Children, gender, and issues of well-being

Abstract

This chapter examines varied dimensions of the significance of gender in children’s lives, providing a framework for thinking about gender in relation to issues of well-being. Gender is central to divisions of labor and to the structuring of institutions such as families, schools, and states; it is also a dimension of bodies and physical reproduction, individual identities and personal experience, and social relations and everyday interaction. Gender is empirically present in the world, but at the same time, also a forceful frame of interpretation that imposes hierarchical dichotomies on differences that are varied and distributional. Highlighting gendered patterns in children’s work, schooling, and peer relations, we primarily focus on children in industrialized or “global North” countries (relatively affluent countries in Europe and North America, also including Australia and New Zealand located in the global South). A brief historical overview describes the consolidation of a dominant type of childhood centered around two institutional domains: privatized families and state-supported schools. The discussion of schools emphasizes changes, and also the continuities, in children’s gendered behavior over the last 30-40 years. We discuss gendered and age-related trends in the amount and type of unpaid work done by contemporary schooled and domesticated children, with patterns strongly related to social class. A family’s income level is also centrally salient in the organization of childhoods in the less industrialized, more impoverished countries of the global South (in Africa, Latin America, Asia). The experiences of children in the North and the South are converging through the dynamics of global capitalism, with high rates of migration and the circulation of commercialized culture and products designed for children. These forces are altering the gendered contours of young people’s experiences, as well as widening the gaps between the rich and poor, in patterns articulated with age and gender.