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�Childhood and Societal Macrostructrures�: The development of the new social studiesof childhood seems to be attracting scholars from mainly disciplines preferring ethno-graphic methodologies. While welcoming this strand, the paper argues that it is indis-pensable to employ structural approaches as well. The target of such studies is child-hood rather than the child; it is however important to understand the consequences forall children of structural developments. The thesis is thus sought substantiated thatchildhood develops as a structural form more or less irrespective of children themselves.In the end, though, a dialogue between the two approaches must be established.�Childhood Exclusion by Default�: The title of the paper refers to the paradoxicalappearance that on the one hand children as individuals through this century havebeen encompassed with a growing concern by their significant others as well aspsychological sciences, on the other hand exposed to an increasing indifference as acollectivity on the side of society. This did not occur as a result of a deliberate plan butrather by default, i.e. as one of the structural side-effects of societal development.

Childhood and Societal Macrostructures

Childhood Exclusion by Default

Jens Qvortrup

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Jens Qvortrup:Childhood and Societal Macr ostructuresChildhood Exclusion by Default

W orking Paper 9. Child and Y outh CultureThe Department of Contemporary Cultural StudiesOdense University

Copyright by the author

Edited by Jørn Guldberg, Flemming Mouritsen and T orben Kure MarkerLayout and DTP by Torben Kure MarkerCover design by LAMA grafikPrinted by Odense University Printing Of fice

ISBN: 87-89375-86-6ISSN: 1 601- 1791

Published by the Department of Contemporary Cultural StudiesThe University of Southern Denmark. Main Campus: OdenseCampusvej 55DK-5230 Odense MTel. + 45 65 57 34 30Fax + 45 65 93 06 72E-mail: kmf@humsek.sdu.dk

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Typeset: Ver dana, Arial Black and BookmanPrinted in Denmark 1999

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Childhood and Societal Macr ostructures

Jens Qvortrup*

1The diversification of the new sociology of childhood is a signof its good health; despite its young age, discussions aboutboth theory and methodology prosper and impr essive ef fortsare done to pr oduce new empirical r esults. There are to besure diff erences between countries as to main orientations,and the definition of sociology of childhood has not (and willnot) come to a close as determination of delimitations to bor-der disciplines is not (and never will be) agr eed upon. Thoughit seems to me that there is a basic agr eement about thesalience for sociology of childhood of two main pillars, namelya structural appr oach and an agency appr oach. At the sametime, as practitioners of the field abound, it appears empiri-cally as if adher ents of the agency appr oach are gaining theupper hand, at least in quantitative terms. This is har dly asurprise if one considers from which disciplines scholars wereexpected to be r ecruited, such as pedagogical or anthr opo-

*Jens Qvortrup, PhD, pr ofessor, di rector of The Norwegian Centre for Child

Resear ch. 1987-1999 r esearch director for the Childhood Unit at SDU,

Esbjerg, Denmark. He has been engaged inter nationally in establishing a

sociology of childhood, founder and chairman (1988-1998) of ISA's child-

hood section (Research Committee 53 Sociology of Childhood); launched

and dir ected the inter national pr oject Childhood as a Social Phenomenon

(1987-1994). Curr ently he is i.a. a member of the advisory board for the

British r esearch pr ogramme Children 5-16: Growing into the 21st Cen-

tury, and joint editor of the jour nal Childhood. He has written extensively

about childhood issues. He was attached to the research pr ogramme Child-

hood and Child Culture 1996-1999. The paper “Childhood and Societal

Macr ostructures” was pr esented on the seminar Conceptualising Child-hood - Perspectives on Research . University of Keele, March 17, 1997 and

on 27 October 1998 at the Institute of Education, University of London.

“Childhood Exclusion by Default” was a plenary lecture at the Children

and Social Exclusion Conference, 5-6 March 1998, at the University of

Hull, Centre for the Social Study of Childhood.

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logical ones, wher eas it is pr obably much har der to convinceresear chers from disciplines such as economics, political sci-ence, geography and sociology to join - in particular thosewith a macr o-orientation. This impr ession has been supportedby observing the nature of papers from both the Sociology ofChildhood sessions at the Inter national Sociological Asso-ciation’s congr ess in Montreal, July 1998 and the Sociologyof Children sessions at the American Sociological Association’scongr ess in San Francisco, August 1998; mor eover, the sup-port awar ded to pr ojects in national r esearch pr ogrammes infor instance UK, Norway and Denmark is confir ming this pic-ture of a rather str ong orientation towards studying childrenas agents.

That was the r eason why, when asked, I pr oposed to talkabout childhood and societal macr o-structur es. This choiceis not dictated by any r eservation towards studying child-hood as an agency or children as actors; on the contrary, Ihave found this strand most constructive, I have even done itmyself, although not by using ethnographic methodology. No,the choice is simply made because I want to make sure thatthe structural perspective does not end up in oblivion; I mustat the same time admit that my own orientation is more to-wards structure than agency, which is I believe more due tomy backgr ound than to considerations of r elevance or perti-nence.

Ther efore, to put it bluntly at the outset: while I find it ex-tremely r elevant to ask children about their own opinionsand to ascertain their competencies, it is far from suf ficient.I do believe it is true, as it has been said, that people maketheir own history, but I’m also convinced that Marx was rightin adding that they don’t do that under cir cumstances of theirown choosing. It is mainly these cir cumstances I will be ad-dressing.

2It is customary to talk about childhood as a social construc-tion; I have used that phrase myself several times, but dis-

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cussions with and my r eading of among others British col-leagues have taught me that I may have misunderstood thisconcept. The pr oper understanding of it seems to be that child-hood is constructed in discourse; something which is negoti-ated or constituted while we are talking about it. W ithin thisdiscourse children are partly admitted the r ole of contribu-tors. I fully agree that this view is relevant, but again - it isnot enough. My own understanding of childhood as a socialconstruction is much more straightforward and simple, name-ly that childhood is constructed by a number of social for ces,economic inter ests, technological deter minants, cultural phe-nomena etc., inclusive of course the discourse about it. Inthis construction work childhood has mostly been a r eactiverather than an active part; by and large it has not been thoughtof in this construction and development of childhood as a hi-storical or a modern phenomenon.

It is beyond doubt that if one were to go deeper into an ana-lysis of childr en’s every day life during this longer or shorterperiod of childhood’s construction, one would have detecteda role of children as actors; children have been pr esent allthe time and they have influenced both their significant andinsignificant others as well as the envir onment they were apart of. As other minority gr oups in history they cannot helphaving had an influence - by means of their mere pr esenceeither as workers, helpers or as a nuisance. The r esearchwhich is now being done in or der to r eveal their actual r ole inhistory and society is very important and must be continuedwith vigour and hard work, but it would in my view be acapital mistake if we were to believe that children had a deci-sive influence in changing societies, and thus in construct-ing childhood.

In this r espect children are even worse off than most otherminority gr oups; due to their - per definition - suppr essedstatus, these gr oups have been for ced to adapt to pr evailingpower r elations - but for instance the working class or womeneventually acquired some power. What I am going to argue,ther efore, is, that irr espective of childr en’s enormous level of

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activities, societal changes have occurred over their heads orbehind their backs. It is ther efore of utmost importance forchildhood research to deal with macr o-societal for ces whichwilly-nilly construct and r econstruct childhood. A sociologyof childhood which ignores these for ces to the advantage ofprimarily studying how we talk about childhood or how chil-dren react in a number of circumstances, will have failed itstask.

3I’m afraid that I will not be able to tell you much new; mysuggestions will be too obvious to surprise you; but I believeit is sometimes worthwhile to be r eminded of the obviouswhich often for the very same r eason is for gotten. Childhoodfor example belong to the obvious, almost to the natural. Nev-ertheless, Ariès was able to surprise the academic world withhis contention that ‘in medieval society childhood did not exist’(Ariès, 1962, p. 128). He did not say that childr en, ‘the littleones’ or those of young age, did not exist, even if we were in-formed that the very word children was a late invention, ex-actly as the notion of family was. It would not have mademuch sense to say that there were no children ar ound in aperiod when they r elatively speaking were much more nu-merous than today. What Ariès meant was that at this timeof our history - and per haps this was still the case until re -cently in some developing countries - people had no aware -ness of childhood; that, if you like, there was no discourseabout childhood.

