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Children rights and contemporary sociological perspectives of
childhood
GUIDO MAGGIONI - CLAUDIO BARALDI
Summary. The aim of this paper is to summarize recent developments in two
perspectives on children and childhood which in recent years have come simultaneously
to the foreground in social sciences and law. In social sciences, a growing consensus has
developed in considering children as active social agents and as agents of change in
society. Sociologists developed new conceptual frameworks and appropriate research
methods to explore children’s experiences, some authors advocating the need to take a
child’s perspective. At the same time, sociological studies have moved away from a
developmental socialization perspective and searched for deeper insights in childhood,
mainly viewing it as a social construction and children as a permanent structural part of
society. In law, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, finalized in
1989, has constructed moral precepts concerning the well-being of children in the form
of legal or quasi-legal rights. The language of rights has met in recent years with wide
acceptance as a means to empower the powerless, and children have been typically
viewed as a separate group needing rights to rescue them from “evils” of contemporary
society. Without taking sides in the political and ideological debate which opposes child
“savers” and child “liberationists”, the authors examine the links between the view that
children are active social agents and the widespread support for children rights and child
citizenship. The former trend in the social sciences is similar in content and aims to the
latter in law: they are both connected to the idea of the autonomy of childhood and of
individual children, but they are both ridden with paradoxes which may undermine this
latter idea.
1.
In recent years a growing consensus has emerged in the social sciences on the
consideration of children as active social agents and as agents of change in society. In
the last two decades sociologists have tried to develop new conceptual frameworks and
appropriate research methods to explore children’s experiences, some authors
advocating the need to take a child’s perspective. At the same time, sociological studies
moved swiftly away from a developmental socialization perspective and searched for
deeper insights into childhood, mainly viewing it as a social construction and children as
a permanent structural part of society.
In law, in the same years, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child has been adopted and then ratified by the overwhelming majority of the countries
of the world. The 1989 Convention constructs moral precepts concerning the well-being
of children in the form of legal or quasi-legal rights. The child is viewed as a person
who is endowed with a panoply of rights, in a perspective that has met an incomparably
1
bigger success, and a much broader media recognition, than the self-determination
vindicated by the now defunct children’s liberation movement of the Seventies.
In this essay we will summarize how both these perspectives on children and childhood
almost simultaneously came to the fore in recent years in social sciences on the one
hand (paragraph 2), and in law on the other (paragraph 3).
We'll suggest that the contemporary picture in sociology and in law is ridden
with such openly conflicting perceptions of children and childhood, which reflect
paradoxes of contemporary society. First of all, we'll suggest that in both these domains
the “older” perspectives on children and childhood have not disappeared. In the social
science, and in public opinion as purported by mass media, a developmental view of
childhood is still holding its own, that can be linked with the socialization approach to
the sociological study of children. In law and social policy the “child best interests”, as
they are perceived by relevant adults, are still held as the principle of paramount
importance for public action involving children and the promotion of children’s welfare,
much more than children "rights" .
Even without dealing with different perceptions of children and childhood
maintained in religion, morals, economics and so on, and restricting ourselves to
sociology and law, we'll suggest that late modernity account of children is not to be
described in terms of a radical paradigm change. It's true that some new elements are
added, but at the same time most of modernity basic tenets on children are confirmed,
and are narrated in the language of autonomy.
It will then be suggested that the perception of children as social actors and the
relevance acquired by the idea of children's rights are not distinct and independent
developments (paragraph 4). While the social constructionist perspective is the
foundation for a new sociology of childhood, the notion of children as autonomous
social actors is the main support for the declaration of the universal rights of children .
The two perspectives have been gradually unfolding in close connection, through
significant, if not continuous, relationships. In fact, they represent distinct ways to
observe the modern aspects of childhood. Autonomy, ambiguously presented both as a
fact and as a goal to be achieved, is a normative ideal perpetually undermined by
concomitant anxieties, old and new, about children and their fate. Theory and ideology
are confusedly associated in this perspective, as it shifts between two opposite social
representation : that of a strong child in command, and that of a weak child at risk. The
paradox arises from the evolution of modern society, increasingly producing the
conditions for autonomy, in spite of the persisting relevance of integration.
