ABSTRACT
It has been widely acknowledged that until the mid 1980s, there was surprisingly little sociological interest in childhood, either by classical sociologists or by North American sociologists (Qvortrup 1995). Where children appear in the main body of sociological writing, this is largely in the context of a wider investigation of something else, most frequently the family, the community or the educational system. Children emerge in the literature as adjuncts of their parents, their carers or their teachers, with little recognition that they might have a place of their own in sociological knowledge and enquiry. Sociological surveys and official statistics frequently did not consider even the presence of children in their data collection and analysis, further increasing their invisibility in sociological discourse (Qvortrup 1994).1 The absence of an analysis of childhood in sociological writing is not only a historical phenomenon. Two recently published textbooks on sociology make no mention of childhood: children are again sidelined in discussions of education, childcare and changing family patterns (Bilton et al. 1996, Marsh et al. 1996).
