The Co‐Construction and Co‐Deconstruction of Childhood and Sociology

Sociology and childhood are co‐constructed. The social construction of childhood was integral to the social processes that gave rise to sociology, involving a growth of social reflexivity—and also, therefore, a more conscious social control—in the emergence of the disciplinary society. Childhood was understood as the period of life in which social control was internalized. Childhood was the focus of discipline and the social ordering efforts in modernity. Both sociology and childhood entered into crisis in the late twentieth century. The rules and practices through which social roles had been formed and defined in modernity came to be regarded in the 1960s as unlivable, with youth at the forefront of this rejection. This was the delegitimization of social control, to the extent that control was inculcated and internalized through socialization. We have moved, Deleuze argued, from a disciplinary society as characterized by Foucault, to what Deleuze called “the society of control.” This, it is here argued, should be thought of as post‐social control. The emergence of the “new sociology of childhood” in the 1990s reflected the de‐construction both of childhood and sociology in the neoliberal post‐social human universe.