The Cultural Politics of Childhood

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the fraught relationship between children and public policy makers in the United States. Why do elected officials, administrators at social-service agencies, academic researchers, etc., seek to regulate childhood? What autonomy do parents have to raise their children as they deem best? Do all children require the same care and attention from government? And what do we even mean when we talk about “children”? Laws and regulations concerning citizenship, child welfare, and juvenile justice both respond to and help shape new conceptualizations of childhood. While all children possess universal characteristics that transcend time, place, and personal circumstance, we can understand the child figure to be a social construction, with “childhood” as we know it emerging as a coherent life stage only in the past few centuries. While the symbolic child figure is a social construction, we will see that class, race, gender and citizenship status are key factors influencing the lived experiences of actual children and their parents. Additionally, we will examine how the proscribed best methods of child-rearing change frequently, with parents often receiving contradictory advice from various “experts.” Works we may engage include Jessamine Chan’s novel The School for Good Mothers, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir The Beautiful Struggle, developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter, and historian Mical Raz’s Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way.