But if there was no discourse about childhood, there musthave been some r eason for it; it was not mer ely a whim of so-me intellectuals, the clergy or whoever, that children beganto be talked and thought about. When Rousseau took an in-terest in this topic, this was not just an original idea of hisown; rather he was clever enough to give voice to changes inlife conditions that were alr eady under way, as described byAriès - for instance in terms of incipient needs for education,

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as it happened in the transition from the Middle Ages to En-lightenment.

I am not going to present an interpr etation of the history ofideas; I simply want to underline the importance of the con-cept and the phenomenon of childhood as distinct from thechild and from childr en. Perhaps slightly exaggerated, child-hood developed as a structural form more or less irrespectiveof childr en. The concepts are dif ficult to deal with, in yourlanguage as well as in my own. Listen for instance to Post-man (1982), who claimed that childhood had disappeared.This might appear as if we have come full cir cle from the timeAriès said it did not exist. But this is not the case; on the con-trary. Postman is not claiming that childhood is disappear-ing as a structural form, but mer ely that it is disappearing asan embodiment of a particular meaning that was given to itin a dominant discourse; as for instance, when we say thatchildren are deprived of a childhood, meaning an individualchildhood.

But again this discourse was not a prime mover in the de-velopment of childhood; when for instance Zelizer (1985) talksabout children as sentimentalised and sacralised she is obvi-ously expr essing a certain mood or attitude which becamemore and more widespr ead ar ound the turn of the last cen-tury. Children were sacralised and sentimentalised - the orga-nised expression of which was found in the child savers move-ment (cf. Platt, 1977) - not because adults all of a sudden be-came nicer - that would be deMause’s interpr etation which Ipersonally find rather flawed (deMause, 1974); nor becausethe new child specialists suddenly made their voices louder.No, they were sentimentalised and sacralised because it forsome r eason became an inter est to have them sentimentalisedand sacralised (cf. Ariès, 1962, p. 119).

4The examples to be mentioned shortly will begin at the his-torical stage I have set. There is a good r eason for that, whichis not historical, but methodological and of course has, as it

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should, much to do with my topic. Paradoxically, it seems asif we are perceiving childhood much more accurate at a dis-tance than if it is close to us. On the other hand, children areeasier to see at a short distance. In r eality, this is not sur-prising. Using a historical perspective is a way of mappingchildhood as a pattern. Childhood is a pattern, and r esearchis mapping. Not much is more abstract than a map, and yetone can har dly think of anything more concrete and usefulfor our orientation in the world. But just as we are unable tosee the pavements or the gates or even the r oads in any detailon our travel or city map, no children are visible on our his-torical childhood map; on your city map, you are unable toexactly figure out the poor ar eas from the more wealthy ar-eas, but the map is of course no less valid for that. A map isthe macr ostructure of a landscape, whether it is a geographi-cal or a childhood landscape.

If we want to perceive the historical landscape of childhoodwe are ther efore for ced to gloss over the details of individualchildhoods; if you are lucky you may be able to make somereconstructions based on ar chival or memoirs, but in gen-eral you will be left with childhood’s macr ostructur es. Whatabout contemporary childhood? In principle, you are able tomake a macr ostructural map of the landscape of childhoodin modern society, but for some r eason such a map is be-lieved to be too generalised a picture of childr en’s lives; mostresear chers appar ently pr efer to make a study of a small groupof childr en’s lives; they will meticulously collect data aboutthese lives and their local cir cumstances; they will observe,talk with and ask children themselves, per haps they will bestudying children’s drawings and observe their r eactions to adiversity of happenings and events, etc. As I said to beginwith this is not wr ong; it is fine; but it is not enough. For bydoing so you will be too close to the reality to grasp otheressentials, indeed, to the extent that you are merely usingsuch myopic methodologies you will be cutting yourself offfrom launching some of the potential explanatory proposalsfor childr en’s everyday life. To come to terms with this other

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essential reality you are for ced to step somewhat back fro mchildr en, i.e. from the r eal children of blood and flesh, some-times so much that you lose sight of them. You are in otherwords forced to abstract - not from the r eality of childhood,but from the everyday life of particular childr en. The benefits- from the point of view of particular childr en’s everyday life -of the pr ocess of abstraction is your enhanced ability to seethe br oader landscape of childhood, that cannot be seen fro ma close distance. But to reiterate: this abstraction is not neces-sarily less r eal or less concr ete or less useful than the studyof living small childr en; exactly as you need the big city mapin order to find the gate of a particular house, you may needthe big map of childhood in or der to open the door to the livesof particular children.

5Some years ago I for mulated a number of theses among whichI want to mention one: ‘childhood is in principle exposed tothe same societal for ces as adulthood, although in a particu-lar way’ (Qvortrup, 1993). Answering the question of howchildhood developed historically until our own time, we willther efore do well in asking how society developed. I’m askingthis question because it will illuminate the transition of child-hood as a structural form from pr e-industrial to industrialsociety, and the period I’m starting out with is late-nineteenthcentury, which by most historians are understood as drama-tically important for changes in childhood, and the r easonfor that is obviously that it was dramatically important forchanges in society. In other words, we are able to empiricallyverify that macr o-structural changes had pr ofound impacton childr en’s life conditions; if you like, we can verify a corre -lation between macro-structural changes and changes inchildhood, but I think it is a plausible hypothesis that changesin childhood were the r esult rather than the cause.

Let me here mention only a few important developmentspertaining to changes in childhood in this century:

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* the per centage of men in agriculture is decr easing from al-most ninety per cent in the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury to less than five per cent now (Coleman, 1993)

* the decr eased per centage of people living in rural ar eas (inthe Nor dic countries from circa 80 per cent to circa 15 percent) (Qvortrup, 1994)

* women without gainful employment decr eased in the USfrom 85 per cent in the late nineteenth century to fifty percent one hundred years later; in our part of the world thisdevelopment has been much more dramatic (Coleman, 1993)

* percentages of households with children decr eased from 73to 36 (Coleman, 1990)

* the per capita income of children r elative to that of adultsdecr eased from 71 per cent to 51 per cent (Coleman, 1990)

* percentages of children aged 5-19 not in school decr easedfrom around fifty to conver ging to zero (Coleman, 1993)

* the fertility rate decr eased from 6.6 to 1.7 during the period(Her nandez, 1993)

The most surprising and power ful, in my view, among thesedevelopments is the parallelism between them, or the corr ela-tion between the phenomena. It is heuristically rich as tohow macr o-structures dir ectly influence the form of child-hood as well as the contents of it. If one were to capture theessence of the story told, one might suggest that childhoodhas become smaller, poorer, institutionalised, privatised.

Of course it is no surprise to anyone that the fertility ratehas decr eased; but it is not without importance to see how itplummeted together with other factors, and first of all onecan only conclude that childhood has become much smallerin quantitative ter ms. One might r ebut that this is not neces-

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sarily of importance for the individual child, who actually isborn, but I do not think this ar gument is a good one. The fal-ling fertility rate, the incr eased longevity of life and the con-comitant r educed share of children in the population, in otherwords, demographic factors are of utmost importance as in-dicators of macro-s tructural changes. It indir ectly r eveals achanging attitude to childhood and it proves the power ofadults to determine in the most ultimate sense the life ofchildren - not by killing them, but by pr eventing them fro mbeing born. It is of course true that no child is as such vio-lated by that; the point is rather that the decisions taken tothat ef fect have r eper cussions on childhood and society. Ithas implication for the cultural climate of society if its aver-age age is incr easing - from some 20 to now close to 50: anAmerican demographer’s pr edominant impr ession of V iennawas that of “gray-haired ladies pr epared to intimidate withtheir walking sticks the rare unruly child who might sit nearthem on a tram” (Coale, 1987, p. 209); it has implications forchildr en’s alter natives in terms of where to stay, if no chil-dren are left in the locality, while par ents are working; it haspolitical and economic implications for distribution of r esour-ces, etc.

Childr en’s life arenas are d eter mined also decisively by par-ents’ work, or more generally by pr evailing modes of pr oduc-tion. Of course it is inter esting to make intensive studies ofindividual children on site, about their use of time and space,about their peer- relations etc., but it is important in additionto figure out the whole framework of their ar enas; how andwhy they were established. The infor mation about women’semployment - and its development thr oughout this century -is therefore of gr eat value as a macr o-factor deter mining thelandscape of childhood. This is well known stuff. The changesof childhood because of changes in mode of pr oduction is onthe other hand less discussed.

