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Children, Childhood, and Everyday Life

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Children, Childhood, and Everyday Life

Children’s Perspectives
Second Edition

edited by

Mariane Hedegaard

University of Copenhagen

Karin Aronsson

Stockholm University

Charlotte Højholt

Roskilde University

Oddbjørg Skjær Ulvik

Oslo Metropolitan University

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

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ISBN: 978-1-64113-169-8 (Paperback)

           978-1-64113-170-4 (Hardcover)

           978-1-64113-171-1 (ebook)

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Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1     Rethinking Development: Situated Studies of Children’s Perspectives

Karin Aronsson, Mariane Hedegaard, Charlotte Højholt, and Oddbjørg Skjær Ulvik

Section I

Family Life as a Social Arena

2     Children’s Creative Modeling of Conflict Resolutions in Everyday Life: Family Life as a Site of Learning and Development

Mariane Hedegaard

3     Daily Practices and The Time Politics of Family Life

Karin Aronsson

4     Money Talks: Children’s Consumption and Becoming in the Family

Lucas Gottzén

5     Constructions of a Culturally Adequate Child: Foster Parents’ Developmental Goals and Strategies for Their Foster Children

Oddbjørg Skjær Ulvik

Section II

The Social Landscape of Schools and Residential Care

6     Children’s Perspectives and Learning Communities

Charlotte Højholt

7     Family Problems: Exploring Dilemmas and Complexities of Organizing Everyday Family Life

Dorte Kousholt

8     Paradoxes of Inclusion: Administrative Procedures and Children’s Everyday Lives

Maja Røn-Larsen

9     Using the Child Perspective to Support Children With Severe Impairments in Becoming Active Subjects

Louise Bøttcher

10    Residential Care and Children’s Development of Agency in Everyday Life

Ida Schwartz

Section III

Children’s Own Reflections on Social Life and Development

11    “Being Oneself” and “Being of Use”: On Children’s Appropriation of Values

Ruth E. Toverud

12    Being a Child, Coming of Age: Exploring Processes of Growing Up

Liv Mette Gulbrandsen

13    Social Identity in Transition: Two Boys’ Stories When Changing School

Ditte Winther-Lindqvist

14    “Remaining the Same” and Children’s Experience of Development

Pernille Hviid

Chapter 1

Rethinking Development

Situated Studies of Children’s Perspectives

Karin Aronsson

Mariane Hedegaard

Charlotte Højholt

Oddbjørg Skjær Ulvik

Toward Situated Studies of Children’s Development

Children live their lives, learn, and develop through participation in the social communities of, for instance, families, peer groups, classrooms, and day care institutions. They thus live their lives across quite different social settings, including homes, schools, and other institutions. Yet, developmental psychology has at large presented decontextualized models of child development, featuring an ahistorical and decontextualized child (for a critique of such an approach, see Burman, 2017; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1997; Prout, 2005; Walkerdine, 1993). In anthropology, there are some seminal texts that illuminate ways in which childhood is shaped in different ways in different communities, including detailed micro-genetic descriptions of ways in which everyday activities unfold in specific activity settings (Ochs, Pontecorvo, & Fasulo, 1979; Rogoff, 1990, 2003). One of today’s research challenges is to present empirical studies of child development that involve studies of children and children’s perspectives, situated across different social settings and activities located within cultural traditions. Our aim with the studies in this book is to present a new take on development, through a number of discussions of children’s life trajectories and development, situated in children’s everyday activities, but also as a process that includes biological and cultural changes and transformations. This includes the children’s1 positions in everyday activity settings (family life, child care, classrooms and school yards, and the different demands that children meet here) and the child’s motives and how s/he experiences social demands in different situations.

