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Contemporary Perspectives Of Childhoods

In contemporary society, images of children are a part of a populous world. These images are presented in many ways especially in the urban globalised society, every individual is surrounded by representations and images which stand as pictures on the page or screen; advertisements on street billboards or the sides of buses; posters in the underground; front pages on newsagents’ stands; jokes in the card shop; packaging in the supermarket: these are public pictures designed for public spaces, whether in decaying inner cities, spruced-up country towns or suburban shopping parades, these images are everywhere. The fact of being surrounded by permeated by imagery has radically changed the ways in which the world is perceived, and the ways in which individuals in particular adults towards children relate to each other (Holland, 2004). “Childhood is not a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is a socially constructed category, a mode of understanding these facts. Childhood, in short, is a ‘social construct’” (Archard, 2004). The aim of this paper is to argue that images of children that have materialised over time have aided societies to deem activities/images acceptable & have unpremeditatedly influenced children’s rights of ‘everyday’ society. Factors include roles, expectations, education & children’s care & how they relate to the children’s rights and what they mean for the child of contemporary society, this will be achieved through the deconstruction & analysis of images as they are presented. The main concepts which will be discussed include: The vulnerable child, the iconic child, & the gendered child and how these images are presented to help us determine the concepts in which they lie.
This image of a baby in the hands of a dark adult represents the social construction of the child as vulnerable & innocent. An aspect of this construction is that children require protection from “dangers they can neither identify or comprehend” (Davis &   Bourhill, 1997, p.31).The...