Childhood

The standard definition of childhood denotes the earliest stages of the life course in which the human being has yet to achieve full physical and mental development. Most of the secondary definitions connote notions such as immaturity, irresponsibility, and dependency. However, the meaning of childhood has varied throughout history and across different cultures, and there are corresponding variations in the way societies understand and organize children's lives. In academic study, the naturalistic child development view clashes with the social constructionist view, but the former tends to be dominant in popular culture. The hybrid view accepts the notion of natural developmental stages while also accepting that there are sociocultural variations in our understanding of when and how these stages occur. Now that identity is increasingly forged in relation to the consumption of symbolic objects and the very young child is a primary target of the marketing industry, the debate on childhood is crucial to the study of consumer culture.

Historical and literary records suggest a widespread tendency to view both childhood and parenthood as difficult experiences. In ancient Hellenic culture, parents were responsible for instilling virtue in children, and since then Western cultures have tended to portray children in three basic ways: naturally innocent and in need of protection from corruption, naturally wicked and in need of discipline, or tabula rasa, a blank slate on which culture writes its scripts. The argument has not been settled, and childhood remains a contested category. The relationship between young people and consumer culture is also contested. Is consumer culture a corrupting influence that captures gullible children to construct tomorrow's consumers or a site of creative identity construction in which young people can find themselves as they play with its symbols?

Despite these wide conceptual variations, most cultures have rites of passage as means of integrating children into society. At their most basic, these rites are simply attempts to make potentially problematic transitional stages as smooth as possible, but at their most complex, they are means of integrating children into the social world and forming individual characters. The integrationist ethos assumes that the adult world is a complete, rational, and desirable condition to which the child should [Page 155]aspire. This ignores the possibility that adulthood itself might be socially constructed as a vehicle for reflecting and reproducing the social elite's values, norms, and institutions. The standard socialization discourse assumes that the child's assiduously arranged bonding with the prevailing social order is good and natural. Does this bonding crush dissent, difference, and individuality? Conservative thinkers tend to agree that to some extent it does, but it is more important to socialize individuals and cultivate “good characters.” Conversely, liberal and radical thinkers tend to argue that this is an oppressive arrangement that incorporates the child at an early age into the sociocultural system and its prevailing hegemonic ideology.

The child development paradigm, based on the principle that incremental cognitive competence is the result of a natural, biological process, has also been highly influential in Western thought. The growing child passes from the early sensory-motor stage through preconceptual, intuitive, and concrete and formal stages, each one increasing the child's ability to understand the world. In Jean Piaget's schema, each child moves from the affective, subjective, and value-laden world to the rational, objective, and fact-defined world. Often criticized as ethnocentric in that it privileges scientific rationality, this schema is also defended as a flexible process that can be adapted to any set of values that require advanced cognitive ability. Just as the developmental process can lead the child to Western scientific rationality, it can lead it to something else. The radical liberal critique of the developmental paradigm suggests that children develop cognitive and emotionally resilient capabilities long before Piaget claimed.

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