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Childhoods and Inequalities in the Americas

gilda charrier, Edna Hernández González and Jean-Marc Serme
This article is a translation of:
Enfances et inégalités dans les Amériques [fr]
Other translation(s):
Infâncias e desigualdades nas Américas [pt]
Infancia, niñez y desigualdades en las Américas [es]

Full text

General introduction

1The Institut des Amériques conference "De jure equality and de facto inequality in the Americas: multidisciplinary approaches" (Brest, November 2021), dedicated to exploring the tension between equality and inequality, dealt with notions of equality, equity, social recognition, social inequality, exclusion, discrimination and more, on the scale of several cultural areas, in varied populations and at different historical periods. The aim of this event was to analyze the legislative texts and political positions that put forward the equalization of conditions, against the yardstick of practices – institutional or otherwise – in different areas of social life in the societies concerned. The relationship between inequalities of power and the vulnerable and highly dependent age of childhood opens up a wide range of research perspectives in the Americas, whether historical, sociological, anthropological, literary or artistic. This dossier offers a few examples.

2Inequalities here refer to differences in access to socially valued, historically constructed rights, resources, relationships or services. These differences between individuals or groups establish a hierarchy of social positions or situations, and can thus be perceived as forms of injustice. They can also be claimed as a right to be educated, to work or to have a family according to an older or alternative social organization (Levesque R., 1997; Massey D., 2008). Inequalities generally stem from discriminatory practices on the part of dominant groups towards dominated groups (socially, culturally or financially). In the humanities and social sciences, the problem of inequality has developed mainly through the approach to social relations based on class, and more recently on gender, ethnicity or race. It is put to the test in the field, by considering population units in which children are not always visible or taken into consideration.

3From the point of view of the American states, interest in childhood and education was initially driven by a concern for national unity. On December 2, 1867, Mexican President Benito Juárez promulgated the Organic Law on Compulsory, Secular and Free Public Education, thereby creating a "common childhood period for all young people" (Schell P., 2004; Ford E., 2019). In 1884, a similar law created Argentina's "common, secular, free and compulsory" education system under the presidency of Julio Argentino Roca (Puiggrós A., 2003: 88). From the point of view of a global political vision of childhood, the idea of children's rights was embodied as early as the 19th century in a first international congress in Belgium (1890). This was followed by the Geneva Convention of 1924, which recognized children's rights, and UNICEF (1946), which was created to offset the effects of the Second World War. A Declaration of the Rights of the Child was approved by the UN in 1959, and the Year of the Rights of the Child in 1979 led to the drafting of a convention inspired by the ideas of Polish pediatrician and writer Janusz Korczak (1878-1942). This eventually led to the 1989 International Convention on the Rights of the Child (ICRC) (Vie publique, 2021). Almost all States ratified it, in an attempt to implement the principles of non-discrimination, the best interests of the child, the right to life, survival and development, and respect for the views of the child in all matters affecting him or her. The CRC expresses the culmination of the twentieth century, during which the concept of the child as a fragile and incapable being who must be protected and educated was relativized to finally integrate that of childhoods to be discovered, based on socialization with adults but also between children capable of expression and thought. Except for the United States, all countries in the Americas have ratified the Convention, and most of them did so as early as 1990. Some, like Argentina, have used it as an "instrument of political criticism" after years of dictatorship (Pochetti I., 2018).

4A critical analysis of the socio-historical conditions of the emergence of new expectations for childhood reveals how they fit in with a neoliberal vision of the economy and public intervention. Children and young people are seen both as consumers – of cultural objects in particular (Octobre S. et N. Berthomier, 2021) – and as future actors in the economic system, autonomous and able to assert their rights. More generally, critical readings of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (ICRC, 1989) remind us that it was first conceived by European adults from the wealthy classes. For example, we can observe the paradoxical effect of including a country like Peru in the international economy, which is supposed to be in the best interests of the child, leading to the stigmatization of parental practices in the fight against precariousness, and even to the substitution of international adoption for the child-parent bond (Leinweaver J., 2007). Whatever the country and its economic level, recent reports show that there is still a gap between the good intentions of the Declaration expressed over 30 years ago and contemporary realities.

5In its annual report on U.S. children dated 2023, the Children's Defense Fund points out that death by firearm is the leading cause of death for children under 20; 4,739 deaths by firearm were recorded in 2021 (The Children's Defense Fund, 2023). In addition, the use of firearms is spreading south of the US border, wreaking havoc in the Caribbean and Latin American countries such as Mexico and Guatemala (McKoy J., 2020).

