Rated E for Everyone

Jami Spencer English 401 Final Paper

Rated “E” For Everyone

While children’s literature is one of the youngest subdisciplines of English

Studies, there is already talk of its limits, shortcomings, and the subsequent necessity of a broader, more devoted and multi-disciplinary study of children. ‘Children’s Studies’ or

‘Childhood Studies’ is a discipline which is younger still than children’s literature. With its foundation set in 1991, Children’s Studies, much like Women’s Studies and African-

American Studies, seeks to give voice to and gain an understanding of a marginalized group under patriarchal dominance.

The field of Children’s Studies began at The City University of New York,

Brooklyn College, in the Fall of 1991. Gertrud Lenzer, in his introduction to The Lion and the Unicorn’s special issue on Children’s Studies, states that this creation of an interdisciplinary field that is focused on children and childhood was the result of critical, academic, analytical neglect of children. The “corporate sector had been well ahead of the academic disciplines” and capitalized, profited, and expanded by devoting a new and separate market to youth (182). Politically and economically, children were used for money and votes, then discarded, forgotten, and ignored.

Aside from overall academic neglect, the need for this new and interdisciplinary field was realized due to the increasing number of “subspecialties” and the “intellectual division of labor in children-related scholarship across the disciplines” that became disconnected (182). The need for a “holistic conceptualization of children as individuals and as a class…and to develop a commensurate and genuinely comprehensive

1 perspective on and analysis of children” resulted in the foundation of Children’s Studies at Brooklyn College (183).

Throughout its creation and subsequent growth, careful attention has been paid to the idea of the ‘child’ and what that term represents within Children’s Studies. Scholars, researchers, teachers, students, and all involved in the development of this new field have proceeded with caution when considering the image of the ‘child’ within the field. It is precisely because Children’s Studies is multidisciplinary that such caution is necessary.

There is danger of disconnection, misrepresentation, misunderstanding and misinterpretation when so many fields of study come together to focus on the same area of interest. There are plenty of issues of disconnection within the very disciplines themselves, not to mention the many that appear with the attempt to join or cross disciplines.

Karen Coats, in her article for the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, points out such issues from the start. The very name of the field seems to come to question. Coats calls attention to the fact that sociologists such as Lenzer (quoted above) refer to the field as Children’s Studies, but in the humanities, in literature departments, and to Galbraith, Travisano, and Flynn, “childhood” is used instead of “children.”

Although these authors will be mentioned later, the disciplinary differences rear their unattractive, conditioned heads early on in this attempt at a field that cuts across disciplinary lines. While one discipline views children as clients, subjects, and thus real live people, the other focuses on the state of childhood as a “sociohistorical construction”

(Coats, 140). Coats points out, too, that we do not say “Womanhood Studies” but the

2 more inclusive “Women’s Studies” and so settles on the plural and inclusive Children’s

Studies (140).

The naming of the field may seem a minor detail, but after researching and reading several articles across various disciplines, it is obvious that there is much in a name. While Lenzer’s approach is to examine the collective ‘children’ and in doing so examines their state of ‘childhood,’ I find that Richard Flynn and Mary Galbraith tend to focus solely on the conception of ‘childhood’. What this does is create specialization in very distinct, very different areas. Writers such as Flynn and especially Galbraith seem unwilling to cross those disciplinary lines and almost unconcerned with the individual, thinking, feeling child that comprises the collective children currently and historically existing in the state of childhood. Looking at Lenzer’s definition and explanation of

Children’s Studies as established at Brooklyn College, one must conclude that a willingness to travel across the disciplinary border and outside of specified and narrow- minded specialization is an absolute necessity in the field of Children’s Studies. In a field that is genuinely (or at least designed to be) multidisciplinary, an ability and a willingness to communicate with the Other is vital to the survival of, to the reputation of, and to the well-being, growth, and success of Children’s Studies.

As Coats states, scholars in this new and growing field ask philosophical, theoretical, and pragmatic questions and get answers that are “always provisional and experimental, hinging on an ethical and methodological pluralism that must be maintained” (emphasis mine, 140). It is the pluralistic quality, resulting from the interdisciplinarity, that forms the very foundation of what a field focused on the complex, multi-faceted, specificity of children seeks to accomplish.

