Global Studies of Childhood

Volume 2 Number 3 2012

www.wwwords.co.uk/GSCH

EDITORIAL

Childhood Futures: better childhoods?

Parents and communities often want their childrens lives to be better than their own. States often
want future adults to be better than the present crop. Historically, all manner of social, medical
and political interventions have found inspiration and legitimation in the call for better
childhoods. Emotional, practical and financial investment in children by parents, by communities
and by states is a widespread feature of those contemporary societies that identify childhood with
such a hope.
Ways to make better childhoods would seem, at first glance, to be obvious. The list of
childrens unmet needs for food, medicine and education is long. But the delivery of these goods
has always been dependent on a complex of political, ideological and economic considerations. For
some commentators, even the condition of wealth is capable of rendering childhood toxic
through media exposure and diet (Palmer, 2007). Further, global futures do not look bright at the
time of writing, with rising concern over security of energy and food supplies, climate change,
demographic change, and intra- and international armed conflict.
It is sometimes difficult to imagine better childhoods emerging from todays conjunctions.
The idea is further troubled by ongoing conflicts between universal childrens rights and local
cultural expectations. What is better for some children from some points of view is not better for
others. At the same time as basic needs and future existence are being brought into doubt in some
countries, digital, biotechnical and genetic tools are being mobilised in other areas to offer radical
new approaches to bettering childhood (Lee, forthcoming).
This special issue explores the aspirations and anxieties about the future that are mobilised in
discussions of what constitutes a better life for children in highly diverse circumstances, and
examines how these aspirations are translated into lived experiences for and by young people. It is
particularly concerned with the diversity of future visions and material resources that are available
to make better childhoods around the world, and the implications of such diversity for social
justice. But first, we need to make a few points about some of our keywords.

Better
As we noted above, this term is controversial. At the simplest level, there are differences of opinion
as to which states of affairs are better than and preferable to others. These differences are often
shaped by underlying concerns for securities of resources and of identity. Sociologies and histories
of childhood offer many examples of occasions where such differences can structure debate and
even precipitate conflict. How best to organise and distribute limited educational resources and the
claims of states and communities over the self-identities of the young have each been contested in
this way. The governance of childhood, parenting and the business of being a child each involve
engagement with these differences of opinion, and such engagements can be more or less skilfully
managed and more or less productive in outcome.
One way of transcending differences of opinion and of desire is through the application of
metric devices. Metrics that are particularly pertinent in the United Kingdom at the time of writing,
for example, include: the use of gross domestic product as a summary measure of national
economies; body mass index as a measure of overweight and obesity (Eknoyan, 2007); and 5 a day
as a state-defined and promoted target for the consumption of fruit and vegetables.[1] These
metrics create quantitative summaries of complex interactions, sequences of action or bodies. They

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quantify in the hope of rendering different solutions to the problem of living comparable with one
another, even in the face of controversy. Measure can be taken of, say, individuals body mass
index that allows for their comparison regardless of any differences of opinion they may have about
appropriate diets. This opens the possibility not only of international comparison and comparison
between peers, but also of comparison with oneself over time. To various degrees, then, the
metrics mentioned above allow for the informed regulation of economic policy, diet and exercise,
and micronutrient intake. Metrics are best understood as tools, forms of social technology that are
designed to lend traction to attempts to create improvement and to guard against complacency.
In practice, and like many other technologies, metrics range in their effectiveness and in the
degree to which they generate unintended consequences. Metrics are haunted by the possibility
that a clear but necessarily simplistic numerical measure can supplant the authentic purposes of an
organisation or the autonomy of an individual life. Arguably, for example, the success of gross
domestic product as a proxy measure of national well-being exerts a strong downward pressure on
the practical political possibility of sustainable use of resources in developed nations. In the end, no
metric can escape the conditions of its production and the partiality and incompleteness of its view
on the world. In other words, if a metric is being applied, this is a sign that someone, at some point,
has lost an argument. Zealous application of body mass index, for example, can be criticised in
view of that metrics insensitivity to differences in the shape of healthy bodies.
Objections to the use of metrics that expose the assumptions they make and alert us to the
sometimes misguided standardisation they perform stand in a long line of critique of betterment
that stretches back to Marx (Singer, 2000). Metrics, or any view of how to get to better, can be
ideological in Marxs sense. They present selected aspects of the world as if they were the whole
world, systematically excluding certain kinds of information and concealing the moment of
exclusion from view. On this view, the apparent transparency of a metric is bought with much
shade and obfuscation. Any discussion of betterment invites the suspicion that some will be
bettering more than others, according to class, gender or ethnic positions, and is therefore open to
critique for its latent ideological content.
No discussion of the controversies that better entails would be complete without some
consideration of the historian and political philosopher Michel Foucault (2007), who examined the
historical development of practices of governance, education and training, and medicine that are
key to many contemporary childhoods. It is possible, though we believe it is mistaken, to read
Foucault as a simple sceptic about the possibility of progress, and as one who reveals, beneath
progress and reason, malevolent forces bent on illegitimate control. Across his work on famine,
plague, reason and discipline, there is good evidence that he discerned a double movement
improvements in the form of increased security of governance balanced by the redistribution of
costs. Over the course of time and through the development of arts of governance, the rates of
occurrence of major unpredictable perturbations such as famine, plague and revolt have been
reduced in minority world polities, but only at the cost of creating newly stable and predictable
zones of suffering or deprivation. The same measures of tariff, trade and agricultural science that
rectify extremes of glut and shortfall to provide the high levels of food security that many, if not all,
enjoy today also help to create a near permanent class of the food insecure, whose members share
an inability to afford nutritious food at the costs set by prevalent trading relations.
For us, then, better is not a unifying goal, but is the name we give to a multilayered field of
strategic operations that are concerned with the distribution of resources and voices licenses to
comment and to state preferences which is of crucial importance in distributing life chances and
lifestyles.