6A growing number of press articles, reports from charities and rights organizations and scientific articles denounce the way in which the United States, supposedly the richest country in the world, treats its children, given the repeated bloody attacks on schools, but also the problems of poverty, difficulties of access to health and school results (Human Rights Watch, 2022; Collins J. and E. Swoveland, 2014; Lareau A., 2011; Shweder R. et al., 2009; Supplee L. and A. Gamoran, 2022; Chibnall S., n.d.). The average rate of children living below the poverty line in the United States was 16% in 2020. For Latin America and the Caribbean, it was 46.2%, with great disparities between countries: Brazil has 40% of its children below the poverty line, Mexico more than half and Argentina more than 63% (Child Poverty, 2021; Children in Latin America, 2020).

7The epistemological chronology of childhood studies (which have only taken on the name childhood studies in recent decades) begins, for the contemporary period, in the 1960s and 1970s. These years mark an academic and historical turning point in the critical interrogation of conceptions, practices and statuses (Leinweaver J., 2007; Alanen L., 2011). It's a global change: the way minorities were perceived (ethnic minorities, women, colonized peoples) was changing, moving towards the recognition of everyone as an individual (speaker, witness). Children are taking on a more central and active role in research. L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Ariès P., 1960) and The Children of Sanchez (Lewis O., 1961) are examples of this new problematization. Family sociologist François de Singly sums up the perspective of French historian Philippe Ariès as follows:

[I]n the West, the family had gradually become child-centred. In the context of the privatization of the family, which was reflected in the strong separation between private and public space, and in the family group's claim to privacy, the child became a central player, with the emergence of a new sense of childhood, and the growing attention paid to its development (2000: 68).

  • 1 A note on the book, published in 1965 in the Revue française de sociologie, stressed both the unive (...)

8For Ariès, the child gradually took center stage. In Oscar Lewis's anthropological work, The Children of Sanchez (1961), the researcher's aim is to define the "culture of poverty" he studied in a Mexico City neighborhood in the late 1970s. In this family, poor children talk about their lives, hold a discourse, have a capacity for self-analysis, reflect. They are more agentic1.

9The first contemporary research program on childhood and children in the USA was founded in 1991 at Brooklyn College in New York. Two years later, in 1993, an international network of research institutions, Childwatch International Research Network, was created in connection with the passage of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) to contribute "to children's rights, development and well-being" (Childwatch, 2023). Over the past 30 years, this university research network has brought together research units in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica, as well as in Canada and the United States, and on every other continent on the planet. An exponential number of scientific publications on children has since profoundly transformed the social sciences' approach to children. This transformation is embodied in the emergence of childhood studies.

10The approach adopted in this thematic dossier is strongly influenced by the field of childhood studies (Garnier P., 2015; Alanen L., 2011) and studies in terms of social differentiation or social relations of power. Childhood studies seek to understand the experience of what it means to be a child, and presuppose that this child or a generation of children are endowed with the capacity to act and express their ideas (Alanen L., 2011; Garnier P., 2015). They distance themselves from an evolutionary vision of childhood as the path to adulthood, and fully accept its capacity for action in the present moment. However, we can question the ethnocentric nature of the notion of agency (negotiation, self-expression), which corresponds to the expectations of the educated white middle classes (Lareau A., 2011). Furthermore, the conception of the child as autonomous and participatory is part of a neo-liberal context (Garnier P., 2015). However, research activating a problematic of inequalities helps to counterbalance these limitations.

11This approach aims to break out of the "sociological indifference" (Sirota R., 2010) towards an age group, by devising an object construction and dedicated methods. Questioning childhood and inequalities implies considering that this age is the age of socialization, which is not an undifferentiated process, but rather one that takes place in differentiated social milieus and distinct socio-historical contexts. Childhood studies are based on the notion of children's voices, and impose a critical attitude that intends to contribute, in research as well as in the social field, to a process of empowerment and social justice for children (Spyrou S., 2011).

12To borrow from childhood studies is to take seriously the project of studying childhood as a generation that is discussed in relation to other groups, such as adults (Alanen L., 2016). The child is thus fully involved in power relations and emotional rationality within family dynamics, educational or economic practices (Stearns P., 2019). This complexity allows us here to respect the "holistic interdisciplinary perspective" (Brooklyn College) of childhood studies by integrating research conducted from anthropology, American studies, history, sociology or even educational sciences (Oxford Bibliographies, 2012).

