Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 8

While the biological capacities of young humans shape their capacities, this still leaves room for great plasticity and variation in how childhood is lived. Childhood is socially constructed, and children’s lives are profoundly shaped by constructions of childhood – whether in conformity, resistance or reinvention. The new social studies of childhood, whether from a historical, spatial or social perspective, have established that children’s lives are shaped by the social and cultural expectations adults and their peers have of them in different times and places; what concept of childhood prevails in any specific time or place is shaped by many factors external to a child, including the complicated intersections of age with ‘race’, gender and class.