Abstract:

Children’s welfare in the last 100 years has been inextricably woven into women’s welfare and women’s social condition; to an extent, children’s welfare has been subsumed under the composite concept ‘women-and- children’. It is hard to peer beyond the tangle of adults who pronounce on children’s ‘needs’ in the context of mother-child relations, and to look clearly at children themselves. It is still more difficult to listen to children seriously. And it is yet more difficult to include children into society rather than excluding them. But these are essential enterprises: we must extricate children, conceptually, from parents, the family and professionals. We must study the social condition of childhood and write children into the script of the social order. Essentially the interlinked reasons for doing this are two- fold. Proper understanding of the social order requires consideration of all its members, all social groups. And children, like other minority groups, lack a voice and have a right to be heard and their views taken into account. It is through working towards better understanding of the social condi- tion of childhood that we can provide a firm basis for working towards implementation of their rights. to study children as a social group and childhood as a social phenomenon. The proper study of the social order has to include the social condition of childhood, and the contributions of children to it. The sociological project is to work initially on the task of extracting children theoretically from the family in order to study their social positioning as a social group. A next step is to replace children in reciprocal relations with adults, and childhood with adulthood. Thus the sociological enterprise aims to locate study of childhood in study of societies.

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