2.
In the last two decades a momentous shift seems to have occurred in the sociological
approaches to childhood, which some would describe as a complete U-turn. The allpervasive notion of the child as a socialized personality system who internalizes social
roles and values, seems to have been replaced by the conceptualization of the child as an
active subject, co-constructing sociality together with other agents. As a consequence of
2
this radical redefinition, a new map of the territory of childhood would have to be
drawn.
If this description probably overemphasizes change, it must be admitted that in
the past not many theorists, in general sociology, came to terms with childhood and
children as a theoretically challenging issue. Those theorists who did (Mead, Parsons)
considered it as a reflection of the more general problem of the relationship between
individuals and society. They developed a socialization perspective which stimulated
research almost exclusively bent on studying children development and socialization,
with an emphasis on the interiorization of social norms and values on the path to
adulthood.
This approach required a thorough analysis of the social structure as it surrounds
children, influencing their development and affecting their behaviour in a variety of
ways and patterns. The focus was not so much on childhood itself as in the reproduction
of social conformity, in how society reproduces and strengthens itself by the
transmission of social values and norms through generations.
This choice of observing socialization processes was consistent with a
sociological approach primarily interested in society as its own object. The child as an
active social agent was not conceptualized, as the socialization process was broadly
perceived as a linear course along which the child passively acquires social knowledge
and adapts itself to society. In the socialization approach, children are observed as
socially determined through internalization of roles and values, but in spite of this they
are also observed as autonomous personality systems, that is as "persons in roles"
(Parsons and Bales, 1955, Parsons, 1977).
Contemporary critics claim that this approach subordinated sociology to the
paradigms dominating (then as now) in psychology and pedagogy, which understand
childhood in terms of developmental stages and ignore it as a social category.
In more recent years the active agent perspective has attracted widespread
support, and it can be recognized as the trade-mark of the so-called “new” sociologists
of childhood, albeit somewhat different emphasis can be detected accordingly to the
different sources these “new” sociologists base their work on: some of them adopt an
interaction perspective (Denzin 1979), others give more weight to agency (Giddens
1984, 1991), or, again, stress other conceptual elements like social actors, coconstruction .
This new trend in childhood sociological studies also dictates that the context of
children’s everyday life experiences should be given special attention, and that children
should be understood as co-agents in the construction of social reality. The focus is now
on the correlations between individual action and social reproduction (Qvortrup et al.
1994). An example of this kind of theory is Corsaro's interpretative reproduction
(Corsaro, 1997). In a different but closely linked perspective, this very aim to "give
voice" to the child as an autonomous social agent, is adequately achieved in the theory
of the social agent which appears to be held as a general framework for analysis in
research concerning children in families (Thompson 1997).
Contemporary social studies on children are not so neatly split in two
unambiguously distinct and conflicting approaches. Far from being the utterly separate
worlds they sometimes are purported to be, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology
3
and social constructionism are strongly intertwined, as can easily be seen in the results
of theorethically grounded research.
Above all, at the level of “pure” theory, the social constructionist approach, in
some cases relying on Vygotskij's suggestions (Harré 1984, Shotter, 1984), seems to be
linked to Parsons' theory, with which it shares the view of children's persons as social
products.
For the new sociology of childhood, socialization may still have partial validity
as a theoretical tool only as a process in which children actively respond to adult effort
to pattern their life and shape their future. In a different but closely linked perspective,
this very aim to portrait the child as an autonomous social agent is achieved in the
theory of the social agent by Paul Thompson (1997), who emphasizes children
competence in constructing the meanings of adults actions and behaviour inside family
networks depicted as systems of emotional and social relationships. Children's
decisions, preferences and choices strongly influence intergenerational cultural
transmission and generational differentiation.
However, the new paradigm of the sociology of childhood can be perceived as an
attempt to integrate the concepts of intepretation and active social construction with the
analysis of social categorization: children are seen both as actors engaged in social
constructions for themselves and others, and as a normatively determined social
category (childhood). Hence a new tension between autonomy and dependence, in
continuity with the old sociological theme of socialization, but in a new constructivist
mould. Social structures influence children, and in so doing they operate for the
consolidation of society. The focus seems to have been readjusted again, but with the
same attention for the reproduction of social conformity.
