Haavind
Contesting and Recognizing Historical Changes and Selves in Development
Hanne Haavind
Professor of Psychology
University of Oslo, Norway
[email protected]
The Methodological Challenge:
The Intersection of History and Development
The changing organization of events in time has two facets – the making of history and
the making of personal development – that are rarely examined in close conjunction. In this
chapter I seek to bring history and development together through a set of analytic procedures
that my co-researchers and I are using as we study how a group of children in contemporary
Norway are transferring themselves from the age of twelve to fourteen.
These children are moving through an age-related social transformation. The
institutional marker is the transfer from elementary school (which children in Norway attend
between ages 6 and 12) to secondary school (for ages 13 to 15). As they make the transition,
children draw on discursive markers to prove themselves as teenagers, and thus, not children
any more. This is a personal change where youths-in-the-making leave something behind, and,
in the process, may claim to be more themselves. Together and separately the children are
leaving a social arrangement – middle childhood – that is itself in the process of changing.
This social arrangement is loosely knit by institutions, among which schools and families are
the most significant. The notion that there are periods in life that children are supposed to
move through operates as a set of cultural requirements. Historically, the very staging of age as
well as the specific requirements used to demonstrate the transitions are undergoing change.
The history of middle childhood is constituted by significant events that, taken together,
account for continuities as well as change in the ways in which children move through and out
of relevant social arrangements. Any cohort of children will face conditions during their
middle childhood that in some ways differ from the conditions that were faced by the cohorts
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before them. This is particularly so when children consider themselves in relation to how they
perceive their parents, and when parents perceive their children in relation to themselves. The
change agents are the people who are engaged in creating childhoods for specific children, and
the children who make their ways through particular surroundings. Any child will encounter
more than one way of doing the transitions, some understood as appropriate and some
contested. The history of middle childhood frames the possible and actual development of
children. And, during their middle childhood, children may change history by the ways in
which they develop. The methodological goal is to understand the one by the other –
reciprocally (Modell 2000a).
Studying Transitions Out of Middle Childhood in a Multicultural Norwegian Setting
Periodization is a tool used not only by social historians and developmental
psychologists; it is also one of the basic modes that people use in organizing their lives both
collectively and individually. This theme is basic to our research on immigration as a historical
set of events that may recast children’s experiences of growing up in Norway. When children
who already live in a particular region or neighborhood encounter immigrant children who
have entered a context that is culturally new to their families, their ways of growing up at will
not necessarily cohere (Lidén 2000). Even before we began research in “Eastmeadow,” a
mixed-ethnic area of Oslo, my colleagues and I knew that the issue of what it means to go from
“child” to “teen” was contested in ways that create a divide between the unmarked Norwegians
and the people marked as “foreigners.” 1 This divide in perceptions and interpretations of the
signs of development is stronger among adults who support the development of children than it
is among children themselves. And the divide is implemented more strictly for girls than for
boys. The contested issues have to do with appropriate and inappropriate ways to prove that
one is growing out of the position of being a child and into something that exceeds that stage
both in promise and in risks and dangers.
This research strategy questions conventional assumptions about appropriate
development. Immigration creates cultural diversity, overturns the present, and envisions new
futures for individuals and for the identification of groups. Twelve year-olds in Norway do live
in Norway, all right, but two sets of transnational movements have recently changed where
1
Dr.Philos, Liv Mette Gulbrandsen and I did the fieldwork together, and a group of students
graduating in psychology was conducting several of the interviews.
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they live: One is the movements globally of information and cultural products like consumer
goods and entertainment designated for children and youth (Drotner 2001); another is the
movement of people from poor countries to rich ones like Norway (Lidén 2000). A
commercialized international youth culture provides ways to demonstrate that one is a “teen” in
ways that are different from earlier historical times. Age related interpretations of skin color
and of religious norms are being reinvented. A new type of language deficiency has been
identified. But among teenagers there are emerging new linguistic formats that draw heavily
on the “imperfect” Norwegian commonly heard from the immigrants. How do people
understand differences between groups and changes in historical time? In what contexts might
“deficiencies,” measured in terms of deviance from the Norwegian, be reconfigured as
acknowledged and perhaps even respected difference?
Questions of this sort were on my mind when I chose a research site – an inner city area
of Oslo where immigrant children comprised 50% of those attending the elementary school.
Twenty years ago, there were so few immigrant kids in Norway that very few schools kept
records of their numbers. In the 1980s and 1990s the number of immigrants increased rapidly
in some areas in the inner city, as well as the outer eastern, southern and northern areas,
although not in the western areas where upper middle class and the majority of middle class
families live. The few schools with a large majority of immigrant kids are inner city schools
close to neighborhoods whose residents are nearly all from Pakistan. In the schools with an
even balance between immigrant and Norwegian kids, the immigrants come from families with
roots in a wide variety of countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.
In order to explore changes in the organization and meanings of middle childhood, we
chose to do research in schools that are meeting grounds for unmarked Norwegian children and
children marked as foreigners. We began by doing a year of fieldwork in the three classrooms
in the final year of the actual elementary school. Throughout this autumn the children have all
turned twelve, and the school they are about to finish is called the children’s school in
Norwegian. We invited children from different ethnic background to personal interviews, and
approximately half of the students participated in four or five interviews over the course of the
school year. We followed these students as they made the transition to a nearby secondary
school – which is called youth school in Norwegian. We continued to observe them for another
year when they joined students from an elementary school in an adjacent neighborhood. The
secondary school, which was somewhat larger, was organized into four highly populated
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classrooms. We also did two or three interviews with the kids we had interviewed the year
before. As we gathered data from and about kids making the transition out of middle
childhood, we continually asked what they were up against and how they handled it, together
and separately.
Situating Events in Time
We are examining immigration as an event with two sides: it is a historical change, in
which children are participants; and immigration is altering the contexts in which children are
changing themselves as persons. How can one grasp relevant historical transitions from a
period with little immigration to the current context of high immigration to this area of Oslo?
“Relevant” in this study has to do with the events of immigration that are salient for the ways in
which various children transfer themselves out of middle childhood. How are issues of
immigration and issues of becoming a teen both recognized and contested in our research site?
This site, a neighborhood attached to a school in Oslo, was carefully selected to bring historical
and developmental analysis into fruitful conjunction. We are using this case to generate more
general knowledge of how to investigate these dual processes of change. The knowledge will
be general in the sense that it will tell what is happening when something is happening; it will
also illuminate when it is happening elsewhere and in other times.
Our analysis assumes that developmental transformation in personal time and
sociocultural transitions in historical time are mutually constituted. Everyone is developing,
and everyone is making history thereby. Developmental events are shaped by historical
change. But these events are also shaping history. Development likens narrative, as do history
(Modell 2000a). What methodological steps should one take to get at this dual process of
change? To get at social history one may search not just at the site and in the minds of the
persons who are present there; the search may be broader in time and in place, and the data will
have to be selected and organized. The next section in the chapter will be the first trial in
getting the history right.
The overall idea is to assume that developmental transformation in personal time and
sociocultural transitions in historical time are mutually constituted. People do age-related
transitions by their observations of what is at hand for them. I also theorize that age-related
changes follow from subjective capacities to situate events in time. One sort of awareness
draws upon ideations of bigger and smaller than me, of younger and older than me, and of
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before and after me. Another sort of awareness concerns social historical changes. Both types
of awareness allow people to position themselves in time – to move by or to move their times.
After the first trial in getting the history right, there is a section on getting the process of
development right. Neither of the first trials will fulfill the purpose, but they will clear the
ground for three subsequent lessons: one about making history, another about understanding
development, and the last one about their conjugation.
First Trial in Getting the History Right:
How the History of this Neighborhood in Oslo Concedes with the History of Immigration
Recent immigration to Norway began about three decades ago, starting with young
adult men from North Africa, the Middle East, and some Asian countries who came seeking
employment in the 1970s. These immigrants came to improve their economic prospects in life
not to get access to Norwegian culture. Later smaller groups of immigrants arrived, who
appealed for political protection as refugees. They came from countries more distant from
Europe, such as Vietnam, Somalia, and Chile, and also from areas more proximal to Norway,
such as Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Both processes of immigration were and continue to be
severely restricted by the Norwegian government
Changing Family Life by Immigration from Poor to Richer Countries
What started out as an enterprise of young men eventually turned into a relocation of
families and children. The early work-related immigration gradually expanded through family
reunification and by new marriages, bringing women and children to Norway. A second
generation of children was born in Norway. Refugees tended to come as families, or they
appealed for family reunification in Norway. Gradually the question of “What would become
of these men?” turned into a question of greater concern to most Norwegians: What would
become of these children? And subsequently, what would their entering schools and day care
centers mean to “our” children? The first answers to this question are emerging from schools
with a high proportion of immigrants.
The number of children under the age of 18 in Norway just exceeds one million (of a
population that exceeds four million). Among them approximately 60 000 (close to 6%) are
identified as immigrant children (Barn og unge med innvandrerbakgrunn [Children and Youths
of Immigration] 2000). First generation immigrants include 26,000 children (who came to
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Norway with their parents); there are 34 000 children among second generation immigrants
(these children were born in Norway, but both of their parents are foreign-born). Among all
immigrant kids 70% are from countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South-America;
15% come from Eastern Europe; around 7% come from other Nordic Countries (although on
the local scene, they are not considered to be foreigners). Four out of ten immigrant kids in
Norway live in Oslo, compared to one out of ten of all children. First or second-generation
immigrants constitute 24.6 % of all children in Oslo; the proportion of immigrant students in
Oslo schools ranges from 1% to 92%.
The children who by their sheer presence are changing school settings – some seen as
different because of their skin color, some heard by their language use, and some known by
their cultural and religious habits and beliefs – correspond fairly well to the categories used in
official statistics (Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway] 2000a) 2. Their status as immigrant
kids, or ”foreigners” as the Norwegian children tend to call them, does not go away. What
immigrant kids make of it may vary, as do understandings among Norwegians. “The
foreigners” is a category that lumps together people from many parts of the world. What they
share is their non-Norwegian-ness, which confronts them as a social fact. That is why the
“foreigners” may also use the term to identify themselves. To the Norwegians they represent
something that is different, but in a general way that does not really apply to anyone.
The children know that their parents came for work and money, and for a better future.
Some of them carry their parents’ hopes to improve the conditions of a family on the move.
Successful schooling may be a pathway for the second generation to accomplish what the first
immigrants were unable to do.
A Place Where the Unmarked and the Marked Share the Ground and Separate their Pathways
Immigrants settled in the neighborhood of Eastmeadow because of its location in the
inner city where housing is relatively inexpensive. The residential area was developed in the
1880s and in the 1950s. Small stores and businesses are tucked in between the apartment
houses and small wooden houses line the narrow streets. The people are working class and
middle class; old rehabilitated wooden houses have special appeal for the college-educated
middle class. No one in Eastmeadow is really rich or really poor, and immigrant and
Norwegian families live in similar apartments. However, immigrant families have more
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members per household, and Norwegian families have more possessions and equipment in their
homes.
