Sally Haslanger's Theory Of Social Construction

While aging itself is a biological process, what it means to be a child is socially constructed. This means that there is no intrinsic cultural or social meaning to the biological process of aging. Rather, cultures infuse youth and age with meanings. Something is a social construction if it is a covert or overt product of social practise, and childhood is no exception. Childhood is a discursive construction as we categorise those of a young age into this category if they reflect innocence, naivety and dependence. The social construction of childhood identifies children as subordinate and adults as the protectors, those who the children are independent to. I will be giving an account of Sally Haslanger’s theory of social construction in order
In order to understand the importance of the new paradigm regarding childhood, we must first prove that it is a true product of a social construction. The idea of childhood has changed along with the development in our societies views, attitudes and intelligence. Before the 18th century, children were seen as ‘tiny adults’ and there was no real difference between children and adults (Aries). In fact, most children, even in the industrial period, were seen as a mere economic asset, a means of supporting the family, which is very different to the modern concept, evidencing how the social construction changed and even developed. Children joined in similar leisure activities to adults, without the construction built in the minds of the adults that such activities were corrupting their minds. It was also accepted that children could be punished for criminal offences in the same way as adults, supporting the fact that the responsibilities of an adult were no different than those of a
The modern sociologist must now look at childhood and see is as social and cultural constructions (cf. Jenks 1996). The significance of such constructions, is that we find them assimilated in our social models and cultural practices. These provide cultural rationales for people to act in relation to, and on, children and childhood. The task of the sociologist is now to deconstruct, such constructions - the cultural ideas, images and models of childhood – by exposing the circumstances and processes of their practical implementation. As this specific route to investigate childhood relies on discursive methods, it can also be called the discursive sociology of childhood. The Structural sociology of childhood has also been developing in which childhood is taken as a permanent element in modern social life, whereas for individual children, it only marks a transient period of life. In this view, 'childhood' itself is a structural phenomenon (see e.g. Qvortrup 1994). To see childhood in this way, it is instructive to think of it as being comparable and parallel to Haslanger’s theory of race and gender being social constructions. Such a parallelization also serves the idea that the particular structural form that childhood takes in a particular country, culture is the result of the continuous interplay between