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CHILDHOOD NARRATED AND NEGOTIATED: 
CHILDREN'S, PARENTS' AND TEACHERS' 

VIEWS ON CHILDHOOD  
Bjørg Kjær 

In this paper I shall demonstrate how different approaches to childhood 
interact with the childhood narratives of children, parents, and school 
teachers. Childhood is narrated and constructed by different agents. In Pierre 
Bourdieu-terms we have a field of agents, discussing the definition of the 
Child. In this discussion, professionals have striven to achieve orthodoxy, 
i.e. the privilege of being experts whose utterances have more power than 
those of others. 

THE DANISH CONTEXT 

In the Nordic countries and especially in Denmark, childhood has 
become extremely institutionalized and professionalized during the last 
thirty years. Today we have a large labor market related to children, and 
childraising has become a matter for professionals as well as parents. 

Most Danish children attend daycare within their first year of living as 
90% of all mothers are in the labor market. So the concept of the Child is a 
very important category which functions as an archimedic point in the 
process of defining specific professional groups as well as parenthood in 
general. The public debate has frequently returned to the question of who 
should influence and leave their mark on children. In the seventies, there 
was a moral panic about indoctrination of school-children, which created a 
taboo in relation to the role of professional upbringers. They were expected 
to be teaching "facts" and useful competences like reading, writing, 
calculating, etc. But it was also expected that teachers would train children's 
independence and improve their abilities to participate in a democratic 
society; at least this is an implicit formulation in the text of the school 
legislation. So, as a teacher, one must both teach "facts" and "attitudes." 

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The questions of what are "facts" and what are "attitudes" has been 
rather obscure in the public debate, and the demand for neutrality has forced 
teachers to emphasize and make visible their teaching, and play down their 
personal opinions and values, even though the latter is an important part of 
teaching democracy. 

METHODS 

In this context I have studied how children, parents and teachers tell 
childhood. I have done so partly by means of interviews and partly by 
fieldwork. The former I rather prefer to call conversations or dialogues with 
people. The latter I would call folkloristic fieldwork, i.e. on the basis of my 
cultural competence I get into dialogues and interactions with adults and 
children. Being a part of the Danish culture myself, I have striven for no 
kind of neutrality. Rather, I have sought to expose the context-bound 
dynamics of communication in relation to children and their upbringing. 

I have been faced with the well-known dilemma of not being able to ask 
the informants about what I wanted to know because I wanted to obtain 
materials which would provide more than just examples of what I could 
think of in advance. So, instead of making questionnaires, I spoke with the 
informants about themes in relation to my interests. We spoke about children 
and adults, about play and school, about toys and joys, about the past, 
present, and future. I also spoke with the children and interacted with them 
in different ways, and I spent time with them, just observing. And those 
observations included adults interacting with children. I see this fieldwork 
partly as a way of producing social reality by means of my person and partly 
as a way of observing (this) social reality. 

THE TEACHERS 

On the basis of Sandra Dolby Stahl's study of personal narratives, I have 
interpreted the dialogues between me and the informants (Kjær 1997) in 
relation to communication strategies 

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Childhood Narrated and Negotiated 

and the use of style and narrative sequences of different kinds. 
In short, teachers tell in generalized terms, they express themselves as 

having official capacities as experts with authority deriving from their 
training. They tell no personal narratives, but many "scientific truths" about 
children's nature. But they do not just hide behind authority. They also 
express very deep personal involvement in their work. In this personal in-
volvement they make use of their childhood memories in two ways: 1) They 
tell pupils about their own childhood experiences in order to establish a 
close relationship with them, and 2) They refer to their own childhoods to 
aid in evaluating contemporary children's competences, needs, and 
possibilities. I shall give an example to illustrate the type of dilemma that 
teachers have to deal with. This teacher tells about the teacher-pupil 
relationship. 

Per: "There has to be a fundamental joint trust, namely, 
that both of us are basically fond of each other. And I don't 
say 'respect' one another. I say: are fond of each other." 

Bjørg: "What then if you're not fond of somebody? Did 
you ever experience that?" 

