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Children’s Families: A Child-Centered Perspective

Jacqueline Scott

Introduction

The focus of this chapter is on children’s families in the context of rapid social change. In the literature, terms like modern childhood and children of postmodernity are used. The societal changes that have altered the shape of adult lives – secularization, urbanization, industrialization, globalization, individualization, and the like – also affect the lives of children. For children, many of the effects of social changes are played out in the context of family life. Families themselves have, as this volume shows, changed markedly in the modern era. The greater diversity of families associated with the increases in childbirth outside of marriage and the high rates of divorce is well known in Western societies and beyond. Changes in maternal work patterns and the changing work–family balance have had consequences for the culture of care, in which children are both recipients and providers. Falling birthrates have resulted in smaller families with fewer siblings. Increased longevity has changed intergenerational relations in ways that are little short of revolutionary. Transnational mobility and international migration have altered the context of family relations in ways that can introduce new tensions for both children and parents. All these changes to the structure of family life have important implications for what, from the child’s point of view, is his or her own particular family.

We all tend to take our families for granted while, at the same time, regarding them as unique. When we fall in love, have kids, get divorced, we are bowled over by experiences that are intensely personal. Yet, as sociologists, we are all too aware of how even something as private as having a baby is a highly structured experience. The declining rate of childbirth in Europe, in one sense, is the sum of many individual choices. However, those choices are made in the context of socioeconomic opportunities and constraints which have led to the postponement and reduction of childbearing. Similarly, children’s lives are structured in ways that reflect socioeconomic events and changes. Many of these changes are mediated through families because children’s lives are codependent on parents and other family members (see chapter by Parcel and Hendrix, Chapter 18, this volume). Yet children’s own preferences and actions are also crucial. The study of children’s families involves understanding the structure of childhood, the experiences and agency of children, and the dynamic processes that are associated with children’s unfolding lives across time and place.

It is now taken as a given that childhood is a social construction. In 1962, the now classic book Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Ariès set the tone for the new sociological interest in children and childhood. The questions he addressed revolved around the origin of modern ideas about the family and about childhood. Ariès argued that before the seventeenth century, a child was regarded as a small and inadequate adult; the concept of the child as something distinct from adults is a creation of the modern world. The change involved far-reaching implications for the family, for education, and for children themselves. “The concept of the family…is inseparable from the concept of childhood. The interest taken in childhood…is only one form, one particular expression of this more general concept – that of family” (Ariès, 1962, p. 353). Ariès’ work has had many critics, but, for our purposes, it does not matter whether Ariès historical interpretation is right or wrong. What Ariès succeeded in, beyond doubt, was demonstrating that childhood and family are social constructs that are rooted in time and place.

In the nineteenth-century America, the increasing differentiation between economic production and the home transformed the basis of family cohesion. According to Zelizer (1985), between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, there emerged the economically worthless but emotionally priceless child. Children are expensive and contribute relatively little to the household income or even to household chores. From the hard-nosed perspective of rational choice, “As soon as men and women…acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action, they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entails under modern conditions” (Schumpeter, [1942] 1988, pp. 501–502). The below-replacement population levels of fertility in many Western societies suggest that the wish for parenthood may indeed erode further under the pressures of competing opportunities for men and women.

However, the relationship between price and value is far from straightforward as Zelizer shows. There is a curious paradox in that the market price of an economically useless child far exceeds the money value of a nineteenth-century useful child. The very notion of a market price is an uncomfortable one, when applied to children. But people pay huge sums for black market babies. And childless women (and their partners) may expend enormous amounts of money, time, and suffering in new fertility treatments to assuage their mounting “baby hunger” as the biological clock ticks by Hewlitt (2002). The value of children is not something that can be inferred, simply, from economic and demographic trends.

As Gillis (2009) points out, developed societies have become extraordinarily child centered even as children have become an ever smaller part of the population. In 1870, the proportion of American households without children was 27%; by 1983, it has reached 64% (Coleman, 1990, p. 590). Gillis claims that it is more common for households to have pets (80%) than children, in part because of falling birthrates and increased voluntary childlessness but also because of the greater longevity of adults who are far more likely to live apart from children in old age. Yet child images pervade modern politics, commerce, and culture. Thus, there is a paradox in that childhood is ever more celebrated in family life even if the actual presence of children has diminished.

Zelizer (2002) argues that by shifting our attention to children’s experiences, we discover that the creation of an ostensibly useless child never segregated children from economic life. She urges that a new agenda for research on children’s economic relations should move in three directions: (i) toward the variable and unequal experience of children within high-income capitalist countries, (ii) toward the enormous variety of children’s circumstances in the lower-income regions where most of the world’s children actually live, and (iii) toward the historical changes that are transforming children’s economic relations (inside and outside their family and household) in rich and poor countries alike.

