Childhood Before and After the End of History

Bridget Stirling, University of Alberta

The “optimistic interregnum” (Gutterman, 2017) of the 1990s coincides with significant developments for children. The adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child began a decade in which children began to hold not only protection rights but also affirmative and participatory rights. Throughout the 1990s, international meetings frequently focused on children (Griffin & Ham, 2020), while the early internet era imagined the possibility of a global village. The child became a symbol of an imagined future of democracy and freedom, even while children themselves suffered through war, famine, environmental crises, and the consequences of neoliberal divestment of the welfare state. In the post-9/11 era, the optimistic future-thinking of the 1990s gave way to a darker, more fearful view. With the entanglement of childhood with future in political discourses, discourses of childhood also shifted. Nostalgia for a less complicated, pre-internet, pre-globalization world that never really existed is reflected in 21st century discourses of childhood, particularly among younger Generation X and elder Millennials who were children and teens during the 1990s and now compose the majority of people of parenting age. This nostalgic, meta-narrative of childhood (Jenks, 2005) distorts both our understanding of an era that was more fraught than its mediated self-perceptions and what childhood means in 2024. This paper considers the risks to childhood studies scholars in not interrogating our perceptions of childhood before the rupture of 9/11 and the advent of Web 2.0. Griffin, R., & Ham, S. (2020). The 1990 World Summit for Children: An Interview with Landon Pearson. Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights Revue Canadienne Des Droits Des Enfants, 7(1), 314–325. https://doi.org/10.22215/cjcr.v7i1.2568 Gutterman, E. (2017). Coming of age in academia: Canadian International Relations and the “optimistic interregnum” of the 1990s. International Journal, 72(2), 180-191. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1177/0020702017711704 Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed.). Routledge.

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 Presented in Session 41. Challenges of Childhood in the Late Twentieth Century