Childhood

http://chd.sagepub.com/

Childhoods Across the Generations : Stories from women in four-generation

English families
Julia Brannen
Childhood 2004 11: 409
DOI: 10.1177/0907568204047104

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://chd.sagepub.com/content/11/4/409

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:
Norwegian Centre for Child Research

Additional services and information for Childhood can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://chd.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://chd.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Citations: http://chd.sagepub.com/content/11/4/409.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Oct 27, 2004

What is This?

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS
Stories from women in four-generation
English families

JULIA BRANNEN
University of London
Key words:
childhood, contextualization, family
generation, historical generation,
life stories, motherhood
Mailing address:
Julia Brannen
Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute
of Education, University of London,
27/28 Woburn Square, London WC1H
OAA, UK
[email: j.brannen@ioe.ac.uk]
Childhood Copyright © 2004
SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi, Vol 11(4): 409–428.
www.sagepublications.com
10.1177/0907568204047104
This article draws upon new analysis from a quali-
tative study of four-generation English families. It
takes a historical generational perspective and
explores perspectives on the childhoods of three
generations of women. The article also offers a
number of theoretical and methodological reflec-
tions upon the interpretation of life stories: the need
to make sense of accounts in relation to life course
phase; the need to examine the nature of the
account being given and the time frames to which
different parts of an account refer; the problems in
treating accounts as reflections of historical condi-
tions; and the difficulties in contextualizing
accounts where context is assumed or ignored.

Childhood is a social institution, and a cultural invention (Ariès, 1962;

Kessen, 1979). In effect, what it means to be a child and what a child experi-
ences in one era is rarely the same in another era. Also, the way we, as
adults, construe children and childhood changes over time. For these reasons
this article refers to childhood in the plural to signify its variability and dif-
ferent meanings (Mayall, 1994). One of the changes that has had great effect
on the social experience of children in England relates to the changes in
women’s lives since the 1920s: the rise in mothers’ employment, the increase
in women’s educational achievement, the postponement of childbearing and
the increasing likelihood of divorce (Elder et al., 1993). A study which
includes recollections of childhood across historical generations has the
capacity to assess the impact of these changes. A study focusing on multi-
generation families has the potential to indicate how parents and others con-
tribute to their children’s childhoods from the perspectives of both children
and parents.
There has been little systematic research in Britain focusing upon peo-
ple’s accounts of their childhoods across family generations (exceptions are
a French study by Attias-Donfut and Segalen [2002] and a Norwegian study

409

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

by Nielsen [2003]). This contrasts with the large volume of research on the
impact of early life course events on individual child outcomes in later life
(see Elder et al., 1993; Wadsworth, 1991), and a literature on childhood in
different historical periods (see, for example, Corsaro, 1997; Elder et al.,
1993; Jamieson, 1987). For example, the work of Zelizer (1985) in the US
charts the way in which children lost their role in the family economy so that
in the 1930s American children were excluded by law from paid work; in
adult eyes children’s ‘economic inutility’ was balanced by a growing belief
in their emotional value.
Childhood in different historical periods is examined retrospectively
when, as adults, people reflect upon past childhoods while also being cog-
nisant of the changes that they witness subsequently. How adults recall
childhood relates to their own experiences in childhood, the ideas and condi-
tions that shaped these at the time, their cultural location in time and place,
their linkages to others’ lives and their own agency at the time (Giele and
Elder, 1998). Recollections are also shaped by individuals’ subsequent expo-
sure to different practices and ideas about childhood. In making sense of
accounts of childhood, we need therefore to address how informants’
accounts are permeated by time perspectives as well as addressing, via our
sociological accounts, the times to which these accounts refer.
The article focuses on women’s lives over three generations. It takes a
historical perspective and identifies emblematic themes which relate to the
childhoods as they were experienced and reflected upon by three cohorts of
women who were born in three distinctive historical periods: the great grand-
mothers born around the First World War (1911–21); grandmothers born
around the Second World War (1940–8); mothers of young children born in
the late 1960s to early 1970s (1965–75). The study employed both life
course and generational perspectives. Informants did not, however, situate
their accounts neatly within particular life course phases but shifted their
time perspectives. Moreover, they varied in how much they referred to the
social contexts of their lives.
The accounts of childhood upon which the article draws are from a
small-scale study of four-generation English families carried out with three
colleagues in 1998–2000 (Brannen, 2003; Brannen et al., 2004). The study
adopted a biographical approach.1 A sociological perspective that combines
knowledge of both the individual and the structural aspects of society – the
intersection between biography and history in the tradition of C. Wright
Mills – is best suited to provide insights into the complexities of social life
as they unfold within specific historical periods. The approach explicated
life course patterns and informants’ life histories around work and care, on
the one hand, and the accounts people gave of their lives in the form in
which they chose to narrate and interpret them, on the other. This then was a
set of cases, the ‘case’ being the kinship group consisting of four generations
(of which the adult members of three generations, but not the youngest

410

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

generation of children, were interviewed). We make no claim to the repre-

sentativeness of the sample and cannot generalize from it. The study’s aim
was rather to provide a thorough description of the families, to identify pat-
terns and to generate theoretical interpretations. Twelve case study kin
groups were theoretically sampled where the youngest generation had at
least one young child (originally intended to be under 5 years, but revised to
under 10 years). The three generations are referred to from the vantage point
of the youngest as parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The kin
groups were also sampled to ‘represent’ a diversity of different employment
and occupational statuses at different ends of the socioeconomic spectrum,
that is in the grandparent generation. In recruiting the families, we
approached the grandparent generation first. We sought a spread of social
classes in the ‘pivot generation’ and to divide the sample according to those
grandparents employed, either currently or in the past, in a professional or
managerial occupation, and to include an equal proportion who worked, or
had worked, in lower status or manual (skilled and unskilled) occupations.
We also sought to ensure that the grandparent generation would be split
between those currently in employment and those outside the labour market.
Seventy-one individuals were interviewed – from five to eight persons per
family; the only members not interviewed were deceased or sick members of
the oldest generation (at least one great-grandparent in each family was
interviewed and in some families all four great-grandparents).

