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was the most elementary and universal char- they have certain kinds of rights specific to
acteristic of all social interaction, understood them, even if the actual meaning and effect of
as the struggle for existence in a world of lim- the idea varies enormously (Alston et al.,
ited resources. When humans become con- 1992; Freeman, 1998; Guggenheim, 2005;
scious of competitive dynamics and organize Roche, 1999). This does not mean that
their social relations accordingly, these the development has been continuous; Göran
processes need another term, conflict, to cap- Therborn points out the historical discontinu-
ture the various social forms which subse- ity between the first wave of interest in chil-
quently emerge, such as status, hierarchy, dren in philanthropy, medicine (pediatrics),
subordination, and so on. ‘Competition,’ and law around the turn of the twentieth
wrote Park and Burgess, ‘determines the century, and the post-welfare state dominance
position of the individual in the [ecological] of the discourse surrounding children by con-
community, conflict fixes his place in society’ ceptions of public welfare and services, social
(Park and Burgess, (1969 [1921]: 574). science, economics, and politics (1996: 30).
Accommodation was the mechanism of To say that there may be increasing recog-
stabilizing and institutionalizing processes of nition of children as social and political sub-
conflict, the basis of social order, but also jects is also not to deny how partial that
always provisional and fragile, always vulner- recognition remains, in social and political
able to being undermined by competition and theory as much as in the public sphere more
conflict. Assimilation, finally, refers to more broadly. It remains difficult to link questions
deeply-seated mechanisms of accommoda- of human development over the lifespan to
tion at the level of culture and habit. It is, ‘big issues’ such as state formation, modern-
they wrote, ‘a process of interpenetration and ization and development, globalization, and
fusion in which persons and groups acquire changing political structures and relations.
the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of As one of us wrote, ‘the standard categories
other persons and groups, and, by sharing of sociological research – individual, society,
their experience and history, are incorporated gender, class, action, structure, state, econ-
with them in a common culture’ (Park and omy, and so on – continue to operate without
Burgess, (1969 [1921]: 735). Effective reference to the fact that human beings exist
assimilation does not eliminate competition in an interdependent relationship with both
and conflict altogether, but does integrate previous and succeeding generations’ (van
cultural and symbolic orientations suffi- Krieken, 1997: 447), and this is only gradu-
ciently to establish a more or less stable ally changing.
‘community of purpose and action’ (Park and The observation that childhood and chil-
Burgess, (1969 [1921]: 735). Since Park and dren’s experiences have been given less
Burgess’s original formulation, the tendency attention than they deserve is itself not espe-
in the social sciences has been to group cially new. Erik Erikson complained in 1950
accommodation and assimilation together about the absence of ‘reference to the fact
under the term ‘cooperation’, seeing them as that all people start as children and that all
closely connected with each other. 3 peoples begin in their nurseries’ (1950: 16).
To see how these three processes run The anthropologist Charlotte Hardman pro-
through the social development of childhood, posed in 1973 that children should be ‘stud-
we need to start with the following observa- ied in their own right, and not just as
tion. Beginning with the League of Nations’ receptacles of adult teaching’, aiming to
Declaration of Children’s Rights in 1924, and reveal ‘whether there is in childhood a self-
decisively reinforced by the UN Convention regulating, autonomous world which does
on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, not necessarily reflect early development of
an essential element of the social and political adult culture’, and suggesting that ‘at the
discourses surrounding children is now that level of behaviour, values, symbols, games,