Futures
Like better, ideas of what counts as the future are subject to profound debate. Such debates
encompass competing ideas about what the future might bring (differences of vision); they
encompass competing ideas about how and whether it is possible to predict the future (differences
of method); and they encompass competing ideas about what the future should bring (differences of
aspiration). In the main, ideas of the future that are mobilised to inform interventions in childhood
are, like better, profoundly ideological selective, partial and seeking to obscure the conditions of

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their production. Consider the frequency with which the demand to prepare children for the
(unspecified, unauthored, unchallenged) future or for the (inevitable, unavoidable, desirable)
future knowledge economy occurs in the speeches of local politicians and the language of
international policy documents. Foretelling futures and demanding that these ideas of the future be
inserted into childrens everyday lives is a common feature of contemporary childhood (Facer,
forthcoming).
The future, however, is a participatory project. Futures are built not merely through political
rhetoric, but through the day-to-day processes of judgment and anticipation of the future that are
woven into the material practices of everyday life. Decisions about where to live, how to eat, what
to consume, and how to survive and thrive all accrete into large-scale social changes and long-term
futures for individuals, societies and ecosystems. Decisions about relationships of care, rituals to
follow and commitments to make to each other all form dependencies that might outlast and
outsmart disruptive changes. The future, fundamentally, is made as well as told. Seeing the future
as made also requires us to pay attention to its materiality, to the role of forces other than rhetoric
and social relations. The accretion of carbon in the atmosphere, the furring of the arteries, the
release of hormones into the water system and the increase in global population all act as forces
within which the everyday practices of anticipation, judgment and action are played out.
Futures, therefore, are constantly being brought into being on a macro scale and on a micro
scale through discourse, through action and through long-term socio-material change. Such
futures are far from predictable and, indeed, such uncertainty about the future brings an ever
intensifying gaze upon childhood as a means of managing, making and shaping the future.
Historically, such a gaze has brought both security and risk to children: the security of care for their
development and the risk of seeking to pre-empt and to manage their futures.
For us, then, the challenge today is not to seek out ever more accurate means of predicting
the future, but to understand how to live better, as Riel Miller (2011) argues, with the creative
possibilities of not knowing the future. The challenge is not to find ways to shape young people
ever more carefully to fit future visions, but to open up the spaces of debate about how all our
futures are produced and how best to understand and intervene in the dance between everyday
judgments, long-term historical conditions, and ongoing and unpredictable change.

Childhoods
The title of this special issue addresses childhoods rather than children. This may look like a bias
towards abstraction and against concrete experience. Of course, there can be no childhoods
without specific children, but we have chosen this formula because, in our view, each and every
child lives to a greater or lesser extent within the confines of, or thanks to, abstract models of how
people can and should live. The abstraction childhood, in this sense, is an artefact of governance.
It cannot be simply shaken off by an individual child, by a community or by us. The point has been
made well elsewhere in sociologies and histories of childhood. The intertwining and mutual
dependence of many strands of governmental activity, including attempts to define and make use
of early life, is what enables and constrains lived childhoods. Though lived experience varies across
the world and children are never reducible to a single standard, a common feature of childhoods
worldwide is their central role in governance, in the business of stabilising the present and trying to
shape the future. Thus, actual children are drawn together under a vision of childhood that
provides for the following:
Controversial treatment of children can be legitimated by reference to national, regional or
global progress.
Actions of children and of adults can be judged in terms of an intergenerational contract, in
which each group has duties and legitimate expectations.
Amongst humans in all their diversity, children are especially open to being shaped and/or
manipulated.
Children are human fragments of a future yet to arrive, and so offer points of purchase on
futures.
These four points have done much to shape present childhoods, in our view, both for good and for
ill. As others have argued, their emphasis on childhoods futurity has tended to overshadow