Ther efore the match between men in agriculture and chil-dren’s schooling is per haps the one which I’m most fond ofbecause of what it is telling about the development of child-

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hood; what happened was that children as a collectivity chan-ged their main mode of activity in accor dance with the majorchange in the dominant mode of pr oducing; it was not a chan-ge due to a new discourse among educationalists or childsavers, but it was a change that was demanded of a new in-dustrial system, which was in need of a mobile, educated la-bour for ce. What we are told is to my mind a corr ection of - touse a Marxist vocabulary - idealist interpr etations of the his-tory of schooling to the advantage of a materialist interpr eta-tion. Ariès was in my view right in suggesting the importanceof schooling for the development of childhood, but I think hewas wr ong in proposing as the cause of that ‘the Refor mation’sgreat moral rear mament of mankind’ (Ariès in pr eface to sec-ond edition, here translated from Danish ed., 1982, p. 7);neither was it the child savers’ compassion. These views aretoo narrow and do not grasp the changing material condi-tions which br ought about the changes. The development inthe mentioned variables demonstrate clearly to me - without,of course, depriving the cultural ar guments of any value -that only if certain material conditions were ready, childrenwere allowed to be fully scholarised on a massive scale.

Whichever of the mentioned ar guments are more salient, itcan in my view be established that the landscape of child-hood actually changed - children were schooled with the con-sequences it had for them, for instance in Ariès’ interpr eta-tion: “at this point begins a long process of segregation ofchildren which has continued into our own day, and which iscalled schooling”; it was, he continues, an “isolation of chil-dren, and their delivery to rationality” (Ariès, loc.cit). How-ever, I do not think it is all the same which interpr etation onegives the development, so let me say a little more about whatled to childr en’s schooling.

I have explored a bit in school history of England and Den-mark, and my conclusions are supporting my hesitance toaccept cultural changes as most important. What is inter est-ing about these two countries is that they vary very much asto when crucial laws were enacted, but the timing of mass-

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schooling is more or less the same. In Denmark schoolingwas made obligatory as early as in 1814, while in Britain thiswas the case only by the end of the century. On the otherhand legislation against child labour began in Britain veryearly in the nineteenth century, while in Denmark this hap-pened only in 1872. What is inter esting is that these piecesof legislation did not deter mine when children on a massivescale were scholarised, whether we talk about labour laws orabout school legislation. By and large children - or rathertheir par ents and the communities in which they lived, werenot ready to let their children go. They continued working inthe fields, in the factories or wher ever. But in both countriesthe mass-scholarisation was a r eality ar ound the turn of thecentury; almost 100 per cent of children now attended. Theinterpr etation varies - children were made super fluous, thelevel of technology made them less fit, the competition withadults became more conspicuous, even par ents saw an in-terest in their schooling, etc. The parallelism between the twocurves demonstrates what it was about: only when childrenare not seen as useful for par ents, schools become a r ealisticalter native, and this seems to corr elate with industrialisationand urbanisation. On the other hand the long moral and le-gal discourses against child labour and for schooling had onlyl i ttle effect as long as it was not supported by material inter-ests (cf. Qvortrup, work in progr ess).

I talked earlier about not for getting the obvious or seem-ingly obvious; schooling belongs to this category - it is nowa-days one of the most obvious ar enas for childr en. What his-tory shows is that it was not always obvious; it was an objectof intense struggles between diff erent inter ests. But does thefact that schooling is now a general interest and that there isno doubt that all children must be schooled, does this factmean that schooling as a fundamental framework for chil-dren has lost our r esearch inter est? Does it mean that wecan take this agreement for granted and trivial and pr oceedto exploring only what happens within the walls and laws ofthe school? I don’t think so. The fact that we all agree about

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something seems rather to indicate that it has become muchmore and massively important; the danger is however thatsince it is no longer contested terrain less attention is givento i t.

6There are, actually, many factors worth mentioning in thisconnection that can be interpr eted as deter minants of macro-societal changes of childhood. Some of them are partly cul-tural - or if you like, part of a continued discourse aboutchildhood. I have no figures to illustrate this, but I’m surethat a curve could be made about the rise of the numbers ofprofessionals who are taking care of children in diff erent ways.It is inter esting that the time when the developments quotedabove began, was also the time when the child pr ofessionalsbegan to or ganise themselves - developmental psychology,child psychiatry, paediatrics and pedagogics for instance allhad their founding conventions in the last decades of the nine-teenth century, and as mentioned people began at this timeto sentimentalise and sacralise children. “The association ofchildhood with primitivism and irrationalism or prelogicismcharacterises our contemporary concept of childhood. Thisconcept made its appearance in Rousseau, but it belongs totwentieth-century history. It is only very recently that it passedfrom the theories of psychologists, pedagogues, psychiatristsand psycho-analysts into public opinion” (Ariès, 1962, p. 119).I would agree that this change in attitudes can be interpretedand analysed as a particular discourse which have contrib-uted to constructing childhood in the minds of modern adults- contrary to a few centuries ago when, as Ariès says, “theideas of innocence and r eason were not opposed to one an-other” (loc.cit.). I would however add that in view of the mas-sive involvement of such pr ofessionalism at all levels - fro mscientification of upbringing thr ough manuals for par ents overpsychologisation of even ordinary problems to childr en’s ex-posure to pr ofessional assistance in schools, child care insti-tutions, libraries, theatr es, media and other ar eas of child

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culture - one can safely speak of a system which qualifies asan important societal parameter in for ming the landscape ofchildhood. It is fine with me that r esearchers are interpretingchildr en’s own r oles, r eactions and contributions as actorson these ar enas, but I believe that it is worthwhile also tounderstand the implications of the very system itself as asystem of usurpation and exploitation and constraint as wellas of new opportunities. In the Fr ench tradition this has beentaken to task, indir ectly by Foucault (1973) and dir ectly byMeyer (1983) and Donzelot (1980), the latter talking aboutthe psy-complex. In the UK it is worth mentioning DavidOldman (1994) and his analysis of the particular inter ests ofthe child workers, as he calls those who are working gain-fully with children and by that in his view exploiting childr en’slabour for ce. We need in my view desperately more researchabout the framework within which children are playing, work-ing, expr essing themselves etc.

7Let me r eturn to the developments quoted above. It has beendocumented fr equently in the last years by several authorsthat children as a population gr oup are in gr eater danger ofpoverty than most other population gr oups (see for instancePreston, 1984; Rainwater and Smeeding, 1995; Ringen, 1997;Bradshaw, 1998; Sgritta, 1999). It is ther efore very instruc-tive to see Coleman’s figures that inform us that this appearsnot to be a new development. The proportion of income whichis at the disposal for children has become r elatively smallerthan that for adults. This information is highly r elevant forpolicy makers, but it also for ces r esearchers to ask aboutsystematic factors to explain this development, which exposeschildren more than others. For while most other authors tendto connect the development with the crisis of the welfare statecombined with the gr owing political power of the elderly,Coleman’s figures cannot be explained in this way. In myview, there is though a demographic factor involved, but incombination with an ideological one.

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The ideological factor is that children were and r emain a pri-vate matter; it is par ents’ r esponsibility to pr ovide for chil-dren; the state may or may not be supporting in terms of fa-mily or children’s policy, while other adults, or ganisationsetc. have no r esponsibility. This is the gist of the family ideol-ogy, which because of its legal underpinnings actually func-tions as a kind of macro-structure in a very concrete sense.The demographic factor is a consequence of both decreasingfertility and pr olonged longevity, which pr oduce much morehouseholds without children under their r oof. In Denmarkonly 23 per cent of the total number are households withchildr en, and given the family ideology the adults in thesehouseholds are the only adults who must share their incomeswith more than one or two persons, mainly childr en. Morethan three out of four households are thus allowed to usewhat they are ear ning for themselves. Since finally all chil-dren belong to a household in which the incomes must beshared between adults and childr en, but only one fourth ofadults is in this position, it logically follows that the incomeof children r elative to that of adults is bound to decrease.

