MUSEUM NOTES
Jeanne Vergeront
Museum Planning
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| Photo credit: Leona Yordy |
Over the last few months, I have been having conversations about childhood with Maeryta Medrano, AIA, Founder and President of Gyroscope, Inc. an architecture, museum planning, and exhibit design studio in Oakland, CA. Childhood comes up regularly in planning museums and experiences for children. In fact, in saying that they are for and about children, children’s museums all but assert they are part of childhood.
After of a kick-off meeting with a museum that is planning to relocate, Maeryta and I sat in a hotel lobby, processing the discussions, jotting notes, picking up and following threads, and tossing out questions. When Maeryta wondered if there is a culture of childhood, we took off again. We excitedly connected ideas from books, articles, research papers, and experience to conclude that, yes, there is a culture of childhood. As a culture, it embodies a unique world view of, for, and about children and the ways in which they find their place in the world and become themselves.
What is Childhood?
For readers of this post, childhood is something we all experienced. Childhood was that time in our lives stretching from 1-2 years through 10-12 years. Even if the specifics of our childhoods were different based on where we grew up, our families, our backgrounds, or our cherished memories, our first decade of life was our childhood—foundational, formative, and enduring.
So, is there a culture of childhood? The idea of a culture of childhood is not completely new and has been the subject of research and writing. Some examples begin to frame what a culture of childhood is.
Iona and Peter Opie, an English team of researchers, studied and documented the oral culture of childhood in England from the 1950’s – 80’s. Observers of urban children’s street culture in England, they conducted primary fieldwork, library research, interviewed thousands of children, collected children’s literature, toys, and games, and published books of children’s songs and games. In documenting the shared experiences of childhood, focusing in particular on language, the Opie’s work established the culture of childhood as a serious area of study.
Peter Gray, psychologist and research professor at Boston College, considers the critical role
of children in the lives of other children as central to the culture of childhood and undervalued in the lives of today’s children. In The Value of Play, he describes critical roles children play in one another’s growth and development, and expresses concern about adult intrusion into children’s lives. Children become increasingly independent through their relationships with other children. They find and solve problems together; establish, communicate and negotiate rules; and assume roles that adults would assume if they were present. Children playing with other children prepares them for roles as adults in collaborating and getting along, true social advantages in adulthood.
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| Photo credit: Sarah Hall |
Author of Discovering the Culture of Childhood, Emily Plank describes her ‘ah-ha’ moment when she recognized how adults and children occupy different cultures: “What if we adults are outsiders to children? What if the problem that we see sometimes as adults interacting with the children in our care and with our own children are intercultural and not biological or not a product of the phases of development? What if there’s a cultural component to it?”
Photo credit: Nature Explore
The lens of culture provided by these thoughtful observers of children and childhood suggests its presence, its fundamental importance in children’s lives, and its value in understanding the transformative process of children composing their common world.
What is Culture?
Although we may not be accustomed to thinking of a culture of childhood, we are familiar with the idea of culture. Understood broadly in relation to the groups of people, culture is viewed in an anthropological framework as customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. We also associate culture with the arts and with other manifestations of collective human intellectual accomplishments. Individuals’ and groups’ attachment to cultural activities, beliefs, and traditions are integrated into their daily lives and are core to their identity. Cultures are ethnic, religious, familial. They are global, national, and local; social, organizational, and team.
Across this wide range of meanings of culture are some basic characteristics that are relevant to exploring the culture of childhood.
• Culture is something that everyone possesses in some form or forms. Often unseen or unnoticed, we may not be very aware of culture in ourselves. But it’s there.
• We all carry cultural traits that we have acquired from others in our group(s) in the ways we listen, give gifts, honor, celebrate, and what we find meaningful.
• Cultures overlap, rather than exclude one another. Just as cultures interact with other cultures, the culture of childhood interacts with other cultures including the culture of adults.
• Culture gives us a sense of belonging and contributes to a sense of identity.
• Culture informs our way of life, permeating everyday experiences—foods, friendships, traditions, language, a sense of place, and play.
• Culture changes. It evolves over time through interactions with others, with places, with events.
In unpacking the culture of childhood, we encounter dimensions of culture—spatial, social, emotional, scientific, philosophical, and spiritual—and associated elements of language, belief systems, social structure (friendships and relationships); objects (toys and materials); and arts (expression and meaning making).
Bringing the Culture of Childhood to Light
The culture of childhood is children’s shared experience of growing up and finding their place
in the world shaping children’s social identity, creating a sense of community, and opening possibilities. Wrapping around and weaving through the time from 1-2 years through 10-12 years, the culture of childhood is a frame for viewing, understanding, respecting, and valuing children and childhood.