Looking out on the schoolyard of Eastmeadow elementary school, one sees that
children’s activities cluster and move around in a pattern that both ignores and utilizes
distinctions of age, gender, and ethnicity. In the classroom breaks and on the way to and from
school children set up their own social practices, sometimes deploying practices they “carry
over” from other meeting places. Interaction in classrooms is more clearly guided by the
educational strategies of the school and the practices of the teachers. The adults will arrange
for the children to collaborate across the gender divide, and across other divides that the
children may utilize to create their communalities (Lidén 2000). The teachers perform the
ambiguous
task of treating students equally while also paying attention to their diversities. The school
tries to reduce social and linguistic patterns that are seen as constraining the accomplishments
of the foreigners.
Even though the baseline for Norwegian-foreigner interactions is fifty-fifty, the
Norwegians still carry the privileges of a majority. They share the social arena with a much
larger proportion of others of their kind, and they maintain their kind as an unmarked category
that cannot be questioned. Many of the “foreigners” share only the locally constructed
category of being non-Norwegian. Because there are only two or three parallel classrooms in
any grade, and because the foreigners may come from 20 to 30 different nations of origin,
many of them do not belong to a group that could be identified by themselves or others. The
use of the identifying markers we and they among the children may draw on distinctions of
gender and age as well as on ethnicity, and are used to signify friendship and other forms of
association like being in the same classroom.
A large proportion of “foreign” students in the elementary school and in the secondary
school are Muslims from Pakistan, the Middle East, or from North and NorthEast Africa. They
represent a wide range of Muslim cultural habits and modes of dressing. In the local scene
Norwegians contest notions of Islamic religion as unfamiliar and incompatible with local
religious and secular traditions and habits. Kids who refer to themselves as Muslim do not,
however, unanimously display these religious codes; they may or may not wear traditional
2
The most frequent groups that are represented nationwide as well as in Eastmeadow are from
Pakistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Morocco, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iran, India and Iraqi (in
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clothing; some follow the religious rituals and some do not. Those who perform usually say
that they decided to do so by themselves. They think of it as a matter of how they are and what
they will become. When the Norwegians may think of it as something that is holding them
back, they tend to see it as a way of moving ahead in the making of themselves.
The foreigners are from Asia (mostly from Vietnam, Thailand, China and Sri Lanka) do
not display religious habits at the school scene. Whatever differences they may carry to the
scene tend not to be spoken. Along with children from South American countries (mostly
Chileans) and those from European countries (refugees from the earlier Yugoslavia, like
Croats, Bosnians and Macedonians), these kids may be perceived as having a somewhat
“lighter” version of foreignness than the performing Muslims. In the local school scene it is
not the darkness of skin that defines difference; instead, Norwegian children may say of a
specific child without a marked religious performance that they “never think of him as a
foreigner.” Norwegians decide whether and how being a foreigner matters to them. During the
transition from twelve to fourteen, children may join and separate themselves from others in the
ways in which they demonstrate that they are growing older.
How to Tell a History in the Making
Recent immigration is significant both in the number of people who are involved and in
its cultural importance as a historical event. However, what I have presented thus far is just a
collection of facts that anchors some people in time and place. That approach to history will
not suffice in the effort to understand actual developmental processes. What is needed are not
more facts; they will soon move to the background and further reference to them will be only
impressionistic and associative, as in the conventional methods used in sociocultural studies of
development. This is what John Modell (2000a) observes about focal examples such as the
work of Barbara Rogoff (1995; Rogoff, Baker-Sennett, Lacasa, and Goldsmith 1995) and
Michael Cole (1996), in his essay on how children’s development may be seen historically.
Another example of this stalled condition of analysis is a forthcoming book by Thomas
Cook and his colleagues, on children going from ages 12 to 14 in Prince George County in the
U.S. state of Maryland (Cook et al. 2000). The second chapter, “Prince George County in
Time and Place,” brings a wide array of facts that are meant to contextualize the developmental
pathways of actual children. These facts continue to reside in the background, and they do not
descending order).
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take the reader anywhere closer than just hinting what could matter for the ways in which child
development is supported and enacted within any of the neighborhoods under discussion.
Subsequent chapters do little to connect to time and history in the descriptions of what happens
to the teenagers. According to John Modell this framework for situating events “in time and
place” is just where the methods for analyzing history starts out (2000a). In a more condensed
presentation of the same results, Cook and collaborators have reduced the presentation of time
and place to a minimum in order to make room a presentation of context constructed as
variables (Cook, Herman, Phillips and Settersten, in press).
The point here is not the history of Prince George County, or the history of Eastmeadow
for that matter. The site is not the object of study, but rather a constituent of the method when
the task is to probe the changing dynamics of middle childhood. The task is difficult because
the history of middle childhood as it relates to immigration in contemporary Norway is not
finished, but rather is in the making. Still, there is no doubt that immigration and the ways in
which children from different family cultures encounter one another in schools and
neighborhoods is altering the cultural legacy of some of the values and skills that children may
grow by. One may assume that immigration will challenge how the heritage of institutions,
practices, technologies and traditions built by previous generations, is connected to the present.
The presence of both Norwegians and foreigners in social arenas that up to now kept an
assumed “Norwegian-ness” is reconfiguring transformations by age.
In order to depict social and historical changes not just as a collection of facts laid out
as a kind of background for the life of people, one may recognize recent events within
subjectively-experienced time scripts that link the past and future. Before I return to the
challenge of rendering the history of immigration into a history of significant interpersonal
phenomena, I will ask what conceptualizations of development might be useful. This will help
me be more conscientious about the purpose of historical narration and the questions they are
designed to address.
First Trial in Getting the Developments Right:
What is Happening to Children and What do They Make of It?
Developmentalists generally agree that the study of development should be firmly
anchored in sociocultural contexts (see for example Rogoff 1990; Valsiner 1997; Wertsch
1991). The methodological issue is how this can be done in actual lines of inquiry. One
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approach is sustained by the argument that when contexts are appropriate, they support
development in a way that will reduce or diminish variation in children’s accomplishments.
Another approach assumes that the context should be taken as a set of independent variables in
order to trace how variations create differences (Cook, Herman, Phillips and Settersten, in
press). In this approach, differences in development among children of the same age become
the dependent variable. I will take a brief look at both approaches to see how they might
construe the development of children when they are about to leave middle childhood in a
culturally diverse setting where one set of practices is hegemonic.
Appropriate Contexts will Support Children in General
When the U.S. journal The Future of Children created a special issue on children’s “out
of school time,” they commissioned a review paper on middle childhood development by
Jaquelynne Eccles (1999). Following a practice often used by developmental psychologists,
Eccles organized her essay around the abstracted middle-childhood child. Her goal is to raise
awareness of the needs and capacities for development of real kids at a point in history where
U.S. policy makers are shaping out of school programs. There is no doubt that children’s
agency, the diversity of their actual experiences, and their transitional moves are on the agenda.
But this is not where Eccle’s arguments start. Developmental progress during middle
childhood is linked to general statements about increasing capacities and expansion of social
involvements. We learn that children in this age range are acquiring a sense of competence,
independence and self-awareness, and that they move to more engagement with peers and
adults outside their own immediate family. Her main points lay out developmental steps come
in general ways, focusing on capacities that can be implemented in any time and in any place.
We also learn that these children need to feel good about themselves – which probably is an
affective stance of importance to humans of all ages.
Although I am sympathetic to the idea of supplying children with affordances and
appropriate support, I note that a paradox resides within this sort of construction. Taken apart
from its social context the general child may have no middle childhood at all. It is the
organism and not the culture that is the assumed context in this case. By way of methods, one
may ask whether it is a good idea to create this abstracted category of a child first, and then
observe how these general needs are fulfilled.
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I do not intend to discard the organism as one context for understanding psychological
processes; indeed, the organism is an important reference point for many of the sub-processes
that may integrate in a person during middle childhood. However, my major concern has to do
with middle childhood as it is historically shaped, because that is the context that any child may
draw upon in the integrative creation of self as person. Mixing biological and psychological
logics of inquiry is a common enterprise; mixing psychological and historical logics of inquiry
is also worth considering.
Contextual Variations Create Advantages and Disadvantages among Children
While Eccles starts with an abstracted child, whose organism is the context, another
approach construes contexts as a set of independent variables. This entails defining differences
in some milieu characteristics as a matter of degree. The variable-centered approach assumes
that contexts may vary in how they favor or hamper some generalized capacities that persons
deploy in middle childhood. Aggregates of changes by age are taken as effects of
development. This approach also tends to specify some rather standardized set of human
capacities to prove development – or the lack thereof. A general and unidirectional model links
capacities to contexts, without any comprehension of what happens when persons link
themselves to contexts in order to transform them by adapting to them or opposing them.
A person-centered approach to method reconfigures connections between persons and
contexts. Rather than assuming that developmental changes reside inside persons, these
changes may be observed on the outside by noticing how contexts act transitionally upon
persons. The basic question then becomes not whether general capacities exist, but rather in
what sense does middle childhood exist – for children moving themselves through, or out of
this mode of being in the world. Therefore, a person-centered approach assumes that persons
change the meanings of their age in ways that accrete into development. Development is not a
straightforward thing. It has to be proven in a way that matters to how a person connects to
others. Therefore what counts as development will more often than not be a contested issue.
Because the issue of what children move out of when they are leaving middle childhood is
contested, this transition illuminates the interactional effects of immigration on the experiences
of children. What is taken as a sign of development for some children may signify the danger
of going astray for some others. We need to get at changes in the ways children develop, and
to realize that different subsets of kids may develop by different means. Not to mention that
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they are developing together with their companions, and by being aware of what age and
company may mean to others.
I will illustrate this point by drawing upon interview data we gathered about a girl
named Fatima, whose parents immigrated to Norway from Morocco before she was born.
Fatima had a lot to say to her adult Norwegian female interviewer about her experiences during
the transition from elementary school to secondary school. With worry and pride she observed
that the “we” she belongs to as a member of a Muslim family from North Africa had made it
impossible for her and her two closest female friends – one from Sri Lanka and another one
from Morocco – to move into the ranks of the teen girls. Fatima had watched the social modes
of interaction through which unmarked Norwegian girls transferred themselves out of
childhood. But she did not want to, nor was she allowed to, participate in these modes. The
contested issue was sexuality. A group of girls were perceived by themselves and others as
moving ahead by their age because they talked about heterosexual attractions among
themselves and their friends. Through their talk, they established romantic love-couples. What
they shared was “popularity.” Fatima found their practices both inappropriate and superfluous.
She preferred not to be a part of the preferences that were shared by many of the girls and the
boys. Still, she found it difficult to prove that she was not interested, and she could not find
other means to provide that she was growing older. She took care of her younger sister at
home, and she worked hard on her homework to improve her grades. But she couldn’t bring
anything like that to her age mates as proof that she was not a child anymore. The company
she kept made all the three of them more socially isolated. They were stuck with repetitious
conflicts concerning loyalty among friends. And they knew all to well that the “popular girls”
could ignore them, or even look down on them.
In this case the conditions for developing certain capacities for social participation were
more accessible – and also more preferable and rewarding – to some children than to others.
Children like Fatima have opportunities that are not fully in correspondence with what is
assumed to be beneficial to children among the Norwegians. Nonetheless, she had an urge to
transform herself by age, to demonstrate that she was growing older, through what she did. She
tried to do it by other means, knowing all too well that her incapacities continued to mark her
as a child. The other members of the “we” that she is a part of in her family may have thought
more positively about Fatima’s situation. But if she claimed the legacy of this home based
“we” among age-mates and outside of her family, she would prove her lack of self-governance
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towards her parents in the eyes in of the Norwegians. She is aware of that joining her parents’
view on the issue of sexuality will position her more firmly in the middle childhood she was
trying to surpass.
