-
ship and efforts helped build this journal and cannot be duplicated. What I
can offer is a perspective gained from standing on the shoulders of others
who have come before me and from my own efforts to navigate through the
endlessly problematic, always generative, terrain of childhood studies.
The invitation comes at a time when I find myself in the midst of opening
a new department of Childhood Studies along with a number of colleagues.
I am told it is the first one of its kind in the US that is multi-disciplinary and
offers Ph.D. as well as Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees. I ask patience and
indulgence as I revisit some key conceptions of children and childhood in
light of some of the struggles encountered during my first year in the new
program.
The campus of Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey is populated
by students many would consider non-traditional. Hailing from working-class
backgrounds, some have children and are employed full- or part-time as state
police, postal workers and supermarket cashiers. Age-wise, undergraduate
students range from the traditional 18–22-year-olds to those who are in their
30s and 40s. It is clear that some are returning to college or attending for the
first time in their later years.
In my Introduction to Childhood Studies course, the class – about
85 undergraduates in a medium-size lecture hall – engaged in some fairly
animated discussions. After a screening of an hour-long program on child
beauty pageants in the American South, some students were quite agitated
at the parents portrayed in the story. The vocal students announced that the
children – some as young as 3 or 4 and as old as 14 – had been “brainwashed”
by the parents to participate in the pageants and were serving as vehicles for
the realization of their mother’s dashed dreams of being a beauty queen. These

5
 CHILDHOOD 16(1)

comments were made about a show I had chosen precisely because I thought
it depicted the children as having some interest and gaining some pleasure in
the competitions.
This discussion took place despite readings and presentations about
children as agents and as meaning makers, and in spite of my efforts to point
out moments where it appeared that the children were doing things that they
wanted. The students, however, read the scenes where the young girls didn’t
want to practice their dance routines or didn’t want to compete on particular
days as evidence of the heavy-handedness of the parents. I asked if it is any
different for a young child who has to practice an instrument or get ready to
attend school? Wouldn’t there also be momentary strife? Aren’t these daily
scenes repeated in many homes where there are tantrums and arguments with
uncooperative children? Perhaps, I offered, these parents were teaching their
children responsibility.
As I reflected on these reactions, a number of insights began to emerge.
For one, the image of an innocent, manipulable child appears to be the default
conceptual position for these students and, I would assume, for others. They
seemed to be fine with and able to contemplate the social construction of child-
hood abstractly, especially when examined in historical terms (something we
had done earlier). But the depiction of contemporary children – in flesh and
blood on the screen in situations that intimated premature sexuality or hyper
self-consciousness about bodily display – triggered a cultural mechanism. The
students strongly maintained that there were right and wrong ways to raise a
child and, further, that there were right and wrong childhoods.
In my graduate class, unsurprisingly, things were different. These discus-
sions moved in a direction where social constructionism, the recognition of
children’s agency and the specificity of discourses of innocence quickly be-
came a somewhat taken-for-granted base from which we moved on to other
issues. It became clear to me that being able to inhabit the analytic space of
“childhood studies” was a privileged intellectual position like any other. The
extent to which the writings and research of the last quarter century have now
built up into something resembling a canon nevertheless reflect and embody
an orientation to children and childhood which is not found often in everyday
life – certainly not the everyday lives of many of those I instruct at Rutgers-
Camden.
It is the study of childhood – or more precisely the constructivism of the
paradigm – which was not resonating with the undergraduate students. I have
encountered many times – in other places and programs – the difficulty of
teaching and presenting the interpretive approach to social life, of engaging
students in contemplating the fabricated but no less real nature of the world in
which we inhabit. Yet, something seemed to be different in this case. I felt an
intensity of resistance not experienced in other situations.
I sensed that something was being violated in this and other discussions –
not simply in the behavior of the mothers toward the children in the video,

