To Be (Come) or Not to Be (Come): Understanding Children’s Citizenship

• Author: Allison James
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716210383642
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Date: 01 January 2011
• Subject Matter: Articles

This article explores notions of the “child as citizen”
and “children’s citizenship” in the context of possibili-
ties and promises for the rights of children that are laid
out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child. It poses the question, Can “children’s
citizenship” ever be fully accomplished for and/or
by children? The article begins with an examination of
contemporary theories of citizenship and considers
the grounds for children’s citizenship in the light of
the ways in which “childhood” is culturally, socially,
economically, and politically constructed in different
To Be (Come) societies. It suggests that in social investment states,
such as the United Kingdom, the contemporary cultural
or Not to
politics of childhood mean that children’s citizenship
remains ambiguous. What is needed, the article suggests,
is a greater understanding at the local level of how
Be (Come): children’s experiences as members of society unfold.
Thus, taking England as a case study, and drawing
Understanding on some empirical research with children’s experiences
in children’s hospitals, the article illustrates the ways in
Children’s
which adults’ ideas about childhood limit children’s
agency and actions, thereby denying them status as
citizens.
Citizenship
Keywords: childhood; citizenship; politics; agency;
rights; hospitals; social construction
By
ALLISON JAMES
This article sets out to examine some of the
theoretical conundrums that the notions of
the “child as citizen” and “children’s citizenship”
raise. The aim is to explore the extent to which
the possibilities and promises for the rights of
children to participate in society, as laid out in
the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child (CRC) in 1989, can ever be fully
accomplished for and/or by children.1 I begin by
examining the ways in which these concepts
are being articulated for children themselves,
as ways of being and acting, through the cultural
Allison James is a professor of sociology at the University
of Sheffield and a professor at the Norwegian Centre
for Child Research, Trondheim. She has worked in
the sociology and anthropology of childhood since
the 1970s, pioneering theoretical and methodological
approaches to research with children that are central to
childhood studies.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716210383642
ANNALS, AAPSS, 633, January 2011
167

---

168
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
politics of childhood currently shaping children’s everyday experiences in England
(see James and James 2004). Using as a case study data from empirical research
carried out in children’s hospitals,2 the article suggests the need for changes in
adults’ ideas about childhood, including ideas about what children are, what they
can do, and how their relationships with adults take place.
As this article argues, exploring the ways that the identity of “child” is practiced
is core to understanding the cultural politics of children’s citizenship. It is out of
the conceptual differences in identity, between children and adults (Jenks 1996),
that the very problem of children’s status as citizens arises. Thus, as James and
James (2004, 37) note for the English context, despite the government’s recent
emphasis on the importance of citizenship education for children and its intro-
duction into the country’s curriculum, in practice, in their everyday lives, children
and young people “remain marginalised and treated as non-citizens by the systems
of surveillance and control through which ‘childhood’ is protected as a social space
in the life course.”
To understand, therefore, how children’s citizenship might be enacted and
made a real possibility for children, it is important to move beyond abstract dis-
cussions of legislative and policy frameworks. What is critical to changing children’s
experiences is unpacking the cultural discourses through which children’s every-
day lives, as children, are constructed on an ongoing and mundane basis.
I begin by exploring the concept of the cultural politics of childhood, demon-
strating the insights that the sociology of childhood can bring to theories of citi-
zenship. Next, I provide empirical illustrations of the obstacles that can arise for
children’s citizenship when attempts are made to put such ideas into practice.
The article concludes with some suggestions for the future directions that chil-
dren’s citizenship might take.
The Cultural Politics of Children’s Citizenship
Since the early 1990s, one of the most significant contributions to understand-
ing children’s lives has been made by the sociology of childhood through its
identification of the socially constructed character of childhood. It was an insight
that prompted a sea change in understandings of childhood through the recogni-
tion that children’s own experiences of childhood, though in part shaped by the
biological facts of infancy, nonetheless vary historically and culturally (James and
Prout 1997). These notions raised the question of the extent to which childhood
could be regarded as a singular and universal concept, applicable to all children
everywhere. The sociology of childhood also questioned the part that Western
developmental psychology played in shaping understandings of childhood, argu-
ing that it promoted a particularized construction of childhood within the life
course that might not be of universal significance. Early social constructionist
accounts questioned, for example, the cultural inevitability of seeing children,
simply by virtue of their age and stage of physical and cognitive development,
as necessarily dependent and in need of protection (Burman 1994; Woodhead 1997).

---

TO BE (COME) OR NOT TO BE (COME)
169
As Wyness (2006) suggests, what sociologists of childhood (and others) argue
is that
children’s biological differences from adults need to be separated from the cultural com-
ponents of childhood. The idea that children are commonly believed to be morally and
culturally weaker or less significant than adults does not necessarily indicate that this
incapacity or subordination is based on their physiological or biological weakness. . . .
Children in different historical and cultural contexts are quite capable of actions that
belie their physiological immaturity. (P. 23)
It is clear that in every society some concept of childhood does help to distinguish
children from adults—concepts that may indeed reflect children’s physiological
and psychological differences from adults. However, it is the cultural evaluations
about what those differences amount to, on what basis such distinctions are to
be made and what social consequences they might have for children, that vary
(Archard 1993; Qvortrup 1994).
These different social and cultural conceptions of what childhood is and
should be are made manifest in laws, policies, and a range of age-based social
divisions and institutions that contextualize the everyday lives of children in any
society. It is the dynamic between the structuring effects of these social institu-
tions and children’s experiences of and reactions to them that composes what
James and James (2004) have termed the ongoing cultural politics of childhood.
As they suggest,
Within any particular cultural context, therefore, policy works to delimit conditions of
possibility and the arenas of restraint through which meanings are given to social prac-
tice and, ultimately, to ideas of the person. Thus one of the ways in which people come
to know not only their own social place and selves but also those of others is, in effect,
through experiencing the process and outcomes of policy as it shapes and reshapes the
humdrum pattern of their everyday lives. (P. 45)
The cultural politics of childhood must be core, therefore, to understanding the
ways in which children’s citizenship unfolds for children in any setting.
Some social theorists of children’s citizenship have embraced such under-
standings. Cockburn (1998), for example, has unpacked the historical discourses
of childhood that underpinned T. H. Marshall’s (1950) argument that children
should be seen as citizens in potentia only. In Marshall’s view, children could not
be regarded as full members of a community since, although they had some
social and civil rights, they had no political rights that might facilitate their full
participation as citizens of society. Marshall envisaged children only as “becom-
ings,” rather than “beings”; this view is consistent with the idea that it is children’s
lack of social competence that separates their citizenship status from that of
adults. Cockburn claims that this understanding of children’s supposed inability
to participate as citizens in...