In the social sciences, namely sociology, children are unfairly dismissed as projects of socialisation. Certainly, in Western culture, it has become commonplace to discern children as fragile, naive, and vulnerable, constantly in need of supervision and rigorous parental care. The child has little life experience, knows nothing about the world, and is perceived as having an inability to make choices. Indeed, when children attempt to become autonomous, they are disregarded on the basis of not having enough social capital. Children are members of society that are projects of imposition. They absorb the social setting and then consequently become a product of it. Therefore, we expect children to be subservient to a contract. This contract vests power in adults and gives them the duty to socialise children with the values, norms, beliefs and cultural tenets of a society. The child is then often seen as an extension of the adult, mainly a parent, and part of his or her social property. As a result, the child is not an integrated member of society, but, instead, a working project on behalf of the agency of the adult. This contract is intrinsically subversive to the autonomy of children because it fails to grant them any meaningful social capital and agency. Instead, it renders children as highly dependent and expectably submissive to other entities of social power, thereby limiting their autonomy and status.
In my work, I aim to further critique this contract, and propose a new framework that will intend to discern children in a different light.
