Responsible Children? Aspects of Children’s Work and Employment Outside School in Contemporary UK

This chapter discusses aspects of children’s work outside school in contemporary UK, drawing on a data from empirical research carried out in 1990 and 1991 with children aged between 11 and 16 years in secondary schools in the city of Birmingham and the county of Cambridgeshire (Morrow, 1992a). It explores the notion of ‘responsibility’ as it relates to children’s roles and the way in which childhood (in the industrialized west, at least) is constructed as a period of dependency, thus signifying children’s lack of ‘responsibility’. It argues that this social construction of children and childhood effectively renders children’s labour outside school ‘invisible’, and challenges traditional conceptualizations of childhood within sociology.