3 Of course, where children are concerned, there will be hot debate, raised hackles, and much controversy. Every parent has his or her own parental strategies and methodologies. Each knows what is right and what works for his or her child (or thinks they do) and each has very specific ideas, many socially constructed, about the best way to raise a child. The fights between parents in little league baseball games or on the basketball court sidelines are nothing compared to what could happen in an academic field that takes parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, teachers, and people who were once children, each with their own adult, academic, disciplinary methodologies and throws them all together in an attempt to reach a “holistic understanding of children”

(Lenzer, 183).

What is important to Lenzer in terms of Children’s Studies, is that children are not reduced to “specialized abstract fragments that then in turn are hypostatized as representing” an ideal of the ‘child’ (183). This is a recognizable danger in any multidisciplinary field, but especially in one that attempts to understand a marginalized group of which every person involved in the scholarship once belonged. The attempt to avoid such reduction or fragmentation is found in the courses which make up specific programs of Children’s Studies. Courses examine the individual child, physical and psychological development, seek an understanding of children and their surroundings, the effects of their environment, their class and race, children as a class, the child and art, human rights of a child, and the historical and contemporary social constructions of childhood. Multidisciplinary? Yes. Holistic? Seems to be. Appealing? Where do I sign up? Ideal? Definitely.

4 While the human rights of children are supposedly an “intrinsic component of all the disciplinary studies concerned with children,” it is important to remember that though we were all children and most of us love children and seek to improve their condition, we are no longer children and so we research, write, read, and analyze from adult perspectives, using adult lenses, and more specifically, using academic lenses (Lenzer,

184). In Children’s Literature there has been conversation and debate surrounding the possibility of children’s literature itself. For Jacqueline Rose, in The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, it is the impossible relationship between adult writer and child reader. For Rose, “children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first and the child comes after, but where neither of them enter the space in between” (58). If adults are writing from adult perspective, constructing the adult ideal of childhood, then isn’t children’s literature really another form of adult literature?

Aren’t adults then just using the child (as do the politician and the corporation) to maintain control and create the ideal child or childhood based on fictional nostalgia? In terms of Children’s Studies, can the adult separate himself from that nostalgia and that ideal enough to gain a true understanding of children and childhood and to give voice to the marginalized child? In terms of Rose’s statement concerning children’s fiction, I think that Children’s Studies attempts to bring the adult and the child together in that in- between space.

Childhood, for adults, is something lost, idealized, and desired. The response to the unattainable return is either a nostalgic remembrance or the discarded childhood. As

Children’s Literature’s endeavor to survive in academia has revealed, for most scholars, the child is discarded or displaced as unimportant or unaffecting to scholarship.

5 However, it is every scholar’s childhood experiences, desires, and fantasies which shape the very perspectives and attitudes with which they study, research, encounter, and teach.

These same adults, though, rather than embracing the experiences and the stage of development that helped to shape their current perspectives, dismiss the study of the child or literature for children as “less than” adult literary critique and study.

The child is always already engaging in interaction with the adult. The marginalized status of the child is accentuated by the dominance of the adult that is always already present in the life of the child. Galbraith suggests that one goal of childhood (or children’s) studies must be to “investigate, describe, and critique the distorting interests of adults in communication communities” (199). For Galbraith, it is this relation between adult and child that is central to the emancipation of children through childhood/children’s studies. For her, “true children’s literature begins” where childhood studies must begin, “with the existential predicament of childhood in an adult- dominated world” (200). This idea is appropriately illustrated in the field of English

Studies in which “adult” literature is the mature, capable, respected, dominator to the inconsequential, immature, peripheral “children’s” literature.

Children’s Literature has battled its way into academia. The critical study of children’s literature has, for the most part, reached a point of legitimization in the academy. The growth of Children’s Studies programs can only prove beneficial to the further acceptance of the study of literature for children. In fact, much of the work proposed by this new field of study has been ongoing in children’s literature. According to Coats, “in studying children’s literature, we find clues about the way adults have attempted to situate children and the way children have responded” (141). Flynn, too,

6 discusses the role scholars in children’s literature are to have in a Children’s Studies program. In his article, “The Intersection of Children’s Literature and Childhood

Studies,” Flynn claims that despite the growing significance of children’s literary study, the “relative invisibility of children’s literature and culture from the field of cultural studies and the mere handful of books examining the construction of childhood in “adult” literary texts suggest that new tactics are called for” to bring an examination of childhood from the margin (144).

