Chapter 2 : Childhood

Abstract

There have been numerous philosophers and scholars who have written about childhood such as John Locke, Jacques Rousseau, Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg (Zalta, Nodelman, Allen & Lanier Anderson, 2015). Over the centuries there has been an increasing level of complexity in ideas about 'young people (Buttigieg, 2008). Emanuel Buttigieg (2008) refers to two main trends in this regard. The first is that there is an intimate association of sexuality with children and adolescents; and secondly there is a tendency to dissect and compartmentalize the study of childhood and adolescence into stages or steps. Sexuality is seen to be an intrinsic part of every child's development, be it positive (in the sense of normal biological development) or negative (in the sense of physical and psychological abuse by adults on younger people). Rebecca Gatt and Joe lnguanez (2010) maintain that when disciplines such as sociology and psychology addressed childhood they created stereotypical images of the family, of the child and of childhood. Until recently, studies that considered childhood as a social process characterised ty its own complex, distinct features have been limited. Theorists such as Sigmund Freud (1905), Abraham Maslow (1943; 1954), Jean Piaget (1936), Erik Erikson, (1950: 1963); Lawrence Kohlberg (1958) and Albert Bandura (1977) (Eysenck, 2013) were mainly concerned with the notion of how the family helped the child to become a mature adult.