“I believe if you focus, you can do an invention perfectly.”

These are the words of Kelvin Doe, who, at age 13, taught himself how to build batteries from the materials he could scavenge locally. He used those batteries to power his neighbourhood in Sierra Leone, where power outages were common. Kelvin might not be the most well-known example of a young person choosing to use their time to lead change in their society, but his self-driven curiosity and care for his community made a positive impact.

Children can change society in many ways, from demanding political agency through social activism to using their creativity to find new ways of using the resources around them. In this essay, I will first briefly describe debates crucial to the study of children and the sociology of childhood, relevant to providing perspective to seeing children as actors in changing society. These will provide a necessary context to focus the answer to the question “Can children change society?” on the giving and conquering of space as a way to trigger social change. I will draw upon two examples from existing research: one act that unintentionally resulted in social change and one act producing change deliberately. The examples illustrate the importance of letting children choose where and how to spend their time and what might hinder that ability.

Throughout the essay, the term ‘children’ will be used to encapsulate people under 18; nonetheless, it is recognised that not all people under 18 want to be viewed as children and might prefer the term teens or young people.

Children as creators of social change

To analyse children as creators of social change, we need to consider the ways in which they may act politically, their agency, participation, rights as citizens and how they are taken seriously.

Before the 1970s, within social sciences, children were mainly seen as “human becomings” in need of being taught by adults. Children were studied regarding their physical and psychological developments, not their social actions and place in relationships.

Since their right to have their views heard was stipulated by the UNCRC, Article 12, efforts have been made to allow children to participate in society. Political participation has been realised in its majority through official spaces created by adults, such as children’s councils in public services and schools. Recent research has examined what constraints and/or fosters children’s participation. For example, these official spaces of participation depend on public agendas and produce limitations, both in what children’s voices are heard, how they are heard and the subjects in which they are invited to participate. To understand to what capacity and extent children can act politically, researcher Diane M. Rodgers proposes a few ways in which children are non-exclusively involved in social movements as:

However, children acting politically can “take place in less official arenas”, as Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli articulate clearly, and the trigger behind it can either be personal or with the intent to have a positive impact on the broader community. Often children choose to advocate for change in topics close to them, such as what might be happing in their communities or stating that, as the future generation, they have the right to have a say on matters that impact their future, e.g. climate change. Children can build their own strategies and spaces for participation and can do so in their everyday lives, even if these actions are not intentionally political.

Not all children’s actions are considered activism because they are not seen as belonging within big P Politics. Some argue that we have failed to recognise children’s participation and therefore have neglected their political contributions. Researcher Fernando J. Bosco argues that failing to analyse the political implications of children’s contributions produces a limited understanding of our social world and political possibilities.

Historically children have also not been recognised as having political agency, and only recently has it been studied the impact of their agency on political action and social change. However, researchers have demonstrated that children can be political in everyday activities. They urge us to look at children’s everyday lives as inspiration and understand the impact of such contributions.

Allison James, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, describes the study of children’s agency as “one of the most important theoretical developments in the recent history of childhood studies”, where there is pressure to see children as rightful and capable social agents. Today children are recognised as social actors, but there are questions about what agency children can and cannot have. This is clear, for example, by how children’s citizenship is conceptualised and how it can be seen as a key to unlocking (or not) children’s political participation. Citizenship provides a link between one’s identity and one’s rights and responsibilities in the context of social space. Children’s relationship with the concept of citizenship and the status it provides is complex, where, differently from adults, some rights and responsibilities are given, and others are denied. For example, they are seen as competent citizens because they belong to a “national membership” but may not be afforded the right to vote on matters that produce a change in that country. Children might have the same rights as adults but still require special protection. Another argument relies on discussing “what it takes to be a vulnerable or a competent child”.

Some argue that youth do not care about politics and are disengaged from formal politics. Others argue that the cause for this disengagement might be a lack of resources. Nevertheless, scholars encourage us to consider political actions beyond formal spaces and recognise that young people may look for other ways to enact social participation. Researcher Ann E. Bartos argues that caring is political and that “children express their political agency through acts of caring”. For example, by maintaining the resources around them, supporting their families or attending to the needs of others. Importantly, caring highlights a sense of responsibility and interdependence, where both children depend on their community, but the community also depends on them. Interdependence allows us to focus on the impact of children on their world and the world on the children instead of focusing only on children’s autonomy.

