Children’s Roles and Relationships

The meanings of parenthood and childhood are deeply intertwined (Valentine 1997) since beliefs about the duties of mothers and fathers towards children invariably implicate ideas about the nature of children and their needs. Chapter 6 pointed to a number of ways in which children affected parenting practices in these families, a phenomenon that has only recently received substantial attention in sociology (see Ambert 1992). This perspective on children as active social agents within families (James and Prout 1997; Mayall and Zeiher 2003) developed largely through the recent sociology of childhood and entails an emphasis on attending to children’s own insights on family life (Brannen and O’Brien 1996). The attendant view of children as social actors worthy of study in their own right (Qvortrup 1994), alongside the notion that childhood is a socially constructed phenomenon (La Fontaine 1979), leads on to a consideration of the meanings of childhood and children as the focus of the current chapter.