Sociedad, infancia y adolescencia, ¿de quién es la dificultad?

Abstract

This article tries to be an invitation to a journey in which the shared safeties taken for granted on the reality of the children and today teenagers, are being put in question, looking for other alternative explanations, which enable us to approach the study of the lives of the children, or the interventions with children (be they or we who meet in difficulty) with a different look. First it is analyzed the process of social construction of the proper concept of "childhood and adolescence in difficulty", in the light of the changes that have taken place, specially throughout last century, in the social sciences and its repercussion in the social images of childhood. In the second term, it is approached the condition to be child or teenager in so called "risk society", characterized, among other things, by the uncertainty and the desires to reach a certain control on the dangers perceived as potentials. The perception of the risks for the childhood in the society has two faces: on the one hand the dangers to those who are exposed and for other one those that they cause, which threatens us. To conspire these risks it is required major control on the part of the institutions that regulate the life of the children (the family, the school or the protection system). The result is a restriction of the autonomy of the children and teenagers, which confront with the expectations of whom, as " children of the modernity ", are capable of choosing their own ways of self-realization.