This connection is not new. These same themes of social construction and social
membership were seen in the light of the polarity autonomy-dependence in the
pioneering and seminal work of Philippe Ariès (1960). Ariès main thesis, and the one
which met with more widespread acceptance, is that childhood is a social and
historically constructed category, as demonstrated both by different representations of
children in different societies, and by the far from universal recognition of childhood as
a distinct social category. Superseding individualistic and developmental perspectives,
Ariès opened the door to a new conceptualization of childhood as a permanent structure
of modern society (Sgritta 1988).
Ariès also added that in modern Europe the "discovery" of childhood, while
stimulating growing concern and more attentive care for children, for quite the same
reason produced their total inclusion in the context of the family and gave birth to a
segregative educational system. As a result of these trends, social control was strongly
increased, children were assigned, as individuals, to a marginal role in society and made
more dependent from the adult world.
In this way, also the new sociology of childhood is involved in paradoxical
outcomes: children are considered as both endowed with, and deprived of, personal
autonomy. The social constructivist-interactionist approach observes children as socially
active but also as social constructions: they can manage social action (they are
competent in agency), but they are also reproduced through society. Socially active
children are also members of a socially constructed social category known as childhood,
4
which varies enormously in space and time in its definition and scope, as childhood is
itself a socially constructed entity.
3.
Approximately at the same time as the “new” sociology of childhood firstly emerged
and then asserted itself in mainstream sociological studies of children, after long and
protracted negotiations and debates between representative of states and nongovernmental organizations, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child was born. For many active participants and commentators alike, the Convention
amounted not only to a revolution in the history of law perception of the child, but also
to a turning point in the very history of childhood. It has been claimed that it would be
wrong only to perceive it as a new step in the long process, which began over a century
ago, of extending the protection of the law on the child to advance its best interests.
Rather, the Convention brings to a “higher” level, in the realm of rights, the new faith in
the power of the law to protect children and their future well-being.
The Convention truly contains an impressive set of “legal” rights, which can be
summarized as follows:
1) General rights, as the right to life, freedom of expression, thought and religion, the
right to information and privacy;
2) Rights concerning the civil status, including the right to acquire nationality, to
preserve one’s identity, to remain with parents (unless their best interests dictate
otherwise) and the right to be reunited with their family;
3) Rights requiring protective mesasures, to protect children from economic and sexual
exploitation, prevent drug abuse and other forms of neglect and abuse;
4) Rights concerned with development and welfare, including the right for a reasonable
standard of living, to health and basic services, to social security, education and leisure;
5) Rights concerning children in special circumstances (refugee children, orphans, etc.)
and / or with special needs (Freeman, 1996).
As it can easily be seen by the last three group of rights in the list above, the
language of rights has been used also to cover what could more exactly be described as
obligations, of specific adults with a parenting responsibility or of welfare agencies, or
ultimately the state. While actually maintaining an emphasis on protection and welfare,
the Convention articulates those issues in the language of rights.
Taken all together, these rights seem to be constituted in a confusing and not
coherent matrix of ideas concerning survival, protection, development and participation.
However, what is clear is that a discursive space has been established within which
children are now seen as individuals whose autonomy should be safeguarded and
fostered (James et al. 1998).
Some commentators have questioned the wisdom of this unlimited and
admittedly confused extension of children’s rights. Some pro-rights activists would
answer their critics saying that whether such rights are good or not to children, is beside
the point : children should be granted rights for the same reason that adults were. By
being presented with rights with which to defend themselves and promote the
5
fulfillement of their desires and needs, children for the first time in history could be
recognized as complete human beings, with integrity and personality, and with the
ability to fully participate in society.
