Childhood studies

1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias The interdisciplinary field of children's studies was founded at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York in the fall of 1991.

Rutgers University-Camden developed the first Childhood Studies Department in the United States to award degrees from BA through Ph.D.

This is a multi-disciplinary department in which Ph.D. students study a range of methodologies to explore cultural constructions of childhood.

The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies, edited by Jens Qvortrup, William Corsaro, and Michael-Sebastian Honig was published in 2009.

According to Lenzer, before the 1990s, most disciplines in the arts and sciences failed to "provide a special focus on children"; indeed, advertisers and politicians "discovered" childhood before scholars did.

However, Lenzer suggests, even "the recent sharpening focus on children and youth in the humanities, social sciences, and international law" limited the efficacy of studies of children and childhood because "the intellectual division of labor in children-related scholarship across the disciplines was largely adding new subspecialties of and within the disciplines themselves."

By contrast, Lenzer emphasizes the need for holistic, interdisciplinary—indeed, humanities-based—approaches to children's studies: "... [C]hildren are not fully characterized by psychological developmental processes, nor ... by any single perspective. ...

In an article entitled “Hijacking the Humanities: Responses in the Field of Childhood Studies to Israel’s Black Sabbath,” Joanna Beata Michlic, an Anglo–Polish scholar specializing in the Holocaust and childhood studies, inveighed against what she saw as the prevailing tendency in the discipline to discount the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 and to portray “the Israelis as the malevolent perpetrators of a merciless assault against the civilians of Gaza and violent crimes against Palestinian children.” She also decried “the allegation that genocide was being committed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)… compounded and expanded upon to encompass accusations that Israel was denying food, water, and fuel to hapless Palestinian civilians…”[6] Books Journals