ABSTRACT
Children are awkward subjects for social scientists. As long as it could be claimed that the causes of their behaviour lay with god or the devil, expert confidence was boundless. This carried over into social science. Laws of development could be plotted and predictions made. Children were ideal subjects for experimentation. But in a more secular world and with the switch to an interpretive social science aimed at understand ing human behaviour by getting to know it in the terms used by those involved, there is a problem. How can we understand children? For those who argue that only women can study and understand women, Blacks understand Blacks and so on, it seems insuperable. Participant observa tion is still going to be intrusive. How do you interpret the babblings of babies, the fancies of infants? Perhaps it is best left to the poets? Yet advice proliferates.
