Challenging Childism through Narrative Self-reflection

In previous blogs I have argued that childism is akin to sexism and racism, a prejudice against someone because of what they are: a child, a woman or a person of colour. In the case of sexism and racism the adults who are discriminated against are able to start the process of resistance by campaigning, raising awareness and arguing their case to convince those who perpetrate sexism or racism that it is unjust and demeaning of humanity. We know from history that this process of getting sexism or racism accepted as real phenomena involves great struggle and courage. The ongoing history of feminism, for example, is the story of how feminists deconstruct the patriarchal attitudes towards girls and women that creates a gendered distortion of power to the disadvantage of females. Deconstruction by feminists and anti-racists alike has led to calls for a reconstruction of society to be more equal, to end the injustices inflicted on women and people of colour. The struggle is ongoing and has gained support from those who are advantaged by such inequalities because they want to live in a more just society. Men identify as feminists and white people as anti-racist. How then do we recruit adults to oppose childism?

It is important that we do, because like women and people of colour, children are historically powerless and in the case of childism it is unrealistic to expect children to initiate and lead campaigns unsupported.  A positive advantage is that whilst only women can truly understand sexism against women and only people of colour can understand racism, when it comes to childism all human beings are capable of understanding it because we have all been children and all experienced childism at first hand. It follows that if childism is to be recognized as a prejudice then we have to raise awareness of what it is and who better to do this than adults whose lives have been shaped by it?

I am arguing that an important step on the journey to end childism is critical reflection by adults on their own experiences as children who were oppressed by childism. I am calling for adults to give their own testimony on the impact of childism on their lives because I think that will contribute to the process of raising awareness of childism and could lead to a change in the behaviour of adults towards children now. As adults we have to take responsibility for our own attitudes and behaviour towards children and we can start by reflecting on our own experiences of being children and raise our own awareness of childism’s power. If our testimony is made available in the public domain I believe it can help disrupt behaviours which are childist in outcome, if not in intent, as a step towards transforming existing social practices that impact negatively on children’s lives.

Childism renders children susceptible to injustice; we can start to uncover that injustice through our own stories of childhood. The stories will also contribute to the process of uncovering stereotypes of children that are present in the social imagination as well as being personally instructive. Narratives that help others understand how prejudice against children structures our thinking is an important way of challenging prejudice. If the stories are convincing then they will provide evidence to support the case for dismantling childism and help to change the collective social imagination which contains a myriad of prejudices and stereotypes of children.

If we wish to effect social change then we have to start with raising awareness of childism and how it affects our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. If adults can be persuaded to engage in critical auto-ethnographic reflection on their own childhoods then it might foster a commitment to ending childism as well as helping to establish a more principled understanding of the wrong that is done to a child by childism.

In this blog I want to begin that process of critical reflection on my own childhood, how I experienced childism and the impact it had on me. I hope it will inspire others to embark on their own self-reflective journey and to make their narratives public.

Critical reflection on my childhood

I was born in 1950, and brought up in an aspiring working-class family that held values that were traditional at the time. My father was a tool-maker and my mother had worked as a typist in a typing pool before marriage. They were married for seven years before I was born and my mother focused on what she saw as her housewifely duties: cooking, cleaning etc. My father worked in a factory but had ambitions and rose to foreman and then went into partnership to set up his own small tool-making business and eventually owned his own business employing 8-10 people. He had middle-class aspirations and sought to acquire the cultural capital his own upbringing had denied him by learning French and joining MENSA and attending elocution lessons. My mother aspired to a more middle class consumer lifestyle and focused on expanding her repertoire of cooking to include ‘foreign’ dishes such as spaghetti bolognaise and food cooked with wine.