6
 EDITORIAL

but also in my very attempt to relativize and problematize the students’ own
responses. Many of us who have made our careers in the study of children
and childhood, broadly construed, I suspect would have found it necessary
to offer some sort of response to the students who seem to read the video in
a way that I, as an instructor, writer and researcher, did not. But, a good deal
of this pedagogical attitude stems from the implicit sense that the students
are somehow “wrong” when it comes to how they are assessing the children
portrayed because they do not allow for agency and did not acknowledge the
child’s perspective. They were “wrong,” that is, not from their perspective,
but wrong from mine or ours.
It became evident to me that childhood studies can function as something
of an elite discourse, that the impetus and ability to address children and child-
hood in the register of social and cultural analysis is privileged precisely
because it is difficult to stand side by side those who essentialize “the child”
and childhood. If the students were research subjects, it seems that their views,
perspectives and voices would be acknowledged with an immanent legitimacy
that doesn’t hold when the relationship is between student and teacher. Their
orientations to children and childhood, that is, would be treated as a form of
“data” not to be countered and corrected, but analyzed.
The students’ resistance to my interpretations might be expected, given
the ready-made media panics about pornography and pedophilia at everyone’s
disposal. Yet, their intense reactions cannot be attributed simply to passions
aroused in this part of the moral spectrum. Rather, many students laid personal
claim to the children represented in the class. Many themselves were mothers
(or about to be) and understandably saw the general issues as their own,
relating to their worlds and their children.
When we were, for instance, discussing the Convention on the Rights of
the Child, one mother of a 10-year-old boy flatly stated, “My kid doesn’t have
rights until I say he does.” She was referring to a scenario under discussion
where children were refusing medical care that a physician deemed necessary.
The more general challenge of teaching the distinction between a case and the
larger class to which it belongs is not lost on me here. But that is part of the
conundrum – this student’s child is not a “case” to her.
Teaching about children and childhood is not equivalent to teaching about
other subjects and objects in the social world. My scholarly awareness of the
specialness culturally imparted to children and childhood did not prepare me
to see how that specialness would translate into pedagogical entanglements.
In what way can one argue with this mother’s contention that she ultimately
confers rights on to her child, especially when she is held culturally, legally
and morally responsible for his well-being, including his healthcare? She did
acknowledge that abuse or suspicions of abuse in a home would be grounds
for the State to intervene, but this woman was not going to concede any ground
on her child’s “rights” over her responsibilities.

7
 CHILDHOOD 16(1)

I see my experiences with this class tied to general questions and issues
about the generalizability of the childhood studies paradigm outside of child-
hood studies scholarship. It is a tension neatly encapsulated by this student’s
remarks, and it came out clearly in another class discussion about child work
and child labor as we examined the accounts and arguments of Rachel Burr
(2006) on Vietnam and Mary Kenney (2007) on hidden heads of households in
Brazil. Students understandably expressed shock at these accounts of beggars
and trash pickers. Comparisons to their own lives abounded. Here perhaps is
where they caught a glimpse of the difference and conflict between identifying
a “child” by age as opposed to behavior or status. But, “the child” here is not
a child. The laboring nine-year-old in Vietnam is not a child in the sense of
being of a certain young age and being able to partake in (or sequestered to)
that realm of freedom, non-responsibility and unknowingness encapsulated
by the idea of innocence.
Some students responded to the categorical confusion of children as heads
of households as many do – with a kind of remorse that is rooted at the inter-
section of deplorable economic conditions and the way these configure certain
childhoods. Similar to Jenks’ (1996) observations about child criminality,
these children no longer fit the criteria as children because they are seen to
have lost their childhoods, or had them disposed of by persons, situations or
conditions.
Since there is no childhood in my culture without childhood innocence,
we – my class and perhaps our theories – are left with an anomaly, a misfit.
The students regularly defended notions of sacred childhood in large part
because it is what they know. It is their heritage and, I would say, an aspiration
for the children they have or hope to have.
My sense is that, especially in the discussions of child work and labor,
the students began to realize that a sequestered childhood of innocence is
something of a privilege, a bourgeois privilege, even if they themselves would
not be considered as living the bourgeois life in US society; they are, after
all, aspiring to it as good Americans. As such, innocence is something to be
defended and cherished that much more intensely precisely because it is rare.
If childhood – innocent, free, liberal childhood – is a scarce resource, then the
smart thing to do is to nurture it, harvest it and get the most out of it. If the
world is full of evil, war, sexual abuse and the like, then why not try to shelter
a child as long as possible from it? This is their thinking when challenged.
Sacred childhood is shrinking, but its emotional force is growing. The
more intensely childhood is sacralized, the greater the profanations upon it
and greater are the felt violations to it. Hyper-moral, hyper-sacred childhood
grows with each story of a child rape, each arrest of a youth offender, each
charge of exploitation. That which can be fortified, encircled and protected
seems to have grown smaller and smaller to include only the most heinous
acts, thereby enhancing the threats to this childhood.

