Childhood Studies and child psychology: Disciplines in dialogue?

Abstract

Childhood Studies is a dynamic and still‐growing subject, bringing a child‐focused, rights‐based and (usually) constructionist perspective to children's lives. Its early days were also marked by wariness of, even hostility to, developmental psychology. Yet it is increasingly recognised that some mainstream developmental psychology is opening itself to more contextualised understandings of children and childhoods, and that other psychologies offer further opportunities for dialogue between disciplines. We aim to explore these opportunities, to consider what (and whether) these fields of study can learn from one another and how this might enrich and further challenge research and practice.

Bringing young children’s voices into programme development, randomized controlled trials and other unlikely places

“…To Cronbach (1982, 1986) a contradictory outcome in a replication study was as enlightening as a confirmatory one. Here, understanding the role of ‘context’, the well‐worn fault line that has generated multiple rifts within developmental psychology, and one of the key sticking points between developmental psychology and childhood studies, was a key motivation (see Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2020). These statistical approaches regarding replication and robustness matter because they are much less common in developmental psychology than economics, yet offer the opportunity to yield more durable insights into children's lives.…”

“…On our part we must be willing to flex the rhetoric and to step out of our disciplinary silos (see, e.g. Spyrou, 2011; Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2020; Tisdall & Punch, 2012) and set aside methodological rigidity in order to embark on a joint process of what Gallacher and Gallagher (2008) identified as “experimentation, innovation and making do”. We need this process now more than ever as the fallout of covid‐19 is changing childhood and children's wellbeing in profound ways.…”

Strengthening the Call for Intentional Intergenerational Programmes towards Sustainable Futures for Children and Families

“…Children's competencies, agency, voices and rights are central to this field. The field is critical of the normative view of children, childhood and human life stages, where children are viewed as human "becomings", which connotes an incompleteness and instability that is attained in adulthood [51]. Theorisations of children as both human "beings" and "becomings" [52] emerged from Childhood Studies that emphasise both childhood and adulthood as temporal life stages that are subject to changes over time and are both fundamentally unstable and incomplete.…”

Four decades of Brazilian and international research on street children

“…The Anglophone literature from the 1990s onwards has been somewhat disconnected from, for instance social work research, which often depicts more deviant dimensions of street life (see Lalor, 1999;Trussel, 1999). In fact, Childhood Studies have recently been criticized for being too insular and not engaging with other disciplines, facilitating a standardization and reproduction of certain master narratives, such as the casual use of 'children as agents' (Alanen et al, 2018;Tatlow-Golden & Montgomery, 2020). In some respects, the Brazilian body of literature is more heterogenous and provides more nuanced glimpses of street life.…”