Nordic Childhoods 1700 1960

This volume strengthens interest and research in the fields of both Childhood Studies and Nordic Studies by exploring conceptions of children and childhood in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). Although some books have been written about the history of childhood in these countries, few are multidisciplinary, focus on this region as a whole, or are available in English. This volume contains essays by scholars from the fields of literature, history, theology, religious studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, education, music, and art history. Contributors study the history of childhood in a wide variety of sources, such as folk and fairy tales, legal codes, religious texts, essays on education, letters, sermons, speeches, hymns, paintings, novels, and school essays written by children themselves. They also examine texts intended specifically for children, including text books, catechisms, newspapers, songbooks, and children’s literature. By bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines who raise distinctive questions about childhood and take into account a wide range of sources, the book offers a fresh and substantive contribution to the history of childhood in the Nordic countries between 1700 and 1960. The volume also helps readers trace the historical roots of the internationally recognized practices and policies regarding child welfare within the Nordic countries today and prompts readers from any country to reflect on their own conceptions of and commitments to children.

This volume strengthens interest and research in the fields of both Childhood Studies and Nordic Studies by exploring conceptions of children and childhood in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). Although some books have been written about the history of childhood in these countries, few are multidisciplinary, focus on this region as a whole, or are available in English. This volume contains essays by scholars from the fields of literature, history, theology, religious studies, intellectual history, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, education, music, and art history. Contributors study the history of childhood in a wide variety of sources, such as folk and fairy tales, legal codes, religious texts, essays on education, letters, sermons, speeches, hymns, paintings, novels, and school essays written by children themselves. They also examine texts intended specifically for children, including text books, catechisms, newspapers, songbooks, and children's literature. By bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines who raise distinctive questions about childhood and take into account a wide range of sources, the book offers a fresh and substantive contribution to the history of childhood in the Nordic countries between 1700 and 1960. The volume also helps readers trace the historical roots of the internationally recognized practices and policies regarding child welfare within the Nordic countries today and prompts readers from any country to reflect on their own conceptions of and commitments to children.

In this book, noted Nordic researchers and teacher educators provide insights into early childhood discourses and practices in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In addition to these insiders' perspectives, an American scholars explore Nordic themes, trends, and practices as they emerge in the book's chapters on such varied topics as Nordic childhoods, children's perspectives, preschool teacher education reforms and developments, transition from preschool to primary school, learning through play, caregiving and instruction.

This edited collection sheds light on Nordic families’ strategies and methods for transferring significant cultural heritage to the next generation over centuries. Contributors explore why certain values, attitudes, knowledge, and patterns were selected while others were left behind, and show how these decisions served and secured families’ well-being and values. Covering a time span ranging from the early modern era to the end of the twentieth century, the book combines the innovative "history from below" approach with a broad variety of families and new kinds of source material to open up new perspectives on the history of education and upbringing.

This book investigates and uncover paradoxes and ambivalences that are actualised when seeking to make the right choices in the best interests of the child. The 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child established a milestone for the 20th century. Many of these ideas still stand, but time calls for new reflections, empirical descriptions and knowledge as provided in this book. Special attention is directed to the conceptualisation of children and childhood cultures, the missing voices of infants and fragile children, as well as transformations during times of globalisation and change. All chapters contribute to understand and discuss aspects of societal demands and cultural conditions for modern-day children age 0–18, accompanied by pointers to their future. Contributors are: Eli Kristin Aadland, Wenche Bjorbækmo, Jorunn Spord Borgen, Gunn Helene Engelsrud, Kristin Vindhol Evensen, Eldbjørg Fossgard, Liv Torunn Grindheim, Asle Holthe, Liisa Karlsson, Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, Jonatan Leer, Ida Marie Lyså, Elin Eriksen Ødegaard, Czarecah Tuppil Oropilla, Susanne Højlund Pedersen, Anja Maria Pesch, Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, Gro Rugseth, Pauline von Bonsdorff, Hege Wergedahl and Susanne C. Ylönen.

This volume explores Nordic textbooks chronologically and empirically from the Protestant reformation to our own time. The chapters are written by scholars from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and deploy a wide range of methods, representing different academic fields.

While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.

In the light of the complex demographic shifts associated with late modernity and the impetus of neo-liberal politics, childhood continues all the more to operate as a repository for the articulation of diverse social and cultural anxieties. Since the Thatcher years, juvenile delinquency, child poverty, and protection have been persistent issues in public discourse. Simultaneously, childhood has advanced as a popular subject in the arts, as the wealth of current films and novels in this field indicates. Focusing on the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, this collection assembles contributions concerned with current political, social, and cultural dimensions of childhood in the United Kingdom. The individual chapters, written by internationally renowned experts from the social sciences and the humanities, address a broad spectrum of contemporary childhood issues, including debates on child protection, school dress codes, the media, the representation and construction of children in audiovisual media, and literary awards for children’s fiction. Appealing to a wide scholarly audience by joining perspectives from various disciplines, including art history, education, law, film and TV studies, sociology, and literary studies, this volume endorses a transdisciplinary and meta-theoretical approach to the study of childhood. It seeks to both illustrate and dismantle the various ways in which childhood has been implicitly and explicitly conceived in different disciplines in the wake of the constructivist paradigm shift in childhood studies.