Personal Lives

This is a book about children: about how children learn about the social world, the sense they make of it and the ways in which their experiential sense-making might shape the things that they choose to do, the opinions they express and the perspectives on the world that they come to embrace and embody. The book draws on data generated with children and adults in the United Kingdom, at different points in time and across a range of social contexts, but what it has to say about the processes of children’s learning about the social world will hopefully have a wider theoretical resonance that can transcend the limitation of these particularities. And it is, therefore, with this bigger aim in mind that the overarching intention behind this book is to provide an account of processes of socialisation. However, although I engage with a wide range of different concepts and theoretical approaches to socialisation along the way that may further their discussion within the social sciences, my desire is not just to initiate a new academic debate. Above all, I want to provide an account of socialisation that is child-centred and that can contribute to the field of childhood studies. Thus, the ideas I shall go on to present will not only be articulated through children’s voices but also be explored from their standpoint (Alanen 2001a). However, though all children belong to the shared generational space called childhood, which contextualises many of their day-to-day experiences, as we shall see, as individuals they also have views and perspectives that are differentiated not only by gender, ethnicity, age or health status but by the different and particular circumstances of their own biographies. My focus throughout, then, is on individual children and their experiences and what these might tell us, more generally, about being a child and the process of growing up.