Childhood Studies

Childhood studies refers to a reorientation in the interdisciplinary study of children and childhood. The study of children and childhood has a long history in many disciplines, including anthropology, but childhood studies seeks to expand and reorient how the study of children and childhood is conceptualized and approached. Anthropology's role is central to this reorientation because childhood studies builds, in large part, upon anthropology's traditional interests in understanding culture and society from the emic (insider, participant) perspective. While children have been the object of a long history of cross-cultural research, the emic perspective of children has received less attention than that of adults. Most anthropological research on children has sought to understand children through the adults charged with their care, usually parents, teachers, and other caregivers. This is also true of the social sciences more broadly. There is a tradition of anthropological work, however, that has actively sought the child's perspective, dating from the foundational work of Margaret Mead (1928) and extending to the present day. This reorientation is similar in some ways to the increased anthropological interest specifically in women that emerged alongside women's studies in recent decades.

Childhood studies also arises from interests that accompanied the 1989United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that by2004 had been ratified by all but three nations (the United States,Somalia, and Timor-Leste). The UNCRC has three basic principles: protection of children from a range of harms (from intrafamilial abuse to war-related traumas); provision of what children need (from the basic physical needs for food and shelter to emotional needs for love and caring); and participation by children themselves in matters concerning them insofar as their developmental capacity permits (from family dissolution to educational issues). The UNCRC stimulated a reorientation of thinking about children and childhood. It was clear that children around the world suffered from a range of insults to their development and well-being. It was also clear that children's voices were rarely sought, and thus rarely heard, on issues of basic concern to them. The UNCRC stimulated a body of research, largely in European countries that had ratified the convention, that sought to make children a more integral part of research and to give credence to the child's perspective.