The eldest of two children, my brother and I were brought up to defer to adults and authority. My natural exuberance was frequently met with, “Children should be seen and not heard”; “don’t be cheeky”; “respect your elders”; “listen and you will learn”; “don’t be rude”. The key message was all about deference to adults. When I was naughty I expected and received punishment. Although I was only hit two or three times I was treated crossly; my mother shouted a lot and frequently threatened me, “wait until your father comes home, you’ll be in trouble.” My father indulged in heavy criticism of my character and behaviour and my appearance; I constantly felt I fell short and wasn’t good enough. When I was naughty I was sent to my room, denied food, not allowed to watch a favourite TV programme or left behind with grandparents whilst the family went off for a much looked forward to treat. The weight of disappointing my parents hung heavily over me. I dreaded disappointing them. The atmosphere I grew up in was never relaxed, I was unsure when my behaviour would be judged as ‘naughty’, but I grew up knowing I was regarded as a ‘naughty child’, a disappointment.

My father was verbally very articulate and could be very cruel. I learned early on that it was impossible to win any arguments with him. He laid down the law every day at the dinner table and his word was always the last word. I grew up with a dread of conflict and found it difficult to be assertive or to defend myself if treated badly. I had a recurring dream as a teenager of being attacked and not being able to defend myself, in my dream I would stand rooted to the spot, unable to respond. Other dreams that continue to this day involve me being unable to speak. I am in situations where it is vital that I explain something, but the words won’t come out, they are trapped in my throat. Sometimes I can whisper, but so quietly that no-one can hear me. I wake from those dreams feeling scared and powerless.

As long as I can remember my response to conflict is to metaphorically take myself to my room, to run away from it and hope things ‘blow over’. I am frequently convinced I have really upset people when in fact I haven’t. I am super-sensitive to nuances of feeling in others and try hard to please. To protect myself I avoid disagreement and acquiesce too easily. I now believe this has limited my life. Feelings of anxiety regarding confrontation is a strong theme of my life that often cripples me, sometimes quite literally as I can’t even get out of bed. Fortunately such intense reactions have lessened over the years but still have the power to affect me.

When I was 12, I started keeping a diary in which I made lists of the kind of parent I would be. I remember writing that I would listen to my children; I wouldn’t make them feel anxious, guilty or unhappy. I wouldn’t punish them. I remember promising my unborn children that I would respect their views and listen to them. As I child I always felt that anything I had to say would either not be listened to or would be dismissed because I was ‘just a child’. I had to bend to my father’s will or reap the consequences.

My parents, in particular my father, used what I now see as a Childist discourse centred around giving commands. He was authoritarian and required obedience, his was a punitive style of parenting that relied on punishment and fear to control me. I wanted to please him and tried to be good, but somehow always seemed to be judged as bad. This style of parenting impacted negatively on me, but was certainly not unusual at the time. My father never hit me; he had been subjected to physical chastisement as a child and as a result, had decided never to hit us. However, he had not abandoned the belief that children needed a punitive approach if they were to be properly socialized and an authoritarian style of verbal interaction and consequential punishment was deliberately adopted. His model of childhood was that of the unruly child who had to be taught to behave appropriately, which for him meant total compliance. I’m sure he regarded himself as a good parent, particularly in contrast to his own father who was a drunken tyrant. I remember him telling me I would thank him one day for instilling good behaviour into me.

My father regarded me as a possession that he had the right to mold as he saw fit. Unlike his father he did think I had the right not to be physically chastised, but still asserted his right to punish me in other ways. As an adult myself, a parent of grown up children and grandmother I firmly reject the right of adults to behave towards children as if they are possessions, to ignore them, neglect them, silence or punish them just because they are not adults and can’t hit back. I never had close relationships with either of my parents and that was a definite barrier to my happiness. My voice was always silenced.

What have I learned from this reflection?

I don’t believe that coercion and intimidation is helpful to a child, they cause anxiety and fear which has a huge effect on how you grow up. Such an approach to a child is a barrier to happiness. When your voice is silenced, when there is no chance for dialogue or negotiation, only rules to follow and punishment for non-compliance then you are devalued as a human being. I realise I was shaped by the normative expectations of my father and of the times and I want to challenge those norms, to change the social imagination so that children are accepted as full human beings deserving of the respect and care adults take as a right.