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understandings of children as agents of change, often excluding them from democratic negotiation
about preferences and futures. As we have suggested, however, better now looks rather difficult
to achieve, and it is now clear that betterment cannot meaningfully be imposed, but must be
negotiated. For these reasons, we would contend that childhoods need to be understood as
potential sites of creative adaptation, and that childrens attempts actively to rewrite socially
defined expectations and preferences need greater appreciation and amplification. We think the
articles collected here offer many examples of how this can be done.
Jill Bradbury and Jude Clark consider the identity formation of South African children and
report on a programme Fast Forward that is designed to encourage young people to imagine
their future lives and to begin to actualise their preferred versions. They present a context in which,
until recently, personal futures were projected along separate, racially defined tracks and
constrained by legalised violence according to a fantasy of permanent, static identity. Bradbury and
Clark are concerned that even as racism diminishes as an aspect of South African identities,
xenophobia directed at African migrants and gendered violence remain. They see evidence of a
hardening of identities along national and gendered lines, a hardening that is problematic because it
involves an increasing predication of identity on violence and force. The programme they describe
uses a variety of strategies to foster and to amplify a range of those identity skills that lie beyond
violence, including: drama to explore alternatives to taken-for-granted identities; music to connect
with a broad African cultural heritage; dance to use bodies to explore trust and gendered power;
and stories of identities built creatively in the face of race, gender and class. For them, imagining
better futures is not simply a question of developing the agency of individuals, but needs to involve
a wider reframing of experience. As they point out, there is no guarantee that young people, simply
by virtue of their youth, will have the will or the skill to build supple identities. In this sense, better
futures are hard work.
Ida Fadzillah takes our themes to her interviews with a group of Spanish-speaking families
who have immigrated to the USA and who currently live in a town in Tennessee. As a cultural
anthropologist, her interests are both in young peoples experiences of globalisation and in those of
their practices that can be understood as shaping those lived experiences. Her study began with
concerns expressed at an elementary school that immigrant children tended to be overweight and
unhealthy, and that their parents did not know what to do about this. Her interviews and
discussion reveal that many of these families live with what might be called a double future a
superposition of two narratives that have contrasting outcomes. In common with many Spanish-
speaking immigrants to the USA, these families chose to migrate to find jobs in the poultry,
furniture and car-manufacturing industries that could provide a level and stability of income which
they would find rather more difficult to achieve in their countries of origin. Further, the US
education system, for all its faults, promises to help them secure a better future for and with their
children. This American Dream narrative of personal and economic advancement, however, is
lived alongside another that concerns childrens diet and exercise, and their present and future
health. While some Latin American cultures associate fat bodies with good lives and skinny bodies
with poverty, the health costs of a diet of highly processed fat and sugar-rich foods that is readily
available to those of a relatively low income are very clear to the parents she interviewed.
Whatever benefits of income and security these children may see in the future, they seem at
present to be inextricably woven in with mounting health problems and shortened lives. Fadzillahs
participants are presented with the puzzle of how to disentangle these two futures. What would it
take to create the secure futures these people want without creating ill health? Fadzillahs article
opens a window on what we would suggest is a major contemporary issue wherever Western
lifestyles are a focus of aspiration.
Kate Pahl worked with girls of 12 and 13 to produce and to analyse what she refers to as
multimodal texts. In the fictional and autobiographical pieces produced, she finds many
illustrations of the complexities of time when considered from the point of view of identity and
cultural production. She found descriptions of events that were linked to historical time, to the
timing of experiences of different family generations, and to the ongoing and unfolding present.
Further, these different times were frequently connected and made interactive one with another.
As these girls considered and communicated their experiences and views, then, so they disrupted a
conventional view of time as a linear succession of events. This connects at a deep level with the
issue of childhood futures. As we have suggested above, the future is no simple matter. Pahls