It is not just children’s economic activities that can take very different forms in the rich minority world and the developing majority world, but there is also a new agenda of research opening up concerning the very different forms that children and young people’s family relationships can take. For example, Jamieson and Milne (2012) focus on the forms of intergenerational and familial disruption precipitated by parents and experienced by many children. In parts of the developing world, the absence of a parent or parents because of premature death or economic migration is common, leaving significant proportions of children and young people brought up by a lone parent or carer stand-in for migrant parents. In contrast, for a significant proportion of children and young people in parts of the developed world, the main disruption to their family households and access to their parents is the upheaval of parental divorce or separation. Such comparisons across space and time can be valuable for exploring the different economic, political, and cultural systems that express the socially constructed conventional generational social order between children, young people, and adults (Alanen, 2009) and the family–sex–power nexus (see Introductory chapter of this volume, and Therborn, 2004).

The sociology of children’s families has come a long way since the 1980s when a variety of authors bemoaned the lack of research on children. Ambert (1986), for example, identified a near absence of children in North American sociological research and argued that this reflected the continuing influence of founding theorists whose preoccupations were shaped by the patriarchal values of the societies in which they lived and the nature of rewards in a discipline which favors research on big issues such as class, bureaucracies, or the political system. Feminist work challenging such patriarchal preconceptions was well under way, when Thorne (1987) raised the question “Where are the children?” The notion that children or childhood should be accorded the same conceptual autonomy as other groups in society was novel. As Qvortrup notes (1990), “Children are ‘human beings’, not only ‘human becomings’, they have not only needs, a fact which is recognized, they also have interests, that may or may not be compatible with the interests of other social groups or categories.”

Thirty years on, Qvortrup, Corsaro, and Honig (2009) look back at the new sociology of childhood and suggest that hindsight allows us to distinguish five characteristics that marked the new childhood paradigm: (i) the aim to study normal childhood and issues concerning the development of prosperous and healthy surroundings for children; (ii) a critique of the conventional socialization perspective, which underplayed the importance of children’s lives as children; (iii) the emphasis on children’s agency and the recognition of the active role children played in constructing relationships and affecting their environment; (iv) the importance of understanding the various structural contexts of childhood across time and place, including common features such as the representation of generational ordering in terms of how children were perceived in relationship to adults; and (v) the extension of common social science methodologies to include research with children. These five characteristics have helped shape subsequent research concerning children’s families in a global world. The emergence of new sociological thinking about childhood and children has gone hand in hand with new political and policy concerns about children’s rights and well-being. Policy interests have inevitably helped shape research agendas in the Western world – if only because the public purse is an important funder of social research. There are several major interrelated public concerns about children and families, at national and international levels (Brannen, 1999; Bȕhler-Niederberger, 2010). The first theme relates to concerns about the “breakup” of the family life, parental responsibilities when marriage and childbirth are separated, and how children fare in the face of marital instability and family change. A second theme relates to concerns about growing levels of child poverty and its consequences. Other concerns involve changing work–life balance that has put a time squeeze on families and has led to increasing pressures on family care and demographic shifts that have changed the balance of generations and the ratio of children to elderly, with all that entails for the future of welfare. Encompassing these themes is the focus on children’s rights and how they should be translated in law and practice in an increasingly globalized world.

These areas of policy concern are all bound up with the changing context of children’s family lives. Childhood experience is inextricably linked to changes in the lives of women and the shifting boundaries of the public and private spheres. In the early twentieth century, the creation of a family wage cemented the notion of women and children as dependents. The traditional gender division of labor was taken as a given. Family meant a male breadwinner and a female carer who would look after the household needs and be responsible for the care of the children.

How times have changed. There is a worldwide increase in the number of children living with single mothers. Single-mother families are disproportionately represented in lower-income households. The “feminization of poverty” (Garfinkel and McLanahan, 1985) is therefore something of a misnomer. The women who are overrepresented among the poor are women with children. It is the feminization and pauperization of childhood that go hand in hand. This is particularly marked in the United States, and, according to the Luxembourg Income Study data, 55% of all American children living in a household headed by a single female with no other adult present live in poverty (Heuveline and Weinshenker, 2008). This is the highest rate among the 15 high-income nations examined in their study. A recent report on single mothers and poverty in Europe points to how a well-designed and generous system of child benefits can do much to reduce poverty, but such benefits need to be accompanied by policies that enable single mothers to engage in paid employment (Van Lancker et al., 2012). The prospects for reduction of child poverty in the richest countries of the world are not looking good as welfare retrenchment becomes a plank of deficit reduction strategies in much of Europe and the United States.