This collection is the updated and expanded 2nd edition of a collection of cultural-psychological and ethnographic studies of children’s everyday lives, emanating from a series of joint symposia in Copenhagen, Oslo, Roskilde, and Stockholm, over many years. Recently, the everyday lives of families have, for instance, been documented in an American context (Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2015), in Italian and Swedish contexts (Pauletto, Aronsson, & Galeano, 2017; Pontecorvo, Fasulo, & Sterponi, 2001), and in Australian and Danish contexts (Grieshaber, 2004; Hedegaard & Fleer, 2013), including social contexts across family life and school. This volume brings together a number of analyses of everyday life in contemporary Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It focuses on questions about children’s world making, anchored in their daily lives as lived together with other persons in different social arrangements for the upbringing of children.

Case Studies of Children’s Life Courses

In work on children’s perspectives in family life, the interview has often been seen as the cardinal or, at times, the only method for studying children’s perspectives. This volume opens up toward broader methodological approaches in that it includes several chapters that document how children’s and youths’ perspectives can be studied through their social actions and their ways of interacting in everyday family life: in their verbal and nonverbal conversations with family members and in their ways of making choices and showing how they orient to school, media, or family members through how they act and interact with others in situated activities.

This volume provides a toolkit for analyzing children’s perspectives over time and in different settings. Many of the chapters include brief case studies, embedded in illustrative vignettes with descriptions of children’s actions in situated activity settings or with transcripts from recorded social interaction. The book as a whole is rich in empirical examples that, in detailed ways, highlight children’s micro-genetic courses of action, as well as their life trajectories in and across everyday activity settings.

Within medical research, case study presentations have traditionally been important in tracing the roots of both illness and recovery trajectories. For instance, each issue of The New England Journal of Medicine contains case study documentation of medical cases. Within developmental psychology, the first case studies also appeared within clinical settings, as in psychoanalysis and its focus on how a child may develop phobias (Freud, 1977). One of the strengths of case studies is that they lend themselves to re-analysis and novel readings. In contemporary theorizing, it has thus been possible to re-think and critically analyze such case studies from discursive (Billig, 1997) and from feminist perspectives (Moi, 1986).

The authors of this volume are based in other theoretical and methodological approaches than clinical medicine. But this volume offers a number of case studies of children’s life experiences beyond the diagnostic restrictions of a clinical gaze. In line with their ethnographic approaches, the present authors all strive toward capturing emic perspectives on children’s life situations, that is, the participants’ orientations to events and settings or their own conceptualizations of what are fortunate or misfortunate life experiences. Focusing on what is important for children (Hedegaard, this volume; Toverud, this volume; Schwartz, this volume) the child’s projects become focal points of analysis for understanding social interaction. Some case studies encompass life periods (Gulbrandsen, this volume; Hviid, this volume). In the linguistic ethnographic tradition, Capps and Ochs (1995) have presented a book-length case study of ways in which family members, including children, cope with and orient to the mother’s agoraphobia. At large, though, case studies are relatively rare within the social sciences (but see Lareau, 2003). Yet, life-story research and the analyses of narratives (Riessman & Quinney, 2005) offer one type of approach that is at times deployed in social work.

One issue that has been much discussed in childhood studies is whether children are to be seen as beings or becomings, that is, as active subjects in their own right or as incomplete persons, adult-to-be (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). As discussed by Lee (1998), though, anti-developmentalist approaches may misfire into an essentialist treatment of agency where children are primarily seen as subjects in their own right, as beings, in that they are seen as “complete” and “finished” (beings) when inspected through the lens of a sociological dichotomy:

We should note that these alternatives share an investment in the complete, the finished, and the mature. Either society is complete and completing, or children are complete as agents and thus capable of speaking in their own right. Socialisation theses and extant sociologies of childhood, despite their differences, have one feature in common—both privilege the “finished.” They share this feature because they both operate by making children fit for sociological theory, rather than by making sociological theory fit for children. (Lee, 1998, p. 463)

The authors of this anthology try to capture the lives of children across the complexities of time, not merely as finished beings or as incompetent becomings, and also how they through their participation in activity settings contribute to these and thereby to their own developmental conditions. Several chapters in this volume present case study data over time from children’s and youth’s social worlds as lived and in their transitions from a first home to a second home, from lower school to upper school, and various ways of coming of age. These cases reveal much complexity in children’s agency, as revealed at different points in their life trajectories, beyond any programmatic notions of innate competence (or incompetence). Notably, these chapters treat children’s and youth’s ways of dealing with and orienting to social change, transitions, and novel demands, for instance, in novel friendship configurations (see Guldbrandsen, this volume; Hviid, this volume; Toverud, this volume; Ulvik, this volume; Winter-Lindqvist, this volume).

