The Story of Childhood Read Free

became the norm, exemplified by the likes of Dr Benjamin Spock and, more recently, Penelope Leach, who advised that parents trust their own instincts and have fun with their offspring.
    But the popularisation of clinical theories of emotional and educational development also proved influential. Just as Rousseau had done in an earlier era, practitioners adopted the concept of successive stages. One such theory was offered by Sigmund Freud, in his classic work on psychosexual development,
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, first published in 1905. He conceived adult sexuality as the outcomeof libidinal drives present from birth, with pleasure being derived from different erotic zones at each developmental phase.
    As Hardyment notes, although the theory was too overtly sexual to be universally adopted by parents, a diluted version did influence popular thinking about the avoidance of psychological distress. ‘[Parents] moved from the offensive to the defensive. Rather than directing the infant, drawing upon the blank tablet, they became its guardian against a host of fears and anxieties which could, it was believed, produce deviant emotional growth and neurotic disorder.’
    By the late 1940s, uncertainties about applying a strictly psychoanalytical approach to child-rearing led to a renewed interest in behaviourism. In 1953, Jean Piaget offered another theory of successive development, this time concentrating on cognitive and intellectual rather than emotional development.
    Piaget identified four different stages and, in order to explain the inevitable exceptions to them, coined the term ‘mental age’, so a child who exhibited competence beyond her prescribed stage had a higher mental age than her peers.
    As Piaget’s concepts filtered into the public psyche, Hardyment observes, parents began to take the concept of an elastic mental age as a challenge. While they may now have worried less about their children’s secret sexual yearnings, Piaget did not offer them an opportunity to relax. Instead, the focus turned to how parents could stimulate their children in order that they grow up as intelligent as possible. ‘They are now handmaids to intellect instead of emotion,’ she writes.
    Within academic circles, the new discipline of sociology came to challenge what it saw as a deterministic view of childhood. Sociologists have argued that psychologists treat children as incompetent, judging them solely in terms of whatthey have yet to achieve. They maintain that this standardises childhood, distracting attention from the diversity of ways in which children can develop, often pathologising deviations. Children should be seen as social beings, they argue, rather than as individual developing minds.
    In their essay on the sociology of childhood, Michael Lavalette and Stephen Cunningham, both lecturers in social policy, note the growing interest in children and childhood as social categories within their discipline since the late 1970s. They go on to identify the dominant theoretical approach which has emerged in this country as the ‘new sociology of childhood’. They argue that this approach makes four central claims: that childhood is a ‘social construction’; that children occupy and conduct themselves in worlds that are full of meaning for them, but about which adults understand little; that children are a ‘minority group’; and that children are an identifiable social group. However, Lavalette and Cunningham balk at what they consider the central message of the new sociology of childhood: the postmodernist view that ‘we have to abandon any attempt to arrive at a full understanding of the world, or to assert that there is any broad directionality to human history.’
    They argue: ‘When we look at the social construction of childhood we cannot fully grasp this process without looking at changes to the totality of social relations within society – the