8
 EDITORIAL

It is no wonder, then, that many retreat to the familiar childhoods they

know. In an assignment to find and analyze an image of a child – after read-
ings and discussions – several of the female students said they chose their
image because the child was “cute.” Cuteness, here, intimates innocence.
It is disarming. It makes even a bear or tiger or a beast approachable and
likeable … a friend.
To ask some of these students to deconstruct this child, to take cuteness
apart and to see it and the innocence it indicates as a kind of adult indulgence
is tantamount to profanation. Profanation, in this context, need not be ugly or
violent; it need only be a critical posture toward something held dear. It need
only question the heretofore unquestioned.
It became clear to me that keeping children as children by defending
their childhood is an adult priority. It gives adults – parents or those aspiring
to parenthood, especially – a role, a duty as moral protector, a reason-to-be
and, yes, a certain form of power. Threats to premature loss of childhood – be
they by actions of children (performing cultural status offense) or by actions
of others – thereby threaten who we are as adults in this cultural context.
It is equally clear that, in the wealthy sectors of the Global North, the
last thing most children want is to be or to remain a child – at least the kind of
child they inhabit in the here and now. Children comprehend their subordinate
position vis-à-vis adults and older children quite well, as many scholars have
noted and studied. Their impetus is to move up and out of subordination.
Entire industries have been built on catering to this aspirational dimension, as
I call it, of children’s consumer culture often found in market discourses of
child empowerment.
To return to the initial problem and question: I find a tension and perhaps
a contradiction between identifying and teaching about multiple, malleable
and differentiated childhoods from a position which must in some ways reject
or relativize at least one perspective on childhood – i.e., that of the essentialist
view held by many. All views are not logically possible together.
Is the epistemology of childhood studies a view and position that can be
held only by those of us who are able in many ways to be outside or above,
to some degree, the worlds we wish to know? When is it in children’s interest
not to be sacralized and not presumed to inhabit innocence? Is innocence
perhaps the greatest threat to efforts to allow children to have and name their
own childhoods? And whose feet did I just step on with that statement? If we
banish innocence from childhood, we take it away not from children but from
adults and adulthood.
In the discussion of the beauty contestants, I played devil’s advocate by
proposing that it might just be good training and good experience for girls
to learn to be able to use their beauty as a resource and tool. After all, that is
the world into which they will enter, and so should they enter it clueless or
armed with knowledge? Maybe, I insisted, we do a disservice to children by
keeping them innocent for as long as possible because innocence is necessarily

9
 CHILDHOOD 16(1)

temporary and fragile. If it is to be lost, stolen or broken, then shouldn’t those

who care for the children in question initiate their departure from the Garden
of Innocence, instead of leaving this task to strangers or corporations?
My questions were met with furrowed brows, stunned looks and blank
stares – responses to which I have become increasingly accustomed these
days.

Note
1. Adapted from remarks given on the occasion of the 25th anniversary celebration of the
Norwegian Centre for Child Research, “Childhood – Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” Trondheim,
Norway, 23 April 2008.

References
Burr, R. (2006) Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood. London: SAGE.
Kenney, M. (2007) Hidden Heads of Households: Child Labor in Northeast Brazil. Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview.

Daniel Thomas Cook

10