The unmarked Norwegian girls with a crush on boys in general and some specific boys
in particular are not doing anything of which their parents and teachers do not approve. This is
not about having actual sexual experiences. The girls and the boys together are arranging to
unite “couples” and to break them up, with a complex web of rules and relationships for
regulating their preferences (Gulbrandsen 2000; Thorne 1993). The parties in a running couple
are not supposed to involve themselves in intimate interaction. What they get involved in is
confirmed as transitional, supposedly driven from the inside of these youngsters, with the full
meaning to be revealed to the participants at a later point in time. The practices of no-touch
heterosexuality direct girls toward a point in the future where they have not yet arrived but are
preparing to go. This (in the view of Norwegian parents and teachers) is an exercise in how to
decide about romantic heterosexual unions. By being unable or unable to partake, Fatima gets
no comparable place to display her “promise.” She is left with ambiguous feelings of being
defeated, because she cannot protect herself from being seen as unattractive and compliant.
The teachers even have a way of talking about it: “she is sweet and quiet, and not very smart.”
Does Middle Childhood Exist?
Middle childhood is both context and content. As a context it is what the children are
using, expanding, and breaking away from. As content it is validated and transformed. Adults
create it for children, and children create it by themselves and with other children. Middle
childhood is interesting to study because of its transitional and malleable character. It has to be
carefully constructed by the method of piecing together facts. The social methodologist selects
the most relevant facts from a broad collection of ideas, constructing a sustainable argument
about how personal transitions of middle childhood are transformed by changing times.
For the sake of inquiry, I claim that such a thing as middle childhood exists in each
case. It may be documented as a set of culturally approved pathways for moving away from
being a little child into being a child; for earning the right to be a child and develop thereby;
and then, for growing out of middle childhood and becoming a teenager. These pathways are
institutionally based and supported by cultural values. We need to describe them both as a set
of resources and messages for expanding the social participation of children, and by the ways
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they work in creating developmental affordances and constraints for children. The point here is
not to define the transitional moves at certain points in the age range. The institutional
arrangement of the age when a next stage of schooling starts and when elementary schooling
ends is just one indication of the existence of a set of converging pathways for members of a
cultural group.
Fatima confronts many possible ways to go from twelve to fourteen in Norway as a
Muslim girl. She makes sense of her specific version with accounts that draw upon a set of
ideations that fit and don’t fit for her. Like many other kids she mediates her change by
referring to both a proximal and a more distal time and place. What she prefers from the popmusic and the kind of social activities that she may observe on television reveal her promise to
grow older in that domain. Her older brother and sister supply her with what she is about to
prefer, not her age mates among the girls in school.
A Plea for an Agentic Construction of the Developing Child
As long as context is assessed as an independent factor, any careful effort to explore its
character will construct development as the resulting effect. The person will mainly be seen as
an organism that works by general and internal laws of development. There is reason to study
the middle childhood as a set of transitional changes, but not to fixate it beyond time and place.
The first trial in getting the process of development right brings out a plea for a person involved
in and informed by own development(s). The idea here is to go beyond the conventional
description of contexts as affecting development in persons, and instead to get at developments
as agentic moves that take place within contexts and work up against them.
It does not make sense to say that the social context that Fatima faced was different
from the context faced by the “popular” Norwegian girls in the same grade at her school.
Fatima sees what they see, and she pays attention to it, but from a different position. They
make up the context for each other. Fatima pays more attention to their whereabouts that she is
not a part of, than they do to hers. Nor does Fatima face a context that is similar to theirs
either. It is her awareness, her explorations, and considerations about herself and others that
frame her moves – and the other girls enter into her moves as well.
To look to children to see how they proceed in developments is not to construe the
developmental steps as a one-sided affair carried out by children as the only legitimate experts.
Development is definitely a matter of co-creation. The most significant context any child is up
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against is the way in which they are understood by others. Children may orient themselves by
getting to know about the reactions their behavior may release in others. No one has analyzed
this more carefully than Jean Briggs in her book, Inuit Morality Play (1998). The method in
her case is to fix events in historical time, and in cultural place, and therefore stay meticulous in
her description of how the details of episodes relate to the continuous whereabouts of persons
that are building a social world together – and they will all do so in particular for the threeyear-old girl moving towards her fourth birthday.
The first trial in getting the history right instigated an effort to construe the history of
middle childhood in a way that could be relevant for understanding what actual children are up
against, and what they make of it. The first trial in getting development right brought out a
plea for an agentic developing person. I derive several methodological lessons from these
efforts. Lesson one is to nominate trends in how particular middle childhoods are changing in
historical time. Lesson two is to get at the actual developmental domains that specific children
are picking and using for their transitional moves. Lesson three returns to the mutual
constituency of history and development, by focusing on interrelationships between these two
modes of organizing events in time. History and development are contingently related. The
methodological challenge is to take them as the flip sides of the same coin instead of assessing
them as two independent factors that may or may not connect.
Lesson One:
Historical Changes in Middle Childhoods: The Nomination of Trends
When life modes are changing, they may be observed in the present and reach the status
of trends in the culture, and in the minds of social researchers. The increasing, and still
restricted immigration to Norway is interpreted as a problem and as enrichment. A trend in
history is not just an increase or a decrease in incidences, but the accreted result of how
different groups of people position themselves. I will present my general argument for
nomination of trends as a methodological way of reasoning. Then I will present the actual
nominees, and illustrate how they relate to the specifics of the study of development.
Looking Out for Trends that May Be Relevant for Developing Children
There are basically two ways one might look out for trends, and they may be combined.
One procedure is to collect statistical time series data and look for changes, for example in
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family demography and in the schooling and training of children. Another procedure is to
collect discussions of ideological issues that are related to the future of children, and listen to
how the arguments are sustained by narratives of improvement or devaluation. Immigration is
such a contested issue. Some worry that the development of immigrant kids will be restricted
in a way that eventually will limit their participation and influence. Others fear that the
attention that immigrant kids are getting in Norwegian schools will hamper the effects of
teaching for the Norwegians. Trends are not just a given state of affairs acting upon people.
Trends are created by people, through accretions of their conduct, in consent with and/or in
conflict with the social behaviors of others who offer support or protest and move in a different
way. People identify and act upon trends by recognition or contestation.
It is appropriate work by method to explore the hegemonic interpretations of trends
first. Those who position themselves in the majority, which in this case is the unmarked
Norwegians, as well as those who are positioned as the minority (the immigrants) react to one
another. Norwegian parents may move their children out of classrooms where the proportion
of immigrant kids get too high. Immigrant parents and children may complain about
discrimination or they may refer to deficiencies in the ways in which Norwegian children are
brought up. Contested ideas about the responsibilities of family and of school may eventually
turn into ideological conflicts that may represent new developmental challenges to particular
groups of children. In this study we chose to focus on the social transition from twelve to
fourteen because it is a period when potentially conflicting, and even incompatible ideations of
development are clearly brought forward. The dynamic that is at work locally is also
widespread.
The first step in identifying a trend might be to supply a collection of facts that are
broad enough to sustain a valid argument about how times are changing both in the actual site
and in the broader set of cultures that are being swept away by similar accretions of agency. To
explore what people are doing about these changes one may strategically select research sites
and procedures that are sustained by theoretical arguments and existing knowledge. A trend is
both an analytical and a phenomenological concept, and it is a methodological challenge to
connect these two dimensions. Both inventive and systematic approaches are advisable as one
nominates a list of historical changes that may alter child development. My advice is to focus
on areas of contestation and validation.
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A trend is a socio-historical change that leaves no one untouched. Changes may turn up
at a definite point in time through a suddenly emerging event, or they may take a more gradual
course by the way in which a series of events connects. Trends can be widespread and include
a large number of people, but they can also happen through a significant case. Trends are open
to reinterpretation by participants as well as by bystanders – or in afterthoughts. But they are
not totally wishy-washy. The work by method matters, and nomination of a trend should
follow procedures for selecting and organizing indications (for example, creating statistical
time trends about child immigration and children born to immigrants); assessing the
significance of changes (for example, interpreting what immigration means to children of
school age), appointing events that may break the waves or turn the clock and considering
when the phenomenon in question has been altered (Barn og unge med innvandrerbakgrunn
[Children and Youths of Immigration] 2000).
In our study of immigration-related changes in Norway, I nominate the following trends
as having significant impact on transitions during – and out of – middle childhood: (1)
changing compositions of families; (2) changing distributions of assets and values between
children and adults and among children; (3) the reorganization and creation of new everyday
practices; (4) changing institutions and procedures attached to schooling and training (Modell
2000b).
Trends in Family Compositions
Demographic studies of family composition in Norway reveal major changes during the
last three decades or so. Women bear children at a later age than in earlier decades, and they
have fewer children during their fertile period (Noack 1996). More couples get divorced, and
there is an increase in the number of female-headed households. Increased divorce rates are
part of a demographic pattern where premarital sex and early heterosexual cohabitation have
become the rule rather than the exception. Children are born to couples not yet married (40%
to unmarried parents; only 5% to single mothers) (Jensen 1996). Changing family life in
Norway parallels changes in other Western countries. The point here is not to discuss the
production of high quality time series. Rather I would like to discuss methods for the
interpretation of social changes that such data bring into view.
First of all, these changes in family compositions are agentic, taken up by women in
particular (Noack 1996). They could be set in the history of women entering the modern realm
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within the last hundred years or so. The trend is the accretion of the efforts of women to
develop themselves as persons though the making of responsible choices for their own lives,
and for the lives of their children. More recent changes could be set in the history of how
modern women got entitled to combine their commitments to education and to their paid jobs
with attachment to and caring for their own children (Andenæs 1996).
For children these trends mean that they tend to live with fewer siblings, and with more
mature parents (Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway] 2000a). There is also a turn from
being a child born by fate, to being a child whose birth is chosen. Still one could ask, what
would children know about these changes? They do not consult statistical yearbooks to check
their positions in life. What they do follow up on, however, is their prospects as a child in their
particular family. Children in middle childhood know pretty well how their mode of family life
relates to what is ordinary and valued, or what is contested. The central trends as well as their
statistical variations give clues to the social researcher about what is in the minds of the actors.
Studying timelines to set up trends is a step toward finding out what some people are going
after and what others are trying to avoid. We are looking through our fieldnotes and interview
transcripts to uncover moments of acknowledgement or contestation, and patterns of alliance or
opposition, as people position themselves toward what they observe. Interpreting particular
timelines, we note that a particular change (such as an increase in the number of children born
to cohabiting couples) may be variously understood as supporting progressive movement
forward in these times, or as a sign that the times are being held back or going astray.
When families have only two closely-spaced children, each of them goes through the
age transitions of middle childhood a little bit ahead or behind the other. Differences between
siblings do not imply that one is entitled to care for the other. Rather, parents try to treat them
fair, and not to instigate jealousy or competition between them (Gulbrandsen 1996).
Parallel to the time series demonstrating an increasing likelihood that children will
experience the divorce of their parents (most likely during their middle childhood) are timelines
that show the expansion of new forms of post-divorce parenting. Of the one million
Norwegian children under the age of 18, 77% live with both parents and 18% live with only
one parent. The rest live with a parent who has created a new couple and brought a stepparent
to the family. Twenty years ago approximately 3000 children experienced parental separation
each year. Now the figure is close to 11 000 every year (Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics
Norway] 2000b).