Another change is the increasing diversity among children’s families. In the United States, as we enter the twenty-first century, even for the white middle class, family structure has become increasingly diverse. Not only are mothers more likely to be employed outside the home, but among married couples, dual-earner couples are now the modal family type. Families with same-sex parents have become more visible. Nearly 40% of all births in the United States were to unmarried women in 2007. In 1980, that rate was only 18.4% (Ventura, 2009). While the majority of children currently live with married parents (including stepparents), divorce and single parenthood have changed the family experiences of many children. Children experience family diversity from a very different vantage point from that of their parents. This applies not just to family composition but also to the different childhood experiences associated with gender, class, and ethnicity.

In this chapter, we review some of the findings of the new sociological approach to children that takes the viewpoint of the child. We also examine studies that use the life course perspective to investigate how children’s experiences are shaped by historical time and place and how childhood experience, in turn, shapes their various pathways through to adult life. One of the central arguments that we make is that the two perspectives are both needed. It is not a case of either approaching children as beings or approaching children as becoming. It must be both.

In the next section, we examine the new sociological perspective which views children as social actors. We show how social constructions of childhood have helped render aspects of children’s activities invisible. One example concerns the time bind syndrome (Hochschild, 1997) where the long work-hour culture changes children’s experiences of family time and family care. Another example which, in some instances, may be a consequence of the time bind is children’s work. In the industrial West, the domestic work and informal labor of children have often been ignored because work has been defined as paid work. The subsequent section explores the implications of childhood as a social category. Following Qvortrup (1990), we show why it is so important to make children visible, rather than being subsumed as part of the family or household, as is often the case. We examine what is known and what is lacking in current knowledge about the social economic conditions of childhood in general and children’s families, in particular. This structural approach to childhood is illustrated by reference to family structure, child poverty, and well-being. The final section reviews what the life course perspective has revealed about children and families in time and place. The life course perspective is concerned with the way societal change impinges on individual lives. It also offers a dynamic view of how the codependencies of children and family members are changing, in a rapidly changing world. In the conclusion, we suggest that the sociological understanding of children and families has made rapid progress in the past few decades, but there are some glaring deficiencies in our knowledge. These reflect not only conceptual limitations in our understanding of children’s families but also ongoing divisions of methodologies. In addition, we suggest that research on children’s families is hindered by the ideological baggage associated with ideals of childhood and family and value judgments concerning family change and family decline.

Children as Social Actors

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) has had a wide-ranging impact on the way children are treated by the state and their entitlement to representation in the judicial and administrative procedures that affect their lives. This includes their family relationships, in the wake of divorce. The interest in children’s rights has provided a receptive climate for social research that puts children at the center of focus. The new sociological perspective on children takes seriously the notion that childhood and children’s social relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right and not just in respect to their social construction by adults. This new paradigm asserts that children should be seen as actively involved in the construction of their own social lives, the lives of those around them, and the societies in which they live.

There has been a wealth of research in the last few decades that belongs to this emerging paradigm. Strangely, there was some initial reluctance to study children in the context of family lives. For example, James and Prout (1996) recount how researchers working toward establishing the independent intellectual integrity of a sociology of childhood have wanted to wrestle the study of children out of the familial context of socialization where it was traditionally located. This was because while children were seen within family sociology under headings such as child-rearing and other adult-centric activities, children were certainly not heard. Just as women had to be liberated from their families (conceptually speaking) in order to be seen and heard, this same consideration applied to children (Oakley, 1994). But the position that studying children in their family settings is inappropriate was clearly untenable. Families are the key context in which children’s identities are formed. Moreover, changes that affect the life world of parents, such as the long work-hour culture, have far-reaching implications for the experience of the child. Families are also the key context in which states intervene to modify childhood and parental practices and influence generational relations (Mayall, 2009). Things like childcare provision and parental leave entitlement vary hugely across countries (Moss, 2011) and have important ramifications, for the children’s lives.

Children’s take on the time bind

How do children view the complex “culture of care” that is necessitated when parents work long hours? Even when only 4 years old, children can learn a great deal through eavesdropping on parental conversations. Hochschild (2001) points to how two children have very different takes on their care situations. One child clearly resented the parents’ absence and was angry and difficult at dinnertime, which made it all the harder for the parents to come home (the time bind syndrome). The other child did not seem to feel any resentment, had ceased to look to the parents as exclusive caregivers, and made it less hard for the parents to reenter family life.