But here lies a paradox: giving children specific rights has the effect of drawing
attention to the fact that children cannot expect to have equal rights to adults. It serves to
reinforce the adult\child distinction, while at the same time defines children privileged,
but also discriminated citizens. Children have “their” rights because they do not have,
and cannot be expected to have, full citizen’s rights (King 1997). The very fact that a
Convention declaring the rights of children was so strongly felt to be needed,
emphasizes the difference between children and adults. If children’s rights are stated as
not being the same as those of adults, then children are confirmed in a minority status
which clearly requires interpreters of their needs and wishes, not too different in their
position and function to the guardians or tutors of the past.
Therefore, not only through the survival of almost intact welfare protective
policies, but also through the notion of separate children’s rights the Convention refrains
from a clear-cut and radical assumption on the self-determination of children, distancing
itself from the liberationists utopia of the Seventies. Unconvinced by the heroic view of
childhood and children which this choice would imply, the Convention, together with
prevailing public opinion and expert advice, including social scientists, seem to rely on
the same image of the child as a weak powerless human being, which was at the bottom
of the protectionist account. Potential victim of adults neglect and abuse, children still
need the support of adult advocates that really know what is best for them.
The ideal of protection that has been articulated in the language of rights on
account of the very wide acceptance this form of expression has met in recent years.
Rights as a means to empower the powerless, are seen as instrumental to the betterment
of the conditions of separate, minority group and children have been typically viewed as
such, needing rights to protect them from the “evils” of contemporary society. The
image of the suffering child has come to symbolize all the injustices of the world, and
giving rights to children has been stated as the way to protect children against all those
injustices.
It is not by chance that the children’s rights movement has put so much faith in
the transformation, both nationally and internationally, of children’s rights into legally
constituted rights. They are formulated as law, because there is no other code for
modern society to openly state its fears and hopes for children and their future, and at
the same time to hold out the possibility of alleviating those fears and realizing those
hopes (King 1997)1. However, this is unlikely. In fact, while the entire framework of
the Convention is built upon concepts of freedom, the prevailing view of the child is
still that of a subject to be protected, first of all from the potentially negative
consequences of his\her “immature” and “unwise” acts, choices and behaviour (Ronfani
1997). The child continues to be seen as an imperfect human being, in a developmental
perspective which tends to describe it as a weak subject, with limited autonomy, slowly
1
This faith in the power of law probably stems from a disillusionment and a lack of faith in other
system (such as politics, economics, science and religion) to protect children and their future well being,
more than from a positive appreciation of law.
6
developing under adult guidance from a primary dependency to the final achievement of
adult rationality and, as a consequence, independence.
Two seemingly contradictory regulatory codes are thus embodied in the
Convention: the one seeks to grant them autonomy, the other seeks to protect children
and promote their welfare through paternalistic measures. Programmes of protection
from abuse and programmes of promotion of rights lead to very different directions:
how is it possible to combine a request for increasing protection with the expectation
that children should be given their own public voice and be liberated from adults
overwhelming power of direction ?
As a consequence of this paradoxical construction, pretended rights endlessly
proliferate, while the problem of the entitlement to their use is not consistently tackled
with.
As it contradictorily describes children both as passive victims of society and as
makers of their own destiny, the Convention seems to be in touch with contemporary
opinion, where children are regularly observed not only as weak, immature, not capable
of decisional autonomy, but also as potential victims of adults' action from which they
must be protected . Actually, at the same time as there is a dynamic towards autonomous
children, other contemporaries social practices point in the opposite directions,
emphasizing children’s separateness, difference and need to be guided and tutored.
Children are arguably now more closely surrounded by surveillance and social
regulations than ever before: <<Childhood is the most intensely governed part of
personal existence.... the modern child has become the focus of innumerable projects
that purport to safeguard it from physical, sexual and moral danger, to ensure its
“normal” development...>> (Rose 1989, 121).
The ideology of child protection and the concomitant attempt to increase the
regulation of children’s behaviour certainly dates back to early modernity, but in late
modernity it has taken new meanings and directions. In the risk society (Beck 1992)
parents increasingly identify the world outside the home as one from which their
children must be shielded and in relation to which they must devise strategies of risk
reduction. Even the boundaries of the family are held to be at risk of penetration by
insidious alien technologies, like the Internet (James et al.1998).
