The Sociology of Childhood

This volume brings an extraordinary range of theoretical ideas and empirical research to a neglected area of sociology. William A Corsaro shows how children contribute to both social stability and social change through a process of interpretive reproduction, and breaks new ground by stressing the conceptual autonomy of children.

Part One reviews traditional approaches to socialization and contrasts them with the author′s perspective of interpretive reproduction. The second part places the new sociology of childhood in historical and cultural perspective. The importance of children′s peer culture is defined and discussed in Part Three, and the last part considers children as social problems and also the social problems of children.