Private Group active 4 years, 2 months ago

Childhood and Youth Studies

During the late1980s scholars in the social sciences began to chide their colleagues for not taking seriously the study of children and childhood and out of this concern emerged a dramatic increase in the interdisciplinary study of childhood. Some say the impetus for what is sometimes called the “new sociology/anthropology of childhood” can be traced to the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been adopted by all countries except the United States: ‘The interlocking Articles of the Convention offer children an internationally recognized set of rights that they can hold in independence of the interests and activities of the adults that directly surround them’ (Lee 2001, 92). But whatever the combination of forces were for the burgeoning of this interdisciplinary activity it has become an important complement to the field of psychology that had for many decades dominated the study of childhood.