Per: "No. There's no reason not to be fond of them. What 
reason would that be?" 

Bjørg: "Maybe you are just not fond of some people." 

Per: "Yes, but I feel differently. And I know that I do. 
Otherwise I couldn't be a teacher. My task. . . is to see that 
there is a person who needs knowledge. And I must give 
knowledge to that human being. Because if I don't do that, 
I've let him or her down." 

This teacher expresses deep devotion and personal involvement in order 
to explain his obligations towards the children. It is a contemporary version 
of a classic nineteenth-century con 

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Per: "And by the way, I get paid for it." 

Kjær 

cept of devotion. This concept is closely connected with the very shaping of 
the professional teacher, who emerged as a skilled person in this historical 
period. This devotion is about morality, affection, and openness in relation 
to any human being that walks through the door of the classroom. This very 
sentence I just quoted, "Because if I don't do that, then I've let him or her 
down," is a strong statement of human commitment. But it ends in a totally 
different style, like this: 

This illustrates the tension between, on the one hand, the teacher's self-
image based on devotion, and, on the other hand, external demands for 
professional capacity to act in standardized and predictable ways in order to 
be fair to all children and trustworthy to the surroundings. This tension 
demands devotion and personal commitment from the teacher-but at the 
same time it taboos the limits of such a deep personal involvement. So the 
teacher has to say that his disliking a pupil is not a possibility.  

We have two lines of argumentation: 1) the personally committed and 
emotionally expressed way of telling, and 2) the professionally distanced 
and intellectually expressed way of telling. And these two lines of 
argumentation never meet. The teachers jump abruptly from one to the 
other. In this movement between the discourses, the image of childhood 
functions as a legitimizer and explanation. As a teacher, one is supposed to 
love all children because they are assumed to be alike-i.e. childish. On the 
other had, because children are alike, one can generalize in scientific ways 
about them. 

THE PARENTS 

Parents tell childhood in very personal ways. This is in complete accord 
with their culturally-defined roles as intimately related to and attached to 
their children. They would be bad parents if they spoke otherwise. They tell 
many personal narratives and identify strongly with their sons and daughters 
as they recollect their own childhood experiences. But the picture is 

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Childhood Narrated and Negotiated 

quite ambiguous because the parents also use scientific concepts and 
knowledge when narrating their children. All of the parents use 
developmental psychology to explain and describe children in general and 
their own children in particular. When the offspring are discussed, parents 
mention, for instance, the importance of play and sport activities for 
children's mental and intellectual development, implicitly drawing on 
psychological research showing a connection between the two. 

The Swedish ethnologist Karl-Olov Arnstberg (1987) describes how 
psychology as a scholarly discipline has led to the growth of a popular 
psychology living side by side with authorized psychology. According to 
Arnstberg, psychology offers personally based causal explanations which 
appear to be universal and place the individual in a larger context without de-
individualizing him or her. This is why scientific psychology is used in 
everyday life. The conceptualization of childhood gives the personal 
interpretations a touch of science. Especially in this field of childhood and 
child raising, the question of right and wrong is attached to scientific results. 

So these parents' interpretations of children are marked by the 
scientifically legitimated discourse of public professional childcare. Today, 
most parents are in contact with daycare institutions very early in their 
parental career, as part of child raising is moved from a private to a public 
space when the child is about one year old. Ideals, norms, dreams, and 
hopes, which can differ a lot, are narrated and negotiated in an arena where 
the intimacy of the family must communicate with professional competence. 
The reference to developmental psychology makes the parents' 
argumentation appear scientific in a way that signifies their mastery of the 
prestigious codes concerning children and their development. This style of 
well-informedness aims at mastering the professional code in order to make 
it possible for the parents to express their own opinions. The parents do not 
necessarily take over scientific frames of reference uncritically. Rather, they 
create a tradition of parenthood and childhood on the basis of a scientific 
discourse. They use this scientific discourse in refiguring their own wishes, 
norms, and morals in much the same way as they use their childhood 
memories. 

