Rights and Wrongs of Children’s Work: New Perspectives from Research and Action
Michael F. Bourdillon, Deborah Levison, William E. Myers, and Ben White
Publication Date: 2012

Almost all the world’s children work at some time in their lives.  In some instances the work is extremely harmful; in other relatively harmless; and in still other are beneficial, a positive element in growing up.  It is questionable whether current child labor policies and interventions, even though pursued with the best intentions, succeed either in protecting children against harm or in promoting their access to education and other opportunities for successful futures.  Incorporating recent theoretical advances in childhood studies and in child development, the authors argue for the need to re-think assumptions that underlie current policies on child labor.  Drawing on well-documented historical cases ranging from contemporary Morocco to nineteenth-century Britain, the authors examine concrete situations of work and schooling, suggesting that not all paid work outside the home is harmful to children, and that not all unpaid work-not even all work in the family or school-is harmless to children.  They also explore ideas of children’s independence in the workforce as well as how working as a child can positively contribute to adolescent development.  The authors, while sensitive to the abusive nature of some children’s work, maintain that a “workless” childhood free of all responsibilities is not a good preparation for adult life in any society.

Michael F.C. Bourdillon is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Zimbabwe.  Deborah Levison is associate professor of population analysis and policy at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.  William E. Myers is a research associate in human and community development at the University of California, Davis.  Ben White is a professor of rural sociology and director of the International Centre for Child and Youth Studies (ICCYS) at the Institute of Social Sciences, The Hague, and professor in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam. 

Children and Childhood in American Religions is a groundbreaking collection of essays that brings the field of religion into the scholarly discourse on childhood in America. The authors consider the various ways in which different religions and religious groups define and guide children within the context of American culture and society. What is their understanding and view of American children? How does each interpret, reconstruct, and mediate its traditions, beliefs and practices to support and guide children in light of what they see to be the dominant threats and opportunities of American life?


Don Browning is a professor emeritus of ethics and social sciences in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore is a professor of pastoral theology and counseling at the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University.

While children figure prominently in religious traditions, few books have directly explored the complex relationships between children and religion. Children and Childhood in World Religions is the first book to examine the theme of children in major religions of the world. Each of six chapters focuses on one religious tradition and includes and introduction and a selection of primary texts ranging from legal to liturgical and from ancient to contemporary. Through both the scholarly introductions and the primary sources, this comprehensive volume addresses a range of topics, from the sanctity of birth through to a child's relationship to evil.

Don Browning is a professor emeritus of ethics and social sciences in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Marcia J. Bunge is a professor of theology and humanities at Valparaiso University and director of the Child in Religion and Ethics Project.

Using ethnographic material gathered on the streets of Vietnam, from international aid agencies, orphanages, reform schools and Vietnamese governmental organizations, this book explores the complex lives of children who work and live on the streets in urban Vietnam. Arguing against the pervasive Western bias that undergirds the work of many international aid agencies, Rachel Burr demonstrates that we must understand the economic imperatives and the Vietnamese cultural emphasis on work and filial obligation that lead Vietnamese children to street work.

Rachel Burr is a lecturer in childhood studies at the Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at The Open University, London, UK.

The 1960s are commonly considered to be the beginning of a distinct "teenage culture" in America. But did this highly visible era of free love and rock 'n' roll really mark the start of adolescent defiance? In Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn of the Century America Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. She argues that the concept of the "generation gap," a stereotypical complaint against American teens actually originated with the division between immigrant parents and their American born or -raised children. Melding a uniquely urban immigrant sensibility with commercialized consumer culture and a youth-oriented ethos characterized by fun, leisure, and overt sexual behavior; these young people formed a new identity that provided the framework for today's concepts of teenage lifestyle.

Sarah E. Chinn is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, and the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

What is the relationship between intimate acts and private desires and larger cultural and economic factors? If we assume that sexuality is strongly influenced by cultural forces then how do we account for the ways individuals craft their own sexual lives? In Pleasures and Perils, anthropologist Debra Curtis turns her attention to the much neglected subject of the sexuality of Caribbean girls. Like many girls in the developing world, they occupy an intensely marginalized social position. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on Nevis, an increasingly globalized island society, Curtis investigates the conditions of sexual exploitation and the nature of sexual pleasure to emphasize the ways in which religion, public health, and consumer culture shape girls’ sexualities. Just as importantly, Curtis explores how girls navigate various social, cultural and personal tensions in their lives. Ultimately, this ethnography demonstrates that sexuality is a domain of power and powerlessness, self-determination and cultural control.

