CHYS 1000 midterm practice 

lec 1 

1. What is a child?

It depends on the context. An individual who is brought up to benefit society.

2. What is childhood?

A time of learning and gaining experience from the world around them to grow into functional adults.

3. How were children regarded in historical religious thought?

Religions opposed infanticide. Children have value by virtue of being born. Noot seen as asset/liability.

4. Who is Phillip Aries and what is his theory? 

Childhood is a recent social invention. Didn't exist before. Stimulated the social study of childhood. Ideas about childhood, what it should be, change overtime.

5. What does discourse mean?

A set of ideas that help us to understand the world around us.

6. What was family life like in classical times?

Back then society was patriarchal. Men were the breadwinners and women stayed at home. Men seemed to have more power over their family members. Abortion, infanticide, and abandonment was common, used as a way to get rid of unwanted children.

7. How did gender and social class affect an individual's life during classical times?

Girls were less likely to be educated and were victims of infanticide/abandonment than boys. Girls viewed as burden/draining resources vs. boys could contribute. Gender roles: “ Men were born to rule, women were born to obey.”

8. What was childhood like in medieval europe?

Time of widespread poverty/ill-health. Mortality rates high, poor kids began to work young.

9. what is social constructionism?

Investigating the ways in which individuals and social groups participate in the creation of the reality they perceive around them.

10. what is the romantic child?

Consideration that the child is pure/innocent and needs to be protected (influenced by Rousseau) 

11. what is the historical approach. impact of Christianity?

Children need to be saved as they are essentially evil & need spiritual salvation

12.  what was the dominant discourse in the Victorian era?

Victorian era to demonstrate a number of discourses including the ‘Exploited Child’ and the ‘Child of Faith’. 

13. what was the contemporary discourse?

Children need to be protected from danger, (physical, biological, and intellectual); children as a future investment

14. what is the ethnographical approach?

it is when the researcher is immersed in the child’s setting in the form of Unstructured Interviews; Group discussion using vignettes; & Observations.

15. what are the 4 themes found in ethnographical research?

playful child, unknowing child, needful and unauthorized child.

16. what is a playful child and how are they characterized?

Play as their predominant occupation. Children & childhood characterized by play and playful interactions, but this play excludes adults and is controlled by children themselves. Children have a specific understanding of play (imagination) and unlike an adult’s understanding of play.

17. what is an unknowing child and how are they characterized?

Children lack knowledge or understanding about a range of situations, information or abilities. 

18. what is a needful child and how are they characterized?

it is an emotional state that is satisfied by the nature of the relationship with the adult. Demonstrate dependency or trust for adults to ‘make it better’, to provide physical care, solve problems and protect.

19. what is an unauthorized child and how are they characterized? 

they Struggle to remove itself from dependency on the adult. Frustration and dissatisfaction when unable to solve problems and complete tasks and this was quashed by the social rules of the situation.

20.  what are the 3 common western historical discourses?

Puritan discourse of childhood, Children as Blank Slates, Inherently Innocent: The Romantic View of Childhood

21. what is the puritan view of childhood?

Child have the potential for evil if not corrected. Child rearing based on the view that child are inherently wicked or evil. Idea largely shared by Christians throughout Europe and Americans. A “godly’ household was an essential requirement for order.

22. what was thomas hobbes theory?

In Hobbes’s view, the child was subject to the parent. Child to a parent as a slave to a master. Children lacked reason: not necessarily as born with original sin but no more valuable than beasts.

23. what is John Locke's theory?

Children as Blank Slates -  At birth, Mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa. Character (good or bad) emerged from experience. Advocated for a system of rewards and punishments. Advised against indulging children, may become undisciplined and poor adult members of society.

24. what is Jean-jacques Rosseau's theory?

 Important to consider a child as a child. Children innocent at birth, rather than tainted with original sin. World corrupts children and children should be protected. Challenging common upper class childrearing practices and encouraged mothers to feed and raise their children themselves, children should enjoy childhood.

25. what is inherently innocent? (Rosseau)

Childhood marked off from the rest of society as a special and separate social world”. Childhood is a time of innocence.

26. what is the industrial revolution?

1760-1850, a period in which Europe and US moved to a more industrial way of life ( e.g., from boats to trains) 

27. what issues did industrialization and urbanization bring?

Poor working-class families moved to the city for work. In Victorian society, there were very different conceptualizations of childhood in place. Children seen as angelic in some sectors – (e.g., middle class). Children from poor families were working in cotton mills and being sent up to sweep chimneys – some died

28. what were social reformers concerned about during the modern institutionalization?

 child labour, and compulsory schooling. Provincial legislation regulating child labour in factories and mines began to pass in the 1870s and 1880s. 

29. what did social reformers do to change children's roles in society? what laws were made and when?

By 1929 illegal to hire children under 14 to work in factories or mines in most provinces. Early 1870s to mid-1920s all provinces enacted legislation requiring school attendance. In 1921 , increased the age of compulsory school to 16.

30. How did compulsory schooling change the view of childhood?

Childhood a time of dependence – children completely reliant on parents and the state

lec 2 

1. what is a dominant paradigm?

the values, or system of thought, in a society that are most standard and widely held at a given time.  shaped both by the community's cultural background and by the context of the historical moment.

2. what is a new paradigm?

social study of childhood

3. what happened after the enlightenment period?

Academics focused on and interested in natural sciences. Development of other disciplines (e.g., medicine, chemistry). Natural world could now be measured and predicted

4. what is the Darwinian approach to child study? what did it do?

first to apply methods of the natural world to understand childhood.Humans are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Darwinian approach led to mass measurement and observations of children

5. Who is Francis Galton and what was his theory?

cousin of Darwin) influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theory (survival of the fittest) applied concepts to the social world. Social Darwinism (or eugenics: It tries to influence the way people choose to mate and raise children, with the aim of improving the human species. aims to cut out traits that lead to suffering, by limiting people with the traits from reproducing.  

