Children And Social Competence: Arenas of Action

256 Pages·1998·1.9 MB·English

by  Ian Hutchby

Children and Social Competence
Children and Social
Competence:
Arenas of Action
Edited by
Ian Hutchby and Jo Moran-Ellis
Foreword by
Allison James
(A member of the Taylor & Francis Group)
London • Washington, D.C.
UK The Falmer Press, 1 Gunpowder Square, London, EC4A 3DE
USA The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101,
Bristol, PA 19007
© I.Hutchby and J.Moran-Ellis 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
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First published in 1998
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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ISBN 0-203-97565-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0 7507 0650 3 cased
ISBN 0 7507 0651 1 paper
Jacket design by Caroline Archer
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Contents
Foreword vi
Allison James
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Ian Hutch by Jo Moran-Ellis
Chapter 1 Situating Children’s Social Competence 8
Ian Hutch by Jo Moran-Ellis
Part I Competence and Family Structures 29
Chapter 2 Children and the Family Order: Constraints and 30
Competencies
Leena Alanen
Chapter 3 Runaway Street Children in Nepal: Social Competence 48
Away from Home
Rachel Baker
Chapter 4 Protest-despair-detachment: Questioning the Myth 68
Helen Barrett
Part II Contexts for Discourse Competence 91
Chapter 5 Children’s Neo-rhetorical Participation in Peer Interactions 92
Robert E.Sanders and Kurt E.Freeman
Chapter 6 Social and Cognitive Competencies in Learning: Which is 120
Which?
Hilary Gardner
Chapter 7 Children’s Participation in the Discourse of Children’s 138
Television
Joanna Thornborrow
Part III Competence and Institutional Knowledge 158
v
Chapter 8 ‘What’s the Problem?’ Restoring Social Order in the 159
Preschool Classroom
Susan Danby and Carolyn Baker
Chapter 9 Difference and Similarity: How Children’s Competence is 186
Constituted in Illness and Its Treatment
Pia Haudrup Christensen
Chapter 10 In the Company of Strangers: Being a Child in Care 202
Gerald de Montigny
Chapter 11 The Case of the Silent Child: Advice-giving and Advice- 221
reception in Parent-Teacher Interviews
David Silverman, Carolyn Baker and Jayne Keogh
List of Contributors 241
Index 242
Foreword
Allison James
That a book which raises questions about children’s social competence and their
arenas of action should be written at the end of the twentieth century gives pause
for reflection on the tremendous changes which have occurred not only in
children’s everyday lives worldwide, but also in attitudes towards childhood
itself. Why is the question of children’s competence a pressing issue of our time?
What has prompted this concern? Whose concern is it? Not just rhetorical
devices, these questions are, I think, very pertinent to the topic: they force us to
confront the fact that children’s social experiences and everyday lives are not
only shaped by their engagement with childhood as a social institution but that
children’s own actions can work to shape the changing face of childhood itself.
By way of illustrating the changes which have occurred with respect to
children’s status in society, we can look to Britain at the beginning of the twentieth
century. Perhaps for the first time, all children, and not just those of the upper
and middle classes, were at last united under the umbrella institution of
‘childhood’. Child protection legislation, which had been drafted towards the end
of the nineteenth century, had begun to filter into both the home and the
workplace to touch the lives of all children by sharpening up the distinctions
between adults’ and children’s activities which are the mark of childhood
(Archard, 1993). This could be seen in the introduction of universal compulsory
schooling, the exclusion of children from full-time work and placing of the duty
of care and responsibility for children’s well-being firmly in the hands of adults
in their roles as parents, teachers or guardians. Justifications for this divide,
argued with increasing certainty and vehemence, charted the progress of the
century and drew upon older and more enduring images and mythologies of the
child: they recalled the innocence espoused by Rousseau and later the Romantics;
they pointed to the child’s need for correction, training and restraint which had
been the hallmark of seventeenth century Puritan attitudes; and they drew
strength from the scientific framing of the process of children’s maturation
offered by the rapidly expanding discipline of developmental psychology. It
seemed that we were becoming increasingly sure of what children needed,
precisely because they were children.
Taking stock at the end of the twentieth century, however, these certitudes
seem less so. The spotlight has fallen upon the child to illuminate an increasing
vii
diversity, rather than uniformity, in children’s experiences, rendering any notion
of ‘childhood’ as a singular phenomenon now obsolete. The sources of this
doubting are manifold. Rapid changes in family form and composition within the
United States and Western Europe have called into question the extent to which
familial socialization plays a determining role in children’s social maturation
(Brannen and O’Brien, 1996); the apparent increase in child sexual abuse has
ruptured notions of the ‘family’ as a safe haven for children and, in turn, raised
questions about children’s own sexuality and rights to sexual knowledge
(Kitzinger, 1990; Jenks, 1994). The exposition of child labour worldwide and
atrocities towards children have not only led to calls for increasingly tighter
controls on children’s activities and the assertion of children’s rights vis-à-vis
those of adults but, at the same time, drawn attention to the work that children
can do and the wider contributions they make as citizens (Boyden, 1997).
Brutalities perpetrated against children have revealed their powerlessness in
relationships with adults, while the public exposure of child bullies and child
murderers have demonstrated children’s power over one another and thrown into
disarray any notions of an all-embracing childish innocence (James and Jenks,
1996). That children can act as child soldiers and as carers for their parents we
know for sure (Stephens, 1995). This makes any claims to a naturalized
incompetence increasingly difficult to sustain and, in Britain, the Children Act
(1989) has put this issue firmly on the statute book (Alderson, 1993). To ask
