Childhood and Human Value: Development, Separation and Separability

Argumento de Childhood and Human Value: Development, Separation and Separability

For millennia children have been valued as possessions - valued by their parents as `my¿ child and valued by communities and cultures as `belonging¿ to them. Recently, a new way of valuing children has emerged ¿ valuing them as people in possession of themselves, as people who have rights. This has led to fears that rights will erode love between parents and children, and separate children from their communities and cultures.

Childhood and Human Value explains why people feel this way and argues that they are mistaken. Adults in modern societies have separation anxieties about children¿s rights, because they are used to measuring human value against a standard of `separateness¿. The more separate you appear to be from the opinions and control of others, the more valuable you seem. This highly original and accessible book shows us how to resolve the conflict between `love¿ and `rights¿ in contemporary relationships between adults and children. Examining a number of Twentieth Century developmental thinkers, including Vygotsky, Winnicott, Gilligan and Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Lee argues that a more flexible and realistic understanding of the sources of human value is available to us, based on `separability¿.

Childhood and Human Value is key reading for students in a variety of fields including sociology of childhood, family studies, sociology of education, psychology of development, and childhood studies. It is also of interest to professionals who work with children, for example social workers, teachers, and the police.0Introduction to volume: Love and Rights

Introduction to Section 1: Possession, separation and separability

Chapter 1: Value and possession
Chapter 2: Value and separation

Introduction to Section 2: Social class, individuals and separation

Chapter 3: Basil Bernstein: Language, class and separation
Chapter 4: Ulrich Beck: Inequality, risk and separation

Introduction to Section 3: Separation and integration

Chapter 5: Immoral hierarchies: Carol Gilligan and moral development
Chapter 6: D.W.Winnicot: Insides, outsides and transitional phenomena

Introduction to Section 4: Competence and separability

Chapter 7: Lev Vygotsky: Thinking for oneself
Chapter 8: Norbert Elias: Being responsible for oneself

Introduction to Section 5: Human value and childhood

Chapter 9: Deleuze and Guattari: separability and the composition of human value
Chapter 10: Overview and Conclusions