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The study of children in European anthropology has followed a different trajectory to much of that in North America and for many years it was possible to talk about two distinct, and sometimes antagonistic, traditions. The dialogue with psychology, so central to American anthropology, never had the same prominence in Europe, nor have cross‐cultural, comparative surveys or studies of childrearing. Indeed, the large‐scale, comparative work that had revealed many aspects of children’s lives in American anthropology was treated with suspicion and some disdain among certain British anthropologists. The HRAF project, such an importance source – and inspiration – for American anthropologists studying socialization, was a source of particular ire, summarily dismissed by Edmund Leach as “tabulated nonsense” (1964, p. 299). E. E. Evans‐Pritchard was no more complimentary, writing of the HRAF that: “it is full of contradictions and of assertions and suppositions without supporting evidence. The statistical survey covering two hundred and fifty societies displays … poor sampling, crude itemization, arbitrary and inadequate criteria of classification – an almost unbelievably uncritical use of sources’ (1965, p. 26).

With such sources dismissed, and studies of child development largely delegated to psychology, British anthropological studies that centered on children were uncommon before the 1970s. There were a few exceptions (Goody & Goody, 1967; Read, 1968) and a larger number of ethnographic monographs where children made fleeting appearances, or merited an implicit acknowledgment that they had a role in legitimating marriage or fulfilling the filial obligations that lie at the heart of kinship (see Montgomery, 2009), but neither socialization nor social development were of great interest. Children were seen as knowing little about their culture, they did not take part in the public practices of religion or politics, or if they did it was completely passively, and they had not yet learnt how to behave or think “properly.” As Jean La Fontaine put it (1986, p. 10), anthropology was characterized by “an outdated view of children as raw material, unfinished specimens of the social beings whose ideas and behaviour are the proper subject matter for social science.” Even those who worked directly on issues affecting children did not ask them about the processes they were going through. Writing in the 1950s about girls’ initiation rites among the Bemba of Zambia, for example, Audrey Richards (1956, p. 63) acknowledged the absence of the girls’ opinions and wished she had asked them what they had experienced and how they understood it. Instead in her published work she commented that the girls being initiated “are both the centres of the ceremony, and yet the least interesting of the actors in it.”

By the early 1970s however this marginalization of children started to be questioned by anthropologists and sociologists who began to reconceptualize studies of childhood. Spurred on by the rise of feminist anthropology in the late 1960s which argued that women had been systematically side‐lined in both description and theory, by (usually) male social scientists who looked only at the public, male world of politics, religion, or other formal institutions and had ignored the domestic world of women and children, there were calls for a critical rethinking of children’s lives and their role in society. In 1973 Charlotte Hardman published a ground‐breaking article which tentatively asked, “Can there be an anthropology of childhood?” In it she claimed that childhood and children’s worlds were valid and valuable subjects for ethnographic research, making the point, since taken as axiomatic by later anthropologists, that “children [are] people to be studied in their own right”’ (1973, p. 87). This article also set the tone for some of the later debate about the role of psychology, arguing that studies of social development were intrinsically adult‐orientated and future‐focused and a way of using children to discuss other issues but failing to see them as interesting or relevant in their own right. Hardman was explicitly critical of the work on children’s social development pioneered in the previous decades by Mead, the Whitings, or LeVine, claiming that such work viewed children:

to a greater or lesser extent, as passive objects, as helpless spectators in a pressing environment which affects and produces their every behaviour. They see the child as continually assimilating, learning and responding to the adult, having little autonomy, contributing nothing to social values or behaviour except the latent outpourings of earlier acquired experiences.

(Hardman, 1973, p. 87)

Building on these insights, others began to reconceptualize and rethink ideas about childhood, looking at what childhood means in contemporary societies and calling for the critical re‐examination of categories such as “the child,” “childhood,” or “children” (James & Prout, 1997). Such studies were often grouped together under the umbrella heading as the “New Social Studies of Childhood” which took as one of its main premises that childhood must be understood as a socially and culturally constructed phenomenon, which changes over time and place, and that there can be no singular concept of childhood. Anthropologists argued that both the patterns of physical and psychological development, and the meanings given to them, vary enormously within and between cultures, so that childhood should always be understood as “a matter of social definition rather than physical maturity” (La Fontaine, 1986, p. 19). This emphasis on childhood as a socially and culturally constructed category led to many criticisms, not only of studies of socialization, but also of some of the basic premises of psychology itself. Pioneers of the New Social Studies of Childhood variously accused psychologists of: being obsessed with the “normal” child and its universal, unchanging needs; being ethnocentric, and taking little account of diverse childhoods while researching almost exclusively middle‐class children in Western countries; using Western developmental patterns as the norm and downplaying the different capacities, competences, interests, and developmental trajectories of poorer and less‐privileged children both in the West and in other parts of the world; promoting a deficit model of childhood that fails to understand the complexity of children’s different competences, or appreciate individual or cultural diversity; and finally believing themselves to be part of a neutral scientific endeavor, positioning themselves above politics and claiming to generate value‐free “objective” knowledge and evidence on which policy and practice is based (see Morrow, 2011; Tatlow‐Golden & Montgomery, 2021). In their seminal book, Theorizing Childhood, James et al. memorably argued that developmental psychology belonged in the “dustbin of history” (1998, p. 9).

Another article of faith – and a reason for discarding psychological studies of development – was that children were human “beings” rather than human “becomings.” Looking at social development was problematic, it was argued, because it focused on what children would become in the future, and how they would get there, not on what children were now. In contrast, the New Social Studies of Childhood conceptualized children as highly knowledgeable and experienced experts on their own contemporary cultural worlds and denied that they were in any way incomplete, incompetent, or ignorant. It also rejected the idea that children’s social or cultural development was a linear process unfurling in measurable, universal stages, during which the incompetent and incomplete child gradually learnt social competence and developed into a fully formed adult. Competence, it was argued, was not solely an adult characteristic achieved with biological and cognitive maturity, but rather was a “fluid context‐dependent performance that can be staged by children and adults alike” (Valentine, 1997, p. 82).