At the same time, they are also thought of as responsible subjects capable to
decide for themselves. And in some areas of late modernity society other new
descripitions of children are being drawn : a heroic social representation of the child as
an independent being, capable of self-development, albeit with some help from adult
experts who write guide-lines for their self-care, teaching them how to behave when
parents and teachers are too busy to take care of them. Latch-key children are tentatively
presented as children in self-care, what was perceived as adult neglect might now be
reshaped as a condition consistent with the development of a competent child
(Hochschild 1995; Kyllönen 1997). The paradox must go on.
The paradoxical unity of children's autonomy and children's protection is
enhanced by the inclusion of every individual under 18 in the catch-all category of
childhood. It is not necessary to share a developmental approach, to observe that
fundamental characteristics are sharply differentiated in adolescents and in young
children and that they are commonly expected to enjoy quite different degrees of
7
personalization and rights. The combination of promotion/protection and age differences
creates further problems.
It seems obvious that in our society young children must be considered relatively
dependent from a social and material point of view, so that protection is particularly
relevant for them, while adolescents can be considered largely autonomous, so that any
expansion of the potential for autonomy is of the utmost importance for them. However,
while the promotion of personalization and autonomy in the first phase of childhood is
strongly asserted, society seems to need a strict and controlled welfare protection for an
ever-growing number of adolescents.
In this view, children should coherently be denied the ability to autonomously
claim their own rights. When they are too young to speak for themselves, because of
their biologically or socially constructed inability to do so, adults should take it upon
themselves to speak for them. Even if some children are deemed to be old enough to
speak their minds as individuals, they could not be taken seriously as a group able to
promote the common interests of children as a social category.
Given this kind of paradoxes, the Convention creates an uneasy relationship
between welfare rights and autonomy rights . While autonomy rights directly pertain to
children's actions, welfare rights pertain to adults' actions, first of all to parenting and
caring . The attempt to formulate in the language of rights both the emancipation of
children from adults, on one side, and the attribution of educational responsibility and
control power to adults, on the other side, is an excessively ambitious and confusing
project.
The paradoxical construction of rights makes it even more difficult to determine
the content of the needs that should be protected and of their corresponding interests. It
is, therefore, an extremely arduous task to turn them in legally constituted rights, as it is
their application in national law systems: in contemporary society it is unlikely to
achieve consensus on the definition of normal and legitimate practices and deviant and
illegitimate ones. A universal moral code which can be used for evaluation of social
events is not a viable proposition anymore, if ever it was2. In this context, the child's
interest may justify very different and arbitrary evaluations and practices (Ronfani
1997). It may become a means for the imposition of ideologies about familial and
parental relations and about educational and pedagogic patterns, as children's interests
are not self-asserted . It is true that some adults feel entitled to articulate them in detail,
perhaps while listening to the voice of their “inner child”. As it is well known, in the last
couple of centuries there has never been any shortage of self-appointed child advocates
ready and willing to state what is good for the child and what is not.
In short, the concept of rights implies the ability to use them, while the concept
of protection is linked to notions of weakness and immaturity. A contradiction surfaces
between children's spontaneous actions and adults' actions interpreting, orienting and
channeling desires, i.e., using power. It is very difficult to imagine the exercise of
individual rights by agents who are considered as only potentially autonomous.
2
Typically, in their efforts to achieve these ambitious aims, advocates of children's rights are
frequently accused to impose western values on different cultures and traditions: the survival of aboriginal
and immigrant minorities is thought to be endangered when western-inspired policies undermine
traditional cultural traits or economic functions deeply embedded in the basic structure of society.
8
4.
Moving to a second order observation of the recent trend towards children rights, it is
possible to identify close links between the growing acceptance of the view that children
are active social agents and the widespread recent support for children rights. The
former trend, which has developed in the social sciences, is similar in content and aims
to the latter which has emerged in law. The recognition of children’s rights is leading
social scientists to believe that children are active social agents, creating and recreating
the social world they live in: as a German writer puts it, we understand children as
independent social actors and we cannot consider them as objects of adult’s actions or
victims of social processes not only for scientific reasons, but also because this
perspective can not be politically justified in the terms of children’s rights (Zinnecker).
