often the needs of adults, rather than children, that are being met through the

provision of segregated spaces for children. The provision of such child-friendly

spaces may, for instance, work to calm adults’ fears about children’s safety and
need for protection, or may serve to occupy children with games and play activi-
ties, thereby freeing up parents’ time through providing some temporary relief
from care-giving.
In a study of the provision of commercial birthday parties for children,
McKendrick et al. argue, for example, that many of the leisure spaces which offer
such facilities can be seen as serving ‘a useful function for adults’ through provid-
ing a safe place for children and relieving adults of the necessity to hold a party at
home (2000: 113). However, they also observe that in providing a child-focused
approach to play, such commercialised venues may serve to free children from
their confinement within the home and help extend the environments in which
children can participate. In this sense, they can also be seen to be meeting chil-
dren’s needs, albeit that some children may not have access to them for social or
economic reasons.
Being child-friendly is, therefore, not simply about making places safe for chil-
dren or ensuring that children have specific services. It is about recognising that
children’s requirements may be different – or the same – as those of adults and
that the best way to assess what these are is to enable children to be involved in
their design and implementation.

FURTHER READING
Christensen, P. and O’Brien, M. (eds) (2003) Children in the City: Home, Neighbourhood and
Community. London: Falmer.
Clark, A. (2010) Transforming Children’s Spaces: Children’s and Adults’ Participation in Designing
Learning Environments. London: Routledge
childhood studies

McKendrick, J., Bradford, M.G. and Fielder, A.V. (2000) ‘Time for a party! Making sense of the
key concepts in

commercialisation of leisure space for children’, in S.L. Holloway and G. Valentine (eds),
Children’s Geographies. London: Routledge.
Moss, P. and Petrie, P. (2002) From Children’s Services to Children’s Spaces. London: Routledge/
Falmer.
Copyright © 2012. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

See also: UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre: www.childfriendlycities.

14

The early part of the life-course; the institutional arrangements that separate children
from adults and the structural space created by these arrangements that is occupied
by children.

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 At its simplest, childhood is understood as the early phase of the life-course of all
people in all societies. It is characterised by rapid physiological and psychological
development and represents the beginning of the process of maturation to adult-
hood. In this sense, it is common to all children, irrespective of culture. However,
as Woodhead (1996) has suggested, these biological ‘facts’ of growth and develop-
ment are culturally relative; they are interpreted and understood in relation to
ideas about children’s needs, welfare and best interests, which vary between cul-
tures. Thus, beyond children’s basic needs for things such as food and water, child-
hood per se does not impose, necessarily, constraints upon what children can do or
what they need once infancy is over.
Such views represent an alternative perspective on childhood, one which sug-
gests that the conceptualisation and experience of childhood are not universal, but
rather that they vary across time and space. Thus, for example, the historian Aries
(1962) claimed that in medieval society childhood did not exist. Taking his evi-
dence from pictures of children in art, he argued that few distinctions were made
to mark out childhood as a distinctive phase of the life-course and that, when no
longer babies, children participated in society much as adults did. While this radi-
cal claim has since been disputed by other historians, Aries’s observations about
the social construction of childhood were important, since they drew attention to
the different ways in which childhood is experienced by children in different soci-
eties and cultures. Indeed, these differences are core to the cultural politics of
childhood (James and James, 2004).
A second important definition of childhood relates to childhood as a social
structural space. Qvortrup (1994) reminds us, for example, that childhood is a
constant feature of the structure of all societies so that although children grow up
and out of childhood as they develop into adults, in terms of the institutional
arrangements of any society, ‘childhood’ remains – it is a space occupied by the
next generation. In this sense, childhood is a universal feature of all societies,
although each will separate ‘children’ from ‘adults’ in different ways. This con-
stancy of childhood as a generational location within the social structure of any

childhood
society is why Qvortrup (1994) argues that, despite cultural variation in children’s
experiences, the term ‘childhood’, rather than ‘childhoods’ in the plural, should be
Copyright © 2012. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

used. However, while this social space does remain, its historical character will
change over time, shaped by, for example, changes in laws, policies and social prac-
tices. This returns us to the argument that childhood is not universal since its
social, cultural and historical location will vary.
An additional dimension of the debate about the universalism or particularism
of childhood relates to its disappearance. Postman (1983) and Elkind (1981),
examining children’s everyday lives in contemporary western cultures, argue that
because of changes in technology and children’s increased access to consumer
15
goods, the boundaries between childhood and adulthood are dissolving and, in
their view, this collapsing of the generational boundary is detrimental to children’s
well-being. Others, such as Buckingham (2000), dispute this claim. In his view,
since childhood is of necessity defined in and through an oppositional relationship
to adulthood, it is simply changing its form, rather than disappearing.

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 These arguments about the changing nature of childhood are further developed
by Lee (2001), who explores childhood as a relational concept through the ideas
of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. Childhood, he argues, is traditionally associated with
ideas of dependency and futurity, with adulthood being seen as the end-point of
growing up. However, according to Lee, since in the modern world ‘adulthood’ can
never be regarded as a complete and stable state, then the distinction between
mature adults and immature children is no longer useful. In an era of uncertainty
about the nature of adulthood, childhood becomes a more complex and ambigu-
ous status that cannot be characterised as a state of dependency and incomplete-
ness as once it was.
The traditional representation of the relational and generational character of
childhood that Lee criticises is one which encompasses the idea of childhood as
the period in the life-course when children undergo the socialisation process as
part of their preparation for future adult status. Other theorists have also chal-
lenged this idea by arguing that such a model of growing up is rather one-sided,
since it neglects children’s agency as social actors. This leads Corsaro (1997) to
suggest that children are active interpreters of the social world. During childhood
children learn about society and contribute to it through a process of what he calls
interpretive reproduction.
‘Childhood’, then, is a term that glosses both the biological phase of early
human development and the ways in which different societies classify and deal
with this by providing institutions and services that are designed specifically for
children – the incumbents of childhood. This has led some to argue (Prout, 2005)
that to understand childhood fully, future researchers will have to address both its
biological and social aspects and, importantly, the interconnections between these.
In this sense, childhood studies is well placed to undertake such a task, given its
interdisciplinary remit.
childhood studies
key concepts in

FURTHER READING
Aries, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood. London: Jonathan Cape.
Copyright © 2012. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

Buckingham, D. (2000) After the Death of Childhood. Cambridge: Polity.

Corsaro, W.A. (1997) The Sociology of Childhood. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Elkind, D. (1981) The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, MA: Addison
Wesley.
James, A. and James, A.L. (2004) Constructing Childhood: Theory, Policy and Social Practice.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Lee, N. (2001) Childhood and Society: Growing Up in an Age of Uncertainty. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Postman, N. (1983) The Disappearance of Childhood. London: Allen.
Prout, A. (2005) The Future of Childhood. London: Routledge/Falmer.
16 Qvortrup, J. (1994) ‘Childhood matters: An introduction’, in J. Qvortrup (ed.), Childhood Matters.
Aldershot: Avebury.
Woodhead, M. (1996) ‘In search of the rainbow: pathways to quality in large-scale programmes
for young disadvantaged children’, Early Childhood Development: Practice and Reflections, 10.
The Hague: Bernard van Leer Foundation.

James, A, & James, AL 2012, Key Concepts in Childhood Studies, SAGE Publications, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [20 December 2018].
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