2021 Volume 33 Issue 1 Pages 28-40
Family diversity tends to be perceived positively when it represents the diverse life courses of adults. However, once children are considered as individual family members, the issue becomes more complex. In Japanese sociology, the recent shift in children’s rights and child welfare has received little attention; children have come to be perceived as individualistic, and their well-being has become the focus. In Japan, although interdisciplinary discussions on children arose in the 1980s, they were evidently limited to repeating slogans such as “children as active agents” and “from children’s perspective” as well as failed sociological analyses of such slogans. Conversely, in the European sociology of childhood, a shift has been led by sociologists such as Alan Prout and David Oswell. They reconsidered typical dichotomies in childhood studies such as being–becoming, active–passive, modern–postmodern, or adult control and child-centered. Further, they proposed sociological descriptions of childhood by following current sociological theories such as the Actor Network Theory and the concept of governmentality. Similarly, Japanese sociology needs to accumulate ethnographical or genealogical descriptions of modern and late modern childhoods.
