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Leonard’s The Sociology of Children, Childhood and Generation offers a thorough and up to date critical review of current debates in the sociology of childhood. Both those new to the field and more seasoned scholars will find much useful insight and food for thought in this book. Leonard’s introduction of generagency (and its subdivisions, inter- and intra-generagency) provides a useful and productive conceptual tool for theorizing the interdependent relationship between generation and agency.
This is a lucid overview as well as an outstanding synthesis of the field of childhood sociology. Also, the book offers an original contribution to theorizing children’s agency.
This book contributes to a more comprehensive framework for bridging childhood as a structural component of society and children as active agents. Indeed, agency is best viewed as relational and not as a possession of individuals. But how to conceptualize this is far from easy. In clearly written and coherently ordered chapters, Madeleine Leonard brings an informed state of the art to the reader’s knowledge.
Madeleine Leonard’s excellent book highlights the most important issues and concepts in the debates of sociology of childhood in a clear and concise way, and without renouncing to portray their nuances. The book describes and explains the distinction and the connections between social structures and children’s agency; it presents the controversial attempts to account for both the restrictions and the promotion of children’s participation opportunities in relationships within the most important social contexts.
I am sometimes a little wary of projects that seek to prioritise one discipline at the expense of others, but I actually found this book to be extremely helpful and interesting and am convinced it makes a very valuable contribution to the literature.
Any research or way of thinking or reflecting on the lives of children and how childhood is shaped is worth reading, and this is no exception, because it would certainly reward your attention.
The book makes a significant contribution to the literature by studying children and childhood because they are worthy subjects on their own. The book does not seek to examine children only by comparing them to adults. The implications of this book are profound.
The book is so much interesting but my students are enrolled in Pedagogy course and they are meant to be future educators. So I am looking for a more practical approach than this. As researcher I appreciated it a lot because it is clear, precise and the theoretical approach is well developed.
This book supports both undergraduate and graduate students' understanding of key sociological concepts in relation to children and childhood, including; the social construction of childhood, the relational nature of childhood, childhood as a social structure and the impact of generation on children's agency. The author writes with clarity and carefully lays the foundations for the reader's consideration of her concept of Generagency.