This is a classical example of structural developments whichnobody has wanted nor initiated deliberately; in several west-ern countries - particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries -there are very high poverty rates for children (in the UK 33per cent), and in most countries the risk for children to endup in poverty is higher than for any other gr oup, even incountries which traditionally are committed to welfare statessuch as the Nordic countries. Although the Luxembourg inco-me studies have shown that state interf erence is able to softenunmitigated market for ces, for instance by lowering povertyrates considerably, a new study in the Nordic countries hasshown that in Sweden in 1993 less than three per cent of allpoor people were older than 65 years (a down from almost 20percent in 1975), while one out of ten were children - a sharewhich had been constant over the last two decades; particu-larly bad off were young people between 18 and 29, whoseshare of all poor had risen from 40 to more than 60 per cent

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(Puide, 1996, p. 161). In Norway the picture was more or lessthe same: almost constant for children (and luckily also foryoung people), but a decrease in poverty among the elderlyfrom 9 per cent to less than one per cent (ibid. p. 125).

The pr oblems dealt with here belong to what is called econo-mics or politics of childhood, which per haps more than otherorientations are inter ested in macr o-structural factors im-pinging on childr en’s life conditions. Unavoidably one is forcedto think in terms of inter generational questions and of diff er-ent inter ests pertaining to various groups; it can har dly bedenied that such interests must have ef fects on childhood,on whose behalf pr essure groups are small and r elativelyweak. One thing is to study such dir ect economic and politi-cal measures as child allowances or childr en’s institutions;as important but more hidden are factors that are politicallydecided or that are implemented in or ganisations or busi-ness-fir ms. If one stays with the public purse one may ask:who is defending childr en’s inter ests? In my country, the mini-stry of social af fairs is for mally in charge of childhood poli-cies. However, I contend, much more important for implica-tions on children are such r esort areas as traf fic, labour, taxes,building and several other departments, because of what isdecided without having children in mind.

An excellent example to demonstrate this is David Thom-son’s r ecent work (see Thomson, 1996a; 1996b). He is takingup a number of very important pr oblems with far- reachingimplications for childr en, but many of them are not from theoutset seen as childhood problems. His conclusion is thatsince the Second World War, and especially during the lasttwo decades wealth and fortunes have massively flown fro mthe younger to the older generations; he is not completelysure how to explain this development, although he does notbelieve too much in ideas about demographic ageing, butrather in what he calls political ageing. By that he is thinkingof a kind of not intended corrosion or metal fatigue of thewelfare state. The pooling of r esour ces, as the welfare state isembodying, has pr oved to be without much contr ol, he ar-

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gues. Now, leaving aside his explanations, it is interestingthat he takes up topics which most childhood resear cherswould not have thought of. He is thus demonstrating that thetax system, as it has been developed, has an inbuilt genera-tional bias. It was not only that tax r elief given to parents ofdependent children ended; also tax r elief for inter est pay-ments on home mortgage payments have dwindled in valueand been curtailed for new arrivals on the housing market;substantial tax r elief for wages and salaries, but not for in-terests, r ents, dividends and the like, have been abolished;there has been a lowering of the top mar ginal tax rates, agrowing exemption from tax-paying of the self-employed andthe companies. All these steps were not suggested as an as-sault on the younger age gr oups, who also happened to havechildr en, but they worked out in this dir ection. In additionthere was a move towards payr oll taxes rather than generalincome taxes, and towards ‘user char ges’ for public services,and as Thomson says, “gover nments have been much quickerto impose char ges on higher education than on health ser-vices for older citizens for example” (Thomson, 1996b, p. 51).“The r esult has been a massive and historic r edistribution oftaxation, from the middle and later years towards the earlier,family-building ones” (loc.cit.).

Another example is the social security system, of which fam-ily benefits is a common issue, so I’ll rather talk about theless familiar housing ar ea. Thomson shows how well this wassupported after the war in New Zealand. The r esult was thata medium-income family could buy a new, modest, 100 squaremeter bungalow by devoting 15 per cent of total net incometo mortgage repayments in the first years of ownership. Thisshare has now risen to 70 per cent since all schemes, grantsand regulations were first cut, then scrapped. And, as heconcludes, “in the last 25 years young adults have lived withtheir par ents longer, married several years later, delayinghaving childr en, had many fewer of them, r etur ned both par-ents to the paid workforce sooner, bought older, cheaper or

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more dilapidated homes, and bought in gr oups rather thanas couples” (see ibid. p. 52-54).

Finally, Thomson mentions in general terms the change ineconomic management, for instance the fact that “in the last20 years full employment has been dr opped as the centralgoal of western governments, in favour of maximal investorgains and consumer choice. It represents a stunning r ever-sal of mid-century priorities, and the young lost badly fro mit” (ibid. p. 55).

What I want to indicate by quoting examples as those fro mDavid Thomson - and one could continue with the book byJohn O’Neill (1995) and his attack on liberalism, individual-ism, globalisation and duty-free market for ces - is that thereare scores and scores of topics to be explored in economy,business, politics, management, or ganisational structures etc.which has traditionally not been dealt with in terms of conse-quences for childhood, because they appear to be too far awayfrom childr en. But they are not, simple because - as I sug-gested in my thesis - ‘childhood is in principle exposed to thesame societal forces as adulthood, but in a particular way’.So let’s study childr en’s language, cr eativity, responsiveness,but never forget that whatever they do, they do it within frame-works of childhood that have primarily been constructed andreconstructed by lar ger societal forces.

As I mentioned these macr o-structures may be easier tograsp historically, but actually I believe that we are to day ina much better position because we have in principle accessto much more infor mation. But we must in this case some-times be bold enough to make the necessary intellectual de-tours; it is tempting to devote most of one’s energy on theliving children working, acting, playing, thinking etc., but onemust always r emember, that the whole architecture and land-scape of childhood may be left to others to design and imple-ment - others who did not for one moment think of it from thepoint of view of childr en. Not because they are hostile to chil-dren, but simply because childhood was not in their minds.I am not, of course, trying to impose a r esearch pr ogramme

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on anybody; I repeat that the action or agency perspective aswell as discourse analyses are vitally important. What shouldbe encouraged in my mind is a division of labour within child-hood r esearch so as to widen our understanding of a diver-sity of childr en’s ar enas and for coming to grips with the factthat childhood is pr oduced by children and adults, by thefamily and the state, by the locality and the society, etc. Thisis trivial in a sense, but it is pr obably not by chance that inthe grant we applied for r ecently in Denmark the whole partdealing with the economics of childhood was simply cut off .W e did r eceive a considerable amount of money, but only afew appear to understand that societal macrostructures mayadd a lot to explaining children’s life conditions; my intentionwas simply to remind you of this perspective.

Refer ences

Ariès, Philippe (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of FamilyLife . New Y ork: V intage Books.

Ariès, Philippe (1982) Barndommens historie . Copenhagen: NNFBradshaw, Jonathan (1998) “The Pr evalence of Child Poverty in the

United Kingdom: A Comparative Perspective”. Paper to theConfer ence Children and Social Exclusion, Centre for the SocialStudy of Childr en, University of Hull, 5-6 Mar ch, 1998.

Coale, Ansley (1987) “Demographic Effects of Below-ReplacementFertility and Their Social Implications”. In: Population andDevelopment Review . A Supplement to V ol. 12, 1986: BelowReplacement Fertility in Industrial Societies. Causes,Consequences, Policies (Kingsley Davis, Mikhail S.Ber nstam, RitaRicardo-Campbell, eds.), pp. 203-216.

Coleman, James S. (1990) Foundations of Social Theory . Cambridge, MAand London: Belknap Pr ess of Harvard University Pr ess.

Coleman, James S. (1993) “The Rational Reconstruction of Society”. I:American Sociological Review, V ol. 58, No. 1.

deMause, Lloyd (1974) “The Evolution of Childhood”. In: deMause, Lloyd(ed.) The History of Childhood . New York: Harper and Row, pp. 1-74.

Donzelot, Jacques (1980) The Policing of Families . London: Hutchinson.Foucault, Michel (1973) Madness and Civilisation. New Y ork: Vintage

Book.Hernandez, Donald J. (1993) America’s Children. Resour ces fro m

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Family, Gover nment, and the Economy. New Y ork: Russell SageFoundation.

Meyer, Philippe (1983) The Child and the State . Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Pr ess.