Anthropologists working in this new paradigm often call their work “child‐focused” or “child‐centered” to differentiate it from previous studies of socialization or childrearing. Child‐centered anthropology conceptualizes children as active and capable people, embedded in social relationships, within particular social, cultural, and historical contexts. Instead of looking at what adults do to children and how they are socialized by others, child‐centered anthropology looks at children’s perspectives and privileges the mundane, everyday lives of children, previously dismissed as uninteresting or unilluminating. This is exemplified in the work of anthropologists like Marianne Gullestad (1984) who examined children’s daily lives at home in Norway and revealed the previously hidden importance of children’s roles and responsibilities within the family. Another example is Allison James (1993) in the United Kingdom, who explored the nature of children’s friendships in British schools. She argued that, despite their importance to children, friendships are often overlooked or trivialized by adults or interpreted only through an adult lens which looked at how children learn from peers rather than how children felt about their friendships and how they had an impact on their daily experiences.

Child‐centered anthropology is seen as a corrective to the previous marginalization of children within anthropology and an inversion of power relationships between adult and child and between researcher and researched. The term child‐centered anthropology also underlines the point that these anthropologists conduct research with rather than on children so that children are acknowledged as the experts on their own lives and experiences and serve as anthropologists’ primary informants. Children must be researched in their own terms, not talked about with parents or other adults, or their experiences extrapolated from large scale datasets. Examining childhood in this way means focusing on how children themselves perceive their lives, surroundings, parents, and upbringing – and what impact this has on wider social and cultural structures and institutions. It is based on the premise that children have agency. They are not empty vessels or blank slates who are socialized by others – but play an active part in their own upbringing, shaping and transforming themselves and others. Children themselves create meanings and form their own belief systems, negotiating and shaping social attitudes about childhood. Anne Solberg (1997), for example, looked at children’s perspectives of their daily domestic lives, as well as analyzing how children see their role in Norwegian society, and showed how this identity is arrived at through a process of negotiation between children and adults in the domestic sphere and beyond.

This emphasis on children’s voices and agency has been complemented by a more politicized theorization of the global cultural politics of childhood. This has analyzed how childhood became a conflicted and contested idea and laid bare the multiple structures and processes of power, between countries and within families (Scheper‐Hughes & Sargent, 1998; Stephens, 1995). Much of this work has pivoted on the new focus on children as rights‐bearing citizens in the international arena and the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, United Nations, 1989). The UNCRC reaffirmed the idea that children’s rights are human rights, and that while children need special protection because of their biological and social vulnerability, these rights spring from the inalienable fact of their humanity. Such ideals fitted easily with academic theorizations that children were people, that society could not be properly understood without understanding the role and experiences of every member, including children, and that children’s own perspectives and daily realities were valid and worthwhile areas of research. By valuing them in their own right children were seen by both academics and those drafting and implementing the UNCRC as individuals with rights and the potential for independent action and agency, not as appendages to their family or the passive recipients of socialization (Montgomery, 2017).

The UNCRC, while providing a rationale for seeing children as autonomous agents and key informants, has not, however, been universally welcomed by either child‐centered anthropologists or indeed those interested in studies of socialization and social development. Robert LeVine, for instance, rejects the argument that an anthropology of childhood should focus only on children as active agents, existing in their own world, refuting the claim that studies of childrearing are in some ways dismissive or even oppressive of children. He argues (2003, p. 5) that studies of socialization do not treat children

simply as objects rather than subjects, suppressing their voices and taking their perspective of the adults who oppress, victimize and exploit children. These allegations come from those who see an anthropology of childhood as a political weapon against injustice like political struggles to end the persecution of women and ethnic minorities, rather than a search for knowledge and understanding. One of the strengths of socialization research is that it has resisted this kind of politicization in its pursuit of a deeper understanding of children and their parents.

However, the United States is the only member state in the world not to ratify the UNCRC and children’s rights, inevitably, have different standing and meanings among US researchers. Whether or not any studies of childhood can be politically neutral is much debated and, as argued earlier, the lack of a political dimension and a failure to understand diversity or privilege is one of the criticisms levelled at psychologists from those in the New Social Studies of Childhood. Even so, while the cultural politics of childhood, and children’s rights in particular, have been a source of inspiration to child‐centered anthropologists, there has also been a certain amount of frustration and distrust of any universalization of childhood, whether from psychological theories or international legislation. On a macro level there have been concerns that the UNCRC has created a notion of a universal childhood, globalized in line with inflexible Western standards and ideals, which is being imposed on cultures with very different notions of what a child is, how they should grow up and what the relationships between adult and child should look like, and which does not allow for cultural variation or political and economic circumstances (Boyden, 1997). The Convention, for example, clearly defines a child as any person under the age of 18 but anthropologists have pointed out that this simply does not hold true in many societies where children marry, bear their own children, work, or are initiated as adults before the age of 18 and where personhood is thought about very differently and both childhood and adulthood acknowledged at different times and in different ways. On a micro‐level, anthropologists have also argued that an insistence on children’s rights has the potential to destabilize family relationships, undermine parental authority and change understandings of what a good childhood looks like and how children should interact with others and develop socially (Burr, 2004). In Ghana, for example, some research has suggested that parents believed that children’s rights would lead to division within families, cause children to become selfish, neglect their parents and forego their responsibilities and reciprocal obligations. In one study, parents said: “we don’t want Western children in Ghana” (Twum‐Danso, 2009, p. 426).