Social inequalities and Discrimination

13The question of inequalities in childhood in the Americas can be problematized in terms of social inequalities or discrimination. We can think of them in terms of social conditions of existence, as Pablo Cowen does, revealing the lack of access to quality medical care for poor expecting mothers, and its consequences on neo- and post-natal mortality in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th century. We can change perspective and approach individual experience, as Cecilia Rustoyburu does, hypothesizing the discrimination of trans children and adolescents, i.e. their experience of being excluded from (or discouraged from accessing) health protocols, precisely because of institutional prejudices concerning their legally recognized identity and autonomy. This distinction between social inequalities "attached to the unequal social positions occupied by supposedly equal individuals" and discriminations that "concern individuals themselves, their value and their identity, whether claimed or assigned" has thus been clearly defined by sociologist François Dubet (2017).

14The approach to social inequalities, differentiating childhoods, can be made more complex by taking into account not only economic resources, but also gender and race, in an intersectional approach that asserts that these systems of social oppression act together (Girls not Brides, 2022). Thus, Ana Cleaver reveals the process of "stolen childhood" and "adulteration" of children employed in domestic work, among whom black girls are over-represented, and whose activity is legitimized by their supposed maturity. The intersection of power relations (male, white, middle- and upper-class domination) is crucial to understanding social inequalities. Beyond this, the interest of this reflection is to adopt a materialist feminist perspective, which updates and displaces the Marxist analysis of forms of exploitation (Bodén L. and T. Joelsson, 2023; Yelland et al., 2021; Rosen R. and K. Twamley, 2018; Braches-Chyrek R., 2021).

Children between state and community conceptions

15The question of equalizing conditions through state or community measures leads to a redefinition of categories, but can also create new inequalities with regard to individual identity, a family tradition, or even an Indigenous cosmogony. While the end of the 19th century saw a systematic policy of forced assimilation of indigenous children in the Americas, which took different forms in different countries (Smith A., 2009; Dawson A.S., 2012), the end of the 20th century erected autochthony as a bulwark against these previous practices throughout the hemisphere (Carlson B. and J. Berglund, 2021; López Bárcenas F., 2008). But this "positive discrimination" creates new barriers between official definitions and individual or community aspirations.

16In his article, based on autobiographies written in English about children educated in U.S. and Canadian federal boarding schools, Fabrice Le Corguillé shows that Indigenous education was demanding and benevolent, whereas boarding schools imposed a harsh discipline based on violence. Perceived by parents as an inevitable concession to white domination, this radical transformation rejected the idea of a dual culture and acceptance of the educational sovereignty of Native nations. This political stance often left the children affected by these measures with an immense sense of loss, estrangement and loneliness, even though some of them found these schools to be a springboard for their future.

17Claire Palmiste examines the unequal treatment of Native children by U.S. welfare authorities in the context of transracial adoption and the Indian Children Welfare Act (1978). She shows how the law has been hijacked in the name of white middle-class standards, taking children from their homes and perpetuating historical violence against Native families, while denying tribal governments sovereignty over their own citizens.

18Carmen Sanchez Caro examines the conditions for implementing public policies for early childhood, based on the principle of positive discrimination aimed at equity, rather than formal equality, in the Houses of Indigenous Thought in Bogotá (Colombia). Positive discrimination implies labelling as Indigenous, in order to identify the beneficiary families and the adults involved in education. Thus, what appeared to be a measure to protect children's ethnic rights could conceal an indigenism, and lead to the conception of "naturalized" behaviors, and from them to discriminatory practices and the fading of their individual status under the "Indigenous" label.

How narratives can foreground children's voices

19Narrative media are a privileged source and research material for shedding light on the process and configuration of social inequalities, by crossing variables such as age, gender and social class. They also give us access to children's voices. We can distinguish between the expression of children's point of view, which restores the singularity of their social position, and the active taking of the floor with the aim of changing their living conditions and social recognition. Children's narratives (Alvarez-Constantin) or those lent to children in the literary context (Campobello and Castellanos) highlight different forms of agentivity among minors, which may be limited or even denied depending on their age status, but also because of the social class to which their family belongs.

20Nellie Campobello's Cartucho (1931) and Rosario Castellanos' Balún-Canán (1957), two Mexican works, are inspired by the authors' youth, the former in northern Mexico and the latter in the south, and feature a child as narrator. Cartucho's child narrator idealizes urban freedom, asserting the frankness of her personality with the image of wild horses, while Balún-Canán's child narrator recounts an experience marked by "reclusion in domestic space and segregation between different classes". Sarah Diraison's article analyzes these two Mexican novels, revealing that the greater or lesser distance of narrative representations from the early twentieth-century conception of the pure and innocent child in the Mexican context influences the reception of the works: Castellanos' work is well received, while Campobello's is poorly received. The author shows how the novelists' social and cultural positions are reflected in their works, and tend to define the novels' proximity to the zeitgeist.