Great grandparents: childhoods in the interwar years

The great grandparent generation witnessed huge changes over the course of
their lives: two world wars, increased prosperity, the growth and decline of
the welfare state, major changes in gender roles. The interwar period was
marked by greater socioeconomic homogeneity compared with the present
day in that a much larger proportion of the male working population was
employed in manual occupations. Especially among working-class people in
the 1920s and 1930s, hard times were a common experience both in absolute
terms but also relative to the present. Given the uncertainty surrounding
employment, especially for working-class families in the 1930s and the
importance placed upon men as breadwinners, children’s experience of their
childhoods was heavily dependent upon their fathers being in work even
though many working-class mothers were employed. Children’s experiences
also depended upon mothers’ contributions inside the home in helping fami-
lies to ‘make do’ and ‘get by’. Great-grandmothers grew up with few educa-
tional expectations and opportunities and while many entered paid work at
different points in the life course, none developed an employment career as
such.
The great-grandparent generation, now in their eighties, described
their childhoods as part of the general condition of family life, though not in

411

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

the sense of family as a bounded discrete unit (Jamieson, 1987: 594). They
did not identify childhood as a specific phase in which children were given
special treatment. Their stories of the past are public accounts which focused
upon the impact of external events rather than their own agency. They por-
trayed the structural features of their lives as broad descriptive landscapes
(for a similar finding, see Nielsen, 2003). Working-class grandmothers
recalled the period of their childhoods as a time of hardship and struggle for
the family and remembered their mothers for keeping families together. As
girls, they remembered helping their mothers with the enormous burden of
household work. What is striking here is that even though this generation
witnessed enormous subsequent changes in children’s lives and in the value
accorded to children, in their interviews none evaluated the past as a loss of
childhood per se.
Great-grandmother Brenda Smith2 started her account (which lasted
five hours over two visits) by positioning herself as a child growing up in an
extremely poor family; she described listening to the adults talking from her
own small space under the ‘dining table’ around which much of the indoor
life of the family took place. Despite this positioning, Brenda’s account
focused not only upon the details of ‘making do’ and ‘getting by’ in a poor
London family but embraced the broad historical landscape of events and
social change. In the first two hours of her interview Brenda scarcely paused
as she described her earliest memories of growing up poor in London in the
1920s. Her father was out of work and was forced to do ‘odd jobs’ until he
got a ‘pitch’ selling newspapers on street corners. The contribution of her
mother and the children to family income she considered crucial:
I was the youngest of seven children, and, um, I seem to have spent – we lived
in a tenement,3 you know, two rooms in a tenement . . . as far as I can remem-
ber, right back . . . I seem to have spent most of my young childhood under the
table. Because the way poor people lived then – and I mean poor – they lived in
two rooms, and in the main room there was usually a bed, and a table, chairs.
Hopefully, a chest of drawers . . . It was a square table, and I used to play under
there a lot. Never got trodden on. I used to, um, . . . make pictures and toys and
everything. I was always under the table, and . . . I used to listen a lot. ’Cos
sometimes I’d say something from years ago, and I think afterwards, it couldn’t
have been really me, it must’ve been me listening to the rest of the family. You
know, my mum and my – her sisters . . . My father was a – God! My father – it
was in the ’20s. Life was very hard, no jobs and all that. So he didn’t really have
a – any profession. He used to do odd jobs. Until he got a newspaper pitch, and
for the rest of time he sold newspapers for a living. Um, he was a clever man
with his hands. . . . And when we were kids, she [mother] used to do – she used
to do the washing. We used to go up to the theatres4 and get a big basket of
washing, and she used to do the towels and the tights, and all the stuff in the
theatre. And we used to go up there with the pram, with my big sister. Pick it up
and, at the end of the week, take it back and . . . [my mother] had a terribly hard
– people in those days had terrible hard lives. She had to get up, you know,
about 4 o’clock in the morning, you know. And a few of her cronies, and they
would go down Covent Garden, and they used to shell peas down there. Peel

412

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

potatoes for the hotels, you know. Like, they do by machine now. And they
used to do that, and they used to be paid sixpence! Sixpence for – 5 days, 6 days
a week and get 3 bob. In shillings. And she used to take in washing. That’s how
we sort of lived. My mum used to take in washing. We used to go to the public
baths, which was just across from where we lived. She used to go in at 8 o’clock
in the morning, and about 8 o’clock at night. She . . . [had] a hard life. But I
don’t remember her buying anything for herself, new . . . ever. Not until she got
old. When you compare that generation to ours, it’s like a different world. It’s –
she was 93 when she died, mind you.

This generation, who grew up without a welfare state, related traumat-

ic events which frequently led to the family falling into poverty, to mothers
seeking paid employment and to disrupted or difficult family relationships.
In some cases the trauma was so great that great grandmothers said they had
‘blocked’ or ‘blanked out’ these memories. Such events included fathers’
long absences during wartime (First and Second World Wars); deaths of and
desertions by a parent in early childhood; having an indifferent stepparent.
In this next case, a great grandmother, Sandra Miller, described escaping
poverty when her father died when she was 6 months old. Her mother found
work as a seamstress and she depended upon the support of her own mother
in bringing up her daughter. Sandra commented that they managed well
because she was an only child, remarking on their good fortune compared
with other members of the family who were ‘extremely poor’: ‘I realized
then just how fortunate I’d been – only for the fact that my mother worked
so hard to give me a good life because I was an only child.’
By contrast, it is significant that no middle-class members of this gen-
eration made explicit reference to the 1930s Depression. Thus while histori-
cal conditions are important contextually in shaping the lives of a genera-
tion, they affect people’s lives differently, in this latter case according to
social class.
Working-class poverty meant children had to help their families.
Brenda Smith, quoted earlier, described how, during the 1930s, she and her
siblings stole tar blocks from the roads to sell as firewood ‘and the servants
would come up from the basements and buy bundles of kindling’. Similarly,
another great-grandmother noted that, as the eldest daughter, at the age of 14
she took over the care of her baby sister when her mother got a full-time job
during the war. Yet another great grandmother, whose mother was a lone
parent and worked as a cleaner, described how the four children each had
their own jobs to keep the household going, which left them no time ‘to go
out to play with other children’. Even girls in middle-class homes often did
household chores especially when they were eldest daughters in large fami-
lies. Grace Horton, as the eldest daughter in a middle-class family of three
boys and two girls growing up in the 1920s, described how she was expected
to help her mother in the house. Grace remembered how, as a child, she had
understood the pressure her mother was under following a fall in family for-
tunes when they could no longer afford the cost of servants.