Oldman; David (1994) “Adult-Child Relations as Class Relation”. In:Childhood Matters. Social Theory, Practice and Politics , ed. by JensQvortrup et al. Aldershot: Avebury. A r evised version of the articleappeared as “Childhood as a Mode of Production” in Berry Mayall(ed.) Childr en’s Childhoods: Observed and Experienced. London:Falmer, 1994.

O’Neill, John (1994) The Missing Child in Liberal Theory: T owards aCovenant Theory of Family, Community, W elfare and the CivicState . University of Tor onto Pr ess: Tor onto.

Platt, Anthony M. (1977) The Child Savers. The Invention ofDelinquency . Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Pr ess.

Postman, Neil (1982) The Disappearance of Childhood. New Y ork:Delacotte Pr ess.

Preston, Samuel H. (1984) “Children and the Elderly: Diver gent Pathsfor America’s Dependents”. In: Demography , Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 435-457.

Puide, Annika (red.) (1996) Den nor diska fattigdomens utveckling ochstruktur. TemaNord 1996:583. Nordisk Ministerråd: København.

Qvortrup, Jens (1990 and 1997) “A V oice for Children in Statistical andSocial Accounting: A Plea for Children’s Right to be Hear d”, inConstructing and Reconstruction Childhood . Contemporary Issuesin the Sociological Study of Childhood, ed. by Allison James andAlan Pr out. London: Falmer Pr ess.

Qvortrup, Jens (1993) “Nine Theses about “Childhood as a SocialPhenomenon”. In: Jens Qvortrup (ed.) Childhood as a SocialPhenomenon: Lessons from an Inter national Pr oject. Eur osocialReport 47 . Vienna: Eur opean Centre .

Qvortrup, Jens (1994) Børn halv pris. Nor disk bar ndom isamfundsperspektiv [Children half price. Nor dic childhood insocietal perspective]. Esbjerg: South Jutland University Pr ess.

Qvortrup, Jens (1995) “From Useful to Useful: The Historical Continuityof Children’s Constructive Participation”. In: Sociological Studies ofChildren , Vol. 7, ed. by Anne-Marie Ambert. Gr eenwich,Connecticut: JAI Pr ess Inc.

Rainwater, Lee and T imothy M. Smeeding (1995) Doing Poorly: The RealIncome of American Children in a Comparative Perspective .Luxembourg Income Study, W orking Paper No. 127.

Ringen, Stein (1997) Citizens, Families, and Reform . Clar endon Pr ess:

Oxford .Sgritta, Giovanni B. (1998) “Inconsistencies: Childhood on the Economic

and Political Agenda”. I: Childhood and Childr en’s Culture , ed. byFlemming Mouritsen and Jens Qvortrup. Odense University Pr ess:Odense (forthcoming).

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Thomson, David (1996a) Selfish Generations? How W elfare States Gro wOld. The White Horse Press: Cambridge.

Thomson, David (1996b) “Justice between Generations and the Plight ofChildr en”. In: Helmut W intersber ger (ed.) Children on the Way fro mMarginality towards Citizenship. Childhood Policies: Conceptualand Practical Issues. Eurosocial 61 . Vienna: Eur opean Centre, pp.43-66

Zelizer, V iviana (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child. The Changing SocialValue of Childr en. Princeton , New Jersey: Princeton UniversityPress.

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Childhood Exclusion by Default

1One of the merits of the new social studies of childhood is theimport of childhood as a structural concept. For us who havetaken part in this endeavour it makes a diff erence, whetherwe talk about childhood or children as excluded or integrated.W e do not necessarily find it contradictory to claim on theone hand that children are integrated, while on the other handchildhood is excluded. Indeed, it seems to be a widely heldview that children, in the course of this century of the child,have been met with more attention and understanding fro mthose r esponsible for them, such as their parents, teachersand other car etakers; also the r hetoric has become more oblig-ing to children and it is culturally unacceptable not to sup-port and promote ideas about childr en’s happy and healthylife conditions. In this sense children are embraced and pro-tected more than ever. To all those who are sincerely caringfor children it would be insulting to suggest that childrenwere not integrated in their family and community, since ev-erything possible is done to achieve this.

Yet, it does give a gr eat deal of meaning at the same time tohold the view, that childhood may be an excluded componentof society. The notion ‘excluded’ needs qualification, but itwould at least not be too daring to suggest that childhood isexperiencing predicaments - both quantitatively and qualita-tively. As I said, this is no contradiction, but it is certainly aparadox. It is a paradox that most, if not all, adults - espe-cially in a democratic society in which these adults are saidto be the true sover eign - wish the best of all worlds for thechildren they care for, while simultaneously childhood isslighted.

What is the pr oblem? There is likely not to be mer ely oneproblem, but one of the important ones is that while our so-cieties as a whole have experienced an enor mous centrifugalexpansion in the sense that traditional communities have been

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split up, we have sought to keep children outside this flood,both symbolically and practically. Although it is true thatchildren as well as their par ents in large numbers are evacu-ating the home to spend their day time in other settings, thefact is that nothing has basically changed as to the r esponsi-bility for childr en, which in principle r emains as private asever.

Is this wr ong? No, from a moral point of view I personallybelieve this is as it should be, but my personal view is not sointer esting. The problem is rather that there no longer seemsto be a fit between the r eality of childhood and modern econo-mic and political or ganisation. If children pr eviously were partof and indeed integrated in what the Gr eek called oikos - theprevailing and dominant economic or ganisation - this is nolonger seen to be the case. Oikos means house and economyat the same time, because the household was the economicunit at the time; it was a br oad concept which encompassed“the totality of human relations and activities in the house,the r elation between man and wife, par ents and children,master and servants and the implementation of all tasks”(Brunner, 1978, p. 83). Our modern oikos is equivalent to theold one in the sense that both presupposes a division of labourand the pr oduction and distribution of goods and services;the phrase ‘societal household’ is a r emnant of it. But thereare also important diff erences, in our context first of all be-cause par ents are now as individuals taking part in the mod-ern economy without seeing their activities as connected, whilechildren are appar ently totally outside our modern oikos;children are in this sense literally speaking excluded as ac-tors and claimants. In the wider sense, given the sole r espon-sibility of par ents for them, children are also lar gely morallyexcluded from the modern oikos. The German sociologistKaufmann (1990 and 1996) has captures this in his thesesabout a structural disr egard and structural indiff erence to-wards children on the side of modern economy and society,not necessarily in the str ong meaning of behaving irr espon-sibly, but in the sense of being exempt from r esponsibility. In

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end effect this means sociologically that there is no more anobliging mutuality and r ecipr ocity between children andadults, mer ely between children and their par ents.

If we are to use Ariès’ insight (Ariès, 1962), it follows thatchildhood did not exist under the early oikos, ir onically enoughat a time when children were recognised as active personsand full participants with expectations and claims. Underthe modern oikos children are not left completely without ex-pectations to them (schooling is the best example), but theyhave no legal claims on society, because their obligatory ac-tivities are not understood as having a worth. They belongfrom an economic point of view to the house or household,which in modern time has little to do with the economy un-derstood as the national economy, but is rather the equiva-lent to the family. While children in other words were inte-grated in the oikos at a time when childhood did not exist, itis now - as childhood has been invented - childr en’s lot androle to be excluded from the economy, which eventually hasbecome a privileged adult domain.

2Does this mean that children/childhood in r eality is outsidesociety? No, but our impr ession that this is the case is due toan historical faux pas, which it obliges the new social studiesof childhood to make intelligible by means of historical andstructural approaches, which is one of the new paradigm’stwo main pillars.

W e are already witnessing and welcoming important strandswithin these new studies - and this is the other pillar - seek-ing to rehabilitate childr en, their agency and subjectivity; thesettings in which these studies take place are however typi-cally r estricted to small scale arenas, be it in child care cen-tres, schools, playgr ounds or r estricted ar eas in towns andrural ar eas. Much has already been achieved in demonstrat-ing children’s ingenuity, cr eativity and strategies, and thesestudies must continue because they gr eatly help to convinceadults in general of childr en’s competencies and capacities

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and to conquer myths to the opposite ef fect. If, however, thesestrands are becoming r elatively unrivalled appr oaches tochildhood studies, as one may fear given the nature of inter-est announced, we will in the end be badly missing perspec-tives and infor mation about br oader contexts within whichchildr en’s agency takes place. Indeed, we may risk consoli-dating the impr ession of exclusion and isolation of children ifthe limits, constraints and opportunities provided by the largerframeworks within which also children live are left unac-counted for. One can understand the temptation to dive intothe exiting and colour ful activities of children to demonstratetheir skills, but I warn against any belief that childr en’s - aslittle as adults’ - life worlds can be dealt with in a void. A tooone-sided focus on children’s own worlds and their agency intheir own right - as important it is - may well make us blindto factors outside their small scale life worlds and thus makeus forget about the much more power ful circumstances sur-rounding all of us; it may unduly exaggerate diff erences amongchildren and thus in the end deprive us of analytical tools formanipulating variables which are important for changing fac-tors which may pr ove decisive for the collectivity of children;the latter pr ogramme demands that we look for similarities,which will also and in particular be useful for the politicallevel.