What explains the difference? Hochschild suggests that children are themselves sophisticated observers of their social worlds. They pick up on what their parents never say to them directly. From overheard conversations, they learn about the problems parents experience in finding care, the conflicts that result from different expectations of care, and whether the carers are doing the work for love, money, or both. Children know the difference between care done by Granny or Grandpa and by the paid care worker. They know, in other words, if the care culture is one that draws on an integrated community of neighbors and kin who are involved in the child’s life, or whether it draws on a market economy, where carers are “good with children,” but in relation to any child. The former, Hochschild suggests, is getting rarer but may work better from the child’s point of view.

There is an ongoing and highly charged debate about the consequences of maternal employment for children. Recent studies have claimed that there has been surprising continuity in the amount of time children spend with their mothers, despite the dramatic changes in mothers’ labor market commitment (Bianchi, 2000). Yet, although mothers may be quite successful at juggling time to ensure that children’s well-being is not adversely affected, children from a very young age are exposed to diverse forms of care that may be more or less beneficial, in terms of child outcomes.

The point is worth reiterating that what is “good care” from the adult perspective may not appear the same to the eyes of a child. Children’s interests, mother’s interests, and societal interests do not necessarily coincide. The change in maternal labor force participation and the long work-hour culture is one example of the relation between social change and family life. Since family is not a monolith, it is necessary to differentiate between the different family members, whose acceptance, responses, and contributions to change will vary. Children’s perspectives and contributions to family life are beginning to be taken seriously, but the long tradition of pervasive adult-centric bias in sociology means that there is a long way to go.

Children’s work

Childhood research has traditionally been located in sociology of family. By contrast, studies of “work” and children, until quite recently, focused almost exclusively on the impact of children on the labor force participation of adults, mothers in particular. Of course, many children do work – in formal part-time employment, in casual informal work, in their family businesses, and in domestic labor. Yet children’s labor outside school has been rendered relatively invisible by conceptions of children as dependent and nonproductive (Morrow, 1996). In both Europe and the United States, there is mounting evidence that children do contribute to household labor in the form of routine daily tasks and childcare. The characterization of children as “priceless but useless” may understate their continuing contributions to the domestic economy, the division of labor, and family care. It may be the case that, because of exposure to family disruption and family diversity, children perform more emotional labor – for instance, in supportive roles such as parental confidante – at quite young ages. Certainly, the children of immigrants are often called on, in both routine and emergency situations, to act as “language brokers,” on their parents’ behalf.

In the United States, nearly all adolescents do paid work at some point during high school, and, perhaps for that reason, there has been a longer tradition of US research on adolescents’ work than in Britain. An interesting study that contrasts the family and work relations of youth in a rural and urban community found that young people in rural communities are more likely than their urban counterparts to suggest that parents construe their work as “adultlike” (Shanahan et al., 1996). The researchers suggest that the rural–urban difference is because urban work opportunities are highly variable, whereas much of the available work in the rural community is integral to the shared agricultural way of life. These findings echo a study of the involvement of Norwegian children in the fishing industry, where children worked alongside adults in baiting fishing lines (Solberg, 1994). Children’s temporary position as workers meant that restrictions associated with the status of child were frequently overridden.

Similarly, in a study of “homestaying” children in Norway (children who spend a good deal of time at home, unsupervised, while parents are at work), Solberg (1990) notes how, by “looking after themselves” and by contributing to “home care,” children are able to negotiate an enhanced “social age.” Solberg puts a positive spin on children spending more time by themselves, suggesting that children can benefit from parental acknowledgment of their autonomy. Hochschild, in her study of the time bind of work and family in corporate America, sees “home-alone” children in a less positive light. She suggests that rationalizing parental absence in the name of children’s “independence” is yet another twist on the varied ways of evading the “time bind.” Children, in this instance, are being asked in essence to “save time” by growing up fast (Hochschild, 1997, p. 229)

Children the world over help shoulder responsibilities toward their families and contribute in different ways to the family economy. Building on her study of children’s work in fishing and coir making in the South Western Indian state of Kerala, Nieuwenhuys (1994, 2009) challenges the current restrictive approaches to child labor for the developing world and defends the potential of the working children’s movements to participate in the fight to achieve dignity for working children. It is possible however to acknowledge both the importance of children’s agency and the need for protective labor laws, albeit recognizing that some working children view any restriction as potential threats to their livelihoods.