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Today the majority of separating parents arrange for the relationship of each parent to
the child to be continuously nourished and developed further in separate homes. New cultural
conventions may assist separated parents in reaching agreements about visitation and shared
responsibility for the child. Since these arrangements are both contested and celebrated,
children will be actively involved in the establishment of parenting practices in two separate
homes. Not only the adults, but the children as well, will position themselves towards parental
separation as a kind of dual change in history and in their personal lives. The overall recipe is
divorce as a way to protect and separate children from the hassles and conflicts that parents
could bring upon them by sharing a home. This new invention of parenting is mainly one of
sentimental, supportive, and continuous fathering from a father who actually lives in another
household. More than 2/3 of all children of divorce have regular visitation arrangements with
their fathers – and the number is steadily increasing (Jensen and Clausen 1997).
Taken as a trend, changes in the demography of the life course and related transitions
are a dynamic change in which women are confronting and pushing men in the formation as
well as the dissolution of heterosexual couples (Andenæs 1996; Haavind 1984). This trend
may also indicate that the practices and values of the educated middle classes are becoming
more affordable and more widespread. Perhaps even more so in a country like Norway where,
compared with the U.S., material resources such as salaries and home ownership are more
evenly distributed and where the population is more culturally and religiously homogenous
(proportionately few are identified as minorities, and they are seen having chosen that status).
A word is needed about the demographic change toward more households with
children, headed by women. This trend can be interpreted not only as more and more women
ending up as single mothers, but also as a trend towards independent female living, or at least
as a second choice laced with some dignity and pride (Syltevik 2000). Compared with the
U.S., Norwegian single female parents have fewer burdens since public support and
compensatory arrangements for single caregivers are relatively generous. The dual support of a
woman-friendly job-market and additional public policies make ends meet. Still, support from
the mother’s own family of origin often plays a significant role. For middle childhood children
this means living in a sustainable households with their mothers, and often one or two siblings.
Taken as a trend, there is increasing awareness that it is culturally inappropriate for children’s
participation in social life with other kids to be restricted due to limited provision from their
single mothers (Epland 2001a; Fløtten 1999).
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Recent immigration brings trends in family composition that are opposite to the
prevailing ones. Immigrants tend to have more children than Norwegians, and they expect
their middle childhood daughters to care for younger siblings. When Fatima has to go home
directly after school every day, it is because otherwise her little sister of four would not have
company (the mother is there already, so this is Fatima’s care). The regulation of practices in
immigrant homes is more often based on gender and age related statuses than in Norwegian
homes. Negotiations about fairness play a lesser role, or have less of an impact.
Many immigrant parents perceive their new country of residence as a place where
family-based ties and responsibilities are neglected and therefore are in a process of
deterioration. They do not want to model their child care after what they observe. The
Norwegians, in turn, regard the practices of immigrant parents with suspicion, and see them as
lagging behind in time. The immigrants’ ties to their countries of origin may, due to this
dynamic tension in how times have moved and how accompanying changes are evaluated, be
more static and less malleable than their own experiences in the present. For the immigrants
this is a matter of making it “here”; for the Norwegians it is a matter of the immigrants being
from “there.” In either case the positioning of immigrants is at stake: What are the possibilities
and the vulnerabilities of these families if their youngsters become more “Norwegian” as teens,
or if they are protected – even by force or isolation – from becoming more “Norwegian”?
When one ascertains trends in demographic changes, one should be alert to changes that
may be significant even though they do not necessarily involve many people. For example the
increasing number of families with homosexual parents cannot be counted as a central tendency
(it is not even counted by Statistics Norway). But the fact that this family form is becoming
visible at all makes it a significant trend. This unconventional mode of family life is sometimes
interpreted as a dismissal of traditional family arrangements, but it might also be understood as
one of a number of new forms appealing for validation. Referring to gay and lesbian families
as “families we choose,” social scientists name a trend that has governed the transformation of
the heterosexual parenting union itself (Weston 1991). There is no reason to believe that
children from unconventional family forms based on intimacy and personal involvements fare
worse in life than kids from “regular” homes (Stacey and Biblarz 2000). The effort to prove
that there is no difference in general well-being and competence between children from
traditional and unconventional families has led to the misinterpretation that family-contexts do
not matter. Rather, homosexual parents and their children are together creating a life mode that
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draws upon many of the “best” components that used to be exclusively attached to hegemonic
forms. The result is not insignificant, but results from efforts to plant these seeds in new
grounds. In this sense they are making history. A history that can be followed from debates
and conflicts about acknowledging these extraordinary mode of family life (Halvorsen and
Joner 1999).
Trends in Distributions of Advantages and Assets
Trends in the distribution of advantages and assets among children are complicated, and
worth considering for methodological reasons. First there is the dynamic of what comes
through one’s family or through other institutional arrangements; second is the dynamic of
what comes by one’s own accomplishments and what comes by provisioning from others.
Children in Norway get their share of improved standards of living, at the same pace as
the families to which they belong. In general, they are growing richer, safer, and healthier in
every generational turn. Parents tend to give their children the resources that they think will
matter in life, and a validated way of moving through time is to enhance the likelihood that
their children get what was not available to parents in their time (Frønes 1997). Education is
such a resource. For some parents it is a matter of reproducing in your children the positions
you already have yourself. For other parents it is a matter of extending your own ambitions in
life by enabling your children to go further than you have been able to go (Frykman 1998).
These general improvements are masked by new contestations over other distributional
effects. Since. according to the hegemonic Norwegian view, every child deserves perfect
health, more and more children fall short of contemporary standards of well-being. Since,
again according to the contemporary hegemonic vision, no child should be the innocent victim
of poverty, more and more families are entitled to financial support to maintain a decent
minimum economic standard of living. There has been a change away from the characteristics
of poverty that mark a group of children as belonging to the clearly identified ranks of the poor
toward characteristics of economical scarcity that act more secretly to exclude some children
from the kinds of social participation that are self evident to the majority of children. There are
20 000 Norwegian children under the age of 18 now living at a redefined level of poverty out
of 1 million Norwegian children (Epland 2001b). Here again, it is insufficient just to set up
timelines to follow improvements and distributional effects, the measuring stick itself will have
to be transformed to fit new contexts and local interpretations. The increasing number of
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children in poverty in contemporary Norway becomes a political issue because the general
standards are growing higher. When health services and schooling are free for everyone, the
feelings of injustice moves to other issues.
Immigrants with children experience challenges of both access and distribution. Most
want to improve the prospects of their own children, which implies a dual stance towards
trends in the culture of origin as well as the culture host country. There are pushes and pulls
towards both positions. To be free, to get fair treatment is something every parent may want to
supply to their children – together with improved socio-material conditions. However,
immigrant kids are more constrained, and they live their childhoods in a poorer condition than
native-origin Norwegian children. The Norwegian children could tell about their own rooms
where they can invite friends, and also of all their possession like their own computers,
television sets, CD players. They will also have “their own” money. Fatima has nothing she
can call her own, except clothes, and they stay in the closet in her parents’ room. She even
shares the bed with her little sister. The circumstances of many immigrant kids in our study
would be regarded as poverty if it were the fate of Norwegians. Trends forecast that the
majority of immigrant kids will also continue to be among the poorest when they reach
adulthood.
Official records indicate an increase in children who are disturbed in mood (anxieties
and depressions) and behavior (acting out, aggressive) (Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics
Norway] 2000a; Sørlie and Nordahl 1998). Increased demands for participation in schools
leave have resulted in more children being registered with learning difficulties, and a full
professional industry related to the discovery of and cure for minor neurological dysfunctions.
Elevated standards and more sensitive measuring sticks witness to the raised status of the child.
As a group they are positioned not just as innocent, but also as deserving. If anyone is to
blame, it is the society or the parents who are unable to bring the children to fulfill the activity
goals and obtain the well being that every child deserves. There is an idiomatic stance towards
these trends in the often-repeated assertion that every child should live in the best of all
possible worlds.
In contemporary Norway every child in the middle years of childhood knows where
they stand in a generational line of academic fulfillment and progress. For parents to move
their child and for children to move themselves is interpreted by both parties through a dynamic
equation between what schools provide and students accomplish by ability and effort. Here
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resides a puzzle or paradox in understanding development during middle childhood in
contemporary society. Better and more fairly distribution of affordances to create success in
schooling between ages 5 and 13 turns out in children who are less and not more engaged, with
a distribution of markers of success that reproduce traditional lines of social class. I will return
to this theme in the next section.
In a country like Norway the major divide between children in their access to assets in
not whether their parents belong to the middle class or the working class. It is rather the
divides between parents who are able to support their children according to their own standards
for a good life, and those who are unable to leave up to the standards they are adhering to for
supporting the middle childhood years of their child (Weisner 1984). With reference to social
categories, this leaves some – but not all – families with single mothers in a less favorable
condition compared to families with two parents, and it leaves immigrant families in a less
favorable condition compared to in-born Norwegian families.
Trends in Institutions and Forms of Schooling and Training
If middle childhood is defined by schooling, this period of life has been steadily
expanding. This is the first contemporary trend worth considering: school attendance is
growing – up as well as down in the age ranks. Until recently preschool age lasted until age
seven in Norway. It was lowered to six to fit with developmental pathways in other countries.
Some other countries enroll children in schools from the age of four. Leaving middle
childhood is not however, when school is left. One of the transitional moves that some twelve
year-olds are into, is to assume more responsibility for their performance in school. They all
know that hard labor goes together with academic accomplishments, which are valuable
because they point toward improved prospects in life. Some children at Eastmeadow
elementary school are willing to endure hardship to earn good grades. But this is an individual
affair, and not something that unites kids and makes them support each other. When schooling
is extended for everyone up the age ranks, it is the transition to youth school where twelve year
olds become thirteen and reach the dubious privilege of becoming the youngest and most
inexperienced in an older category of people. They all know that youth school will bring more
serious stuff their way.
More schooling for children also means that they get differently positioned in the
timeline of their own life. They spend more time and more years training and preparing for
something that will prove its significance at another place and at a later point in time. School
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has become a duty that all the children must hang on to, rather than a privilege for them to
access. The link between good grades and social success later in life is definite on the
aggregate level, but the same connection is rather weak on the personal level for most kids.
They look somewhere other than to their academic duties to give themselves a sense of
growing out of childhood.
For middle childhood kids the trend is not just more schooling, but more involvement in
activities that are organized by adults. The change signifies a move from hours that children
enjoy and fill up with activities that they select and organize by themselves, to hours that are
regulated by activities that parents and teachers and other training experts would like to engage
them in. This is not a straightforward trend. The right to free time, time to relax and to enjoy,
is seen as the privilege of a growing child. Closer supervision and more preparation, on the one
hand, strengthen the claim for self-governance on the other hand.