A Practice-Based Approach
to Children’s Participation

Moreover, we explicitly focus on children’s own perspectives and ways in which children position themselves and are heard and seen in family and school contexts. Notably children’s perspectives in this volume both involve what children say about themselves and others (e.g., in interviews) and what children show through how they actually orient to others in social action, through the many ways in which they display affective stances toward others, and in their ways of interacting with others. In line with linguistic ethnography (e.g., Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989), children’s affective and evaluative stances can thus also be seen, not merely through what children tell about others, but through what children tell to others in social interaction (Aronsson, this volume; Gottzén, this volume; Hedegaard, this volume; Winther-Lindqvist, this volume).

Inspired by Vygotsky’s theory and its cultural methodological approaches as well as linguistic ethnography and discursive analyses, we see an activity-based and situated approach both as a core methodology and as an important theoretical approach to the study of children’s life courses and developmental trajectories. In line with Vygotsky’s work and the cultural-historical tradition of psychology, the child’s development has to be seen as trajectories through situated practices that at every point can be understood in relation to the child’s social situation (Elkonin, 1999; Haavind, 2005; Hedegaard, 2009; Højholt, 2008; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1998). This implies a perspective of development that offers possibilities to investigate children’s agency, that is, how children meet demands and engage in activities, and how they thereby also contribute to their own development.

One of our aims is to problematize time, change, continuity, and transitions in childhood in order to identify and discuss novel ways of documenting trajectories and developmental pathways that may indicate development. The relation between social demands and the child’s motives constitutes an important dynamic factor leading to psychological changes.

The authors of this book share such a practice-based theoretical and analytical ambition in their research on children’s social participation in everyday practices. Our shared interest in children’s social settings and lives can be seen as a way of working with analyses of children as active agents in their own lives in specific social contexts, including situated activities in home life, school, and “special” homes, such as foster homes. Within earlier theorizing on childhood and childhood sociology, there has been a focus on children’s agency (Corsaro, 2005; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Prout, 2005). But there is a need for more empirical work that shows in what ways children are actors in their own lives. Recent work on everyday negotiations shows some ways in which children and adults engage in negotiations that at times involve elements of mutual apprenticeship (Aronsson & Gottzén, 2011; Pontecorvo, Fasulo, & Sterponi, 2001; Rogoff, 2003). Such analyses are in turn related to contemporary theorizing on participation (Goffman, 1981, 1983; Goodwin, 2006; Hedegaard, 2012; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). Participation is a central issue in several of these chapters, and it is, in its turn, related to participants’ ways of positioning themselves and others (Aronsson & Gottzén, 2011; Bourdieu, 1984; Bozhovich, 2009; Davies & Harré, 1990; Goffman, 1981, 1983), with respect to, for instance, local age hierarchies.

Age is here primarily seen as “social age” or as positions within local age hierarchies (Bourdieu, 1984; Waerdahl, 2005; Vygotsky 1998), in terms of implicit ideals for becoming or failing to live up to age class standards. It can be noted though, that a primary concern in these contributions is how the participants themselves orient to becoming and to social demands in novel activity settings, rather than whether children can be seen as competent in terms of any preset categorizations (Gottzén, this volume; Guldbrandsen, this volume; Hviid, this volume; Toverud, this volume; Ulvik, this volume; Winther-Lindqvist, this volume).

