Sociology Of Childhood Sociology Essay

In the process of defining the children and childhood in a social context, author express the evolving political and social arenas in which childhood studies is located and the epistemology roots that support it. He states that the identified childhood studies belong to particular disciplines as sociology or psychology or to the wider discourse of social sciences. He tries to build upon the common meanings or definitions of these terms, in order to identify what is different or problematic about them and how they are used and understood in the context of childhood studies. Understanding childhood in a complex phenomenon, author has trend to favour the perspective of sociology and social anthropology in exploring the various concepts. Based

It underscores children and young people’s capacities to make choices about the things they do and to express their own ideas. Through this, it emphasises children’s ability not only to have some control over the direction their own lives take but also, importantly, to play some part in the changes that take place in society more widely ( Allison James and Adrian James, 2007: 9 ). As Mayall describes it, a focus on children’s agency enables exploration of the ways in which children’s interaction with others ‘make a difference- to a relationship or to a decision, to the workings of a set of social assumptions or constrains’ ( Mayall, 2002: 21

Thus age-grading remains a fundamental aspect of the ways in which, in modern society, children’s lives are structured, because what the calculation of numerical age prime is the establishment of uniformly applicable boundaries to separate children form adults. The school system in many countries provides a prime example of age becoming institutionalised in this way (Allison James and Adrian James, 2007: 9). The result of this process is, however, to establish a process of age-based standardisation (James, 2004). The second reason that author states towards the concept of age, when it is used to define ‘the child’ and, through doing so, to place restrictions or protections on, or to give permissions for, children’s