Identities and Belonging, for all Children

1. Identities and Belonging, for all Children Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre The Care Inquiry 14 November 2012 Ann Phoenix Thomas Coram Research Unit

2. Identities • Erikson (1968) 20th Century was the century of identity. • Proliferation of research and writing on children’s & adults’ identities. • Continuously debated in public policy and in theory. • Implicitly entails difference; the understanding of who we are, who we are not and with whom we belong.

3. Briefly covers Consumption partly constructs children’s and young people’s identities Influential theories of identities Why identities matter (for children) Social positioning and relationality

4. Why identities matter (for children and young people) • Guides individual actions. The ways in which we identify with other people affects what we do (Hopkins and Reicher, 2002). • Affects practices and legislation for children. • Central to children’s understanding of themselves as separate from others (e.g. Mahler separation-individuation, 15 months; object relations). • Knowledge of other perspectives, empathy and Theory of Mind. • Precursor 7-9 months (Baron-Cohen); Meltzoff- 2-3 year • Deictic shift • Ability to keep secrets gives children a feeling of inwardness, privacy, and inner invisibility, autonomy and so of personal identity (by age 12 years). Always an experience of self (Manen & Levering,1996) . • Children’s feelings of belonging to families and social groups and participation are in iterative relationship with identities; Relational. • Help children understand temporality—past, present and future aligned.

5. Briefly covers Consumption partly constructs children’s and young people’s identities Influential theories of identities Why identities matter (for children) Social positioning and relationality

6. Consumption is developmentally salient to identities • Clothes, music, mobile phones and other possessions can be seen as tools that young people can use to show that they are ready to be what Eckert calls, ‘the next step older’ . • Kamptner (1989, 1991) developmental shift was from transitional objects (objects like cuddly toys that help children tolerate separation from their primary caregivers) through activity-centred objects to symbolic consumption associated with identity (from about 14 years of age onwards). • Personal possessions involve control, social power, self image and status; extensions of the individual and provide security (Furby, 1978). • Young children skilled at ‘reading’ clothes and possessions. • Dittmar (2004) ‘to have is to be’. • Barbara Kruger

7. Briefly covers Consumption partly constructs children’s and young people’s identities Influential theories of identities Why identities matter (for children) Social positioning and relationality

8. Erikson’s psychosocial identity theory • A sense of continuity, uniqueness and worth is important for a positive sense of identity. • Social and personal identities interlinked: we need other people to show that they view us as continuous and to feel solidarity with group ideals. • The development of identity is related to how people see both their past and their future. • The achievement of identity is the central task of adolescence and is accompanied by normative ‘crisis’. • Threats to identity lead to over-identification with cliques and/or aggression.

9. ‘Identity crisis’ caused by recognition of difference ‘The first time the doubt that I belonged to this particular planet struck me, was a glorious, calm, blue-skied day when I was twelve years old. …I was thinking about growing up. Until that moment I think I had somehow believed that when I grew up I would become ‘normal’, i.e. without a disability. ‘Normal’ then meant to me, ‘like my big sister’, pretty, rebellious, going out with boys, doing wonderful, naughty things with them. Leaving school and getting a job, leaving home, getting married and having children. That momentous day I suddenly realised that my life was not going to be like that at all. I was going to be just the same as I had always been – very small, funnily shaped, unable to walk. It seemed at that moment that the sky cracked.(Micheline Mason,1981: 23-24)

10. Social Identity Theory; Self Categorization Theory; Entitativity • Tajfel escaped the holocaust and wanted to understand the processes that led to prejudice. • He experimented on intergroup relations to understand social identity, which he differentiated from personal identity. • If people categorise themselves as belonging to a group, they will be prepared to discriminate in favour of their group (the ingroup) and against others (the outgroups). • Intergroup discrimination occurred even if differences were minimal. • SIT suggests that the status of the groups to which we belong affects our feelings about our personal identity. Therefore, social identity has emotional consequences for self-esteem.

11. Social constructionist theoretical perspectives on 'identity’ • Multiple & decentred. • Potentially fluid– never finally achieved. • Constructed through experience. • Linguistically coded into narratives. • Uses culturally available resources—practical accomplishment, performative & interactional resource. • Identity projects • Imbued with power relations • Intersectional—e.g. gender, racialisation, class, embodiment. • Embodied.

12. Children displayed fluidity in claiming disability as an identity. They described how they were not always disabled. One girl talked about how wheelchair basketball equalised social relationships and, as she put it, “in some situations I’m not, we’re not, always disabled”… For some of the children in special schools, disability was normalised, and hence disappeared as an identity in that setting. Even when children refused to occupy the disability category, there could be a strategic claim of privilege and exemption in certain school situations (“can we go early, Miss, ‘cos we’re disabled”.) In these examples, the difference could become a benefit. Negotiating identities and using them as a resource The children’s own sense of identity also became apparent through their resistance to dominant discourses about them. The … children adopted strategies through which they attempted to assert their own agency... In some cases this agency was read by adults as bad behaviour, and the children were labelled as having difficulty coming to terms with their impairment’.(Watson et al., 2000: 12)

13. Briefly covers Consumption partly constructs children’s and young people’s identities Influential theories of identities Why identities matter (for children) Social positioning and relationality

14. Social positioning and relationality are important to children’s identities • From 5 years, psychologically relevant ingroups are integral parts of the self-system (Sani & Bennett, 2009). [Family important before]. • Howarth (2002) 12-16 year olds in a stigmatised area recognized how they are stereotyped and developed a range of strategies. • Physical appearance affects popularity (Francis et al., 2010) • Self-awareness depends on flexible narratives of self (Warin & Muldoon, 2009) Children and adults often get a sense of their identity through comparison with others and the ways in which they and other people are talked about, signalling to children which qualities are to be admired and also how their own performance might measure up,...Folk stories, soap operas and adult talk around them provide childen with models of good and bad identities and relationships which they may explore further through talk among themselves. (Maybin and Woodhead, 2003: 30) ‘…Children and adolescents...learn to understand themselves through the intertextuality of a broad range of cultural texts and images.’ (Alloway and Gilbert, 1998: 97).