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THE CHILDREN 

I am going to introduce you to three boys in a kindergarten. They are 
best friends, sometimes referred to as "The Three Musketeers"—just to give 
you some idea of the character of their friendship. For about two years, these 
boys have been busy telling and playing endless Spiderman stories. They go 
on for hours, days, and weeks. Conscientiously they have been doing their 
"homework" as they have watched the Spiderman TV Show every Friday 
afternoon. They have made their parents videotape the shows, they have 
invited each other home to watch the tapes, and they have rehearsed and 
discussed conflicts and characters in the show. 

The teachers do not think Spiderman is in good taste. They consider it 
to be of poor quality and violent, primitively repeating a stereotyped 
dichotomy between good and evil. The boys use Spiderman in at least three 
ways: 

1. It keeps the adults at a distance, whereby the boys gain 
complete control. Here it is of great help that teachers 
loathe Spiderman! 

2. It serves as a good source for the creativity of the boys, 
as the characters are used, transformed, discussed, and 
elaborated in narratives and play. 

3. It forms a critique of cultural notions in the adult world. 
The boys use Spiderman to insist on the existence of good 
and evil—and they insist on the importance of their own 
judgments, which are far from stereotyped. 

Let me elaborate a bit on the last point. In contemporary Denmark, the 
dichotomy of good and evil is, in a way, non-existent. To be more precise: it 
has been transformed into a dichotomy of good and sick (or good and 
pathological) (d. Frykman 1993). This dichotomy of good and sick is a 
contemporary way of conceptualizing human suffering by relating to evil 
not as an explanation, as in premodern or religious contexts, but as some- 

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Childhood Narrated and Negotiated 

thing that has to be explained. 
In this process of explaining evil, professional caregivers, teachers, 

social workers, etc. play an important role. A child cannot be just evil, bad, 
unpleasant or disagreeable. The badness of the child has to be explained in 
terms of external influences such as events, which have made a healthy, 
normal child turn into a pathological one. This process of making evil 
dissolve into social, psychological, and societal circumstances is practiced 
by professional upbringers of all kinds and has become part of Danish 
common sense, a "truth" taken for granted. 

But by using Spiderman characters in playing and telling, these boys 
insist on the existence of evil. The pedagogues cannot accept such a 
standpoint since their professional identity is closely linked to the 
explanation of evil in order to make it disappear and make the 
malfunctioning child normal again. 

In these three different ways of narrating and defining childhood we can 
see that all of them implicitly or explicitly relate to the private-professional 
dichotomy, and negotiate the appropriate frame of reference. To my mind 
the different, distinct adult modes of telling the child must be understood 
together as a whole. The messages of private and professional utterances are 
important to understand some basic cultural notions in contemporary 
Denmark. 

I consider this tension between modes of utterances to be a reflection of 
an ideology of social life. It is an ideology which connects professional 
competence to both authority and morality. The greater the professional 
competence, the greater the authority and moral habitus. That which is 
formed as rational, scientific, neutral truths are as a matter of fact utterances 
about morals, attitudes, and values. 

Actually, the study of children's expressions is an eye-opener in 
pointing to these truths for what they are: cultural notions about the nature of 
children. 

WORKS CITED 

Arnstberg, Karl-Olav, ed. Bläckfisken. Om tillvarons tolkning, sunt förnuft 
 och psykologins utbredning. 1987. 
Baurdieu, Pierre. Distinktionen. 1986 trans. of La distinction. Paris: Ed 

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de Minuit, 1979. 
______. "Nägra egenskaper hos fälten." 1990 trans. of "Quelques 
 proprietes des champs. "Questions de sociologie. 1980. 
Frykman, Jonas. "Beroendets mörka sida. Ondska i en social kontext." 
        Ondskans etnografi. Eds. Lena Gerholm and Tomas Gerholm. 
 Stockholm, 1993. 
Kjær, Bjørg. "Childhood Narrated, Privately and Professionally." ARV, 
      Nordic Yearbook of Folklore. Ed. Ulrika Wolf-Knuts. The Royal 
      Adolphus Academy, Upsala. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1997. 

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