The child-focused research, described in this section, looks at children as “beings in the present.” Viewing children as prospective adults – workers, parents, citizens, or dropouts of the future – can inadvertently diminish the importance of children as children. Yet, rejecting developmental perspectives on childhood makes no sense, given that children’s actions, family life, and the social and economic processes which are integral to family structure and change unfold over time. This is why the study of children’s families also requires a life course approach. Before examining the insights that can be gained from adopting a life course perspective, we first consider what it means to examine childhood as a social category and why an understanding of children’s families is not the same as the study of families with children.

The Social Structure of Childhood

There is a case for arguing that childhood is a structural concept that is a permanent form, even if its members change continuously and even if it varies considerably across historical time and place. This assumption is necessary for a comparative framework that examines conditions of childhood (e.g., poverty rates of “dependent children”) across different societies, across different groups within societies, and across time. In this section, we examine how childhood has been affected by the revolutionary demographic shifts in family life in the West, in the latter part of the twentieth century. One of the consequences of these changes is the increase in single-parent families, the vast majority being headed by women, and the related increase in child poverty.

Children’s family structures

Changes in demographic behavior have been so dramatic that they have been termed by some the second demographic transition (Lesthaeghe, 1995). This term contrasts the changes that have occurred since 1960 with those in the first half of the century. Underlying the more recent demographic shifts is an increased value placed on individual autonomy and the associated shifts in ideas concerning gender equality. These changes have been the subject of heated debate, with traditionalists believing that the family is collapsing, while modernists welcome the new opportunities for women and the wider choices for both sexes. However, among both camps, there are those who suggest that the greater choice for parents and equality gains for women may be at the expense of their children (Clarke, 1996; Parreñas, 2005). Whatever the truth in the judgments about the relative benefits for adults and children, these changes are unlikely to be reversed.

Patterns of family formation and dissolution have become markedly more frequent, less strictly patterned, and more complex, since the 1960s. But, to a great extent, it is adults not children who trigger these family changes. The evidence is beginning to be assembled on the relative (in)stability of different household forms, the frequency of household compositional change, and the amount of time, contact, and resources that flow between different family members, as they form, leave, and reform household groups. But what has happened to the children?

By the turn of the twenty-first century, children in Northern Europe and the United States were more likely to be born into populations where increasing numbers choose not to have children. Children were also more likely to be born outside marriage, to experience family shifts, to have few siblings, and to live in either a dual-earner or one-parent family (Jensen, 2009). An unmarried mother used to be synonymous with a single mother. This is no longer the case. Many children are born to mothers in consensual unions, and this proportion is increasing. As Jensen suggests, the lost monopoly of marriage for childbirth was a first step on the road to pluralization of children’s family forms.

However, it is not just that family forms are plural but they are also more fragile and children are more likely to spend part of their childhood in different family arrangements and living apart from one of their biological parents (usually the father). Figure 20.1 shows the percentage of young adolescents (11–15) currently living in either a stepfamily or single-parent household. The majority of children still live with both parents, but as the figure shows, substantial numbers of children in some countries do not. The ramifications of the greater diversity and fragility of family forms for children include the enhanced risk of material deprivation in single-parent families, the potential loss of contact with fathers, and the greater likelihood of children having to move between parental homes, as a result of parental splits.

c20-fig-0001 — **Figure 20.1** Living arrangements of young adolescents (11–15) in Europe, 2005–2006.

*Source*: data from Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Survey 2005/2006 in Chapple (2009).

Does it matter that an increasing proportion of children experience a variety of family settings as they pass through childhood and adolescence? Current consensus is that it does. As we shall see, the evidence is more complex to evaluate than the media headlines acknowledge. To understand the very different experiences of children as they negotiate the complex family settings that can follow family disruption, qualitative methods can be invaluable. However, large-scale longitudinal surveys are also crucial for following the lives of children over time and unpacking the complex relationship between family structure and process and between the antecedents and consequences of children’s attributes and actions. We review some of the survey findings in the section on the life course perspective.

Child poverty and children’s well-being

The size and structure of children’s families are important in determining child poverty. In Britain, despite a fall in the number of families with children and declining family size, the number of children living in households with below half the average income had risen rapidly in the last decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the 1990s, about one-fifth of all children were living in such households; this represented a threefold increase over just two decades between 1979 and 1999 (Department for Work and Pensions, 2012). This rise in child poverty reflected a growth in the number of children living in families without work. Sixty-one percent of all poor children lived in a household with no one employed. Half of all poor children lived in a lone-parent household. Three-quarters of poor children were white, but the risk of child poverty was higher in all minority ethnic groups, especially households of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin (Bradshaw, 2002). According to OECD statistics (OECD, 2009a), there is some evidence that the policy targets set by the New Labour government to reduce child poverty had some effect.

