Explorations in generational analysis

Abstract

Sociologists in the field of childhood studies have recognized childhood as a thoroughly social phenomenon and have worked this notion into a number of different approaches in studying childhood. This chapter argues that what has not yet been recognized clearly enough is that childhood is an essentially generational phenomenon. In the main chapters of this book, child-adult relations are the central topic, therefore this is a most appropriate place also to raise the question of the many ways in which the notion of generation can be used-and across the chapters are in fact used-in the study of children’s lives, and even in what ways the study of childhood is always embedded in one or another form of generational frame. This introductory chapter aims to explore such issues, in the hope of clearing some of the conceptual ground surrounding the sociological study of childhood.

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