Such trends have repeatedly prompted social researchers in recent decades to speak of a breakup of the strict separation between the fields of activity of adults and those of children. Some of them, like the US-American sociologist Neil Postman (1982), were disappointed in the ‘disappearance of childhood’, others, such as the British media researcher David Buckingham (2003) or the German culture researcher Heinz Hengst (2013), saw these tendencies as an emancipation of the children from the restrictions of the Western conception of childhood and a new kind of generational relations.2 Alan Prout (2005: 7) expresses these tendencies in the following way:
The distinction between adults and children, once firmly established as a feature of modernity, seems to be blurring. Traditional ways of representing childhood in discourse and in image no longer seemed adequate to its emerging forms. New ways of speaking, writing and imaging children are providing new ways of seeing them and these children are different from the innocent and dependent creatures that appeared to populate the first half of the twentieth century. These new representations construct children as more active, knowledgeable and socially participative than older discourses allowed. They are more difficult to manage, less biddable and hence are more troublesome and troubling.
In such observations, it is not always clear whether they refer to the real life of the children or rather to childhood images and the hopes and fears of the adults that are reflected in them. There is also the question of whether it is possible to speak of a worldwide harmonization of childhoods, as expressed in the popular speech of a ‘global childhood’.
Unequal global childhoods
Looking at the history and at different parts of the world makes the idea that there is a single global form of childhood appear absurd. But it is also to be understood that the spatial and temporal concentration of the world through economic and technological processes as well as through international legal norms also influences the conceptions of ‘good childhood’ and the life of the children, bringing them closer together. That means in a certain way that they become ‘globalized’. Karen Wells (2009: 3–4) describes this fact as follows:
There is now a body of law and a group of international actors – intergovernmental, non-governmental and private – that is based on the presumption that childhood can be governed at a global level. One way of resolving the question of whether there can be a global form of childhood is by thinking of the global level, including international law and international actors but also global media, economic flows, war and politics, as a structure that shapes childhood at the local level. Thought of in this way the global becomes one of several structures – others would include the family, school and work – that shape the lives of children and concepts of childhood in any specific socio-cultural setting.
One question is how we can name the childhoods that result from their ‘globalization’. Would it be justifiable to describe them as more vicious, modernized, secularized, legalized, scorned or consonant? In his attempt to conceive a global history of childhood, Peter Stearns (2005, 2006) argues that the childhoods outside Europe would not have become ‘Westernized’ but changed ‘alongside’ the Western model. It is hard to deny that in the course of colonialization, for example, the school following the Western model occupies more and more space in the life of children and gains greater importance for their further life. But with regard to other aspects of the globalization of childhoods, it must be borne in mind that they do not run the same way for all children, do not attain the same meaning and are even reversible. Classroom education, as well as the legalization of social relationships or the use of digital technologies, can be very differently conceived and practised. Any attempt to use certain concepts for the globalization of childhoods is at risk of making a definite (usually the dominant Western) point of view absolute and established.3
The following tendencies are emphasized in a contribution that relates global influences and local traditions to each other (Bühler-Niederberger and van Krieken, 2008). The international discourse on children’s rights and, in particular, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child strengthened the tendency to measure the quality of childhood on the basis of universal standards, which were strongly oriented to the Western childhood pattern. Today, children are increasingly confronted with the spread and propaganda of consumer goods, which have created new preferences in consumer behaviour. Today, children spend more time outside of home privacy (as long as they were ever in the sense of the European-bourgeois small family) and are more visible. In some cases, they soon assume social responsibility. Global influences are picked up and processed in everyday practices, which are rooted in local traditions. Social inequalities are strengthened rather than reduced. The subordinate social status of children and the deprivation of girls against boys remains largely unaffected. Children show new forms of ‘social agency’, but their ability to express their own viewpoints is also more strongly undermined on the discursive as well as on the practical level by adult child experts.4
Perhaps the greatest challenge of social childhood research is to understand the connections and contradictions between the global and local dimensions of childhood and the lifestyles of children on the objective level, as well as at the level of subjectivity, thinking, feeling and acting. Children are also affected (if not in absolutely the same way) as well as adolescents and adults by what happens in other parts of the world, because there are no more isolated spaces. But the way in which they are influenced also depends on the parts of the world and under what conditions they live, and it is important to consider whether they are willing to be influenced at all. The globalization of childhoods is neither a one-sided nor an absolutely compulsive process, but implies many interdependencies (Twum-Danso Imoh et al, 2019). It does not produce a single uniform ‘global childhood’ but many, quite different ‘global childhoods’ (Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014). Lorenzo Bordonaro and Ruth Payne (2012: 371) bring this to the point:
The notion of a ‘global childhood’ is based on an alleged natural and universal distinction between children and adults and has been formed in Western world imaginations and exported through processes of colonialism, the forces of globalisation, international development organisations and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Whilst it is, therefore, limited in its understanding and conceptualisation of childhood; it has nonetheless become an ideal against which all childhoods should be measured.
Take, for example, the thesis of ‘McDonaldization’ or ‘Coca-Colaization’ in the world. Such pictorial descriptions are intended to show, among other things, the fact that the Global North is going through the world imposing certain thoughts and patterns of consensus which follow uniform prescriptions, are directed towards quick satisfaction, and ultimately reveal superficial and noncritical personalities (see Ritzer, 2007).5 But even if we assume that almost every child has the desire to experience the atmosphere of a McDonald’s location and to embrace a burger or a Coca Cola, this does not mean that the whole life of this child or even an entire generation is stamped by this experience. Children’s lives always include other desires, experiences and challenges, which give them reason to think about their own lives and to make their own decisions.
However,