Childism at the Tate

I sat waiting downstairs in the Tate Gallery whilst my friend deposited our coats in the cloakroom. A teacher was supervising a group of about 18 children between 8-9 years old. The children were standing in line wearing a uniform that identified them as private school children: green tartan pleated skirts and green Blazers. As I watched the teacher directed half of the children to move in single file up the escalator and I overheard the following, which was delivered in a loud, cross and authoritative voice with accompanying hand gesticulation.

Teacher to the first group who were already on the escalator:

What did I say?

Already you're not listening

WAIT at the top of the stairs

Turning to the second group

Next group (loud voice)

(Pointing) Go, GO!

I wrote what she said down so I could think about it. As a researcher interested in discourse I see this extract of dialogue between a teacher and her pupils as indicative of wider social and cultural processes at play. Power is being exercised here. The words and the authoritative tone of voice reveal the power relations between the teacher and the children. There is an asymmetrical distribution of the right to talk and to direct behaviour.

In the context of a public space, her voice has an audience apart from the children. The teacher is performing authority for other adults in the Tate gallery who might witness the event. It says, ‘I am a good teacher. I can manage the behaviour of these children’. The space is important to the children as well; they are expected to perform the role of ‘good pupil’ through listening to and following the teacher’s instructions.

The words of the teacher indicate expectation of compliance and obedience, but I also detect fear that they won't comply and cause public humiliation. Her words have to be seen in this context, she is not just directing the children and ensuring they are safe, she is also producing social relationships and social identities.

This interaction between a teacher and her pupils is a situation I am very familiar with. Her talk was 'teacher talk' and monologic in that her charges were not expected to respond verbally, but only to indicate by their movements their compliance. Teacher talk is a particular way of using language designed to position children as pupils. By calling it 'teacher-talk' I see it as an example of the kind of discursive practice that goes on in schools, a practice that most people who have been pupils in the UK (and almost certainly elsewhere) would recognise. It is an example of a strategic use of language to get the children to behave in certain kinds of ways. It is also ideological as it seeks to maintain accepted social structures and relations between teacher and pupils.

This kind of talk disturbs me. I see this discursive exercise of power as an example of childism. The teacher is exercising structural power that comes from the way society is organized. She possesses power in virtue of her place in a wider network of institutional power held by schools. And with this power comes an expectation that she will use it to effect social control of the children in her care. So the structural power of educational institutions controls the actions of teachers and the teacher in turn exercises power over the child.

When the teacher asks the question, ‘What did I say?’ we know it is rhetorical. No one is expected to answer, it is an assertion of her right to be listened to and obeyed. When she says, ‘Already you're not listening’ she implies her right to be listened to. She would be unlikely to say this to a group of adults. It is the teacher who has the right to be listened to and to be treated with respect because she is a teacher. I suspect that few adults overhearing this discursive event would find any problem with it. Our society’s conception of children’s social identity as subordinate to adults is so widespread as to be almost invisible; it is part of the social imagination. Unless we can change the social imagination with regard to adult and child an event such as this one passes as unremarkable or may even attract praise for its success in controlling and managing the children ­– here is a ‘good teacher’ in action.

A key instrument to change the social imagination is legislation. We know that changes in attitudes are possible, consider how attitudes towards women, people of colour, homosexuality, disability and many other things have changed in the last few decades. It is clear that legislation to outlaw discrimination has been a necessary lever to change the lives of many men and women, but it is not sufficient. The instrument of change we have with regard to children is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The UNCRC is expected to be a catalyst for changes in the organisation and culture of schools that is expected to lead to social and cultural change in the relationship between adult and child. Over time we might expect to see profound differences in the social relations and professional identities of teachers and adults working with children. New discourse practices that reflect respect for the child and values its voice should become evident and the authoritarian and punitive disposition of our teacher in the Tate should disappear.

