Insights into the social construction of childhood by cultural and creative industries

As in the case of "children" and "adults", "membership categories" often go by pairs: the meaning of one of these terms cannot be understood without the other and they are associated with different predicates and category-bound activities that are socially controlled (Sacks, 1974). In Western societies this is the result of a long historical process that has been at first analysed by Ariès (1962), as the increasing "segregation" of children outside adults' life, with the new importance of education and the rise of schooling. In her book Pricing the priceless child, Zelizer (1985) has pointed out one of the major trends of the social and cultural construction of our modern Western vision of childhood: the withdrawn of children from economic labor and the increasing importance of affection in families' relations between children and adults. Nowadays, this distinction is reinforced by the institutionalization of childhood, in terms of the construction of different age categories defining what is authorized, permitted, advised, forbidden, to avoid, etc., at such or such age. This institutionalization goes with the growing importance of age conventions, in particular age as a number of years that is supposed in the internationalization of the cultural content aimed to children and public regulations, including the definition of childhood as a category shared by everyone under 18 years of age in the United Nations Convention on the rights of the...