Childhood in crisis?

Hi there,

Please find below my summury about the paper about childhood in crisis :

Considering both the discourses about the meaning of an ideal childhood and to explore the real life of children can lead to understand what effectively childhood is.
In order to think about children needs, the report relies on some criteria, such as:
- Media representations
- Children’s status in the home
- Educational provision
- Healthcare
- Education
We include cultural worlds too, since it suggests an insight to make context of children’s lives, through their lifestyle and their uses of technology.
Besides, studying the relationships between minority and majority worlds offers us a real comprehension of the modern childhood.
In spite of the stereotypes of thinking that growing up in countries where education and health services are provided is ideal, the reality of the West countries demonstrates the weakness of this talk.
Indeed, following the emergence of the phenomenon of “children in crisis” by the beginning of the 21st century, the UNICEF had reported on 2007, that among 21 industrialized countries, the UK and the USA were ranked at the bottom of countries in an assessment in the framework of the well-being of children, whereas Netherland and Scandinavian countries were on the top.
This finding suggests that whatever the level of national wealth, growing up on poverty induces an increase of vulnerability of children, which leads to a more difficult childhood.
Furthermore, the experience of being a child has changed overtime, across generations where it appears clearly how childhood is different between past and present. This reality is supported by several discourses among adults where a general assumption appears under the discourse of “childhood is not what it was used to be”.
This is perfectly illustrated through the principal differences that we can notice between childhood in the past and in the present across the after-school activities and the role of parents in coaching and supervising each children activities they can do.
To conclude, it is important to know how we can understand children, by recognizing the distinctiveness of their cultural worlds and to consider the power relationships between adults and children, and the influence of gender and inequality. It involves to pay attention to the obstacles that childhood face as well, which make it a local experience and a global concern.

Have a good time

So the differences and problems can be very localised.

Hey, I chose the same course as Narimane, so I decided to write in the same subject to not open another one

For me, the course is very superficial, because it touches some very interesting questions and data not only about childhood but also about parenting.

The most different thing I saw in this course was exactly about parenting. The idea that is not the children on crisis, but actually the parents is a way to change the light on this subject. Today we see a ploriferation of experts and books talking about how to raise the kids in a right way, how to be a good parent, that most of the time they feel incapable and incompetent in this job. All that because parenting is no longer a private activity, everybody feels in the right to give opinions. And this contemporary phenomen is harmful for the parents' selfconfidence.