413

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

However, childhoods in the great-grandparent generation were not

remembered as all work. Even for working-class children, there was also
time for leisure. This was typically organized for children collectively in the
community rather than individually by their parents. Moreover, leisure
demanded children’s active participation – that is they were expected to
make their own amusement, a practice grandparents contrasted with what
they perceived to be the passive consumption of today’s children. Schools,
churches, the Saturday matinee at the local cinema were key institutions pro-
viding amusement for children. Dora Peters commented:
. . . a lot of our activities was with the school and, er, sports days and all differ-
ent things like that. And . . . in the chapel. You know, we used to have what
they used to call – I don’t know whether they do now – Methodist [?], Christian
Endeavour, and they used to have Band of Hope . . . We used to do plays and
singing competitions. You know? And then once a year they used to have –
which they used to call the ‘anniversary’, and all the children… used to sing or
recite . . . we were encouraged to do it. Do you get my meaning? . . . You used
to be able to go to the pictures for a penny. You know. But that was Saturday
matinee or something like that . . . But otherwise you used to make your own
amusements.

The way the world is seen to have changed in this latter respect led
some great-grandmothers to remember the past through rather rose-tinted
glasses. Childhood was remembered as risk free, which contrasted with their
perceptions of the dangers of the present times. Dora Peters: ‘We used to
have nice times. Yeah. And you could go off, and nobody ever used to touch
you, or you never used to have anybody stop or anybody – no fighting or
people nasty to you. You know. It’s where I often wondered what’s gone
wrong. You know?’ In her next remark, Dora Peters suggested that child-
hood was not only remembered as being less risk prone than it is today, it
also incurred less waste and more thrift, even from children. Dora remem-
bered her father having to work hard to keep the family out of poverty; what
was no longer ‘needed was passed on to other people. I mean, as far as, like,
that part, like – as I said, my father was in work and that. But if we had any-
thing that my mother didn’t want, we used to pass on to other people.’
Most great grandmothers recalled ‘missing out’ on educational oppor-
tunities. However, they made it clear that the loss was felt more keenly in
hindsight than at the time. For over the 20th century and over their own life,
they had witnessed the growing importance of education, especially for
women. Grace Horton, who was from a middle-class family, was one such
case. Yet despite her middle-class background, in the interwar years when
access to much of the education system still depended on private means, she
was forced to move from a private school to a state secondary school when
her father’s business collapsed in the 1920s. The family moved to a smaller
house in a different part of London, a move which curtailed Grace’s subse-
quent educational and job opportunities. Grace recalled a moment in her life
when an adult spotted her academic ability and remembered how, during a

414

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

training course after she left school to work as a cookery demonstrator, the
teacher said to her ‘What are you doing here? You should be at university.’
However, at the time she made little of the remark feeling no different from
her friends. Only subsequently, she came to regret the absence of educational
opportunity: ‘And I didn’t know what to say, really. I was very surprised.
And, um – I mean, you didn’t have a chip on your shoulder in those days
because you didn’t, because none of your friends did.’
Thus, for the interwar great-grandparent generation, childhoods were
described in material terms, reflecting a heavily class-based society in which
many families were typically large, working class and poor. Thus the quality
of children’s lives was seen to depend upon the material viability of the
household: male breadwinning and mothers’ household management skills
and sheer hard work. Where fathers were unable to provide adequately or
died, mothers’ paid work became critical. So too was the presence of grand-
mothers, who both looked after the children and took on a parental role (see
also Attias-Donfut and Segalen, 2002). The household work of children was
also critical and sometimes involved work outside the home. The pleasurable
aspects of children’s lives depended more upon organizations in the local
community than upon the involvement of parents. While being shaped by
history, childhoods were also seen from the vantage point of the great
changes which took place in the intervening years. Children’s freedom to
roam was contrasted with the notion of risk-prone childhoods of today.
Childhood was interpreted in relation to a world of thrift in contrast to what
is seen today as wasteful consumption. Great-grandmothers viewed with
hindsight lost educational opportunities from the vantage point of what they
see to be on offer to today’s children.

Grandmothers: childhoods in the postwar period

The grandparent generation, like the generation before, lived through a peri-
od of social change. As children of the postwar period, they grew up in a
time of high male employment and during the foundation of the British wel-
fare state. Some born in the Second World War experienced the employment
of their mothers. But following the end of the war, new childrearing ideas,
introduced by psychologists in the 1950s, emphasized children’s need for
mothers’ full-time presence in the home in order to give children emotional
security. (Later, when this generation became mothers themselves, bringing
up their own children in the 1970s, they were subject to liberal ideas related
to psychoanalysis.) This is not to suggest that attitudes to childrearing were
consistently subject to the hegemony of new philosophies (Jamieson, 1987).
In fact only one great-grandmother, Grace Horton quoted earlier, talked
about new ideas in the postwar period about childrearing and child develop-
ment.
Unlike the generation before them, who evaluated their childhoods as

415

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

good or bad, hard or uneventful, the grandparent generation recalled child-

hoods which were ‘psychologized’. They assessed children’s lives in relation
to the concepts of individualism and the ‘secure child’. Above all else, child-
hood was supposed to be ‘happy’. The importance of the material context of
childhood and family life shaded into the background, while the emotional
milieu came to the fore (see also Harris, 1983). Celia Hurd (grandmother)
grew up in a ‘respectable’ working-class family and is now a member of the
middle class: ‘I think I’m one of those people who thought the sun always
shone, and errr it was very loving, very loving. Very – I suppose I was spoilt.
I was the only child for about 10 years. Ummm. I don’t know, I just feel that
I was wanted and loved and well cared for. I mean obviously a lot of this is
what one gathers from looking at photographs, but my recollection is that it
was a lovely time. I loved school, all through.’ In contrast, Celia’s mother
(great-grandmother) could remember little about her childhood. Her father
died when she was 8. Her mother had four children and ‘a very hard life’: ‘I
think I had such a hard life, I decided to block it [childhood] out of my life.’
Just as the oldest generation saw their own mothers as crucial to fami-
ly’s material welfare, so the next generation considered maternal presence
and mother love to be the axiom of good motherhood, good childhood (and
good adulthood). Unlike the great-grandparent generation, this postwar
(grandparent) generation accorded their parents psychological responsibility
for their children’s lives. Making reference to the postwar ideology ‘moth-
ers’ place is in the home’, they evaluated their mothers according to their
efforts to ‘be there’ for their children, i.e. at home rather than at work.
Mothers’ job was to ensure their children did not come home to ‘empty
houses’. For example, Penelope Peters was quick to suggest that her mother
was ‘there’ for her when she was growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s.
However, in fact her mother took a job as a home help when her children
went to secondary school. Nonetheless Penelope insisted that her mother
was ‘always there, with a cup of tea and a biscuit. Listen[ing] to all our
problems’. Pauline Smith (grandmother) noted, ‘we (children) were never
ever alone . . . We never came home to an empt[y]– although my mother
went to work and my father went to work’. In the postwar period, the cry
‘my mother never left us’ was the badge of a proper childhood and the con-
dition for providing individual children with psychological security. The pre-
vious generation’s concern about having too little space in the home (over-
crowding) was replaced in the following generation with the fear of giving
children too much space – emotional space, that is when children came
home to empty, motherless homes.
Many working-class mothers were employed in the war and some after
the war when the government was encouraging women to return to the
home. Yet the grandmother generation rarely referred to their own mothers’
paid work directly, as if still anxious to protect their mothers’ reputations as
‘good mothers’ at that time. Kate Miller remembered her mother working as

