ABSTRACT
We have as yet only a poorly developed sociology of contemporary childhood in Britain i.e., a sociology of the social position of babies, infants and 3-11-year-olds and their relationships with adults and with other children. The situation in fact provides an interesting parallel with the sociology of women and gender relations before 1970 (Mathieu, 1977). Age, like sex, is one of the three fundamental variables constantly employed in empirical work in sociology and social psychology. But these three variables do not enjoy equally rigorous sociological definition, nor are their problematics equally systematized. One variable, class, has a long history and is now clearly recognized as a social category; but although information on sex and age is collected on all social surveys, these variables are not sociologically defined. They are seen as largely extra-socially determined, by physiological differences (as was class itself in the nineteenth century). That is to say, age relations continue to be treated as a set of groupings based on natural divisions, not as reciprocally related, opposed and socially defined and constituted categories. This situation continues unabated because most of the research on children which does exist, including most of the longitudinal studies conducted since 1945, have been produced by medical researchers and psychologists. An exception is the study of 700 children begun in 1958 by John and Elizabeth Newson at their Child Development Research Unit in Notting-ham (cf. chapter 10 by Hood-Williams in this volume). Much of the available information on children is therefore concerned with the development of their bodies, intellects and personalities. Some of it is interesting to sociologists of childhood, both for its content and as texts ‘locating’ childhood, but unfortunately much which should be culturally and historically contextualized is in fact downright biologistic.