Such change will not happen unless we promote awareness of how current teacher/pupil discourse is a barrier to promoting children's rights. We need to raise critical awareness among teachers of how their current discourse practices impact on children's rights and seek to change them. Legislation alone is not enough.

This leads me to wonder, if we could change discourse practices between adults and children would it contribute to a change in their social relationship? Could such a change impact on adults’ beliefs and understanding of children and vice versa that could lead to a change in the wider social imagination of what is child?

What about the teacher in the Tate? I doubt she would see the relationship between discursive, social and cultural change that I have read into her words. My analysis seeks to uncover the function of her words and show its dissonance as we consider it in the context of the UNCRC. Is the teacher even aware of the changes in her discourse that is required if we are to take children's rights seriously?

The teacher is enacting a discourse that is part of the wider society’s processes of producing social life, social relationships and social identities. If this is to change, we need to pay greater attention to how we speak to each other and seek to find, rights-respecting ways of managing the relationships between adults and children.

The Little Boy 2

Today I was reading a wonderful book by Bronwyn Davies, ‘Listening to children’ (2014, Routledge), and this poem from ‘Don’t put Mustard in the Custard’, by Michael Rosen came into my mind:

My mum says once I came home from nursery with a sulky look on my face.

"What's the matter?" she said.

 I said nothing.

"What's the matter?" she said.

I said nothing.

"What's the matter?"

"I had to sit on the naughty chair."

"Why did you have to sit on the naughty chair?"

 I said nothing.

"Why did you have to sit on the naughty chair?"

"Cos I was being naughty."

"Yes, yes, I guessed that," she said, "but what were you doing?"

"I was playing about at singing time, I wasn't singing the right things."

"What was everyone singing?"

"Baa baa Black sheep."

"And what were you singing?"

 I said nothing.

"What were you singing?"

“Baa Baa Moo Mooo.”

I am going to unashamedly use the ideas Bronwyn Davies lays before us in her book and apply them to think about why this poem came to my mind and how reflecting on it can help me better understand Davies’ ideas about listening to children.

The child represented in this poem is standing on a “familiar, safe plot of land (the nursery rhyme, the ritual, the place)” yet at the same time he takes off on his own ‘line of flight’. He takes a risk in being different. He experiments with his own identity as a humorous being. But being different is not allowed in this classroom and so he is sent to sit on the ‘naughty’ chair. 

A nursery rhyme in a British school is a collective cultural event – familiar to some children from their experience at home, and unfamiliar to others whose cultural space, whilst almost certainly containing songs for children, probably doesn’t have this particular one. The boy has disrupted this space designed to bring all children into the dominant culture. As he explores being different, he finds out that different ways of being are not welcome here. We – the readers of the poem – appreciate the humor of his disruption, but not apparently his teacher.

The teacher’s action has stopped his ‘line of flight’ and turned it into a ‘line of descent’. The boy has challenged the striations of the space (we can all imagine what this looks like – a group of 20+ children sitting on a carpet, joining in with the nursery rhyme that is orchestrated by the teacher) and therefore challenged the authority of the teacher. The teacher can’t let him ‘get away with this’, he has to be publically labeled as ‘naughty’ – a lesson to others not to challenge the capability of the teacher to manage the class.

I can imagine that the teacher was irritated that her careful lesson plan had been disturbed; the nursery rhyme had probably been chosen to support the small child’s love of rhythm, pattern and rhyme; she probably wrote in her lesson plan that this helps prepare the children for literacy. She has clear learning outcomes in mind and is not going to be sent off-course by a small child. Is this I wonder, why she is so closed to hearing the child as he plays with words and makes a joke? She wants an orderly environment where the boundaries are made clear to the children and this overrides the child’s creativity, which bounces against these boundaries.