As can be seen in Figure 20.2, by the mid-2000s, child poverty in the United Kingdom was slightly below the OECD average with one-tenth of children living in households with below 50% of the median equivalized income (the OECD average being 12.4%). According to the OECD 2011 Report, “Doing better for families,” before the financial crisis, child poverty in the United Kingdom fell by the largest proportion out of all OECD countries. However, the report also notes that progress in child poverty reduction has stalled and is now predicted to increase. One area of concern that the report highlights is the relatively high childcare costs in the United Kingdom, which remains a barrier to work for both low-earning families and those higher up the income scale.

c20-fig-0002 — **Figure 20.2** Percentage of children (aged 0–17 years) living in poor households (below 50% of median equivalized income), circa 2005.

*Source*: OECD, *Doing Better for Children* (2009), Fig. 2.2; data from OECD *Income Distribution database*, developed for OECD (2008b), *Growing Unequal: Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries*.

By contrast, child poverty rates remain very high in the United States with one-fifth of children in the mid-2000s living in poor households with less than half the median equivalized income. With the continuing financial crisis, child poverty is forecast to increase still further. The OECD analysis suggests that the United States could do much to reduce children’s poverty rates by strengthening early year’s services and benefits, including legislating for paid parental leave, and building on the successes of child education and care services, such as the Headstart program. The United States is the only OECD country without a national paid parental leave policy, although some states provide leave payments.

In both the United States and Britain, there has been an extraordinary output of work on the causes and consequences of child poverty. While much of the research is directly relevant to policy interventions and is couched in terms of “What works for children?” (e.g., Chase-Lansdale and Brooks-Gunn, 1995; Waldfogel, 2006), it must be recognized that children’s interests, family interests, and societal interests may well be different (Glass, 2001). For example, policies aimed to reduce poverty by raising family income through paid work may not necessarily be consistent with the desire to strengthen family ties or to prioritize parental care of young children. While sociological research can usefully inform policy initiatives, the role of sociology is not in constructing societal engineering blueprints. Rather, it consists of “careful analyses of social processes, awareness of their concealed and unintended manifestations, and sustained efforts to understand the participants’ own reactions to their situation” (Portes, 2000).

There has been a great deal of work analyzing the complexity of social processes involved in growing up poor. As family structure, parental characteristics and household poverty are so interlinked, sorting out what is causing what, and with what consequences is no easy task (Duncan et al., 1998; Mayer, 2010). There has been much less work devoted to understanding children’s own reactions to their family’s poverty. Child poverty is measured in terms of household income, but we know from a number of influential feminist studies that the household allocation of resources is often structured on gender and generational lines. The “black box” of household finances is very difficult to prize open. One of the few studies to look at household income from the child’s perspective suggests that children, as young as seven, are good tacticians in persuading parents to buy them the things they want. Nevertheless, although parents are often willing to make financial sacrifices to protect children from some of the more visible aspects of poverty, children, like adults, suffer from relative deprivation. Children’s consumption ideas are shaped by affluent images portrayed in the media and comparisons with more fortunate peers (Middelton et al., 1994; Cook, 2009).

Children’s Families: A Life Course Perspective

One thing life course research has demonstrated convincingly is that children’s lives are not determined by historical circumstances, economic change, or family structures. Nevertheless, some children grow up in much more disadvantaged circumstances than others, which has clear knock-on effects for children’s subsequent behaviors and achievements. A great deal of research has been devoted to understanding why some children’s life courses are blighted by disadvantage, while others “beat the odds” and make a success of their lives, despite the risks. Fundamental to the idea of risk is the predictability of life chances from earlier circumstances (Bynner, 2001). There are clear patterns and associations between earlier circumstances and later outcomes. For example, persistent child poverty has a well-known detrimental effect on educational attainment. However, there is also considerable individual variation in children’s developmental pathways. To understand children’s life chances, we need to take seriously the way children act to select, shape, and respond to the great number of choices, available in contemporary societies.

Studying children’s lives in times of extreme social, economic, or cultural upheaval can be a useful way of revealing the processes by which an external risk affects the vulnerability and resilience of children. It can also help identify factors that minimize or accentuate the risk. “Children of the Depression” was one of the first of this mold (Elder, [1974] 1999). The study examined archival data on children born in Oakland California in 1920–1921. It showed that the impact of economic deprivation during the Depression was felt mainly through children’s changing family experiences, including altered family relationships, different division of labor, and enhanced social strain.

