Negotiating childhoods:applying a moral filter to children's everyday lives

STUDIES IN

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Sam Frankel

Negotiating Childhoods

Applying a Moral Filter to Children’s Everyday Lives

STUDIES IN

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Sam Frankel

Negotiating Childhoods

Applying a Moral Filter to Children’s Everyday Lives

Studies in Childhood and Youth

Series Editors

Allison James

Department of Sociological Studies

University of Sheffield

Sheffield, UK

Adrian James

Department of Sociological Studies

University of Sheffield

Sheffield, UK

Aim of the series

This series offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on exploring childhood

and youth as social phenomena that are culturally located, articulating

children’s and young people’s perspectives on their everyday lives. The

aim of the series will be to continue to develop these theoretical perspec￾tives through publishing both monographs and edited collections that

present cutting-edge research within the area of childhood studies. It will

provide a key locus for work within the field that is currently published

across a diverse range of outlets and will help consolidate and develop

childhood studies as a discrete field of scholarship.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14474

Sam Frankel

Negotiating

Childhoods

Applying a Moral Filter to Children’s

Everyday Lives

Studies in Childhood and Youth

ISBN 978-1-137-32348-4 ISBN 978-1-137-32349-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-32349-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947039

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017, corrected publication 2018

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Sam Frankel

EquippingKids, Church Stretton

Shropshire, UK

The original version of this book was revised.

An erratum to this book can be found at

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-32349-1_10

To my wife, Moira, esbl

ix

This book has been a number of years in its development. Along the way

I have been very grateful for the support of many people whose help has

been a staging post in finding ways to express the ideas that I felt so pas￾sionate about sharing. Thanks to Kate Bacon for the long conversations

that saw the emergence of the framework of this book. It is a framework,

however, that has only taken on real meaning during my time at King’s

University College, Western University, Ontario. I want to thank Alan

Pomfret for the freedom to explore my ideas and for the opportunity to

be part of a dialogue with him, Pat Ryan and other scholars that certainly

informed this work. I want to say a special thank you to a wonderful

group of students who patiently let me test out my ideas on them. Thank

you for the blank faces and for letting me know when it didn’t make

sense, but most of all for your encouragement that these ideas are of value

to people like you, who are ambitious about drawing off childhood stud￾ies to make a difference in the world.

Thank you to the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience and

encouragement. As always, I am grateful to Allison and Adrian James for

their words of wisdom and ongoing inspiration.

This book would not be what it is without the input of Sally McNamee,

her friendship, encouragement, counsel and spell checking has been

invaluable.

Acknowledgements

x Acknowledgements

I would also like to excpress my thanks to friends and family: to Terry

and Gill Over whose support has given me opportunities like this, as well

as to both sets of parents. Finally to those who have had to put up with

the day-to-day reality of me trying to write – to Ruari, Rosie, Maria and

most of all Moira – thank you.

xi

1 Introduction 1

Step 1 A Theoretical Foundation 9

2 Structure ‘&’ Agency 11

Step 2 Establishing a Framework 41

3 Engaging with Structure 47

4 Engaging with Agency 69

Step 3 Framing a Contextual Backdrop 103

5 Reason 105

6 Virtue 133

Contents

xii Contents

7 Social Harmony 163

Step 4 Recognising Agency in Action 193

8 Negotiating the Everyday 195

Step 5 Re-positioning Children Within Structure 229

9 Restructuring Moral Discourses 233

Erratum to: Negotiating Childhoods – Applying a Moral

Filter to Children’s Everyday Lives E1

Appendix 1: Example Application – Part 1

of the Framework in Practice 265

Appendix 2: Example Application – Part 2 and 3

of the Framework in Practice 269

Bibliography 273

Index 295

xiii

Chapter 2

Fig. 2.1 Uni-directional arrow 24

Fig. 2.2 Bi-directional arrow 34

Step 2

Fig. 1 Framework overview 43

Chapter 3

Fig. 3.1 Framework: part 1 56

Chapter 4

Fig. 4.1 Exploring elements of agency 96

Fig. 4.2 Framework: part 2 98

Fig. 4.3 Reflecting structure and agency 99

Step 3

Fig. 1 The framework 104

Step 4

Fig. 1 The framework 194

Step 5

Fig. 1 The framework 230

Chapter 9

Fig. 9.1 Inverted participation triangles 254

List of Figures

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Frankel, Negotiating Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-32349-1_1

1

Introduction

In January 2016, a 10-year-old boy, probably like many other children

his age in primary schools across the United Kingdom, and no doubt in

other countries as well, was providing an account of life at home. The

point of the exercise was for the children to practise their writing skills

and to put into effect the phonetic method of spelling that they had been

taught. In describing his house, the 10-year-old, who happened to be

Muslim, labelled his home a ‘terror-ist house’, which using the phonetic

technique is not a bad attempt in spelling the word ‘terrace’. Rather than

this being seen just as a product of the spelling approach adopted in the

education system, and simply corrected by the teacher with a wry grin,

this boy and his family became the subject of a counter-terrorist investi￾gation (BBC, 20/1/16).

