All of us were kids once; therefore, it’s easy to think that we
understand what it means to be a kid in preschool or middle school
or even high school. Studying children from a sociological
perspective, however, means that we have to look our own experiences
and figure out how they fit into a larger social, cultural, and
historical context. In this course, we will read about kids of many
ages who come from a range of racial and class backgrounds in order
to see how children who live in different places and in different
social positions experience life. Some questions we will explore in
this course include:
How do kids in preschool make friends? How does a racial identity
impact elementary school age boys? How do kids in middle school talk
to each other? Finally, we’ll talk about some social problems that
children face and some adults’ ideas that kids themselves
are “social problems”.