questions about children’s participation in society, as the chapters in this volume
seek to do, is therefore not only necessary but, it would seem, most timely
indeed.
This questioning is, however, neither singular in its purpose nor in its framing.
Nor does it simply lie within the domain of ‘public interest’, brought to our
attention and for comment through the media and changes in policy legislation.
Within what has come to be called the new social studies of childhood
researchers are embracing these questions from a variety of different approaches
and from within a number of disciplinary traditions. Sociologists,
anthropologists, historians, social geographers, demographers and socio-legal
experts have joined together to ask about the constitution of childhood in society
(James, Jenks and Prout, 1997). These researchers explore, from different
perspectives, both the ways in which childhood as a social institution constructs
spheres of action for children and how children themselves engage with, and
participate in, that process. And central to each of these perspectives are differing
views both of children’s abilities to participate in the social world and the extent
to which the social institution of childhood draws on and shapes their social
competence. However, these differences do not stem simply, if at all, from the
manifestation of different disciplinary research traditions but reflect, rather more
complexly, a different positioning of the child in relation to the adult world. And
it is these varied points of departure which, in turn, permit different kinds of
question to be asked.
viii
For those researchers for whom exploring children’s roles as social actors
constitutes a central concern, children’s competence is taken-for-granted. The
question they pose, instead, is how that competence is acknowledged and
expressed or disguised and controlled in and through children’s everyday
relationships. For some, it is only by looking inside the social worlds of children
that their competence can be discovered and explicated. In this view, the
institution of childhood separates children off from adults in such a way as to
disguise their competencies. These are to be revealed by exploring the ways in
which children’s own social relationships construct a child’s world, distinctive
and unique in its form and content (Hardman, 1973). For others, by contrast,
their interest is in championing children as social actors in an adult world, where
they can be revealed to be demonstrating a shared human competence, rather
than a child-specific set of abilities which are of and about the concerns of
children. In such research children take on the characteristics of a minority group
vis-à-vis the adult population (Mayall, 1995).
The other main focus for research within the new social studies of childhood is
that which, rather than exploring children’s agency, concentrates much more on
questions of how childhood is structured for and by children. Within this kind of
research again two main approaches can be identified. The first looks at the ways
in which a social space for childhood is marked out in different societies and
points to the particular competencies, or their lack, which are signalled for the
occupants of that space. Through thus denying that the universality of the ‘child’
can be plotted through a naturalized set of competencies, such approaches are
diametrically opposed to the model of growth and maturation offered from
within developmental psychology (Stainton-Rogers and Stainton-Rogers, 1992).
Instead, their intention is to explore the ways in which the life course is
differentially classified across time and space and to demonstrate the extensive
range within which notions of children’s social competence can be situated. From
this view there is no constancy in what constitutes the ‘child’. A second strand,
though also concerned with the social space of childhood, argues in contrast for
the universality of the child. It begins, however, from the assumption that the
ways in which childhood is structured in any society are expressive of a
particular view of children’s competence and ability. It is in this sense that the
institution of childhood is a truly social phenomenon (Qvortrup et al., 1994).
These four models are, of course, ideal types and there is, in practice, a great deal
of overlap between them. As this volume clearly demonstrates, researchers may
at different times and for different purposes choose to thread their way between
these approaches and may not pin their colours to any particular mast. However,
what is I think significant about the models, as ideal types, is the questions they
raise about the twin themes that are central to this volume: social competence
and arenas of action. The models underline, first, the need for reflexivity on the
part of researchers concerning their assumptions about ‘what children are’, for
these may implicitly shape the process and progress of research. Second, they
raise an awareness of the variety of ways in which ‘the child’ has been and can
ix
be constituted in society. In the chapters presented in this volume it is the focus
on social competence which brings both these issues immediately to the fore.
Thus, variously, the chapters ask questions about the social relations children
have with adults and point to the tensions that can arise, tensions often centred on
what children can or cannot do; they explore children’s relationships with one
another, revealing a sophistication of social interaction not widely remarked, let
alone accounted for; they demonstrate children’s facility with the material and
technological world and raise awkward questions as to why this competence has
long been unacknowledged; they tackle head-on the assumed sequential
progression which takes a child from incompetence to competence as he/she
moves towards adulthood.
But more than this, the chapters collectively signal the massive strides which
have been made in our understanding of children and childhood and the
increasing sophistication with which researchers are addressing children as
research subjects. The interdisciplinary nature of the new social studies of
childhood, so clearly represented in this volume, signals that, although we may
no longer be able to cling with any certainty to a fixed idea about what childhood
is, we may move into the next millennium confident that, at the very least, we
have the reflexive awareness of how best to proceed.
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