The teacher is part of a system of childhood education that is driven by its will to manage and to measure. How can she ‘measure’ the child’s engagement with the nursery rhyme if he plays around with it like this? What she understands of the purpose of her job in the classroom interferes with her capacity to hear the voice of the child. An opportunity for knowing the child is lost. 

What has the small child learnt from this? He has to face the fact that rules and procedures are the structuring forces of his day; the teacher is in charge – and he must conform. His own thoughts and ideas are not welcome here; if he dares to express them he will make the teacher cross and he will be punished. Through Rosen’s poem we feel his shame and humiliation as he struggles to tell his mother why he had to sit on the naughty chair. He will never experience the exhilaration of exploring different and new modes of thought. He will learn to listen to the teacher, to fit in with her agenda and forget his own ideas.

And what will the other children in the class learn from witnessing this event? They too will quickly learn that the classroom is not a space for experiment, for thinking and doing for yourself. There is no time for ‘lines of flight’ – they will distract from the learning outcomes already planned by the teacher and incur her displeasure. They will learn compliance to the teacher’s will and never even consider that they could contribute new ideas that could help to build a community of learners in the classroom. They will see that the teacher will judge them against her ideal of how a pupil should be and if they don’t match up they will be punished. And punishment incurs public humiliation. They will soon learn what it means to be competent in the teacher’s eyes and most will want to conform to her judgements.

Can the teacher be blamed? Isn’t she merely enacting the status quo – just putting into practice the rules and procedures of the school? She has a need to regulate and to control, and if she fails how will she ‘get through’ all that stuff the government expects her to accomplish? She must, at all costs, be productive – there is no time for diversion, she must stay on track if she is to fulfill the role of ‘a good teacher’.

When I first came across this poem decades ago it made me smile and it made my children laugh. Now I wonder why did I smile? I like to think it was the humour that made me smile. Yet I can’t help wondering why I stopped there, why wasn’t I outraged at this treatment of a small child? Why couldn’t I name this as closing down the child’s voice and failing to truly see him? I think this is all part of childism, the unquestioned assumption that the adult knows best and it is the child that is at fault that I am struggling to overcome. And why did my children laugh – I think they recognized only too well the scenario in the poem and had probably experienced it for themselves and of course they delighted in the child’s humour. Our responses are never straightforward and back then I was much less aware than I am now.

Finally I can’t end this blog without considering in what alternative ways the teacher might have responded. Davies calls on us to see that the alternative is to open oneself up to questioning the status quo, to actively seek ways of questioning the meta-narrative of ‘schools as performances’ to question the drive to ‘raise standards’ by driving up the test performance of pupils in relation to national benchmarks. Instead we need to open up to new ways of being with children, to join children in their ‘lines of flight’, to truly listen to them – not in order to manage and control them, but to become open to their differences, to allow multiple ways of behaving and doing.

What might have happened if the teacher in the poem had been able to see the boy as an individual, to enable ‘the not-yet-known’ to emerge in her classroom instead of shutting it down, to instead ‘open up the capacity for thought and being’? To not be bound by what she already knew – to be open to “Baa, Baa, Moo, Moo”.

  

Finding a voice - valuing children's communication

Last Friday morning when I woke up in my daughter’s house, my grandson Edward greeted me by stretching his arms to the ceiling and bending over to touch his toes. It was a wonderful moment of communication. Last time I had visited he had accompanied me when I did my morning stretches; his bodily gestures told me he remembered my visit and had an expectation of what we might do together. I have thought a lot about that this week and what it tells me about language development in a small child. It is one of the best things about being a Nana when my grandsons do something that sparks off a train of thought. In this blog I want to record my memories of Edward finding his voice.