Furthermore, Family and School, are crucial “institutions through which children become socialised”, and though these have changed over time, they are the places where children are seen as belonging. The home, for example, is usually perceived as a safe and appropriate space for children, a place of co-presence and dependency. The home is not typically considered a place of social change or political action. With the emergence of the modern family, children have been given more agency and allowance to talk in the name of well-being, but “children acting ‘too independently’ raise increasing public concern”. Furthermore, due to increased supervised time, schedules packed with activities and a constant discourse on the quality of those, children in western society crave time by themselves.

Research has shown that having agency over their time and space are common properties of the lived experience of children producing social change, as we can see by Kelvin’s story shared in the introduction. In the following two examples of children producing social change, I will focus on those properties and forms of agency.

Example 1. Unintended production of social change

Children will create their vehicles for participation by utilising the resources available, and often the ingenious ways they use those resources produce cultural changes in society.

In her book “It’s complicated”, danah boyd presents her research findings into how teens create spaces for participation online and thus exercise their freedom. The use of social media shaped the teens’ lives, and teens shaped social media and the public discourse around this relationship. Teens found “their place in society”. Social media has become a crucial means of communication, but most importantly, a form of expression away from adults’ supervision. As danah boyd describes, the discourse around teens is full of adults’ fears of inappropriate use and content, leading to harm. Rarely it takes into account the needs of teens.

For example, danah boyd shared the story of a teenage boy who created videos on youtube using school resources. Students were encouraged to record their assignments, and the school provided a borrowing camera service. “He and his friends had taken to borrowing the camera on Fridays, making sure to tape their homework assignment before spending the rest of the weekend making more entertainment videos.” This is an example of how children will use existing structures, such as borrowing a camera from school and take advantage of those resources to undertake more fulfilling activities. Some might see this as a subversion of the rules and others as creativity. In this case, the students vocalised their need for privacy, freedom, space and expression, which resulted in the creation of a new content creation culture online. danah boyd shares many more examples of how teens have taken social media as a rightful space for their participation and how they have led the way society relates to social media today. This freedom to use social media and content creation tools ultimately led teens to self-organise and use the internet to plan and arrange social activism.

Though unintendedly, teens have changed how society perceives and interacts with social media by claiming their space, creating new forms of relating to it and making their voices heard.

Example 2. Deliberate production social change

Researcher Jessica K. Taft encourages us to learn “with the Peruvian Movement of Working Children” and, through her research, demonstrates how children in this movement demand “that their national government recognise their rights as workers and as political subjects”.

As the Peruvian government planned to abolish child labour, Taft shares an example of how children marched in Lima to encourage the government “to instead focus on protecting working children from exploitation and providing them with better social services and schools.” Many bystanders were surprised to see children as young as 11 leading a march. Children made all the decisions. The march was planned, attended by children and led by a group of eleven to fifteen-year-olds elected by their peers.

This example demonstrates how children have the astuteness to point policymakers to the real, lived experience of child labour, even when civic structures do not consider their voices. Children want to work, and the problem is not with children working; the problem is with exploitation and undignified work — these children focused policymakers on the real issues of child labour. So not only are children able to self-organise and make decisions leading to a robust political stand, but they have the competency to distil a subject and make sense of it in a way that helps point adults to what matters in an actionable way.

Actions of this nature position children as clear social actors and active members of society and demonstrate their competency. They help break apart our formed ideas of children and childhood, of how children behave, communicate, inhabit and are capable of having “ideas of their own”. Whether or not the march can be traced has evidence for a policy change; the change produced is also a change in perspective and how we see childhood.

Conclusion

This essay aimed to answer the question: “Can children change society?”. I started by exploring various aspects related to the study of children and childhood, demonstrating that seeing children as creators of social change is a complex and multifaceted subject. Recognising that there are many intended and unintended ways in which children impact societal changes, I chose to focus on two examples of change. Like in Kelvin’s story at the beginning of the essay, these examples have in common a sense of children conquering space, even when seemingly inappropriate, and choosing how to spend their time.

In the first example, young people created change through their everyday activities, and even though they did not set out to create change, they had an impact on how we relate to social media today. In the second example, we see children self-organising to advocate for their needs within a space where they are often not expected.

Undoubtedly, children can change society; finding ways to own their time and space is only one aspect of unlocking that ability. However, genuinely acknowledging that change and children as actors within it requires society to develop an accepting eye, with the intent of recognising all of the children’s contributions and voices as valuable.

References

An essay written for a ‘Critical Theoretical Debates about Global Childhoods and Society’ module at UCL.