So, I would say that these studies successfully documentchildren as actors within their small scale territories; they doin a sense contribute to showing that children are integratedin and sometime excluded from these small worlds, whereasthe question of childhood’s position in the larger structuresof society is unaddressed. An analysis of this question de-mands that childhood r esearch is taken out of the playr oom,so to say; it demands our attention to units, factors, vari-ables which per haps at first glance has nothing to do withchildhood; we can in other words not afford to assume thatchildhood is not a part of the larger society or that childrenare provisionally strangers. It is not mer ely an example of thefamous false consciousness in the sense that the pr evailing

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view holds that children should neither be seen as or actu-ally be a part of the modern oikos, or as James Garbarino(1986) said ten years ago: children should be shielded againsteconomic and political for ces, while the particularistic ismaximised and the universalistic is minimised; it is also aresult of our pr otecting and caring mood that children aresought kept away from an alleged danger ous world. The prob-lem is however if childhood can be kept outside discursively;perhaps are these discourses rather adding to and consoli-dating a particular form pr edicated on ideas about the child.

3How can we substantiate a claim that childhood is an inte-grated part of society against ideological hopes and per hapsan empirical r eality that it is excluded or marginalised in anumber of important r espects? In addition to what small scalestudies tend to do, I think we have to minimise the diff er-ences between children and maximise the similarities - notas a moral goal or a theoretical principle but rather as a meth-odological device. We have in other words to focus on child-hood as a social form and to accept that childhood has chan-ged, has another position, is impacted by diff erent param-eters, assumes a diff erent for mat, as the oikos changes; ofcourse its metamorphosis has had many stages and so haschildhood, but let us make it simple and hopefully more peda-gogical by staying with the pure forms.

I think this was what both Philippe Ariès and Ruth Benedictaccepted. Ariès (1982) when he said that scholarisation wasone of the main vehicles in producing childhood historicallyand that - as schools gained ground - a long pr ocess of segre -gation, of isolation and of delivering children to rationalitybegan, which has continued into our own day; and Benedictwhen she 60 years ago said that “From a comparative pointof view our culture goes to the extr emes in emphasizing con-trasts between the child and the adult. The child is sexless,the adult estimates his virility by his sexual activities; thechild must be pr otected from the ugly facts of life, the adult

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must meet them without psychic catastr ophe; the child mustobey, the adult must command this obedience: These are alldogmas of our culture, dogmas which, in spite of the facts ofnature, other cultures commonly do not share. In spite of thephysiological contrasts between child and adult, these arecultural accretions” (Benedict, 1955 [1938], p. 21-22).

Both Ariès and Benedict are maximising similarities be-tween children and of course overlooking innumerable dif-ferences between them, which does not mean that they wereunaware of them, but they had another story to tell, a storywhich aimed at understanding the main contours of a chang-ing childhood. Also, it did not mean that they lost points ofrefer ence, because both more or less explicitly they comparedchildhoods historically or interculturally; they did not thinkof any transition of the child into an adult, but of the trans-formation of childhood as the society an the oikos changed,and by that they also indicated a clear distinction betweenchildhood and adulthood. Their comparative macr o-units werein other words diff erent societal for mations and their respec-tive socio-economic parameters. Although several righteousand fussy historians have attempted to kill Ariès by showing- probably corr ectly - that he failed to take on board a lot ofdi ff erences between families and childr en, they are likely tosoon end up in oblivion, while Ariès survives because he hada fruitful methodological point.

In other wor ds: to come to terms with childhood as a socialform is to ascertain its main contours while maximising whatis common for children in a given society; for doing so com-parative perspectives are helpful tools - be they historical,inter cultural or inter generational.

4How do we apply this insight on contemporary society? I amafraid that we cannot do it dir ectly; we have to sharpen ourawar eness about the macro-units and the parameters whichdefine them. All r esearch - at all levels - needs a comparativepoint of r efer ence; this is true for small scale r esearch study-

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ing relations among children and between children and adults,and this is true for macro resear ch, which endeavours to studysocieties, or childhoods as generalised life worlds of childrenwithin a macro context.

The question is of course: which factors are the more pow-erful ones in for ming society and childhood? At one abstractlevel the answer is, that this factor is the oikos. There is al-ways an historical continuity in a changing oikos, but theoikos r emains; if we compare early with r ecent socio-economicformations, they dif fer by childhood, if we are to believe Ariès;they also differ by a lot of other things such as schools, cities,sewerage, telecommunications etc. The absence or pr esenceof such phenomena are pressing towards confor mity and simi-larity within each oikos or for mation, but also towards varia-tion between them. The most power ful force behind any valueof such variables or any constellation and corr elation betweenthem is - hardly a surprise - the economic for mation or thepresent stage of oikos. It deter mines lar gely both the scoreson a number of indicators, and the meaning of them in ourinterpr etation.

The strong co-variation between indicators is evident if youlook into for instance UNICEF’s yearly The State of the W orld’sChildren. Depending on level of moder nity or economic de-velopment countries are clustering ar ound a set of highlypredictable values of survival indicators in a very systematicway; I am ther efore surprised that James, Jenks and Prout(1998) in their inspiring and well-infor med book are drawinganother conclusion. They say, while quoting exactly this year-book but also many other sour ces, that “in sum, what theseaccounts point to is that it is quite misleading to think aboutchildhood in the developing world as homogeneous” (p. 130),and a bit later that “... it is the specificity of childhoods whichemerges as a pr edominant theme thr ough comparative analy-sis” (p. 132). I would have drawn exactly the opposite conclu-sion. It is of course true, that lots of diff erences can be ob-served, but in my view these within-diff erences wane to theadvantage of r elative similarities if third world childhoods are

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compared with first world childhoods. Unless one is pr eparedto deny that str ong economic for ces are largely deter miningdisparities between rich and poor countries, one is for ced tosuggest that a number of similar causes are pressing towardsconfor mity in life conditions within each group of nations. Itis therefore also plausible, that these parameters are prom-ising explanatory factors for understanding the life worlds ofchildren - both in terms of similarities within each gr oup ofnations and in terms of diff erences between these gr oups.

5Now, having ar gued for the importance of comparative analy-sis for identifying our explanatory factors, we can pr oceed toour own modern world and stay there for the r est of the time.What we must bring with us from our comparative adventureis a sharpened awar eness for what are the most r elevant fac-tors, which can not so easily and clearly be discerned if weare too close to our r esearch object. We must have distance,whether in terms of comparative analysis or in terms of theo-retical abstraction.

What is deter mining childhood in modern societies? If weseek to identify a few salient tr ends, which again pr esup-poses a historical comparison, at least five emerge (seeW intersberger, 1997):a) a demographic trend - childhood has in numerical term sbecome r elatively much smaller - i.e. children have becomerelatively fewer due to a declined inclination by adults to havechildren and a longer life expectancy; b) a family trend - child-hood has changed in stability due to a gr eater risk of beinginvolved in pluralisation of family forms; c) an institutionalisa-tion trend - childhood has become more and more institutiona-lised and or ganised; d) an economic trend - childhood is moreexposed to risks of becoming r elatively poor; e) a legal and/orideological tr end - childr en’s chances of obtaining subject- orindividual status have incr eased.

Apart from the fifth and last tr end, none of them were assuch pr ompted with childhood in mind; and in addition, al-

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though some of their consequences can be studied in smallscale studies with children, neither their shape nor theircauses could be revealed without having r ecourse to macro-resear ch. For explaining even these trends we must dig stilldeeper to find for ces lying behind, such as industrialisation,capitalist development, individualisation, employment of even-tually both par ents outside the home and so on. Important tonote is obviously that these tr ends seem to apply to mostdeveloped nations, and thus demonstrate the pressure to-wards confor mity and towards within group similarity. Witha lot of variations of course, but this does not detract from itsvalidity in general ter ms, which is best per ceived in historicalor inter cultural comparisons.