Elder also undertook a comparison study, using a group of children from Berkeley, born just 8 years later in 1928–1929. This showed marked differences between the ways economic deprivation affected the children of the two birth cohorts. The Oakland children encountered the Depression hardships after a relatively secure phase of early childhood in the 1920s. By contrast, the Berkeley group spent their early childhood years in families which were under extraordinary stress and instability. The adverse effects of the Depression were far more severe for the Berkeley group, particularly the boys. The Oakland cohorts were old enough to take on jobs outside the home, and, as we saw in the last section, children, by working, can enhance their status within families. This would have been particularly true under conditions of economic hardship, when children’s earning money could be vital to their families’ welfare.

The study underlines the need to recognize children as agents of their own family experience and the need to take account of the multiple relationships which define patterns of family adaptation in hard times. Such insights have helped shape the four principles that underpin the life course perspective (Elder, 2001). First, the historical time and place of childhood leaves a lasting imprint on people’s lives. Second, the timing of events, life transitions, and behavioral choices are critically important. Third, individual lives are inseparably linked to the lives of significant others, especially family members. Fourth, human agency, including children’s agency, must be recognized. We illustrate, in turn, how these insights have contributed to more recent studies of the interrelation of social change, families, and children’s lives. These studies predate the publication of the research projects that have been commissioned by various funding bodies in Europe and the United States to examine how the ongoing “great recession” affects family life and children’s well-being.

The imprint of changing historical time

One way of looking at the imprint of historical time on children lives is to compare children’s experiences across different societies or different sociohistorical contexts (Wadsworth, 1991; Elder, Modell, and Parke, 1993). With the increasing availability of longitudinal samples, it is possible to compare the diverse pathways from childhood to early adulthood, of children born at different points in time. One such study, comparing children born in 1958 and 1970 in Britain, found that the material circumstances of families had improved for the more recent cohort. The study also found that the accumulative disadvantages associated with children’s socioeconomic background have become more marked over time (Schoon et al., 2002; Schoon, 2006). This result brings little comfort to politicians who hoped that by raising the standard of living, without tackling inequality, they would improve children’s life chances. Subjective assessments of economic well-being are not usually based on comparisons with the past, but on existing expectations for life. Children, whose families are left behind in the overall improvement of standards of living, continue to be at a disadvantage.

The timing of events and interlinked lives

Research in both Britain and the United States has shown that family economic conditions in early childhood are more important, than those of later childhood, for predicting children’s cognitive ability and educational achievement (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Schoon et al., 2002). It is also worth noting that family economic resources seem to matter far more than family structure in terms of children’s cognitive development (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Joshi et al., 1999). Still, most research, to date, suggests that children experiencing lone parenthood or family disruption or both have, on average, tougher lives, more limited options, and less desirable outcomes than those who do not (Rodgers and Pryor, 1998; McCulloch et al., 2000).

Using British birth cohort data from 1946, 1958, and 1970, Ely et al. (1999) examined the secular trends in the overall association of parental divorce or separation and children’s educational attainment at school-leaving age, during the period spanning a quarter of a century since the World War II in Britain. The results refute the commonly held opinion that the effects of divorce on children have attenuated with the increasing prevalence of divorce. These results were indeed surprising as divorce has become less stigmatized than it was for earlier generations, and, in addition, the selection hypothesis would suggest that as divorce increases, the average child of divorce would come from a less troubled family. A different study using more varied measures of disadvantage but with the same 1958 and 1970 British birth cohort studies, results confirmed that the association between parental divorce and subsequent disadvantage has remained remarkably stable over time (Sigel-Rushton et al., 2005). Disadvantage was measured both by children’s temperament and academic success at age 11, and also by lack of educational qualifications, receipt of means-tested benefits, and mental health at age 30. The robustness of this negative association between parental divorce, children’s well-being at 11, and subsequent adult disadvantage raises the most intriguing question for future research: why is it that the associations are so stable across a time period that saw such dramatic change in the frequency of divorce and the acceptance of alternative family structures?

In order to begin to answer this question, researchers need to unpack what really matters about parental divorce for children. Is it a fall in economic status? A loss of a father figure? An erosion of social contacts? A reduction in parental care? Do all of them matter? And is what matters different for different children? We can glean some evidence from studies that go into greater detail about the context of childhood experiences and the process through to later outcomes. For example, an intriguing qualitative study by of Scottish children unpacks the complex perspectives and choices that accompany parental splits, as well as other family changes such as repartnering and family migration (Highet and Jamieson, 2007). Their findings suggest that even relatively commonplace family changes do not feel ordinary to the child. From the child’s perspective, such upheavals disrupt what they regard as normal life.