The interdisciplinarity of Children’s Studies seems to me more empowering than the separate fields of Children’s Literature, Child Psychology, or areas of Education.

Such a multidisciplinary field demands respect of the academy with so many scholars from so many different disciplines represented and invested in the study of children.

There is strength in numbers. Whereas Children’s Literature struggles to be heard in a discipline of shouting adults that have discarded and dismissed their own childhood,

Children’s Studies combines the smaller, unheard voices into a larger, more demanding voice.

This field has the potential to be a powerful force in academia in part because one simple question of consideration from one represented discipline leads to discussion and debate and affects the perspectives and attitudes of multiple disciplines and theories.

Whereas the questions raised in Children’s Literature are only heard by and often only posed to others in that sub-discipline, the questions posed in Children’s Studies are heard by many from across the academic board.

So, we know that the very interdisciplinarity of the field is both a strength and a possible hindrance. While voices are heard, many answers are given, many

7 disagreements result, and numerous debates abound. To remain a succinct field, all scholars involved must be willing to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. Also, even amongst scholars in Children’s Literature, there is debate over the best approach to

Children’s Studies, down to the name of the field. Despite the debate, though, Galbraith,

Coats, Flynn, and Lenzer seem to agree that Children’s Studies “seek out actively areas of disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry that have been traditionally neglected precisely because they seem more relevant to the lives of children than to adults” (Coats,

149). What Galbraith calls “my own childhood studies model” differs profoundly from what Coats proposes, which is similar to what Lenzer describes is in place at Brooklyn

College, which differs substantially from Flynn’s more narrow focus on ‘childhood’

(Galbraith, 200). So, while all are concerned with the neglect of children and childhood, there is radical disagreement on models of approach. It is this argument, though, that will enable the emancipation of childhood through children’s studies.

As Coats states, Children’s Studies cannot be “considered a lens or a way of seeing” (148). Nor can it produce a holistic image of “the child.” Instead, scholars must examine the socially constructed definitions of terms such as “child’ and “childhood” and examine the effects of these constructions on actual children. Such an area of study has, in my mind, more potential to see great social change as a result of academic study than any other field. First, Children’s Studies must travel from marginalization in academia to a central field of study. Then, the findings within the field can make their way into mainstream culture and produce social awareness, enlighten parenting trends, and perhaps see a new perception and appreciation of children and childhood as not

8 peripheral to the human condition, not a mere period of transformation, but as a central stage of development socially, physically, academically, and intellectually.

Like the endeavors of African-American Studies and Women’s Studies,

Children’s Studies seeks to give a voice to the marginalized and unheard, to the unappreciated and the used. The empowering difference for Children’s Studies, though, is that every living and even every dead human being belongs to the group, or did at one time. Every adult has experienced childhood, and so is able to be invested and involved in some manner within the conversation of the field. Lenzer’s hope and conclusion is that “Perhaps Children’s Studies can contribute to providing a voice to children and childhood that is commensurate with their reality, and not exclusively a construction of adults” (186). Perhaps. But the reality is that Children’s Studies still consists of adults representing children, speaking for them, and once again telling them who they are. The difference is that this time, the adults in the various disciplines are joining forces and attempting to agree on the voice and the representation. The hope is that all involved will listen to the child, respect the child, genuinely strive to accurately represent the child based on unbiased observation, love the child, and come to know the child, not a nostalgic ideal of the child.

9 Works Cited

Coats, Karen. “Keepin’ It Plural: Children’s Studies in the Academy.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 27 (2001): 140-50.

Flynn, Richard. “The Intersection of Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (1997): 143-46.

Galbraith, Mary. “Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory Childhood Studies Approach to Children’s Literature.” The Lion and the Unicorn 25 (2001): 187- 205.

Lenzer, Gertrud. “Children’s Studies: Beginnings and Purposes.” The Lion and the Unicorn 25 (2001): 181-86.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.

Travisano, Thomas. “Of Dialectic and Divided Consciousness: Intersections between Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies.” Children’s Literature 28 (2000): 22-29.