Twenty years ago very few Norwegian five-year-olds were enrolled in activities like
ballet classes, soccer playing, ski-school, or swimming courses. There is a trend to engage
children in organized activities in order to fill up their time, to train their skills, and to build
self-confidence. Timelines show that children are more busy at an earlier age than two decades
ago (Frønes 1997). By the age of twelve, most children will have a set of defined activities that
they have quit. To stop doing something in an organized setting directed by adult teachers and
coaches will either mean that you did not demonstrate any special talent and were lacking in
developmental progress, or that the activity or the company who came with it were not
sufficiently entertaining to keep you involved. These activities represent a trend where the free
time of middle childhood kids are becoming more organized and more supervised by
professional and volunteer child workers.
When children are growing out of middle childhood they may entertain some activities
that adults may be willing to allow but not fully approve of. The cards in the child’s hands will
be discourses about what happens to a person who is about to leave childhood and move on to
something which is not yet – and not for a long time – fully mastered. It should be no surprise
that parents and developmentalists alike are increasingly concerned about how to create selfconfidence in children. The ambition to make every child a success in school works by the
ideation of a child who is ruled by his of her own confidence. When the task is to prepare
oneself, then, the proof of success in middle childhood is accountability.
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The ongoing matter is more training, more deployment of success as well as failure.
But it is also more entertainment, and the volunteer sector of society is increasingly organized
as consumption, and less governed by ideological and moral issues than in the past. Fewer
children are involved activities that are offered by religious or political organizations. There
are fewer scouts and more snowboarders in middle childhood. It is more difficult to account
for your growing by activities in which you apprentice to a master, and easier to prove your
growth by activities where you act more like an explorer of virtual social spaces. Competitions
are getting more competitive; children leave when they experience repeated defeats, and the
rest go after whatever gives them triumphs. Participation follows personal preferences
regulated by immediate states of mind, in contrast to the sense of duty and associated feelings
of getting bored released by regular schooling. Sliding on feelings of mastery and competence,
some kids will put in time, effort and stamina and specialize in organized free time activities –
developing athletic or aesthetic/artistic skills that make them special to self and others. They
identify with knowledge and social practices in the corresponding sub-culture. No doubt
regular schooling is losing out in this trend.
The institutional arrangement “After-school programs” came into middle childhood a
little more than twenty years ago. In Norway it is called “the Free-Time-Arrangement-of-theSchool”, shortened to “Free-Time.” An extension of the school day, which used to be shorter
in Norway than in most countries, is a publicly funded arrangement offered by the state and run
by the school administration within each of 434 municipalities. Creating this universal
arrangement for all children in every school was an accommodation to the fact that most
mothers of children of school age are already in the work force. “Free-Time” is the last piece
in an extensive system of child care institutions to be introduced and made effective throughout
the country. Opening hours are directly mirror the time when children may need care and
company because their parents are at work. Some children may arrive before regular school
starts, if that fits with their needs. Most will stay for a couple of hours after school, and the
late-stayers will leave by five p.m.
In the decade between 1990 and 2000 participation in “Free-Time” increased from 15
000 to 150 000 children. In the first and second grade attendance rates vary from 90% to 30%
in different schools. Rates of participation are supposed to drop after that, and only
exceptionally “slow” children in need of extra care and attention are left when they are nine
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years old. At that each child is supposed to monitor their own activities to and from school,
and in their own home before and after school (Gulbrandsen 1996).
School and the school-attached “Free-Time” offer social occasions where immigrant
children and Norwegians may meet and experience a shared childhood. This is also a trend –
the school is growing into a social arena where children are to build shared frames of reference
across the different set of experiences they carry to the school (Lidén 2000). Their encounters
take place across a variety of experiences that are central to each person for him- or herself and
in many ways unknown and even unacknowledged by some of the others. Their exchanges and
patterns of communication may rely on ideations of communalities that are not really there, or
on differences that are mistakenly assumed. How do they develop their procedures of
exchange when they don’t know what assumptions they can rely on as shared? It is definitely
the children who are building these patterns. Adult teachers do not have any consensual ideas
as to how this should be done. If it does not work as they hope for, it is the developmental
shortcomings of the immigrants that will be nearest as hand as an explanation.
For immigrants, integration into Norwegian society is handed over to their children; the
pathways are through the schools, and the assumed supporters are age mates. The task is not
presented as training in non-racist practices, but the underlying assumption is pretty clear. The
institution of schooling is close at hand, based on attendance by everyone, and it offers the
“Norwegian way of living” as its curriculum. It is not a fixed entity that is already at hand, but
something that emerges.
New Everyday Practices for Children
The trends that relate to demography, distributions and schooling have so far been
interpreted as historical changes in the social organization of particular childhoods and the
everyday practices and social participation of children. There are some further steps to be
taken in that direction, and some additional information to piece into this picture of trends.
First of all, children are more than ever before equipped with rights. And they may
learn how to use them, to deploy their preferences, and invent arguments for negotiations.
These are devices to grow by, to learn about own influences and ways to get through middle
childhood. If is often said that children are generally ignored and neglected, and this is a
prevailing argument for improving their influence. The effects of the increasing sensitivity for
children as persons are somewhat ambiguous. Children get more access to an influence of their
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social world yes, but this social world is more and more made for children in particular. For
the adult caregivers and trainers this is a difficult act of balancing between protection for
children and allowing them self-governance.
Middle childhood kids are more regularly moving across social settings, having to
differentiate between them and connect them. They will have to represent themselves and their
experiences in each setting. In order to enhance children’s participation in a complex social
world, this world is designed for them in special institutions and in special content. The
children rely upon popular culture for their own ideations about how to proceed. It will take a
trained cultural observer to understand that Spice Girls and Back Street boys is not meant for
teenagers, but is taken up by middle childhood kids in order to direct their moves by age.
During middle childhood children are in certain areas developing skills that are exceeding those
of their parents. Some of these skills are not acknowledged by adults, but by children only.
Children are left out of adult practices, or they participate in them mainly as recipients.
The task of parenting is tangentially transformed in accordance with an ongoing change
in the everyday practices in the home. The trend to invent practices designed for children will
lead them away from the practices that are directed at production and reproduction within the
family. This trend work even stronger by a set of ideations about children than it does in actual
conduct. That is to say that middle childhood children are seldom described as contributors to
the tasks of work and the chores of care in their families. Their developmental progress is not
regularly evaluated by their responsibility and skills in care and work. Detailed recording of
their everyday practices will show, however, that they spend considerable time with work and
care in home and/or in neighborhood (Solberg 1994; Orellana 2001). Involvement in such
practices is, however, becoming secondary to the practices that are marked by age for children
in any evaluation about how the child fares.
Separate practices for children do not necessarily mean that they are not together with
adults. Time budget surveys show that children and parents are spending considerable amounts
of time together, in shared activities or by being present at home together. There is rather a
growing tendency that the practices of children act as an invitation to adults to join the children
(instead of the other way around). Further, middle childhood children get a considerable
amount of services from their parents in the home or by several kinds of assistance in the ways
they are related to their neighborhood. The adjacent trend here is to mark children by age
through more extensive protective measures. By “having a home” children are seen to be
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protected from their immediate social surroundings and from the dangers of the contemporary.
The task of modern parenting is to read the signs of dangers. Their strategies are not to scare
their children, nor to teach them to manage them on their own, but to protect their children by
preventing any danger or stress to reach them.
This description of a trend in the way practices are changing should not be taken as a
fair description of what everyone is actually doing. Actual practices are more complex and
ambiguous than a trend. The concept of a trend in the rationale of a methodological argument
works to pin point what kind of cultural scene with constraints and affordances people observe
when their own practices emerge in accordance with or in opposition. Actual parents may
scare kids, leave them unprotected, or force responsibilities upon. A trend is not telling what
everybody is doing; a trend is capturing the processes that are moving the times that middle
childhood kids do live in. The trend is witnessing about the direction in the transformation of a
set of cultural standards, by what kind of events this is happening, and where the hegemonic
practices are emerging – as well as what the trend may do to those who cannot or will not (or
are reluctant to partake) follow up on it.
When ideations about children in need of protection and children in need of age marked
activities and age marked company are combined, a search for risks and dangers may follow.
The search leads not just to detection of dangers for children, but there are also children that
will be detected as dangerous. The trend to detect some children as dangerous for society is a
reoccurring one in history. As a trend in the contemporary it is mostly concerned with the age
period that follows after middle childhood, adolescence. That is to say that moving out of
middle childhood is to move away from the protection that has been created, and into a period
of growing up where some other kids may represent the dangers. In this way the middle
childhood period is correctly named by latency. To thrive in this period is in itself seen as a
protective measure for what is to come.
The new forms of immigration leads to a consideration about what the multicultural
encounters among children are doing to the framing of the practices on the local sites. A
guideline in looking for how a “general” change may act for children is to look for how
assumed effects are contested and validated. What pops up then, is increased commercialism
as a trend and the increasing use among children as well of the new technologies for
information distribution and processing (Brusdal 1998; 2001; Drotner 2001; Frønes 1998).
There is already an extensive literature on these issues, as separate trends or taken together as
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an indication of one overarching process. The creation of a trend here is not a unidirectional
process of a broader change that is affecting children.
What makes this into a trend for children and also into a contested issue in the
contemporary, is the skills and the emotional commitment that children are deploying. They
are the makers of the trend, and middle childhood kids are definitely contributing by their
engagements. What makes this into a contest issue in the actual exchanges between parents
and children, is the ambiguous inclination that parents are trapped in between on the one side of
distributing to their middle childhood kids the equipment for the activities they enjoy and
engage in to develop skills, and on the other side their wish to protect them from distasteful or
even dangerous content that may contaminate their minds in development. There are other
ways to phrase the same ambiguous inclination: parents will go by the engagement of their kids
to support their developments, and they will take on the responsibility to channel their desires
towards appropriate goals. This ambiguity which is facing every parent of middle childhood
kids in the hegemonic culture, are also emerging as the line of division in the mutual
contestation of parenting practices of Norwegian and immigrant parents by each other.
Trends are open to reinterpretation by participants as well as by bystanders – or in
afterthoughts. Still they are not totally wishy-washy. The work by method matters; and so far
one would just declare these four possible categories, and all combinations thereof to be the
analytical schemes at hand. Any nomination of a trend must just follow some procedures for
selecting and collecting and organizing indications (like creating statistical time trends about
child immigration and children born to immigrants), signifying the changes (like interpreting
what this immigration mean to children during school age), appointing events that may break
the waves of turn the clock, reconsider when the phenomenon in question has been altered, etc.
Why focus on trends in the arguments of methodology? Why not just describe
everything in the social surrounding that may matter to children, or rate the aspects by their
assumed significance? Rating of the aspects in the surrounding as influences upon
development is to go by the conventional methodology. The argument for the alternative that
is proposed here is that trends may be connected to the developments of persons in ways that
simulates the actual processes. The next lesson in getting the development right is to present
some procedures for exploration of how personal changes are related to, and are accomplished
by the historical changes. The assumption here is that people – and children as well – may
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observe and participate in the collective changes that they are experiencing by positioning
themselves towards them and thereby move and transform themselves.
