ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to review four academic disciplines to examine their images of childhood. These are anthropology, history, religion, and psychology. These disciplines are relevant for our general interest in images of childhood because each of the fields is concerned with childhood and child development. Anthropologists and psychologists study the ways societies and/or parents socialize their children; and socialization practices reflect the images held by socialization agents, thus examining the images should help us to obtain a broad understanding of the way children are reared. The inclusion of the images from religious texts adds a component usually ignored among developmentally oriented social scientists for reasons that are not relevant here. What is relevant here is that religious texts also are indications of underlying cultural perspectives that influence cultural practice. Of course, it may be the case that these fields are so disparate in conception and in practice that there are diverse images. If this is the case, it may well help us to understand some of the sources of individual differences. Coming to understand the bases for differences in socialization may provide us with a more profound understanding of how much variation there is in how societies construct their own myths and metaphors about childhood. On the theoretical side of the question we become more sensitive to the complexity of views by observing similarities and differences. On the practical side, our awareness of diversity becomes a source for caution in recommending social policy at national and international levels.