416

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

a cleaner early morning and late at night but emphasized her presence at
home during the day. ‘Y’know my mum was there during the day or whatev-
er. Didn’t miss her. Y’know she was only doing a little part-time job.’ She
then explained why her mother got a job as a school dinner lady ‘to be home
with us in the school holidays’. Later in her interview, however, Kate went
on to reflect on the fact that she herself had worked during much of her chil-
dren’s lives and was rather proud of this now. Yet she evaluated her mother’s
employment according to the mores which applied during her childhood
rather than according to the mores of the time when she herself was a full-
time working mother (the 1960s). Interestingly, her own daughter (born in
the 1970s) chose not to work while her children were young and made this
decision during a period (the 1990s) in which the employment of mothers of
young children was rising sharply and becoming more acceptable in Britain.
Kate (grandmother) was indeed rather critical of her non-employed daughter
for ‘running herself ragged’ in pursuit of her children’s welfare. In contrast,
Kate’s daughter had consciously rejected Kate’s practice and wanted to ‘be
there’ for her own children.
Working-class great-grandmothers remembered their grandmothers as
providers of care during their childhoods. So too working-class grandmoth-
ers remembered their grandmothers. Pauline Smith noted that as a child she
never came home from school to an empty house because ‘Granny was
there, Nan was there, and old aunt D. . . . There was always people.’ The
social stigma of being a ‘latchkey kid’ was thus avoided. As Attias-Donfut
and Segalen (2002) suggest, grandmothers also represent continuity; they are
a source of symbolic support as well as practical (childcare) support – the
‘backbone of the family’ – and provide a sense of ‘genetic security’.
The experiences of two grandmothers are cases in point. When Thelma
Hillyard’s father was killed, the family went to live with her maternal grand-
parents. It is perhaps significant that, although her mother was working at
the time, she did not refer to it. Her account conveys the emotional security
provided by her grandparents:
. . . they loved us very much, my nan and granddad. They had a nice big house.
And a lovely garden. And I can remember in the summer we used to – they had
a garden, they had a yard, ’cos they – my granddad was a builder, so it was
working premises – and they had a garden at the top. And I can remember we
used to sit up in the [?] to dry our hair in the summers with our nighties on, and
that sort of thing . . . And then, when Mum got married again – we didn’t live
far away, we still lived in Y. And we used to go to Nan’s every . . . for tea,
which we used to look forward after school. And Nan and Granddad were –
they were the ones that sort of – well, all nans and granddads do – look after
you. They used to take us on Sunday school outings, we used to go on the train
from X, because the train was running then. And, um, one of the highlights, I
can remember when we were tiny, was they’d take us out in the car to the pub
on a Sunday (laughs). That was quite nice. Er – yes. They were very – very
happy days, all my sort of younger days.

417

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

Carol Masters’ parents and older sister shared a council house with her
maternal grandparents and an uncle until she was 5. She was very close to
her grandmother, whom she regarded as ‘the mainstay of the family’ and a
source of support with respect to difficulties caused by her father. ‘My
grandma was a real, dominant character in my life. I absolutely adored my
grandma … At times it wasn’t a very happy environment, but we always
went back to Grandma. So she was the mainstay of the family.’ The family
moved to a prefabricated council house in 1947.5 The house was close to her
grandparents, but they moved even closer when they got another council
house in the same road.
The grandparent generation also recalled their childhoods as being
focused on the nuclear family in which mothers occupied a pivotal position.
Indeed the post-1945 period witnessed the advent of the nuclear family ideal
symbolized in the growing importance placed upon the ‘family holiday’
among a wider population. This was due to the success of some groups of
manual workers in gaining from their employers the right to annual leave.
For a minority there were also more possibilities for family travel through
the mass production of the motor car (Inglis, 2000). Holidays were not nec-
essarily very expensive or taken far from home. Holidays away were, how-
ever, only one small part of the long school holidays in which mothers’ pres-
ence was remembered as crucial. Janice Brand, whose father worked in the
local cooperative shop, described taking a family holiday with relatives and
ended her remarks by asserting that her mother never worked in the school
holidays. Janice:
My Dad didn’t travel very far, he didn’t drive, he rode a bike everywhere. So
where we went was extremely limited. Ummm. We used to go down to X for
our, for our holidays. But that was with an aunt and uncle usually. ’Cos they
probably had then a car, and they could actually take us down, or we went on
the train, or the bus, as the case may be . . . as I say, we didn’t go very far– . . .
just X, and that was probably the limit of our holidays . . . my childhood was,
was just a very basic childhood I think, just surrounded by family, with a Mum
and Dad. My Mum was always there. She had school holidays off with us. She
never worked in, in, in the holidays.

The grandmother generation recalled their own childhoods through

different lenses from the older generation: new psychological ideas and the
growing importance of the nuclear family. But there are continuities also
with the previous generation such as the importance of grandmothers and in
their somewhat rose-tinted recollections, grandmothers, like great-grand-
mothers, adopted a comparative time perspective. They contrasted the risky
nature of present childhoods with the freedoms and ‘simple pleasures’ of
their own past childhoods. Grandparents who grew up in rural areas recalled
being free to roam the countryside with their siblings and friends, and those
who were urban children related the pleasures of playing in the street. Carole
Masters remembered playing in the street with local children and making
their own simple pleasures.

