Otherness of childhood

The otherness of childhood is a phrase being used to argue that there are substantial differences between the lived worlds of children and adults. These differences are suggested to emerge from complex outcomes of divergent states of physical, neurological, emotional, affective and experiential being between children's and adults' lives. This is of interest to children's geographies, as children's experiences and practices of, say, a city, and its spaces might be very different from those of adults, and very difficult to recreate through adult sensibilities (this has obvious implications for research).

The approach suggests that adult (researchers) need to be cautious in their claims about understanding the world from a child's perspective. It is not claimed that there are no connections between these two worlds, but rather that they can be at once very connected and close and very far apart. This is a common theme in some literature which considers childhood. Ideas of the otherness of childhood have connections with some children's affinity with disordered spaces (those not managed and tidied by adult society) like waste ground in cities. They also have implications for trying to remember what it was like to be a child as a form of research and knowing childhood. This is, at best, a highly complex and multifaceted process which, again, cannot be assumed to give easy access to children’s worlds. This question has raised some critical response within children's geographies (see Philo, 2003).

Sources

• Cloke, P. and Jones, O. (2005), 'Unclaimed Territory": Childhood and Disordered Spaces(s), Social and Cultural Geography', 6, 3, pp. 311–323.
• Philo, C. (2003), 'To Go Back up the Side Hill': Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood', Geographies of Childhood, 1, 1, pp. 7–23.