I was visiting to share the celebration of Edward’s second birthday. Just two years old, he talks a lot but as yet the sounds that come out are not recognizable as words to the adults around him. I arrived on Thursday evening just as he and his four year-old, brother Charlie were having their bath. Charlie started to tell me about the bird of prey sanctuary they had visited that day and Edward tipped his head back and made open and shut gestures with his mouth. His dad explained he was showing me how a particular bird of prey had caught the food thrown to him by the staff at the sanctuary. His desire to communicate is strong; he wants to share and explain and inform the same as his brother. However sometimes this is frustrating for him. The next day in the car he wanted something and we couldn't work out what it was. We offered food, drink, a toy­ – we just couldn't get it right and he was so cross with us. I really felt the frustration of being a small person wanting to communicate and the big people just don’t understand.

Edward however, doesn’t need spoken language to know exactly what is going on around him. And there is a lot going on! He is surrounded by language and observes it being used to achieve all kinds of things and fortunately for him, all the adults include him in their talk. We see Edward as capable, we believe him when he is struggling to communicate and we expect him to be able to communicate in many different ways. We treat him as an understanding being who wants to make meaning out of what is going on around him. We have noticed with interest how he uses lots of talk to accompany whatever he is doing and do wonder what he is saying but can see that out of the big buzzing swarm of words that surrounds him he is finding his voice. And this voice is expressed using gestures as well as sounds; his whole body is involved in communicating. We pay attention because we assume intent when he addresses us, we respond to his gestures and sounds and recognize he has his own agenda and purpose and do our best, sometimes with limited success, to correctly interpret his signs. Of course he wants to communicate and we value language and immerse him in language related activities all the time. He is very responsive and shows his interest in words through his love of books and nursery rhymes and singing. We sit with him and read the books he chooses and love the way he actively engages and shows his enjoyment in sounds and gestures.

In a single day the activities Edward engages in at nursery and at home are all accompanied by language. He hears language being used for all sorts of different purposes to achieve different things. Sometimes language is directed at him, he is asked if he wants a drink or if he is hungry; sometimes he is given instructions, ‘sit down to eat your dinner’; sometimes he is told off, especially when he does something anti-social; sometimes language is used to try and persuade him to do something he doesn’t want to do. Language is used to describe what is happening or to tell him what is going to happen. When he shows emotions language accompanies it, ‘I know you are feeling angry, tired, frustrated etc.’; ‘You’re really enjoying that aren’t you?’ His expressions of affection are heartily returned and appreciated with words and gestures. Apart from the language directed at him he also hears his parents using language to achieve things, to plan, to speculate, to agree and disagree, to reflect and wonder, to explain and to share. It is a rich language environment and he clearly understands so much of what is going on and wants not only to be part of it, but also to influence it, to make a contribution.

When he does contribute he is definitely working within his own style; it is different to his brother's style and we know how important it is that we strive to understand him so we can support him. Watching his language development reminds me that one of the most important things about us as adults is our style of speech. Each one of us has a unique style of speaking and communicating and it is this more than anything else that gives us our particular individuality. Edward has helped me see how important it is to acknowledge this uniqueness in him and by extension get a firmer grasp of something universal in all of us. He has renewed my commitment to strive to understand this interesting and particular human phenomenon, the drive to communicate, to make meaning, to influence and control, to set our own agendas and make our voices heard. His older brother Charlie tells me, “Nana, he hasn’t got his words yet so we can’t understand him.” It is true, he hasn’t got many words we recognize as words yet, but Edward is a powerful communicator and certainly knows how to make his voice heard. And he makes me think and wonder – what an achievement!

I have written a number of blogs about childism and most of these have highlighted the prejudice adults show towards children simply because they are children. And it is true, dismissive and patronizing attitudes abound; respect for children as knowers is not high on the list of values our society espouses. Instead adults frequently approach children with a ‘we know best’ attitude and expect them to learn from us rather than the other way round. My experience as a grandparent has given me a chance to be in a position to know and experience the world in ways that are otherwise unavailable to me. And as I watch and interact with my grandsons I find it helps me learn and grow. In writing this blog I aim to challenge societal narratives that see children as less than adults and contribute to a different narrative them sees children as ends in themselves, fully worthy of moral respect that we can learn from as well as teach.