6I am afraid that time does not allow me to comment much oneach of the tr ends, which by the way are well known. I wouldlike to spare some time to take up a last kind of comparison,which in my view is decisive for any childhood resear ch, name-ly comparison between generations. The concept of genera-tion is of fundamental importance, because it for the study ofchildhood assumes the same theor etical status as the con-cept of class does in accounting for social inequality, genderfor patriar chal domination, and ethnicity for alerting us toracial and cultural discrimination. In these r esearch - andpolitical - ar eas, it is obviously both possible and relevant tostudy within-group relations, such as connections betweendiff erent gr oups of workers, women and r elations within orbetween one or more ethnic gr oups. These appr oaches, im-portant as they are, do however fail to addr ess and crossboundaries of dominance, and thus fail to elucidate struc-tural reasons for inequality and discrimination between clas-ses, sexes, and ethnic gr oups, i.e. to study the r espectivegroup’s r elation to its corr esponding dominance gr oup; in-deed it is the str ength of these categories to do exactly this.So, I believe, is the case also in generational studies, in whichchildhood assumes status of being a dominated category, whi-

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le its dominance category is adulthood. Only if we seek thequintessential diff erences between childhood an adulthoodwe can hope to identify factors important enough to manipula-te to the advantage of the collectivity of childhood.

To the extent it can be made plausible, that childhood isdiscriminated against - positively or negatively - in terms ofresour ces and privileges, there is a basis for changing the re -ality. The category childhood is thus thought to be strongenough in its assertive power to assume that defining char-acteristics of sub-gr oups of children are secondary to thecategorical status of childhood a such. In analogy, if patriar-chalism is str ong enough as a theory about male dominance,it does not weaken this theory that a number of women arenot objectively or do not subjectively see themselves as domi-nated; if the theory of class is sound, it is not r endered in-valid if some working class members enjoy diff erent life con-ditions than others; and ethnic discrimination r emains theo-retically plausible even if some differ ences within ethnicgroups can be ascertained.

7Now, following my ar gument from above, although diff erentgroups in a given society is exposed to in principle the sameexter nal factors, because they live in the same country, theyare not necessarily impacted in the same way or equallystrong, indeed they are for a number of r easons likely to beinfluenced diff erently, due for instance to the diff erential po-sition they enjoy, such as class, gender, ethnicity and gen-eration.

It is clear that childr en, as other social groups, historicallyhave benefited from and been enjoying the fruits of welfaredevelopments in moder nity. Y et, it is much less clear if theyhave kept pace with other gr oups, if we look at it from a gen-erational perspective, i.e. to which extent have childrenachieved shares of r esources in the same measure as othercomponents of society, such as for instance adults and theelderly. We have bar ely data which convincingly document

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this question historically (see though Coleman, 1990; alsoCaldwell, 1982); and even today it is uncommon to find infor-mation about generational distribution of r esour ces (see Rin-gen, 1996; Rainwater and Smeeding, 1995; Bradshaw, 1998;Ditch et al., 1998).

One r eason for this lacunae is the fact that childhood so farhas been denied its categorical status. Children have not beenallowed to be defined in terms of variables pertaining to them-selves; despite r ecent improvements (see Jensen and Saporiti,1992; Qvortrup, 1990&1997) they are for instance seldomdealt with as statistical units of observation, i.e. they havebeen part of the family, and as family variation is typicallytailored on socio-economic indicators pertaining to adults’characteristics in terms of class or stratification variables,children have been insuf ficiently accounted for and nothingis said about inter generational cleavages.

The main question is if generations are suf ficiently distinctso as to make inter generational comparison r elevant. As Ihave said before, it is immaterial if r esults in the end pr ove tobe to the advantage or disadvantage for any of the genera-tions; what counts is mer ely if we are better infor med by adopt-ing a generational view than without it. As I see it, childhoodis a distinct category or social form in several r espects, where -by I am implicitly defining other generations; I will mentiononly a few.

It is distinct in a r egulative sense: children are without ex-ception - and per definition - legal minors, wher eas everyone,who is not, is an adult. From this law one can derive a num-ber of others, although the age breaks for obtaining particu-lar rights are not always the same, such as criminal or sexualminority. It is nevertheless indisputable, that legal r egula-tions vary systematically with age, and in most countries per-sons, who have r eached the age of 18, are entitled to enjoy allrights of person.

A universal rule, but not quite as str ong as the majority re -gulation, is children’s duty to receive education. It is lessstrong in the sense that its implementation varies from coun-

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try to country in more respects. This is though less impor-tant than the empirical fact that practically all children areenrolled in schools for many years; the duration varies in Eu-rope from 9-10 years - and historically the number of yearshave everywhere incr eased. The for mative power of schoolingthus is pr esumably one of the most forceful ones, and onewhich more decisive than others distinguishes children fro mother generations.

Childr en’s high risk of poverty has been documented bothhistorically and as a current pr oblem on several occasionsduring the last one or two decades (cf Bradshaw, 1998). Thegenerational pr ofile of poverty makes it r easonable to speakof pauperisation of childhood (Jensen, 1994). In this sense,childhood seems to be more vulnerable than other genera-tions, not only economically, but also politically: children donot, neither as individuals nor as a collectivity, possess rightsor powers to ensure distributive justice.

Similarly, childr en’s access to and enjoyment of the envi-ronment is limited compared with that of adults, in particu-lar in urban areas, the shape of which is lar gely deter minedby economic inter ests. By giving supr emacy to the idea andpractice of protecting children in all imaginable ar eas andways, one is justifying a solicitous mood, irr espective of itsencroachments on other wishes children might have, for in-stance a desire for making new experience on their own. Inincr easingly more dominant urban envir onments, childr en’slife worlds are squeezed, their degr ees of fr eedom r educedand their opportunities for autonomous explorations moreand more beyond their r each.

Finally, the nor mative and ideological views of children arevery power ful; to the extent that they are inter nalised in adultsand accepted as truths they eventually assume a power whichhardly falls short of the material and concrete influences ofthe economy and the built envir onment.

8As I said in the beginning, childhood can be seen both as ex-

35

cluded and integrated. As I have shown, childhood is excluded,marginalised - or as I pr efer: dif fers distinctively from adult-hood - both legally and normatively and empirically in term sof diff erential access to r esour ces and privileges. It is how-ever important to stress that childhood is also an integratedcomponent of society, although this is typically overlooked.

In the first place childhood is an imperative component ofany society in the trivial sense of its pr esence; even now as ithas quantitatively been reduced it can not be r ejected andone cannot deny the unavoidable interactions between gen-erations; children are not mer ely potentials, they exert aninfluence on adults wher ever they are and also as a collectiv-ity they leave their imprint.

More importantly perhaps, they are contributors to any so-ciety in which they live. Children’s activities should be ap-preciated not mer ely in their small scale interactions withpeers and par ents, but they have a r ole in the socio-economicprocess as well. As I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere ,childr en’s shift historically from classical child labour to schoolwork was a logical shift which was pr edicated on the changein the oikos. Exactly as children were useful with their handsin an economic for mation in which manual labour dominated,children r emain useful with mental activities as the oikoschanges into one dominated by planning, calculation, deskwork and symbols. Historically, children have always beenasked to take part in the kind of activities which is dominantin the r espective mode of production; thus in our pr esenteconomic for mation, their school activities has - and musthave - a logical corr espondence with the dominant nature ofwork in this for mation. Children ther efore are active contribu-tors to human capital for mation, and it is important to stressthat their school work is necessarily useful also while it takesplace; indeed, if children did not do this school work, societywould soon cease to function. This is briefly the way in whichchildren are also economically an integrated part of society.Vis-à-vis this r eality of being an integrated part in even ourpresent oikos, children can then be said to be excluded in

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two ways: firstly to the extent that their work is not r ecognisedas a valuable input into our economy in terms of r ecipr ocityor exchange value, their status as legitimate claimants is notacknowledged. Instead children and their par ents are left withthe unenviable risk of suffering r elative economic hardships,and still worse: under the pr etext that they are finally at thereceiving end considering the investments the society makesin them - as if they stood outside society. Secondly, they areexcluded by being expelled out of the oikos in the sense thatmerely those manual activities as children conduct after theirreal, system-immanent work in school are recognised. Thiskind of anachronism confir ms, per haps unwittingly, the pre -sociological and traditional psychological picture of them aswaiting for the door to be opened to the serious business oflife.

