Contemporary Childhood and the Institutional Context

Recently, research on the child and childhood as a social and cultural phenomenon has been approached from the position of multidimensionality and extreme complexity. Childhood, as opposed to the beliefs of the majority of adults, is not an isolated, protected, well controlled and predictable manner of guiding a child towards the adult world. Childhood is more focused on the general perception of child and suggests the existence of a special, separate and fundamentally different social group and category. A child’s status as seen from the adult view and its culturally and historically defined construct changes and varies with its definition of the physical and/or sexual maturity, legal status or age group affiliation. The concept of child and childhood deals with the individual, usually defined from the point of view of an adult person. Two extreme views of children and childhood are related to the concept of designing, modeling, building and desirable socialization, or emphasizing the concept where a child is considered as the main agent of childhood. The institutional preschool context with all its segments (culture, curriculum, financial and social determinants) can encourage, empower or reduce all those advantages and potentials that childhood carries. In that sense, childhood does not exist beyond the social context, and its reflexive representation becomes evident in the dynamic relationships and divergently structured educational conditions.