Childhood

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage of the human life cycle. This entry describes anthropological work on childhood as a varying cultural construction, from early comparative studies of childcare and development, through work on the socialization of young children, to more recent ‘child-focused’ research that takes children’s perspectives on their role and position seriously. Anthropological research casts a critical light on institutional attempts to formulate universal understandings of childhood, whether these are found in developmental psychology, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the spread of formal schooling as an essential aspect of modern childhoods. Children, through their participation and observation in social worlds, are always understanding more than they are told by adults, often applying cultural concepts or different languages in innovative ways. This frequently leads children to destabilise or reject wider representations of childhood that reflect adult prejudices, or wider fears about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood or a loss of ‘innocence’. Paradoxically, adult attempts to protect children, whether from work or from societal harms, often say more about the politics of representations of childhood, than they do about children’s actual experiences.