Of course, the connection is working also the other way round, and the influence
can be reciprocated. The law system must likewise construct its own theory of childhood
to support its view of children’s rights, and for this purpose it can avail itself of recent
developments in sociological theory. The scientific notion of the child as a social agent
can easily open the way to ideological assumptions concerning the autonomy of the
child and its competence to handle complex situations without (or even against) parent
or adult advice. The image of the child as a strategic social actor is coherent with the
post-anti-parsonsian sociology of action and is strictly linked to the notion of a strong,
competent child which from a comparatively early age can claim the rights set out in the
more “advanced” parts of the Convention.
In attempting a description of the structural foundations of children's
observations and conditions, we have to start from the notion that the connection
between the theory of the child as a social actor and the ideology of children's rights is
mediated by the concept of autonomy. A full citizenship requires autonomous social
actors, capable to express themselves in multifarious social contexts, in economy,
education, politics, law and so on. For this reason, society creates the structural
conditions conducive to an increasing social importance of autonomy. It is a paradoxical
relevance, because of the simultaneous attempt to preserve integration and normative
expectations of membership. From a structural point of view, the interest in autonomy
and the following paradoxes are connected to the personalizaion process in modern
society.
Personalization is a consequence of an important structural change in Western
society, which began to take place in the sixteenth-seventeenth century: with the growth
of a functional differentiation inside society, individuals become persons. They can no
more primarily be thought of as members of groups and families: they must rely on
themselves, constructing self-confidence and self-identity. In the different forms and
contexts of societal communication, they are treated as autonomous, i.e., as unique and
specific human beings, fully responsible for their choices. The paradoxical result of the
modern social construction of persons in communication is the socialization of a
individualized mind, giving an increasing importance to the sense of autonomy and selfrooting.
The social construction of individuals as persons is functional to a society
requiring each of its members to be a competent and a responsible participant in
multiple and differentiated social contexts. Personalization entails a loss of
9
exclusiveness in social membership and engenders multiple inclusions in differentiated
social systems. Consequently, an individual can no more rely on his/her membership of
a group or a category: as a person, each individual, singled out in society, can trust only
in himself (and, later, in herself), to be available for partial inclusion in different
contexts, in different times and in different ways.
Obviously, the personalization process is full of ambivalences. In spite of the
evolution towards personalization, pre-existing features of society are still positively
evaluated, such as group membership, identification in communities and significant
others. Furthermore, protection and obligations are considered crucial issues in stating
and implementing children's rights. Consequently, the action of society is full of
paradoxes: lack of personalization is increasingly observed as a serious problem. While
the social sciences can consider autonomy as a false or insignificant problem, at the core
of children's condition in our society is the aim to promote and protect their
personalization, and at the same time supply them with adequate provisions enabling
them to attain personal autonomy, the most important goal of child development.
Fundamental personal rights are the product of contemporary culture, crossing
all the social systems, because personalization is a general problem for all the social
systems in modern society. In our times the most important and delicate context in
which personalization takes place is childhood, a phase in the life-course in which
individuals are perceived as humans in development, who are controversially defined
either as persons or as persons to be. The construction of children's personal rights
results from a process of combining the observation of individual cognitive, normative
and emotional development, with relationships with the different social systems (family,
school education, caring services, social policies, law system).
This is the framework producing the paradox: personalization is simultaneously
promoted and protected; individual persons are emancipated and controlled at the same
time. Deviant outcomes and repression must both be avoided, as they are perceived as a
threat to society.
It has been suggested that parallel trends towards increased autonomy and
increased regulation are not as contradictory as they might first appear. They would
prove the extent to which children are at the centre of political strategies in late
modernity, designed to govern the individual through the capture of the inside, rather
than constraint of the outside (James 1998). If this is true, the western political systems
are using paradoxical arguments in order to guide and perhaps control the
personalization process. This is a very risky strategy, as paradox can easily create
serious problems in the observation of social as well as individual systems and,
consequently in socialization and participation processes. The discipline which has the
task of the second order observation, that is sociology, seems also unable to observe the
paradoxes and the risks in their use.
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