One of the basic ambitions of this volume is to transcend the dichotomy between what is labeled the common and the uncommon, or the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary.” Social practices for children that are defined as different, extraordinary, or special in one or another way serve as analytical points of departure for discerning developmental conditions and children’s perspectives (Bøttcher, this volume; Højholt, this volume; Kousholt, this volume; Røn Larsen, this volume; Ulvik, this volume).

Novel Methods for Exploring Children’s Experiences

A theoretical focus on children’s perspectives and situated practices obviously has implications for the methodological choices. Developmental narratives, video ethnographies, participatory observations, life mode interviews, and other ethnographic methods for analyzing children’s life trajectories form part of the methods used for exploring children’s lives.

In their research, the authors of this book have all been engaged in ethnographic or cultural-historical studies of children’s perspectives, anchored in situated everyday activities and social settings, as the core in research on children’s social lives and development. Children’s perspectives involve children’s experiences. Within cultural psychology, narratives form core aspects of the way that we build our social identities, and an important goal for research is thus to explore individual children’s life-worlds and subjective meaning-making (Bruner, 1987, 1990) including their ways of narrating their own lives. Young people’s own narratives are foregrounded in several chapters in this volume. Several chapters draw on life mode interviewing as developed by Hanne Haavind in the late 1980s, a type of interviewing that draws on conversations about situated activities and social relationships in everyday life (see Andenaes, 1995; Haavind, 2003, 2005, 2014; Ulvik, 2015; as well as Gulbrandsen, this volume; Schwartz, this volume; Toverud, this volume; Ulvik, this volume).

Narratives form important parts of the documentation of children’s experiences and their understanding of the interaction in which they are involved in their social life worlds (Bamberg, 2004; Bruner, 1987, 1990; Jansen & Andenaes, 2011). However, children’s perspectives may also involve exploration of children’s orientations through analyses of their participation in different activity practices (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2008). This means that empirical sources do not have to be limited to the children themselves but could also include the perspectives of peers and adults with whom the children in question interact. Moreover, a child perspective can be identified as a participant perspective, that is, a perspective that reveals how children and other participants orient to target phenomena or co-participants as seen through how they take part in social activities (Goodwin, 2006; Potter, 1996), and how the co-participants orient to them. One aspect of such participation is, of course, to what extent children can be seen to engage with adults in negotiations that concern their own interests (Aronsson & Cekaite, 2011; Aronsson & Gottzén, 2011; Beck, 1997; Hedegaard, 2012; Aronsson, this volume; Gottzén, this volume; Hedegaard, this volume).

This collection is an attempt to integrate conceptions of child development and childhood with cultural-historical and discursive approaches to research on children’s perspectives. Although it contributes to theoretical analyses, it also offers rich empirically based descriptions, so that its broader usefulness will be apparent both to those who are tackling practical problems and those who teach child development or childhood studies. The analyses draw on empirical data from diverse social contexts in their problem formulations, and therefore the book may be of interest to a broad range of professionals, as well as research students.

The adult–child relation has traditionally been foregrounded, rather than child–child relations in work on children’s life trajectories. Observations across a series of settings in children’s daily lives have drawn our attention to children’s involvement in each other’s lives and how their attention is recurrently oriented to classmates and towards being part of shared communities. Learning and cognition cannot be isolated from affective and social alignments. As discussed by Charlotte Højholt (2008, this volume) communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) always involve communities of learners. In institutional settings, children recurrently get engaged in social dilemmas as they seek to participate in relevant communities and to be acknowledged there. More than anything, our efforts to explore children’s perspectives have turned our attention toward children’s participation in communities of learners. Everyday learning practices routinely involve persons-in-practices, and phenomena such as inclusion/exclusion, local hierarchies, and identity work.

An important feature of this volume is that it problematizes what is the child’s own voice. The book moves beyond a monolog bias and naïve claims about authenticity in foregrounding the many ways in which voice is a relational and polyphonic phenomenon, co-construed in dialogues with others (Aronsson & Hundeide, 2002; Bakhtin, 1984). Moreover, it discusses ways in which we may understand children’s life worlds and projects through their social actions and orientations. Several of the contributors document children’s perspectives across social contexts.

