Children's Studies: Beginnings and Purposes

"The real question is whether it is still normal for a schoolchild to live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely."

"Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child's mind works."

"The child and the adult live in different worlds."

--George Orwell, "'Such, Such Were the Joys'"

It is a pleasure to introduce this special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn on Children's Studies and to provide a short history of Children's Studies. The new and interdisciplinary field of Children's Studies was founded in the autumn semester of l991 at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. Two central observations led to its establishment.

First, most disciplines in the arts, humanities, social and medical sciences as well as law--with the notable exceptions of children's literature, child psychology, and pediatrics--had failed to provide a special focus on children. In brief, most disciplines did not regard children as both a separate social class and human transhistorical condition. Childhood was conceived as a transitory stage on the way toward future adulthood. To the extent that children received any specialized attention, they had been subsumed under such different categories as education, the family, generational and life course studies, socialization, juvenile delinquency, deviant behavior, and peer group analysis. This general neglect of children and childhood as a distinct focus of analysis was even more remarkable when we consider the circumstance that the corporate sector had been well ahead of the academic disciplines. During recent decades, this sector discovered, singled out, and "developed" children and young people as a separate new market, a new continent for capital expansion. Moreover, children have been used extensively by political parties, especially during periods of elections, to demonstrate the politicians' socially responsible intentions and for purposes of legitimation. Such child-rhetoric, however, disappeared again after the elections. In other words, the increasing visibility of and concentration on children as a social class in the economic and political realms antedates, as it were, the "discovery" of children by the scholarly community.

It has only been during the last two decades, in particular, that an increasing number of disciplines in the arts and sciences have also begun to manifest an interest in children and youth. In the humanities, these growing subfields include children's literature, the history of childhood, and the philosophy of children. Among the social sciences, there are the newly emerging areas of the sociology of children in the United States. Other disciplines, such as anthropology, political science, and economics, have also produced, in rapidly increasing numbers, studies on child-related topics without, however, having established previously or concurrently a primary focus on children as a special branch of scholarly discourse and analysis within their particular intellectual disciplines and organizations. In addition, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, which by now has been signed and ratified by 194 nation-states (with the exception of the United States and Somalia), the field of children's rights has been growing rapidly.

Second, the recent sharpening focus on children and youth in the humanities, social sciences, and international law represents a welcome development. But even as we first established the Sociology of Children as a new field and section within the American Sociological Association in 1991, it had become evident that the intellectual division of labor in children-related scholarship...