Until quite recently, survey researchers, when investigating aspects of childhood, have preferred to ask adult respondents such as parents or teachers to report on children’s lives, rather than to ask children themselves. In part, this has been because of concerns about the cognitive ability of children to process and respond to structured questions about behavior, perceptions, opinions, and beliefs. Yet by including children as respondents in longitudinal surveys, social scientists can improve the theoretical understanding and empirical knowledge of the dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion as they affect childhood experiences and children’s life course trajectories.

Interviewing children does pose distinctive methodological problems that could impinge on the quality of data (Scott, 2008). In particular, survey techniques might not be appropriate for younger children because of cognitive and language limitations. However, by preadolescence (as young as 10), children are quite capable of providing meaningful and insightful information. Research on children as respondents lags behind research on adult respondents. Although child respondents do pose some special concerns (e.g., issues of power and ethics), when children are asked questions they are able and willing to answer, young age is no barrier to data quality.

Children’s agency. Children have an active role in shaping their own life course. Of course, many childhood experiences, including poverty and family disruption, are not in the child’s control. However, the process that links childhood experience and adult outcomes involves many chains of action that the child, himself or herself, initiates.

One chain of links was traced in a British study that followed a group of young people from age 10, through to their choice of first partner. The study demonstrated that childhood behavioral problems exacerbated the risk of young people choosing a first partner who was deviant, in terms of antisocial behavior, persistent drug or alcohol misuse, or marked problems in interpersonal relations (Rutter et al., 1995). Women were much more likely to have a deviant partner than were men. However, the things that helped reduce the risk were similar for both girls and boys. Children who showed forethought in planning life choices were at less risk, and those who had a nondelinquent peer group were less likely to form a “problem” partnership. A harmonious family environment also helped.

Children make choices among options that become building blocks of their evolving life courses. Often, choices amplify tendencies already present. Problem peer groups enhance the chances of a child with deviant leanings going off the rails, whereas high-achieving friends further motivate children’s efforts to succeed. There is considerable individual variation in outcomes. Although family advantage, adversity, genes, and environment all tilt the odds, children’s lives are their own and, to a great degree, are of their own making.

Children and Families: Looking Back and Looking Forward

In this chapter, we have taken it as a given that childhood, like family, is a social construct. The way childhood is conceived, in a particular time and place, frames our knowledge and understanding. In sociology, until quite recently, children were subsumed under family and households and not considered as actors in their own right. The new sociology of childhood rightly emphasizes that children are agents. Children are not passive victims of circumstance, they act and exert influence on the lives of others around them, and they make choices, within the opportunities and constraints that contemporary life brings. Those opportunities and constraints are closely bound with the social positions that are reproduced and transmitted from one generation, to the next, within the family context. Yet children’s fates are in no way determined. There is great variation in outcomes, with some children beating the odds and thriving despite childhood adversities, including poverty and family disruption.

We have insisted that family context is crucial for understanding children’s contemporary well-being and future pathways. Children are agents, but agency is not individual, it is relational. Children’s actions and choices are codependent on the lives of others, particularly their family members. Parents’ lives are also codependent on the lives of their children. There are, of course, important power differences that age statuses bestow. However, as we saw both from examples of children’s work and from children’s responses to the time bind syndrome, children, from a very early age, actively shape their family environment.

The study of children’s families crosses the disciplinary divides and necessitates different methodologies for different purposes. In an early statement about “a new paradigm for the sociology of childhood,” it was asserted that there was a need to break with the traditions of developmental psychology (Prout and James, 1990). It was also stated that ethnography is a particularly useful methodology for the study of childhood. Both claims are unfortunate. There is an ongoing divide between the mainly quantitative studies of children’s families that use the developmentally informed life course perspective, on the one hand, and the mainly qualitative research exploring children’s perspectives, on the other. This divide needs to be broken down. It is not a matter of understanding children as beings or as becomings. We need both.

We have insisted that children must not be marginalized through seeing them only in terms of their family or household. This obscures the position of children. By making children visible in statistics, it becomes evident that children’s interests can differ from those of women, parents, or other groups in society. The potential interest clash between children and other societal groups is clear when there are scarce resources to be distributed (e.g., in the case of child poverty). There may also be a clash between children’s need for family stability and adults’ desire for greater individual freedom and family choice.

The thorny issue of family change or family decline poses a particular challenge to the future study of children’s families. Research on effects for children of family disruption, family diversity, changing work–family balance, and different care cultures is often contentious. Ideology frequently colors interpretations and claims far exceed knowledge. Examples of ideology masking interpretation come from both liberal and conservative viewpoints. To use currently fashionable jargon, we need to “deconstruct” the literature on children’s families to examine how ideals of childhood and family shape not only what questions are asked but also what answers are found.

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