Taking a Step Away from Modernity: Reconsidering the New Sociology of Childhood

This article explores the conditions under which the sociology of childhood was created, suggests some of the problems encountered in this effort and points to some possible remedies. It is argued that the construction of a sociology of childhood entailed a double task. First, space had to be created for childhood within sociological discourse. Second, the increasing complexity and ambiguity of childhood as a contemporary, destabilized phenomenon had to be confronted. It is argued that, whilst a space for childhood has been created, this was accomplished largely in terms of modernist sociology, a discourse that was increasingly unable to deal adequately with the destabilized world of late modernity. An important aspect of this problem is apparent in the reproduction within the sociology of childhood of the dichotomized oppositions that characterize modernist sociology. Three of these oppositions (agency and structure, nature and culture, being and becoming) are explored. It is suggested that moving the sociology of childhood beyond the grip of such modernist thinking entails developing a strategy for ‘including the excluded middle’. Inter alia this may necessitate greater attention to the interdisciplinarity and the hybridity of childhood; being symmetrical about how childhoods are constructed; attending to the networks, flows and mediations of its production, and the co-construction of generational relations.