418

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

As I say, all the children were able to play in the street. The things that we
played mostly with were – were one swing in the garden – I can remember that
– which was made by – I don’t know if it was my granddad or my dad. The
children in the street used to put on lots of concerts that we used to go to, and
we used to have to pay a farthing to get in, in the back yard of one of the chil-
dren, whoever was putting on the concert. But mainly it was simple, really sim-
ple, entertainment that we – er, managed to get by with as children. We played
in a big field at the top of the road, which I can’t imagine our children at all
going out of our sight, you know, in this day and age. But in those days I can
remember this big field being called ‘the Den’ that we all accumulated in, and
we played for hours there.

However, while this generation from the vantage point of their own
childhoods subscribed to dominant ideologies of the period concerning how
best to look after children, this did necessarily lead them to deny their own
positive adult experiences of being working parents. After their youngest
children started school, some grandmothers returned to education and the
labour market to build employment careers (Brannen et al., 2004).

Parents: childhoods in the 1970s

The parent generation was born during the liberal climate of Britain in the
late 1960s and grew up in the neoliberalism of the late 1970s, with its
emphasis on enterprise. Over their lives, this generation has seen a reversal
in ideas around collective welfare towards a greater emphasis upon individ-
ual responsibility and the stigmatization of ‘welfare dependency’. Unlike
their forebears, this generation experienced and expects higher standards of
living with respect to both adulthood and childhood. At the same time, the
period was marked by change and uncertainty in the economic spheres (in
contrast to the postwar period). This generation has also experienced consid-
erable household change as divorce rates rose from the 1970s. Like the two
older generations, this generation grew up in a period in which there was lit-
tle acceptance of British mothers of young children joining the labour force.
However, they took for granted the ideology of gender equality (which
developed in Britain in the mid-1970s). Moreover, as the article discusses
later, by the time this generation became mothers it had become normative
for mothers to remain in work when they had children (Brannen et al.,
1997).
To focus on some continuities with older generations, current parents
considered their grandmothers to have been very important not only as a
childcare resource but also a source of meaning and stability. Jane Smith was
born into a close-knit working-class family and grew up in an inner-city
neighbourhood of London:
My dad was working a lot. He worked hard, my dad. Well, my mum worked as
well. She still does. But my mum was – I mean, my nan. We used to go to my
nan’s after school. My mum would be shopping after work, or something . . .
Old Nan, yeah. She was the eldest of all her brothers and sisters, so – And their

419

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

dad died young. So I think they – I think she held the family together. I think
when she dies, it will – it’s all spread out a bit. We won’t see so much of aunts
and uncles – well, my great-aunts and uncles, really. Her brothers and sisters.
’Cos there’s hundreds of them! . . . it was always in [Nan’s] after school, any-
way, even if my mum was there. A cup of tea and a chat. We still do it now.
Four o’clock, that’s it. Tea-time!

The childhoods of the parent generation were much closer in time than
for the other two generations, which adds a dimension of immediacy to their
accounts of childhood. Childhood also constitutes a large chunk of the life
course of this generation who, at interview, were in their mid-twenties to
mid-thirties. Moreover, this generational group was currently witnessing
their own children’s childhoods and was reflecting upon them from the cur-
rent vantage point of being a parent.
In accordance with a general trend towards ‘the self-regulating sub-
ject’ (Bernstein, 2000; Rose, 1990), this generation of current mothers and
fathers saw themselves as being actively involved in creating their children’s
childhoods although it may also be argued that individualism in family life
has deep roots (Jamieson, 1987). In the 1990s, as the British welfare state
was restructured and trust in experts waned, the neoliberal climate gave a
new emphasis to individual agency. The concept of ‘active parenting’ (a non-
gendered concept) infused public policies relating to children’s welfare, for
example parental involvement in schools and parental responsibility for
keeping their children off the streets (child curfews).
A current mother of two young children evaluated her own mother’s
engagement with her own children positively. Juliet Kent’s childhood was a
privileged middle-class one; Juliet considered that her mother gave a sense
of community and purpose to the lives of her three daughters. Juliet com-
mended her mother for having been very proactive in encouraging herself
and her sisters to participate in lots of extracurricular activities. Juliet was at
pains to note that, while her mother had a part-time job, she was very present
and very ‘proactive’ in their lives. Her account graphically suggests her
mother’s occupancy of space and place:
. . . there was one corner where two roads met, and a second corner, and we
would always meet at first corner or second corner, and I remember her arriving
in the car and picking us up from school. I remember homework round the
kitchen table, and I remember all the activities that we did from – we were all
quite musical, so we all had an instrument, plus the piano. And I remember all
this stuff that she used to take us to, and sit with us, and take us to exams and all
that. So she was very – definitely very – very proactive, and very, um – there
was lots always going on. It was a very noisy, kind of busy house . . . She
always picked us up from school, so she worked funny hours. I was never aware
of her – we had au pairs, we definitely had au pairs. I remember hundreds of au
pairs. So I’m sure au pairs kind of had a part to play in all of that. But, er, I cer-
tainly have absolutely no recollection of her not being there, really.

The current parent generation viewed the childhoods of their own children
as a distinctive phase not merely as a time for ‘growing up’. They saw it as a

420

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

world which they, as parents, constructed for and engaged in with their chil-
dren. However, unlike the previous generations, this active involvement did
not necessarily imply mothers’ presence on a full-time basis. In accordance
with their employment commitments, ‘quality time’ has supplanted ‘quantity
time’ both as a value and a reality. The two discourses of mothers’ employ-
ment and parenting are, however, kept separate in their accounts. From the
vantage point of being a currently ‘involved parent’, some of this generation
of mothers looked back at their own childhoods and found them wanting.
Few criticized their mothers for being housewives (for part of their child-
hood) while more criticized them for not providing a more child-centred
childhood. Thus they evaluated their mothers and fathers according to cur-
rent parenting mores while at the same time, according to the norms which
applied during their childhoods, they were anxious to portray their child-
hoods as ‘happy’ and their mothers as ‘there’ for them.
Janet Brand grew up in a working-class family and scrutinized her par-
ents’ parenting. Through marriage and employment, she developed aspira-
tions, wanting her new family of orientation to ‘get on’ in the world. In par-
ticular she was keen to help her young daughter in her schooling. Looking
back to childhood, she reviewed her own parents’ efforts in this regard.
While emphasizing that her own parents were ‘good parents’ and that her
mother was always ‘there’, Janet now considered them too home-centred
and too concerned with humdrum routines. In seeing them as failing to help
her and her sister with their schooling, she compared them unfavourably
against her current ideals. By ‘sitting down’ more with her daughter, Janet
hoped to inculcate skills and introduce her to new places and experiences.
Janet contrasted the way her parents acted as parents with how they now act
towards their grandchild.
My childhood. Um – it was happy –. But, um, I think, with my mother – my
mother and father were – have worked all their lives, but they didn’t actually
have any ambitions to do any better than what they have – they achieved. So I
think, really, sometimes I think they look at [us] . . . and think, Ooh, I wish, you
know, we’d achieved that. But it’s trying to make them understand that, if they
wanted it, it was there. It’s just having the – the goal to go and do it. Um – but,
yeah, it was happy. I mean, they’re – they’re lovely parents, they’re very caring,
but it’s just that, perhaps homework-wise, and things that I wanted them to
understand and help me with, they just had no idea, or no clue, how to do it. . . .
I found school terribly hard. I mean, we try and encourage [daughter] as much
as we can. You know, If you have any problems, or if you want to do any read-
ing, come and see us, and – you know, she’ll sit down. But I don’t ever remem-
ber doing that with my mother and father. Um – but, yeah, it was happy times.
And, as I say, we get on – lovely now. And they absolutely dote on [grand-
daughter]. But they will actually sit down with a book with her. I’m thinking,
Why didn’t you do that with me?