Lesson two:
Getting at Actual Domains of Development
A prefixed set of developmental standards will not reveal connections between
sociocultural trends and personal development. Indeed, assessing the development of particular
capacities can take place only after one has mapped the social participation of the actual
children. The guiding principle is to search for the ways in which children are directing
themselves. In every interview with the thirty-three children who were the main informants in
our study we urged them to tell what was going on in their lives just now. We got detailed
records of their social arenas, relationships and activities; and we allowed conversational time
to explore what their running experiences meant to them and what they made of them. We use
the term life mode interviews to refer to this set of procedures and their rationale (Haavind
1977; 1987; Andenæs 1991; Gulbrandsen 1996). The actual format of these interviews is in
many ways similar to what Tom Weisner and his collaborators describe as eco-cultural family
interviews (Weisner 1995). In order to learn what their ways of directing themselves meant
throughout the two years when they were moving from twelve to fourteen we interviewed them
in the same manner seven or eight times. In analyzing the records, we look for the domains
that children are choosing to grow by.
The Directedness of Developing Persons
Like any other people, children bring experiences from one social setting to another,
continually building their own models of the world around them and their own place and
significance therein. By doing so, they both perceive and make assumptions about
developmental moves and transitions. They will piece together children’s age-related conduct
by positioning themselves as the targeted child in relation to other kids as younger, older, or as
age mates. Size, power and efficacy may be used as guiding analogies. An adjacent idea is
that the child should follow the pace of age-mates, especially age mates that match in other
categorical markers.
Children also observe the institutionally inscribed pathways that people may take.
School is there for everyone to see and to access, and by regular attendance everyone will
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assess themselves. Other institutional settings with initiation rituals as well as grading
procedures will be ordered by through experiences of accessibility, demand characteristics, and
vulnerabilities and promises. Since we followed a selection of children from the same school
and neighborhood, all interviews contained records from a shared social landscape. The
children described each other as friends and companions, or as enemies or subjects of one
another’s ignorance. The same events were described (or omitted) by children who were
differently positioned towards them.
These assumptions about development guide the social researcher who looks for where
actual children are directing their sustained efforts to grow. A child’s reoccurring involvement
in certain activities may lead the researcher to what is at stake in development just now. This
plain and simple assumption that children’s efforts in the world are directional and
transformative is seldom utilized in the methods of developmental psychologists. This
alternative approach involves taking a more empirical stance on what facets in the social
environment may come to bear on developments through and out of middle childhood for a
targeted group of children and/or within a specified kind of context.
To direct attention to what children picked as their developmental domains does not
assume that children will have a full fledged theory of their own development to share. It is
rather a guideline that may yield knowledge about the process of development as an ongoing
affair. Connecting one’s present to the past, and reframing prospects for the future, is done
subjectively through the exercise of human agency. It is not done in the abstract, but (1) by
positioning one’s self in the concurrent social landscape on the basis of age, inflected by other
significant categorizations of persons and relationships between persons, and (2) through
sharing and interpreting emotional states of mastery and efficacy. Compared with data
gathered by conventional methods of developmental psychology, the results cover a wider set
of possible developments, and a tighter modeling of the mutual constitution of contexts and
persons. To look for developmental domains is distinctively different from testing the
performances of children.
In this naturalistic study of development one may search for domains that institutions
and the adult creators of childhoods present to specific children, as well as the ways children
themselves may find or invent them. Domains may be conjointly appointed by adult-child
alliances, or they may be reproduced by groups of children “on their own” over and over again.
To get at variations, one may check out what particular children do for themselves only, and
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what they do together as part of a specific group of children. They may act in parallel or in
competition with one another; and with or without other children as allies and supporters. As I
have said already, there is often something to harvest when one pursues aspects of children’s
age-related behavior that are approved or contested.
Proving Yourself as a Successful Middle Childhood Child
We already knew from an earlier study that children in middle childhood tend to see
themselves as moving up the ladder of age through their own conduct (Gulbrandsen 1996). We
also realized that what they are taught in the institutionalized setting of schools simply does not
matter much to them in this respect, except for the markers that the school provides in bringing
them up one grade each year. Through analysis of data from several children, we were able to
identify two developmental scripts that in some way or another were of central concern to
every child. One script involved transforming themselves from being recipients of care to
managing on their own and monitoring their own activities. The other transformation, even
more passionately taken on, had to do with creating and maintaining friendships that signified
same sex and same age (Gulbrandsen 1996; Frønes 1999).
Monitoring one’s own activities included tasks like keeping track of time, doing some
preparation and consumption of food items at home, using family equipment like the VCR, and
leaving and picking up messages by calling mom at her job. The initiatives for expanding selfmonitoring usually came from the kids themselves. They were eager to convince their mothers
that they were in charge. Mothers allowed children to proceed on this pathway of increased
self monitoring as long as they could supervise from a more distant position, and read signs
about whether it worked all right and whether the responsibility of the child was increasing in a
way that corresponded with her allowances and permissions. Just to earn privileges was not
enough. The child had to prove her/himself as reliable. The running negotiations that children
grow by balance parental protection and support with the child’s own performances and
responsibilities
If it is this sort of self-management that makes the middle childhood child grow, it is
friendships that make them become what they really are. This is a gender-specific domain in
the creation of relatively more reflective and attached selves. Boys and the girls may take
separate and parallel pathways (Thorne 1993). Those who experience defeats do not
necessarily give up the effort; they may investigate other ways and opportunities, and put in
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other resources. For both boys and girls the school is the place where you meet other kids,
walking together with them to and from school, inventing group play in the school yard, and
making arrangements for spending time together after school.
During middle childhood the evaluation of one’s success and outcomes is a running
affair. Doing fine is a regular state of mind. It is being bored that is a threat. For most
Norwegian kids middle childhood is a safe place to be – in local neighborhoods and in their
families. If there are any risks and dangers to watch out for, they are ahead in time and by age.
When the children were twelve they anticipated that their coming age of thirteen in the youth
school would bring upheaval and even danger.
Throughout the world caring for younger siblings has been the distinctive marker for
moving into middle childhood, at least for girls (Weisner 1996). But as a trend in the modern
world, caring for younger children is no longer attached to the age-related transitions of middle
childhood. Instead, duties are becoming more exclusively attached to school, regulated by
parents and teachers (Frønes 1997). As members of the hegemonic culture the Norwegian
children do not consider to pick the caring for smaller children as a domain to grow by. This
historical change in children’s mode of participation in activities also reflects changed
prospects for girls.
On the local scene, it is distinctively Norwegian to consider the capacity to care as
irrelevant to how children are growing. Girls from immigrant families are positioned as
caregivers in their homes. Fatima and other girls included caring for younger siblings when
they described their everyday lives, conveying both their states of mind and the actual chores.
It was inscribed in the statuses of the siblings to care for each other in a pattern governed by
age and rank. When Fatima reflected on her stance among age mates, she felt childish because
her mother expected her to go home after school for the sake of her little sister. Seen thorough
the Norwegian lens, immigrant kids – and girls in particular – have too little self-governance.
Fatima was painfully aware of this. But in her own family she linked her care with a full
system of interrelatedness among her sibs. Her older brother was protecting her, and her older
sister was entertaining her. She grew by her relationship to them, also because their ways of
controlling her was more lenient than those of her parents. Her brother would for example rent
movies that the parents did not approve of, and allow the younger sisters to watch when no
parent were at home.
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Among the twelve year-olds, involvement in academic tasks that teachers presented to
them in the classroom could not in any way compete with the engagement the very same
children felt towards “my school” as the place “where I meet my friends and find out what to
do afterwards.” For those involved in athletics – and many were, trying out a set of
possibilities in the local sports clubs during middle childhood years – performance in sports
seemed to carry much more significance than performance in school in signaling who the
performer was and could possibly be.
Because school frames their lives in a total way, most kids don’t pick what it affords
academically as their way to grow. In some respects it will happen anyway. The very
structuring of the affordances will give the majority of the kids this age a message about
shortcomings rather than academic excellence. The kids themselves expect the ranking among
them to widen as they move from elementary to secondary school. Because they expect
demands to rise, many prepare for what they perceive will be downward rather than an upward
move for themselves. To put less effort in, and not more, is their response. Many are able to
set up an equation for their own ambivalence: They want to work harder; they think they
should do it; but they experience their own personal weakness when they don’t really do it.
The experience of falling below one’s own standards and those of others is a significant
guideline in picking developmental domains. Kids pick domains where they can succeed, and
eventually avoid ones where they’ll fall below.
Steve could easily inscribe his whereabouts in the classroom into a history that
witnessed not only his defeats, but also his form of mastery: He told us that school was just
terrible. In the first grade he was happy about it, and it was fine, but it worsened during second
grade, and since third grade it had been as bad as it could be. It came about because he could
not learn to read. “You see, I am dyslectic.” In every lesson he tried to do as little as possible.
He described his different strategies, such as entering the classroom wearing a cap. That would
involve him in a discussion with the teacher about taking it off. When he eventually and
reluctantly did so, he was off the hook for awhile. He would then not open his backpack. If
urged to do so, he would pick up some books, but not open them. If urged further, he would
open them and ask for assistance from the TEA. He would ask her to point along the lines,
have her read the text to him, and then he would give an answer, but take no steps to write it
down. In the end he knew that she would do it for him. When he had special ed, he was
willing to involve himself in games and conversations. He told how he discovered that if he
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questioned his special education teacher about something within her areas of interest, she
would lighten up and continue to talk. Then, she would not discover that he was not really
listening, and thus he steered clear of the risk that she would put demands upon him. When his
mind wandered, he imagined things to do with his comrades after school. Steve said that he
would really prefer to learn something, but he had no idea how he could make that happen, nor
did he think any of the teachers could make it happen. He hung out with other boys who didn’t
care much about school performance, whether they were in the top ranks or not.
Children have individual as well as collective strategies to counter-argue, ignore and in
many ways modify the specific developmental challenges that the school offers them. Kids
interpret being excellent in school as an individual affair, usually involving no one except the
very smart or hard-working student him/herself. Other developmental domains are picked by
defined allies, who may engage as an operative “we.” The creation of effective and affective
“we’s” in the service of resisting adult control unites children in their transformation of
themselves out of middle childhood and into their teens.
What Then, Becomes of Development?
So far I have argued that methods to assess development could usefully attend to where
actual children are putting their time and effort, and to their contours of affective involvement.
Where and when are children able to make exercises for themselves, endure frustration and
defeat, and still return in a way that pays attention to the progressive side of their own
performances? To answer this question entails modifying one’s approach to development.
There are two different ways of seeing developmentally – identifying and assessing the
developmental moves that people may take. Putting them in opposition may clarify the
difference.
Models of human development are changing away from imaging development as a set
of mechanisms that reside solely within the person and therefore could be assessed as
characteristics of the individual. Instead development can be conceptualized as an ongoing
affair in relationships (Rogoff 1990; Valsiner 1998).
By the ruling conventions of method, development is assessed by assuming that
something is going on between two set points in time. Development is thus recorded as change
over time. What I propose is to explore the moments and steps through which persons
reposition themselves in their own timelines. Development, then, will be identified as changes
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in the meaning of time. It is change that matters for how the past is included in what is to
become. It allows for different ways of moving yourself back and forth in time, and for
experiential moments of realizing simultaneously how it was then, and how it is different by
now.
What is lost is the ruling idea that development is something that follows universal
steps or stages and therefore should be identified by similar measurements across different
cultural contexts. Instead one searches for several actual pathways which may be prescribed
and/or offered, and which may orient present institutional settings and the participation of
persons in a web of coordinated actions referring to past and future (Modell 1996).
