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An industry in alienation
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THE FUTURE OF CHILDHOOD
By
Alan Prout
TAYLOR & FRANCIS ISBN 0415256755 £16.99
It is not just, as L. P. Hartley said, that “the past is another country”, childhood is too. The one common experience we all share somehow becomes the one from which we are often most divorced. So, in an attempt to obliterate all of the injustices that each of us experience as part of our normal childhood, we attempt to erase childhood itself from our memories and believe instead that we all emerged from the chrysalis with our adult personalities intact.
The journey through adulthood, if we are not careful, is a gradual denial of all those experiences that we each and every one of us had endured.
In the midst of this alienation from childhood, has come a new industry in the social studies of childhood itself. Alan Prout is professor of Sociology at the University of Stirling and his book on the future of childhood contributes to the growing industry.
He argues that the distinction between childhood and adulthood is gradually blurring and dwells on a whole range of differing images of childhood itself. Children are, as the author asserts, at the vanguard of our new digital society, but, across the globe, are also subject of considerable inequalities, readily identified in the images of malnourished children in Africa and other parts of the world.
The book moves from an examination of changing childhood in what is described as a “globalising world” to childhood studies themselves, childhood, nature and culture and a glimpse, in the final chapter, at the future of childhood itself. Unfortunately, some of the language is impenetrable and written in a style more likely to alienate than bring on side the curious reader. For example (and it is not a solitary instance), Prout states “they therefore expand the possibilities of cultural syncretism and hybridity of identity and of meaning” and goes on to say “their carriage of plurality nurtures relativism”.
Interestingly, when dealing with childhood, nature and culture, the author makes no reference to a much earlier, and much clearer book, The Image of Childhood by Peter Coveney, which looks in an imaginative way at how childhood is portrayed through a wide range of authors from Blake and Wordsworth to Joyce and Lawrence. The difficulty with the whole new industry around the social studies of childhood is that it is increasingly difficult to relate it to the lives of real children. Perhaps there should be a moratorium on such books and a determination to make that imaginative link, which we as adults find increasingly difficult, between the experiences of children and the adult world in which they also have to operate. We might then begin to develop more sensitive services for children and young people and use the insights from sociological texts in ensuring that the lives of children themselves are significantly improved.
Christopher Hanvey is UK Director of Operations, Barnardo's
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