6. What is Leilani Muir story?

placed into an institution by her abusive mother. Muir was found to have a very low IQ and at the 14 was sterilized to prevent her from having children and passing down her low IQ. In adulthood she discovered why she was not able to have children and her IQ was in the normal range.

7. Who is jean piaget and what was he interested in?

influential developmental psychologist. He was interested in how children’s thinking developed with age

8. what is the Constructivist theory? 

 children construct an understanding of their world based on observations of the effects of their behaviour. Children are seen as active and Intrinsically motivated to learn.

9. What is Piaget's theory?

cognitive development. explains how a child constructs a mental model of the world.  children move through four different stages of mental development. 

10. what is the difference between cognitive equilibrium vs. disequilibrium?

when things make sense vs. when they don't

11.  what is assimilation and accommodation in piagetian terms?

A child is assimilating knowledge by practicing or repeating something learnt. When that knowledge has changed the existing schemata, then that knowledge has been accommodated.

12. what is equilibration? 

Biological drive to obtain balance between schemes and the environment 

13. what are the 4 stages of cognitive development? 

sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete and formal operations.

14. What is the sensorimotor stage?

(Birth to age 2) Children experience their world: senses and motor movements. Physical development (mobility) allows the child to develop new skills intellectual ability. (language)

15. what is the preoperational stage?

(2-6 years) Intelligence is illustrated through use of the use of symbols, language use matures, memory and imagination develops.

16. what is the concrete stage?

6-12 years. Children begin to reason logically about the world. Conservation is mastered (e.g., number, length, mass, liquid). Intelligence is demonstrated through logical and systematic manipulation of symbols related to concrete objects

17. what is the formal operations stage?

12 years & Older. Cognitive development culminates in the ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically. Individuals can imagine alternative worlds and reason systematically about all possible outcomes of a situation.

18. what are the limitations of the preoperational stage?

egocentrism and centration

19. what is egocentrism?

the tendency to perceive the world solely from one’s own point of view. 

20. what is centration?

the tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event. 

21. What is developmentalism and why is it relevant?

Developmentalism describes the child’s progress to adulthood as a series of age-related steps. Developmental process unfolds naturally and that all children go through the stages in the same order and at the same age. Children that do not develop according to the template are labelled deficient. 

22. How does developmentalism and education go hand in hand?

Extensive poverty resulted in crime and moral degeneration. Compulsory schooling a solution to these problems: Children could be taught good habits and moral values through education. By applying theory - educators knew what stage a child should be at, know what was “normal” for that child at different ages.

23. why was the new way of studying children created?

rejection of the ideas and methods used in psychological research. Children were not only marginalized in social theory but also in society.

24. what is the sociological child?

blank slate or ‘empty vessel’ which is then ‘filled’ by society. 

25. what did developmental psychology and traditional socialization view the child as?

Developmental psychology viewed child as “in the process of becoming”. Traditional socialization examined “how the child becomes a functioning member of society”.

26. what are some criticisms of socialization theory?

maintains existing inequalities and thereby becomes a mechanism of social control. appears to demand no more of children than to internalize or model what they see around them. Kids are active participants in their own social worlds and in those of adults’. 

27. What did Myra Bluebond-Langner research/study?

She conducted an ethnographic study with terminally ill children. Her work demonstrated the part that children themselves play in their socialization. Even though adults around the children did not discuss the children’s illnesses nor their impending deaths, the children came to know what was happening. Children ”not simply the product of universal biological and social processes, rather children are Active Participants. 

28. What did james and prout research?

mapped out what an emerging paradigm of the social study of childhood might look like. Children were worthy of study in their own right. Paradigm shift – a new way of thinking about children. argues to move away from oppositional dichotomies (e.g., nature and culture) and proposes that childhood is a hybrid of the two.

29. Why did we need a paradigm shift?

Rejects a view of children as passive incompetent becomings. Highlights the socially constructed nature of childhood. Moves away from a conception of childhood as an age-bound develop-mental process. Moves away from a view of children as passive recipients of socialization. Moves toward seeing childhood as a time of competence and agency.

30. what is social construction theory?

it allows us to see that there are multiple constructions and representations of childhood that vary between and  within cultures. possessing agency, or children as social actors

31. what is Klocker's thin and thin agency?

Children still able to exercise agency – even if situations where children have very little agency. Thinned by structures such as gender and ethnicity. Children asked to ranked themselves among those who made decisions in their lives. Boys privileged over girls in terms of education (educating girls pointless). Many factors structure girls’ choices. Gendered social practices (e.g. genital mutilation), poverty, and an absence of opportunities. girls are making a choice to become child domestic workers and exercising their agency – however thin this agency might be. 

32. what are the 3 assumptions about childhood?

Childhood is a particular structural form. Childhood is exposed to the same societal forces as adulthood. Children themselves are co-constructors of childhood and of society 

33. how is childhood constructed on four levels?

in transactions and interactions between children and adults; in group transactions, for example between teachers and pupils; in the individual relations between people born at different points in history; and in social policies

34. Pros and cons of Children as beings versus children as becomings.

seeing the child as becoming, implies children’s lack of competency until they reach rational adulthood. In the same way, seeing the child as being also reinforces that children are different from adults. 

35.  what is the mosquito device example and its relevance?

emits a high frequency electronic signal only audible to children and young people. Used to deter teens from gathering. reveals that childhood is seen as a period of potential deviance.

36. what are the central themes of studying childhood?

Children as beings versus becomings; actors versus children as acted upon by structures; varied in time and space; social construction versus childhood as biologically determined and a universal category versus childhoods as diverse.

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