The idea that development could be described as one optimal or logical result or
outcome is probably meant to rescue the conceptualization from teleological assumptions. The
alternative is not to claim that everyone can account for own developmental goal or that all
goals are “present” from the beginning. Actual development will happen only in the relative
sense. Personal trajectories may be countless, but each will still be framed by particular
pathways. Development is what matters to persons and what makes persons. That is why any
trajectory is directed and prospective, but still open ended.
Tracing Developmental Changes
So far I have argued that methods to assess development could usefully attend to where
actual children are putting their time and effort, and to their contours of affective involvement.
Where and when are children able to make exercises for themselves, endure frustration and
defeat, and still return in a way that pays attention to the progressive side of their own
performances? To answer this question entails modifying one’s approach to development.
There are two different ways of seeing developmentally – identifying and assessing the
developmental moves that people may take. Putting them in opposition may clarify the
difference.
Models of human development are changing away from imaging development as a set
of mechanisms that reside solely within the person and therefore could be assessed as
characteristics of the individual. Instead development can be conceptualized as an ongoing
affair in relationships (Rogoff 1990; Valsiner 1998).
By the ruling conventions of method, development is assessed by assuming that
something is going on between two set points in time. Development is thus recorded as change
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over time. What I propose is to explore the moments and steps through which persons
reposition themselves in their own timelines. Development, then, will be identified as changes
in the meaning of time. It is change that matters for how the past is included in what is to
become. It allows for different ways of moving yourself back and forth in time, and for
experiential moments of realizing simultaneously how it was then, and how it is different by
now.
What is lost is the ruling idea that development is something that follows universal
steps or stages and therefore should be identified by similar measurements across different
cultural contexts. Instead one searches for several actual pathways which may be prescribed
and/or offered, and which may orient present institutional settings and the participation of
persons in a web of coordinated actions referring to past and future (Modell 1996).
The idea that development could be described as one optimal or logical result or
outcome is probably meant to rescue the conceptualization from teleological assumptions. The
alternative is not to claim that everyone can account for own developmental goal or that all
goals are “present” from the beginning. Actual development will happen only in the relative
sense. Personal trajectories may be countless, but each will still be framed by particular
pathways. Development is what matters to persons and what makes persons. That is why any
trajectory is directed and prospective, but still open ended.
Tracing Developmental Changes
The exploration of development thus may proceed under the dual assumption that that
any instance will be both normative and relative. As a further guideline I offer four criteria for
judging developmental changes in the relative sense in a single case or set of cases:
• Relatively more realization and utilization of reciprocity in exchanges between
two persons in a relationship
• Relatively expanded responsibility for the consequences of one's own action
• Actions that are embedded in a relatively more extensive functional setting (and
this allows for)
• Relatively widened and more sensible motivation which in turn provides the
basis for new actions
Note that the case here will consist of a person in relation to others. My idea for
combining the methodological logics of psychology and history is to preserve the ideation of
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development as a particular kind of change – change that is transformative and that can be
identified both in contexts and in persons by putting both at risk (Modell 1996)
In social science terminology there is a somewhat inconsistent use of terms like
“pathways” and “trajectories.” I propose a distinction between pathways and trajectories of
development, in line with how I have used the terms so far: social pathways are mediated into
personal trajectories.
Pathways are culturally embedded and institutionally sustained. They are visible ways
growing up, recognized and contested, and they may be articulated into prescriptions. There
are multiple pathways, and they vary across culture and time. Pathways coexist within a
culture; they may be complementary or hierarchically related. They are transpersonal and
transferred through generations or through group identification. They are institutionalized, and
are sustainable as well as malleable.
Trajectories are mediated by persons in efforts to grow by their age and in their time.
Trajectories are more or less attached to existing pathways. As a result of agentic
purposiveness, actual trajectories may end up more or less similar to certain accessible
pathways, or they may be path-breaking. Many similar trajectories indicate a pathway.
Since persons mediate trajectories, they may or may not follow a pathway. Pathways
are what trajectories are drawing upon. Personal trajectories may break off from and they may
evolve into new pathways. Trajectories are not lonely paths; they are made through awareness
and reflectiveness about belonging and becoming, of one’s self and of others growing up. They
may be more or less goal specific, but they are still directed, at least in retrospect. They may
correspond to what is prescribed and recognized, but they carry a logic of development from
within.
Personal trajectories may alter pathways and constitute new ones. Thus, in analyzing
the context-person relationship, one can analyze (1) developmental pathways within and
connecting across contexts (2) actual personal developmental trajectories as they are displayed
(and sometimes, in retrospect, recognized as transformative), and (3) possible feeding back
from personal development into new pathways, which in turn transforms contexts, so that they
may be recognized as changing social history.
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Categorical Markers and the Making of Companions in Developments
Returning to the place where the unmarked Norwegians and the marked foreigners
meet, we learned how the kids would follow one another’s development and navigate by that
knowledge. They move in mutually established “we’s” in particular social settings. The
construction of “we’s” and of activity settings are flip sides of the same coin. Some activities
are open and inviting, some are rather closed. Which is also to say that some activities can be
accessed by a rather straightforward reading of codes for interaction, and others can only be
accessed by a kind of mutual appropriation.
The creation of operative “we’s” is informed by categories of age, gender and the
Norwegian-immigrant divide. Categorical distinctions are not prescribed, but regularly emerge
because being similarly positioned makes relationships more enduring as a terrain in which to
demonstrate who the participants are going to be.
In the Norwegian cultural context, the transition to becoming a teen is supposed to bring
a widened gap between how the child positions him/herself in the home and in other settings.
Some of children develop their capacity to entertain themselves and widen this gap by activities
that their parents – and adults in general – fear and disapprove. Children may “cheat” on the
adults, or try to convince them that it is not as bad and dangerous “out there” as the parents
may suspect. Some children would join each other in the enactment of adult behavior in a
youthful way. For example, they stage and perform heterosexuality for other teens, in order to
establish their transitional stance as not a child anymore, and not an adult yet. Among the
Norwegian parents, this playful heterosexuality is read as a benign sign of adolescence. Not so
among the immigrant parents, who, as we have learned from Fatima’s parents, tend to read it as
a malignant sign of Norwegian-ness.
Some, but not all of the kids are involved in one, or both of these two domains. And
even among those that do not through themselves in, participation is observed as signs of being
a teen-in-the-becoming. They may soon find themselves left behind. The hegemonic character
of these domains follows from their capacity to define everyone as included or left out, and
thereby also some as positioned ahead and others as lagging behind.
In this sense it is acknowledge by everyone that any participation will prove the move
out of childhood is going on. I will name these two domains (1) pushing the limits for selfgovernance by “making trouble” and (2) being a boy or a girl through “no-touchheterosexuality.”
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Going Straight or Making Trouble
Most of the boys devoted their creation of “we’s” in a seemingly open fashion. As
already mentioned, several of them pointed to the value of being a friend with everyone. To
get along well and to have fun was a shared definition of social practices where they also
trained themselves in the skills of athletics, music, or computing. These skills signified their
growth into cool teen boys. Some mediated themselves in a trajectory shaped by their
perception of pathways to professional soccer playing in England.
Here, as elsewhere, some boys not only opposed prescribed pathways; they picked
defiant behavior to grow by, as if getting themselves into trouble was what they were after. We
learned from their records and accounts that they were moving up the age ranks for boys as part
of a “we” that included some of those who were falling short of prescribed pathways within the
school. Their self-identifying activities had to do with “making hell.” Steve explained about
himself, “You see, I like to be with people with the guts to make offenses and create trouble.”
Ken made a similar statement: “I am not the most ordinary kind of guy. I am so bad, I make
hell all the time.” In finding ways to make hell, the significant thing was to join each other,
building a mutually supported scaffold for climbing. They were trying to dare what they had
never done before – never as a child. This was a vulnerable developmental enterprise. Their
efforts to regulate one another’s conduct often fell short, resulting in exclusion and punishment.
It was as if they searched for an alternative to hegemonic discourses of development that they
observed, but considered inaccessible. Their effort to create a subversive reverse was not
straightforward. And their mediation of their own trajectories didn’t get them where they
wanted to be.
The differentiation between the boys who were “having fun” and those who were
“making hell” did not follow any Norwegian-immigrant divide, as some (among the children
also) might expect. Some feared that the defiant behavior of the minority of boys with
immigrant background would damage the neighborhood by being the “bad boys” (Fergusson
2000). But most were positioned on the outskirts of both groups of boys with shared ideas
about how to grow.
The Making of No-Touch-Heterosexuality
It was a group of predominantly, but not exclusively unmarked Norwegian girls that
initiated the practice of organizing mutual consent to love couples – as well as arranging for
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them to break up shortly afterwards. In the last months at elementary school and into the youth
school, these practices took up more and more of these girls’ interest and energy. Adjacent
conversations offered countless interpretations of what was going on. The girls used their
social relational capacities to control of the heterosexual matrix, and also to direct their promise
in this domain.
The boys were included, but they definitely did not rule this form of social play. Some
tried to follow up on nominations by the girls of who was cool. Other boys were not interested
and directed their attention elsewhere. All boys had other investments as well. Both the boys
that are having fun and the boys that are making hell are eligible.
It was not that easy for immigrant girls to turn to something else if they didn’t want to
be a part of this transitional change. Some did like Fatima, and tried to turn away. Then, they
could not be one of the “popular girls.” This was a category that was more salient among those
who did not count themselves among them. Faria was among the very few who went far
enough in performing her Muslim habits, so that everyone else would think she really did not
want to be part of these practices. She always wore Pakistani female clothing, and she would
only be on two-man-hand with other Muslim girls. At school she worked hard and was
successful. None doubted her when she told it was because she wanted to go to medical school
become a physician. There were some others immigrant girls who managed to pick the domain
of no-touch-heterosexuality to grow by. They had to balance between getting involved, and
being categorized as a “whore.” Actually, in this case the efforts of all the girls’ to navigate
between what they considered to be the stigma of a “whore” and that of a “child of the angels”,
was discursively shaped by the Norwegian-foreigner divide on the issue of love and romance in
the lives of young teen girls.
To create a local version of who would count as attractive, joined the majority of
children in new kinds of personal assessment of both girls and boys. Girls who fell short of the
new standards said that the popular ones thought them to be childish, “really nerds!” They
could stay together, deemed to stay the way they were. Or, they could search for other
domains, and hope for their times to come.
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Lesson Three:
The Mutual Constituency of History and Developments – Organization of Events in Time
Developments Relate to Trends
Just as development is something that is about to happen by and to a person, a trend is
something that has not yet fully happened to a set of people. Whatever the actual changes by a
person or a people, the transformative character of both speaks to their significance. The
history of either persons or people may always take another turn – partly expected, and partly
not. The positioning of people as well as persons towards “their stories” and the stories of
others are interdependent and ambiguous. It is not easy to say what belongs where, and
everyone takes a dual stance towards the development of self: Experientially my development
is where I am in charge as well as where I am caught by forces working behind my back, so to
say. I will intermittently be taken by surprise, and driven into repetitions. A mind is ordered
and gets reorganized by developmental changes, and so it is for a set of people as well. People
are socially structured in ways that allow some of them to partake in collective actions. They
will join others in the identification of trends, and they may follow up, contest, or counteract
them. It depends on how they are situated and how they position themselves. Persons as well
as contexts are continuously put at risk by the way these two dynamics interweave (Modell
1996). At least one research methodology should interweave these dynamics instead of trying
to separate them. History as the context for the development of persons is very different from,
but just as significant for understanding the process as is the organism.
