Cultural Childhood Studies: An Overview of the Problem

Abstract

The article demonstrates a complex problem which relates to the process of describing and analysing texts created by children. The author argues that children’s texts reflect the phenomenon of childhood and therefore enable us to distinguish features constituting a cultural picture of a child. The study of the history of the everyday may rely on diverse forms of children’s creativity, such as literary works, diaries, children’s folklore, films, arts, memories or school notebooks. Children’s perspectives recorded in texts written by them (and partly in children’s folklore) do not provide direct evidence of childhood because of the fact that language demands of their users (both young and adult) a certain knowledge and skills. Therefore, a young author has to “struggle” with language as it resists children’s artistic endeavours. Traces of this “struggle” (for example, semantic or syntactic mistakes), left by young authors, can reveal interesting evidence about childhood.