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| Photo credit: Jeanne Vergeront |
The child and childhood are at the center of the culture of childhood not adult agendas, goals, growth charts, and developmental frameworks. Touching on and interacting with every aspect of the child and their world, this culture engages with all developmental domains—physical, social, cognitive, language, and emotional—and the unfolding developmental processes. While there is a sequence most children follow (crawling first, then walking), culture is less about timelines and more about experiences, relationships, and children learning and inhabiting their world.
The culture of childhood recognizes what children have in common as well as variations among individual childhoods. It embraces both the individual child’s particular childhood experiences, settings, and contexts and the shared, evolving childhood constructed over time with other children in a larger context. The culture of childhood embraces an age cohort of children who are increasingly eager to connect with other children and learn from one another what they can’t learn in other ways. As with any culture, there are variations. Childhoods differ depending on children’s backgrounds, their race, specifics of their family, and where they live—their town, region, or city. But, as one father and city leader noted, “Six-year-olds are 6-year-olds. There are experiences all children enjoy.”
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| Photo credit: Jeanne Vergeront |
The culture of childhood is both universal and local. Childhood exists in cultures around the world, shaped by universal fundamentals. Developmentally, children move from dependence to greater independence. They develop new skills and capacities and move from sheltered family relationships to friendships and associations with peers. Early experiences begin in the intimacy of home but soon move beyond the house, around the block, into the neighborhood, to school, camps, and beyond. Seasons, weather, and landscape account for some local variations of childhood culture since children know best what is immediate and local. Weather and geography influence culture and seasonal clothes, activities, play choices, local foods and foodways.
Shared experiences are central to the culture of childhood: Children need to be part of a group with a coherent identity, shared vocabulary, and collective purpose. As part of an age cohort, they go through experiences together that shape perspectives, interests, enthusiasms, and milestones of their age group. Celebrating birthdays, learning their address, losing a tooth are quintessential moments of childhood that connect children to one another in lasting ways. Favorite toys or books, special clothing, movie characters also create shared memories and moments of meaningful connection. Such shared experiences of growing up together make a mark on childhoods. Public, civic, and social events of communities, disruptive events, and community and national tragedies and triumphs become collective memories that can define childhoods and leave a mark on adult lives.
The culture of childhood supports children’s social development outside the family. Childhood is a passage from “me” to “we.” While attachment to parents and caregiving adults is important, children increasingly want to connect with and build strong bonds with other children. They make friends and discover the power of friendship. Through social learning, they find ways to function in and as a group. They figure out how to join a game; invent rules and negotiate with one another; they choose leaders and sometimes question the order of the peer group. Some of the transformation involved in children becoming themselves necessarily occurs away from watchful adult eyes. Children develop a perspective on their lives and encounter new perspectives from other children that they can’t gain from adults.
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| Photo credit: Jeanne Vergeront |
By its very nature, the culture of childhood is dynamic. Childhood is in a perpetual dialogue with the world that for children is constantly revealing itself to them. While all cultures evolve, children’s alertness to their world, their curiosity, and rapid development across all domains guarantees a changing child. Children are immersed in making meaning and finding their place in an ever-expanding, shifting world using multiple languages, modalities, and media. Through on-going interactions with other children in varied settings, children learn from one another, pass on games and words, and share ideas from other contexts. This is a culture that welcomes and hosts ideas from other settings to influence and enrich it going forward.
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| Photo credit: Madison Children's Museum |
Recognizing and supporting the culture of childhood matters. More than just a time period in children’s lives, the culture of childhood is a living force that becomes an endowment of connection, community, and hopeful futures.
But how do we expand the benefits to more children of this overlooked and often undervalued cultural experience?
Let's begin by recognizing the culture of childhood itself. By doing so, we affirm our respect for children and our confidence in their becoming caring, engaged adults and future dreamers, connectors, and leaders. We can also:
• View children as competent learners with mastery over skills, and rich in ideas, rather than as smaller, messier, unfinished adults.
• Commit to creating better childhoods for more children, especially children facing challenges and limited resources by increasing access to places, community, people, programs, and opportunities.
• Make the culture of childhood visible to a larger circle of parents, educators, decision-makers and highlight the roles they can play to strengthen the social infrastructure that supports childhood and its culture.
• Advocate for the culture of childhood to influence the culture of our towns, cities, and regions rather than the reverse that allows busy schedules, structured time, and commercialization to shape the culture of childhood.
• Prioritize play. Besides guarding time and places for children to be children, we need to support children’s freedom to explore, experiment, solve problems together, and take risks. We need to let more of childhood happen out from the watchful eyes of adults.
• Expand the cultural space of childhood. Engage children, families, educators, and community members in co-constructing outdoor spaces, museum spaces, play environments, and other informal learning settings where children can come together, experiment, and creatively explore using multiple modes of expression, materials, and media.
MUSEUM NOTES
OTHER SOURCES
• Peter Gray: The Value of Play
• Emily Plank. (2016) Discovering the Culture of Childhood
• Peter Moss and Pat Petrie. 2002. From Children’s Services to Children Spaces.
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