Geraldine Horton, from a middle-class family, said that her childhood

was happy but questioned her own parents’ wisdom in sending her away
to boarding school. Again, she looked back at her own childhood from the

421

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

vantage point of her current hopes for her own children. ‘I had a happy
childhood. My childhood was just – because I went to boarding school, it
just seems one big blur, really. I mean, I wasn’t home at the night-time. I
didn’t do after-school clubs with my mum and dad. They really weren’t into
all of that at all.’
Sonia Masters, also from a middle-class family, regretted similarly that
her parents sent her to boarding school and found it difficult to understand
why they were not more ‘flexible’ and had not explored ‘other avenues’.
I just still to this day cannot believe how an institution can replace a family life.
I mean I think family life is so crucial, and you know to be ripped so cruelly
away from all of that, in my most formative years. Y’know, through puberty
and all of that, as a young woman developing, I thought was really very damag-
ing. Knowing how unhappy I was. Ummm. And I s’pose they in some ways,
y’know, I can see now their hands were tied. Y’know there wasn’t any alterna-
tive. They were concerned about my academ– . . . Yeah, I mean I can see . . .
But I just sort of kind of wondered why they hadn’t maybe explored other
avenues . . . Thinking about my own children and their schooling, y’know. I
s’pose it is difficult, because you know, y’know, you have the experience of
your years to know what you think will be good for them. And I can understand
that fully. Ummm. But I think there has to be some flexibility and some deci-
sion-making . . .

Fathers also came in for criticism especially for failing to be sufficient-

ly involved in their daughters’ (and sons’) lives, as two sets of comments
about their middle-class workaholic fathers suggest.
Rowan Hurd: Well, I’m the youngest of three children, and was looked after by
my mum all of the time. My dad’s always worked, although he had a period of
unemployment when he sent my mother out to work (for a short time). But then
she still looked after us. I don’t remember him ever doing anything for us when
we were children. He worked, and that was it. In fact, I don’t really have that
much memory of him being around at all. He would go out to work at 7 o’clock
in the morning, and he’d come back at 7 o’clock at night.
Geraldine Horton: My dad never used to come home from work until midnight
most of the time, and when he used to pick us from school, he was always late,
so it was always me and my sisters looking out of the window, waiting for Dad
to drive up the drive. And he was always, always late.

Parents who, as children, had experienced divorce and stepparenthood

did not blame their parents directly for this. However, they saw divorce as
having marred their childhoods.6 Since none of the current parent generation
was divorced, they were able to view divorce through the eyes of childhood.
Stella Miller’s childhood memories focused on her parents splitting up – ‘I
don’t think of us as a family at all’. She remembered resenting the arrival of
her stepfather and resisting his presence; she also fought against her moth-
er’s authority and that of the school, eventually moving to live with her
father:
. . . it always is sort of like the adolescent thing. But, I think because you do
come from a split family, you, you’ve got an extra string to your bow, if you

422

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

know, for want of a better expression. You can just sort of say, ‘Well that’s it, I
don’t care, I’m going over there to live with them now.’ (Yeah. The other
option.) Yes, that’s right. ‘I’m going to tell Dad you’ve said this’, or, ‘I’m
gonna tell Mum you said that’, you know you just . . . it all adds to the, as I say,
you know, your stepparents telling you what to do and why should they?

The parent generation did not lay all the blame on their parents for
their upbringings. They also attributed agency to themselves. In another
family, all three generations experienced poverty and disruptions in their
childhood. The current mother reflected on the difficulties which her parents
had coped with and how she has since managed to come to terms with the
disruptions. Again, grandmothers were remembered as key figures providing
support:
. . . but it was nice, you know, you get spoiled when you go and stay with your
grandma don’t you, so that was . . . I enjoyed that, and the garden was a lot
nicer up there as well, and . . . they used to grow all their own fruit and vegeta-
bles – potatoes and radishes, well all sorts really, ’cos like I said there was a lot
of land there, you know, so you know, . . . and then there were loads of trees . . .
it was dad’s – my dad’s mum. Yeah, she looked after us . . . both my grandfa-
thers died . . . just two grandmothers, but erm, my mum’s mum, she was suffer-
ing from dementia, so she wouldn’t really have been able to look after me, any-
way, but my dad’s mum, she was quite capable and able, and she lived till about
87 I think, and erm, yeah, I used to love spending time with my nan. Yeah, I
bonded with her, better than I think I did with my mum to be honest, which I
suppose – I don’t know whether it’s a shame or not really. I get on well with
mum. It’s not that I don’t get on with my mum, but I’ve got on with my nan bet-
ter because I suppose she was there when I was so young, when I was a baby, so
it was a natural bonding instinct I think, yeah.

Sadly the grandmother died when she was 13. However, even so, Sheila
looked back now at her childhood, remembering how angry she once was
but also managing to find positive experiences and relationships in her past.
It is significant that Sheila and her partner were both very actively involved
with their children and were determined to bring them up differently.
This generation’s views of childhood involves close scrutiny of their
childhood from the standpoint of being relatively new parents. But it also
occurs in the context of what Beck refers to as widespread social processes
of individualization (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995) and
what Giddens refers to as the reflexivity of late modern society (Giddens,
1991). These social processes are reflected in shifts in British public policy
but also in the current generation’s beliefs in their own agency and autono-
my as an increasingly acceptable ‘vocabulary of motive’,7 both with respect
to parenting and their lives more generally. Such beliefs in agency and
empowerment on the part of current generations are more evident among
some groups than others (Brannen and Nilsen, 2002). However, they are typ-
ically accompanied by silence about the structural contexts and constraints
in which agency is embedded (see also Nilsen and Brannen, 2002).