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account offers a rich illustration of this as she considers futures and personal identities. Futures do
not just arrive, but need articulation, and this requires visual, moral and conceptual aids.
Heather Rae-Espinoza is closely concerned with the issue of diversity in understandings of
how to make futures for and with children. She first illustrates the differences between expert and
lay perceptions in a brief discussion of how her own preconceptions were challenged a few years
ago. In the Ecuadorian village she once worked in, a number of parents had left their children in
the village as they sought work abroad. To her mind, this immediately raised the problem of how
children would adjust to abandonment. Villagers helped her out with this by reframing her
perceptions. Though parents were missed, other adults would always have played a major role in
caring for these children. The children were not to be understood as abandoned because families
were not nuclear. As she goes on to show, differences of view do not just form between cultures
or between experts and lay people, but also within communities of people who have different
experiences. She considers the issue through ethnographic material concerning differences of view
about children and futures between transnational and non-migr Ecuadorian families. At one
level, she finds evidence of a stark contrast of views. On the one hand, she found the view that
parental emigration was the only way to provide a better future for children. On the other hand,
she found the view that the psychological and emotional consequences of parental emigration are
always and of necessity negative. Digging beneath this contrast, however, she finds evidence of far
more complex, subtle and adaptive understandings. She works with those to make
recommendations about how to adapt existing cultural logics and expectations about childhoods
for the benefit of the children of transnational and non-migr families. A difference in the desired
future and in how properly to make a future for oneself often seems to be a problem. Unless there
is consensus, how can we proceed? Rae-Espinozas piece points out how, where it is properly
examined and understood, such diversity is a way of enriching thinking about and making futures
a resource rather than a problem.
Jennifer Sumsion and Susan J. Grieshaber draw our attention to the impact of the
globalisation of discourses of childhood futures on the regulation of curricula in Australia for
children to the age of five. They then focus their analysis on the Australian Early Years Framework.
The context they set for their article is one that would appear to have the potential further to
homogenise early years education across the anglophone world. Whatever benefits this might
bring in terms of taking hold of the young as a national resource for the creation of better national
futures, we might wish to preserve space for critique and difference. In this case, globalisation
would appear to threaten that space. Sumsion and Grieshaber draw on a wide range of policy
documents, media representations and academic literature to deliver a strategic analysis of the
Framework that teases apart the various more or less utopian visions of the future which this single
Framework attempts to respond to and to deliver. A distinctive feature of their analysis is that in its
empirical approach to current attempts to create the future, it gives grounds to refuse the
pessimistic view that the term better can only serve elite interests by setting firm boundaries to
possibility.
All of these articles, in different ways, explore the distinctive, localised practices of negotiating
the interrelationship between ideas of childhood, of betterment and of the future. In so doing, they
open up spaces within which young people, parents, researchers and educators can begin
productively to interrogate the relationship between day-to-day actions and the wider historical
forces of food production, of migration, of technological change and of racism out of which these
childrens futures are being made.

Keri Facer, Rachel Holmes & Nick Lee

Note
[1] See http://www.nhs.uk/5aday

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References
Eknoyan, G. (2007) Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) The Average Man and Indices of Obesity, Nephrology
Dialysis Transplantation, 23(1), 47-51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfm517
Facer, K. (forthcoming) The Problem of the Future and the Possibilities of the Present in Education Research,
International Journal of Education Research.
Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population, trans. G. Burchell. New York: Picador.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230245075
Lee, N.M. (forthcoming) Childhood and Bio-politics: climate change, bio-science and human futures. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Miller, R. (2011) Being without Existing: the futures community at a turning point? A Comment on Jay
Ogilvys Facing the Fold, Foresight, 13(4), 24-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14636681111153940
Palmer, S. (2007) Toxic Childhood. London: Orion.
Singer, P. (2000) Marx: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

KERI FACER is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, and Arts
and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow for Connected Communities. She researches
and writes on the relationship between education institutions and wider society in particular in
relation to questions of social justice and economic, environmental and technological change.
From 2007 to 2009 she led the Beyond Current Horizons strategic foresight programme for the
Department for Children, Schools and Families. Her most recent book is Learning Futures: education,
technology and social change (2011). Correspondence: keri.facer@bristol.ac.uk

RACHEL HOLMES is Reader of Cultural Studies of Childhood at the Manchester Metropolitan

University. Her research interests lie across the interstices of applied educational research, social
science research and arts-based research within cultures of childhood. She has written numerous
articles on childhood territories, including ways childhood becomes imag(in)ed through fictional,
documentary and ethnographic film; childrens behaviour, their objects and innovative approaches
to visual methods of ethnographic inquiry in early childhood research. She is currently developing
projects on museum and art gallery work with very young children and new engagements with
visual methodologies in qualitative research. Correspondence: r.holmes@mmu.ac.uk

NICK LEE is based at Warwick University in the UK. He is author of Childhood and Society: growing
up in an age of uncertainty (2001), Childhood and Human Value: development, separation and separability
(2005) and Childhood and Biopolitics: climate change, life science and human futures (forthcoming 2013).
He has written numerous articles on childhood, science and technology, medicine and infectious
disease and has consulted widely with government and private industry. He is currently developing
projects on the present and future roles of children and young people in shaping biosocial relations.
Correspondence: n.m.lee@warwick.ac.uk

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