Debra Curtis is an associate professor of anthropology at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI

Contesting Childhood interrogates the popular autobiography of childhood form and considers how these autobiographies have becomes such a literary phenomenon in the 1990s and 2000s.  Drawing on trauma and memory studies, the sociology of childhood, and the theories of authorship and readership, Contesting Childhood offers commentary on the triumphs, trials and tribulations that have affected the genre, and the particular preoccupations and the investments in childhood that these autobiographies reveal.  Contesting Childhood examines a varied selection of autobiographies written by a diverse range of authors -  from experienced to first-time authors, from literary through popular autobiographies. 

Kate Douglas is a senior lecturer in the department of English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies at Flinders University.

In Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality Fields considers the current controversy surrounding sexuality education as it plays out in classrooms and everyday lives of students and teachers. This ethnographic study of sex education in three U.S. schools illuminates the intended and unintended consequences of young people gathering to discuss the bounds of sexual health, acceptability, and pleasure.

Fields finds that students learn not only how to care for themselves, but also important lessons about relating to their own and other’s sexualities. These lessons reflect, reinforce, and sometimes challenge racial, gender, and other social inequalities.

Jessica Fields is an assistant professor of sociology at San Francisco State University

Winner of the 2009 DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO SCHOLARSHIP BOOK AWARD from the American Sociological Association's Section on Race, Gender, and Class

In an adult-dominated society, young people often find themselves shut out of political participation processes. In We Fight to Win, sociologist Hava Rachel Gordon offers a compelling account of the attempts of young people to break into community politics, and documents the battles that teens wage to form youth movements and create social change in their schools and neighborhoods. Gordon examines two youth movements in two U.S. cities to show how these activists employ a variety of strategies to disrupt adult power in order to become political forces. These strategies however, are far from universal. Gordon shows the many ways in which the politics of youth activism are structured by overlapping age, race, class, and gendered axis of power and privilege. This is one of the first books to take an in-depth look at how youth politics operates on the ground and in the lives of adolescents working for social change.

Hava Rachel Gordon is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Denver.

In this volume, historians, ethnographers, geographers, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects associated with children historically and in the present day. They consider parks, playgrounds, schools, houses, computer games, dolls and pacifiers. The volume also explores children's points of view about the spaces, buildings, and objects they use and create in the modern world. By constructing children to be creators and carriers of culture, [the] authors extract common threads in children's understandings of the material world, all the while recognizing the experience of modernity varies for children across time, through space, and according to gender, race, social class, age, national and local cultures.

Marta Gutman is a professor of architecture at City College of New York. Ning de Coninck-Smith is an associate professor of educational sociology at the Danish Educational University.

Considered to be one of history’s most silent subjects, children continue to occupy the margins of academic inquiry.  Social and cultural historians have only recently begun to fill this lacuna.  Despite a paucity of sources, especially when it comes to girls, new and established scholars have taken on the challenge of recovering these lost histories.  Girls in the World:  A History of Girlhood in a Global Context critically explores the nexus of children’s and women’s history in international and transnational contexts.  The author of each chapter assesses how girls in specific localities were affected by historical developments such as political repression, war, shifts in the labor market, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture, and demonstrates the centrality of girlhood in shaping women’s lives and experiences. 

Jennifer Helgren is a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of the Pacific.  Colleen Vasconcellos is a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia.

In Between Good and Ghetto, Nikki Jones draws on the scholarly traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, and gender studies to explain the social situation of African American, inner city girls.  This richly descriptive account of how inner city girls negotiate school and neighborhood settings that are governed by the “code of the street” (Anderson 1999) – the form of street justice that governs violence in distressed urban areas -  reveals the multiple strategies that girls use to negotiate interpersonal and gender-specific violence and the gendered consequences that result from these strategies. Between Good and Ghetto illuminates the inner city girl’s struggle for survival and encourages academics, policymakers, and community activists to move African American girls toward the center of discussion of the crisis in distressed urban neighborhoods. 