This lack of r ecognition on the part of culture and societythus adds to other signs of exclusion; the familiarisation ofresponsibilities inclusive the economic one has historicallyexposed children and their families to gr eater risks of eco-nomic har dship, which is likely to have become a disincen-tive to have children and thus have left us with a society inwhich children are becoming r elatively fewer. In the end thismay even jeopar dise social cohesion for instance in terms ofthreatening our potentials to finance pensioners in the longrun.

You may have wondered why I have called my paper ‘exclu-sion by default’? It was briefly indicated in my opening wordsabout contradictions and paradoxes. It is a pr oblems whichneeds more reflection, I guess. However, the point is that ifchildren fare ill or experience discrimination it is not due tobad will, nor to any conspiration on the side of adults. Ratherit is the r esult of a combination of insufficient analysis andcompeting priorities. Nobody wishes children to be poor andeveryone would undersign the demand that children are giventhe opportunity to explore and make new experiences in theirenvir onment. If the opposite occurs, as it unfortunately does,we have to ask about other inter ests. The demands accruing

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from moder nity’s desire for pr oductivity and mobility; indi-vidualistic claims for education and consequently for usingthe achieved potentials in the labour market, str ong economicinter ests in colonising urban ar eas, etc. Such inter ests maybe more or less legitimate and many of them have certainlybeen fought for with str ong support in the population.However children were har dly seen as a part of these politicalor economic equations; they were defined out of our modernoikos and left to the responsibility of par ents; even this wasinterpr eted as morally right and the child sciences were sup-portive of keeping children outside the society. But the con-sequences of this cultural tr ends towards privatising the childare, i rrespective all good wills and intentions behind it, paidfor by children themselves or at the cost of childhood.The paradox in our popular imagery ther efore appears to bethat while the child is priceless, childhood is a nuisance.

Refer ences

Ariès, Philippe (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of FamilyLife. New York : Vintage Books.

Ariès, Philippe (1982) Barndommens historie . Copenhagen: NNFBenedict, Ruth (1955) “Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural

Conditioning”. In: Childhood in Contemporary Cultures , ed. by Mar-garet Mead and Martha W olfenstein. Chicago and London: Tne Uni-versity of Chicago Pr ess. [Originally in: Psychiatry , I, No. 2, 1938).

Bradshaw, Jonathan (1998) “The Pr evalence of Child Poverty in theUnited Kingdom: A Comparative Perspective”. Paper to theConfer ence Children and Social Exclusion, Centre for the SocialStudy of Childr en, University of Hull, 5-6 Mar ch, 1998.

Brunner, Otto (1978) “Vom ‘ganzen Haus’ zur ‘Familie’”. In: HeidiRosenbaum (Hrsg.): Seminar: Familie und Gesellschaftsstruktur .Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Bundesministerium für Familie und Senioren (1994) Familien undFamilienpolitik im geeinten Deutschland - Zukunft desHumanver mögens. Fünfter Familienbericht . Bonn: BMFuS.

Caldwell, John (1982) Theory of Fertility Decline . London, New Y ork:Academic Pr ess.

Coleman, James S. (1990) Foundations of Social Theory . Cambridge, MAand Loondon: Belknap Pr ess of Harvard University Pr ess.

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Ditch, John et al (1998) A Synthesis of National Family Policies .European Observatory on National Family Policies. The Eur opeanCommission.

Garbarino, James (1986) “Can American families afford the luxury ofchildhood?”. In: Child W elfare , vol. 65, no. 2.

James, Allison, Chris Jenks, and Alan Pr out (1998) TheorizingChildhood . Cambridge: Polity Pr ess.

Jensen, An-Magritt (1994) “The Feminization of Childhood”. In:Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics , ed. by JensQvortrup et al. Aldershot: A vebury in co-operation with TheEuropean Centre, V ienna.

Jensen, An-Magritt and Angelo Saporiti (1992) Do Children Count?.Childhood as a Social Phenomenon: A Statistical Compendium .Eurosocial Report 36/17, Eur opean Centre, V ienna.

Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver (1990) Zukunft der Familie . München:C.H.Beck’sche V erlagsbuchhandlund.

Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver (1996) Moder nisierungsschübe, Familie undSozialstaat . München: R. Oldenbourg V erlag.

Prout, Alan and Allison James (1990 [1st edition] and 1997 [2ndedition]) “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood?Provenance, Pr omise and Pr oblems”. Constructing andReconstruction Childhood. Contemporary Issues in the SociologicalStudy of Childhood , ed. by Allison James and Alan Pr out. London:Falmer Pr ess, pp. 7-34 r esp. 7-33.

Qvortrup, Jens (1995) “From Useful to Useful: The Historical Continuityof Children’s Constructive Participation”. In: Sociological Studies ofChildren , Vol. 7, ed. by Anne-Marie Ambert. Gr eenwich,Connecticut: JAI Pr ess Inc.

Qvortrup, Jens (1990 and 1997) “A V oice for Children in Statistical andSocial Accounting: A Plea for Children’s Right to be Hear d”, in Proutand James (1990 and 1997).

Ringen, Stein (1997) Citizens, Families, and Reform . Oxford: Clar endonPress.

Rainwater, Lee and T imothy M. Smeeding (1995) Doing Poorly: The RealIncome of American Children in a Comparative Perspective .Luxembourg Income Studies, W orking Paper No. 127.

UNICEF (1997) Children at Risk in Central and Eastern Eur ope: Perilsand Pr omises . Economies in T ransition Studies, RegionalMonitoring Report no. 4. Flor ence: UNICEF Inter national ChildDevelopment Centre .

W intersberger, Helmut (1997) “Children and the W elfare Mix:Distributive Justice Between Generations in a W elfare Society”.Paper based on lecture given at the South Jutland UniversityCentre on 9 January, 1997.

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W orking Papers

The publications can be collected or ordered at the Department ofContemporary Cultural Studies as long as editions are available.

1. Jørn Guldberg: T radition, modernitet og usamtidighed.Om Børge Mogensens FDB-møbler og det moderneshjemliggør else (not available).

2. Flemming Mouritsen: Child Culture - Play Culture .

3. Niels Kayser Nielsen: Madkultur mellem det lokale,det nationale og det globale (not available).

4. Henrik Juel: Form og fortælling i lyd/billed-medier (not available).

5. Carsten Jessen: Det kompetente bør nefællesskab. Leg og læringomkring computeren .Computerspil og legekultur. Skitse til en tolkningsramme

6. Ning de Coninck-Smith: Natural Play in natural Surr oundings.Urban Childhood and Playground Planning in Denmark, c. 1930 –1950

7. Jesper Olesen: Children and Media Risk

8. Carsten Jessen: Childr en's Computer CultureThree essays on Children and Computers

9. Jens Qvortrup: Childhood and Societal Macr ostructures.Childhood Exclusion by Default

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UDSPIL

Previously published:

UDSPIL 1: Jørgen Gleerup: Opbrudskultur.Odense 1991, 5. oplag 1997.

UDSPIL 2: Lars Qvortrup: Kedsomhedens tidsalder.Odense 1991, 2. oplag 1993.

UDSPIL 3: Niels Kayser Nielsen: Krop og oplysning.Odense 1993.

UDSPIL 4: Jørgen Gleerup og Finn Wiedemann (r ed):Kultur ens koder - i og omkring gymnasiet.Odense 1995.

UDSPIL 5: Lars Qvortrup: Mellem kedsomhedog dannelse.Odense 1996.

UDSPIL 6: Flemming Mouritsen: Legekultur.Odense 1996, 2. oplag 1998.

UDSPIL 7: Niels Kayser Nielsen: Krop og kulturanalyser.Odense 1997.

UDSPIL 8: Jør gen Gleerup: Organisationskultur som læreprocesog kommunikation. Svendborg Fingarveri 1931-1990.Odense 1998.

Odense University Pr ess:Tel. +45 66 15 79 99 - fax +45 66 15 81 26 - e-mail: pr ess@forlag.sdu.dk