The Future of Childhood

This short but highly concentrated book is an attempt to introduce new perspectives and ways of thinking in the social studies of childhood, or ‘childhood studies’. The core of the author’s argument is that the recent intellectual history of thinking about childhood, developed during the modern period or ‘modernity’, has run its course as ‘modernity’ itself gives way to a radically altered world, profoundly changed by information technology and other new phenomena. We need, the author argues, to think about children and childhood in different ways, recognizing in particular that familiar oppositional categories such as ‘nature and culture’, ‘social and biological’, ‘being and becoming’, ‘adult and child’, are simplistic and reductive and do not describe the complexity of contemporary childhood. The book is very largely an argument against such binary divisions and in favour of more complex, heterogeneous, gradual and multi-faceted ways of thinking about children. It is an academic text in which one sociologist seeks (very convincingly, it must be said) to revise the terms of reference for one particular field of sociology, and large sections are primarily addressed to fellow specialists. But now that all teachers, parents and others who work with children are confronted with a revolutionised child world in which old categories and assumptions clearly no longer work, this book has significance for a broader readership. Although it is difficult to cherry-pick sections from a continuous argument, all teachers can be strongly advised to read in particular Chapter One, ‘Changing childhood in a globalizing world’, and Chapter Five, ‘The future of childhood’. Much of our everyday thinking about childhood is obsolete, muddled and anxious, desperately shoring up collapsing stereotypes. While Prout’s study is not easy for the ‘general reader’, its clear and persuasive analysis is worth the effort.