Nikki Jones is an assistant professor of sociology at [the] University of California, Santa Barbara.

Donna Lanclos is an instructor in anthropology at University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales
Karen Lury
Publication Date: 2010

Ghastly and ghostly children, “dirty little white girls,” and the child as witness and as victim have always played an important part in the history of cinema, as have child performers. Yet the disruptive power of the child in films made for an adult audience has been a neglected topic. The Child in Film examines popular films including Taxi Driver, Man on Fire, and contemporary Japanese horror, as well as “art house” productions such as Mirror, La Jetée, and Pan’s Labyrinth, and questions why the figure of the child has such a significant impact on the visual aspects and storytelling potential of cinema.

Karen Lury argues that the child as a liminal yet powerful agent has allowed filmmakers to play adventurously with cinema’s formal conventions, with far-reaching consequences. She reveals how a child’s relationship to time allows it to disturb conventional master-narratives and explores how the concern for and investment in the child actor conceals the reality of film acting and the skills of the child performer. She addresses the expression of child sexuality, and questions existing assumptions as to who children “really are.”

Karen Lury is an associate professor of film and television studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of British Youth Television: Cynicism and Enchantment and Interpreting Television, and an editor of the international film and television studies journal, Screen.

Cookies and camping may be the first things that spring to mind when Americans think about Girl Scouting, but in this history of girls’ organizations, Miller shows that much greater issues were at stake. At the turn of the twentieth century, experts identified adolescence as a new and potentially perilous life-stage. If not properly navigated, they argued, female adolescence threatened the health of the individual, the integrity of the family, and even the welfare of the State. In the midst of these dire predictions, girls’ organizations, such as the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls, the Girl Pioneers, offered a different vision. Growing Girls explores leaders’ efforts to create a modern conception of girlhood that would help girls redefine their relationships to their American heritage, their families, and their own bodies.

Susan A. Miller is an assistant professor of childhood studies at Rutgers University, Camden.

Imagined Orphans explores the discrepancy between the representation and reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions in Victorian London. Reformers portrayed children who resided in institutions as either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents, much like Oliver Twist, the archetypal workhouse child. Imagined Orphans demonstrates that most institutionalized children had at least one living parent, that parents turned to welfare services as solutions to short-term crises rather than as permanent depositories for children, and that many parents struggled to maintain contact with their children during the period of institutionalization. The book documents the place of the poor in Victorian welfare practices and the contested, class-based nature of citizenship in the late nineteenth century.

Though the dynamics of immigrant family life has gained attention from scholars, little is known about the younger generation, often considered “invisible.”  Translating Childhoods, a unique contribution to the study of immigrant youth, brings children to the forefront by exploring the “work” they perform as language and culture brokers, and the impact of this largely unseen contribution.  Skilled in two vernaculars, children shoulder basic and more complicated verbal exchanges for non-English speaking adults.  Readers hear, through children’s own words, what it means to be “in the middle” or to hold the “keys to communication” that adults otherwise would lack.  Drawing from ethnographic research in three immigrant communities, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana’s study expands the child labor definition by assessing children’s roles as translators as part of a cost equation in an era of global restructuring and considers how sociocultural learning and development is shaped as a result of the children’s role as translators.     

Marjorie Faulstick Orellana is an associate professor of education at UCLA.

Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison explores the issues arising from a mother’s incarceration, and provides first person accounts of the experiences of children whose mothers are in prison. The book offers an unparalleled view into children’s lives before and after their mother’s confinement. Interviews with nearly 70 children and their mothers conducted at different points in their mothers’ involvement in the criminal justice system bring to light the lived experiences of prisoners’ children. Siegel places the mother’s incarceration in the context of other aspects of the children’s lives; characterized by numerous hardships and traumas. Disrupted Childhoods contributes to our understanding of this at risk population of children, and humanizes the discourse about incarceration’s collateral consequences.

Jane A. Siegel is an associate professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University, Camden.