21For his part, Alvarez Constantin analyzes the confinement experience of two young girls at the Asilo del Buen Pastor in Montevideo, Uruguay, between 1929 and 1934, based on the letters they wrote. The author mobilizes the notion of agentivity and argues that the girls' writing is intended to denounce mistreatment and demand "majority," i.e. emancipation. The author adopts gender and age as variables of analysis, showing how state authority has perpetuated the differences between the sexes, between private and public spaces, and kept children in the sole status of minors to be protected, while the young letter-writers demonstrate their ability to decide for themselves, in the areas that concern them.

Conclusion

22In the 20th century, all Western societies constructed a vulnerable image of the child as irresponsible and incapable of rational decision-making (Christensen P., 2000; Hart J., 2023). In this pattern of unequal relations between children and adults, parents – but also, very significantly, state institutions – are expected to provide constant protection and control over all children's activities and actions in general, at least until they reach the age of 16. Sociologist Howard Becker observed that "it is usually adults who set the standards for young people. Although young people in the U.S. exert a powerful cultural influence (the media, for example, are aligned with their tastes), many important categories of norms are set by adults for youth" (2020). In this way, the state sets out to vulnerabilize, shape, (re)educate or even separate children from their parents, justifying these measures by its protective and supportive role. For researcher Pia Christensen, children's vulnerability is a social construct, particularly with regard to health: "Adults are therefore viewed as being in charge of, and having responsibility for, the child, and the child is positioned as the dependent and passive object". This leads, she argues, to making children's understanding of themselves and their bodily experiences "unimportant" (2000). Marek Tesar denounces the same pressure of the adult world on children: "Instead of being political and participating citizens who shape their own childhoods, children become seen as a resource, and their childhoods colonized through this ideology of care" (2016). This control is obviously social and political, and applies not only to the category of children, but adds to the more studied categories of race, class or gender to which these children belong or identify.

23In a text that sheds light on issues relating to the notion of intersectionality, Finnish sociologist Leena Alenen (2016) suggests that the concept of "generation" or "inter-generationality" could be very useful for the intersectional analysis of childhoods (the child as actor or gendered person, member of a particular social class, or an age class that can only exist in relation to other classes such as that of adults or the elderly, for example). The involvement of children in these relational, individual and social dynamics could be enriched and included in broader, more political reflections. The immense contempt shown by many politicians towards a teenager like Greta Thunberg shows that, while recognition of children's rights has gradually gained a foothold in contemporary societies, children's right to express themselves politically, particularly when they are critical, still seems far from being perceived as legitimate.

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Notes

1 A note on the book, published in 1965 in the Revue française de sociologie, stressed both the universal features of poverty and the popular singularity of the expression of social relationships. But they stuck to Lewis's introduction, forgetting the autobiographical discourse of the children – adopting a new point of view on children was not a matter of course in research. The global institutionalization of the sociology of childhood emerged only in the 1990s (Tricot N., 1965).

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References

Electronic reference

gilda charrier, Edna Hernández González and Jean-Marc Serme, Childhoods and Inequalities in the AmericasIdeAs [Online], 22 | 2023, Online since 01 October 2023, connection on 20 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/16679; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ideas.16679

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About the authors

gilda charrier

Maîtresse de conférences en Sociologie, Laboratoire d'études et de recherche en sociologie, LABERS (ER3149), Université de Bretagne Occidentale (UBO). Thématiques de recherche : vie privée/vie publique, conjugalités non cohabitantes (living apart together) ou décohabitantes (living together part time), mobilités, sociabilités, enquêtes et méthodes compréhensives
gilda.charrier[at]univ-brest.fr

Edna Hernández González

Architecte-urbaniste, maîtresse de conférences à l'Institut de Géoarchitecture de l’UBO et directrice adjointe du laboratoire éponyme. Son travail porte sur l'urbanisme nocturne, en particulier sur le lien entre l'éclairage urbain et les activités humaines nocturnes et leur impact sur l'environnement. Elle prend en compte les pratiques de genre dans l'espace urbain et l'expérience de la marche de nuit dans les villes françaises et mexicaines
edna.hernandez[at]univ-brest.fr

Jean-Marc Serme

Maître de conférences HDR en études états-uniennes et autochtones, Héritage et Création dans le Texte et l'Image (HCTI, UR4249), Université de Bretagne Occidentale à Brest et Quimper. Thématiques de recherche : études hawaiiennes et amérindiennes, souveraineté tribale, territoire, éducation, identité
jean-marc.serme[at]univ-brest.fr

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