The notion of childhood refers to both a stage of life and a perception of children as different in nature from adults. How childhood is understood affects children’s daily lives by influencing child-rearing norms, schooling, a wide range of scientific truths, and children’s place in society. In the 21st century, childhood is an established social category. However, the meaning of the concept of childhood constantly shifts based on time, space, beliefs, and needs. Childhood is also experienced and thought of differently across categories of race, ethnicity, religion, social class, gender, and sexuality. What the stage of childhood encompasses is highly debated in legal and scholarly circles. Age is one of the ways in which childhood has been defined. However, childhood has also been demarcated according to children’s physical capacity to work, attend school, and take care of their siblings and themselves. Childhood might denote innocence, vulnerability, and purity, but it also might serve to highlight the notion that children are political subjects with agency who actively participate in making worlds.
The variability of conceptions of childhood is vividly expressed through the myriad disciplines that study childhood. What is emphasized about childhood differs slightly across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. This entry offers an overview of how various disciplines and conceptual frameworks have contributed to the development of the notion of childhood. Specifically, this entry examines how childhood has been explored in the fields of history, psychology, education, geography, anthropology, sociology, law, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies.
To Cite: Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Hennessy, S. (2020). Childhood. In D. Cook (Ed.), The sage encyclopedia of children and childhood studies (Vol. 1, pp. 299-305). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781529714388.n121
Sarah M. Hennessy 