In many parts of the world children make a living by selling goods and services to foreign tourists. Ambivalent Encounters is one of the first books to provide an in-depth look at how children participate in the global tourist economy. Drawing upon twenty months of fieldwork, Jenny Huberman analyzes encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront in the sacred city of Banaras, India. She explores how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their community, while also detailing the way the children themselves experience their work and render it meaningful. Bringing together scholarship on the anthropology of childhood, tourism, consumption and exchange, Ambivalent Encounters asks: how do children come to be valued and devalued within the global sphere? Why do children so frequently emerge as sources of anxiety, fantasy and debate? What role do children play in representing and configuring people's experiences of socioeconomic change? Why have children increasingly become objects of touristic desire and disdain? How do children actively navigate and experience their lives? What might it take to more effectively inscribe their efforts within the anthropological record? Finally, what can these encounters teach us more generally about the highly mediated and often ambivalent nature of human interaction?

Jenny Huberman is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The lives of youth with disabilities have changed radically in the past 50 years. Youth who are coming of age right now are the first generation to receive educational services throughout childhood and adolescence. Disability policies have opened up opportunities to youth, and they have responded by getting higher levels of education than ever before. Yet many youth are being left behind, compared to their peers without disabilities. Youth with disabilities often still face major obstacles to independence. Leiter argues that there are crucial missing links between federal disability policies and youth's lives. Youth and their parents struggle to gather information about the resources that disability policies have created, and youth are not typically prepared to use their disability rights effectively. Her argument is based on thorough examination of federal disability policy and interviews with young people with disabilities, their parents, and rehabilitation professionals. Attention is given to the diversity of expectations, the resources available to them, and the impact of federal policy and public and private attitudes on their transition to adulthood.

Valerie Leiter is associate professor of sociology and chair of the department of sociology at Simmons College.

Edward Morris's second book, Country Boys, City Boys: Masculinity, Place, and the Gender Gap in Education, examines the purported "gender gap" between boys and girls in educational achievement at two low-income high schools. This gender gap – in which girls outperform boys academically – has been much-discussed in the popular media, and has also been treated in a few academic books, but Morris's exceptional ethnographic study brings a new perspective to this discussion by advancing a more theoretically grounded approach, allowing him to document this gender gap in achievement using contemporary gender theories. The author spent time in two low-income schools, one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly African-American, and uses his in-depth, on-the-scene research to explain how race, class, and geographic location combine to influence and complicate the construction of gender identities among high school students.

Edward Morris is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of Kentucky.

Once valorized as courageous patriots, child soldiers are now seen as victims of child abuse.  Activities once considered normal are now considered deviant and criminal.  Drawing on studies of child soldiers from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century in the U.S., the U.K., and several African countries, Rosen and Rosenbloom explore when, why and how the shift occurred, its consequences for these children and the societies and cultures of which they are a part.  They also consider what is needed for meaningful and effective policies regarding children’s participation in wars and conflicts.  Rosen and Rosenbloom take the position that our romanaticized notions of childhood as a period requiring the protection of children, leads to a view of the use of children as soldiers as a form of deviancy and to policies that are not necessarily in the best interest of the children or of the societies of which they are a part.  Moreover these policies will not insure a decrease in the use of child soldiers, one of their major goals.

How do children negotiate and make meaning of multiple and conflicting messages to develop their own ideas about race? Learning Race, Learning Place engages this question using in-depth interviews with an economically diverse group of African American children and their mothers. Through these rich narratives, Erin N. Winkler seeks to reorient the way we look at how children develop their ideas about race through the introduction of a new framework—comprehensive racial learning—that shows the importance of considering this process from children’s points of view and listening to their interpretations of their experiences, which are often quite different from what the adults around them expect or intend. Winkler examines the roles of multiple actors and influences, including gender, skin tone, colorblind rhetoric, peers, family, media, school, and, especially, place. She brings to the fore the complex and understudied power of place, positing that while children’s racial identities and experiences are shaped by a national construction of race, they are also specific to a particular place that exerts both direct and indirect influence on their racial identities and ideas.

Erin N. Winkler is an assistant professor in the department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.