Roots and Problems of Universalism: The Concept of Children's Agency

This chapter highlights the conceptual narratives of children and childhood. These conceptual narratives have been enhanced in Western society since the beginning of modernity, and later expanded to the global society. Recently, the conceptual narrative of Sociology of Childhood has proposed a new form of universalism in global society. Starting with a radical critique of adult control, this narrative analyses the meanings of social relations involving children, and point out that children are competent actors of social relations and active agents of change. The concept of agency implies the relationship between children’s actions and social structures. The social structure which conditions children’s agency is explained as a hierarchical, although dynamic, generational order of relations. However, the incresaing interest in children’s participation has generated a quest for effective adult-child relations which may promote children’s agency. This interest has also enhanced efforts to find forms of relations that can also enhance the agency of marginalized children, taking into account the global dimension of society. However, the analysis and enhancement of agency require the recogntion of five presuppositions. First, the actions of adults differ in meaning according to different social structures. Second, although the significance of adult actions depends on the strucure of the social system in which they are produced, only local conditions can promote more or less effective adult-child relations. Third, the actions of adults can enable various forms of children’s action, coordination with and among children, management of decisions. Fourth, the paradoxical dependence of children’s actions on adults’ actions may take two forms: either guided adaptation and socialization, or empowered choices and decision-making. Fifth, empowering children’s choices means enhancing unpredictability, which needs the additional enhancement of children’s management of their own actions. The challenge is globalizing facilitation of adult-children dialogue, rather than universal narratives of childhood and children, as dialogue is a hybrid social structure that can promote effective local and differentiated conditions of children’s agency. The identification of the structure of dialogue is a result of research that cannot imply that dialogue and agency are the best possible future in which to hope in the global society. The future of children and their relations with society is the consequence of the unpreditctable success of the structures of relations in which children are involved.