INTRODUCTION

We were all once children. Some of us are still children, many of us have children of our own, and quite a few spend much of their lives with other people’s children. Yet when it comes to studying childhood, specialists recurrently adopt frameworks that assimilate children to other concerns: children as adults in the making, children as organisms passing through developmental stages, children as family members, children as placeholders in systems of inequality, children as objects of control by educational or welfare institutions, but rarely children as distinctive sets of participants in social processes. Without ignoring the value of existing perspectives on childhood, this guide concentrates on integrating all of them into fresh analyses of childhood as a social phenomenon in its own right. In general, we focus on children up to the age of fourteen.

We imagine four overlapping sets of readers for this document:

(1) students and non-specialists who want to learn what recent social-scientifically oriented work in North America and elsewhere on children and childhood has to offer them;

(2) advocates and policy-makers in child-oriented fields who share the same general concerns;

(3) teachers who want to integrate such work into their own courses and supervision of students;

(4) researchers -- from newcomers to old-timers -- who hope to find appropriate questions, theories, methods, and conceptual frameworks for their own investigations.

In hopes of providing help for all four imagined constituencies, we have assembled a highly selective but wide-ranging body of references to publications, research centers, individual researchers, electronic resources, course plans, and more specialized guides. The bibliography lists illustrative readings; in general we have given preference to classic studies, those that are more recent, those with the most extensive bibliographies of their own, and those that provide surveys of the literature they represent. Since many of the topics included in the bibliography overlap (e.g. households, production, and consumption), we have located publications arbitrarily in one or the other. We have also restricted ourselves to materials in English. Electronic resources range from academic websites specialized in the study of childhood to the sites of governmental and non-governmental organizations for or about children, and include research centers and data collections for the study of childhood.

While necessarily far from comprehensive, this guide should help a considerable variety of scholars, students, and practitioners to get new inquiries going. There are hundreds of popular sources for kids, including magazines, newspapers, books, websites, television, and films. We do not list these sources, but obviously any one of them can serve as additional research materials.

This project took shape as an outgrowth of Lloyd E. Cotsen’s investment in studies of childhood at Princeton University. Viviana Zelizer’s three-year appointment as Cotsen Faculty Fellow made possible, among other things, the creation of a new freshman seminar at Princeton on the history and sociology of childhood, just as Nina Bandelj’s appointment as Cotsen Junior Fellow brought her into the same course. During their own terms as Cotsen Junior Fellows, Ann Morning and Lynn Robinson provided crucial research assistance. Taking off from the course bibliography and teaching plan, we began a more general search for materials that would help students of children and childhood.

Searching the web for teachers and scholars who dealt with childhood, we identified about 30 e-mail addresses, mostly within the United States. We contacted them all. The reply was enthusiastic and generous: our respondents sent syllabi, bibliographies, and websites. In order to reach a wider audience, we then e-mailed a notice about our project to the International Sociological Association, asking its administrators to circulate it to its international audience. Once again, the response ran well beyond our expectations. Researchers from around the world contacted us. Forty-three more people from fifteen countries sent in contributions or encouragement.

Nina Bandelj took major responsibility for assembling materials into the guide as well as designing the web page (http://www.princeton.edu/~children). Princeton University’s Bendheim - Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, under the direction of Sara McLanahan, and the Cotsen Fund supported the production of the hard copy.

Certainly, we could not assemble an exhaustive list for any of our categories. We can’t even claim that we included the most relevant listings, although we certainly tried. In any case, our web-based format of dissemination will allow us to update the guide on a regular basis. We invite you to continue helping us in these efforts. We look forward to receiving your feedback and additional contributions.

Nina Bandelj Viviana Zelizer Ann Morning

nbandelj@princeton.edu vzelizer@princeton.edu amorning@princeton.edu

Princeton University

April 2001