This example has obvious features that make it particularly notable,

but it reflects a process that forms part of every child’s every day, one

in which a constructed understanding of morality is used to inform an

image of the child that, as a consequence, leads to certain adult-defined

practices that shape the child’s experience. It is in relation to this back￾drop that children interact with the social world, creating meanings that

2

inform their behaviours. It reflects a multi-tiered moral dimension that

forms part of both our understanding of childhoods and of the individual

child. It is the desire to bring these together that forms the focus for this

book which presents a framework for exploring this moral dimension

and recognising its relevance in children’s lives.

1.1 The Moral Status of Childhood

Perhaps the moral status of childhood provides the most dramatic instance

of misfit between the adult structuring of childhood and young people’s

own knowledge and experience. Young people find that adults routinely

reject or ignore their moral competence, yet they do engage with moral

issues…A further twist to this tangle is that adults also expect young people

to take moral responsibility both at home and at school [and also increas￾ingly within the wider social and virtual spaces that make up the neigh￾bourhood]. This adult neglect and indeed conceptual misunderstanding

accounts for one of the strongest findings…that children find their partici￾pation rights are not respected. This misfit between experience and societal

concepts has to be explained. (Mayall 2002: 138)

Children, Morality and Society (Frankel 2012) was written to promote

discussion and in order to raise the profile of an area of thinking that

had for too long been under-acknowledged (Mayall 2002). Its aim was

simply to contribute to a dialogue that placed children within discourses

of morality. At the time it was a conscious decision to focus on children’s

agency and to consider this as the starting point. There was no intention

to be ‘dismissive’ (Robb 2014) of the wider moral framework, rather it

was a decision of priorities.

This work reflects the next step. To fully understand the way in

which children demonstrate their engagement with morality it is

important that this is seen within a wider theoretical framework.

These ideas had yet to fully mature in that original work. However,

here I hope to put that thinking into a far stronger context that will

not only promote dialogue but will actively support the researcher

in asking more questions and discovering more answers. Are these

Negotiating Childhoods

3

the updated views of an earlier piece of writing? No. They are to be

seen as an addition to what has already been set out, strengthening

those arguments by establishing a more defined model for engage￾ment. The aim of this work, therefore, is to flesh out an enlarged

conceptual framework that will not only support this consideration of

children and morality, but can also aid the way in which we consider

the processes that make up agentic action. As will be suggested, these

processes must not be seen outside of the social web in which interac￾tion takes place. It is, therefore, a fundamental concern of this work

to make sense of the relationship between structure and agency, and

how that helps to further our ability as adults to understand children

and to engage with them more effectively.

But why morality? Morality remains a significant stronghold of

thought from which adults are able to manage children’s position in

society. Drawing from notions of the minority group (see Mayall 2002),

this work recognises the extent to which morality has acted as a choker

through which society has sought to keep control of children. The result

has been a misrepresentation of children at all levels of society, with

implications for all aspects of their everyday lives. The following quote,

although marking an extreme case, has significant resonance. It comes

from an interview in which the child murderer, Mary Bell, reflects, some

30 years later, on her trial as an 11-year-old.

‘In the court while they were talking and talking, I remember thinking of

what I would say when it was my turn. I’d tell them I want my dog. I

wanted him with me when they sent me to be hanged. That’s what I

thought would happen: I’d be sent to the gallows and they might just as

well have said that right away because it was just as meaningless as life

imprisonment or …well…death. None of it meant a damned thing, not a

thing…’

But you were frightened just the same?

‘I think probably more of the whole thing, the kind of hushed atmo￾sphere, the reaction from the adults…adults…’ She repeated her words as

always in moments of stress, losing all structure, rhythm and pattern of

speech ‘…adults, you know, literally avoiding me…looking at me like…

like…like a specimen’. (Sereney 1998: 125)

1 Introduction 3