423

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

Discussion and conclusion

The article has explored the meanings of childhood as viewed by different
generations who grew up in different historical periods. It demonstrated that
the stories which the different generations of women relate about their child-
hoods and the normative vocabularies they draw upon differ. The oldest gen-
eration dwelt on the importance of families being able to provide children
with external, materially secure childhoods and family lives, while the mid-
dle generation stressed the importance of parents providing internal, i.e. psy-
chological, security for the individual child. The youngest generation stood
out in their emphasis upon their own agency in shaping their children’s
childhoods. The two older generations spoke to a world in which children
were free from external dangers and in which childhood was in some
respects a collectivized community experience; this they contrasted with
current concerns about protecting children from the dangers of the external
environment.
While clear differences between the accounts of different generations
emerged, there were also similarities. All three generations referred to the
importance of grandmothers in children’s childhoods especially in working-
class families. In periods in which mothers worked when they were ‘sup-
posed’ to be at home, grandmothers were seen as parental figures as well as
carers. The importance of living near grandmothers at times of difficulty was
also underlined. In some families who stayed close geographically to one
another, grandmothers acted as a central focus for the family, not only giving
meaning to their lives but acting as a cohesive force and a sense of their her-
itage.
These generational studies need to be analysed taking into account cer-
tain methodological and theoretical issues. First, it is necessary to interpret
informants’ accounts in relation to life course phase, which informants may
not always make clear in their narratives. In recounting the stories of their
lives, informants typically moved between different life course phases.
Great-grandmothers looked back from a late phase in the life course over the
whole of their lives which gave them access to a greater number of interpre-
tative contexts (Nielsen and Rudberg, 2000). They were, on the other hand,
distant from earlier life course phases. They were also distant from their
great grandchildren not only because of length of time and lineage but also
because the grandparents assumed such prominence in great-grandchildren’s
lives. Accounts of great-grandmotherhood were notably ‘thinner’ than
accounts of grandmotherhood. Grandmothers, by contrast, spoke both from
their current position as the ‘pivot generation’ – as mothers of adult daugh-
ters, whom they witnessed trying to combine parenthood with employment,
and as daughters of their (elderly) mothers. In contrast again, the parent gen-
eration related their stories as parents currently engaged in caring for young
children. Moreover, childhood was more immediate to this generation, being

424

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

closer in time to the present. And since they viewed childhood from their rel-
atively new status as parents, it is not surprising that they put the parenting
practices of their own parents under the microscope.
An analyst of biographical accounts must take note also of the timing
of a life course phase for a given generation. Thus the grandparent genera-
tion who, on average, had children relatively young became grandparents
rather earlier in the life course than the former generation. This has implica-
tions for their capacity and willingness to care for grandchildren, the
longevity of their relationships with grandchildren, and possibly also for the
way they spoke about their relations with grandchildren.
Second, this type of study underlines the importance of taking note of
the types of account given within interviews, for example whether the inter-
viewee is giving an evaluation or a graphic description of childhood, and the
time frames particular accounts refer to, for example whether they evaluate
childhood in relation to present-day criteria or the criteria of past times.
Since the oldest generation experienced nearly a century of social change, it
is perhaps unsurprising that, in contrast to the two other generations, they
recounted more public accounts than private stories (Cornwell, 1984). They
engaged in meta-narratives of progress in which they told stories of ‘real
struggle’ of moral right over material degradation. Sometimes great-grand-
mothers and grandmothers viewed the past through the rose-tinted spectacles
of the ‘good old days’ contrasted with what they currently viewed as typical
of today’s childhoods, which they disparaged (Samuel and Thompson,
1990). At other points in their interviews, especially with respect to women’s
changing expectations of educational and employment opportunity (Brannen
et al., 2004), by present-day criteria interviewees found the past wanting.
Thus a current mother judged her childhood from the values of her time as a
child but subscribed to current values concerning present-day childhood. It
is therefore important to be attentive to the ways interviewees shift time per-
spectives within the interview since this may help to make sense of what
may appear at first sight to be contradictory viewpoints.
Third, it is important to interpret accounts of the past as ‘small pockets
of history’ preserved in individuals (Nielsen, 2003), that is to understand
childhood in relation to the sociohistorical contexts which each cohort
inhabited during childhood (Mills, 1967). As Mannheim (1952) suggested,
generational identities are shaped in the formative life course phase.
Understanding accounts as resources of history is problematic, however. It is
difficult to disentangle how far narratives of childhood represent the past and
how far they are shaped by current discourses, contexts and practices
(Nielsen, 2003). While emphasizing differences in their experiences, it is
also important to note that the older two generations shared, to some extent,
the public discourses of the present day; they were understanding and sensi-
tive to the practices of current parents – their own children and grandchil-
dren (Brannen et al., 2004). This was brought about by the fact that the life

425

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

course phase of the youngest generation was held constant in this study, with
all current parents having a child under 10 years old. Thus it is important to
disentangle how accounts relate to lived experience and how informants
move between the remembered experiences of past and present (Nielsen,
2003).
The contextualization of life stories is a theoretical as well as a
methodological issue. In analysing generational accounts and contextualiz-
ing them in relation to the conditions which prevailed at the time of report-
ing and in relation to the times to which informants’ accounts refer, it is
important to note that informants make very variable reference to the struc-
tural contexts and resources available to them (Nilsen and Brannen, 2002).
When great-grandmothers described childhood in material terms, the
researcher may have to fill in what is unsaid. For example, she needs to
understand that most women of this generation came from working-class
families who lived through the economic uncertainty of the interwar years
and a time when few opportunities existed for women either in education or
employment. It is significant that great-grandmothers from working-class
origins were more attentive to the socioeconomic landscape than those from
advantaged backgrounds. Similarly, in making sense of the grandparent gen-
eration’s description of childhood in psychological terms, it is important to
note the context: the economic certainty of the postwar period (near full
male employment and increasing intergenerational mobility); the develop-
ment of the British welfare state; greater educational opportunities, particu-
larly for girls; the postwar psychology of maternal attachment which sup-
ported the government’s requirement to create jobs for men after the war and
return mothers to the home.
In interpreting the accounts of the current generation of mothers of
young children, emphasis has been placed upon the way they attribute
agency to themselves. Here again, as researchers we may take note of the
social context of the 1990s: a climate of economic uncertainty, a shrinking
British welfare state, a fall in traditional male employment, girls’ increased
success in education outstripping boys and the increased rates and growing
acceptance of women’s and mothers’ employment. We may also attend to
public discourses, in particular a waning belief in experts, and the reconcep-
tualization of citizens as empowering subjects who exercise individual
responsibility, a highly positive rhetoric which is contrasted with negative
discourses of ‘welfare dependency’.
However, in attributing agency to themselves, it is also important to
note that the youngest generation is least articulate about the social context
in which their agency is embedded (Brannen and Nilsen, 2002). Such
silences may in part be related to life course phase: the recent experience
of becoming a parent; the lack of distance between adulthood and childhood;
the requirement of the research interview to look back at being a child while
thinking about what it means to parent a young child. Additionally, as