A focus on the social landscape of schools is important in several chapters as are dilemmas in schools’ and parents’ ways of orienting to local norms for progress (Bøttcher, this volume; Højholt, this volume; Røn-Larsen, this volume).

Comments on Individual Chapters

The book is organized into three sections. The first section particularly focuses on family life as an arena for negotiations and informal learning. The second section focuses on schools as social arenas. Moreover, several of these chapters document and highlight life processes across social contexts, such as home and school. The third section focuses on children’s own reflections on social life and development.

The chapters in Section I (Family Life as a Social Arena) focus on demands and interactions in family life. Children as well as parents are analyzed as active agents, with developmental goals and strategies in everyday life practices. Children are thus seen as partners in negotiating generational relationships. Their active contributions to their families’ care practice and family politics are highlighted in analyses, where the focus is on everyday practices and ways in which such practices are culturally situated in relation to, for instance, conflicting demands from school and work, available time, and contemporary consumption patterns. Constructionist approaches have become more important in approaches that aim to rethink developmental psychology (Burman, 2017). This volume extends such work in showing, in some degree of detail, ways in which children and parents co-construe time and social life in situated negotiations (Aronsson, this volume; Gottzén, this volume; Hedegaard, this volume).

Mariane Hedegaard (Chapter 2) focuses on the different types of social demands that both children and parents put on each other, and on how children’s creative modeling of conflict resolutions is central in their learning and development within family life. Her analyses draw on participatory observations. Karin Aronsson (Chapter 3) similarly analyzes family life negotiations, particularly negotiations about time and timing, and how time is situated and co-construed within family life micro politics. This illuminates how parents and children orient to time in divergent ways in the life sphere. Lukas Gottzén (Chapter 4) problematizes responsible consumption in his analyses of children’s consumption patterns, showing how children and parents alike might be seen as consumers in becoming. It can be noted that Aronsson’s and Gottzén’s chapters draw on video recordings, where family life is recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed.

Oddbjørg Skjær Ulvik (Chapter 5) analyzes narratives, drawing on everyday life practices in foster families, discussing contemporary foster parents’ constructions of a culturally adequate or autonomous and responsible child. Moreover, she shows ways in which foster parents adopt corrective practices in order to attain such an overarching developmental goal. Her chapter also documents the subtle differentiation between doing things when asked to do so and doing things on one’s own initiative. Daily life is undermined with moral undertones where a foster child is, for instance, both to shower and to do so willingly and spontaneously. In line with Foucault’s (1999) ideas of self-governing subjects, foster children are to do like their foster families do and they are to do so willingly and spontaneously. If the individual child does not endorse the developmental goals that the foster parents have, their very parent–child relationship might be threatened in that the foster parents might threaten to abandon the child (Ulvik, this volume).

The chapters in Section II (The Social Landscape of Schools and Residential Care) focus on everyday school practices and children’s engagements in communities of children inside and outside of classroom contexts. Again, both ordinary and special settings are discussed. Within the school as a social arena, inclusion and exclusion may take place both informally among classmates and formally by authorities removing a child. A large number of children are, for different reasons, taken out of school for various periods of their school life, and this has inspired a focus on strategies for promoting inclusion in school settings. Still, the paradox of inclusion seems to be that children are excluded, with the ultimate purpose of becoming included. Some children are offered fairly comprehensive professional arrangements for supporting children who are encountering difficulties; this may include intellectual, behavioral, or neurodevelopmental disorders.

One of the ambitions of this volume is to illuminate learning as a lived enterprise. Charlotte Højholt (Chapter 6; see also 2008) points out that children should be seen as central for each other’s learning in the classroom. Her research shows that at school, children are not only oriented to school tasks but to each other. Children are concerned about each other, they jointly enter novel learning tasks, and they seem concerned about where to belong or not to belong. Communities of learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in school settings in fact also involve communities of learners, that is, persons with social goals and agendas. Yet, at large, professional support almost exclusively focuses on special, individual, and isolated functions, and overlooks the crucial social challenges in children’s everyday lives where they live together with each other across different social settings.