For social scientists to work by method is to invent ways of piecing together events and
configuring narratives. Events will have to be selected, and in the organization of events there
will be assumptions about what is at stake. Events will have to be ordered and connected, and
in the ways events connect there are further assumptions about the agency, reasons, and
intentions of persons as well as how their relationships are conflictual or sustainable, mutual or
oppressive. Eventually events will have to be interpreted, and the interpretation feeds back on
the selection and the connections and will open the floor for reinterpretation. In the
construction of a chronology, every step can be taken imaginatively over and over again. The
tools are to lay out points in time and to position the representations of events. It can be done
“both ways,” both prospectively and/or retrospectively (Polkinghorne 1995).
There are basically three ways to select and connect events in timelines. One is the
mode of the life-course of persons built and sustained by their age and by their memory. The
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second is generational shifts and continuities that are built and sustained by the transitional
statuses of parents and offspring. The third is the collective mode of people who share a
history and create and sustain the history of each other.
The social researcher may account for the ways things happen along any of these lines.
Every timeline will ask for an interpreter, and the guideline is to look for how one of the
timelines is inscribed in and relying upon any of the others. Setting up chronologies for a
wider set of people acts as a guide to the interpretation of the life-course for each person or
subset of persons. The connecting link in the timelines may be persons/generations/people, but
also the selection of a cause that cuts across. Immigration and middle childhood are two causes
that cut across in the case I have presented. The analytical procedures will be hermeneutic,
moving back and forth between what constitutes the chronology and what constitutes each of
the events in relation to the overarching cause. When the developmental scientists model the
development of persons, they use time as a tool combined with analogous ideas about growth
increases, rises, etc. They also rely upon related notions of progress and transformation. The
concept of standards or norms guides them into ways of valuing and devaluing variation.
Two concepts may help in understanding how the three modes of organizing events in
time may be subjectively connected in specific cases: (1) peoples’ awareness of trends in time;
and (2) the positioning of selves towards time-trends in the present. People link the three
modes of organizing events in time in commitment to their very existence.
Awareness is Linking – or Disconnecting – Persons to Historical Timelines
How can one get at psychological awareness of historical changes that are significant
for how actual children are in the process of becoming? Being a child will inevitably include
putting yourself into some kind of timeline for growing up, and doing so in relation to
generational links in your family and to the history of people that of which you are a part. To
pinpoint awareness is to combine an analysis of how this ordering of events is imposed upon
the children and of how they may see it. Middle childhood children are able to give accounts
of how they envision their growing up. However, I don’t consider it a good idea to question
them about their awareness – nor to “measure” it. This awareness is not necessarily a reflected
knowledge about your people, your community, or your ancestors. It could very well be a
stance towards experience, and documented as affective sets of reacting. When people tell
about events, it can be assumed from the configuration. For example Steve and Martin were
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two boys that participated in some of the events of “making hell” that involved boys from
Eastmeadow school. They were both aware of the risks and the thrills, and they trained
themselves not just to do it, but to get away with it. Martin saw these activities as temporary
and youthful, without any significance for his future prospects. Steve is very well aware of that
they will shape his position in life. He expected to have a poor economy, and limited access to
the benefits that follow from the work of an adult man. His prospects were poor, as he saw it.
And still he is preparing himself to take it, by enforcing it.
Among immigrant kids we can see how awareness of their history of immigration, and
of generational turns format how they try out and eventually pick ways in which to grow. By
the age of twelve Saskia regularly tried to play soccer with kids in the schoolyard. She is
Turkish, but as she saw it, she was about to move closer into the mode of growing up among
Norwegian kids than any of her parents and siblings. By doing so, she paid tribute to the
moves of her family through immigration, expanding their success into a fuller integration.
She did it for them as well as for herself, extending transitional moves further/higher than her
parents might do. Soccer was highly valued in Turkey too, but not as accessible to girls at it
seemed to be here. She grew by expanding the constraints put upon girls.
Soccer games in the schoolyard were open to everyone, girls included. But Saskia
regularly entered on her own, and not as one among the girls. The participation of girls was
accepted, but it was not for real. They were having fun and exercising their rights, but they did
not transform themselves by playing soccer. They were just having fun, and this was just one
of many ways in which girls related to boys. Saskia was definitely aware that she was
inventing her own trajectory, and she downplayed her female look. So far, this had not been
difficult for her since she was small, quick, and looked like a boy who was small for his age.
As the months went by, she was not together with any of the other girls, and the boys in the
soccer games tend to ignore her. She accomplished no excellence in soccer that would suffice
to impress them. She became aware that she was becoming invisible when several boys
repeatedly trapped her into the corridor in the youth school and stole the money in her purse.
Even appeals to the teachers would not save her. Her next step was to get tougher, and to do so
in the company of girls. Another informal arena that seemed open to anyone was to smoke
cigarettes outside the schoolyard. (It was a privilege of students in the youth school to go
outside the yard during breaks, and teachers were not supposed to intervene in what counted as
their personal affairs there.). Saskia began to visit the designated spots for hanging out and
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smoking, but then she realized that no one joined her when she was there first. She made an
impression; the other girls were speaking about her; the boys stepped back from bothering her,
but she was alone.
This step to grow also disconnected Saskia from the transitional movements of her own
parents and siblings. She knew all too well that they would disapprove of her tough style of
smoking. She was disconnecting herself from them and their history as a people. Soccer for
girls may count as progress worth trying among Turks – but smoking, not yet. Saskia began to
consider attaching herself closer to the history of her people as she understood it. She asked
her parents to find out more about a Muslim boarding school for girls in Germany. The school
is designed to keep girls aware of the history that they are part of, and to assist them in relating
to this history in ways that will enable them to set up a sustainable Muslim/Turkish life in
Northern Europe.
Eventually Saskia started wearing a headscarf in her school in Oslo. By doing so, she
signaled to the unmarked Norwegian girls that she was not part of their ways of growing at all.
The headscarf attached her closer to the history of her people and increased her awareness of
what it is about and what it means. Her parents approved of this as her own independent choice
to join the line of her mother and other women in her family. She was aware that they saw her
as a more appropriate prolongation of them. The headscarf also brought her into contact with a
small group of girls who also wore headscarf in school. She anchored her own social
participation more firmly in a pathway prescribed for Muslim girls, not by force or pressure,
but by her own trial and error in relating her own progress into transitional moves that she
became ware of in her immediate and more distal surroundings.
Positioning of Selves
Assuming that a sense of self in history is there for all people, including children, is just
the first step in an analytical procedure. What matters as the next step is how persons are
situated in their social landscape, and how they position themselves directionally by the way
they connect or separate the timelines of which they are aware. Awareness goes with
something made one’s “own.” This is about appropriations (Wertsch 1997a, 1997b).
The example of Saskia shows that this can be done in many ways, as a search for
belonging in the identification of self. In the site that we have been visiting, certain ways of
positioning selves towards transitions of age, towards generational inclusion or exclusion, or
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towards the history of people and their causes have become locally hegemonic. A group of
unmarked girls and unmarked boys are taking the lead, and they consider themselves to be
ahead of the others.
Awareness or lack of awareness of the marks of immigration, and possible
interpretations thereof, is an ongoing affair in the hegemony of the unmarked. The salience of
“foreignness” may vary from situation to situation, and also among subcultures. There may be
discrepancies in saying and doing and ambiguities in the interpretation of practices as new or
old. The hegemony is an assumption that guides empirical analyses; the salience is an
empirical question within the study. The stage of the dramas is moved by immigration. A new
set of ideations frames interactional practices between mothers and fathers and their sons and
daughters, and among boys and among girls who may or may not share ideations of
generational timelines. These changes are both celebrated and contested in daily debates, as
well as in the ways in which children feel about their lives.
One would, of course, expect people’s awareness of how their lives are inscribed in and
act towards social changes, not just to be sensitive to changes, but to be changing. The mind
has a capacity to move in imaginative time and to make sense of what subjects are doing in the
world through such means. Persons may do this in a way that coincides fairly well with
changes in the same period (as such changes would be recorded and accounted for by
historians) – or they may not. The assumption that persons are living in correspondence with
their time – or not doing so – will guide historians to how those changes actually happened and
which people were more or less involved. This is definitely a kind of bootstrapping. And some
testimonies will have to be left out, because they simply do not make sense as way of living at
that time. A straightforward definition of social history is what life was like to ordinary people
at the time, how the life of ordinary people has changed over time, and how they have moved
in time.
To go with the time can instigate many types of changes, reinstatements, and
redistributions of valued forms. Power or hegemony in access as well as in interpretational
rules are involved. To go with or to work against trends will seldom be an unambiguous affair.
Accreting actions can be too optimistic and it can be a rationalization or after thought. The
double bind is a widespread condition of life: Consider whether the steps taken are linking or
separating – or restricting – the subject to/from existing trends. Are ties knit tighter or
loosened? Are practices that are displayed compatible and/or incompatible with different
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trends of which people are aware? Persons are assuming some directionality of the changes
they observe by positioning themselves towards them. And history is made of accreting and
coordinated sets of personal change. The driving forces are the alternating, but not necessarily
incompatible dynamic of the I’s and the we’s.
Middle childhood kids are eager to find developmental companions and not just
supporters. If necessary they may even turn away from supporters if it threatens or weakens
their mate-based alliances. Immigration may create new contestation among parents and
among kids, as well as between children and parents in the same family as to whom should be
and should not be your mates in development.
There is also an assumption that you should be interested in exploring your history.
Which is true, but not self-evident. To inscribe yourself in your generational history is a
widespread way of making a device to grow by, and it is a way of making yourself accountable
– or not-accountable. But it will not necessarily be so for everyone.
In my interviews with Fatima, I was a little bit surprised to learn that she was not really
interested in sharing with me any of events in the immigration history of her family. She just
said that it all happened a long time ago when her parents came to Norway from Morocco as a
young couple before any of her older or younger siblings were born. To her this story could
not mean anything for how she perceived herself. Her lack of engagement was a striking
contrast to all the events I learned about as Fatima described the complex and conflict ridden
history of the relationship with her two best friends. She explored together with me in detail
the events, in order to understand what was going on and what she could do about it. In spite
of the close connections her parents sustained with both families of origin “back there”, Fatima
described her visits to the two villages in Morocco as “holidays”, where she or some other of
the siblings were brought by one of the parents every year. She knew that her father was away
for longer periods when he and his family members built them a house there, but she did not
know the purpose of that house. Her knowledge of the larger area where both her grandparents
lived was similar to that of a place one may visit on occasional vacations. She did not think of
herself as speaking the language, “except for a few words,” and she was firm, but not reflective
in her conviction that she was never going to live there. She doesn’t count herself as
Norwegian, but she was born here, and therefore this is also where she is going to live. Still
her experiences of growing by age were distinctively different from those of the Norwegian
girls who “consider themselves to be cool.”
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Fatima is one of many ethnic minority girls in Norway who are developing themselves
in ways that will also change the history of the nation. For the researcher who is interested in
finding out what is happening and how it happens, I have proposed a methodology that
explores central tendencies and trends in order to understand both those who are and are not
involved. In either case it is reasonable to think that they have an awareness. By looking at
how people variously position themselves in their awareness, one will get at how they are
making themselves and thereby making history.
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