426

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 BRANNEN: CHILDHOODS ACROSS THE GENERATIONS

suggested earlier, the ‘agency discourse’ may relate to broad social processes
referred to as individualization. It may also be argued that such concepts
break the classical sociological link between structure and agency as two
sides of the same coin and have a particular correspondence with current
neoliberal political rhetoric (Nilsen and Brannen, 2002). Such societal
processes of individualization may constitute ideological forces which con-
strain individuals from making the connections between biography and soci-
ety (Bauman, 2001). In seeking to understand how informants make sense of
their family lives across time is a difficult sociological endeavour.

Notes
I wish to acknowledge the work of my colleagues in this study: Peter Moss, Ann Mooney and
Emily Gilbert. The work was funded by the ESRC under the Future of Work Programme.
Thanks are due to comments from Peter Moss, the anonymous referees and the journal editors.

1. We adopted the Biographic-Interpretive Narrative Interviewing approach (Wengraf,

2001) with some adaptations. Following the method in the first part, respondents were invited
to give an account of their lives from childhood onwards, with a minimum of guidance and
intervention from the interviewer. This provided an opportunity for the respondent to present
his or her own Gestalt. In the second part, the interviewer invited the respondent to elaborate
on salient events or experiences that had figured in the initial narrative. Third, using a more
traditional semi-structured style of interview, the interviewer asked questions relating to the
specific foci of the study if they had not already been covered in sufficient detail in the first
two parts of the interview. This final phase also included the use of a vignette to explore nor-
mative views about parental employment and childcare relating to a contemporary situation of
parenthood.
2. Names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
3. A tenement in the dictionary is described as a dwelling house let to different tenants but
in common parlance usually refers to this type of housing built in the Victorian period for
housing poor people.
4. Playhouses in the West End of London.
5. Councils were using prefabricated buildings as a quick and cheap means of rehousing
families in the postwar years.
6. Despite the focus on intact families among those interviewed, one set of grandparents
who had divorced was included and some of those marrying into the families and experienced
divorce in their own families of origin.
7. The originator of this concept is C. Wright Mills (1967).

References
Ariès, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood. New York: Vintage.
Attias-Donfut, C. and M. Segalen (2002) ‘The Construction of Grandparenthood’, Current
Sociology 50(2) Monograph 1: Filiation and Identity: Towards a Sociology of
Intergenerational Relations: 281–94.
Bauman, Z. (2001) The Individualised Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Beck, U. and E. Beck-Gernsheim (1995) The Normal Chaos of Love.Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

427

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013

 CHILDHOOD 11(4)

Brannen, J. (2002) ‘Lives and Time: A Sociological Journey’, Professorial Lecture, Institute of
Education, London, June.
Brannen, J. (2003) ‘Towards a Typology of Intergenerational Relations: Continuities and
Change in Families’, Sociological Research Online 8(2); at:
www.socresonline.org.uk/8/2/brannen.html
Brannen, J. and A. Nilsen (2002) ‘Young People’s Time Perspectives: From Youth to
Adulthood’, Sociology 36(3): 513–37.
Brannen, J., P. Moss, C. Owen and C. Wale (1997) Mothers, Fathers and Employment:
Parents and the Labour Market in Britain 1984–1994. London: Department for
Education and Employment.
Brannen, J., P. Moss and A. Mooney (2004) Working and Caring over the Twentieth Century:
Change and Continuity in Four-Generation Families. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Cornwell, J. (1984) Hard-Earned Lives: Accounts of Health and Illness from East London.
London: Unwin Hyman.
Corsaro, W.A. (1997) The Sociology of Childhood. London: Sage.
Elder, G.H. Jr, J. Model and R.E. Parke (1993) Children in Time and Place: Developmental
and Historical Insights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giele, J.Z. and G.H. Elder (1998) Methods of Life Course Research. London: Sage.
Harris, C.C. (1983) The Family and Industrial Society. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Inglis, F. (2000) The Delicious History of the Holiday. London: Routledge.
Jamieson, L. (1987) ‘Theories of Family Development and the Experience of Being Brought
Up’, Sociology 21(4): 591–607.
Kessen, W. (1979) ‘The American Child and Other Cultural Inventions’, American
Psychologist 34: 815–20.
Mannheim, K. (1952) Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Mayall, B. (1994) Children’s Childhoods: Observed and Experienced. London: Falmer Press.
Mills, C. Wright (1967) Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nielsen, H. (2003) ‘Historical, Cultural and Emotional Meanings: Interviews with Girls in
Three Generations’, NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 11(1).
Nielsen H. and M. Rudberg (2000) ‘Gender, Love and Education: The Way Out and Up’, The
European Journal of Women’s Studies 7: 423–53.
Nilsen, A. and J. Brannen (2002) ‘Theorising the Individual – Structure Dynamic’, in J.
Brannen, A. Nilsen, S. Lewis and J. Smithson (eds) Young Europeans, Work and
Family Life: Futures in Transition, pp. 30–48. London: Routledge.
Rose, N. (1990) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.
Samuel R. and P. Thompson (1990) The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge.
Wadsworth, M.E.J. (1991) The Imprint of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wengraf, T. (2001) Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative and Semi-
Structured Methods. London: Sage.
Zelizer, V. (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child. New York: Basic Books.

428

Downloaded from chd.sagepub.com at Cairo University on January 17, 2013