Dorte Kousholt (Chapter 7) addresses dilemmas of everyday management of professional assistance to families who are defined as having special problems. This chapter problematizes the normal/special divide and draws on analyses of general dilemmas in everyday family life. Moreover, it illuminates how parental care is linked to the everyday life of the child across different contexts. Like several other chapters, she draws on participatory observations (for a methodological discussion, see also Højholt & Kousholt, 2014). Maja Røn Larsen (Chapter 8) focuses on children in the transition between regular schools and special education systems, exposing paradoxical exclusion practices, involving apparent contradictions between ambitions of inclusion and practices of exclusion in special education.

Louise Bøttcher (Chapter 9) deploys the theoretical notion of cognition in practice for understanding a young boy with very severe cerebral palsy and how his learning and development is situated in relation to both individual and situational aspects, including material aspects. Moreover, she shows that a child with quite restricted communicative abilities might still initiate joking activities with objects around him. However, all co-participants might not see and enjoy the “turn-over-ness” of an everyday object. As part of her analyses, she criticizes what she calls impaired practices in working with children who have communicative impairments. Ida Schwartz focuses (Chapter 10) on conceptualizations of agency in relation to child development, invoking the notion of the conduct of everyday life. This theoretical perspective is used to analyze agency, as seen from an 11-year-old girl’s perspective on how a child in residential care relates to parents, professional caregivers, and peers in different contexts, and how she moves across different settings, integrating engagements and relations in everyday life.

Section III (Children’s Own Reflections on Social Life and Development) is concerned with children’s own conceptualizations of the process of growing up. On the basis of children’s and youths’ participation in everyday life activities, this section analyzes how the children reflect on and construe social demands and their own development. An overall aim is to firmly situate children’s learning and development within their daily life activities, anchoring these in cultural and historical events. Ruth Toverud (Chapter 11) problematizes the dichotomy between the individual and the collective, drawing on four young person’s social meaning making in relation to their appropriation of norms for being of use and being oneself. Liv Mette Gulbrandsen (Chapter 12; see also 2003) analyzes the process of children’s development as children’s active meaning-making and characterizes this as a pendulum movement where the past and present, as well as the children’s projected future prospects, are included in continuous and ongoing processes of interpretation and reinterpretation within different social arenas in everyday life. At any moment, past, present, and anticipated experiences are processed into stories that create spaces for being a child or coming of age. Children’s friendships from their own perspectives is also the theme of Ditte Winther-Lindqvist’s (this volume) contribution (Chapter 13), where she analyzes the identity work that children engage in when changing school in the transition between 6th grade and secondary school (7th grade). The two boys of her case studies are shown to orient in quite different ways to becoming accepted in a higher school and novel classroom. This also involves a hierarchical classroom context, structured around a popularity axis from high to low—from participation to exclusion—where friendship formations are foregrounded as a crucial aspect of classroom life. In our last chapter, Pernille Hviid (Chapter 14) discusses developmental processes in relation to different traditions within developmental psychology that focus on either change or stability. On the basis of a young girl’s own experience of her development over time, Hviid (this volume) problematizes concepts of time, change, and pace, in relation to processes of changing configurations of emerging novelties and the remaining present.

In this introductory chapter, we have presented a broad selection of theoretical and methodological approaches to change and development, with the goal of exploring and understanding children’s everyday lives in a richer way. Thereby, we hope to inspire the reader to delve into the full complexity of children’s everyday lives and social worlds.

Note

1. It should be noted that, in line with the UN Convention of the Child, children refer to persons of 18 years or below. This means that our text both refers to youths and young children, unless we specifically comment on “youths” or on “young children.”

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